New releases

#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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#109 – Holden Karnofsky on the most important century

Podcast by and · Published August 19th, 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 titled ‘The Most Important Century’. He hopes to lay out part of the worldview that’s driving the strategy and grantmaking of Open Philanthropy’s longtermist team, and encourage more people to join his efforts to positively shape humanity’s future.

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.

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.

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#108 – Chris Olah on working at top AI labs without an undergrad degree

Podcast by and · Published August 11th, 2021

Chris Olah has had a fascinating and unconventional career path.

Most people who want to pursue a research career feel they need a degree to get taken seriously. But Chris not only doesn’t have a PhD, but doesn’t even have an undergraduate degree. After dropping out of university to help defend an acquaintance who was facing bogus criminal charges, Chris started independently working on machine learning research, and eventually got an internship at Google Brain, a leading AI research group.

In this interview — a follow-up to our episode on his technical work — we discuss what, if anything, can be learned from his unusual career path. Should more people pass on university and just throw themselves at solving a problem they care about? Or would it be foolhardy for others to try to copy a unique case like Chris’?

We also cover some of Chris’ personal passions over the years, including his attempts to reduce what he calls ‘research debt’ by starting a new academic journal called Distill, focused just on explaining existing results unusually clearly.

As Chris explains, as fields develop they accumulate huge bodies of knowledge that researchers are meant to be familiar with before they start contributing themselves. But the weight of that existing knowledge — and the need to keep up with what everyone else is doing — can become crushing. It can take someone until their 30s or later to earn their stripes, and sometimes a field will split in two just to make it possible for anyone to stay on top of it.

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Open position: Head of Marketing

Blog post by · Published August 10th, 2021

Applications for this position have now closed.

We’re looking for a Head of Marketing to help us expand our readership and be the founding member of our marketing team.

We’re hoping to find someone who could take on the Head of Marketing position immediately. However, we’re also open to hiring a candidate with less experience who we could support to take on the responsibilities of a Head of Marketing over time. To apply for the more junior position instead, please see our Marketer job description.

80,000 Hours provides free research and support to help people find careers tackling the world’s most pressing problems.

We’ve had over 8 million visitors to our website, 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.

Even so, about 90% of U.S. college graduates have never heard of effective altruism, and just 0.5% of students at top colleges seem highly engaged in EA. As Head of Marketing, your aim would be to help us reach all students and recent graduates who might be interested in our work. We anticipate this could increase our readership up to five times, and lead to hundreds more people pursuing high-impact careers.

We’re looking for a senior marketing generalist who will:

  • Develop our marketing strategy.

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Open position: Marketer

Blog post by · Published August 10th, 2021

Applications for this position have now closed.

We’re looking for a Marketer to help us expand our readership and be the founding member of our marketing team.

We’d like to support the person in this role to take on more responsibility over time and eventually become our Head of Marketing.

We’re also open to hiring someone more senior, who could take on the Head of Marketing role immediately. To apply for the Head of Marketing position instead, please see the job description here.

80,000 Hours provides free research and support to help people find careers tackling the world’s most pressing problems.

We’ve had over 8 million visitors to our website, 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.

Even so, about 90% of U.S. college graduates have never heard of effective altruism, and just 0.5% of students at top colleges seem highly engaged in EA. As 80,000 Hours’ Marketer, your aim would be to help us reach all students and recent graduates who might be interested in our work. We anticipate this could increase our readership up to five times, and lead to hundreds more people pursuing high-impact careers.

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How are resources in effective altruism allocated across issues?

Blog post by · Published August 9th, 2021

How are the resources in effective altruism allocated across cause areas?

Knowing these figures, for both funding and labour, can help us spot gaps in the current allocation. In particular, I’ll suggest that broad longtermism seems like the most pressing gap right now.

This is a follow on from my first post, where I estimated the total amount of committed funding and people, and briefly discussed how many resources are being deployed now vs. invested for later.

These estimates are for how the situation stood in 2019. I made them in early 2020, and made a few more adjustments when I wrote this post. As with the previous post, I recommend that readers take these figures as extremely rough estimates, and I haven’t checked them with the people involved. I’d be keen to see additional and more thorough estimates.

Update Oct 2021: I mistakenly said the number of people reporting 5 for engagement was ~2300, but actually this was the figure for people reporting 4 or 5.

Allocation of funding

Here are my estimates:

What it’s based on:

  • Using Open Philanthropy’s grants database, I averaged the allocation to each area 2017–2019 and made some minor adjustments. (Open Phil often makes 3yr+ grants, and the grants are lumpy, so it’s important to average.) At a total of ~$260 million, this accounts for the majority of the funding.

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#107 – Chris Olah on what the hell is going on inside neural networks

Podcast by and · Published August 4th, 2021

Big machine learning models can identify plant species better than any human, write passable essays, beat you at a game of Starcraft 2, figure out how a photo of Tobey Maguire and the word ‘spider’ are related, solve the 60-year-old ‘protein folding problem’, diagnose some diseases, play romantic matchmaker, write solid computer code, and offer questionable legal advice.

Humanity made these amazing and ever-improving tools. So how do our creations work? In short: we don’t know.

Today’s guest, Chris Olah, finds this both absurd and unacceptable. Over the last ten years he has been a leader in the effort to unravel what’s really going on inside these black boxes. As part of that effort he helped create the famous DeepDream visualisations at Google Brain, reverse engineered the CLIP image classifier at OpenAI, and is now continuing his work at Anthropic, a new $100 million research company that tries to “co-develop the latest safety techniques alongside scaling of large ML models”.

Despite having a huge fan base thanks to his tweets and lay explanations of ML, today’s episode is the first long interview Chris has ever given. It features his personal take on what we’ve learned so far about what ML algorithms are doing, and what’s next for this research agenda at Anthropic.

His decade of work has borne substantial fruit, producing an approach for looking inside the mess of connections in a neural network and back out what functional role each piece is serving. Among other things, Chris and team found that every visual classifier seems to converge on a number of simple common elements in their early layers — elements so fundamental they may exist in our own visual cortex in some form.

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Is effective altruism growing? An update on the stock of funding vs people

Blog post by · Published July 28th, 2021

See a brief update Aug 2022.

In 2015, I argued that funding for effective altruism — especially within meta or longtermist areas — had grown faster than the number of people interested in it, and that this was likely to continue. This meant that there was a funding overhang, leading to a series of skill bottlenecks.

A couple of years ago, I wondered if this trend was starting to reverse. There hadn’t been any new donors on the scale of Good Ventures, which meant that total committed funds were growing slowly, giving the number of people a chance to catch up.

However, the spectacular asset returns of the last few years, and creation of FTX, seem to have shifted the balance back towards funding. Now the funding overhang seems even larger in absolute terms than 2015.

In the rest of this post, I make some rough guesses at total committed funds compared to the number of interested people, to see how the balance of funding vs. talent might have changed over time.

This will also give us an update on whether effective altruism is growing — with a focus on what I think are the two most important metrics: the stock of total committed funds, and committed people.

This analysis also made me make a small update in favour of giving now vs. investing to give later.

Here’s a summary of what’s coming up:

  • How much funding is committed to effective altruism (going forward)?

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#106 – Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work

Podcast by and · Published July 28th, 2021

If you wanted to start a university department from scratch, and attract as many superstar researchers as possible, what’s the most attractive perk you could offer?

How about just not needing an email address?

According to today’s guest, Cal Newport — computer science professor and best-selling author of A World Without Email — it should seem obscene and absurd for a world-renowned vaccine researcher with decades of experience to spend a third of their time fielding requests from HR, building management, finance, and on and on. Yet with offices organised the way they are today, nothing could feel more natural.

But this isn’t just a problem at the elite level — it affects almost all of us. A typical U.S. office worker checks their email 80 times a day, or once every six minutes. Data analysis by RescueTime found that a third of users checked email or Slack every three minutes or more, averaged over a full work day.

Each time that happens our focus is broken, killing our momentum on the knowledge work we’re supposedly paid to do.

When we lament how much email and chat have reduced our focus, increased our anxiety and made our days a buzz of frenetic activity, we most naturally blame ‘weakness of will’. If only we had the discipline to check Slack and email once a day, all would be well — or so the story goes.

Cal believes that line of thinking fundamentally misunderstands how we got to a place where knowledge workers can rarely find more than five consecutive minutes to spend doing just one thing.

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This is your most important decision

Article by · Published July 2021

When people think of living ethically, they most often think of things like recycling, fair trade, and volunteering.

But that’s missing something huge: your choice of career.

We believe that what you do with your career is probably the most important ethical decision of your life.

This was true 10 years ago, but as we stand on the brink of human-level AI, we’ll argue it’s even more true today.

The first reason is the huge amount of time at stake. You have about 80,000 hours in your career: 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year, for 40 years. That’s more time than you’ll spend eating, socialising, and watching Netflix put together.

And it means (unless you happen to be the heir to a large estate) that time is the biggest resource you have to help others.

So if you can increase the overall impact of your career by just a tiny amount, it will likely do more good than changes you could make to other parts of your life.

Or, to look at it another way, it’s worth thinking a lot about how to make even just small improvements to your career. For instance, if you could increase the impact of your career by 1%, it would be worth spending up to 800 hours working out how to do that.

There are 80,000 hours in an average careerEach dot illustrates one of the 80,000 hours in your career.

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#105 – Alexander Berger on improving global health and wellbeing in clear and direct ways

Podcast by and · Published July 12th, 2021

The effective altruist research community tries to identify the highest impact things people can do to improve the world. Unsurprisingly, given the difficulty of such a massive and open-ended project, very different schools of thought have arisen about how to do the most good.

Today’s guest, Alexander Berger, leads Open Philanthropy’s ‘Global Health and Wellbeing’ programme, where he oversees around $175 million in grants each year, and ultimately aspires to disburse billions in the most impactful ways he and his team can identify.

This programme is the flagship effort representing one major effective altruist approach: try to improve the health and wellbeing of humans and animals that are alive today, in clearly identifiable ways, applying an especially analytical and empirical mindset.

The programme makes grants to tackle easily-prevented illnesses among the world’s poorest people, offer cash to people living in extreme poverty, prevent cruelty to billions of farm animals, advance biomedical science, and improve criminal justice and immigration policy in the United States.

Open Philanthropy’s researchers rely on empirical information to guide their decisions where it’s available, and where it’s not, they aim to maximise expected benefits to recipients through careful analysis of the gains different projects would offer and their relative likelihoods of success.

This ‘global health and wellbeing’ approach — sometimes referred to as ‘neartermism’ — contrasts with another big school of thought in effective altruism, known as ‘longtermism’, which aims to direct the long-term future of humanity and its descendants in a positive direction. Longtermism bets that while it’s harder to figure out how to benefit future generations than people alive today, the total number of people who might live in the future is far greater than the number alive today, and this gain in scale more than offsets that lower tractability.

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Expression of interest: experienced writer

Blog post by · Published June 30th, 2021

80,000 Hours is considering hiring full-time writers who have demonstrable experience writing for the public and who have a preexisting interest in and understanding of our organisation’s priorities including longtermism and effective altruism.

This announcement is an expression of interest, rather than a role we have formally opened. Because of this, we have a high bar for responding to enquiries (see below), and typically won’t be able to respond.

If we don’t respond, please don’t take it as a rejection! You should feel very welcome to respond to future ads for 80,000 Hours positions.

80,000 Hours provides research and support to help people switch into careers that effectively tackle the world’s most pressing problems.

The 80,000 Hours website gets 1-2 million unique visitors and sees over 100,000 hours of reading time per year. We are also one of the top sources of new members of the effective altruism community.

If you join us as a writer, you’d likely be one of the most widely-read writers in effective altruism.

Writers at 80,000 Hours produce pieces that communicate important ideas and arguments, inform readers about pressing global problems, and give advice to help readers pursue high impact career paths.

Some examples:

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#104 – Dr Pardis Sabeti on the Sentinel system for detecting and stopping pandemics

Podcast by and · Published June 29th, 2021

When the first person with COVID-19 went to see a doctor in Wuhan, nobody could tell that it wasn’t a familiar disease like the flu — that we were dealing with something new.

How much death and destruction could we have avoided if we’d had a hero who could? That’s what the last Assistant Secretary of Defense Andy Weber asked on the show back in March.

Today’s guest Pardis Sabeti is a professor at Harvard, fought Ebola on the ground in Africa during the 2014 outbreak, runs her own lab, co-founded a company that produces next-level testing, and is even the lead singer of a rock band. If anyone is going to be that hero in the next pandemic — it just might be her.

She is a co-author of the SENTINEL proposal, a practical system for detecting new diseases quickly, using an escalating series of three novel diagnostic techniques.

The first method, called SHERLOCK, uses CRISPR gene editing to detect familiar viruses in a simple, inexpensive filter paper test, using non-invasive samples.

If SHERLOCK draws a blank, we escalate to the second step, CARMEN, an advanced version of SHERLOCK that uses microfluidics and CRISPR to simultaneously detect hundreds of viruses and viral strains. More expensive, but far more comprehensive.

If neither SHERLOCK nor CARMEN detects a known pathogen, it’s time to pull out the big gun: metagenomic sequencing. More expensive still, but sequencing all the DNA in a patient sample lets you identify and track every virus — known and unknown — in a sample.

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#103 – Max Roser on building the world’s first great source of COVID-19 data at Our World in Data

Podcast by and · Published June 21st, 2021

History is filled with stories of great people stepping up in times of crisis. Presidents averting wars; soldiers leading troops away from certain death; data scientists sleeping on the office floor to launch a new webpage a few days sooner.

That last one is barely a joke — by our lights, people like today’s guest Max Roser should be viewed with similar admiration by COVID-19 historians.

Max runs Our World in Data, a small education nonprofit which began the pandemic with just six staff. But since last February his team has supplied essential COVID statistics to over 130 million users — among them BBC, the Financial Times, The New York Times, the OECD, the World Bank, the IMF, Donald Trump, Tedros Adhanom, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, just to name a few.

An economist at Oxford University, Max Roser founded Our World in Data as a small side project in 2011 and has led it since, including through the wild ride of 2020. In today’s interview, Max explains how he and his team realized that if they didn’t start making COVID data accessible and easy to make sense of, it wasn’t clear when anyone would.

But Our World in Data wasn’t naturally set up to become the world’s go-to source for COVID updates. Up until then their specialty had been in-depth articles explaining century-length trends in metrics like life expectancy — to the point that their graphing software was only set up to present yearly data.

But the team eventually realized that the World Health Organization was publishing numbers that flatly contradicted themselves, most of the press was embarrassingly out of its depth, and countries were posting case data as images buried deep in their sites, where nobody would find them. Even worse, nobody was reporting or compiling how many tests different countries were doing, rendering all those case figures largely meaningless.

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#102 – Tom Moynihan on why prior generations missed some of the biggest priorities of all

Podcast by and · Published June 11th, 2021

It can be tough to get people to truly care about reducing existential risks today. But spare a thought for the longtermist of the 17th century: they were surrounded by people who thought extinction was literally impossible.

Today’s guest Tom Moynihan, intellectual historian and author of the book X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction, says that until the 18th century, almost everyone — including early atheists — couldn’t imagine that humanity or life could simply disappear because of an act of nature.

This is largely because of the prevalence of the ‘principle of plenitude’, which Tom defines as saying:

This has the implication that if humanity ever disappeared for some reason, then it would have to reappear. So why would you ever worry about extinction?

Here are 4 more commonly held beliefs from generations past that Tom shares in the interview:

  • All regions of matter that can be populated will be populated: In other words, there are aliens on every planet, because it would be a massive waste of real estate if all of them were just inorganic masses, where nothing interesting was going on. This also led to the idea that if you dug deep into the Earth, you’d potentially find thriving societies.
  • Aliens were human-like, and shared the same values as us: they would have the same moral beliefs, and the same aesthetic beliefs. The idea that aliens might be very different from us only arrived in the 20th century.
  • Fossils were rocks that had gotten a bit too big for their britches and were trying to act like animals: they couldn’t actually move, so becoming an imprint of an animal was the next best thing.
  • All future generations were contained in miniature form, Russian-doll style, in the sperm of the first man: preformation was the idea that within the ovule or the sperm of an animal is contained its offspring in miniature form, and the French philosopher Malebranche said, well, if one is contained in the other one, then surely that goes on forever.

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#101 – Robert Wright on using cognitive empathy to save the world

Podcast by and · Published May 27th, 2021

In 2003, Saddam Hussein refused to let Iraqi weapons scientists leave the country to be interrogated. Given the overwhelming domestic support for an invasion at the time, most key figures in the U.S. took that as confirmation that he had something to hide — probably an active WMD program.

But what about alternative explanations? Maybe those scientists knew about past crimes. Or maybe they’d defect. Or maybe giving in to that kind of demand would have humiliated Hussein in the eyes of enemies like Iran and Saudi Arabia.

According to today’s guest Robert Wright, host of the popular podcast The Wright Show, these are the kinds of things that might have come up if people were willing to look at things from Saddam Hussein’s perspective.

He calls this ‘cognitive empathy’. It’s not feeling-your-pain-type empathy — it’s just trying to understand how another person thinks.

He says if you pitched this kind of thing back in 2003 you’d be shouted down as a ‘Saddam apologist’ — and he thinks the same is true today when it comes to regimes in China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

The two Roberts in today’s episode — Bob Wright and Rob Wiblin — agree that removing this taboo against perspective taking, even with people you consider truly evil, could potentially significantly improve discourse around international relations.

They feel that if we could spread the meme that if you’re able to understand what dictators are thinking and calculating, based on their country’s history and interests, it seems like we’d be less likely to make terrible foreign policy errors.

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#100 – Having a successful career with depression, anxiety, and imposter syndrome

Podcast by and · Published May 19th, 2021

Today’s episode is one of the most remarkable and really, unique, pieces of content we’ve ever produced (and I can say that because I had almost nothing to do with making it!).

The producer of this show, Keiran Harris, interviewed our mutual colleague Howie about the major ways that mental illness has affected his life and career. While depression, anxiety, ADHD and other problems are extremely common, it’s rare for people to offer detailed insight into their thoughts and struggles — and even rarer for someone as perceptive as Howie to do so.

The first half of this conversation is a searingly honest account of Howie’s story, including losing a job he loved due to a depressed episode, what it was like to be basically out of commission for over a year, how he got back on his feet, and the things he still finds difficult today.

The second half covers Howie’s advice. Conventional wisdom on mental health can be really focused on cultivating willpower — telling depressed people that the virtuous thing to do is to start exercising, improve their diet, get their sleep in check, and generally fix all their problems before turning to therapy and medication as some sort of last resort.

Howie tries his best to be a corrective to this misguided attitude and pragmatically focus on what actually matters — doing whatever will help you get better.

Mental illness is one of the things that most often trips up people who could otherwise enjoy flourishing careers and have a large social impact, so we think this could plausibly be one of our more valuable episodes.

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8-step career planning course

Article by · Published May 2021

Career plan illustration

This 8-step workbook is designed to help you write an in-depth and actionable career plan. The workbook is designed to be used alongside our in-depth career planning process, though it can also be used directly — we link to relevant sections of the process throughout.

Key parts of the career planner:

  1. What does a fulfilling, high-impact career look like for you? (What are your career goals?)
  2. Clarify your views of which global problems are the most pressing
  3. Generate ideas for longer-term paths
  4. Clarify your strategic focus
  5. Determine your best-guess next career step
  6. Plan to adapt
  7. Get feedback, investigate key uncertainties, and make a judgement call
  8. Put your plan into action

If you complete each part, you will have worked through the most important issues you need to think about when planning your career, considered your most promising career options, identified next steps to help you achieve your long term goals, and have all your answers sketched out in one place.

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#99 – Leah Garcés on turning adversaries into allies to change the chicken industry

Podcast by and · Published May 13th, 2021

For a chance to prevent enormous amounts of suffering, would you be brave enough to drive five hours to a remote location to meet a man who seems likely to be your enemy, knowing that it might be an ambush?

Today’s guest — Leah Garcés — was.

That man was a chicken farmer named Craig Watts, and that ambush never happened. Instead, Leah and Craig forged a friendship and a partnership focused on reducing suffering on factory farms.

Leah, now president of Mercy For Animals (MFA), tried for years to get access to a chicken farm to document the horrors she knew were happening behind closed doors. It made sense that no one would let her in — why would the evil chicken farmers behind these atrocities ever be willing to help her take them down?

But after sitting with Craig on his living room floor for hours and listening to his story, she discovered that he wasn’t evil at all — in fact he was just stuck in a cycle he couldn’t escape, forced to use methods he didn’t endorse.

Most chicken farmers have enormous debts they are constantly struggling to pay off, make very little money, and have to work in terrible conditions — their main activity most days is finding and killing the sick chickens in their flock. Craig was one of very few farmers close to finally paying off his debts, which made him slightly less vulnerable to retaliation. That, combined with his natural tenacity and bravery, opened up the possibility for him to work with Leah.

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How much do people differ in productivity? What the evidence says.

Blog post by · Published May 7th, 2021

People sometimes point out that performance is ‘power law’ distributed, e.g. they’ll point out that the top 10% of scientists get 5x more citations over their career than the other 90% of scientists, or that the top 1% of startup founders get 80% of the equity value.

But is this true? And if so, what does it imply?

I think these differences in performance can be really important, and their significance is often not properly appreciated. But it’s also often oversold.

To better understand how much people predictively differ in productivity, Max Daniel of Coefficient Giving and I did an informal review of the academic research.

We found there’s relevant research in several fields (often pursued independently) including economics, organisational psychology, expert performance, scientometrics, and physics.

We aimed to get an overview of what’s out there and combine it with our own understanding to see if we could draw any practical lessons for hiring managers or people planning their careers.

Here’s a summary of some of the data we found in the review:

Data on the dispersion of staff productivity

And here’s a 10-point summary of what we learned. (See the full write up here, and discussion on the EA Forum.)

1) ‘Power law’ sounds catchy, but identifying which distribution to use is hard to do, statistically.

Distinguishing power laws from log-normal distributions is notoriously difficult,

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