I think it would be especially valuable to see to which degree they reflect the individual judgment of decision-makers.
The comment above hopefully helps address this.
I would also be interested in whether they take into account recent discussions/criticisms of model choices in longtermist math that strike me as especially important for the kind of advising 80.000 hours does (tldr: I take one crux of that article to be that longtermist benefits by individual action are often overstated, because the great benefits longtermism advertises require both reducing risk and keeping overall risk down long-term, which plausibly exceeds the scope of a career/life).
We did discuss this internally in slack (prompted by David’s podcatst https://critiquesofea.podbean.com/e/astronomical-value-existential-risk-and-billionaires-with-david-thorstad/). My take was that the arguments don’t mean that reducing existential risk isn’t very valuable, even though they do imply it’s likely not of ‘astronomical’ value. So e.g. it’s not as if you can ignore all other considerations and treat “whether this will reduce existential risk” as a full substitute for whether something is a top priority. I agree with that.
We do generally agree that many questions in global priorities research remain open — that’s why we recommend some of our readers pursue careers in this area. We’re open to the possibility that new developments in this field could substantially change our views.
I think there would be considerable value in having the biggest career-advising organization (80k) be a non-partisan EA advising organization, whereas I currently take them to be strongly favoring longtermism in their advice. While I feel this explicit stance is a mistake, I feel like getting a better grasp on its motivation would help me understand why it was taken.
We’re not trying to be ‘partisan’, for what it’s worth. There might be a temptation to sometimes see longtermism and neartermism as different camps, but what we’re trying to do is just figure out all things considered what we think is most pressing / promising and communicate that to readers. We tend to think that propensity to affect the long-run future is a key way in which an issue can be extremely pressing (which we explain in our longtermism article.)
I like this post and also worry about this phenomenon.
When I talk about personal fit (and when we do so at 80k) it’s basically about how good you are at a thing/the chance that you can excel.
It does increase your personal fit for something to be intuitively motivated by the issue it focuses on, but I agree that it seems way too quick to conclude then that your personal fit with that is higher than other things (since there are tons of factors and there are also lots of different jobs for each problem area), let alone that that means you should work on that issue all things considered (since personal fit is not the only factor).