New releases

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

Blog post by · Published November 25, 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 16, 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 8, 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 30, 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 28, 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 19, 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 30, 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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Kuhan Jeyapragasan on effective altruism university groups

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

In this episode of 80k After Hours, Rob Wiblin interviews Kuhan Jeyapragasan about effective altruism university groups.

From 2015 to 2020, Kuhan did an undergrad and then a master’s in maths and computer science at Stanford — and did a lot to organise and improve the EA group on campus.

Rob and Kuhan cover:

  • The challenges of making a group appealing and accepting of everyone
  • The concrete things Kuhan did to grow the successful Stanford EA group
  • Whether local groups are turning off some people who should be interested in effective altruism, and what they could do differently
  • Lessons Kuhan learned from Stanford EA
  • The Stanford Existential Risks Initiative (SERI)

Who this episode is for:

  • People already involved in EA university groups
  • People interested in getting involved in EA university groups

Who this episode isn’t for:

  • People who’ve never heard of ‘effective altruism groups’
  • People who’ve never heard of ‘effective altruism’
  • People who’ve never heard of ‘university’

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‘S-risks’

Problem profile by · Published September 2022

People working on suffering risks or s-risks attempt to reduce the risk of something causing vastly more suffering than has existed on Earth so far. We think research to work out how to mitigate these risks might be particularly important. You may also be able to do important work by building this field, which is currently highly neglected — with fewer than 50 people working on this worldwide.

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#137 – Andreas Mogensen on whether effective altruism is just for consequentialists

Podcast by and · Published September 8, 2022

Effective altruism, in a slogan, aims to ‘do the most good.’ Utilitarianism, in a slogan, says we should act to ‘produce the greatest good for the greatest number.’ It’s clear enough why utilitarians should be interested in the project of effective altruism. But what about the many people who reject utilitarianism?

Today’s guest, Andreas Mogensen — senior research fellow at Oxford University’s Global Priorities Institute — does reject utilitarianism, but as he explains, this does little to dampen his enthusiasm for effective altruism.

Andreas leans towards ‘deontological’ or rule-based theories of ethics, rather than ‘consequentialist’ theories like utilitarianism which look exclusively at the effects of a person’s actions.

Like most people involved in effective altruism, he parts ways with utilitarianism in rejecting its maximal level of demandingness, the idea that the ends justify the means, and the notion that the only moral reason for action is to benefit everyone in the world considered impartially.

However, Andreas believes any plausible theory of morality must give some weight to the harms and benefits we provide to other people. If we can improve a stranger’s wellbeing enormously at negligible cost to ourselves and without violating any other moral prohibition, that must be at minimum a praiseworthy thing to do.

In a world as full of preventable suffering as our own, this simple ‘principle of beneficence’ is probably the only premise one needs to grant for the effective altruist project of identifying the most impactful ways to help others to be of great moral interest and importance.

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Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla on the Shrimp Welfare Project

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

In this episode of 80k After Hours, Rob Wiblin interviews Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla about the Shrimp Welfare Project, which he cofounded in 2021. It’s the first project in the world focused on shrimp welfare specifically and now has six full-time staff.

They cover:

  • The evidence for shrimp sentience
  • How farmers and the public feel about shrimp
  • The scale of the problem
  • What shrimp farming looks like
  • The killing process, and other welfare issues
  • Shrimp Welfare Project’s strategy
  • History of shrimp welfare work
  • What it’s like working in India and Vietnam
  • How to help

Who this episode is for:

  • People who care about animal welfare
  • People interested in new and unusual problems
  • People open to shrimp sentience

Who this episode isn’t for:

  • People who think shrimp couldn’t possibly be sentient
  • People who got called ‘shrimp’ a lot in high school and get anxious when they hear the word over and over again

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