Amigos,
I read this great article a couple weeks ago from
, titled Underrated ways to change the world, which resonated a lot with me. I strongly recommend reading the article, but the basic idea is summarized in the quote below:We get stuck here because we assume that there are only two paths to improving the world. Option #1 is to go high-status: get rich so you can blast problems with your billions of bucks, or get into office so you can ban all the bad things and mandate all the good things. Only a fortunate few are powerful enough to do anything, of course, so most of the people attempting to improve the world through the high-status route will end up either begging our overlords to do the right thing, or trying to drum up the votes necessary to replace them.
Option #2 is to go high-sacrifice: sell everything you have and spend your life earning $7/hr to scrub the toilets in an orphanage. Only a virtuous few will have the saintliness necessary to live such a life, of course, so most of the people attempting to improve the world through the high-sacrifice path will end up writing checks to the martyrs on the front lines.
These paths aren’t wrong. They’re just too narrow. Money, power, and selflessness are all useful tools in the right hands, but the world is messed up in all sorts of ways that can’t be legislated against, bought off, or undone with a hunger strike. When we focus on just two avenues for making the world better, we exclude almost everybody, leaving most of us with a kind of constipated altruism—we’ve got the urge to do good, but nothing comes out.
I do feel like lately I’ve been stuck to some degree in the overly narrow framing described in this article. Friends know that I’m interested in working on something with a positive social impact, but I do feel like discussions invariably fall into one of the two options described above, usually Option #1.
Humor me as I write out the short version of my work experiences so far and try to trace my connection with this feeling of wanting to improve the world, and I’ll get back to the article at the end.
Since some point in middle/high school, I’ve had a desire to work on something with a positive social impact. The first concrete memory I have of this desire/feeling within myself is from a short after-school trip for my Spanish class (I think? maybe it was for a club?) in early high school. We went to a bustling classroom full of elementary school kids all chatting loudly to each other in Spanish, and broke into small groups. Each of us high schoolers had 4-5 kids that we read bilingual books to for 45 minutes or so, to help the kids practice their English. I quickly found myself learning new Spanish vocab and having a good time joking around with the kids, and they picked up the English words pretty quickly too. The feeling of connection with the kids and ability to help them, even if it was just for a short time, was what stayed with me. This is almost certainly creating a narrative in hindsight, but I think clearly seeing a version of my own immigrant background (albeit a much much harder version) made the desire to do something positive for the world concrete. I was able to see what life may have been like, and how much harder it would have been to assimilate and get the opportunities I ended up getting, if I didn’t have the various privileges I had growing up. Getting to hang out with some funny kids was pretty great too.
I was thankfully able to stay connected to this desire during college by being pretty involved with the Caltech Y, a nonprofit on campus, in a variety of ways. For example, I started a small program with a couple friends called Pasadena LEARNs where Caltech students coached science Olympiad and did interactive science experiments at nearby elementary schools. The program is still going to this day – it relaunched just recently after Covid. It’s kind of wild, but it actually might be the accomplishment I’m most proud of, as it’s something I helped build from scratch and worked directly with friends on.
After college, I joined Google LA and worked on an ads forecasting team for about 4 and a half years. I had a good time overall, as I worked on a team filled with PhDs on a large distributed system and got to actually apply a lot of the probability/stats I learned in school. But I didn’t feel as connected to this desire/feeling. Part of me wishes I had just sent it on doing something full time that kept me connected to this feeling, but that’s probably a version of Option #2 from the article (“high-sacrifice”) making an appearance. Instead, I ended up doing some isolated volunteering here and there, read the book 80000 hours and donated 10% of my income to GiveWell, and financially supported my family a bit. I didn’t feel as connected to the desire/feeling to improve the world, and I do have some mild regrets about not pursuing that more directly, but overall I do feel that my time was spent in a broadly valuable way.
Once Covid hit, I wanted to get closer to that desire/feeling. So much was happening in the world and my work on ads forecasting felt less and less worth my time. I applied for and joined a six month Google.org fellowship/rotation for the first half of 2021, where I was the tech lead of a small team working with the Morehouse School of Medicine to help build https://healthequitytracker.org. I learned web development, some health stats techniques like age-adjustment, had some email comms with the CDC and found errors in their Covid datasets, and developed a tracker that was able to produce visualizations like the below:
However, and I plan to expand on this more in a later post, it was never really clear how this tracker would effect real-world change – the idea was that it would aid “policy influencers” in obtaining data visualizations to push for policy change. I heard about some instances of think tanks using screenshots from the tracker, but I was never really sure about the details. Probably building the tracker was worth it just for highlighting missing/bad data in CDC and other governmental datasets.
In late 2021, I started looking for a new job/team to continue pursuing the desire to improve the world. I interviewed at a few places but eventually settled on a role at Verily (still within Alphabet). My thinking while looking around was that I wanted something that would give me 2/3 of {positive impact, well paid, technically interesting} and Verily hit the bill there. In hindsight, this was unnecessarily limiting and I definitely wouldn’t apply such criteria again while looking for a job (as I say currently jobless), but inertia/not wanting to make too drastic of a change held me back. I do have some larger regrets around making the Google→Verily switch, especially with how things with my project at Verily turned out, rather than going for the more drastic change.
At Verily, my team built/maintained a telehealth platform for treating Substance Use Disorder (SUD), eg opioid/alcohol/cannabis/etc addiction. I was on the team for ~3 years, and ended as manager of the team. The project was a major roller coaster – I will write out the details in a later post – but suffice to say that it was an isolated project within the larger company and was not ever a business priority. I honestly feel like the project was a Zero-Interest Rate Phenomenon, as its favor within the company fell inversely with interest rates. The project served over 7K patients and the outcomes data was well above the (admittedly very poor) standard of care for SUD treatment – so it certainly was very valuable for the people it helped. But I never really felt as connected to the desire/feeling of improving the world as I feel I should have – partially because I was remote and never visited the physical treatment campus. But more so it was due to the never-ending tumult of the project’s fortunes within the company, and because I don’t think I realistically ever believed the project could become a national-scale provider of high quality SUD treatment. I don’t think I ever was fully committed to / really believed we could achieve the “scaled” part of scaled positive social impact. I eventually quit on Oct 1, 2024, once it became clear that the project would essentially be dead. Officially it was put in hibernation and transitioned to OneFifteen, our nonprofit partner, as they continue to look for different forms of funding to revive it, but it’s unclear if that will actually happen.
And so, now I’m at a point where financially I’m in a great place due to working in big tech for 8 years, but the last few years of working and trying to connect with the desire/feeling of improving the world at scale have not really panned out. Now I feel that I am at a bit of a crossroads of figuring out what I want to do, and the article (remember where we started?) hit home with that sense of feeling stuck. I have been in the mode of thinking either Option #1 (high-status) or Option #2 (high-sacrifice) are the only ways to improve the world at scale, and that is just not true. There are so many other creative ways that people have had positive impact, as the article points out. One in particular, “Make a scene” resonated with me:
I meet lots of idealistic folks who think that all they’re missing is money, or credentials, or access to the levers of power. More often, what they’re really missing is friends. Only a crazy person can toil alone for very long. But with a couple of buddies, you can toil pretty much forever, because it doesn’t feel like toil. That’s how you end up with what economic historians call “efflorescences” and Brian Eno called “scenius“ (“scene” + “genius”): hotspots of cool stuff. And for that, we need not just a Francis Bacon, but also a whole gang of Right Reverend Wilkinses.
Building a “scene” that is committed to having fun and doing something valuable is probably why I think I enjoyed creating and running Pasadena LEARNs so much in college – it was a bunch of friends having a good time while doing something positive.
Another part of the article that resonated was:
If none of these seven suit you, that’s fine; seven is not a lot! Fortunately, they come from an infinite list. (#8 is “make the list longer.”) I doubt any of these folks grew up thinking they would one day bust the largest Social Security scam in history, or that they’d be the ones to make science palatable to Puritans, or that they’d be best-known for cracking their knuckles or updating a government website. And yet they left the world a little bit better, and they did it without the power of a king or the sacrifice of a saint.
Over-fixating on the “scaled” part of scaled positive social impact is a big part of why I can fall into the narrow framing of high-status or high-sacrifice options. Remaining in the moment – as I often did when doing Pasadena LEARNs – and not overly worrying about the final destination of scaling what I’m working on to the entire world, feels like the only sustainable approach. Ultimately I am likely maximally valuable to the world if I’m doing something I legitimately enjoy and can keep at it for a long period, ideally with a “scene” / group of friends. I am going to continue working on figuring out what that is during this sabbatical, and hopefully make some friends along the way.