Increasing the pool of people with outstanding accomplishments

I'd hesitate to call your estimate of the social value you'll generate a lower bound, as you do, if you're not sure about the value of the invisible/conventional work you might be persuading people away from

For conventional careers, income is a proxy to social value of work, and this serves as a base-line. I think that most people with an innovative flair can do better than this. But there may be opportunities to systematically contribute outsized impact relative to earnings – I'd very much appreciate pointers to places where we can learn more about this subject.

We think that there are people who:

• Could be using their spare time in much more impactful ways (e.g. writing for the public rather than just for a few friends)
• End up in average paying corporate and academic jobs that don't have an outsized impact relative to earnings

who we can persuade to good effect.

It seems like most of what you're doing and planning should give a boost to any kind of achievement,

That's our hope.

(You don't seem to rely on it, but I especially don't think replaceability is the knockdown argument many people treat it as here.)

Yes, there are major problems with the replaceability argument in full generality.

Even if one is replaceable, if one is replaced, that will divert someone else from something else that's valuable (in expectation) to fill the role, which will divert someone else from something else that's valuable (in expectation) to fill the role, etc.

It's easy to tell ahead of time that you can make an impact as a blogger or a startup founder or a non-profit leader? Hardly - those are all high-risk endeavors, especially in the digital domain: many smart bloggers with something great to say never reach a large audience; many even fail to a modest but interested audience.

I don't have subject matter knowledge (and hope to learn more) but intuitively having an outsized impact in a corporate setting seems more conjunctive, with being in the right place at the right time playing more of a role. Can you give some examples of people who have had outsized impacts in corporate settings, and how they did what they did?

Stability and consistency are the rewards of traditional, ordinary careers; and for many people those are excellent virtues. Make sure your clients understand this. Entrepreneurship, in particular, requires a certain degree of hubris. Society as a whole gains from that hubris, and in selected sectors and times and places the would-be entrepreneurs gain in expectation, but "How would I handle failure" should be a question that anyone embarking on such a path should sincerely ask themselves first".

Note that many of the people on my list have done what they've done on their spare time, while maintaining a stable job. We do raise awareness of the risks to clients who are thinking of deviating from conventional paths. See, for example, Stay mainstream until you have demonstrated success doing unusual stuff.

Non-tech entrepreneurship. And in the domain of non-profits, locally-oriented ones. They can't impact as many people, but impact is often greater and more immediate, and your impact is more immediately visible to yourself. For some people being able to closely observe their own impact is very motivating.

Yes, these are good examples. We've been thinking about non-tech entrepreneurship; have thought less about locally-oriented non-profits. Can you give an example of a locally-oriented nonprofit that's had an outsized impact? (Not a rhetorical question.)

In general, however, at a young age foundational skills and opening their minds are more important than any particular direction (though a particular cause/direction can be very motivating).

We encourage our advisees to develop broad knowledge; see for example our Core reading recommendations.

Whatever they seem to have closed their mind to without proper consideration, that's what you can target for each individual.

This is in line with what we're doing; we're working to communicate the pros and cons of embarking on different paths. For some advisees this may nudge them in less impactful directions, but we expect the overall trend to be in the direction of more impact, because of people's desire to make a difference.

In general, however, at a young age foundational skills and opening their minds are more important than any particular direction (though a particular cause/direction can be very motivating). Show people who think academics or hard sciences are the obvious path that all sorts of "soft skills" are actually very valuable even in their presumptive careers, but can also open their eyes to other paths.

Whatever they seem to have closed their mind to without proper consideration, that's what you can target for each individual.

Oh yes! I think that expanding people's imagination of what's possible.. is really a powerful way of creating impact. To me, there's honestly no compliment better than someone telling me that I expanded their imagination of what's possible.. that I've changed them. Especially if I didn't specifically give them advice. I simply motivated them by doing things differently than everyone else, and showing that it's something that anyone [1] can do, not restricted to the arcane domains of some esoteric genius. It's like basically changing their "openness to experience". In general, I do believe that the world would be "better" if more people had higher levels of "openness to experience".

In fact, it's also a powerful antidote against depression (and against people going into narrow high people-to-problems ratio fields where unhappiness tends to be very high). Sometimes I think that "lack of imagination" is a contributing factor to many cases of depression (not a causative one, and there are obviously genetic factors as well). But in my case.. I just really really wish that I knew of a world beyond that of school/academia, and that there are people I can respect who aren't in academia! (sadly, the experience of being in school made me elitist in many ways, which only further increased my neuroticism). But I didn't know that there were alternative paths that I could still be happy with when I was young (which led me to make some poor decisions in college).

There's just so much stress and depression.. so much people who are constantly comparing themselves against each other in some imaginary competition, all for the sake of signalling. So much of it completely unnecessary. And it's frustrating to see it. I think Peter Thiel summarizes it so well here: http://blakemasters.com/post/21169325300/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-4-notes-essay

Just look at high school, which, for Stanford students and the like, was not a model of perfect competition. It probably looked more like extreme asymmetric warfare; it was machine guns versus bows and arrows. No doubt that’s fun for the top students. But then you get to college and the competition amps up. Even more so during grad school. Things in the professional world are often worst of all; at every level, people are just competing with each other to get ahead. This is tricky to talk about. We have a pervasive ideology that intense, perfect competition makes the best world. But in many ways that’s deeply problematic.

One problem with fierce competition is that it’s demoralizing. Top high school students who arrive at elite universities quickly find out that the competitive bar has been raised. But instead of questioning the existence of the bar, they tend to try to compete their way higher. That is costly. Universities deal with this problem in different ways. Princeton deals with it through enormous amounts of alcohol, which presumably helps blunt the edges a bit. Yale blunts the pain through eccentricity by encouraging people to pursue extremely esoteric humanities studies. Harvard—most bizarrely of all—sends its students into the eye of the hurricane. Everyone just tries to compete even more. The rationalization is that it’s actually inspiring to be repeatedly beaten by all these high-caliber people. We should question whether that’s right.

I just think.. if we could maybe convince people to care more about making impact rather than being so obsessive about status... then so much more value can be produced.. And there would be so much less stress, and wasted years.

[1] I'm using the term lightly, but by "anyone" I mean anyone in the top 10% of intelligence, which is still quite a broad range.

Also, by spreading the word about a people who beat the odds, like a neuroscience professor who got into a top grad school with a 2.5 GPA, who is now an assistant professor who is now a rising star).. Seriously.. That type of anecdote is incredibly inspiring for anyone.

1. My choice of examples is partially driven by who happens to be most salient to me.
2. My list wasn't intended to be a list of people with the most impressive accomplishments: I intentionally omitted extreme outliers because there's a strong prior against being able to enable someone to become one.
3. When I referred to impressive/outstanding accomplishments, I did have social value in mind specifically.
4. I'm indifferent as to whether the social value is added through involvement with rationality or effective altruism, or through other channels.

Not to mention other outstanding accomplishments (such as olympic athletes), which you didn't seem to touch on at all.

Being an olympic athletes doesn't prdocue added social value. It's very much a zero sum game.

Thanks again. I'll have to think about how we might best frame it.

I tried to operationalize it with the list of people – it seems easier to tell if someone is "like somebody on the list" than it is to tell if someone is at a given percentile. Does the "like somebody on the list" operationalization seem insufficiently specific?