New releases | Page 32 of 57 | 80,000 Hours

#7 – Julia Galef on making humanity more rational, what EA does wrong, and why Twitter isn’t all bad

Podcast by Robert Wiblin · Published September 13th, 2017

The scientific revolution in the 16th century was one of the biggest societal shifts in human history, driven by the discovery of new and better methods of figuring out who was right and who was wrong.

Julia Galef – a well-known writer and researcher focused on improving human judgment, especially about high stakes questions – believes that if we could develop new techniques to resolve disagreements, predict the future and make sound decisions together, we could again dramatically improve the world. We brought her in to talk about her ideas.

Julia has hosted the Rationally Speaking podcast since 2010, co-founded the Center for Applied Rationality in 2012, and is currently working for Open Philanthropy on an investigation of expert disagreements.

This interview complements a new detailed review of whether and how to follow Julia’s career path

We ended up speaking about a wide range of topics, including:

Her research on how people can have productive intellectual disagreements.
Why she once planned on becoming an urban designer.
Why she doubts people are more rational than 200 years ago.
What the effective altruism community is doing wrong.
What makes her a fan of Twitter (while I think it’s dystopian).
Whether more people should write books.
Whether it’s a good idea to run a podcast, and how she grew her audience.
Why saying you don’t believe X often won’t convince people you don’t.
Why she started a PhD in economics but then quit.
Whether she would recommend an unconventional ‘public intellectual’ career like her own.
Whether the incentives in the intelligence community actually support sound thinking.
Whether big institutions will actually pick up new tools for improving decision-making if they are developed.
How to start out pursuing a career in which you also try to enhance human judgement and foresight.

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Working at effective nonprofits

Career review by Roman Duda · Published September 2017

Working at effective nonprofits lets you have a big impact, whilst doing rewarding, meaningful work. But it’s crucial that you pick the right nonprofits — look for organisations working on urgent global problems, that are well-run and are short of staff. You should especially consider this option if you’ve already built up skills by working in the private sector or through graduate study.

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#6 – Toby Ord on why the long-term future of humanity matters more than anything else, and what we should do about it

Podcast by Robert Wiblin · Published September 6th, 2017

Of all the people whose well-being we should care about, only a small fraction are alive today. The rest are members of future generations who are yet to exist. Whether they’ll be born into a world that is flourishing or disintegrating – and indeed, whether they will ever be born at all – is in large part up to us. As such, the welfare of future generations should be our number one moral concern.

This conclusion holds true regardless of whether your moral framework is based on common sense, consequences, rules of ethical conduct, cooperating with others, virtuousness, keeping options open – or just a sense of wonder about the universe we find ourselves in.

That’s the view of Dr Toby Ord, a philosophy Fellow at the University of Oxford and co-founder of the effective altruism community. In this episode of the 80,000 Hours podcast Dr Ord makes the case that aiming for a positive long-term future is likely the best way to improve the world.

We then discuss common objections to long-termism, such as the idea that benefits to future generations are less valuable than those to people alive now, or that we can’t meaningfully benefit future generations beyond taking the usual steps to improve the present.

Later the conversation turns to how individuals can and have changed the course of history, what could go wrong and why, and whether plans to colonise Mars would actually put humanity in a safer position than it is today.

This episode goes deep into one of the most distinctive features of 80,000 Hours’ advice on doing good. It’s likely the most in-depth discussion of how we and the effective altruism community think about the long term future, and why we so often give it top priority.

If you prefer a book, Dr Toby Ord, an Oxford philosopher and advisor to 80,000 Hours, has recently published The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity which gives an overview of the moral importance of future generations, and what we can do to help them today.

We’ll mail you the book, for free

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We’ll also send you updates on our latest research, opportunities to work on existential risk, and news from the author.

If you’re already on our newsletter, email us at [email protected] to get a copy.

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#5 – Alex Gordon-Brown on making millions for charity each year by working in quant finance

Podcast by Robert Wiblin · Published August 28th, 2017

Quantitative financial trading is one of the highest paying parts of the world’s highest paying industry. 25 to 30 year olds with outstanding maths skills can earn millions a year in an obscure set of ‘quant trading’ firms, where they program computers with predefined algorithms to trade very quickly and effectively.

This makes it an attractive workplace for people who want to ‘earn to give’, and we know several people who are able to donate over a million dollars a year to effective charities by working in quant trading. Who are these people? What is the job like? And is there a risk that their trading work directly harms the world?

To learn about all this I spoke at length with Alexander Gordon-Brown, a Giving What We Can member who has worked as a quant trader in London for the last three and a half years and donated hundreds of thousands of pounds. We covered:

What quant traders do and how much they earn;
Whether their work is beneficial or harmful for the world;
How to figure out if you’re a good fit for quant trading, and if so how to break into the industry;
Whether Alex enjoys the work and finds it motivating, as well as what alternatives careers he considered;
What variety of positions are on offer in quant trading, and what the culture is like in the various firms;
How he decides where to donate, and whether he has persuaded his colleagues to join him in becoming major philanthropists.

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#4 – Howie Lempel on why we aren’t worried enough about the next pandemic — and specifically what we can do to stop it.

Podcast by Robert Wiblin and Howie Lempel · Published August 23rd, 2017

What natural disaster is most likely to kill more than 10 million human beings in the next 20 years?

Terrorism? Famine? An asteroid?

Actually it’s probably a pandemic: a deadly new disease that spreads out of control. We’ve recently seen the risks with Ebola and swine flu, but they pale in comparison to the Spanish flu which killed 3% of the world’s population in 1918 to 1920. If a pandemic of that scale happened again today, 200 million would die.

Looking back further, the Black Death killed 30 to 60% of Europe’s population, which would today be two to four billion globally.

The world is woefully unprepared to deal with new diseases. Many countries have weak or non-existent health services. Diseases can spread worldwide in days due to air travel. And international efforts to limit the spread of new diseases are slow, if they happen at all.

Even more worryingly, scientific advances are making it easier to create diseases much worse than anything nature could throw at us – whether by accident or deliberately.

In this in-depth interview I speak to Howie Lempel, who spent years studying pandemic preparedness for Open Philanthropy. We spend the first 20 minutes covering his work as a foundation grant-maker, then discuss how bad the pandemic problem is, why it’s probably getting worse, and what can be done about it. In the second half of the interview we go through what you personally could study and where you could work to tackle one of the worst threats facing humanity.

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These skills make you most employable. Coding isn’t one — can that be right?

Article by Benjamin Todd · Last updated August 2017 · First published July 2017

Which job skills will make you most employable?

Most data-driven analyses of this question that you might see in the media only look at which skills boost income or help you get a job.

But this isn’t all that matters. A skill could be highly paid, but only useful in a narrow range of jobs, giving you few options if you change your mind about what to do. A skill could also be highly paid right now, but at risk of being automated in the long-term. And ultimately people care about job satisfaction, and that is not much increased by higher income.

We teamed up with Tee Ponsukcharoen, a Fellow from Insight Data Science, to try to make a better analysis. As well as looking at income, we rated skills on satisfaction, risk of automation, and breadth of applicability.

The results were surprising. People assume that advancing technology means that coding and other STEM skills will be most valuable in the future. But our analysis found the opposite. Rather, the skills that gain the most from changing technology are social, analytical and management skills.

In the rest of the article, we explain our analysis, explore other relevant data, and come to a conclusion on which skills to learn (spoiler: don’t drop out of your coding course just yet!).

If you’d like to get more research like this in your inbox once a month,

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Is it fair to say that most social programmes don’t work?

Article by Benjamin Todd · Last updated August 2017 · First published July 2017

Image courtesy of A&ETV Beyond Scared Straight. Learn more about the effectiveness of Scared Straight.

Lots of government and charity programmes aim to improve education, health, unemployment and so on. How many of these efforts work?

The vast majority of social programs and services have not yet been rigorously evaluated, and…of those that have been rigorously evaluated, most (perhaps 75% or more), including those backed by expert opinion and less-rigorous studies, turn out to produce small or no effects, and, in some cases negative effects.

This estimate was made by David Anderson in 2008 on GiveWell’s blog. At that time, he was Assistant Director of the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy.

This has become a widely-quoted estimate, especially in the effective altruism community, and often gets simplified to “most social programmes don’t work”. But the estimate is almost ten years old, so we decided to investigate further. We spoke to Anderson again, as well as Eva Vivalt, the founder of AidGrade, and Danielle Mason, the Head of Research at the Education Endowment Foundation.

We concluded that the original estimate is reasonable, but that there are many important complications. It seems misleading to say that “most social programmes don’t work” without further clarification, but it’s true that by focusing on evidence-based methods you can have a significantly greater impact.

We’ll go through the estimates made by Anderson, Vivalt and Mason in turn,

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#3 – Dario Amodei on OpenAI and how AI will change the world for good and ill

Podcast by Robert Wiblin · Published July 21st, 2017

Just two years ago OpenAI didn’t exist. It’s now among the most elite groups of machine learning researchers. They’re trying to make an AI that’s smarter than humans and have $1b at their disposal.

Even stranger for a Silicon Valley start-up, it’s not a business, but rather a nonprofit founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman among others, to ensure the benefits of AI are distributed broadly to all of society.

I did a long interview with one of its first machine learning researchers, Dr Dario Amodei, to learn about:

OpenAI’s latest plans and research progress.
His paper Concrete Problems in AI Safety, which outlines five specific ways machine learning algorithms can act in dangerous ways their designers don’t intend – something OpenAI has to work to avoid.
How listeners can best go about pursuing a career in machine learning and AI development themselves.

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Which professions are paid too much given their value to society?

Blog post by Benjamin Todd · Published June 27th, 2017

Many jobs have spillover effects on the rest of society. For instance, the value of new treatments discovered by biomedical researchers is far greater than what they or their employers get paid, so they have positive spillovers. Other jobs have negative spillovers, such as those that generate pollution.

A forthcoming paper, by economists at UPenn and Yale, reports a survey of the economic literature on these spillover benefits for the 11 highest-earning professions.

There’s very little literature, so all these estimates are very, very uncertain, and should be not be taken literally. But it’s interesting reading – it represents a survey of what economists think they know about this topic, and it’s surprisingly little.

Here are the bottom lines – see more detail on the estimates below. (Note that we already discussed an older version of this paper, but the estimates have been updated since then.)

We calculated mean income for 2005 in an earlier article. We increased income by 30% to account for nominal wage growth since then.

The paper uses the expressions spillover and ‘externality’. An ‘externality’ is a technical term for a ‘cost or benefit that affects a party who did not choose to incur that cost or benefit.’ The authors of the paper call it an ‘externality’ when someone who buys a service does (or does not) benefit after taking account of the cost of purchasing it.

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#2 – David Spiegelhalter on risk, statistics, and improving the public understanding of science

Podcast by Robert Wiblin · Published June 21st, 2017

My colleague Jess Whittlestone and I spoke with Prof David Spiegelhalter, the Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge.

Prof Spiegelhalter tries to help people prioritise and respond to the many hazards we face, like getting cancer or dying in a car crash. To make the vagaries of life more intuitive he has had to invent concepts like the microlife, or a 30-minute change in life expectancy. He’s regularly in the UK media explaining the numbers that appear in the news, trying to assist both ordinary people and politicians to make sensible decisions based in the best evidence available.

We wanted to learn whether he thought a lifetime of work communicating science had actually had much impact on the world, and what advice he might have for people planning their careers today.

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Machine Learning PhDs

Career review by Richard Batty · Published June 2017

A machine learning PhD catapults you into a field of critical importance for humanity’s future. You can use the skills you gain to help positively shape the development of artificial intelligence, apply machine learning techniques to other pressing global problems, or, as a fall-back, earn money and donate it to highly effective charities. It’s open to people who have studied a quantitative subject, even if they haven’t done computer science before.

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Working at effective altruist organisations

Career review by Roman Duda · Published June 2017

Working at effective altruist organisations lets you work on some of the most urgent global problems, alongside colleagues who want to do as much good as possible. If you’re a highly self-motivated individual who cares deeply about the ideas of effective altruism, we think it’s one of the highest-impact things you can do with your career.

[Note that this page was written in 2017 and has not been fully updated since then. We still endorse the main takeaways but some specifics may be out of date.]

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Guide to working in AI policy and strategy

Article by The 80,000 Hours team · Published June 2017

Written by Miles Brundage a researcher who works on AI policy at the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, with help from the 80,000 Hours team and others acknowledged below.

Why we wrote this

80,000 Hours’ research suggests that one of the highest-impact opportunities to improve the world may be by positively shaping the development of artificial intelligence. The issue is large in scale and neglected by most people. Recent experience suggests it’s possible to make steady progress in reducing the risks. See our profile of the problem for further explanation of why we believe this.

The last few years have seen dramatic growth in the number of people doing technical research to figure out how we can safely program an artificial general intelligence, and we have a guide for people who are considering doing this kind of work.

There is another topic that is just as important and has become relatively more neglected: improving AI policy and strategy. This includes questions like how can we avoid a dangerous arms race to develop powerful AI systems; how can the benefits of advanced AI systems be widely distributed; and how open should AI research be? If we handle these issues badly, it could lead to disaster, even if we can solve the technical challenges associated with controlling a machine intelligence.

We need answers to AI policy and strategy questions urgently because i) implementing solutions could take a long time,

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#1 – Miles Brundage on the world’s desperate need for AI strategists and policy experts

Podcast by Robert Wiblin · Published June 6th, 2017

If a smarter-than-human AI system were developed, who would decide when it was safe to deploy? How can we discourage organisations from deploying such a technology prematurely to avoid being beaten to the post by a competitor? Should we expect the world’s top militaries to try to use AI systems for strategic advantage – and if so, do we need an international treaty to prevent an arms race?

Questions like this are the domain of AI policy experts.

We recently launched a detailed guide to pursuing careers in AI policy and strategy, put together by Miles Brundage at the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute.

It complements our article outlining the importance of positively shaping artificial intelligence and a podcast with Dr Dario Amodei of OpenAI on more technical artificial intelligence safety work which builds on this one. If you are considering a career in artificial intelligence safety, they’re all essential reading.

I interviewed Miles to ask remaining questions I had after he finished his career guide. We discuss the main career paths; what to study; where to apply; how to get started; what topics are most in need of research; and what progress has been made in the field so far.

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How much do hedge fund traders earn?

Blog post by Benjamin Todd · Published May 10th, 2017

Hedge fund trading may be the highest paying job in the world, so to learn more, we spoke with a former manager at one of the world’s leading hedge funds. They gave us the following information, which allowed us to make a rough estimate of the typical earnings of hedge fund traders.

We also ran this document past several other people in the industry and asked them to point out mistakes.

We found that junior traders typically earn $300k – $3m per year, and it’s possible to reach these roles in 4 – 8 years. Senior portfolio managers can easily earn over $10m per year, though average earnings are probably lower. Read on for the details.

How do hedge funds make money and how is it shared among the employees?

Hedge funds trade in financial markets on behalf of clients in exchange for annual fees, and a cut of the profits. They’re similar to mutual funds but face fewer restrictions on what they can invest in, and can only be used by accredited investors.

The revenue of a hedge fund comes from the fees on the assets it manages. The typical fund charges a fee of 2% of assets under management per year, plus a performance fee. The performance fee is typically 20% of any returns it makes for the clients over and above the 2% base fee. So, if a fund makes 10% returns in a year,

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Most people report believing it’s incredibly cheap to save lives in the developing world

Blog post by Robert Wiblin · Published May 9th, 2017

One way that people can have a social impact with their career is to donate money to effective charities. We mention this path in our career guide, suggesting that people donate to evidence-backed charities such as the Against Malaria Foundation, which is estimated by GiveWell to save the lives of children in the developing world for around $7,500 [Update: now $2,300 as of 2020].

Alyssa Vance told me that many people may see this as highly ineffective relatively to their optimistic expectations about how much it costs to improve the lives of people. I thought the reverse would be true – folks would be skeptical that charities in the developing world were effective at all. Fortunately Amazon Mechanical Turk makes it straightforward to survey public opinion at a low cost, so there was no need for us to sit around speculating. I suggested a survey on this question to someone in the effective altruism community with a lot of experience using Mechanical Turk – Spencer Greenberg of Clearer Thinking – and he went ahead and conducted one in just a few hours.

You can work through the survey people took yourself here and we’ve put the data and some details about the method in a footnote. The results clearly vindicated Alyssa:

It turns out that most Americans believe a child can be prevented from dying of preventable diseases for very little –

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Should you wait to make a difference?

Article by Benjamin Todd · Last updated April 2017 · First published October 2014

If you’re committed to making a difference with your career, you may well find that there is a tension between doing good now and laying the groundwork for doing good later.

For example:

Next year, you have two choices. You could work for an effective charity, making an immediate difference to its beneficiaries. Or you could go to graduate school and build up your career capital, (hopefully) allowing you to have a larger impact later.
Alternatively, say you have a substantial sum of money. You could give it today, or you could invest it, allow it to grow, and then give the larger amount later.

How can you go about deciding between these options? Here we present a summary of our findings. The full research has been published by Oxford University’s Global Priorities Project.

Summary of our findings

Summary: should you donate money now or later?

First, focus on saving enough to live for at least six months with no income, then start saving a reasonable amount for retirement (typical advice is 15% of income) and paying down any high interest rate debt. During this period, aim to give 1% so you stay engaged with giving and keep learning about which charities are most effective.

After that, whether to give now or later depends on a couple of factors.

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What should you look for in a job? Introducing our framework.

Article by Benjamin Todd · Last updated April 2017 · First published July 2015

How can you compare two career options in terms of how satisfying and high-impact they’ll be?

It can seem near impossible to make comparisons like this, and it’s true that it’s hard. But we think it’s still possible to make a lot of progress.

In this article, we show how to break the comparison down into four factors. These form our career framework – the key ingredients of a fulfilling and high-impact career.

Why we chose these factors is more fully explained in our career guide. We’ve used this framework to analyse hundreds of real career decisions, and think it captures most of the important factors. However, it’s a work-in-progress, and we could see ourselves changing the emphasis of the framework over time.

How can we compare different careers?
Short-term impact

Let’s start by considering your impact only in the short-term. We can break it into two components:

Role impact – the extent to which the role gives you opportunities to have a large social impact.
Personal fit – the extent to which you will be able to take advantage of these opportunities, which largely boils down to how good you’ll be in the role.

We think these two factors roughly multiply, i.e. if you’re twice as good at the role, then your overall impact will be twice as high.

This applies whatever you think social impact consists of,

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9 ways to put yourself in a better position in any job

Article by Benjamin Todd · Last updated April 2017 · First published May 2016

This article has been replaced and expanded in a new piece of our career guide: All the evidence-based advice we found on how to be successful in any job.

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