2. For every reader, such a list would include many paths that they can’t take.
But it seems like there’s another problem, closely related to this one: for every reader, the paths on such a list could have different orderings. If someone has a comparative advantage for a role, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they can’t aim for other roles: but it might mean that they should prefer the role that they have a comparative advantage for. This is especially true once we consider that most people don’t know exactly what they could do and what they’d be good at—instead, their personal lists contains a bunch of things they could aim for, ordered according to different probabilities of having different amounts of impact.
In particular, I think it’s a bad idea to take a ‘big list’, winnow away all the jobs that looks impossible, and then aim for whatever is on top of the list. Instead, your personal list might overlap with others’, but have a completely different ordering (yet hopefully contain a few items that other people haven’t even considered, given that 80k can’t evaluate all opportunities, like you say).
As a problem with the ‘big list’, you mention
But it seems like there’s another problem, closely related to this one: for every reader, the paths on such a list could have different orderings. If someone has a comparative advantage for a role, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they can’t aim for other roles: but it might mean that they should prefer the role that they have a comparative advantage for. This is especially true once we consider that most people don’t know exactly what they could do and what they’d be good at—instead, their personal lists contains a bunch of things they could aim for, ordered according to different probabilities of having different amounts of impact.
In particular, I think it’s a bad idea to take a ‘big list’, winnow away all the jobs that looks impossible, and then aim for whatever is on top of the list. Instead, your personal list might overlap with others’, but have a completely different ordering (yet hopefully contain a few items that other people haven’t even considered, given that 80k can’t evaluate all opportunities, like you say).