Blog post by Benjamin Todd · Published May 5th, 2022
Hi readers!
We’ve decided for Howie to become CEO and for me to become President of 80,000 Hours.
After ten years in the role, I’d become less excited about overseeing several aspects of the organisation’s on-going operation. We asked the board to investigate, and their recommendation was that Howie Lempel is the best person to take the org to its next level of scale.
In the President role I hope I’ll be able to focus on my most valuable contributions – providing advice on org strategy & the website, writing, and helping with outreach – and won’t have set responsibilities.
I also have a growing list of other projects in effective altruism that I’m excited to explore.
Howie and I expect the transition to be smooth – in part because Howie is already doing several parts of the role as Chief of Staff. We intend for Howie to officially become CEO this week, and to complete the transfer in about a month.
I’m excited to explore this new role and for 80,000 Hours to continue growing and getting the next generation working on the world’s most pressing problems.
Ben
Note from Howie:
Hi everyone,
I’m really looking forward to taking on this new role and leading 80,000 Hours as we continue to grow.
I’m going to send an initial update on our plans as part of our post-Q2 email update.
In nature, animals roar and bare their teeth to intimidate adversaries — but one side usually backs down, and real fights are rare. The wisdom of evolution is that the risk of violence is just too great.
Which might make one wonder: if war is so destructive, why does it happen? The question may sound naïve, but in fact it represents a deep puzzle. If a war will cost trillions and kill tens of thousands, it should be easy for either side to make a peace offer that both they and their opponents prefer to actually fighting it out.
The conundrum of how humans can engage in incredibly costly and protracted conflicts has occupied academics across the social sciences for years. In today’s episode, we speak with economist Chris Blattman about his new book, Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace, which summarises what they think they’ve learned.
Chris’s first point is that while organised violence may feel like it’s all around us, it’s actually very rare in humans, just as it is with other animals. Across the world, hundreds of groups dislike one another — but knowing the cost of war, they prefer to simply loathe one another in peace.
In order to understand what’s wrong with a sick patient, a doctor needs to know what a healthy person looks like. And to understand war, social scientists need to study all the wars that could have happened but didn’t — so they can see what a healthy society looks like and what’s missing in the places where war does take hold.
Chris argues that social scientists have generated five cogent models of when war can be ‘rational’ for both sides of a conflict:
Unchecked interests — such as national leaders who bear few of the costs of launching a war.
Intangible incentives — such as an intrinsic desire for revenge.
Uncertainty — such as both sides underestimating each other’s resolve to fight.
Commitment problems — such as the inability to credibly promise not to use your growing military might to attack others in future.
Misperceptions — such as our inability to see the world through other people’s eyes.
In today’s interview, we walk through how each of the five explanations work and what specific wars or actions they might explain.
In the process, Chris outlines how many of the most popular explanations for interstate war are wildly overused (e.g. leaders who are unhinged or male) or misguided from the outset (e.g. resource scarcity).
The interview also covers:
What Chris and Rob got wrong about the war in Ukraine
What causes might not fit into these five categories
The role of people’s choice to escalate or deescalate a conflict
How great power wars or nuclear wars are different, and what can be done to prevent them
How much representative government helps to prevent war
And much more
Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type ‘80,000 Hours’ into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.
Producer: Keiran Harris Audio mastering: Ben Cordell Transcriptions: Katy Moore
I’ve felt like an imposter since my first year of university.
I was accepted to the university that I believed was well out of my league — my ‘stretch’ school. I’d gotten good grades in high school, but I’d never seen myself as especially smart: I wasn’t selected for gifted programmes in elementary school like some of my friends were, and my standardised test scores were in the bottom half of those attending my university.
I was pretty confident I got into the university because of some fluke in the system (my top hypothesis was that I was admitted as part of an affirmative action initiative) — and that belief stayed with me (and was amplified) during the decade that followed.
Throughout that decade, there was evidence that I really was good at my work at different points, but I could always come up with an explanation for why the evidence was unreliable.
For example, as an undergraduate, I was the only first-year student in my biology department to get a research internship at the Mayo Clinic — one of the most prestigious biomedical institutions in the US. But I felt I only got the internship because I’d met the right person at the right time, and tricked them into thinking I was smarter than I was by saying smart-sounding things.
Likewise, during my final year of university, I was given an award for being the top performer in my sociology department.
Blog post by Arden Koehler · Published April 19th, 2022
About the 80,000 Hours web team
80,000 Hours provides free research and support to help people find careers tackling the world’s most pressing problems.
We’ve had over 8 million visitors to our website (with over 100,000 hours of reading time per year), and more than 3,000 people have told us that they’ve significantly changed their career plans due to our work. We’re also the largest single source of people getting involved in the effective altruism community, according to the most recent EA Community Survey.
Our articles are read by thousands, and are among the most important ways we help people shift their careers towards higher-impact options.
The role
As a writer, you would:
Research, outline, and write new articles for the 80,000 Hours website — e.g. new career reviews.
Rewrite or update older articles with information and resources — e.g. about rapidly evolving global problems.
Generate ideas for new pieces.
Talk to experts and readers to help prioritise our new articles and updates.
Generally help grow the impact of the site.
Some of the types of pieces you could work on include:
This podcast highlighted Sam Bankman-Fried as a positive example of someone ambitiously pursuing a high-impact career. To say the least, we no longer endorse that. See our statement for why.
The show’s host, Rob Wiblin, has also released some personal comments on this episode and the FTX bankruptcy on The 80,000 Hours Podcast feed, which you can listen to here.
If you were offered a 100% chance of $1 million to keep yourself, or a 10% chance of $15 million — it makes total sense to play it safe. You’d be devastated if you lost, and barely happier if you won.
But if you were offered a 100% chance of donating $1 billion, or a 10% chance of donating $15 billion, you should just go with whatever has the highest expected value — that is, probability multiplied by the goodness of the outcome — and so swing for the fences.
This is the totally rational but rarely seen high-risk approach to philanthropy championed by today’s guest, Sam Bankman-Fried. Sam founded the cryptocurrency trading platform FTX, which has grown his wealth from around $1 million to $20,000 million.
Added 30 November 2022: What I meant to refer to as totally rational in the above paragraph is thinking about the ‘expected value’ of one’s actions, not maximizing expected dollar returns as if you were entirely ‘risk-neutral’. See clarifications on what I (Rob Wiblin) think about risk-aversion here.
Despite that, Sam still drives a Corolla and sleeps on a beanbag, because the only reason he started FTX was to make money to give it away. In 2020, when he was 5% as rich as he is now, he was nonetheless the second biggest individual donor to Joe Biden’s general election campaign.
In today’s conversation, Sam outlines how at every stage in FTX’s development, he and his team were able to choose the high-risk path to maximise expected value — precisely because they weren’t out to earn money for themselves.
This year his philanthropy has kicked into high gear with the launch of the FTX Future Fund, which has the initial ambition of giving away hundreds of millions a year and hopes to soon escalate to over a billion a year.
The Fund is run by previous guest of the show Nick Beckstead, and embodies the same risk-loving attitude Sam has learned from entrepreneurship and trading on financial markets. Unlike most foundations, the Future Fund:
Is open to supporting young people trying to get their first big break
Makes applying for a grant surprisingly straightforward
Is willing to make bets on projects it completely expects to fail, just because they have positive expected value.
Their website lists both areas of interest and more concrete project ideas they are looking to support. The hope is these will inspire entrepreneurs to come forward, seize the mantle, and be the champions who actually make these things happen. Some of the project proposals are pretty natural, such as:
Create a ‘epistemic appeals system’ — a sort of for-hire fact checking organisation that builds credibility through a longstanding reputation for impartiality, transparency, and reliability
While these ideas may seem pretty random, they all stem from a particular underlying moral and empirical vision that the Future Fund has laid out.
In this conversation, we speak with Sam about the hopes he and the Fund have for how the long-term future of humanity might go incredibly well, the fears they hold about how it could go incredibly badly, and what levers they might be able to pull to slightly nudge us towards the former.
Listeners who want to launch an ambitious project to improve humanity’s future should not only listen to the episode, but also look at the full list of the kind of things Sam and his colleagues are hoping to fund, see if they’re inspired, and if so, apply to get the ball rolling.
On top of that we also cover:
How Sam feels now about giving $5 million to Biden’s general election campaign
His fears and hopes for artificial intelligence
Whether or not blockchain technology actually has useful real-world applications
What lessons Sam learned from some serious early setbacks
Why he fears the effective altruism community is too conservative
Why Sam is as authentic now as he was before he was a celebrity
And much more.
Note: Sam has donated to 80,000 Hours in the past
Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type ‘80,000 Hours’ into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.
Producer: Keiran Harris Audio mastering: Ben Cordell Transcriptions: Katy Moore
November 17 2022, 1pm GMT: This podcast highlighted Sam Bankman-Fried as a positive example of someone ambitiously pursuing a high-impact career. To say the least, we no longer endorse that.See our statement for why.
Everybody knows that good parenting has a big impact on how kids turn out. Except that maybe they don’t, because it doesn’t.
Incredible though it might seem, according to today’s guest — economist Bryan Caplan, the author of Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids, The Myth of the Rational Voter, and The Case Against Education — the best evidence we have on the question suggests that, within reason, what parents do has little impact on how their children’s lives play out once they’re adults.
Of course, kids do resemble their parents. But just as we probably can’t say it was attentive parenting that gave me my mother’s nose, perhaps we can’t say it was attentive parenting that made me succeed at school. Both the social environment we grow up in and the genes we receive from our parents influence the person we become, and looking at a typical family we can’t really distinguish the impact of one from the other.
But nature does offer us up a random experiment that can let us tell the difference: identical twins share all their genes, while fraternal twins only share half their genes. If you look at how much more similar outcomes are for identical twins than fraternal twins, you see the effect of sharing 100% of your genetic material, rather than the usual 50%. Double that amount, and you’ve got the full effect of genetic inheritance. Whatever unexplained variation remains is still up for grabs — and might be down to different experiences in the home, outside the home, or just random noise.
The crazy thing about this research is that it says for a range of adult outcomes (e.g. years of education, income, health, personality, and happiness), it’s differences in the genes children inherit rather than differences in parental behaviour that are doing most of the work. Other research suggests that differences in “out-of-home environment,” such as the friends one makes at school, take second place. Parenting style does matter for something, but it comes in a clear third.
You might think that these studies are accidentally recruiting parents who are all unusually competent, by including only the kind of people who respond to letters asking them to participate in a university study of twin behaviour. But in fact that effect is small, because many countries and hospitals have enrolled twins in this research almost by default, and academics can check on some kinds of outcomes using tax, death, and court records, which include almost everyone.
He is quick to point out that there are several factors that help reconcile these findings with conventional wisdom about the importance of parenting.
First, for some adult outcomes, parenting was a big deal (i.e. the quality of the parent/child relationship) or at least a moderate deal (i.e. drug use, criminality, and religious/political identity).
Second, these are adult outcomes — parents can and do influence you quite a lot, so long as you’re young and still living with them. But as soon as you move out, the influence of their behaviour begins to wane and eventually becomes hard to spot.
Third, this research only studies variation in parenting behaviour that was common among the families studied. The studies are just mute on anything that wasn’t actually done by many parents in their sample.
And fourth, research on international adoptions shows they can cause massive improvements in health, income and other outcomes. So a large enough change in one’s entire environment, say from Haiti to the United States, does matter, even if moving between families within the United States has modest effects.
Despite all that, the findings are still remarkable, and imply many hyper-diligent parents could live much less stressful lives without doing their kids any harm at all. In this extensive interview host Rob Wiblin interrogates whether Bryan can really be right, or whether the research he’s drawing on has taken a wrong turn somewhere.
And that’s just one topic we cover, some of the others being:
People’s biggest misconceptions about the labour market
Arguments against high levels of immigration
Whether most people actually vote based on self-interest
Whether philosophy should stick to common sense or depart from it radically
How to weigh personal autonomy against the possible benefits of government regulation
Bryan’s track record of winning 23 out of 23 bets about how the future would play out
And much more
Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type ‘80,000 Hours’ into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.
Producer: Keiran Harris Audio mastering: Ben Cordell Transcriptions: Katy Moore
Since the Soviet Union split into different countries in 1991, the pervasive fear of catastrophe that people lived with for decades has gradually faded from memory, and nuclear warhead stockpiles have declined by 83%. Nuclear brinksmanship, proxy wars, and the game theory of mutually assured destruction (MAD) have come to feel like relics of another era.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has changed all that.
According to Joan Rohlfing — President of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit focused on reducing threats from nuclear and biological weapons — the annual risk of a ‘global catastrophic nuclear event’‘ never fell as low as people like to think, and for some time has been on its way back up.
At the same time, civil society funding for research and advocacy around nuclear risks is being cut in half over a period of years — despite the fact that at $60 million a year, it was already just a thousandth as much as the US spends maintaining its nuclear deterrent.
If new funding sources are not identified to replace donors that are withdrawing (like the MacArthur Foundation), the existing pool of talent will have to leave for greener pastures, and most of the next generation will see a career in the field as unviable.
While global poverty is on the decline and life expectancy increasing, the chance of a catastrophic nuclear event is probably trending in the wrong direction.
Joan points out that the New START treaty, which dramatically limits the number of warheads the US and Russia can deploy at one time, narrowly survived in 2021 due to the election of Joe Biden. But it will again require renewal in 2026, which may or may not happen, depending on whether the relationship between the two great powers can be repaired over the next four years.
Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in 1994 in exchange for security guarantees that turned out not to be worth the paper they were written on. States that have nuclear weapons (such as North Korea), states that are pursuing them (such as Iran), and states that have pursued nuclear weapons but since abandoned them (such as Libya, Syria, and South Africa) may take this as a valuable lesson in the importance of military power over promises.
China has been expanding its arsenal and testing hypersonic glide missiles that can evade missile defences. Japan now toys with the idea of nuclear weapons as a way to ensure its security against its much larger neighbour. India and Pakistan both acquired nuclear weapons in the late 1980s and their relationship continues to oscillate from hostile to civil and back.
At the same time, the risk that nuclear weapons could be interfered with due to weaknesses in computer security is far higher than during the Cold War, when systems were simpler and less networked.
In the interview, Joan discusses several steps that can be taken in the immediate term, such as renewed efforts to extend and expand arms control treaties, changes to nuclear use policy, and the retirement of what they see as vulnerable delivery systems, such as land-based silos.
In the bigger picture, NTI seeks to keep hope alive that a better system than deterrence through mutually assured destruction remains possible. The threat of retaliation does indeed make nuclear wars unlikely, but it necessarily means the system fails in an incredibly destructive way: with the death of hundreds of millions if not billions.
In the long run, even a tiny 1 in 500 risk of a nuclear war each year adds up to around an 18% chance of catastrophe over the century.
Joan concedes that MAD was probably the best available system for preventing the use of nuclear weapons in 1950. But we’ve had 70 years of advances in technology since then that have opened up new possibilities, such as far more reliable surveillance than could have been dreamed up by Truman and Stalin. But MAD has been the conventional wisdom for so long that almost nobody is working on alternative paradigms.
In this conversation we cover all that, as well as:
How arms control treaties have evolved over the last few decades
Whether lobbying by arms manufacturers is an important factor shaping nuclear strategy
Places listeners could work at or donate to
The Biden Nuclear Posture Review
How easily humanity might recover from a nuclear exchange
Implications for the use of nuclear energy
Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type ‘80,000 Hours’ into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.
Producer: Keiran Harris Audio mastering: Ben Cordell Transcriptions: Katy Moore
If someone said a global health and development programme was sustainable, participatory, and holistic, you’d have to guess that they were saying something positive. But according to today’s guest Karen Levy — deworming pioneer and veteran of Innovations for Poverty Action, Evidence Action, and Y Combinator — each of those three concepts has become so fashionable that they’re at risk of being seriously overrated and applied where they don’t belong.
Such concepts might even cause harm — trying to make a project embody all three is as likely to ruin it as help it flourish.
First, what do people mean by ‘sustainability’? Usually they mean something like the programme will eventually be able to continue without needing further financial support from the donor. But how is that possible? Governments, nonprofits, and aid agencies aim to provide health services, education, infrastructure, financial services, and so on — and all of these require ongoing funding to pay for materials and staff to keep them running.
I buy my groceries from a supermarket, and I’m not under the illusion that one day I’ll be able to stop paying and still get everything I need for free. And there’s nothing wrong with this way of getting life’s necessities being ‘unsustainable’ — so long as I want groceries, I’ll keep paying for them.
Given that someone needs to keep paying, Karen tells us that in practice, ‘sustainability’ is usually a euphemism for the programme at some point being passed on to someone else to fund — usually the national government. And while that can be fine, the national government of Kenya only spends $400 per person to provide each and every government service — just 2% of what the US spends on each resident. Incredibly tight budgets like that are typical of low-income countries. While the concept of ‘sustainability’ sounds great, to say “We’re going to pass the cost of this programme on to a government funded by very poor people’s taxes” sounds at best ambiguous.
‘Participatory’ also sounds nice, and inasmuch as it means leaders are accountable to the people they’re trying to help, it probably is. But Karen tells us that in the field, ‘participatory’ usually means that recipients are expected to be involved in planning and delivering services themselves.
While that might be suitable in some situations, it’s hardly something people in rich countries always want for themselves. Ideally we want government healthcare and education to be high quality without us having to attend meetings to keep it on track — and people in poor countries have as many or more pressures on their time. While accountability is desirable, an expectation of participation can be as much a burden as a blessing.
Finally, making a programme ‘holistic’ could be smart, but as Karen lays out, it also has some major downsides. For one, it means you’re doing lots of things at once, which makes it hard to tell which parts of the project are making the biggest difference relative to their cost. For another, when you have a lot of goals at once, it’s hard to tell whether you’re making progress, or really put your mind to focusing on making one thing go extremely well. And finally, holistic programmes can be impractically expensive — Karen tells the story of a wonderful ‘holistic school health’ programme that, if continued, was going to cost 3.5 times the entire school’s budget.
Smallpox elimination was one of humanity’s greatest health achievements and its focus on one thing to the exclusion of all else made it the complete opposite of a holistic program.
In today’s in-depth conversation, Karen Levy and I chat about the above, as well as:
Why it pays to figure out how you’ll interpret the results of an experiment ahead of time
The trouble with misaligned incentives within the development industry
Projects that don’t deliver value for money and should be scaled down
Whether governments typically pay for a project once outside funding is withdrawn
How Karen accidentally became a leading figure in the push to deworm tens of millions of schoolchildren
Logistical challenges in reaching huge numbers of people with essential services
How Karen has enjoyed living in Kenya for several decades
Lessons from Karen’s many-decades career
The goals of Karen’s new project: Fit for Purpose
Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type “80,000 Hours” into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.
Producer: Keiran Harris Audio mastering: Ben Cordell and Ryan Kessler Transcriptions: Katy Moore
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is devastating the lives of Ukrainians, and so long as it continues there’s a risk that the conflict could escalate to include other countries or the use of nuclear weapons. It’s essential that NATO, the US, and the EU play their cards right to ideally end the violence, maintain Ukrainian sovereignty, and discourage any similar invasions in the future.
But how? To pull together the most valuable information on how to react to this crisis, we spoke with Samuel Charap — a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, one of the US’s foremost experts on Russia’s relationship with former Soviet states, and co-author of Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia.
Samuel believes that Putin views the alignment of Ukraine with NATO as an existential threat to Russia — a perhaps unreasonable view, but a sincere one nevertheless. Ukraine has been drifting further into Western Europe’s orbit and improving its defensive military capabilities, so Putin has concluded that if Russia wants to put a stop to that, there will never be a better time to act in the future.
Despite early successes holding off the Russian military, Samuel is sceptical that time is on the Ukrainian side. Though it won’t be able to create a puppet government Ukrainians view as legitimate, if committed to the task, Russia will likely gradually grind down Ukrainian resistance and take formal control of the country. If the war is to end before much of Ukraine is reduced to rubble, it will likely have to be through negotiation, rather than Russian defeat.
Many hope for Putin to be ousted from office, but Samuel cautions that he has enormous control of the Russian government and the media Russians consume, making that very unlikely in the near term. Furthermore, someone who successfully booted Putin from office is just as likely to be even more of an intransigent hardliner as they are to be a dove. In the meantime, loose talk of assassinating Putin could drive him to further reckless aggression.
The US policy response has so far been largely good, successfully balancing the need to punish Russia to dissuade large nations from bullying small ones in the future, while preventing NATO from being drawn into the war directly — which would pose a horrifying risk of escalation to a full nuclear exchange. The pressure from the general public to ‘do something’ might eventually cause national leaders to confront Russia more directly, but so far they are sensibly showing no interest in doing so.
However, use of nuclear weapons remains a low but worrying possibility. That could happen in various ways, such as:
NATO shoots down Russian planes to enforce a no-fly zone — a problematic idea in Samuel’s opinion.
An unintentional cycle of mutual escalation between Russia and NATO, perhaps starting with cyber attacks, or Russian bombs accidentally landing in NATO countries that neighbour Ukraine.
Putin ends up with his back against the wall and believes he can no longer win the war or defend Russia without using tactical nuclear weapons.
Putin decides to invade a country other than Ukraine.
Samuel is also worried that Russia may deploy chemical and biological weapons and blame it on the Ukrainians.
In Samuel’s opinion, the recent focus on the delivery of fighter jets to Ukraine is risky and not the key defence priority in any case. Instead, Ukraine could use more ground-to-air missiles to shoot Russian planes out of the sky.
Before war broke out, it’s possible Russia could have been satisfied if Ukraine followed through on the Minsk agreements and committed not to join NATO. Or it might not have, if Putin was committed to war, come what may. In any case, most Ukrainians found those terms intolerable.
At this point, the situation is even worse, and it’s hard to see how an enduring ceasefire could be agreed upon. On top of the above, Russia is also demanding recognition that Crimea is part of Russia, and acceptance of the independence of the so-calked Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. These conditions — especially the second — are entirely unacceptable to the Ukrainians. Hence the war continues, and could grind on for months until one side is sufficiently beaten down to compromise on their core demands.
Rob and Samuel discuss all of the above and also:
What are the implications if Sweden and/or Finland decide to join NATO?
What should NATO do now, and did it make any mistakes in the past?
What’s the most likely situation for us to be looking at in three months’ time?
Can Ukraine effectively win the war?
Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type ‘80,000 Hours’ into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.
Producer: Keiran Harris Audio mastering: Ben Cordell Transcriptions: Katy Moore
80,000 Hours provides research and support to help students and graduates switch into careers that effectively tackle the world’s most pressing problems.
Over one million people visit our website each year, and more than 3,000 people have told us that they’ve significantly changed their career plans due to our work. We’re also the largest single source of people getting involved in the effective altruism community, according to the most recent EA Survey.
The Internal Systems team
The Internal Systems team is here to build the organisation and systems that support 80,000 Hours to achieve its mission.
We oversee 80,000 Hours’ office, finances, and impact evaluation, as well as much of our fundraising, org-wide metrics, tech systems, HR, and recruiting.
Currently, we have two full-time staff (Brenton Mayer and Sashika Coxhead), some part-time staff, and receive support from CEA (our fiscal sponsor).
Role
This role would be excellent experience for someone who wants to build career capital in operations, especially if you could one day see yourself in a more senior operations role (e.g. taking on more management, and perhaps eventually being a Head of Operations or COO).
Your responsibilities will likely include:
Creating an outstanding office environment. You’ll hire and manage the team that oversees our beautiful central London office. Your team will be responsible for all the systems that keep the office running smoothly,
People curious about the inner workings of the 1-1 team
People who left the first part wanting more
Who this episode isn’t for:
People who left the first part wanting less
People who like up-to-date movie recommendations
Get this episode by subscribing to our more experimental podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type ’80k After Hours’ into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.
Producer: Keiran Harris Audio mastering: Ben Cordell Transcriptions: Katy Moore
One of 80,000 Hours’ main services is our free one-on-one careers advising, which we provide to around 1,000 people a year. Today we speak to two of our advisors, who have each spoken to hundreds of people — including many regular listeners to this show — about how they might be able to do more good while also having a highly motivating career.
Before joining 80,000 Hours, Michelle Hutchinson completed a PhD in Philosophy at Oxford University and helped launch Oxford’s Global Priorities Institute, while Habiba Islam studied politics, philosophy, and economics at Oxford University and qualified as a barrister.
Want to get free one-on-one advice from our team? We’re here to help.
We’ve helped thousands of people formulate their plans and put them in touch with mentors.
We’ve expanded our ability to deliver one-on-one meetings so are keen to help more people than ever before.
If you’re a regular listener to the show we’re particularly likely to want to speak with you, either now or in the future.
Why you can specialise and take more risk if you’re in a group
Gaps in the effective altruism community it would be really useful for people to fill
Stories of people who have spoken to 80,000 Hours and changed their career — and whether it went well or not
Why trying to have impact in multiple different ways can be a mistake
The episode is split into two parts: the first section on The 80,000 Hours Podcast, and the second on our new 80k After Hours. This is a shameless attempt to encourage listeners to our first show to subscribe to our second feed.
Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type ‘80,000 Hours’ into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.
Producer: Keiran Harris Audio mastering: Ben Cordell Transcriptions: Katy Moore
80,000 Hours’ mission is to get talented people working on the world’s most pressing problems. The effective altruism community, of which we are a part, is growing in reach and now includes funding bodies with over $40 billion to allocate in total. But how do we make sure people are pursuing the right kinds of work in order to turn all those resources into long-term impact? This is the problem 80,000 Hours is trying to solve.
We’ve had over eight million visitors to our website (with over 100,000 hours of reading time per year), and more than 3,000 people have now told us that they’ve significantly changed their career plans due to our work. 80,000 Hours is also the largest single source of people getting involved in the effective altruism community, according to the most recent EA Survey.
If you join us as a writer, you’d likely be one of the most widely read writers in effective altruism.
The role
As a writer at 80,000 Hours, your work would involve:
Framing, researching, outlining, and writing articles
Generating ideas for additional articles
Helping with others’ writing by providing comments
Generally helping grow the impact of the site
Some of the types of pieces you’d help work on include:
We decided to make a list of all of the career choice heuristics we could think of — see below. Many of these are stated as if completely true, even though we think they aren’t. We invite you to add any additional heuristics you have in the comments of the original post.
Scale, number helped — do something that impacts many people positively
Scale, degree helped — do something that impacts people to a great positive degree
Neglectedness — do something that few others are doing or that won’t be done counterfactually
Tractability — do something that makes significant progress on a problem
Moments of progress — notice where progress happens in your life and find a career path that integrates those
Strong team — if you haven’t worked well alone, join an excellent team
Likable people — join a team of people that you like
Mental well-being — do something that is optimized for being good for your mental health
Team smarter than you — join a team where most people are smarter than you
Be a thought or org leader — roughly, there are two types of leaders – thought leaders and org leaders; figure out which type you are more likely to be and optimize for succeeding at that type
Learn from leaders — learn from the leaders who you most want to be like
In this episode of 80k After Hours, Keiran Harris interviews 80,000 Hours advisor (and former high school teacher) Alex Lawsen about his advice for students.
We cover:
When half-assing something is a good idea
When you should actually learn things vs just try to seem smart
Why you should shift your focus over the academic year
Novel tips for preparing for exams
What to do if you struggle with motivation
What to do when you have bad teachers
How students should think about exploring and experimenting
Bad approaches to learning
How to think about personal goals
When to start thinking about your career seriously
And more
Who this episode is for:
Students, parents, and teachers
People who know a student, parent, or teacher
People with an interest in improving education
Who this episode isn’t for:
People who never interact with students, parents, or teachers
People who get mad when an 80,000 Hours podcast doesn’t feature Rob Wiblin
Get this episode by subscribing to our more experimental podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type ’80k After Hours’ into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.
Producer: Keiran Harris Audio mastering: Ryan Kessler Transcriptions: Katy Moore
In this episode of 80k After Hours, Rob Wiblin and Keiran Harris are interviewed by Kearney Capuano and Aaron Bergman of the new podcast All Good about what goes on behind the scenes at The 80,000 Hours Podcast.
We cover:
The history and philosophy of The 80,000 Hours Podcast
The nuts and bolts of how we make the show
Rob’s bad habits as an interviewer
Topics we try to avoid
Critiques of the show
The pros and cons of podcasting vs other media
Our position in the effective altruism community
Whether there’s an optimism bias in the EA community
Unifying themes of Rob’s and Keiran’s careers
Advice for other podcasters
And more
Who this episode is for:
Fans of The 80,000 Hours Podcast
New podcasters
Two 80,000 Hours employees who love the sound of their own voice
Who this episode isn’t for:
People who’ve never heard of The 80,000 Hours Podcast
People who only want to learn about more important topics
People who hate podcasts
Get this episode by subscribing to our more experimental podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type ’80k After Hours’ into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.
Producer: Keiran Harris Audio mastering: Ben Cordell Transcriptions: Katy Moore
But different types of content have different audiences, and some people who love classic episodes with Rob will understandably have no interest in experimental episodes with other folks on the team (or vice versa: maybe some people love everyone else on the team but can’t stand Rob!)
It’s a new podcast that includes a much wider variety of content than you’ve come to expect from the original feed.
It’ll mostly still explore the best ways to do good — and some episodes will be much more laser-focused on careers than most original episodes — but we’re going to feel more comfortable with throwing things up there just because they’re fun or entertaining too.
We’ll also feel fine with producing some content for much narrower audiences.
One of our inaugural episodes with Alex Lawsen — on his advice to students — won’t be for everyone. But if you’re a student, a teacher, or a parent,
If you read pollssaying that the public supports a carbon tax, should you believe them? According to today’s guest — journalist and blogger Matthew Yglesias — it’s complicated, but probably not.
Interpreting opinion polls about specific policies can be a challenge, and it’s easy to trick yourself into believing what you want to believe. Matthew invented a term for a particular type of self-delusion called the ‘pundit’s fallacy’: “the belief that what a politician needs to do to improve his or her political standing is do what the pundit wants substantively.”
If we want to advocate not just for ideas that would be good if implemented, but ideas that have a real shot at getting implemented, we should do our best to understand public opinion as it really is.
The least trustworthy polls are published by think tanks and advocacy campaigns that would love to make their preferred policy seem popular. These surveys can be designed to nudge respondents toward the desired result — for example, by tinkering with question wording and order or shifting how participants are sampled. And if a poll produces the ‘wrong answer’, there’s no need to publish it at all, so the ‘publication bias’ with these sorts of surveys is large.
Matthew says polling run by firms or researchers without any particular desired outcome can be taken more seriously. But the results that we ought to give by far the most weight are those from professional political campaigns trying to win votes and get their candidate elected because they have both the expertise to do polling properly, and a very strong incentive to understand what the public really thinks.
First and foremost, that means representing issues as they would be in a hotly contested campaign. If someone says that they sure like the idea of taxing carbon, how much do they still like it when they find out it means their electricity bills would be $100 higher, and gas will cost 20 cents more a gallon? And do they still like it when they know one of the candidates is against it and says it will cost local jobs? This sort of progressive ‘stress testing’ is more work, but can lead researchers to very different conclusions than just asking people favour ‘policy X’.
The problem is, campaigns run these expensive surveys because they think that having exclusive access to reliable information will give them a competitive advantage. As a result, they often don’t publish the findings, and instead use them to shape what their candidate says and does.
Journalists like Matthew can call up their contacts within campaigns and get a summary from people they trust. But being unable to publish the polling itself, they’re unlikely to be able to persuade sceptics.
That’s a pain and a legitimately hard problem to get around. But when assessing what ideas are winners, one thing Matthew would like everyone to keep in mind is that politics is competitive, and politicians aren’t (all) stupid. If advocating for your pet idea were a great way to win elections, someone would try it and win, and others would copy. If none of the pros are talking about your hobby horse, it might be because they know something you don’t.
One other thing to check that’s more reliable than polling is real-world experience. For example, voters may say they like a carbon tax on the phone — but the very liberal Washington State roundly rejected one in ballot initiatives in 2016 and 2018.
Of course you may want to advocate for what you think is best, even if it wouldn’t pass a popular vote in the face of organised opposition. The public’s ideas can shift, sometimes dramatically and unexpectedly. But at least you’ll be going into the debate with your eyes wide open.
In this extensive conversation, host Rob Wiblin and Matthew also cover:
How should a humanitarian think about US military interventions overseas?
From an ‘effective altruist’ perspective, was the US wrong to withdraw from Afghanistan?
Has NATO ultimately screwed over Ukrainians by misrepresenting the extent of its commitment to their independence?
What philosopher does Matthew think is underrated?
How big a risk is ubiquitous surveillance?
What does Matthew think about wild animal suffering, anti-ageing research, and autonomous weapons?
And much more
Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.
Producer: Keiran Harris Audio mastering: Ben Cordell Transcriptions: Katy Moore
Problem profile by Fin Moorhouse · Published February 2022
Humanity’s long-run future could be vast in scale and duration, because almost all of it could lie beyond Earth. As private interest in space increases, early work on space governance could positively shape that spacefaring future, and make it less likely that a future in space goes irreversibly wrong. Of course, it also matters that humanity avoids catastrophe in the meantime, and space governance focused on arms control and diplomacy can help here too — mostly by reducing the risk of great power conflict. However, the path to making a really important difference on these issues looks much less clear and robust than in some of our other top recommended areas.
Expertise in China and its relations with the world might be critical in tackling some of the world’s most pressing problems. In particular, China’s relationship with the US is arguably the most important bilateral relationship in the world, with these two countries collectively accounting for over 40% of global GDP. These considerations led us to publish a guide to improving China–Western coordination on global catastrophic risks and other key problems in 2018. Since then, we have seen an increase in the number of people exploring this area.
China is one of the most important countries developing and shaping advanced artificial intelligence (AI). The Chinese government’s spending on AI research and development is estimated to be on the same order of magnitude as that of the US government, and China’s AI research is prominent on the world stage and growing.
Because of the importance of AI from the perspective of improving the long-run trajectory of the world, we think relations between China and the US on AI could be among the most important aspects of their relationship. Insofar as the EU and/or UK influence advanced AI development through labs based in their countries or through their influence on global regulation, the state of understanding and coordination between European and Chinese actors on AI safety and governance could also be significant.
That, in short, is why we think working on AI safety and governance in China and/or building mutual understanding between Chinese and Western actors in these areas is likely to be one of the most promising China-related career paths.
