EA - FAQ on the relationship between 80,000 Hours and the effective altruism community by Ardenlk

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: FAQ on the relationship between 80,000 Hours and the effective altruism community, published by Ardenlk on June 24, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.As part of 'strategy fortnight' (and in part inspired by this post) I decided to write this short post clarifying the relationship, as I see it, between 80,000 Hours and the EA community. I chose these questions because I thought there might be some people who care about the answers and who would want to know what (someone on the leadership team at) 80,000 Hours would say.Is 80,000 Hours's mission to build the EA community?No — our aim is to help people have careers with a lot of social impact. If the EA community didn't exist, we could still pursue our mission.However, we count ourselves as part of the EA community in part because we think it's pretty great. It has flaws, and we don't blanket recommend getting involved to our readers (a recommendation we feel better about making widely is to get involved in some kind of community that shares your aims). But we think the EA community does do a lot to help people (including us) figure out how to have a big positive impact, think through options carefully, and work together to make projects happen.For that reason, we do say we think learning about and getting involved in the EA community could be a great idea for many of our readers.And we think building the EA community can be a way to have a high-impact career, so we list articles focused on it high up on our problem profiles page and among our career reviews.Both of these are ways in which we do contribute substantially to building the effective altruism community.We think this is one of the ways we've had a positive impact over the years, so we do continue to put energy into this route to value (more on this below). But doing so is ultimately about helping the individuals we are writing for to increase their ability to have a positive impact by getting involved, rather than to benefit the community per se.In other words, helping grow the ea community is part of our strategy for pursuing our mission of helping people have high-impact careers.Does 80,000 Hours seek to provide "career advice for effective altruists"?Somewhat, but not mostly, and it would feel misleading to put it that way.80,000 Hours focuses on helping a group much larger than the (current) EA community have higher impact careers. For example, we estimate the size of the group we are trying to reach with the website to be ~100k people — which is around 10x larger than the EA community. (For context, we currently get in the range of 4M visitors to the website a year, and have 300k newsletter subscribers.)Some of the people in our audience are part of the EA community already, but they're a minority.One reason we focus so broadly is that we are trying to optimise the marginal counterfactual impact of our efforts. This often translates into trying to focus on people who aren't already heavily involved and so don't have other EA resources to draw on. For someone who hasn't heard of EA or who has heard of it but doesn't know much about it, there is much lower hanging fruit for counterfactually helping them improve the impact of their careers. For example, we can introduce them to well-known-within-EA ideas like the ITN framework and cause selection, or particularly pressing issues like AI safety and biosecurity, as well as the EA community itself. Once someone is involved in EA, they are also more likely and able to take advantage of resources that are less optimised for newer people.This is not an absolute rule, and it varies by programme – for example, the website tends to focus more (though not exclusively) on 'introductory' materials than the podcast which aims to go more in-depth, and one-on-one advising tries to tailor their discussio...