Thanks for the post Henry! I work at 80,000 Hours and have thought a little bit (along with Maria) about some of the indirect effects of the job board recently—especially about the degree to which it’ll be seen as representing our all-considered views of the best jobs. So it’s good to have some discussion of it!
Like you, I’m really excited about people using the job board to expand their ideas of what EA/long termist roles can look like, especially to types of roles which don’t have (something like) “effective altruism” somewhere in the name. Rob wrote a bit more about this here.
That being said, I do share many of Habryka, Aidan and Ben’s concerns about people thinking of it as representative of good opportunities in EA. It’s missing roles which orgs don’t advertise, lots of opportunities at early stage orgs, roles you design yourself and doesn’t foreground graduate school enough (yet!).
You can read more about In the user guide/FAQ about how we hope for people to think about the roles we list. In particular, I’m keen for people to keep this in mind:
“there is a good chance that your best option is actually a role that is not featured on the board. If you find a role that seems promising but is not listed on our board, you should not infer that it is less promising than the roles that we do feature.
Thanks for your comment! To build on my comment to Habryka above (“Thanks for this! If I were rewriting this post, I would take more care to emphasise that it’s not 100% my view per se, but it is a view you could have that I have some credence in. The flaws in the view being broadly what you’ve laid out here.”) I would also add that stripping something to its skeleton is not always desirable, and certainly not what you want as your everyday framing of some issue.
In particular I liked your summary of what’s left out of the job board, namely: “it’s missing roles which orgs don’t advertise, lots of opportunities at early stage orgs, roles you design yourself and doesn’t foreground graduate school enough”.
Or, the skeleton !== the body
Another point to make is that Schumpeter’s “all misleading ideologies” works as a quick phrase in an aphorism, but probably works better when describing the state than describing the effective altruism set of ideas and community.
Makes sense! FWIW, I really enjoyed reading your post. There’s definitely something nice about how listing specific vacancies forces us to get down to get really concrete about what all this theorising actually means, even though doing so has been a bit challenging sometimes!
Hmm, I think I would warn against this framing. In particular the job board systematically omits people working on small projects or organizations that don’t really have much of a need for public hiring or recruitment rounds. Some concrete examples:
None of the people the LTFF funds to do research would be represented by a slot on the job board, but I do think it’s a viable path for people to take
I think there are very few PhD positions advertised on the job board, even though that’s obviously a pretty frequent career path, and people can have quite a bit of impact through their PhDs. Like I see no representation of places like CHAI and MILA which have many good safety researchers working there.
Some projects that I know have hired people recently, but aren’t on the job board, presumably because they are hiring from their networks and friends:
LessWrong
Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute
Epidemic Forecasting
The EA Hotel
Center for Applied Rationality
Centre for Effective Altruism
And probably many more that have recently started, or have hired, but didn’t see much of a need for a public hiring round
Overall, when I look at the job board, the list of jobs feels highly unrepresentative to me (and I am also honestly not very excited about someone working in 90% of these roles, but that’s probably a larger disagreement between my thoughts on cause prioritization and 80Ks thoughts on cause prioritization).
I’m not Oli, but jotting down some of my own thoughts: I feel like the job board gives a number of bits of useful selection pressure about which orgs are broadly ‘helping out’ in the world; out of all the various places people go in careers, it’s directing a bit of energy towards some better ones. Analogous to helping raise awareness of which foods are organic or something, which is only a little helpful for the average person, but creating that information can be pretty healthy for a massive population. I expect 80k was motivated to make the board because such a large order of magnitude of people who wanted their advice, and they felt that this was an improvement on the margin that had a large effect if thousands of people tried to follow the advice.
As I wouldn’t expect this was a massive change to your health to start eating organic food, I wouldn’t suddenly become excited about someone and their impact if they became the 100th employee at John Hopkins or if they were the marginal civil servant in the UK government.
In fact (extending this analogy to its breaking point) nutrition is an area where it’s hard to give general advice, the data mostly comes from low quality observational studies, and the truth is you have to do a lot of self-experimentation and building your own models of the domain to get any remotely confident beliefs about your own diet and health. Similarly, I’m excited by people who try a lot of their own projects and have some successes at weird things like forming a small team and creating a very valuable product that people pay a lot of money for, or people who do weird but very insightful research (like Gwern or Scott Alexander to give obvious examples, but also things like this that take 20 hours and falsifies a standard claim from psychology), who figure out for themselves what’s valuable and try very very hard to achieve it directly without waiting for others to give them permission.
An important difference between overall budgets and job boards is that budgets tell you how all the resources are spent whereas job boards just tell you how (some of) the resources are spent on the margin. EA could spend a lot of money on some area and/or employ lots of people to work in that area without actively hiring new people. We’d miss that by just looking at the job board.
I think this is a nice suggestion for getting a rough idea of EA priorities but because of this + Habryka’s observation that the 80k job board is not representative of new jobs in and around EA, I’d caution against putting much weight on this.
Thanks for the post Henry! I work at 80,000 Hours and have thought a little bit (along with Maria) about some of the indirect effects of the job board recently—especially about the degree to which it’ll be seen as representing our all-considered views of the best jobs. So it’s good to have some discussion of it!
Like you, I’m really excited about people using the job board to expand their ideas of what EA/long termist roles can look like, especially to types of roles which don’t have (something like) “effective altruism” somewhere in the name. Rob wrote a bit more about this here.
That being said, I do share many of Habryka, Aidan and Ben’s concerns about people thinking of it as representative of good opportunities in EA. It’s missing roles which orgs don’t advertise, lots of opportunities at early stage orgs, roles you design yourself and doesn’t foreground graduate school enough (yet!).
You can read more about In the user guide/FAQ about how we hope for people to think about the roles we list. In particular, I’m keen for people to keep this in mind:
“there is a good chance that your best option is actually a role that is not featured on the board. If you find a role that seems promising but is not listed on our board, you should not infer that it is less promising than the roles that we do feature.
Thanks for your comment! To build on my comment to Habryka above (“Thanks for this! If I were rewriting this post, I would take more care to emphasise that it’s not 100% my view per se, but it is a view you could have that I have some credence in. The flaws in the view being broadly what you’ve laid out here.”) I would also add that stripping something to its skeleton is not always desirable, and certainly not what you want as your everyday framing of some issue.
In particular I liked your summary of what’s left out of the job board, namely: “it’s missing roles which orgs don’t advertise, lots of opportunities at early stage orgs, roles you design yourself and doesn’t foreground graduate school enough”.
Or, the skeleton !== the body
Another point to make is that Schumpeter’s “all misleading ideologies” works as a quick phrase in an aphorism, but probably works better when describing the state than describing the effective altruism set of ideas and community.
Makes sense! FWIW, I really enjoyed reading your post. There’s definitely something nice about how listing specific vacancies forces us to get down to get really concrete about what all this theorising actually means, even though doing so has been a bit challenging sometimes!
Hmm, I think I would warn against this framing. In particular the job board systematically omits people working on small projects or organizations that don’t really have much of a need for public hiring or recruitment rounds. Some concrete examples:
None of the people the LTFF funds to do research would be represented by a slot on the job board, but I do think it’s a viable path for people to take
I think there are very few PhD positions advertised on the job board, even though that’s obviously a pretty frequent career path, and people can have quite a bit of impact through their PhDs. Like I see no representation of places like CHAI and MILA which have many good safety researchers working there.
Some projects that I know have hired people recently, but aren’t on the job board, presumably because they are hiring from their networks and friends:
LessWrong
Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute
Epidemic Forecasting
The EA Hotel
Center for Applied Rationality
Centre for Effective Altruism
And probably many more that have recently started, or have hired, but didn’t see much of a need for a public hiring round
Overall, when I look at the job board, the list of jobs feels highly unrepresentative to me (and I am also honestly not very excited about someone working in 90% of these roles, but that’s probably a larger disagreement between my thoughts on cause prioritization and 80Ks thoughts on cause prioritization).
I am curious about your disagreement with 80k on what types of jobs EAs should look for, if you ever want to get into it
I’m not Oli, but jotting down some of my own thoughts: I feel like the job board gives a number of bits of useful selection pressure about which orgs are broadly ‘helping out’ in the world; out of all the various places people go in careers, it’s directing a bit of energy towards some better ones. Analogous to helping raise awareness of which foods are organic or something, which is only a little helpful for the average person, but creating that information can be pretty healthy for a massive population. I expect 80k was motivated to make the board because such a large order of magnitude of people who wanted their advice, and they felt that this was an improvement on the margin that had a large effect if thousands of people tried to follow the advice.
As I wouldn’t expect this was a massive change to your health to start eating organic food, I wouldn’t suddenly become excited about someone and their impact if they became the 100th employee at John Hopkins or if they were the marginal civil servant in the UK government.
In fact (extending this analogy to its breaking point) nutrition is an area where it’s hard to give general advice, the data mostly comes from low quality observational studies, and the truth is you have to do a lot of self-experimentation and building your own models of the domain to get any remotely confident beliefs about your own diet and health. Similarly, I’m excited by people who try a lot of their own projects and have some successes at weird things like forming a small team and creating a very valuable product that people pay a lot of money for, or people who do weird but very insightful research (like Gwern or Scott Alexander to give obvious examples, but also things like this that take 20 hours and falsifies a standard claim from psychology), who figure out for themselves what’s valuable and try very very hard to achieve it directly without waiting for others to give them permission.
An important difference between overall budgets and job boards is that budgets tell you how all the resources are spent whereas job boards just tell you how (some of) the resources are spent on the margin. EA could spend a lot of money on some area and/or employ lots of people to work in that area without actively hiring new people. We’d miss that by just looking at the job board.
I think this is a nice suggestion for getting a rough idea of EA priorities but because of this + Habryka’s observation that the 80k job board is not representative of new jobs in and around EA, I’d caution against putting much weight on this.