You can also have a large counterfactual impact if you free up other people to do more important things. Eg, if you’re an EA lawyer who can annually help save 4 FTE-years of filing paperwork or doing legal research.
For example this comment by catehall was super useful for me. I’m sure that even without a legal background, I or someone from the RP ops team could have figured out the right answer eventually, but it would’ve taken us hours if not days, while that comment probably took catehall like 10 minutes, so she had both a large comparative advantage and absolute advantage in answering that question, relative to generalist researchers or generalist ops.
There’s a similar story for being a programmer that automates other people’s work, or for being a research assistant to great researchers, or even for ops writ large.
I’ve seen 80,000 Hours say something similar, but I don’t actually think this provides counterfactual impact unless one of the things I listed above is also true.
If you’re hired as a research assistant or programmer and someone else would have done the role equally well otherwise, you wouldn’t have any counterfactual impact. It’s only if the role wouldn’t have been filled otherwise, or the other candidates wouldn’t have taken the initiative to automate others’ work, that you have a counterfactual impact.
Ah right, not just releasing the next-best candidate to do another job, but helping other people save time as well (in a better way than another candidate would ie because you have rare and valuable skills)
You can also have a large counterfactual impact if you free up other people to do more important things. Eg, if you’re an EA lawyer who can annually help save 4 FTE-years of filing paperwork or doing legal research.
For example this comment by catehall was super useful for me. I’m sure that even without a legal background, I or someone from the RP ops team could have figured out the right answer eventually, but it would’ve taken us hours if not days, while that comment probably took catehall like 10 minutes, so she had both a large comparative advantage and absolute advantage in answering that question, relative to generalist researchers or generalist ops.
There’s a similar story for being a programmer that automates other people’s work, or for being a research assistant to great researchers, or even for ops writ large.
I’ve seen 80,000 Hours say something similar, but I don’t actually think this provides counterfactual impact unless one of the things I listed above is also true.
If you’re hired as a research assistant or programmer and someone else would have done the role equally well otherwise, you wouldn’t have any counterfactual impact. It’s only if the role wouldn’t have been filled otherwise, or the other candidates wouldn’t have taken the initiative to automate others’ work, that you have a counterfactual impact.
Ah right, not just releasing the next-best candidate to do another job, but helping other people save time as well (in a better way than another candidate would ie because you have rare and valuable skills)