EA - $5k challenge to quantify the impact of 80,000 hours' top career paths by NunoSempere

Link to original articleWelcome 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: $5k challenge to quantify the impact of 80,000 hours' top career paths, published by NunoSempere on September 23, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Motivation 80,000 hours has identified a number of promising career paths. They have a fair amount of analysis behind their recommendations, and in particular, they have a list of top ten priority paths. However, 80,000 hours doesn’t quite have quantitative estimates of these paths' value. Although their usefulness would not be guaranteed, quantitative estimates could make it clearer: how valuable their top career paths are relative to each other how valuable their top career paths are relative to options further down their list at which level of personal fit one should switch between different career paths where the expected impact is coming from, and which variables we are most uncertain about eventually, whether certain opportunities are valuable in themselves or for the value of information or career capital that they provide etc. The Prize Following up on the $1,000 Squiggle Experimentation Challenge and the Forecasting Innovation Prize we are offering a prize of $5k for quantitative estimates of the value of 80,000 hours' top 10 career paths. Rules Step 1: Make a public post online between now and December 1, 2022. Posts on the EA Forum (link posts are fine) are encouraged.Step 2: Complete this submission form. Further details Participants can use units or strategies of their choice—these might be QALYs, percentage points of reduction in existential risk, basis points of the future, basis points of existential risk reduced, career-dependent units, etc. Contestants could also use some other method, like relative values, estimating proxies, or some original option. We are specifically looking for quantitative estimates that attempt to estimate some magnitude reasonably close to the real world, similar to the units above. So for example, assigning valuations from 0 to 5 stars would not fulfil the requirements of the contest, but estimates in terms of the units above would qualify. Participants are free to estimate the value of one, several, or all ten career paths. Participants are free to use whatever tool or language they want to produce these estimates. Some possible tooling might be: Excel, Squiggle, Guesstimate, probabilistic languages or libraries (e.g., Turing.jl, PyMC3, Stan), Causal, working directly in a popular programming language, etc. Participants can provide point estimates of impact, but they are encouraged to provide their estimates as distributions instead. Participants are free to estimate the impact of a marginal person, of a marginal person with a good fit, the average value, etc. Participants are welcome to provide both average and marginal value—for example, they could provide a function which provides an estimate of marginal value at different levels of labor and capital. We provide some examples of possible rough submissions in an appendix. We are also happy to comment on estimation strategies: feel free to leave a comment on this post or to send a message to Nuño Sempere using the EA forum message functionality. Judging The judges will be Nuño Sempere, Eli Lifland, Alex Lawsen and Sam Nolan. These judges will judge on their personal capacities, and their stances do not represent their organizations. Judges will estimate the quality and value of the entries, and we will distribute the prize amount of $5k in proportion to an equally weighted aggregate of those subjective estimates. To reduce our operational burden, we are looking to send out around three to five prizes. If there are more than five submissions, we plan to implement a lottery system. For example, a participant who would have won $100 would instead get a 10% chance of receiving $1k. Acknowledgements This contest is a project of...