New releases

Why this role?

80,000 Hours provides free research and support to help people find careers tackling the world’s most pressing problems.

Users can engage with our research in many forms: as longform articles published on our site, as a paperback book received via our book giveaway, as a podcast, or in smaller chunks via our newsletter. But we have relatively little support available in video format.

Time spent on the internet is increasingly spent watching video, and for many people in our target audience, video is the main way that they both find entertainment and learn about topics that matter to them.

We think that one of the best ways we could increase our impact going forward is to have a mature and robust pipeline for producing videos on topics that will help our audience find more impactful careers.

Back in 2017, we started a podcast; today, our podcast episodes reach more than 100,000 listeners, and are commonly cited by listeners as one of the best ways they know of to learn about the world’s most pressing problems. Our hope is that a video programme could be similarly successful — or reach an even larger scale.

We’ve also produced two ten-minute videos already that we were pleased with and got mostly positive feedback on. Using targeted digital advertising, we found we could generate an hour of engagement with the videos for just $0.40,

Why this role?

80,000 Hours provides free research and support to help people find careers tackling the world’s most pressing problems.

Since the launch of our marketing programme in 2022, we’ve increased the hours that people spend engaging with our content by 6.5x, reached millions of new users across different platforms, and now have over 500,000 newsletter subscribers. We’re also the largest single source of people getting involved in the effective altruism community, according to the most recent EA Survey.

Even so, it seems like there’s considerable room to grow further — we’re not nearly at the ceiling of what we think we can achieve. So, we’re looking for a new marketer to help us bring the marketing team to its full potential.

We anticipate that the right person in this role could help us massively increase our readership, and lead to hundreds or thousands of additional people pursuing high-impact careers.

As some indication of what success in the role might look like, over the next couple of years your team might have:

• Cost-effectively deployed $5 million reaching people from our target audience.
• Worked with some of the largest and most well-regarded YouTube channels (for instance, we have run sponsorships with Veritasium, Kurzgesagt, and Wendover Productions).
• Designed digital ad campaigns that reached hundreds of millions of people.
• Driven hundreds of thousands of additional newsletter subscriptions,

Why this role?

80,000 Hours provides free research and support to help people find careers tackling the world’s most pressing problems.

Since the launch of our marketing programme in 2022, we’ve increased the hours that people spend engaging with our content by 6.5x, reached millions of new users across different platforms, and now have over 500,000 newsletter subscribers. We’re also the largest single source of people getting involved in the effective altruism community, according to the most recent EA Survey.

Even so, it seems like there’s considerable room to grow further — we’re not nearly at the ceiling of what we think we can achieve. So, we’re looking for a new team lead to help us bring the marketing team to its full potential.

We anticipate that the right person in this role could help us massively increase our readership, and lead to hundreds or thousands of additional people pursuing high-impact careers.

As some indication of what success in the role might look like, over the next couple of years your team might have:

• Cost-effectively deployed $5 million reaching people from our target audience.
• Worked with some of the largest and most well-regarded YouTube channels (for instance, we have run sponsorships with Veritasium, Kurzgesagt, and Wendover Productions).
• Designed digital ad campaigns that reached hundreds of millions of people.
• Driven hundreds of thousands of additional newsletter subscriptions,

The idea this week: the cynical case against voting and getting involved in politics doesn’t hold up.

Does your vote matter? Around half of the world’s population is expected to see national elections this year, and voters in places like Taiwan, India, and Mexico have already gone to the polls. The UK and France both recently scheduled elections.

And of course, the 2024 US national election campaigns are off and running, with control of the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the White House in contention — as well as many state houses, governorships, and other important offices.

Sometimes people think that their vote doesn’t matter because they’re just a drop in the ocean.

But my colleague Rob has explored the research on this topic, and he concluded that voting can actually be a surprisingly impactful way to spend your time. So it’s not just your civic duty — it can also be a big opportunity to influence the world for the better.

That’s because, while the chance your vote will change the outcome of an election is small, it can still matter a lot given the massive impact governments can have.

To take a simple model: if the US government discretionary spending is $6.4 trillion over four years, and you have a 1 in 10 million chance of changing the outcome of the national election,

The idea this week: your career choices may be much more important than you think — and we have a lot of resources to help you think them through.

Your career is one of your biggest opportunities to make a difference in the world and also have a rewarding and interesting life.

That’s why we wrote our career guide — to help people create a career plan that’s aimed at having a positive impact and a fulfilling career.

But there’s a lot of ground to cover, so we couldn’t do it all in a single book.

That’s why we wrote our advanced series. It covers our most in-depth research on questions like:

• What does it mean to “make a difference”?
• What is “longtermism,” and why does it matter?
• Is it ever OK to take a harmful job?
• Can we balance doing what we love with having a positive impact?
• What role should finding your personal strengths play in your career?
• How should you coordinate with others when trying to do good?
• How long should you explore different career options?
• And a whole lot more!

We hope the articles in our advanced series help you tackle these questions and accelerate you along your path to an impactful career.

See the whole series here or just browse selected topics below.

The idea this week: nuclear war remains a horrifying possibility — our new nuclear career review examines what you could be doing about it.

Here at 80,000 Hours, we’re often trying to find ways to protect future generations.

If we’d been trying to do that in 1950, one thing would have been at the top of everyone’s minds: the terrifying threat of nuclear annihilation. Indeed, many of the world’s greatest thinkers, politicians, and communicators devoted their careers to understanding and reducing the threat — people like Thomas Schelling, Carl Sagan and even, in his later years, Albert Einstein.

But since the end of the Cold War, the nuclear expert has all but disappeared.

And that’s a problem.

It’s a problem because the risk of nuclear war didn’t just disappear with the Cold War.

In fact, the world is currently facing many nuclear challenges:

• The US is modernising its nuclear arsenal.
• China is on track to quintuple their nuclear forces by 2030.
• Cooling relations between the US and Russia mean that existing arms reduction treaties (like New START) are looking very likely to lapse.
• Rising tensions in the Middle East, alongside the collapse of the Iran deal, mean we could very possibly see a new nuclear weapons state in the near future.

The idea this week: there are many potentially high-impact career paths — so don’t limit your options too soon.

Which careers are best for helping others? It’s a simple-sounding question, but it’s not so simple to answer.

We’ve written about this question extensively, and it’s a key part of our career guide. We also have a list of the highest-impact career paths our research has found so far.

Readers naturally focus most on the top of the list. But while we want readers to consider our top-ranked paths (and we think it’s good to be transparent about what we think are the best opportunities to do good), you shouldn’t underrate the personal factors that will make one path or another a better fit for you — both in terms of social impact and personal satisfaction.

So this week we wanted to highlight a few paths and career steps (in no particular order) that we think people should consider if they want to have a lot of impact:

1. Journalism

Public discourse shapes the way societies understand and react to key problems in the world, and journalists have a significant role in shaping it. So if you can become an influential journalist, you might be able to have a big impact by drawing attention to pressing world problems, how to solve them, and how to generally think well about these issues.