New releases

#127 – Sam Bankman-Fried on taking a high-risk approach to crypto and doing good

Podcast by and · Published April 14th, 2022

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.

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#126 – Bryan Caplan on whether lazy parenting is OK, what really helps workers, and betting on beliefs

Podcast by and · Published April 5th, 2022

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.

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#125 – Joan Rohlfing on how to avoid catastrophic nuclear blunders

Podcast by and · Published March 29th, 2022

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.

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#124 – Karen Levy on fads and misaligned incentives in global development, and scaling deworming to reach hundreds of millions

Podcast by and · Published March 21st, 2022

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.

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#123 – Samuel Charap on why Putin invaded Ukraine, the risk of escalation, and how to prevent disaster

Podcast by and · Published March 14th, 2022

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.

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Open position: Operations specialist

Blog post by and · Published March 11th, 2022

80,000 Hours

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.

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Michelle and Habiba on what they’d tell their younger selves, and the impact of the 1-1 team

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

In this episode of 80k After Hours, Rob continues to interview his 80,000 Hours colleagues Michelle Hutchinson and Habiba Islam about the 1-1 team.

This is the second of a two-part interview. You can find the first part on the original 80,000 Hours Podcast feed.

In this part, they cover:

  • Whether just encouraging someone young to aspire to more than they currently are is one of the most impactful ways to spend half an hour
  • How much impact the one-on-one team has, the biggest challenges they face as a group, and different paths they could have gone down
  • Whether giving general advice is a doomed enterprise
  • And more

Who this episode is for:

  • Young people interested in 80,000 Hours
  • 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

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#122 – Michelle Hutchinson & Habiba Islam on balancing competing priorities and other themes from our 1-on-1 careers advising

Podcast by , , and · Published March 9th, 2022

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.

In this conversation, they cover many topics that recur in their advising calls, and what they’ve learned from watching advisees’ careers play out:

  • What they say when advisees want to help solve overpopulation
  • How to balance doing good against other priorities that people have for their lives
  • Why it’s challenging to motivate yourself to focus on the long-term future of humanity, and how Michelle and Habiba do so nonetheless
  • How they use our latest guide to planning your career
  • 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.

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Expression of interest: writer

Blog post by · Published March 9th, 2022

Why 80,000 Hours?

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:

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23 career choice heuristics

Blog post · Published March 7th, 2022

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
  • Maximize learning/skills,

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Operations management

Article by and · Last updated March 2022 · First published March 2018

This career review is based largely on our 2017 survey of talent needs and input from 12 people who have worked in these roles (often in leadership positions), including:

  • Tara Mac Aulay, Caitlin Elizondo, and Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg from the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA)
  • Malo Bourgon and Alex Vermeer from the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI)
  • Amy Willey Labenz, who has worked at both MIRI and CEA
  • Morgan Davis from Coefficient Giving
  • Tanya Singh, Carrick Flynn, and Andrew Snyder-Beattie from the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) at Oxford
  • Kyle Scott, who has worked at both FHI and the Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative (BERI)
  • Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh, who has worked at both FHI and the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) at Cambridge

(However, the views presented here do not necessarily reflect those of everyone listed.)

We also drew on several articles and talks, including:

Because it was written a little while ago, some of the information in this career review may be a bit out of date. However, our impression is that the broad points still stand — indeed,

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Alex Lawsen on his advice for students

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

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

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Rob and Keiran on the philosophy of The 80,000 Hours Podcast

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

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

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Introducing 80k After Hours

Blog post by · Published February 28th, 2022

As The 80,000 Hours Podcast has developed over the last few years, we’ve found ourselves experimenting more with different types of content.

Things like audio versions of some of our best articles, or less formal chats between team members, or novel topics (like our episode on having a successful career with depression, anxiety, and imposter syndrome).

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!)

That’s why we’ve created 80k After Hours.

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,

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Factory farming

Problem profile by · Published July 2024

History is littered with moral mistakes — things that once were common, but we now consider clearly morally wrong, for example: human sacrifice, gladiatorial combat, public executions, witch hunts, and slavery.

In my opinion, there’s one clear candidate for the biggest moral mistake that humanity is currently making: factory farming.

The rough argument is:

  • There are trillions of farmed animals, making the scale of the potential problem so large that it’s hard to intuitively grasp.
  • The vast majority (we estimate 97.5%1) of farmed animals are in factory farms. The conditions in these farms are far worse than most people realise.
  • Even if nonhuman animals don’t morally matter as much as humans, there’s good evidence that they are conscious and that they feel pain — and, as a result, the poor conditions in factory farms are likely causing animals to experience severe suffering.

What’s more, we think that this problem is highly neglected and that there are clear ways to make progress — which makes factory farming a highly pressing problem overall.

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#121 – Matthew Yglesias on avoiding the pundit’s fallacy and how much military intervention can be used for good

Podcast by and · Published February 16th, 2022

If you read polls saying 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.

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Space governance

Problem profile by · 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.

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Expression of interest: popular writing consultant

Blog post by · Published February 7th, 2022

Why 80,000 Hours?

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 turn all those resources into long-term impact? This is the problem 80,000 Hours is trying to solve.

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 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.

The role

We’re looking for a contractor to give our research and writing team regular advice and feedback on their blog posts, articles, and newsletters — helping them produce pieces that are as compelling and engaging as possible. This would mean giving advice about the structure and content of new pieces, and editing drafts to make them punchier and more grabbing.

Some examples of the types of pieces you’d help work on:

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#120 – Audrey Tang on what we can learn from Taiwan’s experiments with how to do democracy

Podcast by and · Published February 2nd, 2022

In 2014 Taiwan was rocked by mass protests against a proposed trade agreement with China that was about to be agreed to without the usual Parliamentary hearings. Students invaded and took over the Parliament. But rather than chant slogans, instead they livestreamed their own parliamentary debate over the trade deal, allowing volunteers to speak both in favour and against.

Instead of polarising the country more, this so-called Sunflower Student Movement ultimately led to a bipartisan consensus that Taiwan should open up its government. That process has gradually made it one of the most communicative and interactive administrations anywhere in the world.

Today’s guest — programming prodigy Audrey Tang — initially joined the student protests to help get their streaming infrastructure online. After the students got the official hearings they wanted and went home, she was invited to consult for the government. And when the government later changed hands, she was invited to work in the ministry herself.

During six years as the country’s ‘Digital Minister’ she has been helping Taiwan increase the flow of information between institutions and civil society and launched original experiments trying to make democracy itself work better.

That includes developing new tools to identify points of consensus between groups that mostly disagree, building social media platforms optimised for discussing policy issues, helping volunteers fight disinformation by making their own memes, and allowing the public to build their own alternatives to government websites whenever they don’t like how they currently work.

As part of her ministerial role, Audrey also sets aside time each week to help online volunteers working on government-related tech projects get the help they need. How does she decide who to help? She doesn’t — that decision is made by members of an online community who upvote the projects they think are best.

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