Hey Michael,
Thanks for commenting. With regard to your first point: I don’t think there is a tension—The idea of a list of the best careers for everyone from top to bottom doesn’t make much conceptual sense. But a list of career paths that it does the most good for a specific set of people to read about and consider does make conceptual sense. I think of 80,000 Hours as more like the latter.
And as I wrote in a reply to your other comment below, a list like that can be really helpful for people in creating their own personal lists of what the best options are for them.
(this is basically to agree with cole_haus’s reply)
Though I am saying that 80,000 Hours’ research can’t offer a single, definite ranking of what is best for everyone to do, that doesn’t mean that their research isn’t very useful for people figuring out what it is best for them to do.
The way I might put it: 80,000 Hours research helps people put together their own list of what is best for them to do, by (1) offering lots of information people need to combine with their own knowledge about themselves to build their list—e.g., what certain jobs are like, how people typically get into a particular job, and so on, (2) offering tools for people to use to figure out the information about themselves that they need—like for assessing personal fit, etc., and (3) offering guidance on how to prioritize options according to the impact that people in the roles can have under various different circumstances. 80,000 hours also does things like seek out specific positions and bring them to people’s attention.
All this is really useful, I believe, for helping people do the most good they can with their careers, without any of it amounting to creating a big list of what it’s best for everyone in group x (e.g., the EA community) to do.