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!
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!