After the shocking massacre in Connecticut it looks like gun control is going to draw a lot of attention from Obama and Congress this year. This got me thinking about how important gun control might be as a political cause. The potential good achieved by focussing on this policy is in large part determined by the damage done by guns in the first place. In that light, does it deserve it?
Robin Hanson is an American economist who recently blogged about an elegant way to help others at little personal cost. The logic goes like this…
Worldwide, over US$100 billion is invested every year in supporting biomedical research, which results in an estimated 1 million research publications per year
A recently updated systematic review of 79 follow-up studies of research reported in abstracts estimated the rate of publication of full reports after 9 years to be only 53%.
An e?cient system of research should address health problems of importance to populations and the interventions and outcomes considered important by patients and clinicians. However, public funding of research is correlated only modestly with disease burden, if at all.
Some activities have many more times more impact than others. For example, if you’re learning a new skill you’ll improve very quickly at the start as you learn the fundamental skills and then your progress will slow. For example, in language-learning the first hundred words you learn are by far the most useful, often gainig you ~80% coverage. Someone who makes sure they learn the most common words can thus reach conversational fluency several times faster than someone who picks more randomly from the most common couple of thousand words.
Many of us at 80,000 Hours have found that having a good task management system – a list of tasks with a process for maintaining it – is important for being productive. The most popular sysetm is called Getting Things Done and you can read a summary of it here.
Commitment devices have boosted my productivity from spending hours or even days procrastinating to consistently achieving my aims. The idea is that you make it costly to fail to do what you say you’ll do. For example, you tell a friend that you have to do 8 hours work a day or you pay them £50. Or maybe you have to shave one side of your body if you fail (I know someone who had to do this!)
To have impact you need to choose the right career. But that’s not all. If you can build your knowledge and productivity faster than everyone else in your career then you’ll rise from average in your field to the top and have much more impact. So how can you do this?
If you’re here, you probably have some idea of what 80,000 Hours is about. We’re trying to become the world’s best source of advice on how to make as big a positive impact as possible. That’s a big project, and we’re growing fast. To support this growth we now need someone to help manage our finances and fundraising, so if you’d like to join the team this is your chance!
Apply now or read on for more details…
Learn more effectively using a spaced repetition system
If you can accelerate your learning then you’ll be able to learn more information useful for your job. You also get compound benefits from knowledge. The more you know, the more easily you can learn related topics and make links between different areas of knowledge to come up with novel solutions. There are lots of useful things you could learn: if you’re a student you could study your subject more efficiently. If your job involves a lot of networking you could use spaced repetition to learn names and information about people that you need to remember. Every time you come across something useful you didn’t know, you can make a new flashcard in seconds.
In December we conducted the first review of our progress as a full-time organisation. In a spirit of transparency, we’re posting the results on our site.
The review consisted of:
A detailed report on our stated goals, our delivery on these goals, our impact over the period, our goals for the future and a proposed budget prepared by the Executive Director.
This report was brought to the three trustees of the Centre for Effective Altruism (the registered charity which 80,000 Hours is a part of) who decide whether to approve the budget.
It was also brought to the three members of our Advisory Committee. These are three supporters of 80,000 Hours who aren’t involved in our day-to-day operation who provide an outside view on our strategy.
Should you try to plan your career?
On the one hand, goals provide direction and motivation. Especially if you care about really making a difference, you don’t want to be just stabbing in the dark. Yet at the same time, the world around you is constantly changing, as are you – isn’t it naive to plan for the future when you have no real idea what the job market will look like, what the world’s biggest needs might be, and what you might want personally
Are you interested in learning how to research charity effectiveness? Want training in communicating the idea of effective giving? Or want experience in the non-profit sector?
Our sister organisation, Giving What We Can, is running a summer internship programme for students interested in promoting effective charitable giving. On the two-week programme (16th-27th September 2013) interns will gain training and experience in the area of their choice; either cost-effectiveness research or communications.
For more information, go here
People often talk about how you should just “go with your gut” when choosing a career. But how useful is this advice, really?
In general, we should be wary of our intuitions about careers. This doesn’t mean intuitions have no part to play in career choice, but it’s worth double checking them.
GiveWell’s charity recommendations currently Against Malaria Foundation, GiveDirectly and the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative are generally regarded as the most reliable in their field. I imagine many readers here donate to these charities. This makes it all the more surprising that it should be pretty easy to start a charity more effective than any of them.
All you would need to do is found an organisation that fundraises for whoever GiveWell recommends, and raises more than a dollar with each dollar it receives. Is this hard?
Suppose you’re looking to donate as much as possible to charity, and are choosing between two jobs. Should you worry about the taxes in each location? Since you can claim back taxes on charitable donations, many people think you don’t need to worry about this issue.
When you’re thinking about earning money to donate it to charity, you need compare different jobs on how much you’ll earn over your lifetime. We have an on-going project to help you work out which career path has the highest expected earnings for you. In this post I’m going to guide you through one of the best sources of earnings information – salary.com – and show you how to use it
Cal Newport is the best-selling author of So Good They Can’t Ignore You, which argues, as we have, against the common sense careers advice ‘do you what you’re passionate about’. He has also written about how to optimise academic study, for instance in How to Win at College. In this post he discussed a predictor of success in research, how it might be used, and suggests that we need more quantitative career planning. It is reposted with his permission from his blog.
There’s a general misconception that researchers are the only people who really contribute towards scientific progress. But there’s a lot of incredibly important work, besides research itself, that’s vital to producing important research, and such work is often underappreciated. We don’t realise how important other people working in academia are: people in administration, management, or communications. Their work is crucial; they bring it all together.
Most of us spend a lot of time visualising scenarios we’d like to happen, thinking about reasons the things we believe (or the things we want to believe) are likely to be true. We very rarely do the opposite: really thinking through worst case scenarios, or actively looking for reasons our deepest held beliefs are false. Why would we want to do this? We might found out something we don’t want to know. But this is exactly why we should do it.
I’ve recently been following a great new blog doing interviews with “research heroes” in the field of judgement and decision-making called InDecision. Some of these interviews seem like they could be really useful and interesting to anyone wanting to make a difference in a research career, and the blog’s editors have kindly agreed to let us repost some of them. First up: Richard Thaler, most famously co-author of global best-seller Nudge.