New releases

Parenting insights from Rob and 8 past guests

Podcast by , , and · Published November 8, 2024

With kids very much on the team’s mind we thought it would be fun to review some comments about parenting featured on the show over the years, then have hosts Luisa Rodriguez and Rob Wiblin react to them.

After hearing 8 former guests’ insights, Luisa and Rob chat about:

  • Which of these resonate the most with Rob, now that he’s been a dad for six months (plus an update at nine months).
  • What have been the biggest surprises for Rob in becoming a parent.
  • Whether the benefits of parenthood can actually be studied, and if we get skewed impressions of how bad parenting is.
  • How Rob’s dealt with work and parenting tradeoffs, and his advice for other would-be parents.
  • Rob’s list of recommended purchases for new or upcoming parents

This bonus episode includes excerpts from:

  • Ezra Klein on parenting yourself as well as your children (from episode #157)
  • Holden Karnofsky on freezing embryos and being surprised by how fun it is to have a kid (#110 and #158)
  • Parenting expert Emily Oster on how having kids affect relationships, careers and kids, and what actually makes a difference in young kids’ lives (#178)
  • Russ Roberts on empirical research when deciding whether to have kids (#87)
  • Spencer Greenberg on his surveys of parents (#183)
  • Elie Hassenfeld on how having children reframes his relationship to solving pressing global problems (#153)
  • Bryan Caplan on homeschooling (#172)
  • Nita Farahany on thinking about life and the world differently with kids (#174)

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Why we get burned out — and what helps

Blog post by · Published November 8, 2024

The idea this week: there are no magical fixes for career burnout, but there are concrete steps that can help.

When I was in the last years of my PhD studying representations of science and technology in fiction, I started feeling tired every day. I was checked out from my research, and I had a nagging sense that I wasn’t as good at it as I used to be.

I now realise I was experiencing burnout — and these feelings are quite common.

The World Health Organisation will tell you that burnout is an occupational syndrome that results from chronic workplace stress. It’s characterised by energy depletion, increased negativity and cynicism about your job, and reduced efficacy.

In my case, I was struggling with a mismatch between my work and what I thought really mattered. I was doing a PhD to become a literature professor, but my research seemed fundamentally disconnected from what I cared about: helping with pressing world problems.

Once something feels pointless, it’s very difficult to muster the motivation to get it done.

The silver lining is that now I can use this experience to help others in my role as a career advisor. And here is one piece of advice I often give: if you can, try to find work that aligns with what you think matters. In order to do this, it’s important to first reflect on what problems you care about and how to best tackle them.

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#206 – Anil Seth on the predictive brain and how to study consciousness

Podcast by and · Published November 1, 2024

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Anil Seth — director of the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science — about how much we can learn about consciousness by studying the brain.

They cover:

  • What groundbreaking studies with split-brain patients and blindsight have already taught us about the nature of consciousness.
  • Anil’s theory that our perception is a “controlled hallucination” generated by our predictive brains.
  • Whether looking for the parts of the brain that correlate with consciousness is the right way to learn about what consciousness is.
  • Whether our theories of human consciousness can be applied to nonhuman animals.
  • Anil’s thoughts on whether machines could ever be conscious.
  • Disagreements and open questions in the field of consciousness studies, and what areas Anil is most excited to explore next.
  • And much more.

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Stable totalitarianism

Problem profile by · Last updated October 2024 · First published June 2024

Working on this problem may be very important for improving the long-term future of humanity. However, it’s probably somewhat less of a priority than our highest priority problems because the path to stable totalitarianism involves multiple unlikely steps.

Still, there are some promising career options in this area you might want to consider, particularly if you think stable totalitarianism is more likely than we do, or if you’re particularly well-placed to work on it.

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What are experts in biosecurity worried about?

Blog post by · Published October 25, 2024

The idea this week: biosecurity experts disagree on many of the field’s most important questions.

We spoke to more than a dozen biosecurity experts to understand the space better. We let them give their answers anonymously so that they could feel comfortable speaking their minds.

We don’t agree with everything the experts told us — they don’t even agree with one another! But we think it can be really useful for people who want to learn about or enter this field to understand the ongoing debates and disagreements.

We already published the first article on their answers about misconceptions in biosecurity, and we’re now sharing three more editions, completing this four-part series:

1. AI’s impact on biosecurity

We think one of the world’s most pressing problems is the risk of catastrophic pandemics, and powerful AI could make this risk higher than ever before.

Experts generally agreed that AI developments pose new risks, but there was some disagreement on how big and immediate the threat is.

These are some key quotes from the experts on areas of disagreement:

  • “AI may really accelerate biorisk. Unfortunately, I don’t think we have yet figured out great tools to manage that risk.” (Read more)
  • “My hot take is that AI is obviously a big deal, but I’m not sure it’s actually as big a deal in biosecurity as it might be for other areas.”

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#205 – Sébastien Moro on the most insane things fish can do

Podcast by and · Published October 23, 2024

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to science writer and video blogger Sébastien Moro about the latest research on fish consciousness, intelligence, and potential sentience.

They cover:

  • The insane capabilities of fish in tests of memory, learning, and problem-solving.
  • Examples of fish that can beat primates on cognitive tests and recognise individual human faces.
  • Fishes’ social lives, including pair bonding, “personalities,” cooperation, and cultural transmission.
  • Whether fish can experience emotions, and how this is even studied.
  • The wild evolutionary innovations of fish, who adapted to thrive in diverse environments from mangroves to the deep sea.
  • How some fish have sensory capabilities we can’t even really fathom — like “seeing” electrical fields and colours we can’t perceive.
  • Ethical issues raised by evidence that fish may be conscious and experience suffering.
  • And plenty more.

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#204 – Nate Silver on making sense of SBF, and his biggest critiques of effective altruism

Podcast by and · Published October 16, 2024

In today’s episode, Rob Wiblin speaks with FiveThirtyEight election forecaster and author Nate Silver about his new book: On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything.

On the Edge explores a cultural grouping Nate dubs “the River” — made up of people who are analytical, competitive, quantitatively minded, risk-taking, and willing to be contrarian. It’s a tendency he considers himself a part of, and the River has been doing well for itself in recent decades — gaining cultural influence through success in finance, technology, gambling, philanthropy, and politics, among other pursuits.

But on Nate’s telling, it’s a group particularly vulnerable to oversimplification and hubris. Where Riverians’ ability to calculate the “expected value” of actions isn’t as good as they believe, their poorly calculated bets can leave a trail of destruction — aptly demonstrated by Nate’s discussion of the extended time he spent with FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried before and after his downfall.

Given this show’s focus on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them, we narrow in on Nate’s discussion of effective altruism (EA), which has been little covered elsewhere. Nate met many leaders and members of the EA community in researching the book and has watched its evolution online for many years.

Effective altruism is the River style of doing good, because of its willingness to buck both fashion and common sense — making its giving decisions based on mathematical calculations and analytical arguments with the goal of maximising an outcome.

Nate sees a lot to admire in this, but the book paints a mixed picture in which effective altruism is arguably too trusting, too utilitarian, too selfless, and too reckless at some times, while too image-conscious at others.

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Anonymous answers: could advances in AI supercharge biorisk?

Article by and · Published October 2024

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

One of the most prominently discussed catastrophic risks from AI is the potential for an AI-enabled bioweapon.

But discussions of future technologies are necessarily speculative. So it’s not surprising that there’s no consensus among biosecurity experts about the impact AI is likely to have on their field.

We decided to talk to more than a dozen biosecurity experts to better understand their views on the potential for AI to exacerbate biorisk. This is the fourth and final instalment of our biosecurity anonymous answers series. Below, we present 11 answers from these experts about whether recent advances in AI — such as ChatGPT and AlphaFold — have changed their biosecurity priorities and what interventions they think are promising to reduce the risks. (As we conducted the interviews around one year ago, some experts may have updated their views in the meantime.)

Some key topics and areas of disagreement that emerged include:

  • The extent to which recent AI developments have changed biosecurity priorities
  • The potential of AI to lower barriers for creating biological threats
  • The effectiveness of current AI models in the biological domain
  • The balance between AI as a threat multiplier and as a tool for defence
  • The urgency of developing new interventions to address AI-enhanced biosecurity risks
  • The role of AI companies and policymakers in mitigating potential dangers

Here’s what the experts had to say.

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Updates to our problem rankings of factory farming, climate change, and more

Blog post by · Published October 8, 2024

At 80,000 Hours, we are interested in the question: “if you want to find the best way to have a positive impact with your career, what should you do on the margin?” The ‘on the margin’ qualifier is crucial. We are asking how you can have a bigger impact, given how the rest of society spends its resources.

To help our readers think this through, we publish a list of what we see as the world’s most pressing problems. We rank the top most issues by our assessment of where additional work and resources will have the greatest positive impact, considered impartially and in expectation.

Every problem on our list is there because we think it’s very important and a big opportunity for doing good. We’re excited for our readers to make progress on all of them, and think all of them would ideally get more resources and attention than they currently do from society at large.

The most pressing problems are those that have the greatest combination of being:

  • Large in scale: solving the issue improves more lives to a larger extent over the long run.
  • Neglected by others: the best interventions aren’t already being done.
  • Tractable: we can make progress if we try.

We’ve recently updated our list.

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#203 – Peter Godfrey-Smith on interfering with wild nature, accepting death, and the origin of complex civilisation

Podcast by and · Published October 3, 2024

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Peter Godfrey-Smith — bestselling author and science philosopher — about his new book, Living on Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness, and the Making of the World.

They cover:

  • Why octopuses and dolphins haven’t developed complex civilisation despite their intelligence.
  • How the role of culture has been crucial in enabling human technological progress.
  • Why Peter thinks the evolutionary transition from sea to land was key to enabling human-like intelligence — and why we should expect to see that in extraterrestrial life too.
  • Whether Peter thinks wild animals’ lives are, on balance, good or bad, and when, if ever, we should intervene in their lives.
  • Whether we can and should avoid death by uploading human minds.
  • And plenty more.

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Anonymous answers: How can we manage infohazards in biosecurity?

Article by and · Published September 2024

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

In the field of biosecurity, many experts are concerned with managing information hazards (or infohazards). This is information that some believe could be dangerous if it were widely known — such as the gene sequence of a deadly virus or particular threat models.

Navigating the complexities of infohazards and the potential misuse of biological knowledge is contentious, and experts often disagree about how to approach this issue.

So we decided to talk to more than a dozen biosecurity experts to better understand their views. This is the third instalment of our biosecurity anonymous answers series. Below, we present 11 responses from these experts addressing their views on managing information hazards in biosecurity, particularly as it relates to global catastrophic risks

Some key topics and areas of disagreement that emerged include:

  • How to balance the need for transparency with the risks of information misuse
  • The extent to which discussing biological threats could inspire malicious actors
  • Whether current approaches to information hazards are too conservative or not cautious enough
  • How to share sensitive information responsibly with different audiences
  • The impact of information restrictions on scientific progress and problem solving
  • The role of public awareness in biosecurity risks

Here’s what the experts had to say.

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#202 – Venki Ramakrishnan on the cutting edge of anti-ageing science

Podcast by and · Published September 19, 2024

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Venki Ramakrishnan — molecular biologist and Nobel Prize winner — about his new book, Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality.

They cover:

  • What we can learn about extending human lifespan — if anything — from “immortal” aquatic animal species, cloned sheep, and the oldest people to have ever lived.
  • Which areas of anti-ageing research seem most promising to Venki — including caloric restriction, removing senescent cells, cellular reprogramming, and Yamanaka factors — and which Venki thinks are overhyped.
  • Why eliminating major age-related diseases might only extend average lifespan by 15 years.
  • The social impacts of extending healthspan or lifespan in an ageing population — including the potential danger of massively increasing inequality if some people can access life-extension interventions while others can’t.
  • And plenty more.

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Why experts and forecasters disagree about AI risk

Blog post by · Published September 16, 2024

This week we’re highlighting:

The idea this week: even some sceptics of AI risk think there’s a real chance of a catastrophe in the next 1,000 years.

That was one of many thought-provoking conclusions that came up when I spoke with economist Ezra Karger about his work with the Forecasting Research Institute (FRI) on understanding disagreements about existential risk.

It’s hard to get to a consensus on the level of risk we face from AI. So FRI conducted the Existential Risk Persuasion Tournament to investigate these disagreements and find out whether they could be resolved.

The interview covers a lot of issues, but here are some key details that stood out on the topic of AI risk:

  • Domain experts in AI estimated a 3% chance of AI-caused human extinction by 2100 on average, while superforecasters put it at just 0.38%.
  • Both groups agreed on a high likelihood of “powerful AI” being developed by 2100 (around 90%).
  • Even AI risk sceptics saw a 30% chance of catastrophic AI outcomes over a 1,000-year timeframe.

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#201 – Ken Goldberg on why your robot butler isn’t here yet

Podcast by and · Published September 13, 2024

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Ken Goldberg — robotics professor at UC Berkeley — about the major research challenges still ahead before robots become broadly integrated into our homes and societies.

They cover:

  • Why training robots is harder than training large language models like ChatGPT.
  • The biggest engineering challenges that still remain before robots can be widely useful in the real world.
  • The sectors where Ken thinks robots will be most useful in the coming decades — like homecare, agriculture, and medicine.
  • Whether we should be worried about robot labour affecting human employment.
  • Recent breakthroughs in robotics, and what cutting-edge robots can do today.
  • Ken’s work as an artist, where he explores the complex relationship between humans and technology.
  • And plenty more.

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Moral status of digital minds

Problem profile by · Published September 2024

We think understanding the moral status of digital minds is a top emerging challenge in the world. This means it’s potentially as important as our top problems, but we have a lot of uncertainty about it and the relevant field is not very developed.

The fast development of AI technology will force us to confront many important questions around the moral status of digital minds that we’re not prepared to answer. We want to see more people focusing their careers on this issue, building a field of researchers to improve our understanding of this topic and getting ready to advise key decision makers in the future. We also think people working in AI technical safety and AI governance should learn more about this problem and consider ways in which it might interact with their work.

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Anonymous answers: What are the best ways to fight the next pandemic?

Article by and · Published September 2024

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

Preventing catastrophic pandemics is one of our top priorities.

But the landscape of pandemic preparedness is complex and multifaceted, and experts don’t always agree about what the most effective interventions are or how resources should be allocated.

So we decided to talk to more than a dozen biosecurity experts to better understand their views. This is the second instalment of our biosecurity anonymous answers series.

Below, we present 12 responses from these experts addressing their views on neglected interventions in pandemic preparedness and advice for capable young people entering the field, particularly as it relates to global catastrophic risks.

Some key topics and areas of disagreement that emerged include:

  • The relative importance of technical interventions versus policy work
  • The prioritisation of prevention strategies versus response capabilities
  • The focus on natural pandemic threats versus deliberate biological risks
  • The role of intelligence and national security in pandemic preparedness
  • The importance of behavioural science and public communication in crisis response
  • The potential of various technologies like improved PPE, biosurveillance, and pathogen-agnostic approaches

Here’s what the experts had to say.

Expert 1: Improving PPE and detection technologies
Expert 2: Enhancing security measures against malicious actors
Expert 3: Implementing biosecurity safeguards and behavioural science
Expert 4: Protecting field researchers and advancing vaccine platforms
Expert 5: Focusing on containment and early detection
Expert 6: Balancing policy and technical interventions
Expert 7: Understanding the bioeconomy
Expert 8: Prioritising biosurveillance and risk modelling
Expert 9: Increasing biodefense efforts
Expert 10: Integrating pathogen-agnostic sequencing
Expert 11: Bolstering intelligence and early detection
Expert 12: Promoting biosafety research
Learn more

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#200 – Ezra Karger on what superforecasters and experts think about existential risks

Podcast by and · Published September 4, 2024

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Ezra Karger — research director at the Forecasting Research Institute — about FRI’s 2022 Existential Risk Persuasion Tournament to come up with estimates of a range of catastrophic risks.

They cover:

  • How forecasting can improve our understanding of long-term catastrophic risks from things like AI, nuclear war, pandemics, and climate change.
  • What the Existential Risk Persuasion Tournament (XPT) is, how it was set up, and the results.
  • The challenges of predicting low-probability, high-impact events.
  • Why superforecasters’ estimates of catastrophic risks seem so much lower than experts’, and which group Ezra puts the most weight on.
  • The specific underlying disagreements that superforecasters and experts had about how likely catastrophic risks from AI are.
  • Why Ezra thinks forecasting tournaments can help build consensus on complex topics, and what he wants to do differently in future tournaments and studies.
  • Recent advances in the science of forecasting and the areas Ezra is most excited about exploring next.
  • Whether large language models could help or outperform human forecasters.
  • How people can improve their calibration and start making better forecasts personally.
  • Why Ezra thinks high-quality forecasts are relevant to policymakers, and whether they can really improve decision-making.
  • And plenty more.

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Updates to our research about AI risk and careers

Blog post by and · Published August 30, 2024

This week, we’re sharing new updates on:

  1. Top career paths for reducing risks from AI
  2. An AI bill in California that’s getting a lot of attention
  3. The potential for catastrophic misuse of advanced AI
  4. Whether to work at frontier AI companies if you want to reduce catastrophic risks
  5. The variety of approaches in AI governance

Here’s what’s new:

1. We now rank AI governance and policy at the top of our list of impactful career paths

It’s swapped places with AI technical safety research, which is now second.

Here are our reasons for the change:

  • Many experts in the field have been increasingly excited about “technical AI governance” — people using technical expertise to inform and shape policies. For example, people can develop sophisticated compute governance policies and norms around evaluating increasingly advanced AI models for dangerous capabilities.
  • We know of many people with technical talent and track records choosing to work in governance right now because they think it’s where they can make a bigger difference.
  • It’s become more clear that policy-shaping and governance positions within key AI organisations can play critical roles in how the technology progresses.
  • We’re seeing a particularly large increase in the number of roles available in AI governance and policy,

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#199 – Nathan Calvin on California’s AI bill SB 1047 and its potential to shape US AI policy

Podcast by and · Published August 29, 2024

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Nathan Calvin — senior policy counsel at the Center for AI Safety Action Fund — about the new AI safety bill in California, SB 1047, which he’s helped shape as it’s moved through the state legislature.

They cover:

  • What’s actually in SB 1047, and which AI models it would apply to.
  • The most common objections to the bill — including how it could affect competition, startups, open source models, and US national security — and which of these objections Nathan thinks hold water.
  • What Nathan sees as the biggest misunderstandings about the bill that get in the way of good public discourse about it.
  • Why some AI companies are opposed to SB 1047, despite claiming that they want the industry to be regulated.
  • How the bill is different from Biden’s executive order on AI and voluntary commitments made by AI companies.
  • Why California is taking state-level action rather than waiting for federal regulation.
  • How state-level regulations can be hugely impactful at national and global scales, and how listeners could get involved in state-level work to make a real difference on lots of pressing problems.
  • And plenty more.

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Diplomacy

Career review by and · Published August 2024

In a nutshell: Diplomacy is crucial for addressing global challenges, such as reducing the risk of great power conflict, preventing the use of bioweapons, mitigating climate change, and strengthening good-governance around the world. The highest-impact diplomatic roles involve opening channels between adversaries, strengthening alliances and international institutions, and shaping a country’s foreign policy strategy.

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