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.
litvand
Karma: 34
Bostrom discusses this possibility, but dismisses it as making the mere locations of people morally significant, because rearranging the terms in a sum can change the limit.