If the way you talk about career capital here is indicative of 80k’s current thinking then it sounds like they’ve changed their position AGAIN, mostly reversing their position from 2018
I didn’t mean for what I said to suggest a departure from 80,000 Hours’ current position on career capital. They still think (and I agree) that it’s better for most people to have a specific plan for impact in mind when they’re building career capital, instead of just building ‘generic’ career capital (generally transferable skills), and that in the best case that means going straight into a career path. But of course sometimes that won’t be possible and people will have to skill up somewhere else.
how well can people feasibly target narrow career capital 5-10 years out when the skill bottlenecks of the future will surely be different?
This is a good question, and it’s of course not easy to predict what the most impactful things to do in 5-10 years will be—it seems unlikely, though, that working toward one of 80,000 Hours’ “priority paths” will become not very useful down the line. And in general being sensitive to how skill bottlenecks might change in the future is definitely something that 80,000 Hours is keen on.
To your second point: I mean, yeah—it’s hard to keep everything up to date, especially as the body of research grows, but it’s obviously bad to have old content up there that is misleading or confusing. Updating and flagging (and maybe removing—I’m not sure) old content is something 80,000 Hours is working on.
an obvious strategy for dealing with this is to explicitly state (for each page or section of the site) who the intended audience is.
I’m not sure what exactly the 80,000 Hours team would say about explicitly labeling different pages with notes about the intended audience, but my guess is that they wouldn’t want to do that for a lot of their content because it’s very hard to say exactly who it will be useful for. They do have something about intended audience on their homepage: “Ultimately, we want to help everyone in the world have a big social impact in their career. Right now, we’re focusing on giving advice to talented and ambitious graduates in their twenties and thirties.” I know that’s vague, but it seems like it has to be vague to keep from screening off people who could benefit from the research.
Maybe they could do a better job of helping people figure out what content is for them and what content isn’t, but it doesn’t seem to me at least like explicitly labels at the top of pages would be the right way to go about it.
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.
I didn’t mean for what I said to suggest a departure from 80,000 Hours’ current position on career capital. They still think (and I agree) that it’s better for most people to have a specific plan for impact in mind when they’re building career capital, instead of just building ‘generic’ career capital (generally transferable skills), and that in the best case that means going straight into a career path. But of course sometimes that won’t be possible and people will have to skill up somewhere else.
This is a good question, and it’s of course not easy to predict what the most impactful things to do in 5-10 years will be—it seems unlikely, though, that working toward one of 80,000 Hours’ “priority paths” will become not very useful down the line. And in general being sensitive to how skill bottlenecks might change in the future is definitely something that 80,000 Hours is keen on.
To your second point: I mean, yeah—it’s hard to keep everything up to date, especially as the body of research grows, but it’s obviously bad to have old content up there that is misleading or confusing. Updating and flagging (and maybe removing—I’m not sure) old content is something 80,000 Hours is working on.
I’m not sure what exactly the 80,000 Hours team would say about explicitly labeling different pages with notes about the intended audience, but my guess is that they wouldn’t want to do that for a lot of their content because it’s very hard to say exactly who it will be useful for. They do have something about intended audience on their homepage: “Ultimately, we want to help everyone in the world have a big social impact in their career. Right now, we’re focusing on giving advice to talented and ambitious graduates in their twenties and thirties.” I know that’s vague, but it seems like it has to be vague to keep from screening off people who could benefit from the research.
Maybe they could do a better job of helping people figure out what content is for them and what content isn’t, but it doesn’t seem to me at least like explicitly labels at the top of pages would be the right way to go about it.
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.