I’m Brenton from 80,000 Hours—thanks for writing this up! It seems really important that people don’t think of us as “tell[ing] them how to have an impactful career”. It sounds absolutely right to me that having a high impact career requires “a lot of independent thought and planning”—career advice can’t be universally applied.
I did have a few thoughts, which you could consider incorporating if you end up making a top level post. The most substantive two are:
Many of the priority paths are broader than you might be thinking.
A significant amount of our advice is designed to help people think through how to approach their careers, and will be useful regardless of whether they’re aiming for a priority path.
Many of the priority paths are broader than you might be thinking:
Most people won’t be able to step into an especially high impact role directly out of undergrad, so unsurprisingly, many of the priority paths require people to build up career capital before they can get into high impact positions. We’d think of people who are building up career capital focused on (say) AI policy as being ‘on a priority path’. We also think of people who aren’t in the most competitive positions as being within the path
For instance, let’s consider AI policy. We think that path includes graduate school, all the options outlined in our writeup on US AI policy and the 161 roles currently on the job board under the relevant filter. It’s also worth remembering that the job board has still left most of the relevant roles out: none of them are congressional staffers for example, which we’d also think of as under this priority path.
A significant amount of our advice is designed to help people think through how to approach their careers, and will be useful regardless of whether they’re aiming for a priority path.
In our primary articles on how to plan your career, we spend a lot of time talking about general career strategy and ways to generate options. The articles encourage people to go through a process which should generate high impact options, of which only some will be in the priority paths:
Unfortunately, there’s something in the concreteness of a list of top options which draws people in particularly strongly. This is a communication challenge that we’ve worked on a bit, but don’t think we have a great answer to yet. We discussed this in our ‘Advice on how to read our advice’. In the future we’ll add some more ‘niche’ paths, which may help somewhat.
We don’t think that the priority paths are the only route through which people can affect the long term future.
I found the tone of this comment generally great, and two of my colleagues commented the same. I appreciate that going through this shift you’ve gone through would have been hard and it’s really impressive that you’ve come out of it with such a balanced view, including being able to acknowledge the tradeoffs that we face in what we work on. Thank you for that.
If you make a top level post (which I’d encourage you to do), feel free to quote any part of this comment.
Hi Aidan,
I’m Brenton from 80,000 Hours—thanks for writing this up! It seems really important that people don’t think of us as “tell[ing] them how to have an impactful career”. It sounds absolutely right to me that having a high impact career requires “a lot of independent thought and planning”—career advice can’t be universally applied.
I did have a few thoughts, which you could consider incorporating if you end up making a top level post. The most substantive two are:
Many of the priority paths are broader than you might be thinking.
A significant amount of our advice is designed to help people think through how to approach their careers, and will be useful regardless of whether they’re aiming for a priority path.
Many of the priority paths are broader than you might be thinking:
Most people won’t be able to step into an especially high impact role directly out of undergrad, so unsurprisingly, many of the priority paths require people to build up career capital before they can get into high impact positions. We’d think of people who are building up career capital focused on (say) AI policy as being ‘on a priority path’. We also think of people who aren’t in the most competitive positions as being within the path
For instance, let’s consider AI policy. We think that path includes graduate school, all the options outlined in our writeup on US AI policy and the 161 roles currently on the job board under the relevant filter. It’s also worth remembering that the job board has still left most of the relevant roles out: none of them are congressional staffers for example, which we’d also think of as under this priority path.
A significant amount of our advice is designed to help people think through how to approach their careers, and will be useful regardless of whether they’re aiming for a priority path.
In our primary articles on how to plan your career, we spend a lot of time talking about general career strategy and ways to generate options. The articles encourage people to go through a process which should generate high impact options, of which only some will be in the priority paths:
The career strategy and planning and decision making sections of key ideas
This article on high impact careers
Career planning
Unfortunately, there’s something in the concreteness of a list of top options which draws people in particularly strongly. This is a communication challenge that we’ve worked on a bit, but don’t think we have a great answer to yet. We discussed this in our ‘Advice on how to read our advice’. In the future we’ll add some more ‘niche’ paths, which may help somewhat.
A few more minor points:
Your point about Bill Gates was really well put. It reminded me of my colleague Michelle’s post on ‘Keeping absolutes in mind’, which you might enjoy reading.
We don’t think that the priority paths are the only route through which people can affect the long term future.
I found the tone of this comment generally great, and two of my colleagues commented the same. I appreciate that going through this shift you’ve gone through would have been hard and it’s really impressive that you’ve come out of it with such a balanced view, including being able to acknowledge the tradeoffs that we face in what we work on. Thank you for that.
If you make a top level post (which I’d encourage you to do), feel free to quote any part of this comment.
Cheers, Brenton