All of brentonmayer's Comments + Replies

Thanks for the thought!

You might be interested in the analysis we did in 2020. To pull out the phrase that I think most closely captures what you’re after: 
 

We also attempted an overall estimate. 

This gave the following picture for 2018–2019 (all figures in estimated DIPY per FTE and not robust):

1. Website (6.5)
2. Podcast (4.1) and advising (3.8)
3. Job board (2.9) and headhunting (2.5)

~~~
 

We did a scrappy internal update to our above 2020 analysis, but haven’t prioritised cleaning it up / coming to agreements internally and prese... (read more)

Cody's answer below and mine above give better 'overall' answers to your question, but - if you'd like to see something concrete and incomplete you could look at this appendix of job board placements we're aware of. 

Basically: these just take a really long time!

Lumping 2021 and 2022 progress together into a single public report meant that we saved hundreds of hours of staff time. 

A few other things that might be worth mentioning:

• I’m not sure whether we’ll use 1 or 2 year cycles for public annual reviews in future. 
• This review (14 pages + appendices) was much less in-depth and so much less expensive to produce than 2020 (42 pages + appendices) or 2019 (109 pages + appendices). If we end up thinking that our public reviews should be more

Hi Vaidehi - I'm answering here as I was responsible for 80k’s impact evaluation until late last year. 
 

My understanding is that plan changes (previously IASPC's then DIPY's) were a core metric 80K used in previous years to evaluate impact. It seems that there has been a shift to a new metric - CBPC's (see below). 

This understanding is a little off. Instead, it’s that in 2019 we decided to switch from IASPCs to DIPYs and CBPCs. 

The best place to read about the transition is the mistakes page here, and I think the best pl... (read more)

Ah nice, understood!

I don't think you'll find anything from us which is directly focused on most of these questions. (It's also not especially obvious that this is our comparative advantage within the community.)

But we do have some relevant public content. Much of it is in our annual review, including its appendices. 

You also might find these results of the OP EA/LT survey interesting. 

Hi - thanks for taking the time to think through these, write them out and share them! We really appreciate getting feedback from people who use our services and who have a sense of how others do. 

I work on 80k’s internal systems, including our impact evaluation (which seems relevant to your ideas). 

I've made sure that the four points will be seen by the relevant people at 80k for each of these. 

Re. #1, I'm confused about whether you're more referring to 'message testing' (i.e. what ideas/framings make our ideas appealing to which audiences) or 'long term follow up with users to see how their careers/lives have change'. (I can imagine various combinations of these.)

Could you elaborate?

I was interested in seeing a breakdown of the endpoints, before they'd been compressed into the scales AAC uses above. 

Jamie kindly pulled this spreadsheet together for me, which I'm sharing (with permission), as I thought it might be helpful to other readers too. 

Through overpopulation and  excessive consumption, humanity is depleting its natural resources, polluting its habitat, and causing the extinction of other species. Continuing like this will lead to the collapse of civilisation and likely our own extinction. 

This one seems very common to me, and sadly people often feel fatalistic about it. 

Two things that feeling might come from:

• People rarely talking about aspects of it which are on a positive trajectory (e.g. the population of whales, acid rain, CFC emissions, UN population projections

It's really cool to see these laid out next to another like this! Thanks for posting  Katja :) 

Makes sense! FWIW, I really enjoyed reading your post. There’s definitely something nice about how listing specific vacancies forces us to get down to get really concrete about what all this theorising actually means, even though doing so has been a bit challenging sometimes!

Thanks for the post Henry! I work at 80,000 Hours and have thought a little bit (along with Maria) about some of the indirect effects of the job board recently - especially about the degree to which it’ll be seen as representing our all-considered views of the best jobs. So it’s good to have some discussion of it!

Like you, I’m really excited about people using the job board to expand their ideas of what EA/long termist roles can look like, especially to types of roles which don’t have (something like) “effective altruism&... (read more)

Hi Aidan,

I’m Brenton from 80,000 Hours - thanks for writing this up! It seems really important that people don’t think of us as “tell[ing] them how to have an impactful career”. It sounds absolutely right to me that having a high impact career requires “a lot of independent thought and planning” - career advice can’t be universally applied.

I did have a few thoughts, which you could consider incorporating if you end up making a top level post. The most substantive two are:

1. Many of the priority paths are broad

Thanks for this post - I agree with your main point that there are many ways to contribute without working at organisations that explicitly identify with the effective altruism community, as would the rest of 80,000 Hours (where I work). In fact, I might go further in emphasising this.

The overwhelming majority of high impact roles in the world lie outside those organisations – with governments, foundations, intergovernmental agencies, large companies and, as you point out, academia. The majority of people interested in effective altruism should be taking ... (read more)

A few nice examples I've seen along these lines:

ACE's graphs on how relatively neglected farm animal welfare is.

Wait But Why on putting time in perspective.

A bunch of art on space, of which this clip of the virgo supercluster is an example.

And my favourite - 'If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel - a tediously accurate scale model of the solar system'.

Thanks Catherine. I’m going to quote the relevant part of my conclusion here, as I think the overall results of high school outreach are one of the most remarkable things to have come out of this review, but they haven’t seen any discussion here so far.

I’ve been very surprised at how little measured success high school EA outreach efforts have yielded. This post has compiled evidence from many competent people trying out multiple different methods, which in total have had over 5 years of full time equivalent work go into them. This has resulted in:

Three s

"I don't think I'm assuming that."

That's fair - my bad.

I think that it felt worthwhile making this point because an obvious response to your conclusion that "demand for jobs at professional EA organizations will continue to be very high" is to not worry if demand for these jobs drops. Or one could go further, and think that it would be good if demand dropped, given that there are costs to being an unsuccessful applicant. I appreciate that you're agnostic on whether people should have that response, but I personally think it would be bad - in part due to the reasoning in my previous comment.

[I work at 80,000 Hours]

It seems like you’re assuming that it would be better if EA organisations could make their jobs less desirable, in order to put off applicants so that the jobs would be less competitive. That doesn’t seem right to me.

Making the jobs less desirable is likely to either put off applicants at random, or even disproportionately put off the most experienced applicants who are most picky about jobs. That would seem reasonable to do if EA orgs were getting plenty of applicants above the bar to hire, and didn’t think there would be much dif... (read more)

This is a good thought! I actually went through a month or two of being pretty excited about doing something like this early last year. Unfortunately I think there are quite a few issues around how well the data we have from advising represents what paths EAs in general are aiming for, such that we (80,000 Hours) are not the natural home for this project. We discussed including a question on this in the EA survey with Rethink last year, though I understand they ran out of time/space for it.

I think there’s an argument that we should start collecting/public... (read more)