On career capital: I find it quite hard to square your comments that “Most readers who are still early in their careers must spend considerable time building targeted career capital before they can enter the roles 80,000 Hours promotes most” and “building career capital that’s relevant to where you want to be in 5 or 10 years is often exactly what you should be doing” with the comments from the annual report that “You can get good career capital in positions with high immediate impact (especially problem-area specific career capital), including most of those we recommend” and “Discount rates on aligned-talent are quite high in some of the priority paths, and seem to have increased, making career capital less valuable.” Reading the annual report definitely gives me the impression that 80k absolutely does not endorse spending 5-10 years in low-impact roles to try to build career capital for most people, and so if this is incorrect then it seems like further clarification of 80k’s views on career capital on the website should be a high priority.
On planning: While I expect 80k’s current priority paths will probably all still be considered important in 5-10 years time, it’s harder to predict whether they will still be considered neglected. It’s easy to imagine some of the fields in question becoming very crowded with qualified candidates, such that people who start working towards them now will have extreme difficulty getting hired in a target role 5-10 years from now, and will have low counterfactual impact if they do get hired. (It’s also possible, though less likely, that estimates of the tractability of some of the priorities will decline.)
On outdated content: I appreciate 80k’s efforts to tag content that is no longer endorsed, but there have often been long delays between new contradictory content being posted and old posts being tagged (even when the new post links to the old post, so it’s not like it would have required extra effort to find posts needing tagging). Further, posts about the new position sometimes fail to engage with the arguments for the old position. And in many cases I’m not sure what purpose is served by leaving the old posts up at all. (It’s not like taking them down would be hiding anything, they’d still be on archive.org.)
On article targeting: In your original post you gave the example of 80k deliberately working to create more content targeted at people later in their careers, and this winding up discouraging some readers who are still early in their careers. Surely at least in that case you could have been explicit about the different audience you were deliberately targeting? More generally, you express concern about “screening off people who could benefit from the research”, but while such false negatives are bad, failing to screen off people for whom your advice would be useless or harmful is also bad, and I think 80k currently errs significantly in the latter direction. I also find it worrying if not even 80k’s authors know who their advice is written for, since knowing your target audience is a foundational requirement for communication of any kind and especially important when communicating advice if you want it to be useful and not counterproductive.
On career capital: I find it quite hard to square your comments that “Most readers who are still early in their careers must spend considerable time building targeted career capital before they can enter the roles 80,000 Hours promotes most” and “building career capital that’s relevant to where you want to be in 5 or 10 years is often exactly what you should be doing” with the comments from the annual report that “You can get good career capital in positions with high immediate impact (especially problem-area specific career capital), including most of those we recommend” and “Discount rates on aligned-talent are quite high in some of the priority paths, and seem to have increased, making career capital less valuable.” Reading the annual report definitely gives me the impression that 80k absolutely does not endorse spending 5-10 years in low-impact roles to try to build career capital for most people, and so if this is incorrect then it seems like further clarification of 80k’s views on career capital on the website should be a high priority.
On planning: While I expect 80k’s current priority paths will probably all still be considered important in 5-10 years time, it’s harder to predict whether they will still be considered neglected. It’s easy to imagine some of the fields in question becoming very crowded with qualified candidates, such that people who start working towards them now will have extreme difficulty getting hired in a target role 5-10 years from now, and will have low counterfactual impact if they do get hired. (It’s also possible, though less likely, that estimates of the tractability of some of the priorities will decline.)
On outdated content: I appreciate 80k’s efforts to tag content that is no longer endorsed, but there have often been long delays between new contradictory content being posted and old posts being tagged (even when the new post links to the old post, so it’s not like it would have required extra effort to find posts needing tagging). Further, posts about the new position sometimes fail to engage with the arguments for the old position. And in many cases I’m not sure what purpose is served by leaving the old posts up at all. (It’s not like taking them down would be hiding anything, they’d still be on archive.org.)
On article targeting: In your original post you gave the example of 80k deliberately working to create more content targeted at people later in their careers, and this winding up discouraging some readers who are still early in their careers. Surely at least in that case you could have been explicit about the different audience you were deliberately targeting? More generally, you express concern about “screening off people who could benefit from the research”, but while such false negatives are bad, failing to screen off people for whom your advice would be useless or harmful is also bad, and I think 80k currently errs significantly in the latter direction. I also find it worrying if not even 80k’s authors know who their advice is written for, since knowing your target audience is a foundational requirement for communication of any kind and especially important when communicating advice if you want it to be useful and not counterproductive.