This is the third post (of a series of six) on our six month evaluation
In this report, we answer a set of critical questions for 80,000 Hours stakeholders. These questions are inspired by GiveWell’s self-evaluation process, but also include further questions that we think are important for 80,000 Hours, including several we have been asked by our stakeholders.
This is the second post (of a series of six) on our six month evaluation
This post outlines the key outreach and community metrics that we track week-to-week.
This is the first post (of a series of six) on our six month evaluation
The purpose of the evaluation is to explain to key stakeholders our progress, plans for the future and how we think we’re performing as an organisation. The main model for our evaluation process is GiveWell.
In this report, we outline how we see our main achievements and mistakes over the last six months.
Our key priority was further developing our business model and content strategy, and we’re pleased with our success in this area. We made two rounds of improvements, culminating with adopting the case study model.
Our next major priority was further building 80,000 Hours and the Centre for Effective Altruism as robust, effective organisations. We made mistakes in this area, but overall I think we made strong progress. We successfully coped with a doubling of the number of people working at the Centre for Effective Altruism.
While prioritising developing our business model and organisation building, we’ve also performed strongly in outreach. Increasing web traffic by 47% and recruiting about 400 new members was well ahead of expectations.
We made many mistakes this period, but I’??d classify most as minor mistakes. The worst mistake was that the operations team ran out of capacity in March, slowing down our overall progress.
Overall, I think we’re in a strong position to carry out our plans over the next six months.
At 80,000 Hours, we think it’s really important to find the causes in which you can make the most difference. One important consideration in evaluating causes is how much we should care about their impact on future generations. Important new research by a trustee of CEA (our parent charity) Nick Beckstead, argues that the impact on the long-term direction of future civilization is likely to be the most important consideration in working out the importance of a cause.
Last month, 80,000 Hours ran its first ever career workshop! This post is a quick summary of the workshop: what we covered, what career changes it led to, and how it was received by our attendees.
In order to work out current best practice within career advising, we looked into personality testing. Several people I have asked for advice have recommended that we consider using it.
Having investigated the leading personality tests, however, we’ve concluded that they’re not very useful in choosing your career. This is because they haven’t been shown to predict the real world outcomes that matter: (i) finding careers you will find satisfying (ii) finding careers that you will succeed in.
While investigating how to give good careers advice, we asked ourselves whether the Myers Briggs test, the world’s most widely used personality test, might be useful. We’ve concluded that it probably isn’t.
Drawing on similarities between an individual planning their career and a startup business, we’ve realised the importance of learning and adapting to change early in your career. Rigid career plans don’t seem that useful, and could even be harmful – but you do still need some means of direction and motivation for the future.
One promising solution we’ve found is the idea of having a “career model”: identifying your aims and values, and making a best guess of how you might achieve them. What’s key is that this model is designed to be tested and adapted as you learn.
Hopefully you’ve seen by now that 80,000 Hours is hiring!
In addition to the positions advertised previously, we’re also looking for a Finance Manager and Director of Fundraising. Both would be full-time paid positions based in Oxford, and you’d be working across both 80,000 Hours and our sister organisation Giving What We Can.
The deadline for all positions is Friday 16th August at 5pm GMT.
Does Earning to Give do more harm than good?
It is often claimed that philanthropists do more harm earning money than good making donations. We saw this idea raised many times during the recent press coverage of Earning to Give. Our response is that although the objection may be true for typical examples of philanthropy, when donors are giving effectively it’s difficult for the expected harm to outweigh the good done by the donations.
In this post, I make some very rough estimates of how harmful finance would have to be in order for it to outweigh the good done by the donations of someone Earning to Give to effective charities.
How do you even begin going about trying to assess the impact of a career?
It might seem impossible. But if you don’t try to weigh up your options, you’ll end up doing far less for the world than you could otherwise.
It’s not an easy question, but it is a fascinating one that has a great deal of importance for the world. After talking one-on-one with around 100 people about their careers, asking people who have made a big impact, and thinking through what matters, we’ve developed an initial simple framework for assessing the value of different careers.
We think that we can draw many useful insights about career planning from thinking about how startups operate successfully. There seem to be a lot of direct analogies between startup strategy and career planning: both mean finding a niche where you can excel and beat the competition, and both require doing so in a highly uncertain and changing environment.
So what can we learn about career planning from startup strategy?
We want to change the world by revolutionising something incredibly important: the way people think about and spend their careers. Our mission is to help talented and dedicated people have the biggest possible positive impact with their careers. This is a big project, and we’re growing fast, so we’re looking for bright and ambitious people to join us. If this sounds like something you’d like to be part of, then apply to work for us!
We recently interviewed Roland Mathiasson, vice president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center (CCC), a leading global think tank which draws together over 100 top economists to work on prioritizing the solutions to the most pressing global issues. The Center’s leader, Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, was named one of the world’s 100 most influential people by Time magazine and has been repeatedly named one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy. We initiated the interview after being contacted by Roland about a job opportunity with CCC…
We recently secured funding for a Research Collaboration with Amlin Insurance focusing on systemic risks associated with risk modelling. This is a unique opportunity to build a world-leading research programme. We’re looking for someone who can not only manage this project, but who also has the drive and initiative to find new sources of funding, network with leading experts, and design future plans for the project. We’re also looking for someone who understands and is motivated by the aims of the FHI; the post-holder will have the opportunity to contribute across the board to FHI projects, and may be a crucial part of the FHI’s success going forward.
It’s a two year position, but there will be the possibility of extension depending on the success of the project and the acquisition of further funding. All the details can be found here
Why do so many elite graduates go into finance and consulting? At Princeton, for example, more than 30% enter finance alone.
The Aspen Impact Careers recently conducted research that attempted to work out why so many elite graduates enter finance and consulting (unpublished). They found several important factors, which chime with the explanations proposed by commentators in the media. But they proposed that the single biggest factor was a desire to keep options open. Entry level consulting and finance jobs successfully market themselves as a great general purpose training and a ticket to all sorts of other jobs in the future. The same is true of Teach for America. The demand is real, and all three have been rewarded with strong applications.
From an entirely personal point of view, it makes sense to prioritise keeping your options open in the first couple of years of your career. You have little idea what you’ll enjoy or be good at when you start working, or what opportunities will come your way in the future. A good way to deal with the problem is to take the job that most keeps your options open. That way you can learn more about what you enjoy, but retain the ability to switch into another job if it turns out you don’t enjoy your first one.
We’re changing how we do our career coaching. For at least the next couple of months, we’re only going to be coaching one or two people each week, but we’re going to spend up to a week of research on each one. We call these our case studies.
Why the change? Why are we going to turn away at least 80% of our coaching requests? This post explains how and why our new approach will be more in depth.
Effective Animal Activism (EAA) will now become entirely independent from 80,000 Hours, and has a separate board of trustees consisting of Brian Tomasik, Eitan Fischer and Rob Wiblin.
In the rest of this post, I let Jon explain the new mission and direction of the organisation.
Want a systematic approach to getting your dream job, whether for earning to give or for working at one of the top organizations? Read this guest post from a Google employee, Alexei Andreev, on how he got his job and how you can do the same.
Want to really add value and innovate in international development? AidGrade, a fantastic new organisation with precisely this aim, are currently hiring.
If making a huge difference using your quantitative skills sounds like something you’re interested in, read on for a full description from Eva of what AidGrade are looking for and offer.