New releases

The idea this week: working on a highly neglected or pre-paradigmatic issue could be a way to make a big positive difference.

We usually focus on how people can help tackle what we think are the biggest global catastrophic risks. But there are lots of other pressing problems we think also deserve more attention — some of which are especially highly neglected.

Compared to our top-ranked issues, these problems generally don’t have well-developed fields dedicated to them. So we don’t have as much concrete advice about how to tackle them, and they might be full of dead ends.

But if you can find ways to meaningfully contribute (and have the kind of self-directed mindset necessary, doing so could well be your top option.

Here they are, in no particular order:

1. Risks of stable totalitarianism

If we put aside risks of extinction, one of the biggest dangers to the long-term future of humanity might be the potential for an ultra-long-lasting and terrible political regime. As technology advances and globalisation and homogenisation increase, a stable form of totalitarianism potentially could take hold, enabled by improved surveillance, advanced lie detection, or an obedient AI workforce. We’re not sure how big or tractable these risks are, but more research into the area could be highly valuable. Read more.

2. Long-term focused space governance

Humanity’s future,

About 80,000 Hours

80,000 Hours’ mission is to get talented people working on the world’s most pressing problems.

Since being founded in 2011, we have helped popularise using your career to ambitiously pursue impact while thinking seriously about cause and intervention prioritisation, as well as grow the fields of AI safety, AI governance, and global catastrophic biological risk reduction, among others.

Over a million people visit our website each year, and thousands of people have told us that they’ve significantly changed their career plans due to our work. Surveys conducted by our primary funder, Open Philanthropy, show that 80,000 Hours is one of the single biggest drivers of talent moving into work related to reducing global catastrophic risks.

The role

As a senior product manager, you would:

• Research, propose, and implement product innovations to make the 80,000 Hours website more useful and delightful for talented people interested in having a high impact career
  • For example, you could lead on refreshing the site’s visual identity to make it more appealing, or creating and integrating a custom LLM to help users navigate the content.
• Lead on strategies for gathering and using user feedback and industry research to inform product decisions and assess their success
• Work with our developers and content team to implement product changes, eventually aiming to manage and hire full-time staff
• Decide on the metrics we should use to track success and implement systems for doing so
• Generally help grow the impact of the site

This is a senior role.

About 80,000 Hours

80,000 Hours’ mission is to get talented people working on the world’s most pressing problems. Since being founded in 2011, we have helped:

• Popularise using your career to ambitiously pursue impact while thinking seriously about cause and intervention prioritisation
• Grow the fields of AI safety, AI governance, global catastrophic biological risk reduction, and global catastrophic risk reduction capacity building (among others)
• Fill hundreds of roles at many of the most impactful organisations tackling the worlds’ most pressing problems

Over a million people visit our website each year, and thousands of people have told us that they’ve significantly changed their career plans due to our work. Surveys conducted by our primary funder, Open Philanthropy, show that 80,000 Hours is one of the single biggest drivers of talent moving into work related to reducing global catastrophic risks.

Our most popular pieces are read by over 1,000 people each month, and they are among the most important ways we help people shift their careers towards higher-impact options.

The roles

We’re listing these roles together because there’s a lot of overlap in what they’ll focus on, and we suspect some of the same candidates could be strong fits for both.

The main difference is that the writer role focuses more on the craft of writing compelling and informative pieces for the audience, and the writer-researcher role focuses more on supporting the knowledge base that informs the pieces.

The idea this week: technical expertise is needed in AI governance and policy.

How do you prevent a new and rapidly evolving technology from spiralling out of control? How can governments, policymakers, and civil society ensure that we’re making the best decisions about how to integrate artificial intelligence into our society?

To answer these kinds of questions, we need people with technical expertise — in machine learning, information security, computing hardware, or other relevant technical domains — to work in AI governance and policy making.

Of course, there are roles for people with many different backgrounds to play in AI governance and policy. Experience in law, international coordination, communications, operations management, and more are all potentially valuable in this space.

But we think people with technical backgrounds may underrate their ability to contribute to AI policy. We’ve long regarded AI technical safety research as an extremely high-impact career option, and we still do. But this sometimes gives readers the impression that if they’ve got a technical background or aptitude, it’s the main path for them to consider if they want to help prevent an AI-related catastrophe.

But this isn’t necessarily true.

Technical knowledge is crucial in AI governance for understanding the current landscape and likely trajectories of the technology, as well as for designing and implementing policies that can reduce the biggest risks.

In 1955, ten years after Robert Oppenheimer, Leslie Groves, and the 130,000 workers of the Manhattan Project built the first atomic bomb, the United States had 2,400 and Russia had 200. At present, the USA has over 3,000, Russia has over 4,000, and China is building an arsenal of hundreds. Most of these are hydrogen bombs many times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These modern arsenals no longer require a bomber plane to deliver them — ICBMs can throw bombs around the earth in half an hour. When we sleep, we sleep as targets of nuclear weapons.

A global thermonuclear war would be the most horrifying event to happen in humanity’s history. If cities were targeted, at the very least, tens of millions would instantly die just like the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Survivors described the scenes of those explosions as “just like Hell” and “burning as if scorching Heaven.”

Afterwards, hundreds of millions could starve due to economic collapse. It’s also possible the ozone layer would be damaged for years and temperatures would drop us into a nuclear winter. In the worst case scenario, this would render the northern hemisphere uninhabitable for years, causing an existential catastrophe.

Faced with this possible future, why don’t we agree it’s too horrible to allow and find a way to disarm? Since the invention of nuclear weapons,

If we were going to summarise all our advice on how to get career capital in three words, we’d say: build useful skills.

In other words, gain abilities that are valued in the job market — which makes your work more useful and makes it easier to bargain for the ingredients of a fulfilling job — as well as those that are specifically needed in tackling the world’s most pressing problems.

So today, we’re launching our series on the most useful skills for making a difference — which you can find here. It covers why we recommend each skill, how to get started learning them, and how to work out which is the best fit for you.

Each article looks at one of eight skill sets we think are most useful for solving the problems we think are most pressing:

• Policy and political skills

• Organisation-building

• Research

• Communicating ideas

• Software and tech skills

• Experience with an emerging power

• Engineering

• Expertise relevant to a top problem

Why are we releasing this now?

We think that many of our readers have come away from our site underappreciating the importance of career capital.

We’re excited to announce that the boards of Effective Ventures US and Effective Ventures UK have approved our selection committee’s choice of Niel Bowerman as the new CEO of 80,000 Hours.

I (Rob Wiblin) was joined on the selection committee by Will MacAskill, Hilary Greaves, Simran Dhaliwal, and Max Daniel.

80,000 Hours is a project of EV US and EV UK, though under Niel’s leadership, it expects to be spinning out and creating an independent legal structure, which will involve selecting a new board.

We want to thank Brenton Mayer, who has served as 80,000 Hours interim CEO since late 2022, for his dedication and thoughtful management. Brenton expressed enthusiasm about the committee’s choice, and he expects to take on the role of chief operations officer, where he will continue to work closely with Niel to keep 80,000 Hours running smoothly.

By the end of its deliberations, the selection committee agreed that Niel was the best candidate to be 80,000 Hours’ long-term CEO. We think Niel’s drive and attitude will help him significantly improve the organisation and shift its strategy to keep up with events in the world. We were particularly impressed by his ability to use evidence to inform difficult strategic decisions and lay out a clear vision for the organisation.

Niel was very forthcoming and candid with the committee about his weaknesses. His focus on getting frank feedback and using it to drive a self-improvement cycle really impressed the selection committee.

The idea this week: developing skills and habits takes time, effort, and using the right techniques.

At the start of a new year, we often reflect on how to improve and develop better habits. People often want to exercise more or become better at self-study. I, for one, wanted to consistently get to work earlier.

But actually making progress requires more than just wanting it — it takes a systematic approach. Doing this is a key part succeeding at your current job, improving your career trajectory, and even just being more fulfilled generally. (Read more in our article on all the evidence-based advice we found on how to be more successful in any job.)

You want to take something that’s a problem in your life and find a solution that becomes second nature.

For example, for some people, getting to work at an early hour is just part of their normal routine — they barely have to think about it. But if that’s not the case for you – like it wasn’t for me – you’ll need to make a conscious change, and work on it until it becomes second nature.

But lots of things block us from forming these new habits and skills.

The key is closing the loop — get feedback about your problem, analyse why you haven’t adopted the habit yet, make a change, test it out, and repeat:

1. Feedback – track your progress and your errors,

As we kick off 2024, we’re taking a moment to look back at our 2023 content.

We published a lot of pieces aimed at helping our readers have more impactful careers, including a completely updated career guide, our revamped advanced series, around 35 podcast episodes, dozens of blog posts, and a bunch of updates to our career reviews and problem profiles.

We’d like to highlight some of the new content that stands out to us:

Standout blog posts

• How to cope with rejection in your career — Luisa Rodriguez, one of the hosts of The 80,000 Hours podcast, wrote this powerful personal piece about her experience with career rejection, the unexpected benefits of getting rejected, and helpful tips for dealing with it that have worked for her. If you have ever struggled with rejection, I think this piece might help you feel less alone.

• My thoughts on parenting and having an impactful career — Michelle Hutchinson, the director of the one-on-one programme at 80,000 Hours, wrote this thoughtful reflection on her decision to become a parent, the effects of parenthood on her career and social impact, and the challenges and benefits of being a parent in a community of people trying to have an impactful career.

• Some thoughts on moderation in doing good — in this post, 80,000 Hours founder Ben Todd addressed why moderation may be underrated by people trying to have a big social impact and how to avoid the pitfalls of extremism.