New releases | Page 8 of 50 | 80,000 Hours

#190 – Eric Schwitzgebel on whether the US is conscious

Podcast by Luisa Rodriguez and Keiran Harris · Published June 7th, 2024

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Eric Schwitzgebel — professor of philosophy at UC Riverside — about some of the most bizarre and unintuitive claims from his recent book, The Weirdness of the World.

They cover:

Why our intuitions seem so unreliable for answering fundamental questions about reality.
What the materialist view of consciousness is, and how it might imply some very weird things — like that the United States could be a conscious entity.
Thought experiments that challenge our intuitions — like supersquids that think and act through detachable tentacles, and intelligent species whose brains are made up of a million bugs.
Eric’s claim that consciousness and cosmology are universally bizarre and dubious.
How to think about borderline states of consciousness, and whether consciousness is more like a spectrum or more like a light flicking on.
The nontrivial possibility that we could be dreaming right now, and the ethical implications if that’s true.
Why it’s worth it to grapple with the universe’s most complex questions, even if we can’t find completely satisfying solutions.
And much more.

Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio engineering lead: Ben Cordell
Technical editing: Simon Monsour, Milo McGuire, and Dominic Armstrong
Additional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa Rodriguez
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

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#189 – Rachel Glennerster on why we still don’t have vaccines that could save millions

Podcast by Luisa Rodriguez and Keiran Harris · Published May 29th, 2024

You can’t charge what something is worth during a pandemic. So we estimated that the value of one course of COVID vaccine in January 2021 was over $5,000. They were selling for between $6 and $40. So nothing like their social value.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that they should have charged $5,000 or $6,000. That’s not ethical. It’s also not economically efficient, because they didn’t cost $5,000 at the marginal cost. So you actually want low price, getting out to lots of people.

But it shows you that the market is not going to reward people who do the investment in preparation for a pandemic — because when a pandemic hits, they’re not going to get the reward in line with the social value. They may even have to charge less than they would in a non-pandemic time. So prepping for a pandemic is not an efficient market strategy if I’m a firm, but it’s a very efficient strategy for society, and so we’ve got to bridge that gap.

— Rachel Glennerster

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Rachel Glennerster — associate professor of economics at the University of Chicago and a pioneer in the field of development economics — about how her team’s new Market Shaping Accelerator aims to leverage market forces to drive innovations that can solve pressing world problems.

They cover:

How market failures and misaligned incentives stifle critical innovations for social goods like pandemic preparedness, climate change interventions, and vaccine development.
How “pull mechanisms” like advance market commitments (AMCs) can help overcome these challenges — including concrete examples like how one AMC led to speeding up the development of three vaccines which saved around 700,000 lives in low-income countries.
The challenges in designing effective pull mechanisms, from design to implementation.
Why it’s important to tie innovation incentives to real-world impact and uptake, not just the invention of a new technology.
The massive benefits of accelerating vaccine development, in some cases, even if it’s only by a few days or weeks.
The case for a $6 billion advance market commitment to spur work on a universal COVID-19 vaccine.
The shortlist of ideas from the Market Shaping Accelerator’s recent Innovation Challenge that use pull mechanisms to address market failures around improving indoor air quality, repurposing generic drugs for alternative uses, and developing eco-friendly air conditioners for a warming planet.
“Best Buys” and “Bad Buys” for improving education systems in low- and middle-income countries, based on evidence from over 400 studies.
Lessons from Rachel’s career at the forefront of global development, and how insights from economics can drive transformative change.
And much more.

Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell
Technical editing: Simon Monsour, Milo McGuire, and Dominic Armstrong
Additional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa Rodriguez
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

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#188 – Matt Clancy on whether science is good

Podcast by Luisa Rodriguez and Keiran Harris · Published May 23rd, 2024

Suppose we make these grants, we do some of those experiments I talk about. We discover, for example — I’m just making this up — but we give people superforecasting tests when they’re doing peer review, and we find that you can identify people who are super good at picking science. And then we have this much better targeted science, and we’re making progress at a 10% faster rate than we normally would have. Over time, that aggregates up, and maybe after 10 years, we’re a year ahead of where we would have been if we hadn’t done this kind of stuff.

Now, suppose in 10 years we’re going to discover a cheap new genetic engineering technology that anyone can use in the world if they order the right parts off of Amazon. That could be great, but could also allow bad actors to genetically engineer pandemics and basically try to do terrible things with this technology. And if we’ve brought that forward, and that happens at year nine instead of year 10 because of some of these interventions we did, now we start to think that if that’s really bad, if these people using this technology causes huge problems for humanity, it begins to sort of wash out the benefits of getting the science a little bit faster.

— Matt Clancy

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Matt Clancy — who oversees Open Philanthropy’s Innovation Policy programme — about his recent work modelling the risks and benefits of the increasing speed of scientific progress.

They cover:

Whether scientific progress is actually net positive for humanity.
Scenarios where accelerating science could lead to existential risks, such as advanced biotechnology being used by bad actors.
Why Matt thinks metascience research and targeted funding could improve the scientific process and better incentivise outcomes that are good for humanity.
Whether Matt trusts domain experts or superforecasters more when estimating how the future will turn out.
Why Matt is sceptical that AGI could really cause explosive economic growth.
And much more.

Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio engineering lead: Ben Cordell
Technical editing: Simon Monsour, Milo McGuire, and Dominic Armstrong
Additional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa Rodriguez
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

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The most interesting startup idea I’ve seen recently: AI for epistemics

Blog post by Benjamin Todd · Published May 19th, 2024

This was originally posted on benjamintodd.substack.com.

If transformative AI might come soon and you want to help that go well, one strategy you might adopt is building something useful that will improve as AI gets more capable.

That way if AI accelerates, your ability to help accelerates too.

Here’s an example: organisations that use AI to improve epistemics — our ability to know what’s true — and make better decisions on that basis.

This was the most interesting impact-oriented entrepreneurial idea I came across when I visited the San Francisco Bay area in February. (Thank you to Carl Shulman who first suggested it.)

Navigating the deployment of AI is going to involve successfully making many crazy hard judgement calls, such as “what’s the probability this system isn’t aligned” and “what might the economic effects of deployment be?”

Some of these judgement calls will need to be made under a lot of time pressure — especially if we’re seeing 100 years of technological progress in under 5.

Being able to make these kinds of decisions a little bit better could therefore be worth a huge amount. And that’s true given almost any future scenario.

Better decision-making can also potentially help with all other cause areas, which is why 80,000 Hours recommends it as a cause area independent from AI.

So the idea is to set up organisations that use AI to improve forecasting and decision-making in ways that can be eventually applied to these kinds of questions.

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#187 – Zach Weinersmith on how researching his book turned him from a space optimist into a “space bastard”

Podcast by Luisa Rodriguez and Keiran Harris · Published May 14th, 2024

Earth economists, when they measure how bad the potential for exploitation is, they look at things like, how is labour mobility? How much possibility do labourers have otherwise to go somewhere else? Well, if you are on the one company town on Mars, your labour mobility is zero, which has never existed on Earth. Even in your stereotypical West Virginian company town run by immigrant labour, there’s still, by definition, a train out. On Mars, you might not even be in the launch window. And even if there are five other company towns or five other settlements, they’re not necessarily rated to take more humans. They have their own oxygen budget, right?

And so economists use numbers like these, like labour mobility, as a way to put an equation and estimate the ability of a company to set noncompetitive wages or to set noncompetitive work conditions. And essentially, on Mars you’re setting it to infinity.

— Zach Weinersmith

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Zach Weinersmith — the cartoonist behind Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal — about the latest book he wrote with his wife Kelly: A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?

They cover:

Why space travel is suddenly getting a lot cheaper and re-igniting enthusiasm around space settlement.
What Zach thinks are the best and worst arguments for settling space.
Zach’s journey from optimistic about space settlement to a self-proclaimed “space bastard” (pessimist).
How little we know about how microgravity and radiation affects even adults, much less the children potentially born in a space settlement.
A rundown of where we could settle in the solar system, and the major drawbacks of even the most promising candidates.
Why digging bunkers or underwater cities on Earth would beat fleeing to Mars in a catastrophe.
How new space settlements could look a lot like old company towns — and whether or not that’s a bad thing.
The current state of space law and how it might set us up for international conflict.
How space cannibalism legal loopholes might work on the International Space Station.
And much more.

Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio engineering lead: Ben Cordell
Technical editing: Simon Monsour, Milo McGuire, and Dominic Armstrong
Additional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa Rodriguez
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

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Where are all the nuclear experts?

Blog post by Benjamin Hilton · Published May 10th, 2024

The idea this week: nuclear war remains a horrifying possibility — our new nuclear career review examines what you could be doing about it.

Here at 80,000 Hours, we’re often trying to find ways to protect future generations.

If we’d been trying to do that in 1950, one thing would have been at the top of everyone’s minds: the terrifying threat of nuclear annihilation. Indeed, many of the world’s greatest thinkers, politicians, and communicators devoted their careers to understanding and reducing the threat — people like Thomas Schelling, Carl Sagan and even, in his later years, Albert Einstein.

But since the end of the Cold War, the nuclear expert has all but disappeared.

And that’s a problem.

It’s a problem because the risk of nuclear war didn’t just disappear with the Cold War.

In fact, the world is currently facing many nuclear challenges:

The US is modernising its nuclear arsenal.
China is on track to quintuple their nuclear forces by 2030.
Cooling relations between the US and Russia mean that existing arms reduction treaties (like New START) are looking very likely to lapse.
Rising tensions in the Middle East, alongside the collapse of the Iran deal, mean we could very possibly see a new nuclear weapons state in the near future.

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#186 – Dean Spears on why babies are born small in Uttar Pradesh, and how to save their lives

Podcast by Luisa Rodriguez and Keiran Harris · Published May 1st, 2024

I work in a place called Uttar Pradesh, which is a state in India with 240 million people. One in every 33 people in the whole world lives in Uttar Pradesh. It would be the fifth largest country if it were its own country. And if it were its own country, you’d probably know about its human development challenges, because it would have the highest neonatal mortality rate of any country except for South Sudan and Pakistan. Forty percent of children there are stunted. Only two-thirds of women are literate. So Uttar Pradesh is a place where there are lots of health challenges.

And then even within that, we’re working in a district called Bahraich, where about 4 million people live. So even that district of Uttar Pradesh is the size of a country, and if it were its own country, it would have a higher neonatal mortality rate than any other country. In other words, babies born in Bahraich district are more likely to die in their first month of life than babies born in any country around the world.

— Dean Spears

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Dean Spears — associate professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin and founding director of r.i.c.e. — about his experience implementing a surprisingly low-tech but highly cost-effective kangaroo mother care programme in Uttar Pradesh, India to save the lives of vulnerable newborn infants.

They cover:

The shockingly high neonatal mortality rates in Uttar Pradesh, India, and how social inequality and gender dynamics contribute to poor health outcomes for both mothers and babies.
The remarkable benefits for vulnerable newborns that come from skin-to-skin contact and breastfeeding support.
The challenges and opportunities that come with working with a government hospital to implement new, evidence-based programmes.
How the currently small programme might be scaled up to save more newborns’ lives in other regions of Uttar Pradesh and beyond.
How targeted health interventions stack up against direct cash transfers.
Plus, a sneak peak into Dean’s new book, which explores the looming global population peak that’s expected around 2080, and the consequences of global depopulation.
And much more.

Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio engineering lead: Ben Cordell
Technical editing: Simon Monsour, Milo McGuire, and Dominic Armstrong
Additional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa Rodriguez
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

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Particularly impactful career paths you might have overlooked

Blog post by Cody Fenwick · Published April 26th, 2024

The idea this week: there are many potentially high-impact career paths — so don’t limit your options too soon.

Which careers are best for helping others? It’s a simple-sounding question, but it’s not so simple to answer.

We’ve written about this question extensively, and it’s a key part of our career guide. We also have a list of the highest-impact career paths our research has found so far.

Readers naturally focus most on the top of the list. But while we want readers to consider our top-ranked paths (and we think it’s good to be transparent about what we think are the best opportunities to do good), you shouldn’t underrate the personal factors that will make one path or another a better fit for you — both in terms of social impact and personal satisfaction.

So this week we wanted to highlight a few paths and career steps (in no particular order) that we think people should consider if they want to have a lot of impact:

Public discourse shapes the way societies understand and react to key problems in the world, and journalists have a significant role in shaping it. So if you can become an influential journalist, you might be able to have a big impact by drawing attention to pressing world problems, how to solve them, and how to generally think well about these issues.

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#185 – Lewis Bollard on the 7 most promising ways to end factory farming, and whether AI is going to be good or bad for animals

Podcast by Luisa Rodriguez and Keiran Harris · Published April 18th, 2024

The constraint right now on factory farming is how far can you push the biology of these animals? But AI could remove that constraint. It could say, “Actually, we can push them further in these ways and these ways, and they still stay alive. And we’ve modelled out every possibility and we’ve found that it works.”

I think another possibility, which I don’t understand as well, is that AI could lock in current moral values. And I think in particular there’s a risk that if AI is learning from what we do as humans today, the lesson it’s going to learn is that it’s OK to tolerate mass cruelty, so long as it occurs behind closed doors. I think there’s a risk that if it learns that, then it perpetuates that value, and perhaps slows human moral progress on this issue.

— Lewis Bollard

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Lewis Bollard — director of the Farm Animal Welfare programme at Open Philanthropy — about the promising progress and future interventions to end the worst factory farming practices still around today.

They cover:

The staggering scale of animal suffering in factory farms, and how it will only get worse without intervention.
Work to improve farmed animal welfare that Open Philanthropy is excited about funding.
The amazing recent progress made in farm animal welfare — including regulatory attention in the EU and a big win at the US Supreme Court — and the work that still needs to be done.
The occasional tension between ending factory farming and curbing climate change.
How AI could transform factory farming for better or worse — and Lewis’s fears that the technology will just help us maximise cruelty in the name of profit.
How Lewis has updated his opinions or grantmaking as a result of new research on the “moral weights” of different species.
Lewis’s personal journey working on farm animal welfare, and how he copes with the emotional toll of confronting the scale of animal suffering.
How listeners can get involved in the growing movement to end factory farming — from career and volunteer opportunities to impactful donations.
And much more.

Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio engineering lead: Ben Cordell
Technical editing: Simon Monsour, Milo McGuire, and Dominic Armstrong
Additional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa Rodriguez
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

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#184 – Zvi Mowshowitz on sleeping on sleeper agents, and the biggest AI updates since ChatGPT

Podcast by Robert Wiblin and Keiran Harris · Published April 11th, 2024

Many of you will have heard of Zvi Mowshowitz as a superhuman information-absorbing-and-processing machine — which he definitely is.

As the author of the Substack Don’t Worry About the Vase, Zvi has spent as much time as literally anyone in the world over the last two years tracking in detail how the explosion of AI has been playing out — and he has strong opinions about almost every aspect of it. So in today’s episode, host Rob Wiblin asks Zvi for his takes on:

US-China negotiations
Whether AI progress has stalled
The biggest wins and losses for alignment in 2023
EU and White House AI regulations
Which major AI lab has the best safety strategy
The pros and cons of the Pause AI movement
Recent breakthroughs in capabilities
In what situations it’s morally acceptable to work at AI labs

Whether you agree or disagree with his views, Zvi is super informed and brimming with concrete details.

Zvi and Rob also talk about:

The risk of AI labs fooling themselves into believing their alignment plans are working when they may not be.
The “sleeper agent” issue uncovered in a recent Anthropic paper, and how it shows us how hard alignment actually is.
Why Zvi disagrees with 80,000 Hours’ advice about gaining career capital to have a positive impact.
Zvi’s project to identify the most strikingly horrible and neglected policy failures in the US, and how Zvi founded a new think tank (Balsa Research) to identify innovative solutions to overthrow the horrible status quo in areas like domestic shipping, environmental reviews, and housing supply.
Why Zvi thinks that improving people’s prosperity and housing can make them care more about existential risks like AI.
An idea from the online rationality community that Zvi thinks is really underrated and more people should have heard of: simulacra levels.
And plenty more.

Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio engineering lead: Ben Cordell
Technical editing: Simon Monsour, Milo McGuire, and Dominic Armstrong
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

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Christian Ruhl on why we’re entering a new nuclear age — and how to reduce the risks

Podcast (80k After Hours) by Luisa Rodriguez and Keiran Harris · Published March 2024

In this episode of 80k After Hours, Luisa Rodriguez and Christian Ruhl discuss underrated best bets to avert civilisational collapse from global catastrophic risks — things like great power war, frontier military technologies, and nuclear winter.

They cover:

How the geopolitical situation has changed in recent years into a “three-body problem” between the US, Russia, and China.
How adding AI-enabled technologies into the mix makes things even more unstable and unpredictable.
Why Christian recommends many philanthropists focus on “right-of-boom” interventions — those that mitigate the damage after a catastrophe — over traditional preventative measures.
Concrete things policymakers should be considering to reduce the devastating effects of unthinkable tragedies.
And on a more personal note, Christian’s experience of having a stutter.

Who this episode is for:

People interested in the most cost-effective ways to prevent nuclear war, such as:
- Deescalating after accidental nuclear use.
- Civil defence and war termination.
- Mitigating nuclear winter.

Who this episode isn’t for:

People interested in the least cost-effective ways to prevent nuclear war, such as:
- Coating every nuclear weapon on Earth in solid gold so they’re no longer functional.
- Creating a TV show called The Real Housewives of Nuclear Winter about the personal and professional lives of women in Beverly Hills after a nuclear holocaust.
- A multibillion dollar programme to invent a laser beam that could write permanent messages on the Moon, and using it just once to spell out #nonukesnovember.

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell
Technical editing: Ben Cordell and Milo McGuire
Content editing: Katy Moore, Luisa Rodriguez, and Keiran Harris
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

“Gershwin – Rhapsody in Blue, original 1924 version” by Jason Weinberger is licensed under creative commons

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Particularly neglected causes you could work on

Blog post by Arden Koehler · Published March 15th, 2024

The idea this week: working on a highly neglected or pre-paradigmatic issue could be a way to make a big positive difference.

We usually focus on how people can help tackle what we think are the biggest global catastrophic risks. But there are lots of other pressing problems we think also deserve more attention — some of which are especially highly neglected.

Compared to our top-ranked issues, these problems generally don’t have well-developed fields dedicated to them. So we don’t have as much concrete advice about how to tackle them, and they might be full of dead ends.

But if you can find ways to meaningfully contribute (and have the kind of self-directed mindset necessary, doing so could well be your top option.

Here they are, in no particular order:

1. Risks of stable totalitarianism

If we put aside risks of extinction, one of the biggest dangers to the long-term future of humanity might be the potential for an ultra-long-lasting and terrible political regime. As technology advances and globalisation and homogenisation increase, a stable form of totalitarianism potentially could take hold, enabled by improved surveillance, advanced lie detection, or an obedient AI workforce. We’re not sure how big or tractable these risks are, but more research into the area could be highly valuable. Read more.

2. Long-term focused space governance

Humanity’s future,

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#183 – Spencer Greenberg on causation without correlation, money and happiness, lightgassing, hype vs value, and more

Podcast by Robert Wiblin and Keiran Harris · Published March 14th, 2024

When a friend comes to me with a decision, and they want my thoughts on it, very rarely am I trying to give them a really specific answer, like, “I solved your problem.” What I’m trying to do often is give them other ways of thinking about what they’re doing, or giving different framings.

A classic example of this would be someone who’s been working on a project for a long time and they feel really trapped by it. And someone says, “Let’s suppose you currently weren’t working on the project, but you could join it. And if you joined, it would be exactly the state it is now. Would you join?” And they’d be like, “Hell no!” It’s a reframe. It doesn’t mean you definitely shouldn’t join, but it’s a reframe that gives you a new way of looking at it.

— Spencer Greenberg

In today’s episode, host Rob Wiblin speaks for a fourth time with listener favourite Spencer Greenberg — serial entrepreneur and host of the Clearer Thinking podcast — about a grab-bag of topics that Spencer has explored since his last appearance on the show a year ago.

They cover:

How much money makes you happy — and the tricky methodological issues that come up trying to answer that question.
The importance of hype in making valuable things happen.
How to recognise warning signs that someone is untrustworthy or likely to hurt you.
Whether Registered Reports are successfully solving reproducibility issues in science.
The personal principles Spencer lives by, and whether or not we should all establish our own list of life principles.
The biggest and most harmful systemic mistakes we commit when making decisions, both individually and as groups.
The potential harms of lightgassing, which is the opposite of gaslighting.
How Spencer’s team used non-statistical methods to test whether astrology works.
Whether there’s any social value in retaliation.
And much more.

Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell
Technical editing: Simon Monsour, Milo McGuire, and Dominic Armstrong
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

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Expression of interest: product manager

Blog post by Arden Koehler · Published March 10th, 2025

About 80,000 Hours

80,000 Hours’ mission is to get talented people working on the world’s most pressing problems.

In 2025, we are planning to focus especially on helping explain why and how our audience can help society safely navigate a transition to a world with transformative AI.

Over a million people visit our website each year, and thousands of people have told us that they’ve significantly changed their career plans due to our work. Surveys conducted by our primary funder, Open Philanthropy, show that 80,000 Hours is one of the single biggest drivers of talent moving into work related to reducing global catastrophic risks.

Our most popular pieces get over 10,000 unique visitors each month, and are among the most important ways we help people shift their careers towards higher-impact options.

The role

As a senior product manager, you would:

Research, propose, and implement product innovations to make the 80,000 Hours website more useful and delightful for talented people interested in having a high impact career
- For example, you could lead on refreshing the site’s visual identity to make it more appealing, or creating and integrating a custom LLM to help users navigate the content.
Lead on strategies for gathering and using user feedback and industry research to inform product decisions and assess their success
Work with our developers and content team to implement product changes, eventually aiming to manage and hire full-time staff
Decide on the metrics we should use to track success and implement systems for doing so
Generally help grow the impact of the site

This is a senior role.

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Expression of interest: Writer and writer-researcher

Blog post by Arden Koehler · Published March 15th, 2024

About 80,000 Hours

80,000 Hours’ mission is to get talented people working on the world’s most pressing problems. Since being founded in 2011, we have helped:

Popularise using your career to ambitiously pursue impact while thinking seriously about cause and intervention prioritisation
Grow the fields of AI safety, AI governance, global catastrophic biological risk reduction, and global catastrophic risk reduction capacity building (among others)
Fill hundreds of roles at many of the most impactful organisations tackling the worlds’ most pressing problems

Over a million people visit our website each year, and thousands of people have told us that they’ve significantly changed their career plans due to our work. Surveys conducted by our primary funder, Open Philanthropy, show that 80,000 Hours is one of the single biggest drivers of talent moving into work related to reducing global catastrophic risks.

Our most popular pieces are read by over 1,000 people each month, and they are among the most important ways we help people shift their careers towards higher-impact options.

The roles

We’re listing these roles together because there’s a lot of overlap in what they’ll focus on, and we suspect some of the same candidates could be strong fits for both.

The main difference is that the writer role focuses more on the craft of writing compelling and informative pieces for the audience, and the writer-researcher role focuses more on supporting the knowledge base that informs the pieces.

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#182 – Bob Fischer on comparing the welfare of humans, chickens, pigs, octopuses, bees, and more

Podcast by Luisa Rodriguez and Keiran Harris · Published March 8th, 2024

[One] thing is just to spend time thinking about the kinds of things animals can do and what their lives are like. Just how hard a chicken will work to get to a nest box before she lays an egg, the amount of labour she’s willing to go through to do that, to think about how important that is to her. And to realise that we can quantify that, and see how much they care, or to see that they get stressed out when fellow chickens are threatened and that they seem to have some sympathy for conspecifics.

Those kinds of things make me say there is something in there that is recognisable to me as another individual, with desires and preferences and a vantage point on the world, who wants things to go a certain way and is frustrated and upset when they don’t. And recognising the individuality, the perspective of nonhuman animals, for me, really challenges my tendency to not take them as seriously as I think I ought to, all things considered.

— Bob Fischer

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Bob Fischer — senior research manager at Rethink Priorities and the director of the Society for the Study of Ethics and Animals — about Rethink Priorities’s Moral Weight Project.

They cover:

The methods used to assess the welfare ranges and capacities for pleasure and pain of chickens, pigs, octopuses, bees, and other animals — and the limitations of that approach.
Concrete examples of how someone might use the estimated moral weights to compare the benefits of animal vs human interventions.
The results that most surprised Bob.
Why the team used a hedonic theory of welfare to inform the project, and what non-hedonic theories of welfare might bring to the table.
Thought experiments like Tortured Tim that test different philosophical assumptions about welfare.
Confronting our own biases when estimating animal mental capacities and moral worth.
The limitations of using neuron counts as a proxy for moral weights.
How different types of risk aversion, like avoiding worst-case scenarios, could impact cause prioritisation.
And plenty more.

Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell
Technical editing: Simon Monsour and Milo McGuire
Additional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa Rodriguez
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

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#181 – Laura Deming on the science that could keep us healthy in our 80s and beyond

Podcast by Luisa Rodriguez and Keiran Harris · Published March 1st, 2024

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Laura Deming — founder of The Longevity Fund — about the challenge of ending ageing.

They cover:

How lifespan is surprisingly easy to manipulate in animals, which suggests human longevity could be increased too.
Why we irrationally accept age-related health decline as inevitable.
The engineering mindset Laura takes to solving the problem of ageing.
Laura’s thoughts on how ending ageing is primarily a social challenge, not a scientific one.
The recent exciting regulatory breakthrough for an anti-ageing drug for dogs.
Laura’s vision for how increased longevity could positively transform society by giving humans agency over when and how they age.
Why this decade may be the most important decade ever for making progress on anti-ageing research.
The beauty and fascination of biology, which makes it such a compelling field to work in.
And plenty more.

Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell
Technical editing: Simon Monsour and Milo McGuire
Additional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa Rodriguez
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

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The case for taking your technical expertise to the field of AI policy

Blog post by Cody Fenwick · Published March 1st, 2024

The idea this week: technical expertise is needed in AI governance and policy.

How do you prevent a new and rapidly evolving technology from spiralling out of control? How can governments, policymakers, and civil society ensure that we’re making the best decisions about how to integrate artificial intelligence into our society?

To answer these kinds of questions, we need people with technical expertise — in machine learning, information security, computing hardware, or other relevant technical domains — to work in AI governance and policy making.

Of course, there are roles for people with many different backgrounds to play in AI governance and policy. Experience in law, international coordination, communications, operations management, and more are all potentially valuable in this space.

But we think people with technical backgrounds may underrate their ability to contribute to AI policy. We’ve long regarded AI technical safety research as an extremely high-impact career option, and we still do. But this sometimes gives readers the impression that if they’ve got a technical background or aptitude, it’s the main path for them to consider if they want to help prevent an AI-related catastrophe.

But this isn’t necessarily true.

Technical knowledge is crucial in AI governance for understanding the current landscape and likely trajectories of the technology, as well as for designing and implementing policies that can reduce the biggest risks.

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Open roles: Operations team

Blog post by Sashika Coxhead · Published February 27th, 2024

About 80,000 Hours

80,000 Hours’ goal is to get talented people working on the world’s most pressing problems — we aim to be the world’s best source of support and advice for them on how to do so. That means helping people shift their careers to work on solving problems that are more important, neglected, and solvable — and to pick more promising methods for solving those problems.

We’ve had over 10 million readers on our website, have ~450,000 subscribers to our newsletter and have given 1on1 advice to over 4,000 people. We’re also one of the top ways people who get involved in EA first hear about it, and we’re the most commonly cited factor for ‘getting involved’ in the EA community.

The operations team oversees 80,000 Hours’ HR, recruiting, finances, org-wide metrics, and office management, as well as much of our fundraising, tech systems, and team coordination. We’re also currently overseeing our spinout from Effective Ventures and setup as an independent organisation.

Currently, the operations team has four full-time staff, some part-time staff, and we receive operations support from Effective Ventures. We’re planning to (at least!) double the size of our operations team over the next year.

The roles

These roles would be great for building career capital in operations, especially if you could one day see yourself in a more senior operations role (e.g. specialising in a particular area, taking on management, or eventually being a Head of Operations or COO).

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Anonymous answers: What are the biggest misconceptions about biosecurity and pandemic risk?

Article by Anemone Franz and Tessa Alexanian · Published February 2024

This is Part One of our four-part series of biosecurity anonymous answers. You can also read Part Two: Fighting pandemics, Part Three: Infohazards, and Part Four: AI and biorisk.

We rank preventing catastrophic pandemics as one of the most pressing problems in the world, and we have advised many of our readers to work in biosecurity to have high-impact careers.

But biosecurity is a complex field, and while the threat is undoubtedly large, there’s a lot of disagreement about how best to conceptualise and mitigate the risks. We wanted to get a better sense of how the people thinking about these threats every day perceive the risks.

So we decided to talk to more than a dozen biosecurity experts to better understand their views.

To make them feel comfortable speaking candidly, we granted the experts we spoke to anonymity. Sometimes disagreements in this space can get contentious, and certainly many of the experts we spoke to disagree with one another. We don’t endorse every position they’ve articulated below.

We think, though, that it’s helpful to lay out the range of expert opinions from people who we think are trustworthy and established in the field. We hope this will inform our readers about ongoing debates and issues that are important to understand — and perhaps highlight areas of disagreement that need more attention.

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