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.
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.