Thanks for the thoughtful post! As you said, we’ve thought about these kinds of questions a lot at 80k. Striking the right balance of content on our site, and prioritising what kinds of content we should work on next, are really tricky tasks, and there’s certainly reasonable disagreement to be had about the trade-offs.
We’re not currently planning to focus on neartermist content for the website, but:
We just released a giant update to our career guide and re-centered it on our site. It is targeted at a broad audience, not just those interested in x-risk or similar causes, and it discusses many neartermist causes.
Our podcast often covers topics relevant to neartermist causes, including some episodes currently in the pipeline.
Our job board lists many roles in organisations that work on near-term cause areas.
Much of our website content is useful for readers whether or not they priorritise longtermist cause areas, and we’re pretty dedicated to keeping it this way.
So I think we’re probably covering a lot (though not all) of the benefits we can get by being pretty “big tent” while also trying to (1) not to mislead people about the cause areas we think are most pressing (a reason you touch on above) and (2) focus our efforts where we they’ll be as useful as possible. On the latter point: to be honest, much of this is ultimately about capacity constraints. For example, we think that we could do more to make our site helpful and appealing to mid-career people (it can be off-putting for them currently due to a vibe of treating the reader like a ‘blank slate’), and my current guess is that our marginal resources would be better put there in the near future vs. doing more neartermist content.
Hi Nick —
Thanks for the thoughtful post! As you said, we’ve thought about these kinds of questions a lot at 80k. Striking the right balance of content on our site, and prioritising what kinds of content we should work on next, are really tricky tasks, and there’s certainly reasonable disagreement to be had about the trade-offs.
We’re not currently planning to focus on neartermist content for the website, but:
We just released a giant update to our career guide and re-centered it on our site. It is targeted at a broad audience, not just those interested in x-risk or similar causes, and it discusses many neartermist causes.
Our podcast often covers topics relevant to neartermist causes, including some episodes currently in the pipeline.
Our job board lists many roles in organisations that work on near-term cause areas.
Much of our website content is useful for readers whether or not they priorritise longtermist cause areas, and we’re pretty dedicated to keeping it this way.
So I think we’re probably covering a lot (though not all) of the benefits we can get by being pretty “big tent” while also trying to (1) not to mislead people about the cause areas we think are most pressing (a reason you touch on above) and (2) focus our efforts where we they’ll be as useful as possible. On the latter point: to be honest, much of this is ultimately about capacity constraints. For example, we think that we could do more to make our site helpful and appealing to mid-career people (it can be off-putting for them currently due to a vibe of treating the reader like a ‘blank slate’), and my current guess is that our marginal resources would be better put there in the near future vs. doing more neartermist content.