Open Source Technology: A Career in Engineering
We recently interviewed Joshua Pearce, a professor at Michigan Tech and member of 80,000 Hours, about open source appropriate technology as a promising high impact research area. Here’s what we found…
New releases
How much is a volunteer worth?
The problem with volunteer labour is that it’s free, so a charity has an incentive to recruit volunteers as long as they contribute some value to the charity. In the case of Feed My Starving Children, volunteer labour isn’t just free; it’s a source of revenue. Feed My Starving Children don’t use volunteers in the US for their adept food-handling skills or their convenient location: they use them to attract donations, which volunteers are encouraged to make.
The most important unsolved problems in ethics
In 1900 the mathematician David Hilbert published a list of 23 of the most important unsolved problems in mathematics. This list heavily influenced mathematical research over the 20th century: if you worked on one of Hilbert’s problems, then you were doing respectable mathematics.
There is no such list within moral philosophy. That’s a shame. Not all problems that are discussed in ethics are equally important. And often early graduate students have no idea what to write their thesis on and so just pick something they’ve written on for coursework previously, or pick something that’s ‘hot’ at the time. I don’t know for sure, but I imagine the same is true of many other academic disciplines.
How to do one year of work in four hours
The author, Tim Ferriss, promises to teach you how to cut your working week down to just four hours, using a careful combination of Indian virtual assistants, the 80/20 principle and automatic email responders. But Ferriss has nothing on us. If your goal is to help others, then you can cut your entire working year down to just four hours.
Why don’t charities spend more on fundraising?
People often think it’s bad for their charity of choice to spend money fundraising. This has always been a mystery to me. If a charity can use your money to go out and raise even more money, that’s great! They’ve just multiplied the impact of your donation. It turns out that charities are being pretty rational after all.
When should I quantify? – Quantification – Part 4
Every 48 seconds someone dies of malaria. Every one of those deaths is a human being with passions and loves and feelings. When we talk about quantifying our impact on the world it is important not to forget what those numbers mean. They mean people. Every single year of happy life we can give, is a joyful thing to the person living it. This is ultimately why we what to have as much impact as possible. Because more people living happy joyful lives is better than fewer.
How to do important research
Many academics want to do important research that makes the world a better place. Unfortunately, there’s virtually no guidance out there.
We’re aiming to build a resource of strategies and ideas for finding high impact research questions, as well as practical information about how to get involved with them.
In this post, we take a first step and explore how to find research questions that need your talent.
Let’s stop building schools
I recently came accross Taylor Conroy, who’s using an innovative fundraising technique to let ordinary people to raise $8,500 to build a school with just an evening’s work. The method has since been expanded to include water pumps and libraries. The fundraising is amazing, but I can’t help slightly regretting the goal towards which Taylor has directed his considerable talents. Building a school is a motivating, tangible project, which seems to obviously be a good thing. They can send you pictures of it after it’s built. But is this really where we should be directing our efforts?
Quantification as a Lamppost in the Dark – Quantification – Part 3
Late one evening a police officer comes across a man on the way home from a party. He is quite drunk and looking for something under a lamppost. “What are you looking for?” asks the policeman. “My keys,” the man replies, pointing down the road a little way, “I dropped them over there.” The policeman is baffled, “Then why are you looking for them here?”. “Because there’s no light over there.”
The joke is old but it gets to the heart of the debate over quantification. Is it best to look for keys under lampposts?
How many lives does a doctor save? – Part 3 – Replacement
If I become a doctor, I won’t increase the total number of doctors by one. The NHS has a limited budget, so it can’t just hire every qualified person who applies; medical schools have limited places by law, and there are more applicants who are ‘good enough’ than there are places. If I become a doctor, then I’ve just displaced someone else who would have taken the job.
How to be a high impact philosopher, part II
There’s a second method for high impact philosophy. Let’s call it the bottom-up method.
Begin by asking ‘which are the biggest decisions that one typically makes in life?’
Quantum Quest: Pruning Procrastination
In a series of posts, I will offer a perspective on the “quantum quest” – the evolving attempt to make tomorrow better than today. Changing the world is certainly a quest. And while the evolution may appear to be smooth and continuous, it happens in discrete steps hence the “quantum”.
Quantification – Part 2 – The Dangers
Somalia is in crisis. For decades it has been racked by civil war, famine, and political violence. Members of 80,000 Hours who want to help the people of Somalia will most likely explore various ways they can help and assess them quantitatively. Is it obvious that quantitative methods provide the correct tools to deal with a crisis like this? Or instead can quantification limit the kinds of possible interventions we think about, blinding us to significant long term solutions?
Does money make you happy?
If we’re to believe the Internet, various apologists for materialism have quipped that whoever said money can’t buy happiness didn’t know where to shop. Indeed, the happiness of others can be bought at bargain-basement prices with a donation to an effective charity. If you’re thinking of donating a substantial portion of your income, though, it’s natural to wonder how your well-being will be affected. What can research tell us about this..?
How many lives does a doctor save? – Part 2 – Diminishing marginal returns
In the first post, I worked out an upper bound for the average direct health impact of a doctor in the UK, and found it amounted to producing about 2600 QALYs. We can think of this, very roughly, as saving 90 lives. This doesn’t, however, show how much difference you make by becoming a doctor. There’s already about 200,000 doctors in the UK. How can we take the figure for the average impact of a doctor and work out the impact of an additional doctor?
Quantification – Part 1 – An Introduction
Who was the most important person in the 20th century? JFK? Einstein? Bill Gates? On the one hand it’s a silly question. On the other our different approaches to answering it tell us a lot about how we think about issues of great importance…
Do you really know what job will make you happy?
Why are so many people dissatisfied with their jobs? A big part of the problem is that we’re pretty bad at predicting how happy things will make us, or how long that happiness will last. This has some serious ramifications for career choice…
Is there such thing as a ‘bad’ charity?
When we talk about giving to charities there’s a dirty secret we try really hard not to mention. Some charities are “bad”.
How good are the best?
Imagine you’re offered the top job at SCI one of the world’s most cost-effective charities should you take it?
Should we sacrifice doing what we love to make a difference? part 2
Making a difference can lead to a satisfying career, so you might think we should just focus on making a difference, and happiness will follow. But, a I will show, we’re also more likely to succeed, and therefore to make more difference, in careers we enjoy. So we still need to think about which careers we’ll enjoy.