New releases

Bonus episode: What we do and don’t know about the 2019-nCoV coronavirus

Podcast by , and · Published February 3, 2020

UPDATE: Please also see our COVID-19 landing page for many more up-to-date articles about the pandemic.

Two 80,000 Hours researchers, Robert Wiblin and Howie Lempel, just recorded a discussion about the 2019-nCoV virus.

You can get it by subscribing to the 80,000 Hours Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more about the show.

In the 1h15m conversation we cover:

  • What is it?
  • How many people have it?
  • How contagious is it?
  • What fraction of people who contract it die?
  • How likely is it to spread out of control?
  • What’s the range of plausible fatalities worldwide?
  • How does it compare to other epidemics?
  • What don’t we know and why?
  • What actions should listeners take, if any?
  • How should the complexities of the above be communicated by public health professionals?

Below are some links we discuss in the episode, or otherwise think are informative:

Advice on how to avoid catching contagious diseases

Forecasts

General summaries of what’s going on

Our previous episodes about pandemic control

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Anonymous contributors answer: What’s one way to be successful you don’t think people talk about enough?

Blog post by · Published January 28, 2020

The following are excerpts from interviews with people whose work we respect and whose answers we offered to publish without attribution. This means that these quotes don’t represent the views of 80,000 Hours, and indeed in some cases, individual pieces of advice explicitly contradict our own. Nonetheless, we think it’s valuable to showcase the range of views on difficult topics where reasonable people might disagree.

The advice is particularly targeted at people whose approach to doing good aligns with the values of the effective altruism (EA) community, but we expect most of it is more broadly useful.

This is the eighth in this series of posts with anonymous answers. You can find the complete collection here.

We’ve also released an audio version of some highlights of the series, which you can listen to here, or on the 80,000 Hours Podcast feed.

Did you just land on our site for the first time? After this you might like to read about 80,000 Hours’ key ideas.

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#68 – Will MacAskill on the moral case against ever leaving the house, whether now is the hinge of history, and the culture of effective altruism

Podcast by and · Published January 24, 2020

You’re given a box with a set of dice in it. If you roll an even number, a person’s life is saved. If you roll an odd number, someone else will die. Each time you shake the box you get $10. Should you do it?

A committed consequentialist might say, “Sure! Free money!” But most will think it obvious that you should say no. You’ve only gotten a tiny benefit, in exchange for moral responsibility over whether other people live or die.

And yet, according to today’s return guest, philosopher Will MacAskill, in a real sense we’re shaking this box every time we leave the house, and those who think shaking the box is wrong should probably also be shutting themselves indoors and minimising their interactions with others.

To see this, imagine you’re deciding whether to redeem a coupon for a free movie. If you go, you’ll need to drive to the cinema. By affecting traffic throughout the city, you’ll have slightly impacted the schedules of thousands or tens of thousands of people. The average life is about 30,000 days, and over the course of a life the average person will have about two children. So — if you’ve impacted at least 7,500 days — then, statistically speaking, you’ve probably influenced the exact timing of a conception event. With 200 million sperm in the running each time, changing the moment of copulation, even by a fraction of a second, will almost certainly mean you’ve changed the identity of a future person.

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Anonymous contributors answer: What mistakes do people most often make when deciding what work to do?

Blog post by · Published December 17, 2019

The following are excerpts from interviews with people whose work we respect and whose answers we offered to publish without attribution. This means that these quotes don’t represent the views of 80,000 Hours, and indeed in some cases, individual pieces of advice explicitly contradict our own. Nonetheless, we think it’s valuable to showcase the range of views on difficult topics where reasonable people might disagree.

The advice is particularly targeted at people whose approach to doing good aligns with the values of the effective altruism (EA) community, but we expect most of it is more broadly useful.

This is the seventh in this series of posts with anonymous answers. You can find the complete collection here.

We’ve also released an audio version of some highlights of the series, which you can listen to here, or on the 80,000 Hours Podcast feed.

Did you just land on our site for the first time? After this you might like to read about 80,000 Hours’ key ideas.

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#67 – David Chalmers on the nature and ethics of consciousness

Podcast by , and · Published December 16, 2019

What is it like to be you right now? You’re seeing this text on the screen, you smell the coffee next to you, feel the warmth of the cup, and hear your housemates arguing about whether Home Alone was better than Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. There’s a lot going on in your head — your conscious experiences.

Now imagine beings that are identical to humans, except for one thing: they lack conscious experience. If you spill that coffee on them, they’ll jump like anyone else, but inside they’ll feel no pain and have no thoughts: the lights are off.

The concept of these so-called ‘philosophical zombies’ was popularised by today’s guest — celebrated philosophy professor David Chalmers — in order to explore the nature of consciousness. In a forthcoming book he poses a classic ‘trolley problem’:

Many people think you should divert the trolley, precisely because the lack of conscious experience means the moral status of the zombies is greatly reduced, or absent entirely.

So, which features of consciousness qualify someone for moral consideration? One view is that the only conscious states that matter are those that have a positive or negative quality, like pleasure and suffering. But Dave’s intuitions are quite different.

He asks us to consider the ‘Vulcans’. If you’ve never seen Star Trek, Vulcans experience rich forms of cognitive and sensory consciousness; they see and hear and reflect on the world around them. But they’re incapable of experiencing pleasure or pain.

Does such a being lack moral status?

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Anonymous contributors answer: What bad habits do you see among people trying to improve the world?

Blog post by · Published December 9, 2019

The following are excerpts from interviews with people whose work we respect and whose answers we offered to publish without attribution. This means that these quotes don’t represent the views of 80,000 Hours, and indeed in some cases, individual pieces of advice explicitly contradict our own. Nonetheless, we think it’s valuable to showcase the range of views on difficult topics where reasonable people might disagree.

The advice is particularly targeted at people whose approach to doing good aligns with the values of the effective altruism (EA) community, but we expect most of it is more broadly useful.

This is the sixth in this series of posts with anonymous answers. You can find the complete collection here.

We’ve also released an audio version of some highlights of the series, which you can listen to here, or on the 80,000 Hours Podcast feed.

Did you just land on our site for the first time? After this you might like to read about 80,000 Hours’ key ideas.

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#66 – Peter Singer on being provocative, EA, how his moral views have changed, & rescuing children drowning in ponds

Podcast by , and · Published December 5, 2019

In 1989, the professor of moral philosophy Peter Singer was all over the news for his inflammatory opinions about abortion. But the controversy stemmed from Practical Ethics — a book he’d actually released way back in 1979. It took a German translation ten years on for protests to kick off.

According to Singer, he honestly didn’t expect this view to be as provocative as it became, and he certainly wasn’t aiming to stir up trouble and get attention.

But after the protests and the increasing coverage of his work in German media, the previously flat sales of Practical Ethics shot up. And the negative attention he received ultimately led him to a weekly opinion column in The New York Times.

Singer points out that as a result of this increased attention, many more people also read the rest of the book — which includes chapters with a real ability to do good, covering global poverty, animal ethics, and other important topics. So should people actively try to court controversy with one view, in order to gain attention for another more important one?

Perhaps sometimes, but controversy can also just have bad consequences. His critics may view him as someone who says whatever he thinks, hang the consequences. But as Singer tells it, he gives public relations considerations plenty of thought.

One example is that Singer opposes efforts to advocate for open borders. Not because he thinks a world with freedom of movement is a bad idea per se, but rather because it may help elect leaders like Mr Trump.

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Anonymous answers: How risk-averse should talented young people be about their careers?

Blog post by · Published November 29, 2019

The following are excerpts from interviews with people whose work we respect and whose answers we offered to publish without attribution. This means that these quotes don’t represent the views of 80,000 Hours, and indeed in some cases, individual pieces of advice explicitly contradict our own. Nonetheless, we think it’s valuable to showcase the range of views on difficult topics where reasonable people might disagree.

The advice is particularly targeted at people whose approach to doing good aligns with the values of the effective altruism (EA) community, but we expect much of it is more broadly useful.

This is the fifth in this series of posts with anonymous answers. You can find the complete collection here.

We’ve also released an audio version of some highlights of the series, which you can listen to here, or on the 80,000 Hours Podcast feed.

Did you just land on our site for the first time? After this you might like to read 80,000 Hours’ career guide.

Continue reading →

Anonymous contributors answer: If you were 18 again, what would you do differently this time around? And other personal career reflections.

Blog post by · Published November 22, 2019

The following are excerpts from interviews with people whose work we respect and whose answers we offered to publish without attribution. This means that these quotes don’t represent the views of 80,000 Hours, and indeed in some cases, individual pieces of advice explicitly contradict our own. Nonetheless, we think it’s valuable to showcase the range of views on difficult topics where reasonable people might disagree.

The advice is particularly targeted at people whose approach to doing good aligns with the values of the effective altruism (EA) community, but we expect much of it is more broadly useful.

This is the fourth in this series of posts with anonymous answers. You can find the complete collection here.

We’ve also released an audio version of some highlights of the series, which you can listen to here, or on the 80,000 Hours Podcast feed.

Did you just land on our site for the first time? After this you might like to read about 80,000 Hours’ key ideas.

Continue reading →

#65 – Ambassador Bonnie Jenkins on 8 years of combating WMD terrorism

Podcast by and · Published November 19, 2019

Ambassador Bonnie Jenkins has had an incredible career in diplomacy and global security.

Today she’s a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and president of Global Connections Empowering Global Change, where she works on global health, infectious disease and defence innovation. And in 2017 she founded her own nonprofit, the Women of Color Advancing Peace, Security and Conflict Transformation (WCAPS).

But in this interview we focus on her time as Ambassador at the U.S. Department of State under the Obama administration, where she worked for eight years as Coordinator for Threat Reduction Programs in the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation.

In that role, Bonnie coordinated the Department of State’s work to prevent weapons of mass destruction (WMD) terrorism with programmes funded by other U.S. departments and agencies, and as well as other countries.

What was it like to be an ambassador focusing on an issue, rather than an ambassador of a country? Bonnie says the travel was exhausting. She could find herself in Africa one week, and Indonesia the next. She’d meet with folks going to New York for meetings at the UN one day, then hold her own meetings at the White House the next.

Each event would have a distinct purpose. For one, she’d travel to Germany as a US Representative, talking about why the two countries should extend their partnership. For another, she could visit the Food and Agriculture Organization to talk about why they need to think more about biosecurity issues. No day was like the last.

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Anonymous answers: What’s the thing people most overrate in their career?

Blog post by · Published November 18, 2019

The following are excerpts from interviews with people whose work we respect and whose answers we offered to publish without attribution. This means that these quotes don’t represent the views of 80,000 Hours, and indeed in some cases, individual pieces of advice explicitly contradict our own. Nonetheless, we think it’s valuable to showcase the range of views on difficult topics where reasonable people might disagree.

The advice is particularly targeted at people whose approach to doing good aligns with the values of the effective altruism (EA) community, but we expect much of it is more broadly useful.

This is the third in this series of posts with anonymous answers. You can find the complete collection here.

We’ve also released an audio version of some highlights of the series, which you can listen to here, or on the 80,000 Hours Podcast feed.

Did you just land on our site for the first time? After this you might like to read about 80,000 Hours’ key ideas.

Continue reading →

Advice on how to read our advice

Article by · Published November 2019

We’ve found that readers sometimes interpret or apply our advice in ways we didn’t anticipate and wouldn’t exactly recommend. That’s hard to avoid when you’re writing for a range of people with different personalities and initial views.

To help get on the same page, here’s some advice about our advice, for those about to launch into reading our site.

We want our writing to inform people’s views, but only in proportion to the likelihood that we’re actually right. So we need to make sure you have a balanced perspective on how compelling the evidence is for the different claims we make on the site, and how much weight to put on our advice in your situation.

What follows is a list of points to bear in mind when reading our site, and some thoughts on how to avoid the communication problems we face.

We’ve been wrong before, and we’ll be wrong again

We still have a lot to learn about how people can best have a positive impact with their careers. This means, unfortunately, that we make mistakes and change our advice over time. And this means that in a couple of years, we’ll no longer stand by some of the claims we make today.

Our positions can change because the world changes — for instance, a problem that was more pressing in the past can receive lots of attention and become less pressing over time. Our positions can also change as we learn more —

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Before committing to management consulting, consider directly entering priority paths, policy, startups, and other options

Article by · Published November 2019

Many people we advise seem to think that management consulting is the best way to establish their career and gain career capital in their first one or two jobs after their undergraduate degree.

Because of this, people we advise often don’t spend much time generating additional options once they’ve received a management consulting offer, or considering alternatives before they apply to consulting in the first place. However, we think that for people who share our ‘longtermist’ view of global priorities, there are often even better options for career capital.

We’ve even met people who already have PhDs from top programmes in relevant areas but who think they need to do consulting to gain even more career capital, which we think is rarely the best option.

This is even more true of other prestigious generalist corporate jobs, such as investment banking, corporate law, professional services, and also perhaps to options like Teach for America (if you don’t intend to go into education) and MBAs. We provide a little more detail on these alternatives below.

We think this mistaken impression is in part due to our old career guide, which featured consulting and other prestigious corporate jobs prominently in our article on career capital. (We explain how our views have changed over time and the mistakes we made presenting them in the appendix.)

We want to clarify that while we think consulting is a good option for career capital early in your career (especially for practical “do-er”

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#64 – Bruce Schneier on how insecure electronic voting could break the United States — and surveillance without tyranny

Podcast by and · Published October 25, 2019

November 3 2020, 10:32PM: CNN, NBC, and FOX report that Donald Trump has narrowly won Florida, and with it, re-election.

November 3 2020, 11:46PM: The NY Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal report that some group has successfully hacked electronic voting systems across the country, including Florida. The malware has spread to tens of thousands of machines and deletes any record of its activity, so the returning officer of Florida concedes they actually have no idea who won the state — and don’t see how they can figure it out.

What on Earth happens next?

Today’s guest — world-renowned computer security expert Bruce Schneier — thinks this scenario is plausible, and the ensuing chaos would sow so much distrust that half the country would never accept the election result.

Unfortunately the US has no recovery system for a situation like this, unlike Parliamentary democracies, which can just rerun the election a few weeks later.

The constitution says the state legislature decides, and they can do so however they like; one tied local election in Texas was settled by playing a hand of poker.

Elections serve two purposes. The first is the obvious one: to pick a winner. The second, but equally important, is to convince the loser to go along with it — which is why hacks often focus on convincing the losing side that the election wasn’t fair.

Schneier thinks there’s a need to agree how this situation should be handled before something like it happens, and America falls into severe infighting as everyone tries to turn the situation to their political advantage.

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A framework for comparing global problems in terms of expected impact

Article by · Last updated October 2019 · First published April 2016

Suppose you’re trying to figure out whether to learn about health in developing countries; or whether to become a researcher in solar energy; or whether to campaign for criminal justice reform in the USA. Which of these areas is most effective to focus on?

A year’s work on some problems can help a lot more people than a year’s worth of work on other problems. In fact, our analysis suggests that which problem areas you choose to work on may be the single biggest determinant of the social impact you have with your career.

We often make use of an informal framework for comparing problems in terms of their potential for an additional person to have a positive impact: scale, neglectedness, solvability and personal fit. Here’s a popular introduction to the framework.

Applying the informal version of the framework is useful, and good enough for many situations, but it can lead to some issues like double counting. In this article, we outline a more precise, quantitative version of the framework, and give more details on how to apply it to make your own comparisons of areas.

The framework was first created by Coefficient Giving. We further developed this process in collaboration with staff at the Future of Humanity Institute, a former research group at the University of Oxford that advised policy-makers and major decision-makers on how to prioritise global problems (learn more about global priorities research).

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How useful are longer-term career plans?

Article by · Last updated October 2019 · First published October 2019

There are two main types of mistakes one can make with career plans: having an overly rigid and specific plan, and having no long-term plans at all. We see both issues in our advising.

In the rest of this article, we give some arguments for and against long-term career planning, and explain how we aim to strike the balance between both types of mistake.

“Plans are useless but planning is essential.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower

We start with the arguments against long-term plans, and then cover the arguments in favour of them.

Some arguments against long-term plans

Many of our readers get paralysed thinking about long-term options. It’s easy to see your choice of career as a single decision that you have to “get right” immediately, creating a lot of anxiety. In reality, most of the time you’re only committing to a job for a couple of years, and you’ll have many opportunities to shift course in the future.

Your preferences will also change over your career (more than you think), the world will change (including which problems are most pressing and what the key bottlenecks are), and you will learn a huge amount about your skills and which options are best.

Most people we know who are having a big impact today wouldn’t have predicted they’d be doing the kind of work they’re doing ten years ago.

This means it’s not useful to make detailed long-term plans.

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Anonymous answers: How have you seen talented people fail in their work?

Blog post by · Published October 10, 2019

The following are excerpts from interviews with people whose work we respect and whose answers we offered to publish without attribution. This means that these quotes don’t represent the views of 80,000 Hours, and indeed in some cases, individual pieces of advice explicitly contradict our own. Nonetheless, we think it’s valuable to showcase the range of views on difficult topics where reasonable people might disagree.

The advice is particularly targeted at people whose approach to doing good aligns with the values of the effective altruism (EA) community, but we expect much of it is more broadly useful.

This is the second in this series of posts with anonymous answers. You can find the complete collection here.

We’ve also released an audio version of some highlights of the series, which you can listen to here, or on the 80,000 Hours Podcast feed.

Did you just land on our site for the first time? After this you might like to read about 80,000 Hours’ key ideas.

Continue reading →

Anonymous advice: What’s good career advice you wouldn’t want to have your name on?

Blog post by · Published October 3, 2019

The following are excerpts from interviews with people whose work we respect and whose answers we offered to publish without attribution. This means that these quotes don’t represent the views of 80,000 Hours, and indeed in some cases, individual pieces of advice explicitly contradict our own. Nonetheless, we think it’s valuable to showcase the range of views on difficult topics where reasonable people might disagree.

The advice is particularly targeted at people whose approach to doing good aligns with the values of the effective altruism (EA) community, but we expect much of it is more broadly useful.

This is the first in a series of posts with anonymous answers to a range of questions. You can find the complete collection here.

We’ve also released an audio version of some highlights of the series, which you can listen to here, or on the 80,000 Hours Podcast feed.

Did you just land on our site for the first time? After this you might like to read about 80,000 Hours’ key ideas.

Continue reading →

Have we helped you have a bigger social impact? Our annual impact survey 2019

Blog post by · Published September 17, 2019

Briefly, once a year, we at 80,000 Hours ask you to tell us if we’ve helped you have a larger social impact.

We and our donors need to know which of our programs are helping people enough to continue or scale up, and it’s only by hearing your stories that we can make these decisions well.

You can also let us know where we’ve fallen short, which helps us fix problems with our advice.

So, if our podcast, job board, articles, advising or other services have somehow contributed to your life or career plans, please take 3–10 minutes to let us know how:

https://80000hours.org/impact-survey/

We’ve refreshed the survey this year, hopefully making it easier to fill out than in the past.

We’ll keep this appeal up for the next week, but it would be great if you could fill it out now so we can start working through your stories.

Thanks so much!

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#63 – Vitalik Buterin on effective altruism, better ways to fund public goods, the blockchain’s problems so far, and how it could yet change the world

Podcast by and · Published September 3, 2019

Historically, progress in the field of cryptography has had major consequences. It has changed the course of major wars, made it possible to do business on the internet, and enabled private communication between both law-abiding citizens and dangerous criminals. Could it have similarly significant consequences in future?

Today’s guest — Vitalik Buterin — is world-famous as the lead developer of Ethereum, a successor to the cryptographic-currency Bitcoin, which added the capacity for smart contracts and decentralised organisations. Buterin first proposed Ethereum at the age of 20, and by the age of 23 its success had likely made him a billionaire.

At the same time, far from indulging hype about these so-called ‘blockchain’ technologies, he has been candid about the limited good accomplished by Bitcoin and other currencies developed using cryptographic tools — and the breakthroughs that will be needed before they can have a meaningful social impact. In his own words, “blockchains as they currently exist are in many ways a joke, right?”

But Buterin is not just a realist. He’s also an idealist, who has been helping to advance big ideas for new social institutions that might help people better coordinate to pursue their shared goals.

By combining theories in economics and mechanism design with advances in cryptography, he has been pioneering the new interdiscriplinary field of ‘cryptoeconomics’. Economist Tyler Cowen has observed that, “at 25, Vitalik appears to repeatedly rediscover important economics results from famous papers — without knowing about the papers at all.”

Though its applications have faced major social and technical problems, Ethereum has been used to crowdsource investment for projects and enforce contracts without the need for a central authority. But the proposals for new ways of coordinating people are far more ambitious than that.

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