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Show HN: A career test for people who want to have a social impact

73 pointsby BenjaminToddalmost 10 years ago

13 comments

rdlalmost 10 years ago
I can support the idea here (&quot;people wanting to have social impact&quot;), but the quiz is probably the worst way to direct people toward that possible.<p>Just show ~10 ways to have social impact, and what skills&#x2F;traits&#x2F;etc. are important to each.<p>The profiles <i>are</i> good. Lead with those. Give some examples.<p>You&#x27;re not going to get people to accurately self assess their skills or risk tolerance. You might get people to see &quot;oh, I want to get involved in party politics&quot;, and see what factors are important to success there.<p>(Also both UK centric and 20-year-old centric.)
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guci22almost 10 years ago
The cutesy answer subscripts are really lame. I really did not want to complete the survey after the first question.
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code_sterlingalmost 10 years ago
If you&#x27;re bad at math, poor at writing or analyzing arguments, and have the competitive instinct of a Care Bear, you&#x27;re a 10&#x2F;10 for a think tank researcher. I find it a little dubious to call this a career test.
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kickscondoralmost 10 years ago
I&#x27;m a programmer who left startups to go be a teacher at a public elementary school. It told me to be in politics or a tech startup founder. I&#x27;m just not sure how those can match both the reward of lighting up little faces with fresh knowledge and the impact of directly working to improve what is (to me) the center of my community.<p>So yeah can I suggest &#x27;school teacher&#x27; as a result? Is it just totally outside of the realm of possibility here? Maybe I just didn&#x27;t see it. (I did check the box that said I&#x27;m okay with a small influence!)
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atmosxalmost 10 years ago
IMHO if you wanna have impact, you write. You write theatrical plays, social and political philosophy, satire, comics, songs, whatever.<p>Anything that will connect someone in 200 years from today, with your mind and soul, can make a difference.<p>At least, this is how I feel when I read poems, watch a play, read a book or listen to a song.<p>ps. A prominent example is Tolstoy. The impact his writings had on Gandhi is outstanding IMHO.
neilkalmost 10 years ago
Think tank researcher and economics professor? These are good careers for people who want to change things? Citation needed.
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ForHackernewsalmost 10 years ago
A lot of these suggestions seem really...douchey (for lack of a more precise term). I guess theoretically you can have a great social impact being a hedge fund quant or a startup founder, but the more traditional goal of those careers (and the people who undertake them) is making yourself filthy stinking rich.<p>I know the 80,000 hours people have this idea of earn-to-give, but do they have any stats on how many people actually follow through with that? It&#x27;s very easy to imagine a bright, young college grad heading for Wall Street planning to donate 75% of his income, but once he gets there he finds he quite likes the taste of caviar and all his friends and coworkers have a couple BMWs, anyway...
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vonklausalmost 10 years ago
While that was fun, you get what you aspire to be. The bias is tied to your appraisal of your skills and potential and a few arbitrary pieces of info. That being said, the top 3 choices i got would be my top 3 fav careers in descrnding order.
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kw71almost 10 years ago
I think it&#x27;s great to encourage these kinds of work.<p>I&#x27;m old and wish I had made my impact in more meaningful areas.<p>Lots of people here have changed the world. I can&#x27;t be the only one looking back wanting to have done it for a better cause.
roneeshalmost 10 years ago
I appreciate the sentiment, that if you look at just gross impact, then a quant&#x2F;hedge fund&#x2F;think tank career might actually be more helpful than something more traditionally &#x27;impactful&#x27;. But I can&#x27;t help but feel that in it&#x27;s quest to say something novel about social impact, it misses the soul of what it means to change the world for the better.
Aeolunalmost 10 years ago
I uh... had 10&#x2F;10 on all my first 5 results. After that I just closed the page, since it was obviously irrelevant.<p>I like these tests, if just for fun, but they need to have an actual result :P
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overpaidgoogleralmost 10 years ago
If you look at a graph of world GDP, you&#x27;ll see that it grows steadily and exponentially. The full set of causes is this is not known, but it can be shown not to be merely due to the gradual accumulation of capital. A large part must be due to technological growth.<p>So if you want to measure social impact I would also include the positive externalities of various jobs including working in technology. Even though I will probably be ridiculed as a typical silicon valley cultist, I think that anything that advances technology, including software, has a big positive economic externality.
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curiousjorgealmost 10 years ago
I got a think tank researcher answer. How do I get this job, I&#x27;m actually really serious.
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