I don’t expect the impact analysis to be as good as what 80K aims for, but don’t you think we could improve over the current situation?
For example, imagine someone disagrees with the 80K analysis of being a doctor or due to some combination of skills, contacts and location wants to earn to give as a doctor anyways. While it’s hard to estimate a job’s impact in general, on the job board, people could estimate impact relative to an average doctor. By default, the search would multiply this by 80K’s overall low priority of medicine, but if someone wants to be a doctor for other reasons, they could edit the overall priority to take that into account.
Another example is avoiding a negative direct impact while earning to give or building career capital, or working in an area that 80K hasn’t (yet) evaluated (e.g. cybersecurity). Personally I would find a larger job board helpful even if most positions had only quantitative impact estimates and relied on the law of large numbers for reasonable results.
In general, 80K has a good (or at least decent) estimate of absolute impact for a small number of positions, but given the difficulty of getting one of them, my impression is that there’s space for a much larger list with just relevant areas and relative impact for each position.
I definitely think there’s room for improvement! In particular, I’d be interested to see people who have or want to obtain Job X write about their assessment of the job’s impact—ideally on this very website, though a site cataloging all such reviews and presenting them with nice formatting could also be useful.
(The Forum is a good place to try “content-only” versions of this kind of idea while features like dynamic sorting and web scraping get figured out.)
I’m not sure crowdsourcing from people without direct interest would work very well, but that’s largely based on my experience with other EA crowdsourcing projects; it’s easy to get initial enthusiasm, but few such projects keep going over the long run.
More measures of job impact are on my long list of “things I wish existed, but which seem not to be getting generated by EA’s collective consciousness”. If people can be convinced to make more of them exist, that would be wonderful, but I expect that getting solid writeups will be difficult.
That said, I hope you convince people to try! I’ll definitely read any job-impact posts published on the Forum, and I will appreciate the authors’ efforts, even if they only make loose/”law of large numbers” estimates.
I don’t expect the impact analysis to be as good as what 80K aims for, but don’t you think we could improve over the current situation?
For example, imagine someone disagrees with the 80K analysis of being a doctor or due to some combination of skills, contacts and location wants to earn to give as a doctor anyways. While it’s hard to estimate a job’s impact in general, on the job board, people could estimate impact relative to an average doctor. By default, the search would multiply this by 80K’s overall low priority of medicine, but if someone wants to be a doctor for other reasons, they could edit the overall priority to take that into account.
Another example is avoiding a negative direct impact while earning to give or building career capital, or working in an area that 80K hasn’t (yet) evaluated (e.g. cybersecurity). Personally I would find a larger job board helpful even if most positions had only quantitative impact estimates and relied on the law of large numbers for reasonable results.
In general, 80K has a good (or at least decent) estimate of absolute impact for a small number of positions, but given the difficulty of getting one of them, my impression is that there’s space for a much larger list with just relevant areas and relative impact for each position.
I definitely think there’s room for improvement! In particular, I’d be interested to see people who have or want to obtain Job X write about their assessment of the job’s impact—ideally on this very website, though a site cataloging all such reviews and presenting them with nice formatting could also be useful.
(The Forum is a good place to try “content-only” versions of this kind of idea while features like dynamic sorting and web scraping get figured out.)
I’m not sure crowdsourcing from people without direct interest would work very well, but that’s largely based on my experience with other EA crowdsourcing projects; it’s easy to get initial enthusiasm, but few such projects keep going over the long run.
More measures of job impact are on my long list of “things I wish existed, but which seem not to be getting generated by EA’s collective consciousness”. If people can be convinced to make more of them exist, that would be wonderful, but I expect that getting solid writeups will be difficult.
That said, I hope you convince people to try! I’ll definitely read any job-impact posts published on the Forum, and I will appreciate the authors’ efforts, even if they only make loose/”law of large numbers” estimates.