On finding ways to contribute and fungibility
My impression is that many people sort of drift around the EA/rationality/x-risk/futurism sphere, wanting to contribute something, but not really sure how they can help. There are many reasons why, but I think one of them is that people see contributing talent through the same lens as contributing money, even though that's not really accurate. For example, this is the 80,000 Hours job board:
https://80000hours.org/job-board/
The range of jobs listed there is pretty narrow, and they often have very specific qualifications, like a PhD in a particular technical subject. Most people, even if smart and ambitious, wouldn't see a job there that they both liked and would get hired for. Why is it so narrow? You'll notice that there's a lot of overlap between organizations listed there, and orgs that the Open Philanthropy Project has made grants to (http://www.openphilanthropy.org/giving/grants). Because money is fungible - all dollar bills are the same - one can, given perfect knowledge, create an ordered list of all donation options from best to worst (for any given value system). This list is universal, since it doesn't depend on who you are, and at the top will be the one, single, best place to give money to. Since we have imperfect knowledge, there may be factual disagreements, but the overall trend is still towards a narrowly targeted list. This narrow donation list then seems to bleed over into a narrow job board list.
However, unlike money, talent isn't fungible; for various reasons (skills, background, interests, etc.), any particular person will be orders of magnitude more effective at some things than others. While the 80K list closely resembles the OpenPhil list, for a lot of people, the list of best projects to work on won't look like the list of best projects to donate to. For example, suppose that someone is an accomplished, fifty-year-old chemistry professor. What is the best thing for them to work on? I don't know, but I think it's likely the answer would involve chemistry or a closely related field, even though "chemistry research" isn't a priority area for donors. Quite possibly, it's something that only they could know, since they might be the only person in the world in the intersection of <expertise in their particular field> and <thinking seriously about the future>. For this situation, I think that a general "how to find good project candidates" toolkit (with lots of worked examples) is probably more useful than a specific pre-chosen list. Unfortunately, such a thing doesn't exist, and it might be hard to write without either being too meta or not meta enough.