MichaelA🔸 comments on Some thoughts on Toby Ord’s existential risk estimates

[MichaelA🔸]

Some comments from Michelle Hutchinson (80k’s Head of Advising) on the latest 80k podcast episode seem worth mentioning here, in relation to the last section of this post:

Yeah, I think people often assume that we’re only really excited about our priority paths which are listed explicitly on the website which is definitely not the case. One of the things that’s going on there is that it’s pretty difficult to figure out where people can have most impact. And so we’ve tried pretty hard to find some examples where we think some particular type of role could absorb quite a lot of people and still be amongst the most important things. But I think actually, it’s the case that most of the most important roles are plausibly going to be ones where there’s only a few people who could easily go into them. Or only a few people are needed. Or they’re just the type of roles or careers that we haven’t yet found or haven’t yet worked out are particularly impactful. And those are obviously very difficult to describe.

And so what I ideally want is for advisees to be thinking through what they think is the best possible option for them to go into and to have tons of people exploring different roles depending on what their particular background and skillset is, and then using these analytical tools to compare carefully between them and really squarely aim for impact in them. I’m really pleased that we now have some new content up alongside our priority paths, which are called “niche paths”, which describe some of the various different, more specific types of things people could do where maybe they’re ones that we think we’d just like one or two people working in them. Maybe there’s something like journalist, which is actually pretty difficult to get into and so not necessarily a good thing to aim for unless you already have quite a bit of evidence that you’ll be good at it. Or maybe they’re just things where we’re not really sure at all whether they’ll be very impactful, but we think there’s a good shot that they will be and so we’d be very interested to have people explore them further.