I think that given the 80k brand (which is about helping people to have a positive impact with their career), it’s very hard for you to have a jobs board which isn’t kinda taken by many readers as endorsement of the orgs. Disclaimers help a bit, but it’s hard for them to address the core issue — because for many of the orgs you list, you basically do endorse the org (AFAICT).
I also think it’s a pretty different experience for employees to turn up somewhere and think they can do good by engaging in a good faith way to help the org do whatever it’s doing, and for employees to not think that but think it’s a good job to take anyway.
My take is that you would therefore be better splitting your job board into two sections:
In one section, only include roles at orgs where you basically feel happy standing behind them, and think it’s straightforwardly good for people to go there and help the orgs be better
You can be conservative about inclusion here — and explain in the FAQ that non-inclusion in this list doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be good to straightforwardly help the org, just that this isn’t transparent enough to 80k to make the recommendation
In another more expansive section, you could list all roles which may be impactful, following your current strategy
If you only have this section (as at present), which I do think is a legit strategy, I feel you should probably rebrand it to something other than “80k job board”, and it should live somewhere other than the 80k website — even if you continue to link it prominently from the 80k site
Otherwise I think that you are in part spending 80k’s reputation in endorsing these organizations
If you have both of the sections I’m suggesting, I still kind of think it might be better to have this section not under the 80k brand — but I feel that much less strongly, since the existence of the first section should help a good amount in making it transparent that listing doesn’t mean endorsement of the org
(If the binary in/out seems too harsh, you could potentially include gradations, like “Fully endorsed org”, “Partially endorsed org”, and so on)
Edited to add: I want to acknowledge that at a gut level I’m very sympathetic to “but we explained all of this clearly!”. I do think if people misunderstand you then that’s partially on them. But I also think that it’s sort of predictable that they will misunderstand in this way, and so it’s also partially on you.
I should also say that I’m not confident in this read. If someone did a survey and found that say <10% of people browsing the 80k job board thought that 80k was kind of endorsing the orgs, I’d be surprised but I’d also update towards thinking that your current approach was a good one.
I am generally very wary of trying to treat your audience as unsophisticated this way. I think 80k taking on the job of recommending the most impactful jobs, according to the best of their judgement, using the full nuance and complexity of their models, is much clearer and straightforward than a recommendation which is something like “the most impactful jobs, except when we don’t like being associated with something, or where the case for it is a bit more complicated than our other jobs, or where our funders asked us to not include it, etc.”.
I do think that doing this well requires the ability to sometimes say harsh things about an organization. I think communicating accurately about job recommendations will inevitably require being able to say “we think working at this organization might be really miserable and might involve substantial threats, adversarial relationships, and you might cause substantial harm if you are not careful, but we still think it’s overall still a good choice if you take that into account”. And I think those judgements need to be made on an organization-by-organization level (and can’t easily be captured by generic statements in the context of the associated career guide).
I don’t think you should treat your audience as unsophisticated. But I do think you should acknowledge that you will have casual readers who will form impressions from a quick browse, and think it’s worth doing something to minimise the extent to which they come away misinformed.
Separately, there is a level of blunt which you might wisely avoid being in public. Your primary audience is not your only audience. If you basically recommend that people treat a company as a hostile environment, then the company may reasonably treat the recommender as hostile, so now you need to recommend that they hide the fact they listened to you (or reveal it with a warning that this may make the environment even more hostile) … I think it’s very reasonable to just skip this whole dynamic.
But I do think you should acknowledge that you will have casual readers who will form impressions from a quick browse, and think it’s worth doing something to minimise the extent to which they come away misinformed.
Yeah, I agree with this. I like the idea of having different kinds of sections, and I am strongly in favor of making things be true at an intuitive glance as well as on closer reading (I like something in the vicinity of “The Onion Test” here)
Separately, there is a level of blunt which you might wisely avoid being in public. Your primary audience is not your only audience. If you basically recommend that people treat a company as a hostile environment, then the company may reasonably treat the recommender as hostile, so now you need to recommend that they hide the fact they listened to you (or reveal it with a warning that this may make the environment even more hostile) … I think it’s very reasonable to just skip this whole dynamic.
I feel like this dynamic is just fine? I definitely don’t think you should recommend that they hide the fact they listened to you, that seems very deceptive. I think you tell people your honest opinion, and then if the other side retaliates, you take it. I definitely don’t think 80k should send people to work at organizations as some kind of secret agent, and I think responding by protecting OpenAIs reputation by not disclosing crucial information about the role, feels like straightforwardly giving into an unjustified threat.
Hmm at some level I’m vibing with everything you’re saying, but I still don’t think I agree with your conclusion. Trying to figure out what’s going on there.
Maybe it’s something like: I think the norms prevailing in society say that in this kind of situation you should be a bit courteous in public. That doesn’t mean being dishonest, but it does mean shading the views you express towards generosity, and sometimes gesturing at rather than flat expressing complaints.
With these norms, if you’re blunt, you encourage people to read you as saying something worse than is true, or to read you as having an inability to act courteously. Neither of which are messages I’d be keen to send.
And I sort of think these norms are good, because they’re softly de-escalatory in terms of verbal spats or ill feeling. When people feel attacked it’s easy for them to be a little irrational and vilify the other side. If everyone is blunt publicly I think this can escalate minor spats into major fights.
Maybe it’s something like: I think the norms prevailing in society say that in this kind of situation you should be a bit courteous in public. That doesn’t mean being dishonest, but it does mean shading the views you express towards generosity, and sometimes gesturing at rather than flat expressing complaints.
I don’t really think these are the prevailing norms, especially not regards with an adversary who has leveraged illegal threats of destroying millions of dollars of value to prevent negative information from getting out.
Separately about whether these are the norms, I think the EA community plays a role in society where being honest and accurate about our takes of other people is important. There were a lot of people who took what the EA community said about SBF and FTX seriously and this caused enormous harm. In many ways the EA community (and 80k in-particular) are playing the role of a rating agency, and as a rating agency you need to be able to express negative ratings, otherwise you fail at your core competency.
As such, even if there are some norms in society about withholding negative information here, I think the EA and AI-safety communities in-particular cannot hold itself to these norms within the domains of their core competencies and responsibilities.
I don’t regard the norms as being about witholding negative information, but about trying to err towards presenting friendly frames while sharing what’s pertinent, or something?
Honestly I’m not sure how much we really disagree here. I guess we’d have to concretely discuss wording for an org. In the case of OpenAI, I imagine it being appropriate to include some disclaimer like:
OpenAI is a frontier AI company. It has repeatedly expressed an interest in safety and has multiple safety teams. However, some people leaving the company have expressed concern that it is not on track to handle AGI safely, and that it wasn’t giving its safety teams resources they had been promised. Moreover, it has a track record of putting inappropriate pressure on people leaving the company to sign non-disparagement agreements. [With links]
I don’t regard the norms as being about witholding negative information, but about trying to err towards presenting friendly frames while sharing what’s pertinent, or something?
I agree with some definitions of “friendly” here, and disagree with others. I think there is an attractor here towards Orwellian language that is intentionally ambiguous about what it’s trying to say, in order to seem friendly or non-threatening (because in some sense it is), and that kind of “friendly” seems pretty bad to me.
I think the paragraph you have would strike me as somewhat too Orwellian, though it’s not too far off from what I would say. Something closer to what seems appropriate to me:
OpenAI is a frontier AI company, and as such it’s responsible for substantial harm by assisting in the development of dangerous AI systems, which we consider among the biggest risks to humanity’s future. In contrast to most of the jobs in our job board, we consider working at OpenAI more similar to working at a large tobacco company, hoping to reduce the harm that the tobacco company causes, or leveraging this specific tobacco company’s expertise with tobacco to produce more competetive and less harmful variations of tobacco products.
To its credit, it has repeatedly expressed an interest in safety and has multiple safety teams, which are attempting to reduce the likelihood of catastrophic outcomes from AI systems.
However, many people leaving the company have expressed concern that it is not on track to handle AGI safely, that it wasn’t giving its safety teams resources they had been promised, and that the leadership of the company is untrustworthy. Moreover, it has a track record of putting inappropriate pressure on people leaving the company to sign non-disparagement agreements. [With links]
We explicitly recommend against taking any roles not in computer security or safety at OpenAI, and consider those substantially harmful under most circumstances (though exceptions might exist).
I feel like this is currently a bit too “edgy” or something, and I would massage some sentences for longer, but it captures the more straightforward style that i think would be less likely to cause people to misunderstand the situation.
So it may be that we just have some different object-level views here. I don’t think I could stand behind the first paragraph of what you’ve written there. Here’s a rewrite that would be palatable to me:
OpenAI is a frontier AI company, aiming to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI). We consider poor navigation of the development of AGI to be among the biggest risks to humanity’s future. It is complicated to know how best to respond to this. Many thoughtful people think it would be good to pause AI development; others think that it is good to accelerate progress in the US. We think both of these positions are probably mistaken, although we wouldn’t be shocked to be wrong. Overall we think that if we were able to slow down across the board that would probably be good, and that steps to improve our understanding of the technology relative to absolute progress with the technology are probably good. In contrast to most of the jobs in our job board, therefore, it is not obviously good to help OpenAI with its mission. It may be more appropriate to consider working at OpenAI as more similar to working at a large tobacco company, hoping to reduce the harm that the tobacco company causes, or leveraging this specific tobacco company’s expertise with tobacco to produce more competetive and less harmful variations of tobacco products.
I want to emphasise that this difference is mostly not driven by a desire to be politically acceptable (although the inclusion/wording of the “many thoughtful people …” clauses are a bit for reasons of trying to be courteous), but rather a desire not to give bad advice, nor to be overconfident on things.
… That paragraph doesn’t distinguish at all between OpenAI and, say, Anthropic. Surely you want to include some details specific to the OpenAI situation? (Or do your object-level views really not distinguish between them?)
I was just disagreeing with Habryka’s first paragraph. I’d definitely want to keep content along the lines of his third paragraph (which is pretty similar to what I initially drafted).
Otherwise I think that you are in part spending 80k’s reputation in endorsing these organizations
Agree on this. For a long time I’ve had a very low opinion of 80k’s epistemics[1] (both podcast, and website), and having orgs like OpenAI and Meta on there was a big contributing factor[2].
In particular that they try to both present as an authoritative source on strategic matters concerning job selection, while not doing the necessary homework to actually claim such status & using articles (and parts of articles) that empirically nobody reads & I’ve found are hard to find to add in those clarifications, if they ever do.
I think that given the 80k brand (which is about helping people to have a positive impact with their career), it’s very hard for you to have a jobs board which isn’t kinda taken by many readers as endorsement of the orgs. Disclaimers help a bit, but it’s hard for them to address the core issue — because for many of the orgs you list, you basically do endorse the org (AFAICT).
I also think it’s a pretty different experience for employees to turn up somewhere and think they can do good by engaging in a good faith way to help the org do whatever it’s doing, and for employees to not think that but think it’s a good job to take anyway.
My take is that you would therefore be better splitting your job board into two sections:
In one section, only include roles at orgs where you basically feel happy standing behind them, and think it’s straightforwardly good for people to go there and help the orgs be better
You can be conservative about inclusion here — and explain in the FAQ that non-inclusion in this list doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be good to straightforwardly help the org, just that this isn’t transparent enough to 80k to make the recommendation
In another more expansive section, you could list all roles which may be impactful, following your current strategy
If you only have this section (as at present), which I do think is a legit strategy, I feel you should probably rebrand it to something other than “80k job board”, and it should live somewhere other than the 80k website — even if you continue to link it prominently from the 80k site
Otherwise I think that you are in part spending 80k’s reputation in endorsing these organizations
If you have both of the sections I’m suggesting, I still kind of think it might be better to have this section not under the 80k brand — but I feel that much less strongly, since the existence of the first section should help a good amount in making it transparent that listing doesn’t mean endorsement of the org
(If the binary in/out seems too harsh, you could potentially include gradations, like “Fully endorsed org”, “Partially endorsed org”, and so on)
Edited to add: I want to acknowledge that at a gut level I’m very sympathetic to “but we explained all of this clearly!”. I do think if people misunderstand you then that’s partially on them. But I also think that it’s sort of predictable that they will misunderstand in this way, and so it’s also partially on you.
I should also say that I’m not confident in this read. If someone did a survey and found that say <10% of people browsing the 80k job board thought that 80k was kind of endorsing the orgs, I’d be surprised but I’d also update towards thinking that your current approach was a good one.
I am generally very wary of trying to treat your audience as unsophisticated this way. I think 80k taking on the job of recommending the most impactful jobs, according to the best of their judgement, using the full nuance and complexity of their models, is much clearer and straightforward than a recommendation which is something like “the most impactful jobs, except when we don’t like being associated with something, or where the case for it is a bit more complicated than our other jobs, or where our funders asked us to not include it, etc.”.
I do think that doing this well requires the ability to sometimes say harsh things about an organization. I think communicating accurately about job recommendations will inevitably require being able to say “we think working at this organization might be really miserable and might involve substantial threats, adversarial relationships, and you might cause substantial harm if you are not careful, but we still think it’s overall still a good choice if you take that into account”. And I think those judgements need to be made on an organization-by-organization level (and can’t easily be captured by generic statements in the context of the associated career guide).
I don’t think you should treat your audience as unsophisticated. But I do think you should acknowledge that you will have casual readers who will form impressions from a quick browse, and think it’s worth doing something to minimise the extent to which they come away misinformed.
Separately, there is a level of blunt which you might wisely avoid being in public. Your primary audience is not your only audience. If you basically recommend that people treat a company as a hostile environment, then the company may reasonably treat the recommender as hostile, so now you need to recommend that they hide the fact they listened to you (or reveal it with a warning that this may make the environment even more hostile) … I think it’s very reasonable to just skip this whole dynamic.
Yeah, I agree with this. I like the idea of having different kinds of sections, and I am strongly in favor of making things be true at an intuitive glance as well as on closer reading (I like something in the vicinity of “The Onion Test” here)
I feel like this dynamic is just fine? I definitely don’t think you should recommend that they hide the fact they listened to you, that seems very deceptive. I think you tell people your honest opinion, and then if the other side retaliates, you take it. I definitely don’t think 80k should send people to work at organizations as some kind of secret agent, and I think responding by protecting OpenAIs reputation by not disclosing crucial information about the role, feels like straightforwardly giving into an unjustified threat.
Hmm at some level I’m vibing with everything you’re saying, but I still don’t think I agree with your conclusion. Trying to figure out what’s going on there.
Maybe it’s something like: I think the norms prevailing in society say that in this kind of situation you should be a bit courteous in public. That doesn’t mean being dishonest, but it does mean shading the views you express towards generosity, and sometimes gesturing at rather than flat expressing complaints.
With these norms, if you’re blunt, you encourage people to read you as saying something worse than is true, or to read you as having an inability to act courteously. Neither of which are messages I’d be keen to send.
And I sort of think these norms are good, because they’re softly de-escalatory in terms of verbal spats or ill feeling. When people feel attacked it’s easy for them to be a little irrational and vilify the other side. If everyone is blunt publicly I think this can escalate minor spats into major fights.
I don’t really think these are the prevailing norms, especially not regards with an adversary who has leveraged illegal threats of destroying millions of dollars of value to prevent negative information from getting out.
Separately about whether these are the norms, I think the EA community plays a role in society where being honest and accurate about our takes of other people is important. There were a lot of people who took what the EA community said about SBF and FTX seriously and this caused enormous harm. In many ways the EA community (and 80k in-particular) are playing the role of a rating agency, and as a rating agency you need to be able to express negative ratings, otherwise you fail at your core competency.
As such, even if there are some norms in society about withholding negative information here, I think the EA and AI-safety communities in-particular cannot hold itself to these norms within the domains of their core competencies and responsibilities.
I don’t regard the norms as being about witholding negative information, but about trying to err towards presenting friendly frames while sharing what’s pertinent, or something?
Honestly I’m not sure how much we really disagree here. I guess we’d have to concretely discuss wording for an org. In the case of OpenAI, I imagine it being appropriate to include some disclaimer like:
I largely agree with the rating-agency frame.
I agree with some definitions of “friendly” here, and disagree with others. I think there is an attractor here towards Orwellian language that is intentionally ambiguous about what it’s trying to say, in order to seem friendly or non-threatening (because in some sense it is), and that kind of “friendly” seems pretty bad to me.
I think the paragraph you have would strike me as somewhat too Orwellian, though it’s not too far off from what I would say. Something closer to what seems appropriate to me:
I feel like this is currently a bit too “edgy” or something, and I would massage some sentences for longer, but it captures the more straightforward style that i think would be less likely to cause people to misunderstand the situation.
So it may be that we just have some different object-level views here. I don’t think I could stand behind the first paragraph of what you’ve written there. Here’s a rewrite that would be palatable to me:
I want to emphasise that this difference is mostly not driven by a desire to be politically acceptable (although the inclusion/wording of the “many thoughtful people …” clauses are a bit for reasons of trying to be courteous), but rather a desire not to give bad advice, nor to be overconfident on things.
… That paragraph doesn’t distinguish at all between OpenAI and, say, Anthropic. Surely you want to include some details specific to the OpenAI situation? (Or do your object-level views really not distinguish between them?)
I was just disagreeing with Habryka’s first paragraph. I’d definitely want to keep content along the lines of his third paragraph (which is pretty similar to what I initially drafted).
Yeah, this paragraph seems reasonable (I disagree, but like, that’s fine, it seems like a defensible position).
Yeah same. (although, this focuses entirely on their harm as an AI organization, and not manipulative practices)
I think it leaves the question “what actually is the above-the-fold-summary” (which’d be some kind of short tag).
Agree on this. For a long time I’ve had a very low opinion of 80k’s epistemics[1] (both podcast, and website), and having orgs like OpenAI and Meta on there was a big contributing factor[2].
In particular that they try to both present as an authoritative source on strategic matters concerning job selection, while not doing the necessary homework to actually claim such status & using articles (and parts of articles) that empirically nobody reads & I’ve found are hard to find to add in those clarifications, if they ever do.
Probably second to their horrendous SBF interview.