New releases

My thoughts on parenting and having an impactful career

Blog post by · Published January 20th, 2023

When my husband and I decided to have children, we didn’t put much thought into the broader social impact of the decision. We got together at secondary school and had been discussing the fact we were going to have kids since we were 18, long before we found effective altruism.

We made the actual decision to have a child much later, but how it would affect our careers or abilities to help others still wasn’t a large factor in the decision. As with most people though, the decision has, in fact, had significant effects on our careers.

Raising my son, Leo — now three years old — is one of the great joys of my life, and I’m so happy that my husband and I decided to have him. But having kids can be challenging for anyone, and there may be unique challenges for people who aim to have a positive impact with their careers.

I’m currently the director of the one-on-one programme at 80,000 Hours and a fund manager for the Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund. So I wanted to share my experience with parenting and working for organisations whose mission I care about deeply. Here are my aims:

  • Give readers an example of a working parent who also thinks a lot about 80,000 Hours’ advice.
  • Discuss some of the ways having kids is likely to affect the impact you have in your career, for people who want to consider that when deciding whether to have kids.

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The quick, medium, and long versions of career planning

Blog post by · Published January 19th, 2023

I think it’s a good idea to consider how you’re feeling about your career each year. At least, intellectually I think it’s good. In practice, I find it really hard. Compared to others I know, I’m not as naturally drawn to personal reflection and goal-setting. I intended to reflect on my own career over the festive period… and ended up bailing because I found it too stressful.

But it is important! Without making time to check in on the big career questions, you might stay too long at a job, miss opportunities for doing more good, or fail to push yourself to grow — I’ve certainly been there before.

So I suggest doing a career review this January — but committing to a realistic volume of work. You can start small. You can also try getting help — ask a friend to act as an “accountability buddy” or apply to talk one-on-one with someone from 80,000 Hours.

I’m committing to do it too this month — that’s one of the reasons I’m writing this newsletter!

Here are some of our tools and resources that you could use at whatever level of detail works for you:

The quick version (30–60 minutes)

Try our annual career review tool

These guided questions help you reflect on the last year, consider whether to change your job, and make a plan for this year.

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2022 in review

Blog post by · Published January 5th, 2023

As 2023 gets underway, we’re taking a look back at the content we produced in 2022 and highlighting some particular standouts.

We published a lot of new articles and podcasts to help our readers have impactful careers — below are some of our favourite pieces from the year.

Standout posts and articles

My experience with imposter syndrome — and how to (partly) overcome it
80,000 Hours team member Luisa Rodriguez wrote this powerful and insightful piece on a challenge many people face when trying to have an impactful career. In it, she describes clearly what it’s like to have imposter syndrome from her own first-hand experience and provides a lot of helpful advice and guidance on how to manage it. I think a lot of people will benefit from reading it.

Know what you’re optimising for
Alex Lawsen, one of 80,000 Hours’ advisors, has noticed that people often fall into the trap of trying to optimise the wrong things — like students who spend so much time worrying that their homework is neatly written, rather than actually understanding and learning from the material. The piece offers practical advice for overcoming this issue.

Anonymous advice: If you want to reduce AI risk, should you take roles that advance AI capabilities?
This is a really challenging question that we are still struggling with, and this post was one way we have grappled with it.

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#143 – Jeffrey Lewis on the most common misconceptions about nuclear weapons

Podcast by · Published December 29th, 2022

America aims to avoid nuclear war by relying on the principle of ‘mutually assured destruction,’ right? Wrong. Or at least… not officially.

As today’s guest — Jeffrey Lewis, founder of Arms Control Wonk and professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies — explains, in its official ‘OPLANs’ (military operation plans), the US is committed to ‘dominating’ in a nuclear war with Russia. How would they do that? “That is redacted.”

We invited Jeffrey to come on the show to lay out what we and our listeners are most likely to be misunderstanding about nuclear weapons, the nuclear posture of major powers, and his field as a whole, and he did not disappoint.

As Jeffrey tells it, ‘mutually assured destruction’ was a slur used to criticise those who wanted to limit the 1960s arms buildup, and was never accepted as a matter of policy in any US administration. But isn’t it still the de facto reality? Yes and no.

Jeffrey is a specialist on the nuts and bolts of bureaucratic and military decision-making in real-life situations. He suspects that at the start of their term presidents get a briefing about the US’ plan to prevail in a nuclear war and conclude that “it’s freaking madness.” They say to themselves that whatever these silly plans may say, they know a nuclear war cannot be won, so they just won’t use the weapons.

But Jeffrey thinks that’s a big mistake. Yes, in a calm moment presidents can resist pressure from advisors and generals. But that idea of ‘winning’ a nuclear war is in all the plans. Staff have been hired because they believe in those plans. It’s what the generals and admirals have all prepared for.

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How we’re thinking about where to donate to charity this year

Blog post by · Published December 23rd, 2022

Charitable giving can be hugely impactful — if you’re careful about where you donate.

One of the simplest ways to have an impact with your career is to donate a portion of your income.

But if you’re going to do that, where you donate can make a huge difference. Within a cause area, the best charities could be 10 times better than typical charities, and hundreds of times better than poorly performing charities.

650 million people — 8% of the world’s population — live in extreme poverty. That’s surviving on less than $2.15 a day (in 2017 prices).

Meanwhile, if you earn over $25,000 a year in the US, you’re probably in the richest ~10% of the world’s population.

You can send money directly to the world’s poorest people with minimal overhead via GiveDirectly.

And that’s just a start. GiveWell estimates that through donating to its top charities (focused on extremely cost-effective, evidence-backed public health interventions), your donation will go 5–10 times further than a direct cash transfer.

And we’d guess that if you target donations towards effective organisations tackling the world’s most pressing problems, you can do even more good.

So, this giving season, we’ve updated our guide to picking where to donate: How to choose where to donate.

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How to choose where to donate

Article by · Last updated December 2022 · First published November 2016

If you want to make a difference, and are happy to give toward wherever you think you can do the most good (regardless of cause area), how do you choose where to donate? This is a brief summary of the most useful tips we have.

How to choose an effective charity
First, plan your research

One big decision to make is whether to do your own research or delegate your decision to someone else. Below are some considerations.

If you trust someone else’s recommendations, you can defer to them.

If you know someone who shares your values and has already put a lot of thought into where to give, then consider simply going with their recommendations.

But it can be better to do your own research if any of these apply to you:

  • You think you might find something higher impact according to your values than even your best advisor would find (because you have unique values, good research skills, or access to special information — e.g. knowing about a small project a large donor might not have looked into).
  • You think you might be able to productively contribute to the broader debate about which charities should be funded (producing research is a public good for other donors).
  • You want to improve your knowledge of effective altruism and charity evaluation.

Consider entering a donor lottery.

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#142 – John McWhorter on key lessons from linguistics, the virtue of creoles, and language extinction

Podcast by and · Published December 20th, 2022

John McWhorter is a linguistics professor at Columbia University specialising in research on creole languages.

He’s also a content-producing machine, never afraid to give his frank opinion on anything and everything. On top of his academic work John has also written 22 books, produced five online university courses, hosts one and a half podcasts, and now writes a regular New York Times op-ed column.

Our show is mostly about the world’s most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them. But what’s the point of hosting a podcast if you can’t occasionally just talk about something fascinating with someone whose work you appreciate?

So today, just before the holidays, we’re sharing this interview with John about language and linguistics — including what we think are some of the most important things everyone ought to know about those topics. We ask him:

  • Can you communicate faster in some languages than others, or is there some constraint that prevents that?
  • Does learning a second or third language make you smarter, or not?
  • Can a language decay and get worse at communicating what people want to get across?
  • If children aren’t taught any language at all, how many generations does it take them to invent a fully fledged one of their own?
  • Did Shakespeare write in a foreign language, and if so, should we translate his plays?
  • How much does the language we speak really shape the way we think?
  • Are creoles the best languages in the world — languages that ideally we would all speak?
  • What would be the optimal number of languages globally?
  • Does trying to save dying languages do their speakers a favour, or is it more of an imposition?
  • Should we bother to teach foreign languages in UK and US schools?
  • Is it possible to save the important cultural aspects embedded in a dying language without saving the language itself?
  • Will AI models speak a language of their own in the future, one that humans can’t understand, but which better serves the tradeoffs AI models need to make?

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#141 – Richard Ngo on large language models, OpenAI, and striving to make the future go well

Podcast by and · Published December 13th, 2022

Large language models like GPT-3, and now ChatGPT, are neural networks trained on a large fraction of all text available on the internet to do one thing: predict the next word in a passage. This simple technique has led to something extraordinary — black boxes able to write TV scripts, explain jokes, produce satirical poetry, answer common factual questions, argue sensibly for political positions, and more. Every month their capabilities grow.

But do they really ‘understand’ what they’re saying, or do they just give the illusion of understanding?

Today’s guest, Richard Ngo, thinks that in the most important sense they understand many things. Richard is a researcher at OpenAI — the company that created ChatGPT — who works to foresee where AI advances are going and develop strategies that will keep these models from ‘acting out’ as they become more powerful, are deployed and ultimately given power in society.

One way to think about ‘understanding’ is as a subjective experience. Whether it feels like something to be a large language model is an important question, but one we currently have no way to answer.

However, as Richard explains, another way to think about ‘understanding’ is as a functional matter. If you really understand an idea, you’re able to use it to reason and draw inferences in new situations. And that kind of understanding is observable and testable.

One experiment conducted by AI researchers suggests that language models have some of this kind of understanding.

If you ask any of these models what city the Eiffel Tower is in and what else you might do on a holiday to visit the Eiffel Tower, they will say Paris and suggest visiting the Palace of Versailles and eating a croissant.

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Marcus Davis on founding and leading Rethink Priorities

Podcast (80k After Hours) by and · Published December 2022

In this episode of 80k After Hours, Rob Wiblin interviews Marcus Davis about Rethink Priorities.

Marcus is co-CEO there, in charge of their animal welfare and global health and development research.

They cover:

  • Interventions to help wild animals
  • Aquatic noise
  • Rethink Priorities strategy
  • Mistakes that RP has made since it was founded
  • Careers in global priorities research
  • And the most surprising thing Marcus has learned at RP

Who this episode is for:

  • People who want to learn about Rethink Priorities
  • People interested in a career in global priorities research
  • People open to novel ways to help wild animals

Who this episode isn’t for:

  • People who think global priorities research sounds boring
  • People who want to host very loud concerts under the sea

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Four values at the heart of effective altruism

Blog post by · Published December 9th, 2022

What actually is effective altruism?

Effective altruism isn’t about any particular way of doing good, like AI alignment or distributing malaria nets. Rather, it’s a way of thinking.

Last summer, I wrote a new introduction to effective altruism for effectivealtruism.org. In it, I tried to sum up the effective altruism way of thinking in terms of four values. (I wrote this newsletter before FTX collapsed, but maybe that makes it even more important to reiterate the core values of EA.)

  1. Prioritisation. Resources are limited, so we have to make hard choices between potential interventions. While helping 10 people might feel as satisfying as helping 100, those extra 90 people really matter. And it turns out that some ways of helping achieve dramatically more than others, so it’s vital to really try to roughly compare ways we might help in terms of scale and effectiveness.
  2. Impartial altruism. It’s reasonable and good to have special concern for one’s own family, friends, life, etc. But when trying to do good in general, we should give everyone’s interests equal weight — no matter where or even when they live. People matter equally. And we should also give due weight to the interests of nonhumans.
  3. Open truth-seeking. Rather than starting with a commitment to a certain cause, consider many different ways to help and try to find the best ones you can.

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Why being open to changing our minds is especially important right now

Blog post by · Published November 25th, 2022

If something surprises you, your view of the world should change in some way.

We’ve argued that you should approach your career like a scientist doing experiments: be willing to test out many different paths and gather evidence about where you can have the most impact.

More generally, this approach of open truth-seeking — being constantly, curiously on the lookout for new evidence and arguments, and always being ready to change our minds — is a virtue we think is absolutely crucial to doing good.

One of our first-ever podcast episodes was an interview with Julia Galef, author of The Scout Mindset (before she wrote the book!).

Julia argues — in our view, correctly — that it’s easy to end up viewing the world like a soldier, when really you should be more like a scout.

Soldiers have set views and beliefs, and defend those beliefs. When we are acting like soldiers, we display motivated reasoning: for example, confirmation bias, where we seek out information that supports our existing beliefs and misinterpret information that is evidence against our position so that it seems like it’s not.

Scouts, on the other hand, need to form correct beliefs. So they have to change their minds as they view more of the landscape.

Acting like a scout isn’t always easy:

  • There’s lots of psychological evidence suggesting that we all have cognitive biases that cloud our thinking.

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Regarding the collapse of FTX

Blog post · Published November 16th, 2022

The collapse of FTX is likely to cause a tremendous amount of harm – to customers, employees, and many others who have relied on FTX. We are deeply concerned about those affected and, along with our community, are grappling with how to respond.

Though we do not know for sure whether anything illegal happened, we unequivocally condemn any immoral or illegal actions that may have taken place.

Prior to this, we had celebrated Sam Bankman-Fried’s apparent success, had held him up as a positive example of someone pursuing a high-impact career, and had written about how we encouraged him to use a strategy of earning to give (for example here). We feel shaken by recent events, and are not sure exactly what to say or think.

In the meantime, we will start by removing instances on our site where Sam was highlighted as a positive example of someone pursuing a high-impact career, since, to say the least, we no longer endorse that. We are leaving up discussions of Sam in places that seem important for transparency, for example this blog post on the growth of effective altruism in 2021.

In the coming weeks and months we will be thinking hard about what we should do going forward and ways in which we should have acted differently.

If you are out there trying the best you can to use your career to help solve the world’s most pressing problems with honesty and integrity,

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#140 – Bear Braumoeller on the case that war isn’t in decline

Podcast by and · Published November 8th, 2022

Is war in long-term decline? Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature brought this previously obscure academic question to the centre of public debate, and pointed to rates of death in war to argue energetically that war is on the way out.

But that idea divides war scholars and statisticians, and so Better Angels has prompted a spirited debate, with datasets and statistical analyses exchanged back and forth year after year. The lack of consensus has left a somewhat bewildered public (including host Rob Wiblin) unsure quite what to believe.

Today’s guest, professor in political science Bear Braumoeller, is one of the scholars who believes we lack convincing evidence that warlikeness is in long-term decline. He collected the analysis that led him to that conclusion in his 2019 book, Only the Dead: The Persistence of War in the Modern Age.

The question is of great practical importance. The US and PRC are entering a period of renewed great power competition, with Taiwan as a potential trigger for war, and Russia is once more invading and attempting to annex the territory of its neighbours.

If war has been going out of fashion since the start of the Enlightenment, we might console ourselves that however nerve-wracking these present circumstances may feel, modern culture will throw up powerful barriers to another world war. But if we’re as war-prone as we ever have been, one need only inspect the record of the 20th century to recoil in horror at what might await us in the 21st.

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The importance of considering speculative ideas

Blog post by · Published October 30th, 2022

Let’s admit it: some of the things we think about at 80,000 Hours are considered weird by a lot of other people.

Our list of the most pressing problems has some pretty widely accepted concerns, to be sure: we care about mitigating climate change, preventing nuclear war, and ensuring good governance.

But one of our highest priorities is preventing an AI-related catastrophe, which sounds like science fiction to a lot of people. And, though we know less about them, we’re also interested in speculative issues — such as atomically precise manufacturing, artificial sentience, and wild animal suffering. These aren’t typically the kind of issues activists distribute flyers about.

Should it make us nervous that some of our ideas are out of the mainstream? It’s probably a good idea in these cases to take a step back, reexamine our premises, and consult others we trust about our conclusions. But we shouldn’t be too shocked if some of our beliefs end up at odds with common sense — indeed, I think everyone has good reason to be open to believing weird ideas.

One of the best reasons for this view relates to another of 80,000 Hours’ top priorities: preventing catastrophic pandemics. I’d guess few people think it’s strange to be concerned about pandemics now,

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#139 – Alan Hájek on puzzles and paradoxes in probability and expected value

Podcast by and · Published October 28th, 2022

A casino offers you a game. A coin will be tossed. If it comes up heads on the first flip you win $2. If it comes up on the second flip you win $4. If it comes up on the third you win $8, the fourth you win $16, and so on. How much should you be willing to pay to play?

The standard way of analysing gambling problems, ‘expected value‘ — in which you multiply probabilities by the value of each outcome and then sum them up — says your expected earnings are infinite. You have a 50% chance of winning $2, for ‘0.5 * $2 = $1’ in expected earnings. A 25% chance of winning $4, for ‘0.25 * $4 = $1’ in expected earnings, and on and on. A never-ending series of $1s added together comes to infinity. And that’s despite the fact that you know with certainty you can only ever win a finite amount!

Today’s guest — philosopher Alan Hájek of the Australian National University — thinks of much of philosophy as “the demolition of common sense followed by damage control” and is an expert on paradoxes related to probability and decision-making rules like “maximise expected value.”

The problem described above, known as the St. Petersburg paradox, has been a staple of the field since the 18th century, with many proposed solutions. In the interview, Alan explains how very natural attempts to resolve the paradox — such as factoring in the low likelihood that the casino can pay out very large sums, or the fact that money becomes less and less valuable the more of it you already have — fail to work as hoped.

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Open position: Recruiter

Blog post by · Published October 19th, 2022

The role

You’ll be managed by Sashika Coxhead, our Head of Recruiting, and will have the opportunity to work closely with hiring managers from other teams.

Initial responsibilities will include:

  • Project management of active recruiting rounds. For example, overseeing the candidate pipeline and logistics of hiring rounds, making decisions on initial applications, and managing candidate communications.
  • Sourcing potential candidates. This might include generating leads for specific roles, publicising new positions, reaching out to potential candidates, and answering any questions they have about working at 80,000 Hours.
  • Taking on special projects to improve our recruiting systems. For example, you might help to build an excellent applicant tracking system, test ways to improve our ability to generate leads, or introduce strategies to make our hiring rounds more efficient.

Depending on your skills and interests, you might also:

  • Take ownership of a particular area of our recruiting process, e.g. proactive outreach to potential candidates, our applicant tracking system, or metrics for the recruiting team’s success.
  • Conduct screening interviews where needed, to assess applicants’ fit for particular roles at 80,000 Hours.

After some time in the role, we’d hope for you to sit on internal hiring committees. This involves forming an inside view on candidates’ performance; discussing uncertainties with the hiring manager and committee; and,

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Anonymous advice: If you want to reduce AI risk, should you take roles that advance AI capabilities?

Article by · Published October 2022

We’ve argued that preventing an AI-related catastrophe may be the world’s most pressing problem, and that while progress in AI over the next few decades could have enormous benefits, it could also pose severe, possibly existential risks. As a result, we think that working on some technical AI research — research related to AI safety — may be a particularly high-impact career path.

But there are many ways of approaching this path that involve researching or otherwise advancing AI capabilities — meaning making AI systems better at some specific skills — rather than only doing things that are purely in the domain of safety. In short, this is because:

  • Capabilities work and some forms of safety work are intertwined.
  • Many available ways of learning enough about AI to contribute to safety are via capabilities-enhancing roles.

So if you want to help prevent an AI-related catastrophe, should you be open to roles that also advance AI capabilities, or steer clear of them?

We think this is a hard question! Capabilities-enhancing roles could be beneficial or harmful. For any role, there are a range of considerations — and reasonable people disagree on whether, and in what cases, the risks outweigh the benefits.

So we asked the 22 people we thought would be most informed about this issue — and who we knew had a range of views —

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#138 – Sharon Hewitt Rawlette on why pleasure and pain are the only things that intrinsically matter

Podcast by and · Published September 30th, 2022

What in the world is intrinsically good — good in itself even if it has no other effects? Over the millennia, people have offered many answers: joy, justice, equality, accomplishment, loving god, wisdom, and plenty more.

The question is a classic that makes for great dorm-room philosophy discussion. But it’s hardly just of academic interest. The issue of what (if anything) is intrinsically valuable bears on every action we take, whether we’re looking to improve our own lives, or to help others. The wrong answer might lead us to the wrong project and render our efforts to improve the world entirely ineffective.

Today’s guest, Sharon Hewitt Rawlette — philosopher and author of The Feeling of Value: Moral Realism Grounded in Phenomenal Consciousness — wants to resuscitate an answer to this question that is as old as philosophy itself.

That idea, in a nutshell, is that there is only one thing of true intrinsic value: positive feelings and sensations. And similarly, there is only one thing that is intrinsically of negative value: suffering, pain, and other unpleasant sensations.

Lots of other things are valuable too: friendship, fairness, loyalty, integrity, wealth, patience, houses, and so on. But they are only instrumentally valuable — that is to say, they’re valuable as means to the end of ensuring that all conscious beings experience more pleasure and other positive sensations, and less suffering.

As Sharon notes, from Athens in 400 BC to Britain in 1850, the idea that only subjective experiences can be good or bad in themselves — a position known as ‘philosophical hedonism’ — has been one of the most enduringly popular ideas in ethics.

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