Comment by dreghgh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dreghgh | Hacker News Reader

> A full-time career consists of 80,000 hours, or 10,000 workdays, or 2,000 workweeks. How you spend that time is one of the most important moral decisions of your life.

This just seems like a confusion to me. My job is the time I spend getting money to pay for the things I need to live. By definition, the work I do then is of value to someone paying me, but not to me. The rest of my time I spend doing things which I can choose, including things I think are a positive contribution to the world.

I could make sense of arguments such as:

1. You should consume vastly less, so that you spend less time earning money and more time contributing to improving the world.

2. Society should be organised differently so that people have to work less and can contribute as they see best in their increased non-paid-work time.

3. You should spend a lower proportion of your free time doing things that benefit yourself and more doing things which benefit the world.

But "you should spend the time you dedicate to getting food, clothes, energy and shelter to contributing to good causes?" Doesn't really make sense.

That so misses the point. Not all work that pays contributes equally to society. Some jobs that pay well (because they are of value to the employer) are harmful to society as a whole. If you harm society for 40 or 50 hours every week you're not going to make up for that with an hour or two of volunteer work.

In many, most(?), cases, it can be very difficult for the average person to understand what harms society or otherwise decide if what they are doing is harming society.

It is not hard to decide if you're hungry or if more money is better than less money.

Difficult only for the average person? I know nobody who is such a genius as to be able to decide what is best for society.

Not disagreeing, but if not me, someone else would probably do an even better job at that harmful position. Everyone is replaceable. When does this become about changing the society?

I suppose making yourself more than an immediately replaceable cog in the machine is part of what the author is advocating, ideally in a societally beneficial position.

Moreover, many businesses operate under the "everyone is replaceable" model, implicitly adding "without much effort", but that's not really true. There are plenty of examples of political movements that never recovered from their leader or figurehead leaving. You can't just take any other politician and swap them, their positions are too personal. That's an extreme example, but I think it applies to most job positions that aren't just about following checklists, in varying degrees.

You're talking about avoiding harmful work, whereas the article is discussing finding work mainly based on it being beneficial to the things you care about. These are two quite different things.

If you both have to cover a cost of living, and care about improving the world, there is some most efficient strategy which allows you maximise the latter, given the former as a constraint. (This obviously varies by individual, depending on your abilities, available work, etc.) How can one be sure that working at an 'altruistic' job is optimal, as opposed to for example working at a very highly paid job in some pointless but not harmful field, and contributing either some of your money, or some of your increased spare time?

The example of someone who doesn't care at all about altruism and who has maximised wealth while causing significant harm does not establish the right strategy for people who do care somewhat about both things.

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