1) 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 (that you should focus on roles with high immediate impact or on acquiring very specific narrow career capital as quickly as possible) and returning to something more like their position from 2016 (that your impact will mostly come many years into your career so you should focus on building career capital to be in the best position then). It’s possible the new position is a synthesis somewhere between these two, since you do include the word “targeted”, but how well can people feasibly target narrow career capital 5-10 years out when the skill bottlenecks of the future will surely be different?
2) In general I’ve noticed a pattern (of which the above two linked posts are an example) where 80k posts something like “our posts stating that ‘A is true’ have inadvertently caused many people to believe that A is true, here’s why A is actually false” while leaving up the old posts that say ‘A is true’ (sometimes without even a note that they might be outdated). This is especially bad when the older ‘A is true’ content is linked conveniently from the front page while the more recent updates are buried in blog history. Is it feasible for 80k to be more aggressive in taking down pages they no longer endorse so they at least don’t continue to do damage, and so the rest of us can more easily keep track of what 80k actually currently believes?
3) Regarding the problem of a diverse audience with differing needs, 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’ve found that 80k seems strangely reluctant to answer what level of human/social/career/financial capital they assume their audience has, even when asked directly.
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.
In general I’ve noticed a pattern (of which the above two linked posts are an example) where 80k posts something like “our posts stating that ‘A is true’ have inadvertently caused many people to believe that A is true, here’s why A is actually false” while leaving up the old posts that say ‘A is true’ (sometimes without even a note that they might be outdated). This is especially bad when the older ‘A is true’ content is linked conveniently from the front page while the more recent updates are buried in blog history.
The posts I linked on whether it’s worth pursuing flexible long-term career capital (yes says the Career Guide page, no says a section buried in an Annual Report, though they finally added a note/link from the yes page to the no page a year later when I pointed it out to them) are one example.
The “clarifying talent gaps” blog post largely contradicts an earlier post still linked from the “Research > Overview (start here)” page expressing concerns about an impending shortage of direct workers in general, as well as Key Articles suggesting that “almost all graduates” should seek jobs in research, policy or EA orgs (with earning-to-give only as a last resort) regardless of their specific skills. The latter in turn contradict pages still in the Career Guide and other posts emphasizing earning-to-give as potentially superior to even such high-impact careers as nonprofit CEO or vaccine research.
Earlier they changed their minds on replaceability (before, after); the deprecated view there is no longer prominently linked anywhere but I’m unsure of the wisdom of leaving it up at all.
Given how much 80k’s views have changed over the past 5-10 years, it’s hard to be optimistic about the prospects for successfully building narrow career capital targeted to the skill bottlenecks of 5-10 years from now!
Re point 1, as you say the career capital career guide article now has the disclaimer about how our views have changed at the top. We’re working on a site redesign that will make the career guide significantly less prominent, which will help address the fact that it was written in 2016 and is showing its age. We also have an entirely new summary article on career capital in the works—unfortunately this has taken a lot longer to complete than we would like, contributing to the current unfortunate situation.
Re point 2, the “clarifying talent gaps” post and “why focus on talent gaps” article do offer different views as they were published three years apart. We’ve now added a disclaimer linking to the new one.
The “Which jobs help people the most?” career guide piece, taken as a whole, isn’t more positive about earning to give than the other three options it highlights (research, policy and direct work).
I think your characterisation of the process we suggest in the ‘highest impact careers’ article could give readers the wrong impression. Here’s a broader quote:
When it comes to specific options, right now we often recommend the following five key categories, which should produce at least one good option for almost all graduates:
Research in relevant areas
Government and policy relevant to top problem areas
Work at effective non-profits
Apply an unusual strength to a needed niche
Otherwise, earn to give
You say that that article ‘largely contradicts’ the ‘clarifying talent gaps’ post. I agree there’s a shift in emphasis, as the purpose of the second is to make it clearer, among other things, how many people will find it hard to get into a priority path quickly. But ‘largely contradicts’ is an exaggeration in my opinion.
Re point 3, the replaceability blog post from 2012 you link to as contradicting our current position opens with “This post is out-of-date and no longer reflects our views. Read more.”
Our views will continue to evolve as we learn more, just as they have over the last seven years, though more gradually over time. People should take this into account when following our advice and make shifts more gradually and cautiously than if our recommendations were already perfect and fixed forever.
Updating the site is something we’ve been working on, but going back to review old pages trades off directly with writing up our current views and producing content about our priority paths, something that readers also want us to do.
One can make a case for entirely taking down old posts that no longer reflect our views, but for now I’d prefer to continue adding disclaimers at the top linking to our updated views on a question.
If you find other old pages that no longer reflect our views and lack such disclaimers, it would be great if you could email those pages to me directly so that I can add them.
Re point 2, the “clarifying talent gaps” post and the “why focus on talent gaps” article do offer different views. They were published three years apart. The older post opens with a disclaimer linking to the new one.
Just to be clear, I added the disclaimer to that page today after lexande wrote their initial comment. I don’t think Rob realised that the disclaimer was new.
Just to address your last point/question: I don’t think that the right thing to take away from 80,000 Hours changing its mind over the years on some of these points is pessimism about the targeted career capital one builds now being useful in 5-10 years—there are a lot of ways to do good, and these changes reflect 8,000 Hours changing views on what the absolute optimal way of doing good is. That’s obviously a hard thing to figure out, and it obviously changes over time. But most of their advice seems pretty robust to me. Even if it looks like in 5-10 years it would have been absolutely optimal to be doing something somewhat different, having followed 80,000 Hours advice would still likely put you in a position that is pretty close to the best place to be.
For example, if you are working toward doing governmental AI policy, and in 5-10 years that area is more saturated and so slightly less optimal than they think now it will be, and now it’s better to be working in an independent think tank, or on other technology policy, etc., then (1) what you’re doing is probably still pretty close to optimal, and (2) you might be able to switch over because the direct work you’ve been engaging in has also resulted in useful career capital.
It’s also important to remember that if in 10 years some 80,000 Hours-recommended career path, such as AI policy, is less neglected than it used to be, that is a good thing, and doesn’t undermine people having worked toward it—it’s less neglected in this case because more people worked toward it.
The specific alternatives will vary depending on the path in question and hard to predict things about the future. But if someone spends 5-10 years building career capital to get an operations job at an EA org, and then it turns out that field is extremely crowded with the vast majority of applicants unable to get such jobs, their alternatives may be limited to operations jobs at ineffective charities or random businesses, which may leave them much worse off (both personally and in terms of impact) than if they’d never encountered advice to go into operations (and had instead followed one of the more common career path for ambitious graduates, and been able to donate more as a result).
I’m also concerned about broader changes in how we think about priority paths over the coming 5-10 years. A few years ago, 80k strongly recommended going into management consulting, or trying to found a tech startup. Somebody who made multi-year plans and sacrifices based on that advice would find today that 80k now considers what they did to have been of little value.
It’s also important to remember that if in 10 years some 80,000 Hours-recommended career path, such as AI policy, is less neglected than it used to be, that is a good thing, and doesn’t undermine people having worked toward it—it’s less neglected in this case because more people worked toward it.
80,000 Hours has a responsibility to the people who put their trust in it when making their most important life decisions, to do everything it reasonably can to ensure that its advice does not make them worse off, even if betraying their trust would (considered narrowly/naively) lead to an increase in global utility. Comments like the above, as well as the negligence in posting warnings on outdated/unendorsed pages until months or years later, comments elsewhere in the thread worrying about screening off people who 80k’s advice could help while ignoring the importance of screening off those who it would hurt, and the lack of attention to backup plans, all give me the impression that 80k doesn’t really care about the outcomes of the individual people who trust it, and certainly doesn’t take its responsibility towards them as seriously as it should. Is this true? Do I need to warn people I care about to avoid relying on 80k for advice and read its pages only with caution and suspicion?
1) 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 (that you should focus on roles with high immediate impact or on acquiring very specific narrow career capital as quickly as possible) and returning to something more like their position from 2016 (that your impact will mostly come many years into your career so you should focus on building career capital to be in the best position then). It’s possible the new position is a synthesis somewhere between these two, since you do include the word “targeted”, but how well can people feasibly target narrow career capital 5-10 years out when the skill bottlenecks of the future will surely be different?
2) In general I’ve noticed a pattern (of which the above two linked posts are an example) where 80k posts something like “our posts stating that ‘A is true’ have inadvertently caused many people to believe that A is true, here’s why A is actually false” while leaving up the old posts that say ‘A is true’ (sometimes without even a note that they might be outdated). This is especially bad when the older ‘A is true’ content is linked conveniently from the front page while the more recent updates are buried in blog history. Is it feasible for 80k to be more aggressive in taking down pages they no longer endorse so they at least don’t continue to do damage, and so the rest of us can more easily keep track of what 80k actually currently believes?
3) Regarding the problem of a diverse audience with differing needs, 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’ve found that 80k seems strangely reluctant to answer what level of human/social/career/financial capital they assume their audience has, even when asked directly.
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.
Do you have examples of this?
The posts I linked on whether it’s worth pursuing flexible long-term career capital (yes says the Career Guide page, no says a section buried in an Annual Report, though they finally added a note/link from the yes page to the no page a year later when I pointed it out to them) are one example.
The “clarifying talent gaps” blog post largely contradicts an earlier post still linked from the “Research > Overview (start here)” page expressing concerns about an impending shortage of direct workers in general, as well as Key Articles suggesting that “almost all graduates” should seek jobs in research, policy or EA orgs (with earning-to-give only as a last resort) regardless of their specific skills. The latter in turn contradict pages still in the Career Guide and other posts emphasizing earning-to-give as potentially superior to even such high-impact careers as nonprofit CEO or vaccine research.
Earlier they changed their minds on replaceability (before, after); the deprecated view there is no longer prominently linked anywhere but I’m unsure of the wisdom of leaving it up at all.
Given how much 80k’s views have changed over the past 5-10 years, it’s hard to be optimistic about the prospects for successfully building narrow career capital targeted to the skill bottlenecks of 5-10 years from now!
Hi lexande —
Re point 1, as you say the career capital career guide article now has the disclaimer about how our views have changed at the top. We’re working on a site redesign that will make the career guide significantly less prominent, which will help address the fact that it was written in 2016 and is showing its age. We also have an entirely new summary article on career capital in the works—unfortunately this has taken a lot longer to complete than we would like, contributing to the current unfortunate situation.
Re point 2, the “clarifying talent gaps” post and “why focus on talent gaps” article do offer different views as they were published three years apart. We’ve now added a disclaimer linking to the new one.
The “Which jobs help people the most?” career guide piece, taken as a whole, isn’t more positive about earning to give than the other three options it highlights (research, policy and direct work).
I think your characterisation of the process we suggest in the ‘highest impact careers’ article could give readers the wrong impression. Here’s a broader quote:
You say that that article ‘largely contradicts’ the ‘clarifying talent gaps’ post. I agree there’s a shift in emphasis, as the purpose of the second is to make it clearer, among other things, how many people will find it hard to get into a priority path quickly. But ‘largely contradicts’ is an exaggeration in my opinion.
Re point 3, the replaceability blog post from 2012 you link to as contradicting our current position opens with “This post is out-of-date and no longer reflects our views. Read more.”
Our views will continue to evolve as we learn more, just as they have over the last seven years, though more gradually over time. People should take this into account when following our advice and make shifts more gradually and cautiously than if our recommendations were already perfect and fixed forever.
Updating the site is something we’ve been working on, but going back to review old pages trades off directly with writing up our current views and producing content about our priority paths, something that readers also want us to do.
One can make a case for entirely taking down old posts that no longer reflect our views, but for now I’d prefer to continue adding disclaimers at the top linking to our updated views on a question.
If you find other old pages that no longer reflect our views and lack such disclaimers, it would be great if you could email those pages to me directly so that I can add them.
Rob says:
Just to be clear, I added the disclaimer to that page today after lexande wrote their initial comment. I don’t think Rob realised that the disclaimer was new.
[Rob’s now edited his post to make that clear.]
Hey Lexande-
Just to address your last point/question: I don’t think that the right thing to take away from 80,000 Hours changing its mind over the years on some of these points is pessimism about the targeted career capital one builds now being useful in 5-10 years—there are a lot of ways to do good, and these changes reflect 8,000 Hours changing views on what the absolute optimal way of doing good is. That’s obviously a hard thing to figure out, and it obviously changes over time. But most of their advice seems pretty robust to me. Even if it looks like in 5-10 years it would have been absolutely optimal to be doing something somewhat different, having followed 80,000 Hours advice would still likely put you in a position that is pretty close to the best place to be.
For example, if you are working toward doing governmental AI policy, and in 5-10 years that area is more saturated and so slightly less optimal than they think now it will be, and now it’s better to be working in an independent think tank, or on other technology policy, etc., then (1) what you’re doing is probably still pretty close to optimal, and (2) you might be able to switch over because the direct work you’ve been engaging in has also resulted in useful career capital.
It’s also important to remember that if in 10 years some 80,000 Hours-recommended career path, such as AI policy, is less neglected than it used to be, that is a good thing, and doesn’t undermine people having worked toward it—it’s less neglected in this case because more people worked toward it.
The specific alternatives will vary depending on the path in question and hard to predict things about the future. But if someone spends 5-10 years building career capital to get an operations job at an EA org, and then it turns out that field is extremely crowded with the vast majority of applicants unable to get such jobs, their alternatives may be limited to operations jobs at ineffective charities or random businesses, which may leave them much worse off (both personally and in terms of impact) than if they’d never encountered advice to go into operations (and had instead followed one of the more common career path for ambitious graduates, and been able to donate more as a result).
I’m also concerned about broader changes in how we think about priority paths over the coming 5-10 years. A few years ago, 80k strongly recommended going into management consulting, or trying to found a tech startup. Somebody who made multi-year plans and sacrifices based on that advice would find today that 80k now considers what they did to have been of little value.
80,000 Hours has a responsibility to the people who put their trust in it when making their most important life decisions, to do everything it reasonably can to ensure that its advice does not make them worse off, even if betraying their trust would (considered narrowly/naively) lead to an increase in global utility. Comments like the above, as well as the negligence in posting warnings on outdated/unendorsed pages until months or years later, comments elsewhere in the thread worrying about screening off people who 80k’s advice could help while ignoring the importance of screening off those who it would hurt, and the lack of attention to backup plans, all give me the impression that 80k doesn’t really care about the outcomes of the individual people who trust it, and certainly doesn’t take its responsibility towards them as seriously as it should. Is this true? Do I need to warn people I care about to avoid relying on 80k for advice and read its pages only with caution and suspicion?
Hi lexande—thanks for taking the time to share your worries with us. We take our responsibility towards our users seriously.
I don’t think we’re likely to come to agreement right now on a lot of the other specific issues that have been raised.
That said, it’s helpful to know when our users strongly disagree with our priorities and we take that into account when we form our plans.