We surveyed managers at organisations in the community to find out their views. These results help to inform our recommendations about the highest impact career paths available.
How much weight does 80,000 Hours give to these survey results relative for other factors which together form 80k’s career recommendations?
I ask because I’m not sure managers at EA organizations know what in the near future their focus area as a whole will need, and I think 80k might be able to exercise better independent judgement than the aggregate opinion of EA organization leaders. For example, there was an ops bottleneck in EA that is a lot better now. It seemed like orgs like 80k and CEA spotted this problem, and drove operations talent to a variety of EA orgs. But independent of one another I don’t recall other EA orgs which benefited from this push helping to solve this coordination problem in the first place.
In general, I’m impressed with 80k’s more formal research. I imagine there might be pressure for 80k to give more weight to softer impressions like what different EA org managers think the EA movement needs. But I think 80k’s career recommendations will remain better if they’re built off a harder research methodology.
Responses to the survey do help to inform our advice but it’s only considered as one piece of data alongside all the other research we’ve done over the years. Our writeup of the survey results definitely shouldn’t be read as our all-things-considered view on any issue in particular.
Perhaps we could have made that clearer in the blog post but we hope that our frank discussion of the survey’s weaknesses and our doubts about many of the individual responses gives some sense of the overall weight we put on this particular source.
Oh, no, that all makes sense. I was just raising questions I had about the post as I came across them. But I guess I should’ve have read the whole post first. I haven’t finished it yet. Thanks.
How much weight does 80,000 Hours give to these survey results relative for other factors which together form 80k’s career recommendations?
I ask because I’m not sure managers at EA organizations know what in the near future their focus area as a whole will need, and I think 80k might be able to exercise better independent judgement than the aggregate opinion of EA organization leaders. For example, there was an ops bottleneck in EA that is a lot better now. It seemed like orgs like 80k and CEA spotted this problem, and drove operations talent to a variety of EA orgs. But independent of one another I don’t recall other EA orgs which benefited from this push helping to solve this coordination problem in the first place.
In general, I’m impressed with 80k’s more formal research. I imagine there might be pressure for 80k to give more weight to softer impressions like what different EA org managers think the EA movement needs. But I think 80k’s career recommendations will remain better if they’re built off a harder research methodology.
Hi Evan,
Responses to the survey do help to inform our advice but it’s only considered as one piece of data alongside all the other research we’ve done over the years. Our writeup of the survey results definitely shouldn’t be read as our all-things-considered view on any issue in particular.
Perhaps we could have made that clearer in the blog post but we hope that our frank discussion of the survey’s weaknesses and our doubts about many of the individual responses gives some sense of the overall weight we put on this particular source.
Oh, no, that all makes sense. I was just raising questions I had about the post as I came across them. But I guess I should’ve have read the whole post first. I haven’t finished it yet. Thanks.