I notice that in their list of high-impact careers, not one of them involves actually doing the work that all this charity pays for. The grunt work is beneath them and the audience they're aiming at. A lot of the careers consist of telling other people what to do: managers, policy advisors, grant writers, sitting on funding bodies. The closest any of them get to boots on the ground is scientific research and development.
Now, I can see the argument for this. If your abilities lie in the direction of a lucrative profession, you should do that and give most of the proceeds to charity. The lawyer and the soup kitchen. But take this a step further (as the 80,000ers do themselves). Wouldn't it be even more effective to persuade other people to do this? If you get 10 people to make substantial donations, that's more effective than just doing it yourself. Or in their words, "There are also many opportunities for forming chains of these activities. For instance, you could campaign for more people to become professional philanthropists, who could spend money paying for more campaigners."
But why stop there? The more money people have, the more they can give, so you should concentrate on persuading the seriously wealthy to donate. And to move in their circles, you will have to cultivate a certain degree of prosperity yourself, or you'll never get access. Just an expense of the job, which will pay off with even more money raised for charity.
But then again, governments command vastly more wealth and power than almost any individual, so that is where you could have a truly great impact. Better still, go for the governments of governments, the supra-national organisations. Of course, it will be such a chore to maintain a pied-à-terre in every major capital, charter private jets for your travelling, and dine at the most expensive restaurants with senior politicians and businessmen, but one could probably put up with it.
Now, the higher up this pyramid you go, the smaller it gets, so there will only be room for a few giga-effective careers at the top. But never mind, it's your duty to climb as far up as you can, and if you do replace someone rather than adding yourself, make sure that it's because you can do an even more effective job than they were doing.
And it's all for the sake of the poor, and the more successful you are, the less you'll ever see of them.
Yes, I can see the argument.
Onion, if you want to write a satirical piece on this theme, go right ahead.
BTW, a couple of the names on the list of authors of their blog are LessWrong regulars, although I'm not sure Eliezer should be listed there: the only post attributed to him is actually a repost by someone else of something he posted to LW.
Some of the links you make aren't sound (lots of people are already trying to get the seriously wealthy to donate, so it might not be where you can have the greatest impact, there's not a good reason to think that you would be more effective than the people who currently run the IMF and WorldBank) but the overall idea seems good to me: look for where you can most improve the world and go there.
The current issue of the Oxford Left Review has a debate between socialist Pete Mills and two 80,000 hours people, Ben Todd and Sebastian Farquhar: The Ethical Careers Debate, p4-9. I'm interested in it because I want to understand why people object to the ideas of 80,000 hours. A paraphrasing:
As a socialist, Mills really doesn't like the argument that the best way to help the world's poor is probably to work in heavily capitalist industries. He seems to be avoiding engaging with Todd and Farquhar's arguments, especially replaceability. He also really doesn't like looking at things in terms of numbers, I think because numbers suggest certainty. When I calculate that in 50 years of giving away $40K a year you save 1000 lives at $2K each, that's not saying the number is exactly 1000. It's saying 1000 is my best guess, and unless I can come up with a better guess it's the estimate I should use when choosing between this career path and other ones. He also doesn't seem to understand prediction and probability: "every revolution is impossible, until it is inevitable" may be how it feels for those living under an oppressive regime but it's not our best probability estimate. [1]
In a previous discussion a friend also was mislead calculations. When I said "one can avert infant deaths for about $500 each" their response was "What do they do with the 500 dollars? That doesn't seem to make sense. Do they give the infant a $500 anti-death pill? How do you know it really takes a constant stream of $500 for each infant?". Have other people run into this? Bad calculations also tend to be distributed widely, with people saying things like "one pint of blood can save up to three lives" when the expected marginal lives saved is actually tiny. Maybe we should focus less on estimates of effectiveness in smart-giving advocacy? Is there a way to show the huge difference in effect between the best charities and most charities without using these?
Maybe I should have way more of these discussions, enough that I can collect statistics on what arguments and examples work and which don't.
(I also posted this on my blog)
[1] Which is not to say you can't have big jumps in probability estimates. I could put the chance of revolution at 5% somewhere based on historical data but then hear some new information about how one has just started and sounds really promising which bumps my estimate up to 70%. But expected value calculations for jobs can work with numbers like these, it's just "impossible" and "inevitable" that break estimates.