EA - Should 80,000 hours have more near-termist career content? by NickLaing

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: Should 80,000 hours have more near-termist career content?, published by NickLaing on September 29, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.TDLR: Assuming that Long Termist causes are by far the most important, 80,000 hours might still be better off devoting more of their space to near-termist causes, to grow the EA community, increase the number working in long term causes and improve EA optics.Background80,000 hours is a front page to EA, presenting the movement/idea/question to the world. For many, their website is people's introduction to effective altruism (link). and might be the most important internet-based introduction to Effective altrurism, - even if this is not their main purpose.As I see it, 80,000 hours functions practically as a long-termist career platform, or as their staff put it, to "help people have careers with a lot of social impact". I'm happy that they have updated their site to make this long-termist focus a little more clear, but I think there is an argument that perhaps 20%-30% of their content should be near-term focused, and that this content should be more visible. These arguments I present have probably been discussed ad-nauseam within 80,000 hours leadership and EA leadership in general, and nothing I present is novel. Despite that, I haven't seen these arguments clearly laid out in one place (I might have missed it), so here goes.AssumptionsFor the purposes of this discussion, I'm going to make these 3 assumptions. They aren't necessarily true and I don't necessarily agree with them, but they make my job easier and argument cleaner.Long termist causes are by far the most important, and where the vast majority of EAs should focus their work.Most of the general public are more attracted to near-termist EA than long-termist EA80,000 hours is an important "frontpage" and "gateway" to EAWhy 80,000 hours might want to focus more on near-term causes1. Near termist focus as a pathway to more future long termist workersMore focus on near termist careers might paradoxically lead to producing more long termist workers in the long run. Many people are drawn to the clear and more palatable idea that we should devote our lives to doing the most good to humans and animals alive right now (assumption 2). However after further thought and engagement they may change their focus to longtermism. I'm not sure we have stats on this, but I've encountered many forum members who seem to have followed this life pattern. By failing to appeal to the many who are attracted to near-termist EA now, we could miss out on significant numbers of long termist workers in a few years time.2. Near termist causes are a more attractive EA "front door" 80,000 hours is a "front door" to Effective Altruism, then it is to make sure as many people enter the door as possible. Although 80,000 hours make it clear this isn't one of their main intentions, there is huge benefit to maximizing community growth.3. Some people will only ever want/be able to work on near-term causes.There are not-unreasonable people who might struggle with the tenets/tractability of long-termism, or be too far along the road-of-life to move from medicine to machine learning, or just don't want to engage with long termism for whatever reason. They may miss out a counterfactual fruitful living-your-best-EA-life, because when they clicked on the 80,000 hours website they didn't manage to scroll down 5 pages to cause area no. 19 and 20 - the first 2 near-term cause areas "Factory farming" and "Easily preventable or treatable illness". These are listed below well established and clearly tractable cause areas such as "risks from atomically precise manufacturing" and "space governance"There may be many people who never want to/be able decide to change careers to the highest impact long-term causes, but ...