EA - Half baked idea: A "pivot pledge" by Ardenlk

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: Half baked idea: A "pivot pledge", published by Ardenlk on August 16, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.I work at 80,000 Hours but this is not an 80,000 Hours thing - this is just an idea I wrote up because I had it and thought it was kind of cool.I probably won't be executing on it myself, but I thought I'd throw it out there into the world in case someone is interested in picking it up and running with it, do-ocracy style!Epistemic status: half baked.The problem:Being and staying prepared to switch jobs/careers if an excellent impact opportunity arises is very hard, but high expected value for many people.The proposal:Someone set up a "pivot pledge" to provide accountability, support, and encouragement to people who want to be prepared to switch careers in this way.More on the problem:In "Jobs to help with the most important century", Holden Karnofsky wrote that if you aren't up for making a career change right now, one thing you can do is to keep your options open and be ready to jump at the right opportunity. He says:> It's hard to predict what skills will be useful as AI advances further and new issues come up.> Being ready to switch careers when a big opportunity comes up could be hugely valuable - and hard. (Most people would have a lot of trouble doing this late in their career, no matter how important!)He reiterated this idea recently on the 80,000 Hours Podcast:> It might be worth emphasising that the ability to switch careers is going to get harder and harder as you get further and further into your career. So in some ways, if you're a person who's being successful, but is also making sure that you've got the financial resources, the social resources, the psychological resources, so that you really feel confident that as soon as a good opportunity comes up to do a lot of good, you're going to actually switch jobs, or have a lot of time to serve on a board or whatever - it just seems incredibly valuable.> I think it's weird because this is not a measurable thing, and it's not a thing you can, like, brag about when you go to an effective altruism meetup. And I just wish there was a way to kind of recognise that the person who is successfully able to walk away, when they need to, from a successful career has, in my mind, more expected impact than the person who's in the high-impact career right now, but is not killing it.I'd add a few things here:1. It doesn't seem like you need to prioritize AI to think that this would be good for many people to do. Though this does seem especially important if you have a view of the world in which "things are going to go crazy at some point", because that makes longer-term high impact career planning harder, and you are more likely to think that l if you think AI risk is high, longer-term career planning is always hard and even if you think other problems are much more pressing you could still think that some opportunities will be much higher impact than others and will be hard to predict.2. Many people have pointed out that we could use more experienced hands on many top problem areas. This is one way to help make that happen.3. I think going into some mechanisms that account for why it's hard to switch careers later in your career could be useful:I think it's hard for more senior people to take an actual or perceived step down in level of responsibility, prestige, or compensation, because it feels like 'going backward.' But when you switch your career, you often need to take a step 'down' on some hierarchy and build back up.Relatedly. people really don't want to have 'wasted time' so they are always very keen to be applying previous experience. Switching careers usually involves letting some of your previous experience 'go to waste'. We see this a lot at 80,000 Hours even in people in their 20s!Sta...