Hi Jan, thanks for your thoughts. Kit’s response is fairly close to our views.
The most important thing we want to emphasize is that at 80,000 Hours we definitely don’t think that working at an EA org is the only valuable thing for people to do. I think that taken as a whole, our writing reflects that.
The best way to quickly get sense of our views is reading through our high impact careers article, especially the list of 10 priority paths. Only one of these is working at an EA org.
I think our job board, problem profiles, podcast and so on give a similar sense of how much we value people working outside EA orgs.
A second key point is that when we score plan changes, we do not have a strict formula. We score changes based on our overall views of which paths are high-impact and assess many of the plan changes, especially the larger ones, on an individual basis, rather than simply putting them in a category. As an approximation, those we most prioritise are those represented by the 10 priority paths.
Of our top rated plan changes, only 25% involve people working at EA orgs
Fortunately, scoring on a case by case basis makes our scoring less vulnerable to Goodharting. Unfortunately, it means that it’s difficult for us to communicate exactly how we score plan changes to others. When we do so, it’s generally a few sentences, which are just aimed at giving people a sense of how impactful 80,000 Hours is as an organisation. These explanations are not intended to be career advice and it would be a shame if people have been taking them as such.
The specific sentences you quote are a bit out of date and we explain the categories differently in a draft of our annual review, which we hope to publish in the coming months. For example, we often score a plan change as rated-10 if somebody takes up a particularly valuable skill-building opportunity within one of our priority paths.
Of our top rated plan changes, only 25% involve people working at EA orgs
For what it’s worth, given how few EA orgs there are in relation to the number of highly dedicated EAs and how large the world outside of EA is (e.g. in terms of institutions/orgs that work in important areas or are reasonably good at teaching important skills), 25% actually strikes me as a high figure. Even if this was right, there might be good reasons for the figure being that high, e.g. it’s natural and doesn’t necessarily reflect any mistake that 80K knows more about which careers at EA orgs are high-impact, can do a better job at finding people for them etc. However, I would be surprised if as the EA movement becomes more mature the optimal proportion was as high.
(I didn’t read your comment as explicitly agreeing or disagreeing with anything in the above paragraph, just wanted to share my intuitive reaction.)
Thank you for your comments here, they’ve helped me understand 80K’s current thinking on the issue raised by the OP.
Thanks for the thoughts, Max. As you suggest in your parenthetical, we aren’t saying that 25% of the community ought to be working at EA orgs. The distribution of the plan changes we cause is also affected by things like our network being strongest within EA. That figure is also calculated from a fairly small number of our highest impact plan changes so it could easily change a lot over time.
Personally, I agree with your take that the optimal percentage of the community working at EA orgs is less than 25%.
To clarify the concern, I’m generally not much more worried about how you use it internally, but about other people using the metric. It was probably not clear from my comment.
I understand it was probably never intended as something which other should use either for guiding their decisions or evaluating their efforts.
Hi Jan, thanks for your thoughts. Kit’s response is fairly close to our views.
The most important thing we want to emphasize is that at 80,000 Hours we definitely don’t think that working at an EA org is the only valuable thing for people to do. I think that taken as a whole, our writing reflects that.
The best way to quickly get sense of our views is reading through our high impact careers article, especially the list of 10 priority paths. Only one of these is working at an EA org.
I think our job board, problem profiles, podcast and so on give a similar sense of how much we value people working outside EA orgs.
A second key point is that when we score plan changes, we do not have a strict formula. We score changes based on our overall views of which paths are high-impact and assess many of the plan changes, especially the larger ones, on an individual basis, rather than simply putting them in a category. As an approximation, those we most prioritise are those represented by the 10 priority paths.
Of our top rated plan changes, only 25% involve people working at EA orgs
Fortunately, scoring on a case by case basis makes our scoring less vulnerable to Goodharting. Unfortunately, it means that it’s difficult for us to communicate exactly how we score plan changes to others. When we do so, it’s generally a few sentences, which are just aimed at giving people a sense of how impactful 80,000 Hours is as an organisation. These explanations are not intended to be career advice and it would be a shame if people have been taking them as such.
The specific sentences you quote are a bit out of date and we explain the categories differently in a draft of our annual review, which we hope to publish in the coming months. For example, we often score a plan change as rated-10 if somebody takes up a particularly valuable skill-building opportunity within one of our priority paths.
I hope that helps answer your concern!
For what it’s worth, given how few EA orgs there are in relation to the number of highly dedicated EAs and how large the world outside of EA is (e.g. in terms of institutions/orgs that work in important areas or are reasonably good at teaching important skills), 25% actually strikes me as a high figure. Even if this was right, there might be good reasons for the figure being that high, e.g. it’s natural and doesn’t necessarily reflect any mistake that 80K knows more about which careers at EA orgs are high-impact, can do a better job at finding people for them etc. However, I would be surprised if as the EA movement becomes more mature the optimal proportion was as high.
(I didn’t read your comment as explicitly agreeing or disagreeing with anything in the above paragraph, just wanted to share my intuitive reaction.)
Thank you for your comments here, they’ve helped me understand 80K’s current thinking on the issue raised by the OP.
Thanks for the thoughts, Max. As you suggest in your parenthetical, we aren’t saying that 25% of the community ought to be working at EA orgs. The distribution of the plan changes we cause is also affected by things like our network being strongest within EA. That figure is also calculated from a fairly small number of our highest impact plan changes so it could easily change a lot over time.
Personally, I agree with your take that the optimal percentage of the community working at EA orgs is less than 25%.
To clarify the concern, I’m generally not much more worried about how you use it internally, but about other people using the metric. It was probably not clear from my comment.
I understand it was probably never intended as something which other should use either for guiding their decisions or evaluating their efforts.