In case “I can imagine” was literal, then let me serve as proof-of-concept, as a person who thinks the risk is high but there’s nothing we can do about it short of a major upheaval of the culture of the entire developed world.
thecommexokid
Karma: 50
Feedback on this post: I did not understand what CoLabs was after reading the 1-minute snapshot; I had to read aways into the outline and click through to the site to understand what the product is. I think you assume your target audience knows what a “projects platform” is without needing it defined, but it took me a while to understand what that meant.
Others are answering in units of hours, but in terms of toggling between accomplishing real work and getting caught in distractions, I feel like the more relevant unit for me would be in minutes. I predict that an attempt to log my time “actually working” would be doomed because I flit in and out of “actually working” on a much finer timescale than it is practical to track. Perhaps this is a sign I would benefit from an attention-improving drug.
The advice I would most want that I haven’t gotten from 80000 Hours’ existing literature is a general strategy for pursuing an impactful career subject to the constraint of not leaving the city I live in. Maybe there is no useful generic advice to give on that question and it entirely depends on which city. But if that’s not the case, then maybe your experience giving career advice within Israel could lead to better guidance than 80K, who seem to have an implicit assumption that of course you’d be willing to move to SF or London if you want an impactful career.
Very cool, and if you eventually reach a scale where you are seeking dedicated operations staff, you’ll probably be getting a résumé from me!
In your FAQ on the website, I would suggest clarifying the language of the claim you make that “the relationship between lead exposure and neurotoxic effects is greater at lower blood lead levels.” It is correct as written, but I had to follow the link and find the graph in the original paper to understand it. My initial reading was that you were claiming some sort of J-shaped dose–response curve, which fortunately struck me as nonsensical enough to click through and verify. I might suggest “stronger”or “more pronounced” rather than “greater,” or some other way to make it clearer that you are talking about the slope rather than the value.
I’m not looking for an engineering role, but definitely for myself the disconnect between what I am looking for and what EA-adjacent opportunities I find advertised is 100% location. I live in a particular city and I am not in a position to move in the short term, and as that city is not the Bay, NYC, or Oxford, it’s hard to find any useful postings or even guidance from the online EA community. I’d love for 80,000 Hours to have any advice whatsoever tailored to someone constrained to job-searching only within their own city, but so far I haven’t come across any.
I worry that this could be somewhat motivated reasoning. It reads as though you started with the conclusion you wanted to reach, namely that physics can be a promising EA field, and worked backwards to find arguments that support that conclusion. [See also https://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur/2010/04/22/.]
Is this supposed to be some sort of knockdown argument? It obviously doesn’t drown out all other considerations, but I’d absolutely consider it a major pro if my oncologist was herself a cancer survivor.
Once I have conceded the basic point that no, standpoint doesn’t add infinite value such that nothing else matters, and you’ve conceded the basic point that yes, standpoint does add more than literally 0 value all else equal, then where does that leave us? We still need some recipe to weigh standpoint relative with expertise, study, and all the rest of the considerations.
I do agree that if I want to give a lot of weight to standpoint, I should be able to tell you a specific story about the added value I expect to get from it. E.g., my cancer-survivor oncologist will have a better understanding of what it is like to navigate the medical system from the patient’s perspective, which will make her more compassionate; she’ll be better able to advise me on intangible quality-of-life tradeoffs associated with different treatment decisions; etc.
But I worry that this heuristic could lead to a sort of Diversity Dunning–Kruger effect, where the same Standpoint X that would help a project succeed is also required in order to even identify that Standpoint X would be helpful to have. It’s kind of paradoxical to require that I have a specific story in advance about how filling in a blindspot will help me; if I knew that, then it wouldn’t be a blindspot.