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Impact, agency, and taste — LessWrong

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You might think that the main thing that makes people really effective at research or engineering is technical ability, and among the general population that’s true. Among people hired at Anthropic, though, we’ve restricted the range by screening for extremely high-percentile technical ability, so the remaining differences, while they still matter, aren’t quite as critical. Instead, people’s biggest bottleneck eventually becomes their ability to get leverage—i.e., to find and execute work that has a big impact-per-hour multiplier. For example, here are some types of work at Anthropic that tend to have high impact-per-hour, or a high impact-per-hour ceiling when done well (of course this list is extremely non-exhaustive!): I think of finding high-leverage work as having two interrelated components: Without taste, you’re likely to work toward the wrong thing. Without agency, even if you work toward the right thing, you’re likely to get nowhere. How can someone improve at these? Mostly, I

x Impact, agency, and taste — LessWrong Practical Curated 2025 Top Fifty: 19 % 210 Impact, agency, and taste by benkuhn 19th Apr 2025 benkuhn.net 10 min read 10 210 I’ve been thinking recently about what sets apart the people who’ve done the best work at Anthropic. You might think that the main thing that makes people really effective at research or engineering is technical ability, and among the general population that’s true. Among people hired at Anthropic, though, we’ve restricted the range by screening for extremely high-percentile technical ability, so the remaining differences, while th

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