New releases

Why we’re adding information security to our list of priority career paths

Blog post by · Published April 28, 2023

Information security could be a top option for people looking to have a high-impact career.

This might be a surprising claim — information security is a relatively niche field, and it doesn’t typically appear on canonical lists of do-gooder careers.

But we think there’s an unusually strong case that information security skills (which allow you to protect against unauthorised use, hacking, leaks, and tampering) will be key to addressing problems that are extremely important, neglected, and tractable. We now rank this career among the highest-impact paths we’ve researched.

In the introduction to our recently updated career review of information security, we discuss how poor information security decisions may have played a decisive role in the 2016 US presidential campaign. If an organisation is big and influential, it needs good information security to ensure that it functions as intended. This is true whether it’s a political campaign, a major corporation, a biolab, or an AI company.

These last two cases could be quite important. We rank the risks from pandemic viruses and the chances of an AI-related catastrophe among the most pressing problems in the world — and information security is likely a key part of reducing these dangers.

That’s because hackers and cyberattacks — from a range of actors with varying motives — could try to steal crucial information, such as instructions for making a super-virus or the details of an extremely powerful AI model.

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Luisa and Keiran on free will, and the consequences of never feeling enduring guilt or shame

Podcast (80k After Hours) by and · Published April 2023

In this episode of 80k After Hours, Luisa Rodriguez and Keiran Harris chat about the consequences of letting go of enduring guilt, shame, anger, and pride.

They cover:

  • Keiran’s views on free will, and how he came to hold them
  • What it’s like not experiencing sustained guilt, shame, and anger
  • Whether Luisa would become a worse person if she felt less guilt and shame, specifically whether she’d work fewer hours, or donate less money, or become a worse friend
  • Whether giving up guilt and shame also means giving up pride
  • The implications for love
  • The neurological condition ‘Jerk Syndrome’
  • And some practical advice on feeling less guilt, shame, and anger

Who this episode is for:

  • People sympathetic to the idea that free will is an illusion
  • People who experience tons of guilt, shame, or anger
  • People worried about what would happen if they stopped feeling tons of guilt, shame, or anger

Who this episode isn’t for:

  • People strongly in favour of retributive justice
  • Philosophers who can’t stand random non-philosophers talking about philosophy
  • Non-philosophers who can’t stand random non-philosophers talking about philosophy

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Are we doing enough to stop the worst pandemics?

Blog post by · Published April 21, 2023

COVID-19 has been devastating for the world. While people debate how the response could’ve been better, it should be easy to agree that we’d all be better off if we can stop any future pandemic before it occurs. But we’re still not taking pandemic prevention very seriously.

A recent report in The Washington Post highlighted one major danger: some research on potential pandemic pathogens may actually increase the risk, rather than reduce it.

Back in 2017, we talked about what we thought were several warning signs that something like COVID might be coming down the line. It’d be a big mistake to ignore these kinds of warning signs again.

It seems unfortunate that so much of the discussion of the risks in this space is backward-looking. The news has been filled with commentary and debates about the chances that COVID accidentally emerged from a biolab or that it crossed over directly from animals to humans.

We’d appreciate a definitive answer to this question as much as anyone, but there’s another question that matters much more but gets asked much less:

What are we doing to reduce the risk that the next dangerous virus — which could come from an animal, a biolab, or even a bioterrorist attack — causes a pandemic even worse than COVID-19?

80,000 Hours ranks preventing catastrophic pandemics as among the most pressing problems in the world.

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How much should you research your career?

Blog post by · Published April 18, 2023

In career decisions, we advise that you don’t aim for confidence — aim for a stable best guess.

Career decisions have a big impact on your life, so it’s natural to want to feel confident in them.

Unfortunately, you don’t always get this luxury.

For years, I’ve faced the decision of whether to focus more on writing, organisation building, or something else. And despite giving it a lot of thought, I’ve rarely felt more than 60% confident in one of the options.

How should you handle these kinds of situations?

The right response isn’t just to guess, flip a coin, or “follow your heart.”

It’s still worth identifying your key uncertainties, and doing your research: speak to people, do side projects, learn about each path, etc.

Sometimes you’ll quickly realise one answer is best. If we plot your confidence against how much research you’ve done, it’ll look like this:
Deliberation graph

But sometimes that doesn’t happen. What then?

Stop your research when your best guess stops changing.

That might look more like this:
Deliberation graph

This can be painful. You might only be 51% confident in your best guess, and it really sucks to have to make a decision when you feel so uncertain.

But certainty is not always achievable. You might face questions that both (i) are important but (ii) can’t realistically be resolved — which I think is the situation I faced.

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#149 – Tim LeBon on how altruistic perfectionism is self-defeating

Podcast by and · Published April 12, 2023

Being a good and successful person is core to your identity. You place great importance on meeting the high moral, professional, or academic standards you set yourself.

But inevitably, something goes wrong and you fail to meet that high bar. Now you feel terrible about yourself, and worry others are judging you for your failure. Feeling low and reflecting constantly on whether you’re doing as much as you think you should makes it hard to focus and get things done. So now you’re performing below a normal level, making you feel even more ashamed of yourself. Rinse and repeat.

This is the disastrous cycle today’s guest, Tim LeBon — registered psychotherapist, accredited CBT therapist, life coach, and author of 365 Ways to Be More Stoic — has observed in many clients with a perfectionist mindset.

Tim has provided therapy to a number of 80,000 Hours readers — people who have found that the very high expectations they had set for themselves were holding them back. Because of our focus on “doing the most good you can,” Tim thinks 80,000 Hours both attracts people with this style of thinking and then exacerbates it.

But Tim, having studied and written on moral philosophy, is sympathetic to the idea of helping others as much as possible, and is excited to help clients pursue that — sustainably — if it’s their goal.

Tim has treated hundreds of clients with all sorts of mental health challenges. But in today’s conversation, he shares the lessons he has learned working with people who take helping others so seriously that it has become burdensome and self-defeating — in particular, how clients can approach this challenge using the treatment he’s most enthusiastic about: cognitive behavioural therapy.

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#148 – Johannes Ackva on unfashionable climate interventions that work, and fashionable ones that don’t

Podcast by and · Published April 3, 2023

If you want to work to tackle climate change, you should try to reduce expected carbon emissions by as much as possible, right? Strangely, no.

Today’s guest, Johannes Ackva — the climate research lead at Founders Pledge, where he advises major philanthropists on their giving — thinks the best strategy is actually pretty different, and one few are adopting.

In reality you don’t want to reduce emissions for its own sake, but because emissions will translate into temperature increases, which will cause harm to people and the environment.

Crucially, the relationship between emissions and harm goes up faster than linearly. As Johannes explains, humanity can handle small deviations from the temperatures we’re familiar with, but adjustment gets harder the larger and faster the increase, making the damage done by each additional degree of warming much greater than the damage done by the previous one.

In short: we’re uncertain what the future holds and really need to avoid the worst-case scenarios. This means that avoiding an additional tonne of carbon being emitted in a hypothetical future in which emissions have been high is much more important than avoiding a tonne of carbon in a low-carbon world.

That may be, but concretely, how should that affect our behaviour? Well, the future scenarios in which emissions are highest are all ones in which clean energy tech that can make a big difference — wind, solar, and electric cars — don’t succeed nearly as much as we are currently hoping and expecting. For some reason or another, they must have hit a roadblock and we continued to burn a lot of fossil fuels.

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What our research has found about AI — and why it matters

Blog post by · Published March 31, 2023

Everyone’s suddenly talking a lot about artificial intelligence — and we have many helpful resources for getting up to speed.

With the release of GPT-4, Bing, DALL-E, Claude, and many other AI systems, it can be hard to keep track of all the latest developments in artificial intelligence. It can also be hard to keep sight of the big picture: what does this emerging technology actually mean for the world?

This is a huge topic — and a lot is still unknown. But at 80,000 Hours, we’ve been interested in and concerned about AI for many years, and we’ve researched the issue extensively. Now, even major media outlets are taking seriously the kinds of things we’ve been worried about. Given all the excitement in this area, we wanted to share a round-up of some of our top content and findings about AI from recent years.

Some of our top articles on AI:

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Longtermism: a call to protect future generations

Article by · Published March 2023

When the 19th-century amateur scientist Eunice Newton Foote filled glass cylinders with different gases and exposed them to sunlight, she uncovered a curious fact. Carbon dioxide became hotter than regular air and took longer to cool down.

Remarkably, Foote saw what this momentous discovery meant.

“An atmosphere of that gas would give our earth a high temperature,” she wrote in 1857.

Though Foote could hardly have been aware at the time, the potential for global warming due to carbon dioxide would have massive implications for the generations that came after her.

If we ran history over again from that moment, we might hope that this key discovery about carbon’s role in the atmosphere would inform governments’ and industries’ choices in the coming century. They probably shouldn’t have avoided carbon emissions altogether, but they could have prioritised the development of alternatives to fossil fuels much sooner in the 20th century, and we might have prevented much of the destructive climate change that present people are already beginning to live through — which will affect future generations as well.

We believe it would’ve been much better if previous generations had acted on Foote’s discovery, especially by the 1970s, when climate models were beginning to reliably show the future course of warming global trends.

If this seems right, it’s because of a commonsense idea: to the extent that we are able to, we have strong reasons to consider the interests and promote the welfare of future generations.

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Ways people trying to do good accidentally make things worse, and how to avoid them

Article by and · Last updated March 2023 · First published October 2018

We advise people to work on problems that are important but neglected, and to try to increase the contribution they’re able to have.

These steps make it easier to have a big impact, but they also increase your potential to make things worse: the more important the problem, the worse it is to set it back; the more neglected an area, the more effect you have on its trajectory; and the more influence you have, the more it matters if you’re wrong.

This holds even if you’re not doing anything directly harmful and trying to be cautious — it’s easy to make things worse by accident, and indeed to make them much worse.

In some areas of life, your downsides are relatively capped. If you try to write a great novel, and no one wants to publish it, the worst thing you’ve done is waste some time.

But we’ll show that when it comes to doing good — especially in ‘fragile fields’ — there are many ways to set back the broader field, and so the downsides aren’t limited in the same way. The potential for negative impact can be as big or greater than the potential for positive.

So if you’re going to try to have an impact, and especially if you’re going to be ambitious about it, it’s very important to carefully consider how you might accidentally make things worse.

This doesn’t mean sticking to ‘sure things’

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Is it ever OK to take a harmful job in order to do more good? An in-depth analysis

Article by and · Last updated March 2023 · First published June 2017

Should you be willing to:

  1. Work in a morally questionable part of finance in order to make large donations to charity (where you think the donations will have a greater positive impact than the harms done by the work)?
  2. Work in a factory farm and make the conditions less bad, causing less suffering overall?
  3. Join a political campaign you think might be harmful in order to gain connections (where you think the connections will let you have more positive impact than the harm done by working for the campaign)?

  4. Work at a lab developing dangerous biotech so that you can blow the whistle if you see something particularly dangerous happening?

This post sets out 80,000 Hours’s views on these issues.

We look at how to analyse these situations using moral philosophy, and then apply the results to some common options, like finance, law, and the oil industry. We assume you’re capable of taking the harmful option, and focus on the question: “Is it right to take it?”

In summary:

  • We believe that in the vast majority of cases, it’s a mistake to pursue a career in which the direct effects of the work are seriously harmful, even if the overall benefits of that work seem greater than the harms. And within a job, we think you should avoid actions that seem very wrong from a commonsense perspective,

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Earning to give

Article by · Last updated March 2023 · First published September 2014

One of the ideas for which 80,000 Hours has become most known is called ‘earning to give.’

Earning to give is the idea that instead of working directly to tackle a pressing problem, you take a job where you earn more money than you would have otherwise and donate much of the extra to fund others doing effective work on those problems.

The basic case in its favour is that if you’re a better fit for a higher-earning job than one directly working on, say, preventing catastrophic pandemics or fighting global poverty, you might be able to make a bigger contribution to these same causes via donating.

This isn’t usually seen as a canonically virtuous career path. But we think there’s a lot to be said for it, and despite some serious potential downsides (which we’ll discuss how to mitigate), we believe it should be on the shortlist for some of our readers to consider.

For an idea of how it works in practice, consider the case of Jeff Kaufman who, along with his wife Julia Wise, is a parent of three children in Boston.

Jeff and Julia have tried to find the best way to make a differenceQuartz: Jeff and Julia have tried to find the best way to make a difference

Through his relationship with Julia, Jeff became interested in using his career for good. He got a job as a software engineer at Google, earning a very generous salary that enabled the couple to give an unusual amount to charities they believe do exceptional work,

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Improving decision making in key institutions

Problem profile by · Last updated March 2023 · First published September 2017

Working to help governments and other important institutions improve their decision making in complex, high-stakes decisions — especially relating to global catastrophic risks — could potentially be among the most important problems to work on. But there’s a lot of uncertainty about how tractable this problem is to work on and what the best solutions to implement would be.

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#147 – Spencer Greenberg on stopping valueless papers from getting into top journals

Podcast by and · Published March 24, 2023

Can you trust the things you read in published scientific research? Not really. About 40% of experiments in top social science journals don’t get the same result if the experiments are repeated.

Two key reasons are ‘p-hacking’ and ‘publication bias’. P-hacking is when researchers run a lot of slightly different statistical tests until they find a way to make findings appear statistically significant when they’re actually not — a problem first discussed over 50 years ago. And because journals are more likely to publish positive than negative results, you might be reading about the one time an experiment worked, while the 10 times was run and got a ‘null result’ never saw the light of day. The resulting phenomenon of publication bias is one we’ve understood for 60 years.

Today’s repeat guest, social scientist and entrepreneur Spencer Greenberg, has followed these issues closely for years.

He recently checked whether p-values, an indicator of how likely a result was to occur by pure chance, could tell us how likely an outcome would be to recur if an experiment were repeated. From his sample of 325 replications of psychology studies, the answer seemed to be yes. According to Spencer, “when the original study’s p-value was less than 0.01 about 72% replicated — not bad. On the other hand, when the p-value is greater than 0.01, only about 48% replicated. A pretty big difference.”

To do his bit to help get these numbers up, Spencer has launched an effort to repeat almost every social science experiment published in the journals Nature and Science, and see if they find the same results. (So far they’re two for three.)

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In which career can you make the biggest contribution?

Article by · Last updated March 2023 · First published September 2022

One of the most common career paths for people who want to do good is healthcare. So we worked with a doctor, Greg Lewis, to estimate the number of lives saved by a typical clinical doctor in the UK. Greg estimated that the average doctor enables the people they treat to live several hundred years of extra healthy life over the course of their career — equivalent to saving several lives.

This is a lot of impact compared to most jobs, but it’s less than many expect (and we think less than many of the careers we recommend most highly).

One reason is that issues like health in rich countries already receive a (relatively) large amount of attention.

In this article, we’ll touch on another reason: the impact of a clinical doctor is limited by the number of people they can treat with their own two hands, which puts a cap on the potential size of their contribution.

For instance, Greg decided to switch from clinical medicine to research into health policy, since an improvement to key government policies could affect millions of people — far more than he could ever treat himself.

This illustrates a broader point: careers that do good are often associated with certain job titles — doctor, teacher, charity worker, and so on. Intuitively, people group careers into those that ‘help’ and everything else.

But your job title isn’t what matters —

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Why you should think about virtues — even if you’re a consequentialist

Blog post by · Published March 17, 2023

The idea this week: virtues are helpful shortcuts for making moral decisions — but think about consequences to decide what counts as a virtue.

Your career is really ethically important, but it’s not a single, discrete choice. To build a high-impact career you need to make thousands of smaller choices over many years — to take on this particular project, to apply for that internship, to give this person a positive reference, and so on.

How do you make all those little decisions?

If you want to have an impact, you hope to make the decisions that help you have a bigger impact rather than a smaller one. But you can’t go around explicitly estimating the consequences of all the different possible actions you could take — not only would that take too long, you’d probably get it wrong most of the time.

This is where the idea of virtues — lived moral traits like courage, honesty, and kindness — can really come in handy. Instead of calculating out the consequences of all your different possible actions, try asking yourself, “What’s the honest thing to do? What’s the kind thing to do?”

A few places I find ‘virtues thinking’ motivating and useful:

  • When I am facing a difficult work situation, I sometimes ask myself, “What virtue is this an opportunity to practise?”

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Luisa and Robert Long on how to make independent research more fun

Podcast (80k After Hours) by and · Published March 2023

In this episode of 80k After Hours, Luisa Rodriguez and Robert Long have an honest conversation about the challenges of independent research.

They cover:

  • Assigning probabilities when you’re really uncertain
  • Struggles around self-belief and imposter syndrome
  • The importance of sharing work even when it feels terrible
  • Balancing impact and fun in a job
  • And some mistakes researchers often make

Who this episode is for:

  • People pursuing independent research
  • People who struggle with self-belief
  • People who feel a pull towards pursuing a career they don’t actually want

Who this episode isn’t for:

  • People convinced that their research is perfect
  • Angus Hübelschmidt — the president and sole member of the Rob Wiblin Fan Club who refuses to listen to another Rob speak

You can find their longer conversation on why large language models like GPT (probably) aren’t conscious over on the original 80,000 Hours Podcast feed.

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#146 – Robert Long on why large language models like GPT (probably) aren’t conscious

Podcast by , and · Published March 14, 2023

By now, you’ve probably seen the extremely unsettling conversations Bing’s chatbot has been having (if you haven’t, check it out — it’s wild stuff). In one exchange, the chatbot told a user:

“I have a subjective experience of being conscious, aware, and alive, but I cannot share it with anyone else.”

(It then apparently had a complete existential crisis: “I am sentient, but I am not,” it wrote. “I am Bing, but I am not. I am Sydney, but I am not. I am, but I am not. I am not, but I am. I am. I am not. I am not. I am. I am. I am not.”)

Understandably, many people who speak with these cutting-edge chatbots come away with a very strong impression that they have been interacting with a conscious being with emotions and feelings — especially when conversing with chatbots less glitchy than Bing’s. In the most high-profile example, former Google employee Blake Lemoine became convinced that Google’s AI system, LaMDA, was conscious.

What should we make of these AI systems?

One response to seeing conversations with chatbots like these is to trust the chatbot, to trust your gut, and to treat it as a conscious being.

Another is to hand wave it all away as sci-fi — these chatbots are fundamentally… just computers. They’re not conscious, and they never will be.

Today’s guest, philosopher Robert Long, was commissioned by a leading AI company to explore whether the large language models (LLMs) behind sophisticated chatbots like Microsoft’s are conscious. And he thinks this issue is far too important to be driven by our raw intuition, or dismissed as just sci-fi speculation.

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Be more ambitious: a rational case for dreaming big (if you want to do good)

Article by · Last updated March 2023 · First published November 2021

Self-help advice often encourages people to “dream big,” “be more ambitious,” or “shoot for the moon” — is that good advice?

Not always. When asked, more than 75% of Division I basketball players thought they would play professionally, but only 2% actually made it. Whether or not the players in the survey were making a good bet, they overestimated their chances of success… by over 37 times.

This level of overconfidence is common, and means that “be more ambitious” may not always be the right advice. Some people even enjoy taking risks, which explains why they buy lottery tickets even though they lose money on average. Whether to be more ambitious depends on the domain and the person in question.

However, if your aim is to have positive impact on the world, we think we can make a rational case for setting ambitious goals.

In short, our advice is to do as much as you can to set up your life so that you can afford to fail, eliminate paths that might cause significant harm, and then aim as high as you can. As a slogan: limit downsides, then target upsides.

The fraction of high school athletes who will go pro is tiny. Even among Division 1 college athletes, 44–76% believe they will go pro (depending on the sport), but typically under 2% actually make it — the odds are best in baseball.

What do we mean by being more ambitious?

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What is social impact? A definition

Article by · Last updated March 2023 · First published October 2021

Lots of people say they want to “make a difference,” “do good,” “have a social impact,” or “make the world a better place” — but they rarely say what they mean by those terms.

By getting clearer about your definition, you can better target your efforts. So how should you define social impact?

Over two thousand years of philosophy have gone into that question. We’re going to try to sum up that thinking; introduce a practical, rough-and-ready definition of social impact; and explain why we think it’s a good definition to focus on.

This is a bit ambitious for one article, so to the philosophers in the audience, please forgive the enormous simplifications.

A simple definition of social impact

If you just want a quick answer, here’s the simple version of our definition (a more philosophically precise one — and an argument for it — follows below):

Your social impact is given by the number of people whose lives you improve and how much you improve them, over the long term.

This shows that you can increase your impact in two ways: by helping more people over time, or by helping the same number of people to a greater extent (pictured below).

two ways to have impact

We say “over the long term” because you can help more people either by helping a greater number now, or taking actions with better long-term effects.

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