This is cool Ben, thanks for doing this! I agree with the general idea that personal fit is very important and we should be open to considering a wide range of careers.
I do think this slightly misrepresents 80k though. You say they only have a list of four top careers, but in fact what they have is four careers they consider “very promising, but highly competitive and with low chance of success”, and ten more careers they consider promising. I think 80k also talk about most of the careers you list—if not all the specific sub-categories. And the 80k website actually actively advises against narrowing down based on what you’re interested in, and emphasises the importance of personal fit.
Most of what I said was not attempting to represent 80k at all, though—it was largely based on how I observed real EAs making career decisions, which somehow often got framed as “tech vs. trading” (possibly vs. academia) despite 80k’s excellent advice!
The sentence that you picked out did end ”...and ten or so other second- or third-tier options”, which was my understanding of how that list was organized—perhaps the headings were different the last time I read it or something. At any rate, three of the second four are dominated in the sub-rankings by one of the first four, so I think it’s fair to call them “second-tier” based on that, even if the headings don’t make it explicit.
Yeah, fair—the way I read it at the beginning sounded more like the whole thing was talking about 80k than perhaps it was. Anyway, just wanted to make clear that I think 80k very much agrees with most (if not all) or what you’re saying here :)
Just adding a few more clarifications of our views here:
The current list is just the careers that we’ve found promising among those we’ve investigated, but we haven’t yet investigated very many. There’s definitely many other good options out there.
We also include ‘learning value’ in our framework, to flag the value of doing things you don’t already know much about.
Many of these career options are already listed on the ‘other careers we’d like to investigate’ list here
I really like the idea of having a list of promising careers we haven’t investigated yet that includes a couple of sentences of explanation, like you’ve done here, so I’ll probably add a page like that in the next iteration of the site. Thanks for suggesting it.
You’re also right that if you want to coordinate with the EA community, then there’s extra value from doing stuff that other EAs aren’t doing. We don’t include that in our guide, however, because the guide isn’t aimed only at EAs. I think this is an important consideration that’s often neglected though, so I’m really pleased to see it being discussed here.
This is cool Ben, thanks for doing this! I agree with the general idea that personal fit is very important and we should be open to considering a wide range of careers.
I do think this slightly misrepresents 80k though. You say they only have a list of four top careers, but in fact what they have is four careers they consider “very promising, but highly competitive and with low chance of success”, and ten more careers they consider promising. I think 80k also talk about most of the careers you list—if not all the specific sub-categories. And the 80k website actually actively advises against narrowing down based on what you’re interested in, and emphasises the importance of personal fit.
Most of what I said was not attempting to represent 80k at all, though—it was largely based on how I observed real EAs making career decisions, which somehow often got framed as “tech vs. trading” (possibly vs. academia) despite 80k’s excellent advice!
The sentence that you picked out did end ”...and ten or so other second- or third-tier options”, which was my understanding of how that list was organized—perhaps the headings were different the last time I read it or something. At any rate, three of the second four are dominated in the sub-rankings by one of the first four, so I think it’s fair to call them “second-tier” based on that, even if the headings don’t make it explicit.
(Edited for grammar)
Yeah, fair—the way I read it at the beginning sounded more like the whole thing was talking about 80k than perhaps it was. Anyway, just wanted to make clear that I think 80k very much agrees with most (if not all) or what you’re saying here :)
Just adding a few more clarifications of our views here:
The current list is just the careers that we’ve found promising among those we’ve investigated, but we haven’t yet investigated very many. There’s definitely many other good options out there.
We also include ‘learning value’ in our framework, to flag the value of doing things you don’t already know much about.
Many of these career options are already listed on the ‘other careers we’d like to investigate’ list here
I really like the idea of having a list of promising careers we haven’t investigated yet that includes a couple of sentences of explanation, like you’ve done here, so I’ll probably add a page like that in the next iteration of the site. Thanks for suggesting it.
You’re also right that if you want to coordinate with the EA community, then there’s extra value from doing stuff that other EAs aren’t doing. We don’t include that in our guide, however, because the guide isn’t aimed only at EAs. I think this is an important consideration that’s often neglected though, so I’m really pleased to see it being discussed here.