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Replaceability

TagLast edit: 15 Jan 2022 11:37 UTC by Leo

In the context of career choice, a person’s replaceability is the degree to which their role impact would vary should that position be occupied by the next most likely candidate.

Benjamin Todd illustrates this idea with an example:[1]

Suppose you become a surgeon and perform 100 life saving operations. Naively it seems like your impact is to save 100 people’s lives. If you hadn’t taken the job, however, someone else likely would have taken it instead. So your true (counterfactual) impact is less than the good you do directly.

This type of consideration is relevant not only to careers, but to donations (“Would someone else have fulfilled charity X’s funding gap if I hadn’t?”) and fundraising (“If I persuade someone to give money, would they have given it anyway?”).

However, it is often unclear to what an extent replaceability applies for a given action, and 80,000 Hours notes that for many career decisions replaceability has only limited relevance.

Further reading

Christiano, Paul (2013) Replaceability, Rational Altruist, January 22.
An alternative view.

Kuhn, Ben (2013) Replaceability in altruism, Effective Altruism Forum, August 29.
A discussion regarding charitable donations.

O’Keeffe-O’Dononvan, Rossa (2014) What does economics tell us about replaceability?, 80,000 Hours, July 17.
An analysis with regards to careers.

Rieber, Lila (2015) The bittersweetness of replaceability, Effective Altruism Forum, July 12.
A more personal approach to the arguments, and a discussion of the various ways in which they can be applied.

Related entries

altruistic coordination | counterfactual reasoning | impact assessment | markets for altruism

  1. ^

Coun­ter­fac­tual im­pact when your cowork­ers share your values

Kirsten16 Oct 2021 11:48 UTC
25 points
4 comments5 min readEA link

Im­pact above Replacement

Erich_Grunewald 🔸30 Nov 2022 8:12 UTC
10 points
0 comments12 min readEA link
(www.erichgrunewald.com)

Altru­is­tic Or­ga­ni­za­tions Should Con­sider Coun­ter­fac­tu­als When Hiring

MichaelDickens11 Sep 2016 4:19 UTC
1 point
17 comments2 min readEA link

Replaceability

Paul_Christiano22 Jan 2013 5:00 UTC
15 points
0 comments4 min readEA link

Re­place­abil­ity with differ­ing priorities

MichaelStJules8 Mar 2020 6:59 UTC
26 points
5 comments5 min readEA link

Re­place­abil­ity in altruism

Ben Kuhn29 Aug 2013 4:00 UTC
0 points
0 comments3 min readEA link

[Question] How does Re­place­abil­ity ap­ply to over­crowded aca­demic ar­eas, such as the­o­ret­i­cal physics, and how does it com­pare to other com­pet­i­tive ca­reers?

askingquestionst25 Jan 2022 7:36 UTC
9 points
5 comments1 min readEA link

For­get re­place­abil­ity? (for ~com­mu­nity pro­jects)

Owen Cotton-Barratt31 Mar 2021 14:41 UTC
70 points
25 comments6 min readEA link

EA read­ing list: re­place­abil­ity and discounting

richard_ngo3 Aug 2020 10:10 UTC
12 points
2 comments1 min readEA link

Re­place­abil­ity Con­cerns and Pos­si­ble Responses

sapphire2 Aug 2020 18:19 UTC
34 points
7 comments4 min readEA link

The Bit­ter­sweet­ness of Re­place­abil­ity

Lila11 Jul 2015 23:44 UTC
18 points
22 comments6 min readEA link
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