New releases - Page 29 of 48 - 80,000 Hours

Even if we can’t lower catastrophic risks now, we should do something now so we can do more later

Blog post by Robert Wiblin · Published December 18th, 2015

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Does that fit with your schedule Mr President?

A line of argument I frequently encounter is that it is too early to do anything about ‘global catastrophic risks’ today (these are also sometimes called ‘existential risks’).

For context, see our page on assessing the biggest problems in the world, evaluation of opportunities to lower catastrophic risks and our review of becoming an AI safety researcher.

This line of argument doesn’t apply so much to preventing the use of nuclear weapons, climate change, or containing disease pandemics – the potential to act on these today is about at the same level as it will be in the future.

But what about new technologies that don’t exist yet: artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, atomically precise manufacturing, and others we haven’t thought about yet? There’s a case that we should wait until they are closer to actually being developed – at that point we will have a much better idea of:

what form those technologies will take, if any at all;
what can be done to make them less risky;
who we need to talk to to make that happen.

Superficially this argument seems very reasonable. Each hour of work probably does get more valuable the closer you are to a ‘critical juncture in history.’ Things clearly could have been done directly to change nuclear weapons policy and the direction of the Cold War in the 40s and 50s.

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Existential risk

What’s the easiest way anyone can have a big social impact?

Blog post by Benjamin Todd · Published December 16th, 2015

Many people want a career that contributes to the world, that helps others live happier lives. To do this, some become teachers, some work in the nonprofit sector, and others work in many other sectors. Sometimes this involves significant personal sacrifice – at the very least, “socially good” jobs usually have lower earnings.

Let’s suppose you want to minimise sacrifice and maximise social impact. What should you choose then? What would be good is a career option that’s:

Open to most of our audience (college grads in developed countries).
Involves little or no sacrifice.
Has as large a social impact as possible, with high confidence.

I think a path like this exists, as I’ll argue in the rest of this post. I call it the easy baseline:

Take whichever job you’d find most personally fulfilling.
Give 10% of your income to the world’s poorest people.

As of 2008, you can give your income to the world’s poorest people through GiveDirectly, a charity that provides one-off cash transfers to the poorest people in Kenya via mobile app. Every $1 you give results in $0.90 in the hands of one of the world’s poorest people. This intervention could soak up billions of dollars in the coming years, so could be pursued by many people.

If you want to have a social impact with your career, giving 10% is the easiest thing you can do, and I think almost everyone reading this should do it. You can take a public pledge to do so in just a few minutes.

Below I’ll explain in more detail why doing so is such an attractive option.

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Earning to Give

Plan change story: from neuroscience academia to cost-effectiveness research

Blog post by Roman Duda · Published December 8th, 2015

Hauke did a PhD in Neuroscience and was planning to go into academia. But after reading our research, he changed his plans and applied to jobs in German politics, consulting, tech-startups and our parent organisation, the Centre for Effective Altruism. He’s now Director of Research at Giving What We Can, where he researches which charities most effectively alleviate extreme poverty.

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Lehua closed down her fundraising startup after reading our blog: plan change story

Blog post by Robert Wiblin · Published December 3rd, 2015

Learning about ‘counterfactual analysis’ threw some puts on sunglasses cold water on Lehua’s startup idea.

Lehua Gray’s story is an interesting ‘significant plan change’ because she increased her social impact simply by realising what she was doing was not accomplishing anything when the true counterfactual was taken into account.

Lehua is an entrepreneur in Texas who studied environmental sciences but afterwards taught herself coding. In late 2014, along with two co-founders she had just met at the eBay Hackathon, she founded a company that offered charities an innovative fundraising platform and took a cut of the money raised. Her role in the startup was a combination of coding, UX and sales.

The team’s hope was to make the viral nature of the ‘ice-bucket challenge’ replicable. In their platform, someone would donate money to a charity, but it would only actually be delivered if, say, 3 friends who they nominated matched their donation. They might also be offered the option to do a public challenge on social media that would spread the fundraiser instead of donating the full amount, as in the ‘ice-bucket challenge’.

Over a period of 9 months they had built this platform and were improving it while some charities tested it out.

However, in the first half of 2015 Lehua started following me on Facebook and so started regularly encountering and reading new 80,000 Hours’ blog posts about how to have more social impact.

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Fundraising

How to pursue a career in research to lower the risks from superintelligent machines: a new career review.

Blog post by Robert Wiblin · Published December 1st, 2015

This is a summary of our full career review on artificial intelligence risk research.

Have you read the profile and think you want to contribute to artificial intelligence risk research? Fill out this form and we’ll see if we can help.

Many people we coach are interested in doing research into artificial intelligence (AI), in particular how to lower the risk that superintelligent machines do harmful things not intended by their creators – a field usually referred to as ‘AI risk research’. The reasons people believe this is a particularly pressing area of research are outlined in sources such as:

The book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by University of Oxford philosopher Prof Nick Bostrom.
This more accessible introduction from Wait But Why.
This GiveWell cause investigation.
This cause description and associated papers from the Global Priorities Project.

Our goal with this career review was not to assess the cause area of AI risk research – on that we defer to the authors above. Rather we wanted to present some concrete guidance for the growing number of people who want to work on the problem.

We spoke to the leaders in the field, including top academics, the head of MIRI and managers in AI companies, and the key findings are:

Some organisations working on this problem,

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Working at effective altruist organisations: good or bad for career capital?

Blog post by Benjamin Todd · Published November 30th, 2015

Working in effective altruism directly is a good way to build career capital in some respects, and a bad way in others. How about on balance?

Many people in our community are interested in working at “effective altruist” (EA) organisations, which I define as organisations whose leaders aim to do the most good on the basis of evidence and reason, and explicity identify as part of the effective altruism movement (see a list).

These jobs are often seen as higher-impact and more fulfilling than alternatives, but there’s a common worry: they’ll provide worse career capital, putting you in a worse position in the long-term.

I argued here that career capital might not be a strong enough consideration to outweigh the additional impact.

In this post, I’ll explore whether the career capital you get from working at EA orgs really is worse than the alternatives. I’ll outline arguments give for and against, arguing the career capital is better than is often assumed.

Arguments against working in effective altruist organisations for career capital
Less prestige

The jobs are less prestigious – few people have heard of organisations like GiveWell or the Center for Effective Altruism – and so these jobs don’t provide as impressive general-purpose credentials as working at a brand name employer like Google or McKinsey.

Less concrete career progression

The jobs don’t come with an obvious career path.

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Why you should focus more on talent gaps, not funding gaps

Blog post by Benjamin Todd · Published November 27th, 2015

Update April 2019: We think that our use of the term ‘talent gaps’ in this post (and elsewhere) has caused some confusion. We’ve written a post clarifying what we meant by the term and addressing some misconceptions that our use of it may have caused. Most importantly, we now think it’s much more useful to talk about specific skills and abilities that are important constraints on particular problems rather than talking about ‘talent constraints’ in general terms. This page may be misleading if it’s not read in conjunction with our clarifications.

Update Aug 2021: See this update on how the balance of funding and people has changed the last five years.

Many members of the effective altruism community see making a difference primarily in terms of moving money to fill funding gaps rather than moving talent to fill talent gaps. This seems to me to be one of the community’s more serious mistakes, which causes us to:

Put too much weight on earning to give and fundraising.
Put too little weight on gaining expertise and developing the skills needed for direct work.
Overlook pressing causes that aren’t funding constrained.

In the rest of the post, I’ll:

Outline what I mean by talent gaps.
Suggest why the community might be biased towards focusing on funding gaps.

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One of the most exciting new effective altruist organisations: An interview with David Goldberg of the Founders Pledge

Blog post by William MacAskill · Published November 26th, 2015

It’s my pleasure to introduce David Goldberg to those who in the effective altruism community who don’t yet know him. He’s behind the Founders Pledge, which in just 8 months has raised $64 million in legally binding pledges of equity, is growing fast, and has got some very exciting (but currently confidential) plans in the works. I met him when I was representing 80,000 Hours at the Founders Forum conference earlier this year and introduced him in more depth to the idea of effective altruism, which he’s now built into the core of the Founders Pledge’s mission.

Tell us about your background

I did my undergraduate work at UCLA in Political Science and Public Policy and then continued with postgraduate study at the University of Cambridge focusing on International Relations. My plan was to get a PhD and then stay in academics and shape International Security policy. However a year in, I realised that the practical impact of my work would be marginal at best, so I finished with a Master’s degree and began to look for opportunities that would actually have a discernible effect on the world. I got involved with Founders Forum For Good — the precursor to what I do now with the Founders Pledge — where I focused on helping social entrepreneurs build and scale businesses. Before all that, I spent a couple years in finance in the US, started and sold a business in Europe, and ran a chain of Segway dealerships in California.

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Take the growth approach to evaluating startup nonprofits, not the marginal approach

Blog post by Benjamin Todd · Published November 26th, 2015

In its first 2 years, Google made no revenue. Did this indicate it was a bad idea to invest or work there?

We spent the summer in Y Combinator, and one of the main things we learned about is how Y Combinator identifies the best startups. What we learned made me worry that many in the effective altruism community are taking the wrong approach to evaluating startup non-profits.

In summary, I’ll argue:

There’s two broad approaches to assessing projects – the marginal cost-effectiveness approach and the growth approach.
The community today often wrongly applies the marginal approach to fast growing startups.
This means we’re supporting the wrong projects and not investing enough in growth.

At the end I’ll give some guidelines on how to use the growth approach to evaluate non-profits.

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Stop assuming ‘declining returns’ in small charities

Blog post by Benjamin Todd · Published November 24th, 2015

Amazon is one of the world’s largest companies and is still achieving lower marginal costs as it gets larger. Organisations with just a few people will frequently do much better as they get larger.

We often hear people in our community state, as if obvious, that becoming the 5th employee of an organisation creates less impact than becoming the 4th employee. Similarly, later donations are thought to create less impact than earlier donations. This sentiment was widespread in recent discussion about whether to donate to Giving What We Can, discussions on the EA forum about where to donate, and in discussions I’ve had with people about where to work.

The reason stated is “diminishing marginal returns”. The first staff members take the best opportunities, so the extra opportunities available at the margin are worse, so each extra staff member has less impact.

The problem is, assuming diminishing returns to small organisations contradicts basic economic theory.

According to economics, as an organisation scales up, there’s two opposing forces:

Economies of scale.
Diminishing returns.

Economies of scale are a force for increasing returns, and they win out while still at a small scale, so the impact of the 5th staff member can easily be greater than the 4th.

Economies of scale are caused by:

Gains from specialisation. In a one person organisation,

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Are our most engaged readers overweighting career capital?

Blog post by Benjamin Todd · Published November 19th, 2015

We’ve spoken a lot about the importance of building career capital. But now, it seems like some of our most engaged readers are putting more weight than we think they should career capital, and not enough on short-run impact.

A situation many people face is something like the following:

The interesting project: Do something where there’s a small chance you really excel, achieve something exceptional and have a big impact.
The safe project: Do something that offers a clear path to good options in the future.

The first option is usually something like doing a for-good startup, capitalising on a side project, or taking an unusual job with a mentor. The second is usually something like doing consulting, working at a prestigious large firm or doing graduate study.

The debate usually boils down to the following: the first path has a higher impact, but the second offers better career capital. Then people reason that since career capital is more important than impact early in their career, they should go with the second option.

That’s often going to be the right answer, but here’s a couple of reasons it might be a mistake.

You might be biased

There’s several biases that push in favour of the safe project.

Ambiguity aversion. Usually it’s relatively clear what the safe project involves and what concrete next steps it’ll lead to (e.g.

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In case you missed it: Open Phil would like to fund a science policy think tank

Blog post by Benjamin Todd · Published November 18th, 2015

It appears to us that the strongest scientific funders have little interest in policy analysis and advocacy, while the strongest funders of policy analysis and advocacy tend not to take interest in the scientific research issues discussed in this post. We’re interested in the idea of combining – in a dedicated organization – great scientists and great policy analysts, in order to put in the substantial amount of work needed to develop and promote the best possible proposals for improving science policy and infrastructure. It would be a high-risk, potentially very high-return project to attempt. We aren’t aware of any attempts to do something along these lines at the moment, and we think it could be a risk worth taking.

So far, we haven’t been able to find a person or organization who seems both qualified and willing to lead the creation of the sort of organization described in this post. We plan to continue looking for such a person or organization, while continuing to discuss, refine and reflect on these ideas.

If you might be able to get into a position where you’ll have the right expertise in a couple of years, that could be a good option to pursue. Check in with Open Phil to learn more about what they’re looking for.

Read example research questions on science policy and infrastructure.

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Science policy & infrastructure

Why and how to found a (GiveWell) nonprofit

Blog post by Benjamin Todd · Published November 13th, 2015

We’ve argued against nonprofit jobs as an early career move, because many have little impact and you often don’t get good career progression.

However, there’s a certain type of nonprofit opportunity that we think is very exciting: start a nonprofit focused on implementing an evidence-backed intervention in international development i.e. try to make the next Against Malaria Foundation.

Why?

There’s lots of evidence-backed interventions that don’t have a well-run, transparent organisation implementing them.
Scaling up many of these interventions can be expected to have a big impact.
There’s a huge pool of funding for nonprofits going after these opportunities, most notably from GiveWell, but also foundations like Gates and CIFF, as well as government aid agencies. These groups would like to fund more nonprofits, but can’t find enough that meet their criteria.

We’ve talked about this opportunity for years – see our exploratory career profile on it – and it has become even more pressing recently. The money flowing through GiveWell is growing rapidly, but the pipeline of nonprofits isn’t.

GiveWell recently made a post about exactly the sorts of nonprofits they’d like to fund:

Charities that implement GiveWell’s priority programs: vitamin A supplementation, immunizations, conditional cash transfers, micronutrient fortification, or even bednets and deworming (since our top charities that focus on the latter two have limited room for more funding).

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The story of 80,000 Hours (podcast)

Blog post by Benjamin Todd · Published November 12th, 2015

Here’s a podcast with me by Campus Kudos on:

How 80,000 Hours got started.
How I ended up working at 80,000 Hours.
What it was like being in Y Combinator as a nonprofit.
Our plans for the next year.

I’d also recommend checking out Campus Kudos. Often the best way to learn about a career and get a job is to speak to lots of people already in that path, but when you’re at college it’s hard to get the right connections. Campus Kudos aims to solve exactly this problem. If you’re a US student, you can sign up and be introduced to people willing to answer your career questions and provide free mentoring. Check it out and let me know how you get on ([email protected]).

Listen to the podcast

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Why even our readers should save enough to live for 6-24 months

Blog post by Benjamin Todd · Published November 10th, 2015

Your ‘personal runway’ is how many months you can easily live if you stopped working. It’s a product of the cash and sellable assets you have on hand, your living expenses, and your ability to draw on your friends and family in times of need.

For instance, if you have $10,000 of savings and live on $1,000 per month, your personal runway is 10 months. If you could quickly and comfortably move back in with your parents or stay on a friend’s couch, cutting your living expenses by $500 a month, then your personal runway is 20 months. If you have non-work income, that boosts your runway further. If you’re lucky enough to have a family who would support you indefinitely in a productive lifestyle, then your runway is indefinitely long.

I think most people we advise should aim to have at least 6 – 12 months’ personal runway, and up to 12 – 24 could be good for flexibility.

I’ve noticed some people in the community who don’t have much runway and don’t appear to be saving, because they are donating a lot of income or doing very low wage work. Unless you have family or friends who’ll support you, you should cut back on donations and save until you’ve got enough runway.

Some more detail follows.

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Our new tool can help you make the right career decision

Blog post by Robert Wiblin · Published November 4th, 2015

We’ve released a new tool to help you think through career decisions, such as which major to study, which jobs to apply for, and which of various offers to accept. We’ve tested it in one-on-one coaching over the last six months, and are now making it freely available.

These decisions can both be very important and very difficult. This tool will make these decisions easier by walking you through a step-by-step process, asking you the questions we use during coaching, and checking that you’ve applied the most important results of our research. We designed the process using the scientific literature on decision making to reduce bias and it has received positive feedback from many users:

Try out the tool.
Share it on Facebook or Twitter.

It won’t tell you what to do, but it will make sure you haven’t missed anything obvious, are asking the right questions, and have a clear next step. It takes about 30 min to run through.

We will continue to improve the tool in coming months based on your feedback and our experience in coaching.

If you know a friend or family member trying to make a career decision you might also like to pass it on to them!

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Common investing mistakes in the effective altruism community

Blog post by Benjamin Todd · Published October 28th, 2015

This was written in 2015 and no longer reflects all my current thinking, though I think still makes some good points.

Many in our community are investing money to donate later, as well as saving for retirement and emergencies. Here’s some mistakes I’m concerned they’re making when investing.

I’m not a qualified financial advisor, and this should not be taken as investment advice. For speed, I’m also not referencing all my claims and this piece isn’t as thoroughly researched as normal – I just want to get the ideas out there. Please do your own research before making any investments. This post is based on personal interests of mine, and was not written in work time.

This post is aimed at people who already understand the basics of personal finance and investing. Some starting points for an introduction are here and here.

In summary:

Don’t expect to earn 7-10% returns from US equities. It’s more likely to be 1-7%. Adjust your assumptions about retirement savings and giving now vs. giving later calculations accordingly.
The baseline portfolio is the global market portfolio, roughly 40% international stocks (half US, a quarter emerging and a quarter other developed markets), 20% corporate bonds, 30% international government bonds, and 15% real assets. If you don’t think you can beat the market, this is much closer to what you should invest in than 100% US equities.

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How to write a career plan

Blog post by Benjamin Todd · Published October 20th, 2015

We see lots of career planning mistakes.

Some people simply don’t have a plan, and hope the future will figure itself out. This leads them to take steps that seem attractive in the short-run but don’t help in the long-run e.g. we’ve met quite a few people who ended up regretting doing a philosophy PhD.

Other people try to figure out “what to do with their lives”, or make a detailed “10 year plan”. That doesn’t work either.

Instead, we recommend:

Have a plan, but make it flexible – we call this flexible plan a “vision”.
Review your plan at least once a year. Think like a scientist testing a hypothesis.
Make sure you gain flexible career capital, that way you’ll be in a better position no matter what the future holds.

For long-term readers, what’s new?
1. New content on how to make your “vision”

We added a new step-by-step process for making your plan based on “ABZ planning”, an idea we found in Reid Hoffman’s excellent book “The Start-Up of You”.

Here’s the process we recommend:

First start by asking:

What does the world most need? List the 1-3 causes that you think are most pressing. If you’re trying to make an impact, then you need to start by understanding what the world most needs. Focusing on how you can help others is also the key to being successful and fulfilled.

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Startup employees don’t earn more

Blog post by Ben West · Published October 7th, 2015

Image by Sebastiaan ter Burg. License: CC-BY-SA 2.0

Since the average startup founder who makes it to Series A earns more than a large company employee, many believe that early-stage startup employees also earn more (albeit less than founders). Dustin Moskovitz has even claimed that startup early employees have better earnings prospects than founders.

We’ve looked at the data, and this does not seem to be true on average. There are strong reasons why people might want to work at a startup (e.g. career capital), and it’s true the employees of the most successful startups will earn more; but someone deciding between working at a startup vs. a bigger company should rarely be making the decision based on income. On average, startup early employees earn at most only a little more than developers at larger companies.

Three estimates of how much startup early employees earn, including both equity and salary

According to AngelList, early-stage backend developers, for example, generally get about $110,000 in salary and .7% equity (salary data from Riviera is similar).

While the startup salary data is fairly clear, it’s hard to know how to value the equity portion of their compensation. Below are three different methods for doing so, which all show that developers at early-stage startups at most earn only a little more than they would at a large tech company.

1) Using average exit values

Let’s assume the 0.7% equity stake will eventually get diluted down to .35% at time of exit (a typical amount of dilution from Series A to exit).

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New opportunities to work in effective altruism

Blog post by Benjamin Todd · Published October 6th, 2015

Our parent organisation, the Centre for Effective Altruism, is doing a recruitment round, and is hiring for a lot of positions. If you’d like to work at an effective altruist organisation, these are some great opportunities:

Find more details.

Please email recruitment [at] centreforeffectivealtruism [dot] org if you have any queries or would like to request any alternate arrangements to the usual application process.

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