Hi Arden, thanks for engaging like this on the forum!

Re: "the general type of person we tend to ask for input" - how do you treat the tradeoff between your advisors holding the values of longtermist effective altruism, and them being domain experts in the areas you recommend? (Of course, some people are both - but there are many insightful experts outside EA).

or to take an extreme example, becoming president of the US
 

What is your thinking for not including this? I am asking as there might be people (you know better than me!) that might think it worthwhile to pursue this career even if it to them has a 0.01% chance of success. I am asking as there is existing EA advice about being ambitious, but is there advice that I have not seen about not being too ambitious? I feel like many people might "qualify" for becoming a president even if the chance of "making it" is low, so in one way it is perhaps not that narrow (even if there is only one 1st place). And on the way to this goal, people are likely to be managing large pots of money and/or making impactful policy more likely to happen.

Thanks for the comprehensive reply, Arden!

Thanks for your interest and also for raising this with us before you posted so I could post this response quickly!

Thanks for sharing the 1st version of your answer too, which prompted me to add a little more detail about what I was asking in the post.

If some of the additional notes below seem like they should be included that'd be helpful to hear.

I think it would be valuable to include all the additional notes which are not on your website. As a minimum viable product, you may want to link to your comment.

To reply to your specific question about aggregating people's personal rankings: no, we don't do any formal sort of 'voting' system like that. The problems and paths rankings are informed by the views of the staff at 80,000 Hours and external advisors via surveys where I elicit people's personal rankings, and lots of ongoing internal discussion, but I am the "point person" for ultimately deciding how to combine this information into a ranking. In practice, this means my views can be expected to have an outsized influence, but I put a lot of emphasis on takes from others and aim for the lists to be something 80,000 Hours as an organisation can stand behind.

Thanks for sharing! The approach you are following seems to be analogous to what happens in the broader society, where there is often one single person responsible for informally aggregating various views. Using a formal aggregation method is the norm in forecasting circles. However, there are often many forecasts to be aggregated, so informal aggregation would hardly be feasible for most cases. On the other hand, Samotsvety, "a group of forecasters with a great track record", also uses formal aggregation methods. I am not aware of research comparing informal to formal aggregation of a few forecasts, so there might not be a strong case either way. In any case, I encourage you to try formal aggregation to see if you arrive to meaningfully different results.

Another big factor is what the lists were before, which I tend to view as a prior to update from, and which were informed by the research we did in the past and the views of people like like Ben Todd, Howie Lempel, and Rob Wiblin.

Makes sense.

The rankings are not nearly as formal or quantitative as, e.g. the cost-effectiveness analyses that GiveWell performs of its top charities. Though previous versions of the site have included numerical weightings to something like the problem profiles list, we’ve moved away from that practice. We didn’t think the BOTECs and estimations that generated these kinds of numbers were actually driving our views, and the numbers they produced seemed like they suggested a misleading sense of precision.

Your previous quantitative framework was equivalent to a weighted-factor model (WFM) with the logarithms of importance, tractability and neglectedness as factors with the same weight, such that the sum respects the logarithm of the cost-effectiveness. Have you considered trying a WFM with the factors that actually drive your views?

Thanks for the comment, Mo! I would be interested in that too.

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.)

Thanks for engaging, mhendric!

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

My guess is that 80,000 Hours^[1] is aware of these, but I would be curious to know the extent to which their longtermism article discusses such concerns. I added it to my list, but feel free to have a look yourself!

As a teacher at a university, I often try to encourage students to rethink their career choices from an EA angle.

Great that you do this!

80.000 hours is a natural place to recommend for interested students, but I am wary of recommending it to non-longtermist students. Probably good seems to offer a more shorttermist alternative, but are significantly newer and have less brand recognition. 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.

I would say it makes sense for 80,000 Hours to tailor their advice to what they consider are the most pressing problems. On the other hand, I think it may well be the case that 80,000 Hours is overestimating the difference between the pressingness of areas traditionally classified as longtermist and neartermist^[2]. Rather than picking one of these 2 views, I wonder 80,000 Hours' had better rank problems along various metrics covering a wider range of areas. For example:

• Increasing welfare in the next few decades. I expect improving the welfare of farmed animals would come out on top here.
• Boosting economic growth in the next few decades. I guess global health and development as well as high-leverage ways to speed up economic growth would be strong candidates to come out on top here.
• Decreasing global catastrophic risk in the next few decades. I guess decreasing biorisk would come out on top here.
• Decreasing extinction risk this century. I guess decreasing AI risk would come out on top here.
• Improving positive values. This is important, but vague, and applicable to many areas due to indirect effects, so producing a ranking would be difficult.

I believe having neartermism and longtermism as the only 2 categories would be overly reductive, as traditionally neartermist interventions have longterm effects (e.g. economic growth), and traditionally longtermist interventions have nearterm effects (e.g. less deaths of people currently alive). Furthermore, the above decomposition may mitigate a problem I see in 80,000 Hours' current ranking of problems:

• Climate change is currently ranked as a top problem in 5th, whereas animal welfare and global health and development are not top problems.
• However, I think animal welfare and global health and development have a greater chance than climate change of topping one of the above 5 rankings. So I would say they should be prioritised over climate change. 

I strongly endorse expectactional total hedonistic utilitarianism, and therefore agree that all metrics can in theory be mapped to a single dimension, such that all problems could be ranked together. However, doing this in practice is difficul because there is lots of uncertainty.

1. ^{^}

   Nitpick, there is a comma after "80", not a dot.

2. ^{^}

   I have not seen the term shortermist being used much.

Thanks, Pat! You and other readers may be interested in Probably Good's list of impact-focused job boards.