New releases

Open position: Head of Job Board

Blog post by and · Published January 27th, 2022

80,000 Hours is hiring a Head of Job Board to lead the job board. They will be responsible for setting and executing strategy to grow the job board’s impact, as well as managing and hiring the job board team.

More than 180,000 users visited the job board in 2021. Over the next few years, we hope to grow the job board to the point where millions of people per year use it to find out about impactful jobs.

This role is based in London, UK. The salary will vary based on your skills and experience, but the starting salary for someone with five years of relevant experience would be approximately £72,000 per year.

To apply for this role, please complete this application form by 11pm GMT on Sunday, 27 February 2022.

We are offering a £1000 referral bonus to anyone outside the Centre for Effective Altruism who suggests a successful candidate we didn’t otherwise have on our radar. Please email [email protected] with your referrals.

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Our advisors want to talk with more people than ever before

Blog post by and · Published January 25th, 2022

Last year, 80,000 Hours’ advisors spoke to more people than ever before — and we are hoping to help even more people this year! If 80,000 Hours’ content resonates with you, and you want to get help applying the ideas to your career, then apply to speak with our team.

What we did in 2021

2021 was a landmark year for the 80,000 Hours one-on-one team:

  • We had over 800 advising calls. That’s the most calls per year in our 10-year history!
  • We hired two new advisors, Alex Lawsen and Matt Reardon, to join Habiba Islam on the team. That means we now have more people focused on helping people one-on-one than ever before.
  • We spoke to about 50% of people who applied — and when we didn’t speak to people ourselves, we often connected them with someone else, or sent them resources to help with their career planning.

We plan to continue to expand our service and help more people to find high-impact careers in 2022. So if it sounds like we can help you, apply now!

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The twelve 80,000 Hours 2021 releases that affected our staff most

Blog post by · Published January 19th, 2022

In 2021, we released over 20 new articles and blog posts, plus over 30 new podcast episodes.

It was a lot to keep up with! So I asked my colleagues at 80,000 Hours to recommend some of their favourites from last year.

Below are their top picks.

Podcast episode #100 — Having a successful career with depression, anxiety, and imposter syndrome

Lots of the team found Keiran Harris’s interview with our chief of staff, Howie Lempel, particularly powerful (and a few of us, myself included, have struggled with many of the issues Howie discusses) — so much so that the majority of my colleagues thought of this release first when I asked them to recommend their favourite.

Alex Lawsen, one of our advisors, describes the episode’s impact on him:

“I had to listen to Howie’s podcast episode over the course of a few days because of how intense its effect on me was; although I’ve never had an episode as difficult as the one he described, the thought patterns felt very familiar. The advice he gives is just about the best I’ve ever heard on mental health: things like noticing when something has become aversive and then making it a top priority, pre-writing an email in case of something like a mental health crisis to minimise the negative repercussions, or considering whether you should see a therapist or seek a diagnosis —

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Open position: Advisor

Blog post by and · Published January 17th, 2022

We’re looking for new colleagues to join our team of advisors.

  • Our advisors talk one-on-one to talented and altruistic applicants in order to help them find the highest impact career they can.
  • We’ve found that experience with coaching is not necessary – everything from management consulting to global priorities research has helped someone be a good fit.
  • London-based role with starting salary around £65,000.

80,000 Hours’ mission

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, 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 1on1 team

The 1on1 team at 80,000 Hours takes people from “interested in the ideas and want to help” to “actually working to solve pressing world problems.” For example, Sophie Rose applied for advising in 2019.

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Insider insights from people reviewing their own careers

Blog post by · Published January 17th, 2022

The people who know the most about a career path are usually the people following that path themselves.

Luckily, some members of the effective altruism community have written about their jobs, including insider tips on how to get into similar positions, and how to have an impact once you’re there.

Here are a few we think are especially exciting.

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#119 – Andrew Yang on our very long-term future, and other topics most politicians won’t touch

Podcast by and · Published December 20th, 2021

Andrew Yang — past presidential candidate, founder of the Forward Party, and leader of the ‘Yang Gang’ — is kind of a big deal, but is particularly popular among listeners to The 80,000 Hours Podcast.

Maybe that’s because he’s willing to embrace topics most politicians stay away from, like universal basic income, term limits for members of Congress, or what might happen when AI replaces whole industries.

But even those topics are pretty vanilla compared to our usual fare on The 80,000 Hours Podcast. So we thought it’d be fun to throw Andrew some stranger or more niche questions we hadn’t heard him comment on before, including:

  1. What would your ideal utopia in 500 years look like?
  2. Do we need more public optimism today?
  3. Is positively influencing the long-term future a key moral priority of our time?
  4. Should we invest far more to prevent low-probability risks?
  5. Should we think of future generations as an interest group that’s disenfranchised by their inability to vote?
  6. The folks who worry that advanced AI is going to go off the rails and destroy us all… are they crazy, or a valuable insurance policy?
  7. Will people struggle to live fulfilling lives once AI systems remove the economic need to ‘work’?
  8. Andrew is a huge proponent of ranked-choice voting. But what about ‘approval voting’ — where basically you just get to say “yea” or “nay” to every candidate that’s running — which some experts prefer?
  9. What would Andrew do with a billion dollars to keep the US a democracy?
  10. What does Andrew think about the effective altruism community?
  11. What’s one thing we should do to reduce the risk of nuclear war?
  12. Will Andrew’s new political party get Trump elected by splitting the vote, the same way Nader got Bush elected back in 2000?

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#118 – Jaime Yassif on safeguarding bioscience to prevent catastrophic lab accidents and bioweapons development

Podcast by and · Published December 13th, 2021

If a rich country were really committed to pursuing an active biological weapons program, there’s not much we could do to stop them. With enough money and persistence, they’d be able to buy equipment, and hire people to carry out the work.

But what we can do is intervene before they make that decision.

Today’s guest, Jaime Yassif — Senior Fellow for global biological policy and programs at the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) — thinks that stopping states from wanting to pursue dangerous bioscience in the first place is one of our key lines of defence against global catastrophic biological risks (GCBRs).

It helps to understand why countries might consider developing biological weapons. Jaime says there are three main possible reasons:

  1. Fear of what their adversary might be up to
  2. Belief that they could gain a tactical or strategic advantage, with limited risk of getting caught
  3. Belief that even if they are caught, they are unlikely to be held accountable

In response, Jaime has developed a three-part recipe to create systems robust enough to meaningfully change the cost-benefit calculation.

The first is to substantially increase transparency. If countries aren’t confident about what their neighbours or adversaries are actually up to, misperceptions could lead to arms races that neither side desires. But if you know with confidence that no one around you is pursuing a biological weapons programme, you won’t feel motivated to pursue one yourself.

The second is to strengthen the capabilities of the United Nations’ system to
investigate the origins of high-consequence biological events — whether naturally emerging, accidental or deliberate — and to make sure that the responsibility to figure out the source of bio-events of unknown origin doesn’t fall between the cracks of different existing mechanisms. The ability to quickly discover the source of emerging pandemics is important both for responding to them in real time and for deterring future bioweapons development or use.

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#117 – David Denkenberger on using paper mills and seaweed to feed everyone in a catastrophe, ft Sahil Shah

Podcast by and · Published November 29th, 2021

If there’s a nuclear war followed by nuclear winter, and the sun is blocked out for years, most of us are going to starve, right? Well, currently, probably we would, because humanity hasn’t done much to prevent it. But it turns out that an ounce of forethought might be enough for most people to get the calories they need to survive, even in a future as grim as that one.

Today’s guest is engineering professor Dave Denkenberger, who co-founded the Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED), which has the goal of finding ways humanity might be able to feed itself for years without relying on the sun. Over the last seven years, Dave and his team have turned up options from the mundane, like mushrooms grown on rotting wood, to the bizarre, like bacteria that can eat natural gas or electricity itself.

One option stands out as potentially able to feed billions: finding a way to eat wood ourselves. Even after a disaster, a huge amount of calories will be lying around, stored in wood and other plant cellulose. The trouble is that, even though cellulose is basically a lot of sugar molecules stuck together, humans can’t eat wood.

But we do know how to turn wood into something people can eat. We can grind wood up in already existing paper mills, then mix the pulp with enzymes that break the cellulose into sugar and the hemicellulose into other sugars.

Dave estimates that “…if hypothetically you were to feed one person all of their calories this way, it’s only about a dollar a day from cellulosic sugar. … It’s particularly cheap because we have these factories that have most of the components already. … Because we’re trying to feed everyone no matter what, we want to look at those resilient foods that are inexpensive.”

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#116 – Luisa Rodriguez on why global catastrophes seem unlikely to kill us all

Podcast by and · Published November 19th, 2021

If modern human civilisation collapsed — as a result of nuclear war, severe climate change, or a much worse pandemic than COVID-19 — billions of people might die.

That’s terrible enough to contemplate. But what’s the probability that rather than recover, the survivors would falter and humanity would actually disappear for good?

It’s an obvious enough question, but very few people have spent serious time looking into it — possibly because it cuts across history, economics, and biology, among many other fields. There’s no Disaster Apocalypse Studies department at any university, and governments have little incentive to plan for a future in which almost everyone is dead and their country probably no longer even exists.

The person who may have spent the most time looking at this specific question is Luisa Rodriguez — who has conducted research at Rethink Priorities, Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, the Forethought Foundation, and now here, at 80,000 Hours.

She wrote a series of articles earnestly trying to foresee how likely humanity would be to recover and build back after a full-on civilisational collapse.

In addition to being a fascinating topic in itself, if you buy philosopher Derek Parfit’s argument that the loss of all future generations entailed by human extinction would be a much greater moral tragedy than the deaths of even as many as 99% of humans alive, it’s also a question of great practical importance.

Luisa considered two distinct paths by which a global catastrophe and collapse could lead to extinction.

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Career exploration: when should you settle?

Article by · Last updated November 2021 · First published September 2021

Career exploration illustrated by an old map

Suppose you’ve researched different career paths, and now need to make a choice:

  1. ‘Settle’: commit to the path that seems best now.
  2. Explore: try other paths with the hope of finding something even better.

What should you do?

Steve Jobs liked to say you should “never settle,” but there’s a real balance to be struck between exploring and committing.

Many hope to be able to find and commit to their career calling right away, but this is rarely possible because it’s so hard to predict where you’re going to succeed in the long term.

Rather, you should approach your career like a scientist doing experiments. This means you should be prepared to test out several paths, if possible.

While everyone would ideally do some career exploration, the interesting question is how much you should plan to explore, and how best to balance the costs of exploring with its upsides.

There’s been plenty of research in decision science, computer science, and psychology that can help us answer this question. In this article, we combine these findings with what we’ve learned from advising people one-on-one, and summarise some of the bottom lines.

We’ll argue that if you want a career that’s not only satisfying but has a significant positive impact — our focus at 80,000 Hours — then the value of exploration is even higher.

The information value of exploration

The typical 25- to 34-year-old changes jobs every three years,

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The growth of effective altruism: what does it mean for our priorities and level of ambition?

Blog post by · Published November 11th, 2021

Lots of people have claimed that effective altruism hasn’t been growing in recent years. In a recent talk, I argue that it has.

I then explore how this growth has changed the priorities for the movement, and argue that we should be more ambitious.

The talk was given at Effective Altruism Global in London in October 2021. You can see the video and a transcript below. The talk was 30 minutes, followed by a Q&A with audience-submitted questions.

It summarises several recent pieces of research, including Is effective altruism growing?, How are resources allocated across causes?, Why to be more ambitious, and Why we need more megaprojects.

I added an explanation of why the large amount of additional funding available doesn’t mean that it’s easy to fundraise (and why me talking about a ‘funding overhang’ was probably a mistake). A better framing is that there is a lot of funding available for any projects that can clear the current funding bar, but this bar is still pretty high.

Finally, I suggest that the recent success of Sam Bankman-Fried is an additional reason to aim high.

First, he shows that it’s possible. Back in 2015, perhaps only about 1,000 people were seriously directing their careers on the basis of effective altruism. And now one of them has made billions of dollars to donate,

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#115 – David Wallace on the many-worlds theory of quantum mechanics and its implications

Podcast by and · Published November 12th, 2021

Quantum mechanics — our best theory of atoms, molecules, and the subatomic particles that make them up — underpins most of modern physics. But there are varying interpretations of what it means, all of them controversial in their own way.

Famously, quantum theory predicts that with the right setup, a cat can be made to be alive and dead at the same time. On the face of it, that sounds either meaningless or ridiculous.

According to today’s guest, David Wallace — professor at the University of Pittsburgh and one of the world’s leading philosophers of physics — there are three broad ways experts react to this apparent dilemma:

  1. The theory must be wrong, and we need to change our philosophy to fix it.
  2. The theory must be wrong, and we need to change our physics to fix it.
  3. The theory is OK, and cats really can in some way be alive and dead simultaneously.

Physicists tend to want to change the philosophy, and philosophers want to change the physics.

In 1955, physicist Hugh Everett bit the bullet on Option 3 and proposed Wallace’s preferred solution to the puzzle: each time it’s faced with a ‘quantum choice,’ the universe ‘splits’ into different worlds. Anything that has a probability greater than zero (from the perspective of quantum theory) happens in some branch — though more probable things happen in far more branches.

This explanation of quantum physics, called the ‘Everettian interpretation’ or ‘many-worlds theory,’ does seem a little crazy. But quantum physics already seems crazy, and that doesn’t make it wrong. While not a consensus position, the many-worlds approach is one of the top three most popular ways to make sense of what’s going on, according to surveys of relevant experts.

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#114 – Maha Rehman on working with governments to rapidly deliver masks to millions of people

Podcast by and · Published October 22nd, 2021

It’s hard to believe, but until recently there had never been a large field trial that addressed these simple and obvious questions:

  1. When ordinary people wear face masks, does it actually reduce the spread of respiratory diseases?
  2. And if so, how do you get people to wear masks more often?

It turns out the first question is remarkably challenging to answer, but it’s well worth doing nonetheless. Among other reasons, the first good trial of this prompted Maha Rehman — Policy Director at the Mahbub Ul Haq Research Centre — as well as a range of others to immediately use the findings to help tens of millions of people across South Asia, even before the results were public.

The groundbreaking Bangladesh RCT that inspired her to take action found that:

  • A 30% increase in mask wearing reduced total infections by 10%.
  • The effect was more pronounced for surgical masks compared to cloth masks (plus ~50% effectiveness).
  • Mask wearing also led to an increase in social distancing.
  • Of all the incentives tested, the only thing that impacted mask wearing was their colour (people preferred blue over green, and red over purple!).

The research was done by social scientists at Yale, Berkeley, and Stanford, among others. It applied a program they called ‘NORM’ in half of 600 villages in which about 350,000 people lived. NORM has four components, which the researchers expected would work well for the general public:

N: no-cost distribution
O: offering information
R: reinforcing the message and the information in the field
M: modeling

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#113 – Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

Podcast by and · Published October 18th, 2021

Our failure to get every kid in the world all of their basic vaccinations on time leads to 1.5 million deaths every year.

According to today’s guest, Varsha Venugopal, for the great majority this has nothing to do with weird conspiracy theories or medical worries — in India 80% of undervaccinated children are already getting some shots. They just aren’t getting all of them, for the tragically mundane reason that life can get in the way.

As Varsha says, we’re all sometimes guilty of “valuing our present very differently from the way we value the future,” leading to short-term thinking, whether about going to the gym or getting vaccines.

So who should we call on to help fix this universal problem? The government, extended family, or maybe village elders?

Varsha says that research shows the most influential figures might actually be local gossips.

In 2018, Varsha heard about the ideas around effective altruism for the first time. By the end of 2019, she’d gone through Charity Entrepreneurship’s strategy incubation program, and quit her normal, stable job to co-found Suvita, a nonprofit dedicated to improving the uptake of immunisation in India, which focuses on two models:

  1. Sending SMS reminders directly to parents and carers
  2. Gossip

The first one is intuitive. You collect birth registers, digitise the paper records, process the data, and send out personalised SMS messages to hundreds of thousands of families. The effect size varies depending on the context, but these messages usually increase vaccination rates by 8–18%.

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Effective altruism in a nutshell

Blog post by and · Published October 18th, 2021

Let’s say you’re planning to buy a new laptop — well, how do you choose that laptop?

You’re probably not going to pick randomly. And you’re probably not even going to choose the prettiest one either.

I’m guessing that you’ll put a bit of research into it. And that’s just common sense.

You’ll likely cross-reference a couple of different sources, try to find a laptop that’s endorsed by a few people you respect. Or maybe you go on a review site like Wirecutter to find what the reviewers consider the ‘best deal.’

You also might not even be married to the idea of getting a laptop at all — if the underlying thing you want to do is your work, maybe you should get a desktop and just use your phone when on the move.

At the end of the process, you would have hoped to get the outcome you really wanted, without spending too much time figuring it out.

But when it comes to doing good, most people don’t instinctively apply the same rigorous and practical mindset they do in other parts of their life. We’re more likely to volunteer our time at a place that’s easy to get to, give money to whichever charity knocks on our door, or focus on an issue just because it grabbed our attention when we were young.

To people in the effective altruism community, that seems like a pretty significant mistake.

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#112 – Carl Shulman on the common-sense case for existential risk work and its practical implications

Podcast by and · Published October 5th, 2021

Preventing the apocalypse may sound like an idiosyncratic activity, and it sometimes is justified on exotic grounds, such as the potential for humanity to become a galaxy-spanning civilisation.

But the policy of US government agencies is already to spend up to $4 million to save the life of a citizen, making the death of all Americans a $1,300,000,000,000,000 disaster.

According to Carl Shulman, research associate at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, that means you don’t need any fancy philosophical arguments about the value or size of the future to justify working to reduce existential risk — it passes a mundane cost-benefit analysis whether or not you place any value on the long-term future.

The key reason to make it a top priority is factual, not philosophical. That is, the risk of a disaster that kills billions of people alive today is alarmingly high, and it can be reduced at a reasonable cost. A back-of-the-envelope version of the argument runs:

  • The US government is willing to pay up to $4 million (depending on the agency) to save the life of an American.
  • So saving all US citizens at any given point in time would be worth $1,300 trillion.
  • If you believe that the risk of human extinction over the next century is something like one in six (as Toby Ord suggests is a reasonable figure in his book The Precipice), then it would be worth the US government spending up to $2.2 trillion to reduce that risk by just 1%, in terms of American lives saved alone.
  • Carl thinks it would cost a lot less than that to achieve a 1% risk reduction if the money were spent intelligently. So it easily passes a government cost-benefit test, with a very big benefit-to-cost ratio — likely over 1000:1 today.

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This could be the most important century

Article by · Published September 2021

Will the future of humanity be wild, or boring? It’s natural to think that if we’re trying to be sober and measured, and predict what will really happen rather than spin an exciting story, it’s more likely than not to be sort of… dull.

But there’s also good reason to think that that is simply impossible. The idea that there’s a boring future that’s internally coherent is an illusion that comes from not inspecting those scenarios too closely.

At least that is what Holden Karnofsky — founder of charity evaluator GiveWell and foundation Open Philanthropy — argues in his new article series, “The Most Important Century.”

The bind is this: for the first 99% of human history, the global economy (initially mostly food production) grew very slowly: under 0.1% a year. But since the Industrial Revolution around 1800, growth has exploded to over 2% a year.

Graphic

To us in 2020, that sounds perfectly sensible and the natural order of things. But Holden points out that in fact it’s not only unprecedented, it also can’t continue for long.

The power of compounding increases means that to sustain 2% growth for just 10,000 years — 5% as long as humanity has already existed — would require us to turn every individual atom in the galaxy into an economy as large as the Earth’s today. Not super likely.

So what are the options?

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#111 – Mushtaq Khan on using institutional economics to predict effective government reforms

Podcast by and · Published September 10th, 2021

If you’re living in the Niger Delta in Nigeria, your best bet at a high-paying career is probably ‘artisanal refining’ — or, in plain language, stealing oil from pipelines.

The resulting oil spills damage the environment and cause severe health problems, but the Nigerian government has continually failed in their attempts to stop this theft.

They send in the army, and the army gets corrupted. They send in enforcement agencies, and the enforcement agencies get corrupted. What’s happening here?

According to Mushtaq Khan, economics professor at SOAS University of London, this is a classic example of ‘networked corruption’. Everyone in the community is benefiting from the criminal enterprise — so much so that the locals would prefer civil war to following the law. It pays vastly better than other local jobs, hotels and restaurants have formed around it, and houses are even powered by the electricity generated from the oil.

In today’s episode, Mushtaq elaborates on the models he uses to understand these problems and make predictions he can test in the real world.

Some of the most important factors shaping the fate of nations are their structures of power: who is powerful, how they are organized, which interest groups can pull in favours with the government, and the constant push and pull between the country’s rulers and its ruled. While traditional economic theory has relatively little to say about these topics, institutional economists like Mushtaq have a lot to say, and participate in lively debates about which of their competing ideas best explain the world around us.

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#110 – Holden Karnofsky on building aptitudes and kicking ass

Podcast by and · Published August 26th, 2021

Holden Karnofsky helped create two of the most influential organisations in the effective philanthropy world. So when he outlines a different perspective on career advice than the one we present at 80,000 Hours — we take it seriously.

Holden disagrees with us on a few specifics, but it’s more than that: he prefers a different vibe when making career choices, especially early in one’s career.

While he might ultimately recommend similar jobs to those we recommend at 80,000 Hours, the reasons are often different.

At 80,000 Hours we often talk about ‘paths’ to working on what we currently think of as the most pressing problems in the world. That’s partially because people seem to prefer the most concrete advice possible.

But Holden thinks a problem with that kind of advice is that it’s hard to take actions based on it if your job options don’t match well with your plan, and it’s hard to get a reliable signal about whether you’re making the right choices.

How can you know you’ve chosen the right cause? How can you know the future job you’re aiming for will still be helpful to that cause? And what if you can’t get a job in this area at all?

Holden prefers to focus on ‘aptitudes’ that you can build in all sorts of different roles and cause areas, which can later be applied more directly.

Even if the current role or path doesn’t work out, or your career goes in wacky directions you’d never anticipated (like so many successful careers do), or you change your whole worldview — you’ll still have access to this aptitude.

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