New releases

The case for taking your technical expertise to the field of AI policy

Blog post by · Published March 1, 2024

The idea this week: technical expertise is needed in AI governance and policy.

How do you prevent a new and rapidly evolving technology from spiralling out of control? How can governments, policymakers, and civil society ensure that we’re making the best decisions about how to integrate artificial intelligence into our society?

To answer these kinds of questions, we need people with technical expertise — in machine learning, information security, computing hardware, or other relevant technical domains — to work in AI governance and policy making.

Of course, there are roles for people with many different backgrounds to play in AI governance and policy. Experience in law, international coordination, communications, operations management, and more are all potentially valuable in this space.

But we think people with technical backgrounds may underrate their ability to contribute to AI policy. We’ve long regarded AI technical safety research as an extremely high-impact career option, and we still do. But this sometimes gives readers the impression that if they’ve got a technical background or aptitude, it’s the main path for them to consider if they want to help prevent an AI-related catastrophe.

But this isn’t necessarily true.

Technical knowledge is crucial in AI governance for understanding the current landscape and likely trajectories of the technology, as well as for designing and implementing policies that can reduce the biggest risks.

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Open roles: Operations team

Blog post by · Published February 27, 2024

About 80,000 Hours

80,000 Hours’ goal is to get talented people working on the world’s most pressing problems — we aim to be the world’s best source of support and advice for them on how to do so. That means helping people shift their careers to work on solving problems that are more important, neglected, and solvable — and to pick more promising methods for solving those problems.

We’ve had over 10 million readers on our website, have ~450,000 subscribers to our newsletter and have given 1on1 advice to over 4,000 people. We’re also one of the top ways people who get involved in EA first hear about it, and we’re the most commonly cited factor for ‘getting involved’ in the EA community.

The operations team oversees 80,000 Hours’ HR, recruiting, finances, org-wide metrics, and office management, as well as much of our fundraising, tech systems, and team coordination. We’re also currently overseeing our spinout from Effective Ventures and setup as an independent organisation.

Currently, the operations team has four full-time staff, some part-time staff, and we receive operations support from Effective Ventures. We’re planning to (at least!) double the size of our operations team over the next year.

The roles

These roles would be great for building career capital in operations, especially if you could one day see yourself in a more senior operations role (e.g. specialising in a particular area, taking on management,

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Anonymous answers: What are the biggest misconceptions about biosecurity and pandemic risk?

Article by and · Published February 2024

This is Part One of our four-part series of biosecurity anonymous answers. You can also read Part Two: Fighting pandemics, Part Three: Infohazards, and Part Four: AI and biorisk.

We rank preventing catastrophic pandemics as one of the most pressing problems in the world, and we have advised many of our readers to work in biosecurity to have high-impact careers.

But biosecurity is a complex field, and while the threat is undoubtedly large, there’s a lot of disagreement about how best to conceptualise and mitigate the risks. We wanted to get a better sense of how the people thinking about these threats every day perceive the risks.

So we decided to talk to more than a dozen biosecurity experts to better understand their views.

To make them feel comfortable speaking candidly, we granted the experts we spoke to anonymity. Sometimes disagreements in this space can get contentious, and certainly many of the experts we spoke to disagree with one another. We don’t endorse every position they’ve articulated below.

We think, though, that it’s helpful to lay out the range of expert opinions from people who we think are trustworthy and established in the field. We hope this will inform our readers about ongoing debates and issues that are important to understand — and perhaps highlight areas of disagreement that need more attention.

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Why you might not want to work on nuclear disarmament (and what to work on instead)

Blog post by · Published February 22, 2024

In 1955, ten years after Robert Oppenheimer, Leslie Groves, and the 130,000 workers of the Manhattan Project built the first atomic bomb, the United States had 2,400 and Russia had 200. At present, the USA has over 3,000, Russia has over 4,000, and China is building an arsenal of hundreds. Most of these are hydrogen bombs many times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These modern arsenals no longer require a bomber plane to deliver them — ICBMs can throw bombs around the earth in half an hour. When we sleep, we sleep as targets of nuclear weapons.

A global thermonuclear war would be the most horrifying event to happen in humanity’s history. If cities were targeted, at the very least, tens of millions would instantly die just like the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Survivors described the scenes of those explosions as “just like Hell” and “burning as if scorching Heaven.”

Afterwards, hundreds of millions could starve due to economic collapse. It’s also possible the ozone layer would be damaged for years and temperatures would drop us into a nuclear winter. In the worst case scenario, this would render the northern hemisphere uninhabitable for years, causing an existential catastrophe.

Faced with this possible future, why don’t we agree it’s too horrible to allow and find a way to disarm? Since the invention of nuclear weapons,

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#180 – Hugo Mercier on why gullibility and misinformation are overrated

Podcast by and · Published February 21, 2024

The World Economic Forum’s global risks survey of 1,400 experts, policymakers, and industry leaders ranked misinformation and disinformation as the number one global risk over the next two years — ranking it ahead of war, environmental problems, and other threats from AI.

And the discussion around misinformation and disinformation has shifted to focus on how generative AI or a future super-persuasive AI might change the game and make it extremely hard to figure out what was going on in the world — or alternatively, extremely easy to mislead people into believing convenient lies.

But this week’s guest, cognitive scientist Hugo Mercier, has a very different view on how people form beliefs and figure out who to trust — one in which misinformation really is barely a problem today, and is unlikely to be a problem anytime soon. As he explains in his book Not Born Yesterday, Hugo believes we seriously underrate the perceptiveness and judgement of ordinary people.

In this interview, host Rob Wiblin and Hugo discuss:

  • How our reasoning mechanisms evolved to facilitate beneficial communication, not blind gullibility.
  • How Hugo makes sense of our apparent gullibility in many cases — like falling for financial scams, astrology, or bogus medical treatments, and voting for policies that aren’t actually beneficial for us.
  • Rob and Hugo’s ideas about whether AI might make misinformation radically worse, and which mass persuasion approaches we should be most worried about.
  • Why Hugo thinks our intuitions about who to trust are generally quite sound, even in today’s complex information environment.
  • The distinction between intuitive beliefs that guide our actions versus reflective beliefs that don’t.
  • Why fake news and conspiracy theories actually have less impact than most people assume.
  • False beliefs that have persisted across cultures and generations — like bloodletting and vaccine hesitancy — and theories about why.
  • And plenty more.

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Our new series on building skills

Blog post by · Published February 14, 2024

If we were going to summarise all our advice on how to get career capital in three words, we’d say: build useful skills.

In other words, gain abilities that are valued in the job market — which makes your work more useful and makes it easier to bargain for the ingredients of a fulfilling job — as well as those that are specifically needed in tackling the world’s most pressing problems.

So today, we’re launching our series on the most useful skills for making a difference — which you can find here. It covers why we recommend each skill, how to get started learning them, and how to work out which is the best fit for you.

Each article looks at one of eight skill sets we think are most useful for solving the problems we think are most pressing:

Why are we releasing this now?

We think that many of our readers have come away from our site underappreciating the importance of career capital.

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#179 – Randy Nesse on why evolution left us so vulnerable to depression and anxiety

Podcast by and · Published February 12, 2024

Mental health problems like depression and anxiety affect enormous numbers of people and severely interfere with their lives. By contrast, we don’t see similar levels of physical ill health in young people. At any point in time, something like 20% of young people are working through anxiety or depression that’s seriously interfering with their lives — but nowhere near 20% of people in their 20s have severe heart disease or cancer or a similar failure in a key organ of the body other than the brain.

From an evolutionary perspective, that’s to be expected, right? If your heart or lungs or legs or skin stop working properly while you’re a teenager, you’re less likely to reproduce, and the genes that cause that malfunction get weeded out of the gene pool.

So why is it that these evolutionary selective pressures seemingly fixed our bodies so that they work pretty smoothly for young people most of the time, but it feels like evolution fell asleep on the job when it comes to the brain? Why did evolution never get around to patching the most basic problems, like social anxiety, panic attacks, debilitating pessimism, or inappropriate mood swings? For that matter, why did evolution go out of its way to give us the capacity for low mood or chronic anxiety or extreme mood swings at all?

Today’s guest, Randy Nesse — a leader in the field of evolutionary psychiatry — wrote the book Good Reasons for Bad Feelings, in which he sets out to try to resolve this paradox.

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#178 – Emily Oster on what the evidence actually says about pregnancy and parenting

Podcast by and · Published February 1, 2024

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Emily Oster — economist at Brown University, host of the ParentData podcast, and the author of three hugely popular books that provide evidence-based insights into pregnancy and early childhood.

They cover:

  • Common pregnancy myths and advice that Emily disagrees with — and why you should probably get a doula.
  • Whether it’s fine to continue with antidepressants and coffee during pregnancy.
  • What the data says — and doesn’t say — about outcomes from parenting decisions around breastfeeding, sleep training, childcare, and more.
  • Which factors really matter for kids to thrive — and why that means parents shouldn’t sweat the small stuff.
  • How to reduce parental guilt and anxiety with facts, and reject judgemental “Mommy Wars” attitudes when making decisions that are best for your family.
  • The effects of having kids on career ambitions, pay, and productivity — and how the effects are different for men and women.
  • Practical advice around managing the tradeoffs between career and family.
  • What to consider when deciding whether and when to have kids.
  • Relationship challenges after having kids, and the protective factors that help.
  • And plenty more.

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Announcing Niel Bowerman as the next CEO of 80,000 Hours

Blog post by · Published January 31, 2024

We’re excited to announce that the boards of Effective Ventures US and Effective Ventures UK have approved our selection committee’s choice of Niel Bowerman as the new CEO of 80,000 Hours.

I (Rob Wiblin) was joined on the selection committee by Will MacAskill, Hilary Greaves, Simran Dhaliwal, and Max Daniel.

80,000 Hours is a project of EV US and EV UK, though under Niel’s leadership, it expects to be spinning out and creating an independent legal structure, which will involve selecting a new board.

We want to thank Brenton Mayer, who has served as 80,000 Hours interim CEO since late 2022, for his dedication and thoughtful management. Brenton expressed enthusiasm about the committee’s choice, and he expects to take on the role of chief operations officer, where he will continue to work closely with Niel to keep 80,000 Hours running smoothly.

By the end of its deliberations, the selection committee agreed that Niel was the best candidate to be 80,000 Hours’ long-term CEO. We think Niel’s drive and attitude will help him significantly improve the organisation and shift its strategy to keep up with events in the world. We were particularly impressed by his ability to use evidence to inform difficult strategic decisions and lay out a clear vision for the organisation.

Niel was very forthcoming and candid with the committee about his weaknesses. His focus on getting frank feedback and using it to drive a self-improvement cycle really impressed the selection committee.

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#177 – Nathan Labenz on recent AI breakthroughs and navigating the growing rift between AI safety and accelerationist camps

Podcast by and · Published January 24, 2024

Back in December, we released an episode where Rob Wiblin interviewed Nathan Labenz — AI entrepreneur and host of The Cognitive Revolution podcast — on his takes on the pace of development of AGI and the OpenAI leadership drama, based on his experience red teaming an early version of GPT-4 and the conversations with OpenAI staff and board members that followed.

In today’s episode, their conversation continues, with Nathan diving deeper into:

  • What AI now actually can and can’t do — across language and visual models, medicine, scientific research, self-driving cars, robotics, weapons — and what the next big breakthrough might be.
  • Why most people, including most listeners, probably don’t know and can’t keep up with the new capabilities and wild results coming out across so many AI applications — and what we should do about that.
  • How we need to learn to talk about AI more productively — particularly addressing the growing chasm between those concerned about AI risks and those who want to see progress accelerate, which may be counterproductive for everyone.
  • Where Nathan agrees with and departs from the views of ‘AI scaling accelerationists.’
  • The chances that anti-regulation rhetoric from some AI entrepreneurs backfires.
  • How governments could (and already do) abuse AI tools like facial recognition, and how militarisation of AI is progressing.
  • Preparing for coming societal impacts and potential disruption from AI.
  • Practical ways that curious listeners can try to stay abreast of everything that’s going on.
  • And plenty more.

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Practical steps to form better habits in your life and career

Blog post by · Published January 23, 2024

The idea this week: developing skills and habits takes time, effort, and using the right techniques.

At the start of a new year, we often reflect on how to improve and develop better habits. People often want to exercise more or become better at self-study. I, for one, wanted to consistently get to work earlier.

But actually making progress requires more than just wanting it — it takes a systematic approach. Doing this is a key part succeeding at your current job, improving your career trajectory, and even just being more fulfilled generally. (Read more in our article on all the evidence-based advice we found on how to be more successful in any job.)

You want to take something that’s a problem in your life and find a solution that becomes second nature.

For example, for some people, getting to work at an early hour is just part of their normal routine — they barely have to think about it. But if that’s not the case for you – like it wasn’t for me – you’ll need to make a conscious change, and work on it until it becomes second nature.

But lots of things block us from forming these new habits and skills.

The key is closing the loop — get feedback about your problem, analyse why you haven’t adopted the habit yet, make a change, test it out, and repeat:

  1. Feedback – track your progress and your errors,

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2023 in review: some of our top pieces from last year

Blog post by · Published January 8, 2024

As we kick off 2024, we’re taking a moment to look back at our 2023 content.

We published a lot of pieces aimed at helping our readers have more impactful careers, including a completely updated career guide, our revamped advanced series, around 35 podcast episodes, dozens of blog posts, and a bunch of updates to our career reviews and problem profiles.

We’d like to highlight some of the new content that stands out to us:

Standout blog posts

  • How to cope with rejection in your career — Luisa Rodriguez, one of the hosts of The 80,000 Hours podcast, wrote this powerful personal piece about her experience with career rejection, the unexpected benefits of getting rejected, and helpful tips for dealing with it that have worked for her. If you have ever struggled with rejection, I think this piece might help you feel less alone.
  • My thoughts on parenting and having an impactful career — Michelle Hutchinson, the director of the one-on-one programme at 80,000 Hours, wrote this thoughtful reflection on her decision to become a parent, the effects of parenthood on her career and social impact, and the challenges and benefits of being a parent in a community of people trying to have an impactful career.

  • Some thoughts on moderation in doing good — in this post, 80,000 Hours founder Ben Todd addressed why moderation may be underrated by people trying to have a big social impact and how to avoid the pitfalls of extremism.

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An apology for our mistake with the book giveaway

Blog post by · Published January 5, 2024

80,000 Hours runs a programme where subscribers to our newsletter can order a free, paperback copy of a book to be sent to them in the mail. Readers choose between getting a copy of our career guide, Toby Ord’s The Precipice, and Will MacAskill’s Doing Good Better.

This giveaway has been open to all newsletter subscribers since early 2022. The number of orders we get depends on the number of new subscribers that day, but in general, we get around 150 orders a day.

Over the past week, however, we received an overwhelming number of orders. The offer of the free book appears to have been promoted by some very popular posts on Instagram, which generated an unprecedented amount of interest for us.

While we’re really grateful that these people were interested in what we have to offer, we couldn’t handle the massive uptick in demand. We’re a nonprofit funded by donations, and all our advice can be accessed for free. We had budgeted to run the book giveaway projecting the demand would be in line with what it’s been for the past two years. Instead, we had more than 20,000 orders in just a few days — which we anticipated would run through around six months of the book giveaway’s budget.

We’ve now paused taking new orders, and we’re unsure when we’ll be able to re-open them.

Also, because of this large spike in demand,

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Special podcast holiday release: One highlight from every episode in 2023

Blog post by · Published December 31, 2023

Happy new year! We’re celebrating with a special podcast holiday release: our favourite highlights from each episode of the show that came out in 2023.

That’s 32 of our favourite ideas packed into one episode that’s so bursting with substance it might be more than the human mind can safely handle.

Find this episode wherever you get podcasts:

There’s something for everyone here:

…plus another 23 such gems from the rest of our 2023 guest lineup.

And they’re in an order that our audio engineer Simon Monsour described as having an “eight-dimensional-tetris-like rationale.”

I don’t know what the hell that means either, but I’m curious to find out.

And remember: if you like these highlights,

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Announcing our plan to become an independent organisation

Blog post by · Published December 29, 2023

We are excited to share that 80,000 Hours has officially decided to spin out as a project from our parent organisations and establish an independent legal structure.

80,000 Hours is a project of the Effective Ventures group — the umbrella term for Effective Ventures Foundation and Effective Ventures Foundation USA, Inc., which are two separate legal entities that work together. It also includes the projects Giving What We Can, the Centre for Effective Altruism, and others.

We’re incredibly grateful to the Effective Ventures leadership and team and the other orgs for all their support, particularly in the last year. They devoted countless hours and enormous effort to helping ensure that we and the other orgs could pursue our missions.

And we deeply appreciate Effective Ventures’ support in our spin-out. They recently announced that all of the other organisations under their umbrella will likewise become their own legal entities; we’re excited to continue to work alongside them to improve the world.

Back in May, we investigated whether it was the right time to spin out of our parent organisations. We’ve considered this option at various points in the last three years.

There have been many benefits to being part of a larger entity since our founding. But as 80,000 Hours and the other projects within Effective Ventures have grown, we concluded we can now best pursue our mission and goals independently. Effective Ventures leadership approved the plan.

Becoming our own legal entity will allow us to:

  • Match our governing structure to our function and purpose
  • Design operations systems that best meet our staff’s needs
  • Reduce interdependence with other entities that raises financial,

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#176 – Nathan Labenz on the final push for AGI, understanding OpenAI’s leadership drama, and red-teaming frontier models

Podcast by and · Published December 22, 2023

OpenAI says its mission is to build AGI — an AI system that is better than human beings at everything. Should the world trust them to do this safely?

That’s the central theme of today’s episode with Nathan Labenz — entrepreneur, AI scout, and host of The Cognitive Revolution podcast. Nathan saw the AI revolution coming years ago, and, astonished by the research he was seeing, set aside his role as CEO of Waymark and made it his full-time job to understand AI capabilities across every domain. He has been obsessively tracking the AI world since — including joining OpenAI’s “red team” that probed GPT-4 to find ways it could be abused, long before it was public.

Whether OpenAI was taking AI safety seriously enough became a topic of dinner table conversation around the world after the shocking firing and reinstatement of Sam Altman as CEO last month.

Nathan’s view: it’s complicated. Discussion of this topic has often been heated, polarising, and personal. But Nathan wants to avoid that and simply lay out, in a way that is impartial and fair to everyone involved, what OpenAI has done right and how it could do better in his view.

When he started on the GPT-4 red team, the model would do anything from diagnose a skin condition to plan a terrorist attack without the slightest reservation or objection. When later shown a “Safety” version of GPT-4 that was almost the same, he approached a member of OpenAI’s board to share his concerns and tell them they really needed to try out GPT-4 for themselves and form an opinion.

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Not sure where to donate this year? Here’s our advice.

Blog post by · Published December 15, 2023

The idea this giving season: figuring out where to donate is tricky, but a few key tips can help.

There are lots of pressing problems in the world, and even more possible solutions. We mostly focus on careers, but donating to effective organisations tackling these problems — if you can — is another great way to help.

But how can you figure out where it’s best to donate?

Our article on choosing where to donate lays out how you can make this choice. First, you have to decide whether:

  • You want to defer to someone you think is trustworthy, shares your values, and has already evaluated charities. Just following their recommendations can save you work. (We discuss some options below.)
  • You want to do your own research instead, which might allow you to find unusually high-impact options matched to your specific values, plus improve your knowledge of effective giving.
  • You can also enter a donor lottery — learn more about them here.

If you decide to do your own research, you can use our article to figure out how much time you should spend. For example, we think young people might especially benefit from doing research since they’ll learn lessons about charity evaluation that they can apply for a long time in the future.

If you do your own research,

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Engineering skills

Skill by · Published December 2023

In 1958, Nils Bohlin was recruited as an engineer for Volvo. At the time, over 100,000 people were dying in road accidents every year.

Bohlin came up with one very simple invention: the modern seat belt.

Within a year, Volvo began equipping their cars with seat belts as standard, and — as a result of its importance to safety — opened up the patent so that other manufacturers could do the same. Volvo claims that Bohlin’s invention has saved over a million lives. That would make Bohlin one of the highest-impact people in history, alongside David Nalin, the inventor of oral rehydration therapy for diarrhoea.

We’d guess Bohlin’s impact wasn’t quite that large. For one thing, seat belts already existed: in 1951, a Y-shaped three-point seat belt was patented that avoided the risks of internal injuries from simple lap belts. Bohlin’s innovation was doing this with just one strap, making it simple and convenient to use. For another thing, it seems likely that someone else would have come up with Bohlin’s design eventually.

Nevertheless, a simple estimate suggests that Bohlin saved hundreds of lives at the very least — incredible for such a simple piece of engineering.

Thanks to Jessica Wen and Sean Lawrence at High Impact Engineers for their help with this article. Much of the content is based on their website.

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Software and tech skills

Skill by · Last updated December 2023 · First published September 2023

Why are software and tech skills valuable?

By “software and tech” skills we basically mean what your grandma would call “being good at computers.”

When investigating the world’s most pressing problems, we’ve found that in many cases there are software-related bottlenecks.

For example, machine learning (ML) engineering is a core skill needed to contribute to AI safety technical research. Experts in information security are crucial to reducing the risks of engineered pandemics, as well as other risks. And software engineers are often needed by nonprofits, whether they’re working on reducing poverty or mitigating the risks of climate change.

Also, having skills in this area means you’ll likely be highly paid, offering excellent options to earn to give.

Moreover, basic programming skills can be extremely useful whatever you end up doing. You’ll find ways to automate tasks or analyse data throughout your career.

If you’re interested in engineering disciplines outside software — for example, chemical, biomedical, or electrical engineering — we’ve written a separate article on engineering skills.

What does a career using software and tech skills involve?

A career using these skills typically involves three steps:

  1. Learn to code with a university course or self-study and then find positions where you can get great mentorship. (Read more about how to get started.)
  2. Optionally,

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Specialist knowledge relevant to a top problem

Skill by · Last updated December 2023 · First published September 2023

What specialist knowledge is valuable?

Many highly specific areas of knowledge seem applicable to solving the world’s most pressing problems, especially risks posed by biotechnology and artificial intelligence.

In particular we’d highlight:

  • Subfields of biology relevant to pandemic prevention. Working on many of the possible technical solutions to reduce the risk of pandemics will require expertise in parts of biology. We’d particularly highlight synthetic biology, mathematical biology, virology, immunology, pharmacology, and vaccinology. This expertise can also be helpful for pursuing a biorisk-focused policy career. (Read more about careers to prevent catastrophic pandemics.)
  • AI hardware. Specialised hardware is a crucial input to the development of frontier AI systems. As a result, we expect expertise in AI hardware to become increasingly important to the governance of AI systems. (Read more about becoming an expert in AI hardware).
  • Economics. Understanding economics can be valuable in a huge range of impactful roles when combined with another skill set. For example, economics research is crucial for conducting global priorities research and improving decision making in large institutions. And a knowledge of economics can also support you in building policy and political skills, particularly for policy design and governance research.
  • Other areas we sometimes recommend include history, knowledge of China,

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