A few weeks ago, a new online forum to discuss effective altruism was released.
So far, the quality of the discussion has been great. If you’re interested in what we discuss on 80,000 Hours, you should definitely check it out. It may also be a good place to field career-related questions – we’re on there often.
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.
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.
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.
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:
You can see a full list of ideas for questions we often use here.
If you’ve made a career decision recently, we’d like to feature your story on the blog. Here’s some examples: Peter, Jess, Alexei.
If you’re interested, please email [email protected].
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:
In the recent content release, we added a new top careers page.
It’s based on the popular blog post we released in February – “in which career can you make the most difference? – but with several changes…
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:
The reason this advice works is because:
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.
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?
One of our key new pages is ‘how to choose’ – a step-by-step process for making your next career decision. It explains how to tie all of our information together to make a rational next decision, and is based on the process we use in coaching and workshops.
In summary…
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:
Some other important pages include:
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.
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.
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.
This is a verbatim email conversation from the 26th of March 2014. Paul is a proponent of cause prioritization research. Here he explains his support of prioritization research, and makes some suggestions about how to do it.
Note: Paul is Katja’s boyfriend, so consider reading his inclusion as a relevant expert with a grain of salt.
This is a summary made by Katja of points made by Owen during a conversation on March 24 2014.
The Global Priorities Project is new, and intends to experiment for a while with different types of projects and then work on those that appear highest value in the longer term. Their work will likely address questions about how to prioritize, improve arguments around different options, and will produce recommendations. It will probably be mostly research, but also include for instance some policy lobbying. They will likely do some work with concrete policy-relevant consequences and also some work on general high level arguments that apply to many things. Most features of the project are open to modification after early experimentation.
There will be principally two audiences: policy makers and philanthropists, the latter including effective altruists and foundations. GPP has some access to moderately senior government and civil service policy people and are experimenting with the difficulty of pushing for high impact policies.
Research topics will be driven by a combination of importance and comparative advantage. GPP is likely to focus on prioritizing broad areas rather than narrower interventions, though these things are closely linked. It is good to keep an eye on object level questions to ensure that you are thinking about things the right way.
Owen is interested in developing frameworks for comparing things. This can produce value both in their own evaluations and through introducing metrics that others want to use, and so making proposals more comparable in general.
Kerry Vaughan was a member of the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (LJAF) – a major strategic foundation with over $1.5B in assets – for 3 years and served as the manager of the technology and innovation group. Kerry is also a PhD candidate in philosophy with a specialization in ethics. We spoke with Kerry as part of some compensated research he was doing for 80,000 Hours about the impact one can have working at a foundation.
We recently interviewed Owen Barder to find out about making a difference through careers in policy.
The interview was conducted in person. Below we summarize the key messages of the conversation, followed by some key excerpts which have been edited and reorganized for clarity.
In summary, Owen told us:
How influence over policies works in the UK political system. In his experience the partnership between ministers, back-bench MPs and civil servants is one in which they all have an important role to play and they all depend on each other to achieve success. In addition, there is a complex ecosystem of outsiders that influence policies, which requires a combination of proper research, smart political ideas, effective communication and political leadership to influence policy change.
That the most important types of international policies can be divided into three groups: zero-sum policies in which there is a short-run trade-off between the interests of rich countries and poor countries (eg aid transfers); win-win policies which would benefit rich countries and poor countries (eg trade liberalisation); and fostering global public goods (eg R&D and global institutions).
Students interested in any career field dealing with the developing world should strongly consider traveling to and living in the developing world for some period of time. For those particularly interested in getting involved in politics, becoming a special advisor is one clear pathway, but transitions to the civil service or politics later in life are possible.
At the recent Good Done Right conference, I had the opportunity to speak with Larissa MacFarquhar about careers in journalism.
Larissa is a journalist at the New Yorker, and next year will release Strangers Drowning, which explores the lives of those who dedicate themselves to helping others, and features a chapter on effective altruism.
The following is a couple of notes on my key takeaways from our conversation, which were run past Larissa before publishing.
This July saw the first academic conference on effective altruism. The three-day event took place at All Souls College, one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford. The conference featured a diverse range of speakers addressing issues related to effective altruism in a shared setting, including the CEO of JPAL, Derek Parfit, Nick Bostrom, Larissa MacFarquhar of the New Yorker, and many of our donors and supporters. It was a fantastic opportunity to share insights and ideas from some of the best minds working on these issues.
I’m very pleased to announce that audio recordings from most of the talks are now available on the conference website, alongside speakers’ slides (where applicable). I’m very grateful to all of the participants for their fantastic presentations, and to All Souls College and the Centre for Effective Altruism for supporting the conference.
‘Replaceability’ has become a core concept in discussions of career choice among Effective Altruists (EAs) – put simply, people should not simply consider the ‘direct impact’ from doing a job, but instead the difference in outcomes resulting from taking that job, relative to not taking it. Ben Todd and Seb Farquhar have both written blogs introducing this concept, and the importance of counterfactual reasoning in general (read these first if you’re not familiar with replaceability!); Paul Christiano and Ben Kuhn (among others) have written blogs further exploring the concept, and its various representations and applications. Some Effective Altruists (EAs) have noted that representations of replaceability have varied in their sophistication, and Will MacAskill summarises this nicely as the ‘simple view’, ‘simplistic replaceability’ and ‘correct replaceability’.
‘Correct replaceability’ is particularly nuanced and complicated, and comprises taking into account the full set of counterfactual outcomes not only in your (potential) job, but in any other jobs affected by the employment decision, through knock-on and labour market effects. Given this, and that ‘replaceability’ varies significantly across different industries and jobs, Will MacAskill and Ben Todd asked me to think about what Economics has to tell us about the concept. For clarity, rather than think about the ethical considerations of ‘replaceability’ as a whole, they asked me to answer a sub-question, namely: “according to mainstream economics, if I add myself to the labour pool for job type X (being a doctor, or an aid worker, or a banker), then how many more type X jobs come into being (on average)?”. Although these issues have been discussed before, this blog post is a first attempt at providing a thorough analysis of this question.
There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ answer to our question – it will vary considerably across different industries and we must try to understand how each industry functions in order to make an informed estimate.
I believe that the supply and demand framework, or some variant of it, is useful for analysing our question for most jobs and industries, particularly those that are not highly specialised.
I discuss how (and whether) this framework should be applied in a few industries, most of which are seen as viable EA career paths. This framework can lead us to some (tentative) conclusions:
This post only discusses one aspect of replaceability, and does not consider other issues related to the (direct) impact of a job, effects on the quality of employees, or long term effects of a job, such as creating social value.