New releases

The idea this week: the cynical case against voting and getting involved in politics doesn’t hold up.

Does your vote matter? Around half of the world’s population is expected to see national elections this year, and voters in places like Taiwan, India, and Mexico have already gone to the polls. The UK and France both recently scheduled elections.

And of course, the 2024 US national election campaigns are off and running, with control of the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the White House in contention — as well as many state houses, governorships, and other important offices.

Sometimes people think that their vote doesn’t matter because they’re just a drop in the ocean.

But my colleague Rob has explored the research on this topic, and he concluded that voting can actually be a surprisingly impactful way to spend your time. So it’s not just your civic duty — it can also be a big opportunity to influence the world for the better.

That’s because, while the chance your vote will change the outcome of an election is small, it can still matter a lot given the massive impact governments can have.

To take a simple model: if the US government discretionary spending is $6.4 trillion over four years, and you have a 1 in 10 million chance of changing the outcome of the national election,

The idea this week: your career choices may be much more important than you think — and we have a lot of resources to help you think them through.

Your career is one of your biggest opportunities to make a difference in the world and also have a rewarding and interesting life.

That’s why we wrote our career guide — to help people create a career plan that’s aimed at having a positive impact and a fulfilling career.

But there’s a lot of ground to cover, so we couldn’t do it all in a single book.

That’s why we wrote our advanced series. It covers our most in-depth research on questions like:

• What does it mean to “make a difference”?
• What is “longtermism,” and why does it matter?
• Is it ever OK to take a harmful job?
• Can we balance doing what we love with having a positive impact?
• What role should finding your personal strengths play in your career?
• How should you coordinate with others when trying to do good?
• How long should you explore different career options?
• And a whole lot more!

We hope the articles in our advanced series help you tackle these questions and accelerate you along your path to an impactful career.

See the whole series here or just browse selected topics below.

The idea this week: nuclear war remains a horrifying possibility — our new nuclear career review examines what you could be doing about it.

Here at 80,000 Hours, we’re often trying to find ways to protect future generations.

If we’d been trying to do that in 1950, one thing would have been at the top of everyone’s minds: the terrifying threat of nuclear annihilation. Indeed, many of the world’s greatest thinkers, politicians, and communicators devoted their careers to understanding and reducing the threat — people like Thomas Schelling, Carl Sagan and even, in his later years, Albert Einstein.

But since the end of the Cold War, the nuclear expert has all but disappeared.

And that’s a problem.

It’s a problem because the risk of nuclear war didn’t just disappear with the Cold War.

In fact, the world is currently facing many nuclear challenges:

• The US is modernising its nuclear arsenal.
• China is on track to quintuple their nuclear forces by 2030.
• Cooling relations between the US and Russia mean that existing arms reduction treaties (like New START) are looking very likely to lapse.
• Rising tensions in the Middle East, alongside the collapse of the Iran deal, mean we could very possibly see a new nuclear weapons state in the near future.

The idea this week: there are many potentially high-impact career paths — so don’t limit your options too soon.

Which careers are best for helping others? It’s a simple-sounding question, but it’s not so simple to answer.

We’ve written about this question extensively, and it’s a key part of our career guide. We also have a list of the highest-impact career paths our research has found so far.

Readers naturally focus most on the top of the list. But while we want readers to consider our top-ranked paths (and we think it’s good to be transparent about what we think are the best opportunities to do good), you shouldn’t underrate the personal factors that will make one path or another a better fit for you — both in terms of social impact and personal satisfaction.

So this week we wanted to highlight a few paths and career steps (in no particular order) that we think people should consider if they want to have a lot of impact:

1. Journalism

Public discourse shapes the way societies understand and react to key problems in the world, and journalists have a significant role in shaping it. So if you can become an influential journalist, you might be able to have a big impact by drawing attention to pressing world problems, how to solve them, and how to generally think well about these issues.

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.