After all, we don’t want to do the most good in cause area X but the most good, period.
Yes, and 80k think that AI safety is the cause area that leads to the most good. 80k never covered all cause areas—they didn’t cover the opera or beach cleanup or college scholarships or 99% of all possible cause areas. They have always focused on what they thought were the most important cause areas, and they continue to do so. Cause neutrality doesn’t mean ‘supporting all possible causes’ (which would be absurd), it means ‘being willing at support any cause area, if the evidence suggests it is the best’.
Yeah framed like this, I like their decision best. In the important sense, you could say, they are still cause-neutral. It’s just that their cause-neutral evaluation now came to a very specific result: all the most cost-effective careers choices are in (or related to) AI. If this indeed the whole motivation for the strategic shift of 80k, I would have liked this post to use this framing more directly: “we have updated our beliefs on the most impactful careers” rather than “we have made strategic shifts” as the headline. It wasn’t clear to me whether the latter is a consequence of only the former, on my first reading.
Yes, and 80k think that AI safety is the cause area that leads to the most good. 80k never covered all cause areas—they didn’t cover the opera or beach cleanup or college scholarships or 99% of all possible cause areas. They have always focused on what they thought were the most important cause areas, and they continue to do so. Cause neutrality doesn’t mean ‘supporting all possible causes’ (which would be absurd), it means ‘being willing at support any cause area, if the evidence suggests it is the best’.
Yeah framed like this, I like their decision best. In the important sense, you could say, they are still cause-neutral. It’s just that their cause-neutral evaluation now came to a very specific result: all the most cost-effective careers choices are in (or related to) AI. If this indeed the whole motivation for the strategic shift of 80k, I would have liked this post to use this framing more directly: “we have updated our beliefs on the most impactful careers” rather than “we have made strategic shifts” as the headline. It wasn’t clear to me whether the latter is a consequence of only the former, on my first reading.