New releases

Should you wait to make a difference?

Blog post by · Published October 26th, 2014

The issue

One big picture consideration in career choice is the question of how important it is to make a difference now versus later. Here’s the issue: suppose you could either work at a charity next year or go to graduate school. If you work at the charity, you’ll be making a difference right away, speeding up progress. If you go to graduate school, you’ll be investing in yourself and able to have a larger impact later. Which is better?

If you think it’s better to make a difference as soon as possible, the more you’ll value your immediate opportunities for impact. In our framework, you’ll put more emphasis on path impact potential. If you think it’s better to invest and give later, the more you’ll value activities that build your skills, connections and credentials (career capital), and the more you’ll value learning about the world so you can make better decisions in the future (exploration value).

There’s a similar issue with charitable giving. If you have some money, you can either give today, or you can invest your money, which will grow over time, and give a larger amount later. Under what circumstances should you invest rather than give now?

Summary

Overall, we favour investing in your human capital and wealth early, so that you make a greater difference later in your career. Why?

  1. You’ll be able to find better opportunities to make a difference in the future, because you’ll get wiser and be able to use better research in which causes and careers are most effective.
  2. Early-to-mid career, most people can make investments that significantly increase their career capital, such as learning new skills, doing a graduate degree and building a professional network. The returns from these investments more than justify the cost of waiting.

Nevertheless, there are a few other reasons to start making a difference now: it will teach you about the world; it will help you find collaborators; it’s motivating; and it will help you build altruistic habits.

So, overall, we suggest that early in your career you mainly focus on building career capital and learning more, though still put some weight on your immediate impact. If choosing between two jobs, this could mean choosing the one that best builds your career capital, using immediate impact as a tiebreaker. As you get older, put more and more weight on your immediate impact.

Read on to see a full discussion of the considerations and our reasoning.

Continue reading →

Update: 7 career strategies for making a difference

Blog post by · Published October 22nd, 2014

We recently released a page on “top career strategies”, featuring two strategies for building your long-run potential, and five for immediate impact:

  1. The experimenter: Finding a career that’s the right fit for you is important, but it’s also difficult to do just by thinking about it. It can therefore be a good strategy to try out a number of different areas in order to learn more about your own interests and skills.
  2. The self-developer: When you’ve narrowed down which area you want to enter, focus on investing in yourself to build your career capital.
  3. The effective worker: There are many non-profit and for-profit organisations that have a large impact, which are short of specific types of human capital. If you’re a good fit for a high-impact organization, it’s an option worth considering. By high-impact organisations we mean those that are well-run and work on an effective cause.
  4. The entrepreneur: If you’ve got potential as an entrepreneur, attempt to found new effective non-profit organisations or innovative for-profits that benefit their customers and create positive spill-over effects.
  5. The philanthropist: Some people have skills that are better suited to earning money than the other strategies. These people can take a higher-earning career and donate the money to effective organisations. We call this strategy ‘earning to give’.
  6. The researcher: Some people are especially good at and interested in research – attempting to create new knowledge. If this is you, and have you have the opportunity to work in a field that seems particularly important, tractable and neglected, then this could be a way to have a large impact.
  7. The advocate: If you can take a job that gives you a public platform, good network and credibility, you can use it to promote and unite people behind important ideas.

Continue reading →

    Want to do something about the risks of artificial intelligence?

    Blog post by · Published October 17th, 2014

    Nick Bostrom’s recent book, “Superintelligence”, has been a great success, gaining favorable reviews in the Financial Times and the Economist, as well as support from Elon Musk, the founder of Telsa and SpaceX.

    The field of research into the risks of artificial intelligence is also taking off, with the recent founding of Cambridge University’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and the Future of Life Institute (supported by Morgan Freeman!); continued strong growth at MIRI; and GiveWell’s recently declared interest in the area.

    If you’ve read the book, and are interested in how you can contribute to this cause, we’d like to hear from you. There’s pressing needs developing in the field for researchers, project managers, and funding. We can help you work out where you can best contribute, and introduce you to the right people.

    If you’re interested, please email ben at 80000hours.org, or apply for our coaching.

    Continue reading →

    What I learned quitting my job to found a tech startup

    Blog post by · Published October 16th, 2014

    Ben West

    I’ve been earning to give as a software developer for the past several years, and it started to become clear that I could make more money in a different job. But I was torn between a finance career which put my math skills to use and founding a company where I might achieve the vocational equivalent of winning the lottery.

    I eventually decided to pursue entrepreneurship because I thought it would better build career capital, i.e. it would prepare me for a wider variety of future careers. After four months of running a company that idea still doesn’t seem completely idiotic, but it doesn’t seem completely true either.

    I’ve encountered several people who are in similar positions, so I’d like to give an overview of my motivations (particularly the ones which haven’t been discussed here before), how I went about my career change, and of course how I should’ve gone about my career change. Optimizing for one narrow career path is a bad idea, so I hope this post is useful to everyone, not just potential entrepreneurs.

    Continue reading →

    Tips on careers in journalism from NPR correspondent David Folkenflik

    Blog post by · Published October 8th, 2014

    David Folkenflik

    David has been NPR’s media correspondent since 2004, and before that spent over a decade at the Baltimore Sun. He has won numerous awards for journalism, and is the author of Murdoch’s World: The Last of the Old Media Empires.

    I had the chance to meet him at the 4th annual Nexus Global Youth Summit, where we chatted about careers in journalism for people who want to make a difference. Here’s the notes I made on the key takeaways, which I ran past David before publishing for edits (and are entirely his own views).

    • If you want to get a job in journalism, apply to any news organization that interests you, including all the major media organisations. Set some priorities – pay, location, size of organization, type of work, etc and select among them based on your top several priorities once you’ve got offers. “I applied to over 70 organisations. I got two offers, only one of which paid more than $10,000, so I went with that!”
    • Previously the route into the industry was to get a job at a local news station or paper. But the local news industry has shrunk significantly in recent years, so it’s a lot harder to advance from these positions today.
    • Build a personal library of content on Tumblr or some platform where it’s relatively easy to build a site. “There needs to be something out there you can link to.”
    • If you’re still in college, what should you do next? Start writing and reporting on the side to test yourself out, and to start building your portfolio.
    • How competitive is journalism? “You need to really want it; that’s the major filter.” It’s not a career you should drift into, but if you’re motivated, you’ve got a decent chance.
    • Although the industry is changing rapidly, it’s not high risk if you’re young and don’t have a mortgage or other family obligations. And if you do, it can still be rewarding.
    • Journalism is a good path if you want to effect social change, but that change may be defined quite differently than it would be at a philanthropy or advocacy organization. Providing good information and analysis is a public good in itself. You’ve also got a public platform to promote neglected concerns. And there’s been a renaissance of new news outlets that openly embrace advocacy and point of view journalism.

    Continue reading →

    Career story: Ben Kuhn: My job hunt after graduating

    Blog post by · Published October 6th, 2014

    In this guest post, 80,000 Hour’s member Ben Kuhn describes how he looked for a job after graduating from Harvard with a maths major. Ben’s especially reflective, so it’s fascinating to hear how he went about choosing between options in software, startups, finance and research with the aim of making the biggest difference.

    Ben Kuhn

    Background

    For my first few years of college I prioritized getting experience in a bunch of different potential fields–I tried working at Fog Creek, Jane Street, and GiveWell, and cofounding a startup. By the end of that I came to a couple conclusions about what I wanted to do.

    In terms of altruistic career choice considerations, I decided I should probably focus on doing the things I could be most awesome at, rather than trying to naively maximize earnings or maximize direct good done–basically, because I’m fairly uncertain about whether having lots of money will be helpful, and I’m fairly uncertain about what does the most direct good, but being awesome at things is a robustly good outcome that can be parlayed into many different advantages later.

    Historically, technology- and software-related things seemed to have some of the greatest potential for me to be awesome at them, and also the widest breadth of opportunities to improve the world with those abilities later, so they seemed like the most promising options to pursue further. But I had already done one software internship, and while it was a fun experience, I didn’t want to do anything very similar–I guessed that I’d hit diminishing returns for standard software-engineering internships.

    I was concurrently in the process of realizing that studying at Harvard for a fourth year didn’t seem especially high-value, and that I could graduate in three years if I wanted to thanks to my Advanced Placement credits. So I realized that I needed to put a lot of effort into my summer job search to make sure I found something that wasn’t a repeat of my previous internship, and that I would be happy turning into a full-time job if I decided I didn’t want to go back to Harvard.

    Continue reading →

      Interview: Holden Karnofsky on cause selection

      Blog post by · Published October 3rd, 2014

      Holden Karnofsky

      In August 2014, we interviewed Holden Karnofsky, the co-founder of GiveWell, to discuss how the results of the Open Philanthropy (formerly GiveWell Labs) might extend to career choice. In particular, we regard Open Philanthropy as the best available single source of information about which causes are most high priority (for more, see our cause page, and we want to explore how much the results transfer from philanthropists to people picking careers. See our previous interview with Holden.

      The interview was carried out in person in GiveWell’s offices and recorded. Below, we list some of the key points and excerpts from the interview edited for clarity, which were reviewed by Holden before publishing.

      Key points made by Holden

      • If a cause is on Open Philanthropy’s list, that’s an extra reason to seek a job in that area.
      • However, if a cause isn’t on the list, it may still be promising, especially if you have good personal fit with the area. Personal fit may often overwhelm considerations about the general effectiveness of a cause.
      • There can be other differences between the causes that are most promising for philanthropists and those that are most promising for job seekers. For instance, since OPP’s causes are often constrained by a lack of money, it may be difficult to get a job within them.
      • Some ideas for causes OPP isn’t investigating, but at first glance still look promising for job seekers include: environment and climate change, scientific research, for-profit work (especially in innovative areas), and foreign relations.
      • OPP aren’t highly likely to drastically change their list of causes (especially within global catastrophic risks and political advocacy) for at least two to three years.
      • If you want to make a difference in the for-profit world, avoid activities that make money through (i) zero-sum games (ii) addiction (iii) a marketing-first approach. If you’ve cleared those filters, then ask (i) is this scalable? (ii) does it make people’s lives better in a significant way? (iii) are you good at this activity?

      Continue reading →

        Interview: Holden Karnofsky on the importance of personal fit

        Blog post by · Published October 1st, 2014

        In January 2014, I interviewed Holden Karnofsky, the co-founder of GiveWell, to further discuss his views on the importance of personal fit in career choice, and how they might differ from our own. See our previous interview with Holden.

        The interview was carried out on Skype and recorded. Below, we list some of the key points and excerpts from the interview. These have been edited for clarity, and were reviewed by Holden before publishing.

        Summary of Holden’s key points

        • Your degree of “fit” with a role depends on your chances of ultimately excelling in the role if you work at hard at it, arising from the match between yourself and the requirements of the role.
        • Holden believes that if you want to make a difference, seeking out roles with which you have a high degree of fit should be a top priority, especially early in your career. This is because:
        • Fit is easier to judge than many other factors, such as how much immediate impact you have, which means it’s easier to improve your degree of fit over time.
        • It’s harder to change your career ‘role’ than your cause later in your career. For instance, if you become a great salesperson, it’s relatively easy to transition into an organisation that works on a different cause, but much harder to become great at some other skill. This means that early in your career it’s more important to figure out what types of roles suit you than what cause support early in your career.
        • There’s huge, robust benefits from being good at your job including (i) better career capital – “it gives you a better learning experience, better personal development, better overall status, better overall opportunities” – (ii) higher impact within your field.
        • Excelling at what you do is one of the most important rules of thumb for having more impact, partly because a lot of the world’s impact comes from extreme cases, so your chances of being an extreme case may dominate your expected impact. In particular, extreme impact often arises from innovation – spotting ideas others haven’t – and this is more likely when you’re at the top of your field.
        • Some other criteria that are important early in your career are: (i) the general status of the option (ii) the pay (iii) how much you’ll learn about yourself and your other options from taking this option.

        If you’re interested in finding out more about Holden’s views on career choice for people interested in effective altruism, we recommend seeing the transcript of his conference call on career choice.

        Continue reading →

        We would like to interview you

        Blog post by · Published October 1st, 2014

        If you’ve got experience with a career of interest to our readers, we’d like to feature an interview with your on our blog. Similarly, if you’re interviewing someone as part of your career research, we’d like to feature your notes. For instance, see this interview with Buck from App Academy – one of our most popular ever pieces of content – and see many more here.

        Why are we looking for interviews?

        We think our readers have lots of useful knowledge to share about their careers, and we’ve found interviews to be one of the quickest, most transparent ways to do it.

        How would we like to do the interview?

        If you’re interested, choose 5-10 questions, draft answers to them, and send them to [email protected]. I’ll ask some follow up questions, then we’ll publish the final result on the blog.

        If you’re interviewing someone else, make sure to get their permission to post the notes.

        Example questions

        Some good general purpose questions are:

        • What did you do before this job?
        • Why did you take this job?
        • What does the job involve?
        • What are the main pros and cons of this job for someone looking to make a difference?
        • What are the best sources of further information on this area?

        You can see a full list of ideas for questions we often use here.

        Continue reading →

          Should you move to Thailand?

          Blog post by · Published September 26th, 2014

          Chiang Mai Coffee Shop
          Chiang Mai Coffee Shop. Credit: Spartantraveler.com

          By moving to Thailand, you can cut your cost of living by two to six times, and probably have a higher standard of living than you would have in a big city in the US or UK. NomadList currently estimates that you can live in Chiang Mai for only £400 per month, and flights from London can be had for £500 return. There’s several other cities in Thailand, Vietnam and Eastern Europe, which offer a cost of living under £900 per month.

          In the case of Chiang Mai, this includes:

          • A nice, serviced apartment on short-let.
          • Fast internet.
          • Plenty of good cafes and co-working spaces.
          • Warm weather all year.
          • No commute.
          • Big community of international remote workers.
          • Eating out every meal.
          • No visa required for 3 months.
          • Set up within a day.

          Continue reading →

          Update: Don’t follow your passion

          Blog post by · Published September 22nd, 2014

          Some have claimed “follow your passion” is the definitive career advice of our time.

          The idea behind the slogan “follow your passion” is that the best way to choose a career is to:

          1. Identify your passions through self-reflection.
          2. Identify careers that involve those passions.
          3. Try to get one of those careers.

          The reason this advice works is because:

          1. Matching your career with your passions in this way is the best way to be truly satisfied with your work.
          2. If you’re satisfied with your work, you’ll be good at what you do.
          3. Being good at what you do is the best way to make the world a better place.

          We mainly disagree with the first and last claims: matching your career with your passions is not a particularly good way to find satisfying work, and being good at what you do is only one factor that matters for having a social impact.

          Continue reading →

          What does good research look like?

          Blog post by · Published September 18th, 2014

          We want to be transparent about how we go about our research into career choice, so in the latest site update, we added a page listing the principles we use to guide our research. The full page is here. I’ve copied the text below.

          What principles do you think we’ve missed? Which parts don’t you agree with?

          Continue reading →

            Lots of new content released to the site

            Blog post by · Published September 14th, 2014

            We’ve recently expanded our research page into a series of ten, supported by sixteen career profiles. In total, we’ve released around 30,000 words of new content.

            We provide an overview of everything on the getting started page.

            The three most important pages are:

            1. Top careers: Lists the most promising careers from among the careers we’ve investigated so far.
            2. How to choose: A step-by-step process to make your next career decision.
            3. Our framework: A checklist of criteria to use to compare your individual options in terms of how much difference you can make.

            Some other important pages include:

            • Top strategies: A list of strategies you can take to make a difference (skill build, experiment with your options, do research, earning to give, advocacy, work at effective organisations, entrepreneurship).
            • Cause selection: A framework for comparing causes, and our list of top causes.
            • Personal fit: A step-by-step process for finding a career that fits, and our views on ‘do what you’re passionate about’.
            • Job satisfaction: How to assess jobs in terms of how satisfying you’re likely to find them.

            Many of our views on these topics have changed since we last wrote about them. I’ll be going through some of the changes on the blog over the next couple of weeks.

            Continue reading →

            Cause overview: cause prioritisation

            Blog post by · Published September 5th, 2014

            Katjagrace_25_july_14

            Introduction

            I recently conducted a ‘shallow investigation’ (see GiveWell) into cause prioritization, with the help of Nick Beckstead. It covers the importance of cause prioritization; who is doing it, funding it, or using it; and opportunities to contribute. We had conversations with eight relevant people. The full document is here and the collection of related interview notes and such is here. This blog post is a summary of my impressions, given the findings of the investigation.

            Cause prioritization research seems likely enough to be high value to warrant further investigation. It appears that roughly billions of dollars per year might be influenced by it in just the near future, that current efforts cost a few million dollars per year and are often influential, and that there are many plausible ways to contribute. It also seems like things are likely to get better in the future, as more work is done.

            Continue reading →

            Conversation with Paul Penley of Excellence in Giving

            Blog post by · Published September 3rd, 2014

            Paul_penley

            Participants

            • Paul Penley: Director of Research, Excellence in Giving
            • Katja Grace: Research Assistant, Machine Intelligence Research Institute
            • Nick Beckstead: Research Fellow, Future of Humanity Institute; Board of Trustees, Center for Effective Altruism

            Notes

            This is a summary of Paul Penley’s points in a conversation on April 3, 2014, written by Katja with substantial help from the other participants.

            Continue reading →