EA - Avoiding 10 mistakes people make when pursuing a high-impact career (Alex Lawsen on the 80k After Hours Podcast) by 80000 Hours

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Avoiding 10 mistakes people make when pursuing a high-impact career (Alex Lawsen on the 80k After Hours Podcast), published by 80000 Hours on September 12, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.We just published an interview: Alex Lawsen on avoiding 10 mistakes people make when pursuing a high-impact career. You can click through for the audio, a full transcript, and related links. Below are the episode summary and some key excerpts.Episode summaryI think the key consideration that I end up highlighting to people who I think are trying to do the best thing right now is something like: It might be that setting yourself up well to do more good later looks like not directly having as much of an impact right now.Because probably learning is pretty good if you want to have an impact later. Probably getting some signalling experience for a lot of careers, maybe doing a prestigious internship, maybe getting paid a lot of money: these things just often pay off later, and often trade off against doing the very most good with the summer internship you're doing this year, or in the first two years of your job just after you've graduated.Alex LawsenIn this episode of 80k After Hours, Luisa Rodriguez and Alex Lawsen discuss common mistakes people make when trying to do good with their careers, and advice on how to avoid them.They cover:Taking 80,000 Hours' rankings too seriouslyNot trying hard enough to failFeeling like you need to optimise for having the most impact nowFeeling like you need to work directly on AI immediatelyNot taking a role because you think you'll be replaceableConstantly considering other career optionsOverthinking or over-optimising career choicesBeing unwilling to think things through for yourselfIgnoring conventional career wisdomDoing community work even if you're not suited to itWho this episode is for:People who want to pursue a high-impact careerPeople wondering how much AI progress should change their plansPeople who take 80,000 Hours' career advice seriouslyWho this episode isn't for:People not taking 80k's career advice seriously enoughPeople who've never made any career mistakesPeople who don't want to hear Alex say "I said a bunch of stuff, maybe some of it's true" every time he's on the podcastGet this episode by subscribing to our more experimental podcast on the world's most pressing problems and how to solve them: type '80k After Hours' into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.Producer and editor: Keiran HarrisAudio Engineering Lead: Ben CordellTechnical editing: Milo McGuire and Dominic ArmstrongAdditional content editing: Luisa Rodriguez and Katy MooreTranscriptions: Katy MooreWhy you shouldn't "just do whatever 80k says is best"Luisa Rodriguez: One thing you hear a lot is something like, "I should just do the thing that 80k says is best." Can you say more about what that looks like?Alex Lawsen: Yeah, I think there are a bunch of different ways this can come up. Maybe the most obvious one is just that, at any particular time, there's going to be something really salient that it seems like lots of people should do. And maybe it's because it's at the top of the ranked list we have. That is one disadvantage of having ranked lists. So a very clean version of this mistake could just be people going, "The thing that's at number one of the list of career profiles on the 80k website is technical AI safety research, so I guess I have to do technical AI safety research."So why might this be a mistake? The obvious thing is just that personal fit really matters. It matters in a bunch of ways. My guess is, during a lot of this conversation, I'm going to end up saying, "Did you know that personal fit is a big deal?" But specifically in the case of someone correctly realising that a thing is really important for ...