Will: Has 80k or someone else considered writing up a profile of the typical EA in the scenario you note (early career, willing to choose just about any career option if it maximizes good) to give people a better understanding of what standard we should be comparing ourselves to when assessing our comparative advantage? I can see this being particularly useful for people with many good options who don’t know where to go. From what I see, most people I’ve talked to seem to be relying on informal conversations and intuitions about their peers that might easily be wrong. Something like: Early career EAs as a group are very skilled at x but seem to lack y skills as compared to the demands of the ‘EA job market’. Their median SAT/GRE scores are xyz (if that data is available), so to be considered particularly quant-y as compared to the group you should be in the x-y range, etc. Something like this but updated & tailored to help people coordinate amongst themselves would be great: https://80000hours.org/2014/03/coaching-applications-analysis/. If such a resource exists already, it’d be marvelous if someone could point me to it.
Come to think of it, this sounds less feasible but some sort of comparative advantage calculator (intending to do exactly what you describe in your edit but compared against the average EA) sounds like it could be useful, if difficult to achieve.
I realize belatedly my original post sounds like its talking in terms of absolute advantages still :) But having a general sense of the ‘ratios’ between the different skillsets the median young EA possesses would be useful for comparative purposes I think. Maybe presenting that information in terms of ratios rather than absolute figures can also help ward against the anxieties of being part of (at least what I perceive to be) such a highly talented community. This might be easiest to do with things like SAT scores, where you have actual numbers to work with. But if this is a bad/incorrect way to think about comparative advantages I’d appreciate the correction.
Will: Has 80k or someone else considered writing up a profile of the typical EA in the scenario you note (early career, willing to choose just about any career option if it maximizes good) to give people a better understanding of what standard we should be comparing ourselves to when assessing our comparative advantage? I can see this being particularly useful for people with many good options who don’t know where to go. From what I see, most people I’ve talked to seem to be relying on informal conversations and intuitions about their peers that might easily be wrong. Something like: Early career EAs as a group are very skilled at x but seem to lack y skills as compared to the demands of the ‘EA job market’. Their median SAT/GRE scores are xyz (if that data is available), so to be considered particularly quant-y as compared to the group you should be in the x-y range, etc. Something like this but updated & tailored to help people coordinate amongst themselves would be great: https://80000hours.org/2014/03/coaching-applications-analysis/. If such a resource exists already, it’d be marvelous if someone could point me to it.
Come to think of it, this sounds less feasible but some sort of comparative advantage calculator (intending to do exactly what you describe in your edit but compared against the average EA) sounds like it could be useful, if difficult to achieve.
I realize belatedly my original post sounds like its talking in terms of absolute advantages still :) But having a general sense of the ‘ratios’ between the different skillsets the median young EA possesses would be useful for comparative purposes I think. Maybe presenting that information in terms of ratios rather than absolute figures can also help ward against the anxieties of being part of (at least what I perceive to be) such a highly talented community. This might be easiest to do with things like SAT scores, where you have actual numbers to work with. But if this is a bad/incorrect way to think about comparative advantages I’d appreciate the correction.