# LLMs.txt - Sitemap for AI content discovery

# Learn more:https://80000hours.org/ai-sitemap/

# 80,000 Hours

> 

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## AI guide

- [The case for AGI by 2030](https://80000hours.org/agi/guide/when-will-agi-arrive/): 
- [Why AGI could be here soon and what you can do about it: a primer](https://80000hours.org/agi/guide/summary/): 

## Career guide pages

- [Career Guide (audio version)](https://80000hours.org/career-guide/audio/): 
- [Summary: How to find a fulfilling career that does good](https://80000hours.org/career-guide/summary/): Just the bottom lines from our career guide. TL;DR: To have a fulfilling career, get good at something and then use it to tackle pressing global problems.
- [The end: A cheery final note - imagining your deathbed](https://80000hours.org/career-guide/end/): We summarise our entire career guide in one minute.
- [Part 9: All the evidence-based advice we found on how to be more successful in any job](https://80000hours.org/career-guide/how-to-be-successful/): Much advice on how to be successful is wrong, or useless cliches. Here we cover the best advice we've found in the last 10 years that's backed by evidence.
- [Part 3: No matter your job, here’s 3 evidence-based ways anyone can have a real impact](https://80000hours.org/career-guide/making-a-difference/): Three ways to make a big positive impact without changing jobs: 1. Give 10% to effective charities. 2. Use your political influence. 3. Be a multiplier.
- [Part 12: One of the most powerful ways to improve your career -- join a community.](https://80000hours.org/career-guide/community/): Learn about joining a community can help you succeed and have a greater impact.
- [Part 5: The world’s biggest problems and why they’re not what first comes to mind](https://80000hours.org/career-guide/world-problems/): What are the biggest problems and issues in the world that are the most important to solve? Here's what we learned after 10 years of research.
- [Why should I read this guide?](https://80000hours.org/career-guide/introduction/): You’ll spend about 80,000 hours working in your career: 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, for 40 years. How to spend that time is one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make.
- [Part 11: All the best advice we could find on how to get a job](https://80000hours.org/career-guide/how-to-get-a-job/): A step-by-step guide to how to get a job, based on all the best advice we could find and what we've learned coaching thousands of people.
- [Part 4: Want to do good? Here's how to choose an area to focus on.](https://80000hours.org/career-guide/most-pressing-problems/): To have the biggest impact, you'll want to work on the world's most pressing problems. This sounds obvious, but people often fail to put it into practice.
- [Part 2: Can one person make a difference? What the evidence says.](https://80000hours.org/career-guide/can-one-person-make-a-difference/): Many common ways to do good don't make as much difference as you first think. But it's possible to have a huge impact by being a little unconventional.
- [Part 7: Which jobs put you in the best long-term position?](https://80000hours.org/career-guide/career-capital/): One mistake many people make is to take jobs that don’t put them in a better long-term position. Why does this happen and how can you avoid it?
- [Part 6: Which jobs help people the most?](https://80000hours.org/career-guide/high-impact-jobs/): You don’t need to be a doctor or a charity worker to help people. Drawing on over ten years of research, we outline five types of jobs that help others.
- [Part 10: How to make your career plan](https://80000hours.org/career-guide/career-planning/): Detailed long-term career plans can be harmful, but it's still good to have some idea where you're going. Here's how to write out your plan.
- [Part 1: We reviewed over 60 studies about what makes for a dream job. Here's what we found.](https://80000hours.org/career-guide/job-satisfaction/): We reviewed over 60 studies. We found a dream job isn't highly paid or easy, and need not involve your "passion". Rather, focus on 6 key ingredients.
- [Part 8: How to find the right career for you](https://80000hours.org/career-guide/personal-fit/): Career aptitude tests and gap years don't help you find the right career. Here's a step-by-step process to work out the career that suits you best.

## Problem profiles

- [Gradual disempowerment](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/gradual-disempowerment/): 
- [Understanding the moral status of digital minds](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/moral-status-digital-minds/): We don't know how to assess whether future AI systems will have moral status. Here's why that could be a big problem.
- [Factory farming](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/factory-farming/): Each year, 50 billion animals are raised and slaughtered in factory farms. Most experience extreme levels of suffering.
- [Risks of stable totalitarianism](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/risks-of-stable-totalitarianism/): 
- [Nuclear weapons](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/nuclear-security/): It’s very plausible that there will be a nuclear war this century. As a result, nuclear weapons remain an extremely pressing problem.
- [Great power war](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/great-power-conflict/): Another great power conflict could cause unprecedented destruction. But there are ways to reduce the risks.
- [Reducing global catastrophic biological risks](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/reducing-global-catastrophic-biological-risks-for-ted-ed/): 
- [Immigration restrictions](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/immigration-restrictions/): 
- [Whole brain emulation](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/whole-brain-emulation/): 
- [Preventing the spread of false ideas on social media](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/preventing-the-spread-of-false-ideas-on-social-media/): 
- [Wild animal suffering](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/wild-animal-welfare/): It's easy to imagine that wild animals live harmoniously with one another in a natural 'balance' — but advocates for wild animal welfare argue that this attitude ignores the huge amounts of suffering present in nature.
- [Promoting positive values](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/promoting-positive-values/): 
- [Risks from malevolent actors](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/risks-from-malevolent-actors/): 
- [‘S-risks’](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/s-risks/): 
- [Safeguarding liberal democracy](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/liberal-democracy/): 
- [Civilisation resilience](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/civilisation-resilience/): 
- [Preventing an AI-related catastrophe](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/artificial-intelligence/): The future of AI is difficult to predict. But while AI systems could have substantial positive effects, there's a growing consensus about the dangers of AI.
- [Risks from atomically precise manufacturing](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/atomically-precise-manufacturing/): Both the risks and benefits of advances in atomically precise manufacturing could be significant. Shaping the trajectory of this technology is highly neglected.
- [More neglected areas in mental health](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/neglected-mental-health/): 
- [Science policy and infrastructure](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/science-policy-and-infrastructure/): 
- [High-leverage ways to speed up economic growth](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/high-leverage-economic-growth/): 
- [Improving incentives and governance for global public goods](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/global-public-goods/): 
- [Improving individual reasoning or cognition](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/improving-individual-reasoning-or-cognition/): 
- [Voting reform](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/voting-reform/): 
- [Climate change](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/climate-change/): Climate change will affect all our lives and gravely damage livelihoods around the world. But how pressing is climate change compared to other risks?
- [Space governance](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/space-governance/): Humanity’s long-run future could lie in space — it could go well, but that’s not guaranteed. What can you do to help shape the future of space governance?
- [Preventing catastrophic pandemics](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/preventing-catastrophic-pandemics/): Are we prepared for the next pandemic? Pandemics — and biological risks like bioterrorism or biological weapons — pose an existential threat to humanity.
- [Reducing global catastrophic biological risks](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/preventing-catastrophic-pandemics/full-report/): 
- [Improving decision making (especially in important institutions)](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/improving-institutional-decision-making/): Governments and other important institutions frequently have to make complex, high-stakes decisions based on the judgement calls of just a handful of people.
- [Building effective altruism](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/promoting-effective-altruism/): Effective altruism is about using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis.
- [Land use reform](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/land-use-reform/): Local laws often prohibit the construction of dense new housing, which drives up prices, especially in a few large high-wage urban areas. The increased prices transfer wealth from renters to landowners and push people away from centers of economic activity
- [Smoking in the developing world](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/tobacco/): Smoking takes an enormous toll on human health - accounting for about 6% of all ill-health globally according to the best estimates. This is more than HIV and malaria combined. Despite this, smoking is on the rise in many developing countries as people become richer and can afford to buy cigarettes. There appears to be a range of policies which have been shown to reduce smoking rates, which are usually not applied in developing countries. The most natural ways to tackle the problem through your career include becoming a health policy expert, or advocacy through journalism, think tanks and politics. This is a particularly promising cause for people living in a developing country with high smoking rates.
- [Global priorities research](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/global-priorities-research/): Global priorities research seeks to use new methods to determine in which causes funding to improve the world can have the biggest impact, and make a convincing case about this to people in a position to redirect large amounts of money.
- [Global health](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/health-in-poor-countries/): Every year around ten million people in poorer countries die of illnesses that can be very cheaply prevented or managed, including malaria, HIV, tuberculosis and diarrhoea.

## Career reviews

- [Diplomacy](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/diplomacy/): 
- [Nuclear weapons safety and security](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/nuclear-weapons/): Find out how you could use your career to prevent a nuclear war and reduce the risks posed by nuclear weapons.
- [Expert in AI hardware](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/become-an-expert-in-ai-hardware/): 
- [US policy master's degrees](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/us-policy-masters-degrees/): Working in policy is among the most effective ways to have a positive impact in key fields. Getting a policy master’s degree can be a big help in this path.
- [AI governance and policy](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/ai-policy-and-strategy/): Advanced AI systems could have massive impacts on humanity and potentially pose global catastrophic risks. There are opportunities...
- [Should you work at a frontier AI company?](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/working-at-an-ai-lab/): 
- [AI safety technical research](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/ai-safety-researcher/): AI safety research — research on ways to prevent unwanted behaviour from AI systems — generally involves working as a scientist or engineer at major AI labs, in academia, or in independent nonprofits.
- [AI Safety technical research](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/ai-safety-technical-research/): There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
- [Information security in high-impact areas](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/information-security/): Organisations with influence, financial power, and advanced technology are targeted by actors seeking to steal or abuse these assets. A career in information security is a promising avenue to support high-impact organisations by protecting against these attacks, which have the potential to disrupt an organisation's mission or even increase existential risk.
- [Journalism](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/journalism/): For the right person, becoming a journalist could be very impactful.But the most influential positions in the field are highly competitive...
- [Should you go to law school in the US to have a high-impact career?](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/should-you-go-to-law-school/): Law school can be valuable for people pursuing several promising high-impact career paths — but you should avoid some common mistakes.
- [Data collection for AI alignment](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/alignment-data-expert/): Many proposals to reduce risks from misaligned AI may need a lot of high-quality data from people that can be used to train machine learning models.
- [China-related AI safety and governance paths](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/china-related-ai-safety-and-governance-paths/): China is a leading country in AI. If you have a background in China you may be able to help ensure its development benefits everyone.
- [Software engineering](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/software-engineering/): Software engineers can contribute directly to solving some of the world’s most pressing problems. There is a shortage of software engineers at the cutting edge of research into AI safety.
- [Founder of new projects tackling top problems](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/founder-impactful-organisations/): Become a founder of an organisation tackling one of the world’s most pressing problems.
- [Manager of a long-term philanthropic fund](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/managing-philanthropic-funds/): 
- [Investigate a potentially pressing but unexplored global issue](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/explore-a-potentially-pressing-global-issue/): 
- [Research & advocacy promoting impactful climate solutions](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/effective-altruist-approach-to-climate-change/): 
- [Organise an effective altruism local group](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/organise-an-effective-altruism-group/): 
- [Expert on formal verification](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/formal-verification-expert/): 
- [Public intellectual](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/public-intellectual/): This is a high risk but potentially very high impact path. Public intellectuals can do a lot of good by spreading important ideas -- when they succeed.
- [Specialist in emerging global powers](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/emerging-global-power-specialist/): 
- [Research management](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/research-management/): 
- [Become an executive assistant for someone doing especially high-impact work](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/executive-assistant-for-an-impactful-person/): 
- [Policy careers focused on other pressing global issues](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/policy-careers-focused-on-other-pressing-global-issues/): 
- [Historian of large societal trends, inflection points, progress, or collapse](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/historian-of-societal-trends/): Find out how to become a historian to help understand how technology and social change could affect the future.
- [Forecasting and related research and implementation](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/forecasting/): You can work on making better predictions of future events in order to guide decision-making by powerful governments and institutions.
- [Earning to give in quantitative trading](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/quantitative-trading/): We think most people's highest-impact options involve working directly on solving pressing global problems. But if you want to focus on having an impact by donating part of your income (earning to give) and will thrive in a quantitative trading role
- [Biorisk research, strategy, and policy](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/biorisk-research/): Explore how careers in biosecurity research, strategy, and policy can help reduce biorisks like engineered pandemics.
- [Research into global priorities](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/global-priorities-researcher/): You can help figure out which global problems are most pressing by working in global priorities research.
- [Help build the effective altruism community](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/work-in-effective-altruism-organisations/): Help grow, shape, and support organisations working to address global problems by working in the effective altruism community.
- [Grantmaker focused on pressing world problems](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/grantmaker/): In a grantmaking job, you can direct millions of dollars to tackle the world's most pressing problems.
- [Philosophy academia](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/philosophy-academia/): 
- [Academic research](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/academic-research/): Are academic careers a good option if you want to have a positive impact? A review of the pros and cons.
- [Congressional staffer](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/congressional-staffer/): Want to get a job in Congress? Here's what it takes to get one — and why it matters.
- [UK commercial law (for earning to give)](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/uk-commercial-law-for-earning-to-give/): 
- [Improving China-Western coordination on global catastrophic risks](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/china-specialist/): 
- [Policy-oriented government jobs](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/policy-oriented-civil-service-uk/): 
- [Working at effective nonprofits](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/effective-non-profits/): 
- [Machine Learning PhDs](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/machine-learning-phd/): We explain why it’s a high-impact area, how to work out if it’s for you, and exactly how and where to apply.
- [Working at effective altruist organisations](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/working-at-effective-altruist-organisations/): 
- [Allied health professional](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/allied-health-professional/): 
- [Product manager in tech](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/product-manager-in-tech/): Product management is one of the best non-programming roles in the tech industry. It pays well and builds skills widely-applicable skills.
- [Web designer](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/web-designer/): 
- [Executive search](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/executive-search/): 
- [Nursing](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/nursing/): Pros and cons of being a nurse, who should become one, and how to do so.
- [Biomedical research](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/biomedical-research/): Interested in understanding how the human body works? Become a biomedical researcher to find new ways to improve people’s health.
- [Foundation grantmaker](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/foundation-program-manager/): 
- [Early-stage startup employee](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/startup-early-employee/): 
- [Think tank research](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/think-tank-research/): Working in a think tank for a few years early in your career is a plausible way to influence government policy for the better, and in the meantime gain...
- [Teaching](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/teaching/): 
- [Pursuing fame in art and entertainment](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/pursuing-fame-in-art-and-entertainment/): 
- [Medical careers](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/medical-careers/): If you want to save lives, should you become a doctor? Surprisingly: maybe not. Find out which medical careers we recommend if you want to do good.
- [Actuarial science](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/actuarial-science/): 
- [Marketing (for skill-building & earning to give)](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/work-in-marketing/): 
- [Computer Science PhD](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/computer-science-phd/): Thinking of pursuing a computer science PhD? Read this first to find out whether you should (or shouldn’t).
- [Economics PhDs](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/economics-phd/): An econ PhD is one of the most attractive graduate programs: if you get through, you have a high chance of landing a good research job in academia or...
- [Data science (for skill-building & earning to give)](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/data-science/): 
- [Management consulting (for skill-building & earning to give)](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/management-consulting/): 
- [Trading in quantitative hedge funds (for earning to give)](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/trading-in-quantitative-hedge-funds/): 
- [Front office finance (for skill-building & earning to give)](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/front-office-finance/): Front facing finance still offers some of the highest pay available, making it a potential option for earning to give, however, we don't recommend it unless you could develop very strong motivation to succeed. The work load can be brutal, and is often boring. It's highly competitive and has high drop out rates. Moreover, the skills and knowledge you develop seem less useful than alternatives such as (/research/top-careers/profiles/consulting/) and (/research/top-careers/profiles/tech-entrepreneurship/).
- [Party politics](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/party-politics-uk/): 
- [Founding effective nonprofits (international development)](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/founding-effective-global-poverty-non-profits/): 
- [Program manager in international organisations](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/program-manager-in-international-organisations/): 
- [Found a tech startup](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/tech-entrepreneurship/): 

## Career reports

- [Management consulting](https://80000hours.org/career-guide/reports/management-consulting/): 

## Key articles

- [Anonymous answers: could advances in AI supercharge biorisk?](https://80000hours.org/articles/anonymous-answers-could-advances-in-ai-supercharge-biorisk/): 
- [Anonymous answers: How can we manage infohazards in biosecurity?](https://80000hours.org/articles/anonymous-answers-how-can-we-manage-infohazards-in-biosecurity/): 
- [Anonymous answers: What are the best ways to fight the next pandemic?](https://80000hours.org/articles/anonymous-advice-what-are-the-best-ways-to-fight-the-next-pandemic/): 
- [Anonymous answers: What are the biggest misconceptions about biosecurity and pandemic risk?](https://80000hours.org/articles/anonymous-misconceptions-about-biosecurity/): Experts give their opinions about common misconceptions about biosecurity and pandemic prevention. They were granted anonymity for this piece.
- [How many lives does a doctor save? (Part 3)](https://80000hours.org/articles/how-many-lives-does-a-doctor-save-part-3/): 
- [How many lives does a doctor save? (Part 2)](https://80000hours.org/articles/how-many-lives-does-a-doctor-save-part-2/): Is medicine the most promising career path if you want to do good? This series of posts examines the impact of being a doctor in terms of saving lives.
- [How many lives does a doctor save? (Part 1)](https://80000hours.org/articles/how-many-lives-does-a-doctor-save-part-1/): 
- [Longtermism: a call to protect future generations](https://80000hours.org/articles/future-generations/): It would be better for the future if we avoid extinction, manage our resources carefully, foster institutions that promote cooperation rather than violent conflict, and responsibly develop powerful technology.
- [Anonymous advice: If you want to reduce AI risk, should you take roles that advance AI capabilities?](https://80000hours.org/articles/ai-capabilities/): Should you work on AI capabilities? We put this question to the AI experts we thought most qualified to answer it - and they don't all agree.
- [How much do solutions to social problems differ in their effectiveness? A collection of all the studies we could find.](https://80000hours.org/articles/charitable-interventions-differ/): There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
- [What if you lived every human life?](https://80000hours.org/articles/what-if-you-lived-every-human-life/): There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
- [In which career can you make the biggest contribution?](https://80000hours.org/articles/leverage/): Find out how to get more leverage to contribute to pressing world problems in many different career paths.
- [What could an AI-caused existential catastrophe actually look like?](https://80000hours.org/articles/what-could-an-ai-caused-existential-catastrophe-actually-look-like/): Arguments for AI being risky are often very abstract. Here we explain several concrete ways an AI system might be able to actually gain power.
- [Applying an unusual skill to a needed niche](https://80000hours.org/articles/applying-an-unusual-skill-to-a-needed-niche/): 
- [Be more ambitious: a rational case for dreaming big (if you want to do good)](https://80000hours.org/articles/be-more-ambitious/): Self-help often says you should be more ambitious. This isn't always good advice. But if you want to do good, here are 4 reasons it makes sense.
- [What is social impact? A definition](https://80000hours.org/articles/what-is-social-impact-definition/): Lots of people say having a social impact is one of their key goals. But what does it actually mean to have a social impact? Here's our definition.
- [Moral uncertainty: how to act when you’re uncertain about what’s good](https://80000hours.org/articles/moral-uncertainty/): 
- [Cluelessness: can we know the effects of our actions?](https://80000hours.org/articles/cluelessness/): 
- [Counterfactuals and how they change our view of what does good](https://80000hours.org/articles/counterfactuals/): 
- [Expected value: how can we make a difference when we're uncertain what’s true?](https://80000hours.org/articles/expected-value/): A brief introduction to what expected value is, how we can use it to work out what's best to do, and some of the main objections to it.
- [Why some of your career options probably have 100x the impact of others](https://80000hours.org/articles/careers-differ-in-impact/): 
- [This could be the most important century](https://80000hours.org/articles/the-most-important-century/): 
- [How to compare global problems for yourself](https://80000hours.org/articles/comparing-problems-yourself/): 
- [How to balance impact and doing what you love](https://80000hours.org/articles/do-what-you-love-vs-impact/): Some might say to do what you love means giving up on having as much social impact. We think the two things don’t need to be in tension.
- [3 key career stages](https://80000hours.org/articles/key-career-stages/): What are the key career stages? Our simple framework helps you know where you are and plan your next step.
- [Career exploration: when should you settle?](https://80000hours.org/articles/career-exploration/): How much career exploration should you do? We draw on research from computer science, psychology and elsewhere to provide a practical answer.
- [The best solutions are far more effective than others](https://80000hours.org/articles/solutions/): Most solutions to social problems don’t actually work very well.
- [Why the problem you work on is the biggest driver of your impact](https://80000hours.org/articles/your-choice-of-problem-is-crucial/): If you want to help others, should you follow your passion? Probably not. You'll do far more good if you focus on bigger and more problem areas.
- [Effective altruism](https://80000hours.org/articles/effective-altruism/): 
- [How to identify your personal strengths](https://80000hours.org/articles/personal-strengths/): The best advice we’ve found on identifying your strengths, turned into a 3-step process, plus a list of personal strengths used by researchers.
- [If you care about social impact, why is voting important?](https://80000hours.org/articles/is-voting-important/): If you care about social impact, why is voting important? It's not just about your civic duty. We examine the research on US presidential elections.
- [Research questions that could have a big social impact, organised by discipline](https://80000hours.org/articles/research-questions-by-discipline/): Seeking inspiration for research questions? Discover examples of open questions that could have a big social impact.
- [How to use your career to help reduce existential risk](https://80000hours.org/articles/how-to-reduce-existential-risk/): 
- [Anonymous answers: the complete collection](https://80000hours.org/articles/anonymous-answers/): 
- [Essential Facts and Figures - COVID-19](https://80000hours.org/articles/covid-19-key-facts/): Summary of our understanding of the current science on key questions about COVID-19 (as of 3 April, 2020), as best we can given the state of the evidence and the fast moving situation.
- [Options for donating to fight COVID-19](https://80000hours.org/articles/covid-19-options-for-donating/): Many people have been asking about where they can donate to fight COVID-19, so we asked a couple of advisors for their quick thoughts.
- [If you want to help the world tackle COVID-19, what should you do?](https://80000hours.org/articles/covid-19-what-should-you-do/): There are five main things we need to tackle the crisis. How to find your best opportunity to help.
- [Advice on how to read our advice](https://80000hours.org/articles/advice-on-how-to-read-our-advice/): 
- [Before committing to management consulting, consider directly entering priority paths, policy, startups, and other options](https://80000hours.org/articles/alternatives-to-consulting/): 
- [How useful are longer-term career plans?](https://80000hours.org/articles/career-planning/): 
- [Working in US AI policy](https://80000hours.org/articles/us-ai-policy/): The US Government is likely to be a key actor in how advanced AI is developed and used in society. Learn more about this career path.
- [ML engineering for AI safety & robustness: a Google Brain engineer's guide to entering the field](https://80000hours.org/articles/ml-engineering-career-transition-guide/): 
- [Ways people trying to do good accidentally make things worse, and how to avoid them](https://80000hours.org/articles/accidental-harm/): Even when you try to do good, you can end up doing accidental harm. But there are ways you can minimise the risks.
- [Have a particular strength? Already an expert in a field? Here are the socially impactful careers 80,000 Hours suggests you consider first.](https://80000hours.org/articles/advice-by-expertise/): 
- [Doing good together: how to coordinate effectively and avoid single-player thinking](https://80000hours.org/articles/coordination/): When we work together, we can do far more good in the world. We cover the basics of coordination and practical tips for doing it more effectively.
- [Should you play to your comparative advantage when choosing your career?](https://80000hours.org/articles/comparative-advantage/): Doing a job where you have the comparative advantage seems like an obviously good idea, but that may not always be the case.
- [Operations management in high-impact organisations](https://80000hours.org/articles/operations-management/): We argue that operations management is one of the highest-impact roles in the effective altruism and existential risk communities right now, and address some common misconceptions about the roles.
- [Video: The world's biggest problems and why they're not what first comes to mind](https://80000hours.org/articles/video-most-pressing-problems/): 
- [The case for reducing existential risks](https://80000hours.org/articles/existential-risks/): What experts say are the most likely existential risks, why they're more likely than people think, and what we can do about them.
- [If you want to do good, here’s why future generations should be your focus](https://80000hours.org/articles/if-you-want-to-do-good-heres-why-future-generations-should-be-your-focus/): 
- [Is it fair to say that most social programmes don't work?](https://80000hours.org/articles/effective-social-program/): 
- [These skills make you most employable. Coding isn’t one -- can that be right?](https://80000hours.org/articles/skills-most-employable/): A data-driven ranking of which job skills make you most employable by 80,000 Hours, a career research group founded by Oxford academics.
- [Is it ever OK to take a harmful job in order to do more good? An in-depth analysis](https://80000hours.org/articles/harmful-career/): Why you should avoid harmful jobs, even if you’ll do more good. We look at how to analyse the situation and common options, like finance, law, and oil.
- [Guide to working in AI policy and strategy](https://80000hours.org/articles/ai-policy-guide/): 
- [Which industry has the highest-paying jobs?](https://80000hours.org/articles/highest-paying-jobs/): New tax data lets us accurately estimate which 11 jobs and industries are the highest paying on average, and for top performers.
- [College advice](https://80000hours.org/articles/college-advice/): Looking for college advice? Here’s what we know about how to choose a major, and what to do once you start studying.
- [Some further resources on high-impact careers](https://80000hours.org/articles/further-reading/): 
- [Where's the best place to volunteer?](https://80000hours.org/articles/volunteering/): 
- [How to choose where to donate](https://80000hours.org/articles/best-charity/): 
- [AI safety syllabus](https://80000hours.org/articles/ai-safety-syllabus/): This is a syllabus of relevant background reading material and courses related to AI safety. It is intended as a guide for undergraduates in mathematics and computer science.
- [The best email scripts for cold-emailing](https://80000hours.org/articles/email-scripts/): 
- [9 ways to put yourself in a better position in any job](https://80000hours.org/articles/career-capital-in-any-job/): 
- [A framework for comparing global problems in terms of expected impact](https://80000hours.org/articles/problem-framework/): 
- [Everything you need to know about whether money makes you happy](https://80000hours.org/articles/money-and-happiness/): It's said "money can't buy happiness," but we've all felt the pull of financial success -- so what's the truth? Here's what science has to say.
- [What should you look for in a job? Introducing our framework.](https://80000hours.org/articles/framework/): 
- [Best existing resources](https://80000hours.org/articles/best-existing-resources/): 
- [Stop worrying so much about long-term career plans](https://80000hours.org/articles/stop-worrying-so-much-about-the-long-term/): So many people are clearly desperate to plan out the next decade of their career, ending up anxious and overwhelmed. But this isn't the best way to approach
- [Some causes are better than others](https://80000hours.org/articles/effective-or-not/): 
- [The difference between true and tangible impact](https://80000hours.org/articles/true-vs-tangible-impact/): 
- [Reasoning behind our framework](https://80000hours.org/articles/reasoning-behind-our-framework/): On this page we outline why we use a framework and how we selected the factors to go in our framework.
- [4 biases to avoid in career decisions](https://80000hours.org/articles/4-biases-to-avoid-in-career-decisions/): 
- [Should you wait to make a difference?](https://80000hours.org/articles/should-you-wait/): 
- [Why and how to keep your options open](https://80000hours.org/articles/keeping-options-open/): 
- [Don't go with your gut (but check with it)](https://80000hours.org/articles/dont-go-with-your-gut-instinct/): People often talk about how you should just go with your gut instinct when choosing a career. But how useful is this advice, really?
- [Research reports](https://80000hours.org/articles/research-reports/): Here we list some of our most in-depth career research reports that have not been featured on other pages.
- [How to make a difference in any career](https://80000hours.org/articles/how-to-make-a-difference-in-any-career/): It's possible to make a big difference in any career. On this page, we explain how.
- [The entrepreneur](https://80000hours.org/articles/entrepreneurship/): If you’ve got potential as an entrepreneur, attempt to found new effective non-profit organisations or innovative for-profits that benefit their customers and create positive externalities.
- [The effective worker](https://80000hours.org/articles/effective-work/): There are many nonprofit and for-profit organisations that have a large impact, which are short of specific types of human capital. If you’re a good fit for a high-impact organization, it’s an option worth considering.
- [Why and how to earn to give](https://80000hours.org/articles/earning-to-give/): Some people have skills that are better suited to earning money than the other strategies. These people can take a higher earning career and donate the money to effective organisations.
- [How to do high impact research](https://80000hours.org/articles/research/): An introduction to how to have an impact in research: which graduate programs are best, what should you prioritise early career, and which topics are best?
- [The experimenter](https://80000hours.org/articles/the-experimenter/): Finding a career that’s the right fit for you is important, but it’s also difficult to do just by thinking about it. It can therefore be a good strategy to try out a number of different areas in order to learn more about your own interests and skills.
- [Self-developer](https://80000hours.org/articles/self-developer/): 
- [Framework worksheet](https://80000hours.org/articles/worksheet/): 
- [To find work you love, don't (always) follow your passion](https://80000hours.org/articles/dont-follow-your-passion/): Research shows that "follow your passion" is often bad advice. We explain why and how to do better.
- [Improving decision making](https://80000hours.org/articles/improving-decision-making/): 
- [Promoting effective altruism](https://80000hours.org/articles/promoting-effective-altruism/): 
- [Global priorities research](https://80000hours.org/articles/global-priorities-research/): 
- [Job satisfaction research](https://80000hours.org/articles/job-satisfaction-research/): The full results of our literature survey into how to predict job satisfaction.
- [Yardsticks: how to compare the scale of different social problems](https://80000hours.org/articles/yardsticks/): What are ‘yardsticks’, and why use them? In order to compare causes, we want to estimate the impact of solving...
- [A checklist for making rational career decisions](https://80000hours.org/articles/making-an-assessment/): A list of the best advice we've found on how to assess your career options in the face of high uncertainty.
- [7 strategies for having an impact with your career](https://80000hours.org/articles/strategies/): A list of career strategies for making a difference.
- [Some of the most promising areas to work in](https://80000hours.org/articles/top-careers/): Some careers have more opportunities to make a difference than others. See our list of top careers for making a difference, based on our in-depth research.

## Pages

- [AI Sitemap (LLMs.txt)](https://80000hours.org/ai-sitemap/): 
- [Get the career guide](https://80000hours.org/gettheguide/): 
- [Terms of use](https://80000hours.org/terms-of-use/): 
- [Website Privacy Notice](https://80000hours.org/privacy-policy/): 
- [In-depth career advice](https://80000hours.org/indepth/): 
- [Work on a better future](https://80000hours.org/betterfuture/): 
- [In-depth career guide](https://80000hours.org/key-ideas-tier-meta/): 
- [We’re developing an AI safety careers handbook](https://80000hours.org/ai-book/): 
- [The most useful skills for making a difference](https://80000hours.org/skills/): 
- [In-depth career guide](https://80000hours.org/key-ideas-lin/): 
- [In-depth career guide](https://80000hours.org/key-ideas-snap/): 
- [Translations of our content](https://80000hours.org/about/translations/): 
- [In-depth career guide](https://80000hours.org/key-ideas-campaign-gdn/): 
- [In-depth career guide](https://80000hours.org/key-ideas-youtubeengw/): 
- [In-depth career guide](https://80000hours.org/key-ideas-youtubeengc/): 
- [In-depth career guide](https://80000hours.org/key-ideas-campaign-meta/): 
- [In-depth career guide](https://80000hours.org/key-ideas-campaign-yt/): 
- [Skill set page template](https://80000hours.org/skill-set-page-template/): There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
- [Test skill set page with sidebar](https://80000hours.org/test-skill-set-page/): There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
- [Share the career guide](https://80000hours.org/career-guide-share/): Sharing our career guide lets us help more people find a fulfilling career that does good. If you know someone who might find the guide useful, consider sharing it.
- [Advanced series: our most important and novel research on what makes for a high-impact career](https://80000hours.org/advanced-series/): Our most important and novel research findings about how to increase the impact of our career.
- [Find a fulfilling career that does good](https://80000hours.org/ebook/): 
- [The 80,000 Hours Podcast on Artificial Intelligence and related topics](https://80000hours.org/podcast/on-artificial-intelligence/): Ten curated episodes of The 80,000 Hours Podcast that quickly get you up to speed on the school of thought known as effective altruism.
- [](https://80000hours.org/book-giveaway-paused/): 
- [80,000 Hours Cookie Notice](https://80000hours.org/cookie-notice/): 
- [What others have said about 80,000 Hours](https://80000hours.org/about/credibility/what-others-say-about-80000-hours/): 
- [Start here](https://80000hours.org/start-here/): Your career is not only a major driver of your happiness — it’s probably also your biggest opportunity to have a positive impact on the world.
- [What We Owe The Future](https://80000hours.org/what-we-owe-the-future/): What We Owe The Future releases August 16th. Read the introduction for free now.
- [User stories](https://80000hours.org/stories/): 
- [What are the most pressing world problems? [Prob profiles V2]](https://80000hours.org/our-current-list-of-pressing-world-problems/): If you want to do as much good as you can with your career, what world problems should you try to tackle? Get ideas from our list.
- [In-depth career guide](https://80000hours.org/key-ideas-campaign/): 
- [All articles](https://80000hours.org/all-articles/): 
- [Career planning: our eight-week course to help you have a high-impact career](https://80000hours.org/career-planning-landing-page/): 
- [Get our guide to what makes for a high-impact career](https://80000hours.org/key-ideas-landing-page/): 
- [style guide for sharing](https://80000hours.org/style-guide-for-sharing/): There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
- [80k After Hours Podcast](https://80000hours.org/after-hours-podcast/): 
- [Book giveaway](https://80000hours.org/free-book/): 
- [Summary: what makes for a high-impact career?](https://80000hours.org/key-ideas-2023/summary/): 
- [Career capital: how best to invest in yourself](https://80000hours.org/key-ideas-2023/career-capital/): 
- [Personal fit: why being good at your job is even more important than people think](https://80000hours.org/key-ideas-2023/personal-fit/): 
- [Speak with us](https://80000hours.org/speak-with-us/): Get free 1:1 career advice from one of our advisors. We can help you choose your focus, make connections, and find a fulfilling job.
- [This is your most important decision](https://80000hours.org/key-ideas-2023/make-a-difference-with-your-career/): 
- [This is your most important decision](https://80000hours.org/make-a-difference-with-your-career/): 
- [Sam Harris newsletter](https://80000hours.org/sam/): You have 80,000 hours in your career. How can you best use them to help solve the world’s most pressing problems?
- [The 80,000 Hours Podcast](https://80000hours.org/podcast/): In-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them.
- [Career planning course: thank you for signing up!](https://80000hours.org/career-planning/welcome/): 
- [Putting your plan into action](https://80000hours.org/career-planning/process/put-your-plan-into-action/): 
- [How to investigate your career uncertainties and make a judgement call](https://80000hours.org/career-planning/process/feedback-and-investigation/): 
- [Planning to adapt](https://80000hours.org/career-planning/process/plan-to-adapt/): 
- [How to figure out your next career step](https://80000hours.org/career-planning/process/determine-next-steps/): 
- [Clarifying your strategic focus](https://80000hours.org/career-planning/process/clarify-your-strategic-focus/): 
- [How to generate ideas for longer-term paths](https://80000hours.org/career-planning/process/longer-term-paths/): 
- [Which global problems do you think are most pressing?](https://80000hours.org/career-planning/process/your-views-of-global-problems/): 
- [What does a fulfilling, high-impact career look like for you?](https://80000hours.org/career-planning/process/what-does-a-fulfilling-high-impact-career-look-like/): 
- [8-week career planning course: career planning template](https://80000hours.org/career-planning/career-plan-template/): Our 8-step career planner template is designed to help you write an in-depth and actionable career plan.
- [Effective Altruism: Ten Global Problems — curated episodes from The 80,000 Hours Podcast](https://80000hours.org/podcast/effective-altruism-ten-global-problems/): Ten curated episodes from The 80,000 Hours Podcast explaining a selection of problems the effective altruism community is working to solve.
- [Planning a high-impact career: a summary of everything you need to know in 7 points](https://80000hours.org/career-planning/summary/): 
- [Your biggest opportunity to make a difference: our guide to what makes for a high-impact career](https://80000hours.org/key-ideas-2023/): What makes for a high-impact career? Here's how to compare your options in terms of the difference they make.
- [Career planning and decision making — all our best resources](https://80000hours.org/career-planning/): Research-based, practical advice on career planning, decision-making and getting jobs for people who want a fulfilling career with positive impact.
- [Effective Altruism: An Introduction — ten curated episodes from The 80,000 Hours Podcast](https://80000hours.org/podcast/effective-altruism-an-introduction/): Ten curated episodes of The 80,000 Hours Podcast that quickly get you up to speed on the school of thought known as effective altruism.
- [Career planning series: how to plan your high-impact career](https://80000hours.org/career-planning/process/): We've taken ten years of research and turned it into a free, in-depth career planning process, to help you make a career plan you feel confident in.
- [Contact us](https://80000hours.org/about/contact-us/): 
- [Redirect](https://80000hours.org/r/): 
- [COVID-19: Analysis, resources and how you can help [visible to anyone with the link]](https://80000hours.org/covid-19-preview/): 
- [COVID-19: Analysis, resources and how you can help](https://80000hours.org/covid-19/): Analysis and resources to help mitigate COVID-19.
- [The Precipice Book](https://80000hours.org/the-precipice/): Toby Ord's new book on existential risk was released in March 2020. Get a free copy now.
- [Calibration training](https://80000hours.org/calibration-training/): 
- [Recruiting terms & privacy policy](https://80000hours.org/legal/recruiting-terms/): 
- [Donate to 80,000 Hours](https://80000hours.org/support-us/donate/): 
- [Explore our research by topic](https://80000hours.org/topics/): 
- [Psychology results in top journals - are they true? And can you guess which ones?](https://80000hours.org/psychology-replication-quiz/): 
- [What are the most pressing world problems?](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/): Which problems are the biggest, most tractable, and most neglected in the world - and what can you do about them?
- [Thanks for your interest](https://80000hours.org/speak-with-us/waitlist/): 
- [Apply for advising](https://80000hours.org/speak-with-us/apply/): We’ve already helped over 5,000 people choose a focus, make connections, and find work that makes a difference.
- [Thank you](https://80000hours.org/user-survey/thank-you/): 
- [Application received](https://80000hours.org/speak-with-us/application-received/): 
- [Find a fulfilling career that does good](https://80000hours.org/book/): 
- [Job board](https://80000hours.org/job-board/): Handpicked roles to help you tackle the world's most pressing problems with your career.
- [Thank you](https://80000hours.org/thank-you/): 
- [Get social impact career ideas](https://80000hours.org/career-quiz/): 
- [Career Planning Tool Part 2](https://80000hours.org/career-planning-tool-part-2/): 
- [Career Planning Tool](https://80000hours.org/career-planning/career-planning-tool/): 
- [Make a decision](https://80000hours.org/career-decision/): 
- [Find a fulfilling career that does good](https://80000hours.org/career-guide/): This free career guide, based on over 10 years of research alongside academics at Oxford, will help you find fulfilling work that fits your skills and does good.
- [Problem quiz](https://80000hours.org/problem-quiz/): Answer 6 questions to filter our list of the world's most biggest problems, based on research with academics at the University of Oxford.
- [Annual career review tool](https://80000hours.org/career-planning/annual-career-review/): 
- [Welcome to our newsletter](https://80000hours.org/newsletter/step-2/): 
- [How to make tough career decisions](https://80000hours.org/career-decision/article/): A step-by-step process to help you make career decisions based on decision-making research.
- [Checklist for assessing options](https://80000hours.org/checklist-for-assessing-options/): 
- [Get help from our community](https://80000hours.org/community/): 
- [The highest-impact career paths our research has identified so far](https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/): Our list of the most promising high-impact career paths for helping others.
- [Acknowledgements](https://80000hours.org/support-us/acknowledgements/): 
- [Search results](https://80000hours.org/search/): 
- [Advising terms & privacy policy](https://80000hours.org/legal/advising/): 
- [Welcome to our newsletter](https://80000hours.org/newsletter/welcome/): 
- [Tell us about your experience with 80,000 Hours, so that we can improve our programmes](https://80000hours.org/user-survey/): 
- [Alumni](https://80000hours.org/alumni/): Our alumni are some of the people we've worked with who have been most dedicated to making a difference with their careers.
- [Financial accounts](https://80000hours.org/about/credibility/evaluations/financial-accounts/): 
- [Research process and principles](https://80000hours.org/about/credibility/research-principles/): A list of the principles we use to guide our research.
- [Our mistakes](https://80000hours.org/about/credibility/evaluations/mistakes/): 
- [Evaluations](https://80000hours.org/about/credibility/evaluations/): 
- [Our impact and credibility](https://80000hours.org/about/credibility/): 
- [Legal disclaimer](https://80000hours.org/legal/): 
- [All our research](https://80000hours.org/research/): A list of all our research into careers that make a difference.
- [Work with us](https://80000hours.org/about/work-with-us/): The core 80,000 Hours team in summer 2013 We’re looking for bright and ambitious people to help us in our...
- [Join our newsletter](https://80000hours.org/newsletter/): Student Groups
- [Stay updated](https://80000hours.org/about/stay-updated/): Want to stay updated on our new research? Follow our blog by liking us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter....
- [Our donors](https://80000hours.org/about/donors/): We greatly appreciate all the support we receive to keep 80,000 Hours running! The vast majority of our donations come...
- [Meet the team](https://80000hours.org/about/meet-the-team/): Meet the team behind 80,000 Hours.
- [Support us](https://80000hours.org/support-us/): 
- [About us: what do we do, and how can we help?](https://80000hours.org/about/): We offer career coaching and in-depth research on the careers that do the most to solve the world’s most pressing problems.
- [Home](https://80000hours.org/): You have 80,000 hours in your career. How can you best use them to help solve the world’s most pressing problems?
- [New releases](https://80000hours.org/latest/): Research, interviews and case studies on social impact career choice.

## Blog post

- [To understand AI, you should use it. Here's how to get started.](https://80000hours.org/2025/04/to-understand-ai-you-should-use-it-heres-how-to-get-started/): 
- [We're shifting our strategic approach to focus more on AGI](https://80000hours.org/2025/04/strategic-approach/): 
- [Shrinking AGI timelines: a review of expert forecasts](https://80000hours.org/2025/03/when-do-experts-expect-agi-to-arrive/): 
- [Expression of Interest: Podcast Host](https://80000hours.org/2025/03/podcast-host/): 
- [Expression of Interest: Podcast Chief of Staff](https://80000hours.org/2025/03/podcast-chief-of-staff/): 
- [Understanding trends in our AI job postings](https://80000hours.org/2025/03/trends-in-ai-jobs/): 
- [Expression of interest: senior product manager](https://80000hours.org/2025/03/senior-product-manager-eoi/): 
- [Ask a career advisor: how to compete with AI models in the job market and whether to stay in the US government](https://80000hours.org/2025/02/ask-an-advisor-volume-two/): 
- [Expression of interest: writer-researcher](https://80000hours.org/2025/02/expression-of-interest-writer-researcher/): 
- [Ask a career advisor: how mid-career people can help with AI and how to survive a job hunt](https://80000hours.org/2025/02/ask-a-career-advisor-switching-to-ai-and-surviving-job-hunt/): 
- [Transcripts for Bastian](https://80000hours.org/2025/01/transcripts-for-bastian/): There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
- [How quickly could robots scale up?](https://80000hours.org/2025/01/how-quickly-could-robots-scale-up/): 
- [It looks like there are some good funding opportunities in AI safety right now](https://80000hours.org/2025/01/it-looks-like-there-are-some-good-funding-opportunities-in-ai-safety-right-now/): 
- [What happened with AI in 2024?](https://80000hours.org/2025/01/what-happened-with-ai-2024/): 
- [2024 in review: some of our top pieces from this year](https://80000hours.org/2024/12/2024-in-review-some-of-our-top-pieces-from-this-year/): 
- [Two key tips for giving season](https://80000hours.org/2024/12/giving-season/): 
- [Why we get burned out — and what helps](https://80000hours.org/2024/11/burnout/): 
- [What are experts in biosecurity worried about?](https://80000hours.org/2024/10/what-are-experts-in-biosecurity-worried-about/): 
- [Updates to our problem rankings of factory farming, climate change, and more](https://80000hours.org/2024/10/updates-to-our-problem-rankings-on-factory-farming-climate-change-and-more/): 
- [Why experts and forecasters disagree about AI risk](https://80000hours.org/2024/09/why-experts-and-forecasters-disagree-about-ai-risk/): 
- [Updates to our research about AI risk and careers](https://80000hours.org/2024/08/updates-to-our-research-about-ai-risk-and-careers/): 
- [Mpox and H5N1: assessing the situation](https://80000hours.org/2024/08/h5n1-and-mpox-assessing-the-situation/): 
- [Why Orwell would hate AI](https://80000hours.org/2024/08/why-orwell-would-hate-ai/): 
- [Advisor [Applications closed]](https://80000hours.org/2024/08/open-position-advisor-2024/): 
- [Open position: Head of Video](https://80000hours.org/2024/07/open-position-head-of-video/): 
- [Open position: Marketer](https://80000hours.org/2024/07/open-position-marketer-2024/): 
- [Open position: Head of Marketing](https://80000hours.org/2024/07/open-position-head-of-marketing-2024/): 
- [Mental health and your career: our top resources](https://80000hours.org/2024/07/handling-mental-illness-in-your-career/): 
- [Does your vote matter? What the research says](https://80000hours.org/2024/06/does-your-vote-matter-what-the-research-says/): 
- [Dive into our most in-depth research on careers](https://80000hours.org/2024/06/dive-into-advanced-series/): 
- [The most interesting startup idea I’ve seen recently: AI for epistemics](https://80000hours.org/2024/05/project-idea-ai-for-epistemics/): This is the most interesting idea for a startup that I've heard recently.
- [Where are all the nuclear experts?](https://80000hours.org/2024/05/where-are-all-the-nuclear-experts/): 
- [Particularly impactful career paths you might have overlooked](https://80000hours.org/2024/04/overlooked-career-paths/): 
- [Particularly neglected causes you could work on](https://80000hours.org/2024/03/particularly-neglected-causes/): 
- [Expression of interest: Writer and writer-researcher](https://80000hours.org/2024/03/writer-writer-researcher-eoi/): 
- [The case for taking your technical expertise to the field of AI policy](https://80000hours.org/2024/03/the-case-for-taking-your-technical-expertise-to-the-field-of-ai-policy/): 
- [Open roles: Operations team](https://80000hours.org/2024/02/open-positions-operations-team/): 
- [Why you might not want to work on nuclear disarmament (and what to work on instead)](https://80000hours.org/2024/02/why-you-might-not-want-to-work-on-nuclear-disarmament/): 
- [Our new series on building skills](https://80000hours.org/2024/02/skills-pages-launch/): 
- [Announcing Niel Bowerman as the next CEO of 80,000 Hours](https://80000hours.org/2024/01/announcing-niel-bowerman-ceo/): 
- [Practical steps to form better habits in your life and career](https://80000hours.org/2024/01/forming-new-habits/): 
- [2023 in review: some of our top pieces from last year](https://80000hours.org/2024/01/2023-in-review/): 
- [An apology for our mistake with the book giveaway](https://80000hours.org/2024/01/an-apology-for-our-mistake-with-the-book-giveaway/): 
- [Special podcast holiday release: One highlight from every episode in 2023](https://80000hours.org/2023/12/best-of-2023-podcast-highlights/): 
- [Announcing our plan to become an independent organisation](https://80000hours.org/2023/12/announcing-plan/): 
- [Not sure where to donate this year? Here’s our advice.](https://80000hours.org/2023/12/giving-season-advice/): 
- [A note of appreciation for your efforts to help others](https://80000hours.org/2023/11/a-note-of-appreciation-for-your-efforts-to-help-others/): 
- [New opportunities are opening up in AI governance](https://80000hours.org/2023/11/new-ai-governance-opportunities/): 
- [We've made mistakes in our careers — here's what we learned](https://80000hours.org/2023/10/staff-career-mistakes/): 
- [Building career capital: some new advice on three paths](https://80000hours.org/2023/09/building-career-capital/): 
- [What you should know about our updated career guide](https://80000hours.org/2023/09/what-you-should-know-about-our-updated-career-guide/): 
- [Open positions: 1on1 team](https://80000hours.org/2023/09/open-positions-1on1-team/): 
- [Announcing the new 80,000 Hours career guide](https://80000hours.org/2023/09/career-guide-launch/): 
- [What the past can tell us about how AI will affect jobs](https://80000hours.org/2023/09/what-the-past-can-tell-us-about-how-ai-will-affect-jobs/): 
- [Why you might consider switching careers — and what it takes to do it](https://80000hours.org/2023/08/why-you-might-consider-switching-careers-and-what-it-takes-to-do-it/): 
- [Operations management: how I found the right career path for me](https://80000hours.org/2023/08/operations-management-how-i-found-the-right-career-path-for-me/): 
- [What recent events mean for AI governance career paths](https://80000hours.org/2023/08/what-recent-events-mean-for-ai-governance-career-paths/): 
- [Why many people underrate investigating the problem they work on](https://80000hours.org/2023/07/why-i-think-many-people-underrate-investigating-the-problem-they-work-on/): 
- [What the war in Ukraine shows us about catastrophic risks](https://80000hours.org/2023/06/what-the-war-in-ukraine-shows-us-about-catastrophic-risks/): 
- [How to cope with rejection in your career](https://80000hours.org/2023/06/career-rejection/): 
- [Practical steps to take now that AI risk is mainstream](https://80000hours.org/2023/06/practical-steps-to-take-now-that-ai-risk-is-mainstream/): 
- [The public is more concerned about AI causing extinction than we thought](https://80000hours.org/2023/05/the-public-is-more-concerned-about-ai-causing-extinction-than-we-thought/): 
- [Give feedback on the new 80,000 Hours career guide](https://80000hours.org/2023/05/give-feedback-on-the-new-80000-hours-career-guide/): 
- [How 80,000 Hours has changed some of our advice after the collapse of FTX](https://80000hours.org/2023/05/how-80000-hours-has-changed-some-of-our-advice-after-the-collapse-of-ftx/): 
- [Some thoughts on moderation in doing good](https://80000hours.org/2023/05/moderation-in-doing-good/): How much should you do what seems right to you, even if it seems extreme or controversial, vs how much should you moderate your views and actions based on other perspectives?
- [Why we’re adding information security to our list of priority career paths](https://80000hours.org/2023/04/why-were-adding-information-security-to-our-list-of-priority-career-paths/): 
- [Are we doing enough to stop the worst pandemics?](https://80000hours.org/2023/04/are-we-doing-enough-to-stop-the-worst-pandemics/): If you're looking for a career working on a problem that is massively important, relatively neglected, and potentially very tractable, reducing biorisk might be a terrific option.
- [How much should you research your career?](https://80000hours.org/2023/04/how-much-should-you-research-your-career/): 
- [What our research has found about AI — and why it matters](https://80000hours.org/2023/03/concerned-about-recent-ai-progress-heres-our-best-resources-to-understand-whats-going-on/): 
- [Why you should think about virtues — even if you're a consequentialist](https://80000hours.org/2023/03/why-you-should-think-about-virtues-even-if-youre-a-consequentialist/): 
- [80,000 Hours two-year review: 2021 and 2022](https://80000hours.org/2023/03/80000-hours-two-year-review-2021-and-2022/): 
- [What Bing’s chatbot can tell us about AI risk — and what it can’t](https://80000hours.org/2023/03/what-bings-chatbot-can-tell-us-about-ai-risk-and-what-it-cant/): 
- [Expression of interest: headhunting lead (closed)](https://80000hours.org/2023/02/expression-of-interest-headhunting-lead/): 
- [Expression of interest: systems hire (closed)](https://80000hours.org/2023/02/expression-of-interest-systems-hire/): 
- [How much do solutions to social problems differ in their effectiveness? A collection of all the studies we could find.](https://80000hours.org/2023/02/how-much-do-solutions-differ-in-effectiveness/): In a 2013 paper, Dr Toby Ord reviewed data that compared about 100 health interventions in developing countries in terms of how many years of illness they prevent per dollar. He discovered some striking facts about the data.
- [Is the world getting better or worse?](https://80000hours.org/2023/02/is-the-world-getting-better-or-worse/): 
- [Open position: Content associate](https://80000hours.org/2023/01/open-position-content-associate/): 80,000 Hours is looking for a content associate to help us improve and grow the impact of the 80,000 Hours website, which provides free research and advice to help people use their careers to address the world’s most pressing problems.
- [My thoughts on parenting and having an impactful career](https://80000hours.org/2023/01/parenting-impactful-career/): Having kids can be challenging for anyone, and there may be unique challenges for people who aim to have a positive impact with their career.
- [The quick, medium, and long versions of career planning](https://80000hours.org/2023/01/the-quick-medium-and-long-versions-of-career-planning/): Without making time to check in on the big career questions, you might stay too long at a job, miss opportunities for doing more good, or fail to push yourself to grow — I’ve certainly been there before.
- [2022 in review](https://80000hours.org/2023/01/2022-in-review/): As 2023 gets underway, we’re taking a look back at the content we produced in 2022 and highlighting some particular standouts. We published a lot of new articles and podcasts to help our readers have impactful careers — below are some of our favourite pieces from the year.
- [How we’re thinking about where to donate to charity this year](https://80000hours.org/2022/12/how-were-thinking-about-where-to-donate-to-charity-this-year/): Charitable giving can be hugely impactful — if you’re careful about where you donate. One of the simplest ways to have an impact with your career is to donate a portion of your income. But if you’re going to do that, *where* you donate can make a huge difference.
- [Four values at the heart of effective altruism](https://80000hours.org/2022/12/four-values-at-the-heart-of-effective-altruism/): Effective altruism isn’t about any particular way of doing good, like AI alignment or distributing malaria nets. Rather, it’s a way of thinking.
- [Why being open to changing our minds is especially important right now](https://80000hours.org/2022/11/why-being-open-to-changing-our-minds-is-especially-important-right-now/): 
- [Regarding the collapse of FTX](https://80000hours.org/2022/11/regarding-the-collapse-of-ftx/): 
- [The importance of considering speculative ideas](https://80000hours.org/2022/10/the-importance-of-considering-speculative-ideas/): If you want to do the most good you can, it can be a good sign to be working on something that sounds a little weird. Our list of the most pressing problems has some pretty widely accepted concerns, to be sure: we care about mitigating climate change, preventing nuclear war, and ensuring good governance.
- [Open position: Recruiter](https://80000hours.org/2022/10/open-position-recruiter/): 
- [Do recent breakthroughs mean transformative AI is coming sooner than we thought?](https://80000hours.org/2022/08/is-transformative-ai-coming-sooner-than-we-thought/): If transformative AI is coming sooner than expected, work to ensure this transformation goes well (rather than disastrously) is even more urgent.
- [Expression of interest: Head of Operations](https://80000hours.org/2022/07/expression-of-interest-head-of-operations/): 
- [Open position: Marketer](https://80000hours.org/2022/07/open-position-marketer-2022/): 
- [Know what you’re optimising for](https://80000hours.org/2022/06/know-what-youre-optimising-for/): This idea is about being deliberate in what you’re trying hard to achieve. It’s about trying to ensure that the subject of the majority of your effort is in fact the most important thing.
- [Let's get serious about preventing the next pandemic](https://80000hours.org/2022/05/prevent-future-pandemics-with-these-projects/): 
- [Effective altruism and the current funding situation](https://80000hours.org/2022/05/ea-and-the-current-funding-situation/): 
- [Leadership change at 80,000 Hours](https://80000hours.org/2022/05/leadership-change-at-80000-hours/): 
- [My experience with imposter syndrome — and how to (partly) overcome it](https://80000hours.org/2022/04/imposter-syndrome/): 
- [Open position: writer](https://80000hours.org/2022/04/open-position-writer/): 
- [Open position: Operations specialist](https://80000hours.org/2022/03/open-position-operations-specialist/): 
- [Expression of interest: writer](https://80000hours.org/2022/03/expression-of-interest-writer/): 
- [23 career choice heuristics](https://80000hours.org/2022/03/23-career-choice-heuristics/): 
- [Introducing 80k After Hours](https://80000hours.org/2022/02/introducing-80k-after-hours/): 
- [Expression of interest: popular writing consultant](https://80000hours.org/2022/02/expression-of-interest-popular-writing-consultant/): 
- [When to worry about replaceability, and when not to](https://80000hours.org/2022/01/replaceability/): There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
- [Open position: Head of Job Board](https://80000hours.org/2022/01/open-position-head-of-job-board/): 80,000 Hours is hiring a Head of Job Board to lead the job board. They will be responsible for setting...
- [Our advisors want to talk with more people than ever before](https://80000hours.org/2022/01/our-advisors-want-to-talk-with-more-people-than-ever-before/): Last year, 80,000 Hours’ advisors spoke to more people than ever before -- and we are hoping to help even...
- [The twelve 80,000 Hours 2021 releases that affected our staff most](https://80000hours.org/2022/01/best-of-2021/): 
- [Insider insights from people reviewing their own careers](https://80000hours.org/2022/01/career-reviews-from-our-community/): 
- [Open position: Advisor](https://80000hours.org/2022/01/open-position-advisor/): 
- [The growth of effective altruism: what does it mean for our priorities and level of ambition?](https://80000hours.org/2021/11/growth-of-effective-altruism/): 
- [Effective altruism in a nutshell](https://80000hours.org/2021/10/effective-altruism-in-a-nutshell/): 
- [Open position: Head of Marketing](https://80000hours.org/2021/08/open-position-head-of-marketing/): 
- [Open position: Marketer](https://80000hours.org/2021/08/open-position-marketer/): 
- [How are resources in effective altruism allocated across issues?](https://80000hours.org/2021/08/effective-altruism-allocation-resources-cause-areas/): 
- [Is effective altruism growing? An update on the stock of funding vs people](https://80000hours.org/2021/07/effective-altruism-growing/): 
- [Expression of interest: experienced writer](https://80000hours.org/2021/06/expression-of-interest-experienced-writer/): 
- [80,000 Hours Annual Review — November 2020](https://80000hours.org/2021/05/80000-hours-annual-review-nov-2020/): 
- [How much do people differ in productivity? What the evidence says.](https://80000hours.org/2021/05/how-much-do-people-differ-in-productivity/): We did a survey of academic research about how much people differ in productivity. This is a quick summary of what we found.
- [Launching a new resource: 'Effective Altruism: An Introduction'](https://80000hours.org/2021/04/launching-a-new-resource-effective-altruism-an-introduction/): 
- [Why I find longtermism hard, and what keeps me motivated](https://80000hours.org/2021/02/why-i-find-longtermism-hard/): 
- [Rob Wiblin on how he ended up the way he is](https://80000hours.org/2021/02/rob-wiblin-on-how-he-ended-up-the-way-he-is/): 
- [Rob Wiblin on self-improvement and research ethics](https://80000hours.org/2021/01/rob-wiblin-on-self-improvement-and-research-ethics/): 
- [Notes on good judgement and how to develop it](https://80000hours.org/2020/09/good-judgement/): Good judgement is the ability to weigh complex information and is a valuable career asset. Find out what we know about how to develop good judgement.
- [Career success: five philosophies](https://80000hours.org/2020/09/career-success/): What drives career success? Discover five different theories on how to be successful in your career.
- [Why I've come to think global priorities research is more important than I thought](https://80000hours.org/2020/08/global-priorities-research-update/): 
- [The emerging school of patient longtermism](https://80000hours.org/2020/08/the-emerging-school-of-patient-longtermism/): 
- [Misconceptions about effective altruism](https://80000hours.org/2020/08/misconceptions-effective-altruism/): William MacAskill on 4 top misconceptions about effective altruism.
- [Ideas for high-impact careers beyond our priority paths](https://80000hours.org/2020/08/ideas-for-high-impact-careers-beyond-our-priority-paths/): 
- [What 80,000 Hours learned by anonymously interviewing people we respect](https://80000hours.org/2020/06/lessons-from-anonymous-interviews/): 
- [Anonymous answers: Are there myths you feel obliged to support publicly? And five other questions.](https://80000hours.org/2020/06/anonymous-answers-myths-and-other-questions/): 
- [Policy and research ideas to reduce existential risk](https://80000hours.org/2020/04/longtermist-policy-ideas/): 
- [Anonymous contributors answer: How should the effective altruism community think about diversity?](https://80000hours.org/2020/04/anonymous-answers-diversity/): 
- [What programmes will 80,000 Hours provide (and not provide) within the effective altruism community?](https://80000hours.org/2020/04/which-programmes-within-ea/): We aim to sum up what we intend to provide and what we can’t within effective altruism, to make it easier for other groups to fill these gaps.
- [200+ opportunities to work on COVID-19, and 60+ places to get funding](https://80000hours.org/2020/04/opportunities-to-work-on-covid-19/): 
- [80,000 Hours Annual Review - December 2019](https://80000hours.org/2020/04/annual-review-dec-2019/): We review our progress and mistakes over 2019, and plans for 2020.
- [Good news about COVID-19](https://80000hours.org/2020/04/good-news-about-covid-19/): 
- [The coronavirus crisis and our new review of how to prevent the worst possible pandemics](https://80000hours.org/2020/03/coronavirus-crisis-new-gcbr-profile/): 
- [Anonymous contributors answer: What are the biggest flaws of the effective altruism community?](https://80000hours.org/2020/03/anonymous-answers-flaws-effective-altruism-community/): 
- [Anonymous contributors answer: What are the biggest flaws of 80,000 Hours?](https://80000hours.org/2020/02/anonymous-answers-flaws-80000hours/): 
- [Anonymous contributors answer: Should the effective altruism community grow faster or slower? And should it be broader, or narrower?](https://80000hours.org/2020/02/anonymous-answers-effective-altruism-community-and-growth/): 
- [Anonymous contributors answer: What's some underrated general life advice?](https://80000hours.org/2020/02/anonymous-answers-general-life-advice/): 
- [Anonymous contributors answer: How honest & candid should high-profile people really be?](https://80000hours.org/2020/02/anon-answers-honesty/): 
- [Anonymous contributors answer: What's one way to be successful you don't think people talk about enough?](https://80000hours.org/2020/01/anon-answers-one-way-successful/): 
- [Anonymous contributors answer: What mistakes do people most often make when deciding what work to do?](https://80000hours.org/2019/12/anon-answers-what-to-work-on/): 
- [Anonymous contributors answer: What bad habits do you see among people trying to improve the world?](https://80000hours.org/2019/12/anonymous-answers-bad-habits/): 
- [Anonymous answers: How risk-averse should talented young people be about their careers?](https://80000hours.org/2019/11/anonymous-answers-risk-aversion/): 
- [Anonymous contributors answer: If you were 18 again, what would you do differently this time around? And other personal career reflections.](https://80000hours.org/2019/11/anonymous-answers-personal-reflections/): 
- [Anonymous answers: What’s the thing people most overrate in their career?](https://80000hours.org/2019/11/anonymous-answers-most-overrated/): 
- [Anonymous answers: How have you seen talented people fail in their work?](https://80000hours.org/2019/10/anonymous-advice-fail-at-work/): 
- [Anonymous advice: What's good career advice you wouldn’t want to have your name on?](https://80000hours.org/2019/10/anonymous-advice-careers/): The following are excerpts from interviews with people whose work we respect and who would like to remain anonymous.
- [Rob Wiblin on plastic straws, nicotine, doping, & whether changing the long term is really possible](https://80000hours.org/2019/09/rob-wiblin-on-many-things/): 
- [Have we helped you have a bigger social impact? Our annual impact survey 2019](https://80000hours.org/2019/09/have-we-helped-you-have-a-bigger-social-impact-our-annual-impact-survey/): 
- [How replaceable are the top candidates in large hiring rounds? Why the answer flips depending on the distribution of applicant ability](https://80000hours.org/2019/08/how-replaceable-are-top-candidates-in-large-hiring-rounds/): 
- [Rob Wiblin on human nature, new technology, and living a happy, healthy & ethical life](https://80000hours.org/2019/05/rob-wiblin-on-living-well/): 
- [80,000 Hours Annual Review - December 2018](https://80000hours.org/2019/05/annual-review-dec-2018/): We review our progress and mistakes over 2018, and plans for 2019.
- [Recap: why do some organisations say their recent hires are worth so much?](https://80000hours.org/2019/05/why-do-organisations-say-recent-hires-are-worth-so-much/): 
- [Career advice I wish I'd been given when I was young](https://80000hours.org/2019/04/career-advice-i-wish-id-been-given-when-i-was-young/): 
- [Find your highest impact role: 104 new vacancies in our February 2019 job board updates](https://80000hours.org/2019/02/february-job-board-updates/): 
- [Find your highest impact role: 77 new vacancies in our December job board updates](https://80000hours.org/2018/12/find-your-highest-impact-role-77-new-vacancies-in-our-december-job-board-updates/): 
- [A simple checklist for overcoming life and career setbacks](https://80000hours.org/2018/12/dealing-with-setbacks/): 
- [Think twice before talking about 'talent gaps' — clarifying nine misconceptions](https://80000hours.org/2018/11/clarifying-talent-gaps/): 
- [Second October job board update](https://80000hours.org/2018/10/second-october-job-board-update/): 
- [New article: Have a particular strength? Already an expert in a field? Here are the socially impactful careers 80,000 Hours suggests you consider first.](https://80000hours.org/2018/10/new-article-advice-by-expertise/): 
- [New article: Ways people trying to do good accidentally make things worse, and how to avoid them](https://80000hours.org/2018/10/new-article-accidental-harm/): 
- [What skills or experience are most needed within professional effective altruism in 2018? And which problems are most effective to work on? New survey of organisational leaders.](https://80000hours.org/2018/10/2018-talent-gaps-survey/): 
- [New career review on becoming an academic researcher: Highlights on your chances of success, which fields have highest GRE scores, & having impact outside research](https://80000hours.org/2018/10/career-review-academic-research/): 
- [October job board update](https://80000hours.org/2018/10/october-job-board-update/): 
- [List of 80,000 Hours content from the last 4 months, summary of what was most popular, and plans for future releases.](https://80000hours.org/2018/10/research-review-4-months/): 
- [Recent research we've published: Our top 10 careers for social impact; Congressional staffing; Comparative advantage; And can you guess which psychology experiments will replicate?](https://80000hours.org/2018/09/recent-research-weve-published-our-top-10-careers-for-social-impact-congressional-staffing-comparative-advantage-and-can-you-guess-which-psychology-experiments-will-replicate/): 
- [American with a science PhD? Get a fast-track into AI and STEM policy by applying for the acclaimed AAAS Science & Technology Fellowship by Nov 1.](https://80000hours.org/2018/09/aaas-science-technology-policy-fellowship/): 
- [Randomised experiment: If you're genuinely unsure whether to quit your job or break up, then you probably should](https://80000hours.org/2018/08/randomised-experiment-if-youre-really-unsure-whether-to-quit-your-job-or-break-up-you-really-probably-should/): 
- [80,000 Hours user data is affected by the Typeform data breach](https://80000hours.org/2018/07/typeform-data-breach/): On Monday we learnt that Typeform, a popular service we’ve used to create some of our online forms, has suffered a significant data security breach. Many 80,000 Hours users have have completed one or more of these forms, and a subset of their form responses were among the information that was stolen from Typeform.
- [Yes, a career in commercial law has earning potential. We still don’t recommend it.](https://80000hours.org/2018/03/law-career-review-blog/): Going into law isn’t going out of style. Law ranks among the top five career options for students and is...
- [Blog: A new recommended career path for effective altruists: China specialist](https://80000hours.org/2018/03/china-careers-blog/): 
- [Annual review December 2017](https://80000hours.org/2017/12/annual-review/): We review our progress and mistakes over 2017, and plans for 2018.
- [Guide to effective holiday giving in 2017](https://80000hours.org/2017/12/effective-holiday-giving-in-2017/): 
- [Why you should consider applying for grad school (but make sure you're aware of the potential drawbacks of attending!)](https://80000hours.org/2017/11/consider-applying-for-a-phd-program-now/): 
- [What are the most important talent gaps in the effective altruism community?](https://80000hours.org/2017/11/talent-gaps-survey-2017/): 
- [Our 20 most popular pieces of research](https://80000hours.org/2017/10/our-20-most-popular-pieces-of-research/): 
- [New problem profile: Improving institutional decision-making](https://80000hours.org/2017/10/new-problem-profile-improving-institutional-decision-making/): 
- [New career review: Policy-oriented civil service (with a UK focus)](https://80000hours.org/2017/10/new-career-review-policy-oriented-civil-service-with-a-uk-focus/): 
- [Which professions are paid too much given their value to society?](https://80000hours.org/2017/06/which-jobs-do-economists-say-create-the-largest-spillover-benefits-for-society/): 
- [The Schwarzman Scholarship: An exciting opportunity to learn more about China and get a Masters in Global Affairs](https://80000hours.org/2017/06/the-schwarzman-scholarship-an-exciting-opportunity-to-learn-more-about-china-and-get-a-masters-in-global-affairs/): 
- [How much do hedge fund traders earn?](https://80000hours.org/2017/05/how-much-do-hedge-fund-traders-earn/): 
- [Most people report believing it's incredibly cheap to save lives in the developing world](https://80000hours.org/2017/05/most-people-report-believing-its-incredibly-cheap-to-save-lives-in-the-developing-world/): 
- [How accurately does anyone know the global distribution of income?](https://80000hours.org/2017/04/how-accurately-does-anyone-know-the-global-distribution-of-income/): 
- [What skills are effective altruist organisations short of? Results from our survey.](https://80000hours.org/2017/03/what-skills-are-effective-altruist-organisations-missing/): A survey of the skills that are most lacking in the effective altruism community.
- [5 reasons not to go into education](https://80000hours.org/2017/01/5-reasons-not-to-go-into-education/): Many people who want to make a difference are interested in careers in education. But there's many reasons education doesn't look like the best cause to enter.
- [The effective altruism guide to donating this giving season](https://80000hours.org/2016/12/the-effective-altruism-guide-to-donating-this-giving-season/): People in the effective altruism community aim to use evidence and careful reasoning to work out how to best promote...
- [80,000 Hours annual review Dec 2016](https://80000hours.org/2016/12/annual-review-dec-2016/): 
- [Has 80,000 Hours justified its costs?](https://80000hours.org/2016/12/has-80000-hours-justified-its-costs/): 
- [End of year update on plan changes](https://80000hours.org/2016/12/metrics-report-2016/): This is an update on the number of significant plan changes we’ve caused as of the end of Nov 2016....
- [80,000 Hours has a funding gap](https://80000hours.org/2016/12/80000-hours-has-a-funding-gap/): 
- [How much is one vote worth?](https://80000hours.org/2016/11/why-the-hour-you-spend-voting-is-the-most-socially-impactful-of-all/): 
- [Update on 80,000 Hours May 2015 - June 2016](https://80000hours.org/2016/09/update-on-80000-hours-may-2015-june-2016/): This is a quick update on our progress over the last year. Our next in-depth annual review, in which we’ll...
- [Trevor decided to move from a nonprofit to a for-profit to do more good in the long run. Was it the right call?](https://80000hours.org/2016/08/plan-change-story-building-skills-in-the-private-sector-to-have-more-impact-in-the-long-run/): 
- [Is deep work the most underappreciated skill for career success? An interview with Cal Newport.](https://80000hours.org/2016/08/is-deep-work-the-most-underappreciated-skill-for-career-success-an-interview-with-cal-newport/): 
- [Update on number of significant plan changes](https://80000hours.org/2016/07/update-on-number-of-significant-plan-changes/): This is a brief update on the number of significant plan changes we’ve caused as of the end of Dec...
- [Maria Gutierrez on doing good through art, Costa Rica and why 80,000 Hours changed her career](https://80000hours.org/2016/06/interview-with-maria-gutierrez-about-doing-good-through-art/): In 2014 Maria had a general desire to improve the world, but no idea how to put that into practice. She didn't see any way to do good using her art.
- [The rent is too damn high — should you work on reforming land use regulations?](https://80000hours.org/2016/05/the-rent-is-too-damn-high-should-you-work-on-reforming-land-use-regulations/): Local laws often prohibit the construction of dense new housing, which drives up prices, especially in a few large high-wage urban areas.
- [New report: Is climate change the biggest problem in the world?](https://80000hours.org/2016/05/how-can-we-buy-more-insurance-against-extreme-climate-change/): How does climate change rank amongst the worlds biggest problems? Should you use your career to work on this problem?
- [Why and how to work on nuclear security](https://80000hours.org/2016/04/how-and-why-to-work-on-nuclear-security/): 
- [How and why to use your career to make artificial intelligence safer](https://80000hours.org/2016/04/why-and-how-to-use-your-career-to-make-artificial-intelligence-safe/): We've released a new 'problem profile' on the risks posed by artificial intelligence.
- [The case for and against using your career to combat smoking](https://80000hours.org/2016/04/the-case-for-dedicating-your-career-to-tobacco-control/): Smoking takes an enormous toll on human health - accounting for about 6% of all ill-health globally according to the best estimates.
- [Why and how to work on cause prioritisation research](https://80000hours.org/2016/04/why-and-how-to-work-on-cause-prioritisation-research/): Global priorities research seeks to use new methods to determine in which causes funding to improve the world can have the biggest impact.
- [Is global health the most pressing problem to work on?](https://80000hours.org/2016/04/why-and-how-to-work-on-global-health-problems/): 
- [Why and how to use your career to work on biosecurity](https://80000hours.org/2016/04/why-and-how-to-use-your-career-to-work-on-biosecurity/): Natural pandemics and new scientifically engineered pathogens could potentially kill millions or even billions of people. 
- [Why and how to use your career to end factory farming](https://80000hours.org/2016/04/new-profile-on-factory-farming/): Each year, 50 billion animals are raised and slaughtered in factory farms. Most experience extreme levels of suffering. 
- [We'll pay you up to £1,000 to write a career review for us](https://80000hours.org/2016/03/write-career-reviews-for-us-as-a-freelancer/): To get more career reviews written quickly we are going to experiment with allowing readers to submit them themselves.
- [Which skills make you most employable?](https://80000hours.org/2016/03/which-skills-make-you-most-employable/): There’s lots of skills you could learn. How can we narrow them down to the most useful ones?
- [Will high stress kill you, save your life, or neither?](https://80000hours.org/2016/02/should-you-look-for-a-low-stress-job/): If you’re working on a lake and also using your laptop to look at pictures of lakes, you might need a harder job.
- [Interview: trying to change the resources industry from the inside](https://80000hours.org/2016/02/interview-trying-to-change-the-resources-industry-from-the-inside/): Benjamin Todd interviewed Michael Dello-Iacovo about his attempts to do good as a geophysicist inside the Australian mining industry.
- [Help build our career guide as a freelance web engineer](https://80000hours.org/2016/02/we-are-looking-for-a-freelance-product-engineer-to-build-our-interactive-career-guide-and-help-millions-of-graduates-have-a-greater-social-impact-1000-for-referrals/): We'd like to hire a freelance web engineer to work 2-3 days per week developing our career guide for the next six months.
- [New career review: web designer](https://80000hours.org/2016/02/new-career-review-web-designer/): What is the best career for someone whose main strengths are in visual design? We’ve released a new career review on web design.
- [What the literature says about the earnings of entrepreneurs](https://80000hours.org/2016/02/what-the-literature-says-about-the-earnings-of-entrepreneurs/): It depends a lot on what kind of business you're trying to run.
- [Use our tool to decide whether you're on the right career path](https://80000hours.org/2016/02/annual-career-check-in/): Once you’re done and have decided what steps to take, you can relax about your career trajectory for another 12 months!
- [Is nursing or headhunting the best career for you?](https://80000hours.org/2016/02/new-career-reviews-of-headhunting-and-nursing/): What are the pros and cons of these careers, and who do they best suit?
- [How important is finding a career that matches your strengths?](https://80000hours.org/2016/02/how-important-is-finding-a-career-that-matches-your-strengths/): One of the most common ideas in career advice is that finding a good career is a matter of finding the role that uniquely matches you. But is that right?
- [Doing good through for-profits: Wave and financial tech](https://80000hours.org/2016/02/doing-good-through-for-profits-lincoln-quirk-and-wave/): Lincoln Quirk is saving people 70% of the cost of sending money back to their families in east Africa.
- [Rule-breaking in children predicts future success](https://80000hours.org/2016/02/rule-breaking-in-children-predicts-future-success/): 
- [We can learn a lot from Tara, who left pharmacy to work in effective altruism](https://80000hours.org/2016/02/we-can-learn-a-lot-from-tara-who-left-pharmacy-to-work-in-effective-altruism/): Tara saved lives working as a pharmacist in Bhutan - no really we checked, and she totally did - but she nevertheless left to try to find something better.
- [Plan change story: interview with Dillon Bowen, founder of Effective Altruism group at Tufts University](https://80000hours.org/2016/02/plan-change-story-interview-with-dillon-bowen-leader-of-effective-altruism-at-tufts-university/): I recently interviewed Dillon Bowen, who runs the EA student group at Tufts University, about how his career plans changed...
- [The value of coordination](https://80000hours.org/2016/02/the-value-of-coordination/): When you’re part of a community doing the most good becomes much more of a coordination problem.
- [10 steps to a job in politics](https://80000hours.org/2016/01/10-steps-to-a-job-in-politics/): 
- [Just how bad is being a CEO in big tobacco?](https://80000hours.org/2016/01/just-how-bad-is-being-a-ceo-in-big-tobacco/): Last year I wrote about the most harmful careers and had encouraging smoking at the top. But how bad is it exactly?
- [Is now the time to do something about AI?](https://80000hours.org/2016/01/is-now-the-time-to-do-something-about-ai/): Open Philanthropy recently released a review of research on when human level artificial intelligence will be achieved. The main conclusion of the report was we’re really uncertain
- [Where should you donate to have the most impact during giving season 2015?](https://80000hours.org/2015/12/where-should-you-donate-to-have-the-most-impact-in-giving-season-2015/): Many of our readers choose to give away substantial sums over the ‘giving season’ around Christmas and New Year. Where...
- [Podcast with Ben West, who expects to donate tens of millions for charity through tech entrepreneurship](https://80000hours.org/2015/12/interview-with-ben-who-expects-to-donate-eight-figures-for-charity-through-tech-entrepreneurship/): 
- [Who should found a startup? Podcast with the founder of Entrepreneur First](https://80000hours.org/2015/12/podcast-with-founder-of-entrepreneur-first-about-being-a-startup-founder/): I recently interviewed Matt Clifford (left), the Co-founder & Chief Executive at Entrepreneur First, which describes itself as “Europe’s leading...
- [Even if we can't lower catastrophic risks now, we should do something now so we can do more later](https://80000hours.org/2015/12/even-if-we-cant-lower-catastrophic-risks-now-we-should-do-something-now-so-we-can-do-more-later/): 
- [What’s the easiest way anyone can have a big social impact?](https://80000hours.org/2015/12/whats-the-easiest-way-anyone-can-have-a-big-social-impact/): Let’s suppose you want to minimise sacrifice and maximise the good you do. What should you choose?
- [Plan change story: from neuroscience academia to cost-effectiveness research](https://80000hours.org/2015/12/plan-change-story-from-neuroscience-academia-to-cost-effectiveness-research/): Hauke did a PhD in Neuroscience and was planning to go into academia. But after reading our research, he changed...
- [Lehua closed down her fundraising startup after reading our blog: plan change story](https://80000hours.org/2015/12/plan-change-report-lehua-gray-closed-down-her-fundraising-startup-when-she-realised-it-wouldnt-have-impact/): 
- [How to pursue a career in research to lower the risks from superintelligent machines: a new career review.](https://80000hours.org/2015/12/how-to-pursue-a-career-in-research-to-lower-the-risks-from-superintelligent-machines-a-new-career-review/): 
- [Working at effective altruist organisations: good or bad for career capital?](https://80000hours.org/2015/11/working-at-effective-altruist-organisations-good-or-bad-for-career-capital/): 
- [Why you should focus more on talent gaps, not funding gaps](https://80000hours.org/2015/11/why-you-should-focus-more-on-talent-gaps-not-funding-gaps/): 
- [One of the most exciting new effective altruist organisations: An interview with David Goldberg of the Founders Pledge](https://80000hours.org/2015/11/one-of-the-most-exciting-new-effective-altruist-organisations-an-interview-with-david-goldberg-of-the-founders-pledge/): 
- [Take the growth approach to evaluating startup nonprofits, not the marginal approach](https://80000hours.org/2015/11/take-the-growth-approach-to-evaluating-startup-non-profits-not-the-marginal-approach/): In its first 2 years, Google made no revenue. Did this indicate it was a bad idea to invest or...
- [Stop assuming 'declining returns' in small charities](https://80000hours.org/2015/11/stop-talking-about-declining-returns-in-small-organisations/): 
- [Are our most engaged readers overweighting career capital?](https://80000hours.org/2015/11/safe-credentials-are-not-always-the-best-way-to-career-capital/): 
- [In case you missed it: Open Phil would like to fund a science policy think tank](https://80000hours.org/2015/11/in-case-you-missed-it-open-phil-would-like-to-fund-a-science-policy-think-tank/): 
- [Why and how to found a (GiveWell) nonprofit](https://80000hours.org/2015/11/why-and-how-to-found-a-givewell-non-profit/): 
- [The story of 80,000 Hours (podcast)](https://80000hours.org/2015/11/the-story-of-80000-hours-podcast/): 
- [Why even our readers should save enough to live for 6-24 months](https://80000hours.org/2015/11/why-everyone-even-our-readers-should-save-enough-to-live-for-6-24-months/): Your 'personal runway' is how many months you can easily live if you stopped working. It’s a product of the...
- [Our new tool can help you make the right career decision](https://80000hours.org/2015/11/our-new-tool-can-help-you-make-the-right-career-decisions/): 
- [Common investing mistakes in the effective altruism community](https://80000hours.org/2015/10/common-investing-mistakes-in-the-effective-altruism-community/): 
- [How to write a career plan](https://80000hours.org/2015/10/how-to-write-a-career-plan/): 
- [Startup employees don't earn more](https://80000hours.org/2015/10/startup-salaries-and-equity-compensation/): We estimate typical startup salaries and equity compensation, and find early-employees don't earn more than large company employees.
- [New opportunities to work in effective altruism](https://80000hours.org/2015/10/new-opportunities-to-work-in-effective-altruism/): 
- [The return to coding bootcamps may not remain so high forever](https://80000hours.org/2015/09/the-return-to-coding-bootcamps-may-not-remain-so-high-forever/): We have been positive about learning to code as a way to gain useful skills for earning to give or...
- [Join us as product engineer, build our interactive career guide, and help millions of graduates have a greater social impact. $1000 for referrals.](https://80000hours.org/2015/09/join-us-as-product-engineer-build-our-interactive-career-guide-and-help-millions-of-graduates-have-a-greater-social-impact-1000-for-referrals/): 
- [Are too many people going into biomedical research - or too few?](https://80000hours.org/2015/09/are-too-many-people-going-into-biomedical-research-or-too-few/): 
- [Will effective altruism destroy the arts? No.](https://80000hours.org/2015/09/will-effective-altruism-destroy-the-arts-no/): 
- [What do journalists say about journalism as a high-impact career?](https://80000hours.org/2015/09/what-do-journalists-say-about-journalism-as-a-high-impact-career-interviews-with-dylan-matthews-derek-thompson-and-shaun-raviv/): I interviewed three journalists who have written articles that promote important causes: Dylan Matthews, Derek Thompson, and Shaun Raviv.
- [What do leaders of effective nonprofits say about working in nonprofits?](https://80000hours.org/2015/09/what-do-leaders-of-effective-non-profits-say-about-working-in-non-profits-interviews-with-givedirectly-deworm-the-world-initiative-development-media-international-schistosomiasis-control-initiativ/): Rob Mather - founder and CEO of GiveWell’s top rated charity, Against Malaria Foundation. Photo credit: Andrew Testa. I reached...
- [How can doctors do the most good? An interview with Dr Gregory Lewis](https://80000hours.org/2015/08/how-can-doctors-do-the-most-good-an-interview-with-dr-gregory-lewis/): 
- [How to explore in your career](https://80000hours.org/2015/08/how-to-explore-in-your-career/): 
- [What are the 10 most harmful jobs?](https://80000hours.org/2015/08/what-are-the-10-most-harmful-jobs/): 
- [Try the new 80,000 Hours 'Career Recommender' - it could change your life](https://80000hours.org/2015/08/try-the-new-80000-hours-career-recommender-it-could-change-your-life/): We just added a new and very cool feature to our website: the ‘career recommender’. It takes about 3 minutes...
- [4 reasons working at a foundation is better than you think](https://80000hours.org/2015/08/4-reasons-working-at-a-foundation-is-better-than-you-think/): If you're an all-rounder who wants to make a difference, consider working as a foundation grantmaker. Grantmaking can seem like...
- [Summary of our annual review May 2015](https://80000hours.org/2015/08/summary-of-our-annual-review-may-2015/): 
- [What's it like being a nonprofit in Y Combinator?](https://80000hours.org/2015/08/why-is-80000-hours-in-y-combinator-as-a-non-profit-and-whats-it-like/): 
- [Plans for the coming year May 2015](https://80000hours.org/2015/08/plans-for-the-coming-year-may-2015/): 
- [Review of progress May 2015](https://80000hours.org/2015/08/review-of-progress-may-2015/): 
- [Review of program performance May 2015](https://80000hours.org/2015/08/review-of-program-performance/): 
- [Can you have more impact working in a foundation than earning to give?](https://80000hours.org/2015/07/can-you-have-more-impact-working-in-a-foundation-than-earning-to-give/): 
- [‘Replaceability’ isn’t as important as you might think (or we’ve suggested)](https://80000hours.org/2015/07/replaceability-isnt-as-important-as-you-might-think-or-weve-suggested/): Often if you turn down a skilled job, the role simply won't be filled at all because there's no suitable...
- [Update: how many extra donations have we caused?](https://80000hours.org/2015/07/update-how-many-extra-donations-have-we-caused/): 
- [80,000 Hours finance report April 2015](https://80000hours.org/2015/07/80000-hours-finance-report-april-2015-2/): In this report, we outline our income, expenses, projected budget and financial situation as of the end of March 2015.
- [Is wealth inequality so extreme that it's OK to be a ruthless trader?](https://80000hours.org/2015/07/is-wealth-inequality-so-extreme-that-its-ok-to-be-a-ruthless-trader/): 
- [LinkedIn finds the most common ways in and out of every career](https://80000hours.org/2015/07/linkedin-finds-the-most-common-ways-in-and-out-of-every-career/): 
- [Systemic change becomes non-systemic change and vice versa](https://80000hours.org/2015/07/systemic-change-becomes-non-systemic-change-and-vice-versa/): 
- [We’ve caused 188 significant plan changes](https://80000hours.org/2015/07/weve-caused-188-significant-plan-changes/): 
- [New definition of a significant plan change](https://80000hours.org/2015/07/new-definition-of-a-significant-plan-change/): 
- [If you want to save lives, should you study medicine? Probably not.](https://80000hours.org/2015/07/if-you-want-to-save-lives-should-you-study-medicine-probably-not/): 
- [Disagreeing about what's effective isn't disagreeing with effective altruism](https://80000hours.org/2015/07/disagreeing-about-whats-effective-isnt-disagreeing-with-effective-altruism/): 
- [Get the chance to save the world with this one weird trick](https://80000hours.org/2015/07/get-the-chance-to-save-the-world-with-this-one-weird-trick/): 
- [What people miss about career capital: exceptional achievements](https://80000hours.org/2015/07/what-people-miss-about-career-capital-exceptional-achievements/): 
- [Defining 'Earning to Give'](https://80000hours.org/2015/07/defining-earning-to-give/): 
- [Why you usually shouldn't work at nonprofits straight after graduation](https://80000hours.org/2015/07/why-you-usually-shouldnt-work-at-non-profits-straight-after-graduation/): I recently gave a TEDx talk at Cambridge University, where I argue that, most of the time, graduates who want...
- [Effective altruists love systemic change](https://80000hours.org/2015/07/effective-altruists-love-systemic-change/): Effective altruists are out working every day to fix society's systemic problems. It's time to definitely rebut the claim that...
- [80,000 Hours thinks that only a small proportion of people should earn to give long term](https://80000hours.org/2015/07/80000-hours-thinks-that-only-a-small-proportion-of-people-should-earn-to-give-long-term/): 
- [In some careers your parents can give you a huge boost. Should you do what they did?](https://80000hours.org/2015/07/in-some-careers-your-parents-can-give-you-a-huge-boost-should-you-do-what-they-did/): 
- [Why are wages less stable in skilled professions?](https://80000hours.org/2015/07/why-are-wages-less-stable-in-skilled-professions/): There is some evidence, in fact, that markets for highly skilled workers, such as engineers and other specialized professionals, exhibit...
- [I want to make a difference. Should I work in marketing?](https://80000hours.org/2015/07/i-want-to-make-a-difference-should-i-work-in-marketing/): If you want to make a difference, should you work in marketing? The short answer: probably not. Although marketing may...
- [What are your chances of getting elected to Congress, if you try?](https://80000hours.org/2015/07/what-are-your-odds-of-getting-into-congress-if-you-try/): Calculation of the chances of being elected to Congress if you reach certain posts.
- [What’s the best way to spend $20,000 to help the common good?](https://80000hours.org/2015/06/whats-the-best-way-to-spend-20000-to-help-the-common-good/): I recently came across the following question posted by Paul Buchheit (the founder of Gmail): Assume that I'm going to...
- [I want to make a difference. Should I become a philosopher?](https://80000hours.org/2015/06/i-want-to-make-a-difference-should-i-become-a-philosopher/): To most people, this question sounds like a joke. I think that’s the wrong reaction. (Full career profile on philosophy...
- [Should you go into journalism to make a difference?](https://80000hours.org/2015/06/should-you-go-into-journalism-to-make-a-difference/): We just completed an exploratory profile on journalism. To write the profile, we interviewed an NPR correspondent and a writer...
- [Should you do a computer science PhD?](https://80000hours.org/2015/06/should-you-do-a-computer-science-phd/): 
- [Why an economics PhD might be the best graduate program](https://80000hours.org/2015/06/why-an-economics-phd-might-be-the-best-graduate-program/): We've released an exploratory profile on doing an Economics PhD in the US, concluding that it looks like one of...
- [Advice on entering a US economics PhD from the UK with a non-quantitative background](https://80000hours.org/2015/06/advice-on-entering-a-us-economics-phd-from-the-uk-with-a-non-quantitative-background/): We asked someone with a philosophy undergraduate degree from the UK who was applying to economics PhD's in the US,...
- [Announcing the effective altruism handbook](https://80000hours.org/2015/06/announcing-the-effective-altruism-handbook/): A new Effective Altruism handbook has been released, which features some of 80,000 Hours' ideas about high impact careers.
- [New profile on a new career path: data science](https://80000hours.org/2015/06/new-profile-on-a-new-career-path-data-science/): If you have a PhD in a quantitative subject, or if you’re the type of person who would enjoy a quantitative PhD, you should consider data science as an option. You are particularly likely to be well suited if you want to do research that produces immediate and tangible results, and are able to clearly present quantitative findings to people without technical backgrounds.
- [New in-depth profile on software engineering](https://80000hours.org/2015/06/new-in-depth-profile-on-software-engineering/): We've released a major update to our career profile on software engineering. See the updated profile here and the full...
- [The winner takes all economy](https://80000hours.org/2015/06/the-winner-takes-all-economy/): It’s said that we live in an increasingly “winner takes all” economy. The following chart provides a nice illustration.
- [Donating to Giving What We Can is higher impact than donating to GiveWell recommended charities.](https://80000hours.org/2015/06/donating-to-giving-what-we-can-is-higher-impact-than-donating-to-givewell-recommended-charities/): If you give to Giving What We Can, you'll have more impact than giving directly to GiveWell top recommended charities.
- [The rise of income inequality and what it means for your career](https://80000hours.org/2015/06/rise-of-income-inequality/): What's driving the increasing in income inequality and what does it mean for your career?
- [Why I stopped Earning to Give](https://80000hours.org/2015/06/why-i-stopped-earning-to-give/): I stopped in mid-2014, and I do not plan to do it again. Instead, I am now writing a master’s thesis in philosophy, and I aim for a career in that field.
- [New TEDx talk released!](https://80000hours.org/2015/05/new-tedx-talk-released/): To find fulfilling work, don't follow your passion.
- [New in-depth profile on management consulting](https://80000hours.org/2015/05/new-in-depth-profile-on-management-consulting/): We've released a major update to our career profile on management consulting. See the updated profile here. See the new...
- [Our advice in three minutes](https://80000hours.org/2015/04/our-advice-in-three-minutes/): We've summarised the 9 major types of career change that our members have taken as a result of our career advice.
- [The four big challenges](https://80000hours.org/2015/04/four-big-challenges/): The 80,000 Hours community is involved with many different causes - from scientific research to social justice - but there...
- [10 new organisations founded due to 80,000 Hours](https://80000hours.org/2015/04/10-new-organisations-founded-due-to-80000-hours/): One of our key reasons for founding 80,000 Hours was the “multiplier argument”: When we graduated, we had two options:...
- [Get paid to do existential risk reduction research](https://80000hours.org/2015/04/get-paid-to-do-existential-risk-reduction-research/): The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) is hiring for postdoctoral researchers. Existential risk reduction is a high-priority...
- [Education research: Interview with Dan Greene](https://80000hours.org/2015/03/education-research-interview-with-dan-greene/): If you’d like to work in education research and design to make a difference, how should you go about it? We recently asked Dan Greene for his thoughts.
- [How to network](https://80000hours.org/2015/03/how-to-network/): It’s no secret that networking can be one of the keys to career success. It's useful in helping you to...
- [Researcher position available at Animal Charity Evaluators](https://80000hours.org/2015/02/researcher-position-available-at-animal-charity-evaluators/): Animal Charity Evaluators has a researcher position available. They are looking for applicants with a passion for animal welfare and research.
- [The Chronicle of Higher Education on who gets 'elite' jobs](https://80000hours.org/2015/02/chronical-on-elite-jobs/): Recruiters for elite jobs (law firms, investment banks, consultancies) pay more attention to what school you attended than anything else.
- [Should I help now or later?](https://80000hours.org/2015/02/should-i-help-now-or-later/): When committing to make a difference, it can be hard to decide if you should help now or later. We outline a method to choose between different options.
- [We change more than we expect](https://80000hours.org/2015/02/we-change-more-than-we-expect-so-keep-your-options-open/): How much will your personality, values and preferences change over the next decade? Probably more than you think, so keep your options open.
- [How to start a career in technology (even if you studied art)](https://80000hours.org/2015/02/how-to-start-a-career-in-technology/): We recently hosted a panel on careers in technology, featuring four people who did arts degrees but ended up working in tech and loving their jobs.
- [Which careers are most likely to be automated?](https://80000hours.org/2015/02/which-careers-will-be-automated/): A recent paper suggests that up to 47% of American jobs are at risk of being automated within the next couple of decades.
- [The social impact of different professions](https://80000hours.org/2015/01/the-social-impact-of-different-professions/): Economists and Harvard and Chicago recently published a paper that contains a number of estimates of the social value produced...
- [A meta-analysis may not mean much](https://80000hours.org/2015/01/a-meta-analysis-may-not-mean-much/): Scott Alexander recently posted an interesting and provocative article: "Beware the man of one study" (and see the follow up...
- [Opportunity to work at JPAL as a Research Associate - just hours left to apply!](https://80000hours.org/2015/01/opportunity-to-work-at-jpal-as-a-research-associate-just-hours-left-to-apply/): The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) is the world leader in conducting evidence-based research in developing countries. Their...
- [Earning to give is systemic change](https://80000hours.org/2014/12/earning-to-give-is-systemic-change/): One of the most common criticisms of earning to give (e. g. see this article released yesterday), and advocating for...
- [Why apply to Teach First?: An interview with the UK's largest graduate recruiter](https://80000hours.org/2014/12/we-interview-the-uks-largest-graduate-recruiter-teach-first/): Teach First is a two year program that places talented graduates in schools in challenging circumstances as teachers after a...
- [The camel doesn't have two humps - update to software engineering profile](https://80000hours.org/2014/12/the-camel-doesnt-have-two-humps-update-to-software-engineering-profile/): In our current software engineering profile, we say: Programming ability seems to roughly divide into two groups: those who find...
- [Stop worrying so much about the long-term](https://80000hours.org/2014/12/stop-worrying-so-much-about-the-long-term/): Today I’ve been reviewing our most recent round of coaching, and something struck me about the applications. Many of them...
- [Learn to code in 16 weeks for free in the UK at Founders and Coders](https://80000hours.org/2014/12/learn-to-code-in-16-weeks-for-free-in-the-uk-at-founders-and-coders/): Want to learn to code for in 16 weeks in the UK or free? A review of Founders and Coders.
- [Giving What We Can is seeking a Director of Research](https://80000hours.org/2014/12/giving-what-we-can-is-seeking-a-director-of-research/): 
- [Interested in working in international development? Consider 2Seeds.](https://80000hours.org/2014/12/interested-in-working-in-international-development-consider-2seeds/): Many people have told us that if you want to work in international development, it's very useful to spend time...
- [Interview with a project manager at the Copenhagen Consensus](https://80000hours.org/2014/12/interview-with-a-project-manager-at-the-copenhagen-consensus/): Ben recently interviewed Brad Wong about his career and current job at the Copenhagen Consensus Center (CCC), a leading global...
- [80,000 Hours is seeking a Head of Research](https://80000hours.org/2014/11/80000-hours-is-seeking-a-head-of-research/): As Head of Research, you will become part of our founding team to lead our research efforts into how to...
- [The Centre for Effective Altruism is seeking a Chief Operating Officer](https://80000hours.org/2014/11/the-centre-for-effective-altruism-is-seeking-a-chief-operating-officer/): 
- [Serial social entrepreneur, Michael Norton OBE, speaks in Oxford](https://80000hours.org/2014/11/serial-social-entrepreneur-michael-norton-obe-speaks-in-oxford/): The serial social entrepreneur, Michael Norton, recently spoke at 80,000 Hours: Oxford. Michael started his career as a scientist, merchant...
- [Why and how to keep your options open](https://80000hours.org/2014/11/why-and-how-to-keep-your-options-open/): Keeping options open is important for everyone, it's especially important if you want to make a difference...
- [Mid-year review September 2014](https://80000hours.org/2014/11/mid-year-review-september-2014/): This document is an update on the priorities we set in our May 2014 team plan, as part of our...
- [Should you wait to make a difference?](https://80000hours.org/2014/10/should-you-wait-to-make-a-difference/): Suppose you could either work at a charity next year or go to graduate school. If you work at the charity, you’ll be making a difference right away, speeding up progress. If you go to graduate school, you’ll be investing in yourself and able to have a larger impact later. Which is better?
- [Update: 7 career strategies for making a difference](https://80000hours.org/2014/10/update-7-career-strategies-for-making-a-difference/): New research on the seven top career strategies for making a difference.
- [Want to do something about the risks of artificial intelligence?](https://80000hours.org/2014/10/want-to-do-something-about-the-risks-of-artificial-intelligence/): The field of research into the risks of artificial intelligence is taking off. If you're wondering how you can contribute, we'd like to hear from you.
- [What I learned quitting my job to found a tech startup](https://80000hours.org/2014/10/what-i-learned-quitting-my-job-to-found-a-tech-startup/): I’ve been earning to give as a software developer for the past several years, and it started to become clear that I could make more money in a startups.
- [Update on Peter's career story](https://80000hours.org/2014/10/update-on-peters-career-story/): Peter wrote about his career choice story on the blog back in January. After graduating, he started his software engineer...
- [Tips on careers in journalism from NPR correspondent David Folkenflik](https://80000hours.org/2014/10/tips-on-careers-in-journalism-from-npr-correspondent-david-folkenflik/): David has been NPR’s media correspondent since 2004, and before that spent over a decade at the Baltimore Sun. He...
- [Career story: Ben Kuhn: My job hunt after graduating](https://80000hours.org/2014/10/career-story-ben-kuhn-my-job-hunt-after-graduating/): In this guest post, 80,000 Hour's member Ben Kuhn describes how he looked for a job after graduating from Harvard...
- [Have you checked out the Effective Altruism Forum yet?](https://80000hours.org/2014/10/have-you-checked-out-the-effective-altruism-forum-yet/): A few weeks ago, a new online forum to discuss effective altruism was released. So far, the quality of the...
- [Interview: Holden Karnofsky on cause selection](https://80000hours.org/2014/10/interview-holden-karnofsky-on-cause-selection/): We interviewed Holden to discuss which causes are most important to work on with your career if you want to make a difference.
- [Interview: Holden Karnofsky on the importance of personal fit](https://80000hours.org/2014/10/interview-holden-karnofsky-on-the-importance-of-personal-fit/): In January 2014, I interviewed Holden Karnofsky, the co-founder of GiveWell, to further discuss his views on the importance of...
- [We would like to interview you](https://80000hours.org/2014/10/wed-like-to-interview-you/): If you've got experience with a career of interest to our readers, we'd like to feature an interview with your...
- [Tell us about your career](https://80000hours.org/2014/09/tell-us-about-your-career/): If you’ve made a career decision recently, we’d like to feature your story on the blog. Here’s some examples: Peter,...
- [Should you move to Thailand?](https://80000hours.org/2014/09/should-you-move-to-thailand/): By moving to Thailand, you can cut your cost of living by two to six times, and probably have a higher standard of living than you would have in the US or UK.
- [Update: In which career can you make the most difference?](https://80000hours.org/2014/09/update-in-which-career-can-you-make-the-most-difference/): In which career can you make the most difference? We've updated our top careers list.
- [Update: Don't follow your passion](https://80000hours.org/2014/09/update-dont-follow-your-passion/): Why we think follow your passion is bad advice, but how it contains a some truth – it’s worth searching for a career that’s a good personal fit.
- [What does good research look like?](https://80000hours.org/2014/09/what-does-good-research-look-like/): A list of the principles that guide our research.
- [Update: How to choose a career](https://80000hours.org/2014/09/update-how-to-choose-a-career/): One of our key new pages is ‘how to choose’ - a step-by-step process for making your next career decision, based on the process we use in coaching and workshops.
- [Lots of new content released to the site](https://80000hours.org/2014/09/lots-of-new-content-released-to-the-site/): We’ve recently expanded our research page into a series of ten, supported by sixteen career profiles. In total, we’ve released...
- [Cause overview: cause prioritisation](https://80000hours.org/2014/09/cause-prioritization-summary/): Introduction I recently conducted a ‘shallow investigation’ (see GiveWell) into cause prioritization, with the help of Nick Beckstead. It covers...
- [Conversation with Paul Penley of Excellence in Giving](https://80000hours.org/2014/09/conversation-with-paul-penley-of-excellence-in-giving/): Participants Paul Penley: Director of Research, Excellence in Giving Katja Grace: Research Assistant, Machine Intelligence Research Institute Nick Beckstead: Research...
- [Conversation with Paul Christiano on Cause Prioritization Research](https://80000hours.org/2014/08/conversation-with-paul-christiano-on-cause-prioritization-research/): Participants Paul Christiano: Computer science PhD student at UC Berkeley Katja Grace: Research Assistant, Machine Intelligence Research Institute Summary This...
- [Conversation with Owen Cotton-Barratt of the Global Priorities Project](https://80000hours.org/2014/08/conversation-with-owen-cotton-barratt-of-the-global-priorities-project/): Notes This is a summary made by Katja of points made by Owen during a conversation on March 24 2014....
- [Foundation influence interview with Kerry Vaughan](https://80000hours.org/2014/07/foundation-influence-interview-with-kerry-vaughan/): Introduction Kerry Vaughan was a member of the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (LJAF) - a major strategic foundation with...
- [How to influence policy? An interview with Owen Barder of the Center for Global Development](https://80000hours.org/2014/07/how-to-influence-policy-an-interview-with-owen-barder-of-the-center-for-global-development/): Introduction We recently interviewed Owen Barder to find out about making a difference through careers in policy. The interview was...
- [Careers in journalism - an interview with Larissa MacFarquhar](https://80000hours.org/2014/07/careers-in-journalism-an-interview-with-larissa-macfarquhar/): At the recent Good Done Right conference, I had the opportunity to speak with Larissa MacFarquhar about careers in journalism....
- [Good Done Right: audio recordings now online](https://80000hours.org/2014/07/good-done-right-audio-recordings-now-online/): This July saw the first academic conference on effective altruism. The three-day event took place at All Souls College, one...
- [What does economics tell us about replaceability?](https://80000hours.org/2014/07/what-does-economics-tell-us-about-replaceability/): Introduction ‘Replaceability’ has become a core concept in discussions of career choice among Effective Altruists (EAs) - put simply, people...
- [Interview with Caroline Fiennes about opportunities in effective philanthropy](https://80000hours.org/2014/07/interview-with-caroline-fiennes-about-opportunities-in-effective-philanthropy/): Introduction We recently interviewed Caroline Fiennes to find out about her ideas on opportunities to make a difference promoting effective...
- [The payoff and probability of obtaining venture capital](https://80000hours.org/2014/06/the-payoff-and-probability-of-obtaining-venture-capital/): Venture capital has facilitated the growth of many companies including Apple, Google and Facebook. But is venture capital a key...
- [Which university has better entrepreneurs?](https://80000hours.org/2014/06/which-university-has-better-entrepreneurs/): Some of the most successful companies in recent years have been founded by students of America’s most prestigious universities. The...
- [How to quantify research quality?](https://80000hours.org/2014/06/how-to-quantify-research-quality/): Introduction You may have recently noticed a number appearing under our blog posts, in a little green square. That’s an...
- [What is the average net worth of Stanford entrepreneurs?](https://80000hours.org/2014/06/what-is-the-average-net-worth-of-stanford-entrepreneurs/): In this post we estimate the mean net worth of Stanford alumni who made their wealth primarily through founding startups....
- [Increasing your earnings as a doctor](https://80000hours.org/2014/06/increasing-your-earnings-as-a-doctor/): Making a difference to patient’s lives is a gratifying part of medical work. However, an investigation by Dr Gregory Lewis...
- [Advisory board report June 2014](https://80000hours.org/2014/06/advisory-board-report-june-2014/): As part of our annual review, we held an advisory board meeting. Our advisory board consists of: James Norris, Alex...
- [Case series - why and how to learn programming](https://80000hours.org/2014/06/case-series-why-and-how-to-learn-programming/): Software engineering is a lucrative career with an unusually low barrier to entry. Due to its appeal, some people in...
- [How much do Y Combinator founders earn?](https://80000hours.org/2014/05/how-much-do-y-combinator-founders-earn/): Introduction We're interested in estimating how much tech entrepreneurs earn, since it's one of our top recommended careers, and this...
- [Summary of the annual review May 2014](https://80000hours.org/2014/05/summary-of-the-annual-review-may-2014/): Introduction In this document, we present some concluding comments about our annual review and provide a guide to the rest...
- [Team plan May 2014](https://80000hours.org/2014/05/team-plan-may-2014/): In this document, which is part of our annual review, we outline our priorities over the rest of 2014. We...
- [Review of progress July 2013 to April 2014](https://80000hours.org/2014/05/review-of-progress-july-2013-to-april-2014/): Introduction and summary The purpose of this document is to review what 80,000 Hours has achieved from July 2013 to...
- [80,000 Hours finance report](https://80000hours.org/2014/05/80-000-hours-finance-report/): Summary (N. B figures are rounded) Current financial situation As of April 2014, 80,000 Hours had £148,000 in reserves. This...
- [Our strategic review May 2014](https://80000hours.org/2014/05/our-strategic-review-may-2014/): Introduction - where have we come from? Less than two years ago, we were simply a group of student volunteers...
- [Plan change analysis and cost effectiveness](https://80000hours.org/2014/05/plan-change-analysis-and-cost-effectiveness/): Introduction This document is part of our annual review. In section one, it aims to resolve some key uncertainties within...
- [How well are our programs performing?](https://80000hours.org/2014/05/how-well-are-our-programs-performing/): Introduction and summary In this document, which is part of our annual review, we overview the performance of our programs...
- [What impact has 80,000 Hours had?](https://80000hours.org/2014/05/what-impact-has-80-000-hours-had/): Introduction What impact has 80,000 Hours had since we started in 2011? This document is not meant as an impact...
- [What we can learn about career choice from the Terman study](https://80000hours.org/2014/05/what-we-can-learn-about-career-choice-from-the-terman-study/): The Terman study is the longest running longitudinal studies ever to be carried out in psychology. The study included 1,528...
- [Biographies of Top Entrepreneurs](https://80000hours.org/2014/05/biographies-of-top-entrepreneurs/): Lots of the people we coach want to know how to become a successful technological entrepreneur. One approach to this...
- [Shared values predict startup success? An interview with Saberr](https://80000hours.org/2014/05/shared-values-predict-startup-success-an-interview-with-saberr/): Introduction As part of our ongoing research we have been looking at the best ways to go into entrepreneurship. When...
- [App Academy interview with Buck Shlegeris](https://80000hours.org/2014/04/interview-with-buck-shlegeris-from-app-academy/): Buck Shlergeris is a teaching assistant at App Academy. We interviewed him on how to enter, what you do on the course and what the benefits are.
- [The Undercover Economist speaks to 80,000 Hours](https://80000hours.org/2014/04/the-undercover-economist-speaks-to-80-000-hours/): Tim Harford recently spoke to us at Oxford. He’s a journalist for the Financial Times and the best-selling author of...
- [The Copenhagen Consensus speaks to 80,000 Hours about global prioritisation](https://80000hours.org/2014/04/the-copenhagen-consensus-speaks-to-80-000-hours-about-global-prioritisation/): In October, Bjorn Lomborg from the Copenhagen Consensus Centre led a global priorities setting session at 80,000 Hours: Oxford in...
- [How much do people pursuing earning to give actually give?](https://80000hours.org/2014/04/how-much-do-people-pursuing-earning-to-give-actually-give/): Introduction The purpose of this document is to estimate: 1. How much do people pursuing earning to give donate, and...
- [80,000 Hours visits Number 10](https://80000hours.org/2014/04/80-000-hours-visits-number-10/): In December, Will and I had the opportunity to visit Number 10 Downing St. to meet with policy advisors to...
- [Review of progress on the website](https://80000hours.org/2014/03/review-of-progress-on-the-website/): This document outlines the website updates from the period of August 2013 to January 2014. It's part of our annual...
- [80,000 Hours impact survey evaluation](https://80000hours.org/2014/03/80-000-hours-impact-survey-evaluation/): To understand our impact and learn how to improve as an organisation, we recently ran an open survey of our...
- [Coaching Applications Analysis](https://80000hours.org/2014/03/coaching-applications-analysis/): Who has been applying to coaching from 80,000 Hours? In this post, we analyze our coaching applications to understand what...
- [Interview with Matt Gibb](https://80000hours.org/2014/02/interview-with-matt-gibb/): Introduction Matt Gibb has been involved with 80,000 Hours since its inception. Early on, he was influenced by the idea...
- [Case study: should I finish my degree?](https://80000hours.org/2014/02/case-study-should-i-finish-my-degree/): Introduction Martin is taking a year out from an applied science degree at a Russell group university to work in...
- [Case study: earning to give compared to medical research](https://80000hours.org/2014/02/case-study-earning-to-give-compared-to-medical-research/): Introduction Ramit came to us with a simple question: should I try to train as a medic with the aim...
- [Should you do a degree?](https://80000hours.org/2014/02/should-you-do-a-degree/): As university fees have continued to increase, there has been debate in the press over whether doing a degree is...
- [Internship opportunities at 80,000 Hours](https://80000hours.org/2014/02/internship-opportunities-at-80-000-hours/): We are looking for interns to join our Graduate Volunteer Scheme, which involves a period of 6-10 months of work...
- [An estimate of the expected influence of becoming a politician](https://80000hours.org/2014/02/an-estimate-of-the-expected-influence-of-becoming-a-politician/): Introduction How much influence could you have by becoming a politician? Common sense says that politicians have a lot of...
- [Assessing the social value produced by founding Google](https://80000hours.org/2014/02/assessing-the-social-value-produced-by-founding-google/): 80,000 Hours has outlined some reasons tech entrepreneurship could be a particularly promising career path. One relevant factor is that...
- [The Centre for Effective Altruism is looking for a Director of Development](https://80000hours.org/2014/02/the-centre-for-effective-altruism-is-looking-for-a-director-of-development/): We are looking for a Director of Development to join our team in Oxford! The right candidate would play a...
- [In which career can you make the most difference?](https://80000hours.org/2014/02/in-which-career-can-you-make-the-most-difference/): Introduction Previously, we introduced a way to assess career opportunities in terms of their potential for positive impact, but which...
- [Some stories of career change due to 80,000 Hours](https://80000hours.org/2014/02/some-stories-of-career-change-due-to-80-000-hours/): What kinds of career changes has 80,000 Hours caused? The following is a collection of 15 examples we prepared as...
- [5 ways to make a big difference in any career](https://80000hours.org/2014/02/5-ways-to-make-a-big-difference-in-any-career/): At 80,000 Hours, we’re focused on finding the very best opportunities for you to do good with your career. We’re...
- [80,000 Hours is hiring: careers analyst job available](https://80000hours.org/2014/01/80-000-hours-is-hiring-careers-analyst-job-available/): As we continue to expand our team in Oxford, we are looking for someone to join 80,000 Hours full time...
- [Case study: can I earn more in software or finance?](https://80000hours.org/2014/01/case-study-can-i-earn-more-in-software-or-finance/): Jessica is a software engineer at Google, who donates much of her income to GiveWell recommendations and 80,000 Hours. She...
- [Interview with leading HIV vaccine researcher - Prof. Sir Andrew McMichael](https://80000hours.org/2014/01/interview-with-leading-hiv-vaccine-researcher-prof-sir-andrew-mcmichael/): Introduction Continuing our investigation into medical research careers, we interviewed Prof. Andrew McMichael. Andrew is Director of the Weatherall Institute...
- [Has 80,000 Hours helped you?](https://80000hours.org/2014/01/has-80-000-hours-helped-you/): We want to find out. We’re doing a survey to understand how we may have helped readers like yourself. This...
- [80,000 Hours is hiring! Lead Developer and tech/design interns needed](https://80000hours.org/2014/01/80-000-hours-is-hiring-lead-developer-and-tech-design-interns-needed/): As we continue to expand our team in Oxford, we are seeking three new team members to join us some...
- [Reasoning about influence in politics](https://80000hours.org/2014/01/reasoning-about-influence-in-politics/): Understanding a politician’s influence at first appears to be hopelessly tangled. A politicians’ influence is very tenuously related to the...
- [Which cause is most effective?](https://80000hours.org/2014/01/which-cause-is-most-effective-300/): In previous posts, we explained what causes are and presented a method for assessing them in terms of expected effectiveness....
- [The Value of a Degree](https://80000hours.org/2014/01/the-value-of-a-degree/): Introduction Many of our readers are students, and some have come to us wondering whether they should start a university...
- [Neglectedness and impact](https://80000hours.org/2014/01/neglectedness-and-impact/): Summary Let’s suppose there’s a cause that you care about much more than society at large. In your eyes, that...
- [Case study: choosing between working at effective altruist organisations, earning to give, and graduate school](https://80000hours.org/2014/01/case-study-choosing-between-working-at-effective-altruist-organisations-earning-to-give-and-graduate-school/): Introduction Back in May 2013, I realized I would be graduating in a year and wondered a lot about what...
- [Research into the earnings of software engineers](https://80000hours.org/2014/01/research-into-the-earnings-of-software-engineers/): Introduction We recently did a case study for an individual who has worked at Google for several years in an...
- [A framework for strategically selecting a cause](https://80000hours.org/2013/12/a-framework-for-strategically-selecting-a-cause/): Introduction and summary We could have all the influence in the world, but if we focus on the wrong opportunity,...
- [An interview on which skills most boost your employability](https://80000hours.org/2013/12/an-interview-on-which-skills-most-boost-your-employability/): We recommend reading the following interview by Peter Hurford (an 80,000 Hours coachee, and volunteer at CEA) with Satvik Beri....
- [A comparison of medical research and earning to give](https://80000hours.org/2013/12/a-comparison-of-medical-research-and-earning-to-give/): Introduction and Summary We recently did a case study with Ramit (see the full case study write up here). He...
- [Why pick a cause?](https://80000hours.org/2013/12/why-pick-a-cause/): Introduction We normally find our coachees benefit from picking a cause as part of their career planning, like global health...
- [More evidence on the competitiveness of charity jobs](https://80000hours.org/2013/12/more-evidence-on-the-competitiveness-of-charity-jobs/): Introduction Here’s a short report, “Charities: Passion and skills in aid of a good cause,” on changes in the nonprofit...
- [Economics PhD the only one worth getting?](https://80000hours.org/2013/12/economics-phd-the-only-one-worth-getting/): Introduction Here’s a case for doing an Economics PhD by Noah Smith, professor of finance at Stony Brook University. We...
- [Summary of our thoughts on how to pick a degree](https://80000hours.org/2013/11/summary-of-our-thoughts-on-how-to-pick-a-degree/): Introduction I recently came across this post, which prompted me to summarise our current thoughts on how to pick an...
- [An attempt to create a new AMF](https://80000hours.org/2013/11/an-attempt-to-create-a-new-amf/): There are several health interventions that have been found in academic papers to have a cost-effectiveness that’s similar or better...
- [Careers advice from top tech entrepreneur Marc Andreessen](https://80000hours.org/2013/11/careers-advice-from-top-tech-entrepreneur-marc-andreessen/): We just came across a series of four careers advice posts by Marc Andreessen (hat tip, Satvik Beri). We’re always...
- [Interview with malaria vaccine researcher Katie Ewer](https://80000hours.org/2013/11/interview-with-malaria-vaccine-researcher-katie-ewer/): Introduction A recent case study candidate asked us whether he should enter vaccine research. As part of our research for...
- [Career Opportunities for Economics PhDs](https://80000hours.org/2013/11/career-opportunities-for-economics-phds/): Introduction This post presents some research notes we made while investigating the value of economics PhDs. We were motivated to...
- [Interview with a Cambridge Professor of Medical Genetics on research careers](https://80000hours.org/2013/11/interview-with-a-cambridge-professor-of-medical-genetics-on-research-careers/): Introduction I recently interviewed John Todd, a Professor of Medical Genetics at Cambridge, as part of a series of interviews...
- [Case study: Working in the financial sector to promote a flourishing long-term future](https://80000hours.org/2013/11/case-study-working-in-the-financial-sector-to-promote-a-flourishing-long-term-future/): Introduction This post is a write up of an in-depth case study, exploring one person’s decision about where to work...
- [Live Q&A in Oxford with Dame Stephanie Shirley](https://80000hours.org/2013/11/live-q-a-in-oxford-with-dame-stephanie-shirley/): Introduction We recently held a public Q&A with Dame “Steve” Shirley at our Oxford student group. In the talk, Dame...
- [What should you do with a very large amount of money?](https://80000hours.org/2013/11/what-should-you-do-with-a-very-large-amount-of-money/): A philanthropist who will remain anonymous recently asked Nick Beckstead, a trustee of 80,000 Hours, what he would do with...
- [Thoughts on my experience working at GiveWell](https://80000hours.org/2013/11/thoughts-on-my-experience-working-at-givewell/): Introduction In this post, I offer some thoughts on my experience working at GiveWell. I’ve had a number of different...
- [Why consider becoming a trader?](https://80000hours.org/2013/10/why-consider-becoming-a-trader/): Introduction The following is an article by 80,000 Hours member, Joe Mela, about (i) why he thinks trading can be...
- [Linearity - a useful assumption in evaluating careers and causes](https://80000hours.org/2013/10/linearity-a-useful-assumption-in-evaluating-careers-and-causes/): Introduction When analysing the good done by different paths, we’ve often found it useful to assume that the value of...
- [Interview with the World Health Organisation](https://80000hours.org/2013/10/interview-with-the-world-health-organisation/): Jeremy Lauer is a researcher at WHO-CHOICE, a project of the World Health Organization to encourage cost-effectiveness via both research...
- [Why I'm doing a PhD](https://80000hours.org/2013/10/why-i-m-doing-a-phd/): I’ve just started a PhD in Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School. People who have thought hard about how to...
- [More on What Really Matters for Finding a Job You Love](https://80000hours.org/2013/10/more-on-what-really-matters-for-finding-a-job-you-love/): We think being satisfied in the work you do is really crucial if you want to make a difference: you...
- [Interview with the founder of Giving Games](https://80000hours.org/2013/10/interview-with-the-founder-of-giving-games/): Like both Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld, Jon Behar left a lucrative job at a hedge fund to create a...
- [Interview with Matt Clifford](https://80000hours.org/2013/10/interview-with-matt-clifford/): In 2011 Matt Clifford and Alice Bentick, left their consulting jobs in McKinsey to found their own non-profit, Entrepreneur First....
- [Influencing the Far Future](https://80000hours.org/2013/10/influencing-the-far-future/): Introduction In an earlier post we reviewed the arguments in favor of the idea that we should primarily assess causes...
- [The value of economics PhDs: A conversation with Robin Hanson](https://80000hours.org/2013/10/the-value-of-economics-phds-a-conversation-with-robin-hanson/): Summary Purpose of the call: We organized this call to learn more about the value of getting a PhD in...
- [Should more altruists consider entrepreneurship?](https://80000hours.org/2013/09/should-more-altruists-consider-entrepreneurship/): One thing you might consider, if you’re aiming to do the most good with your career, is going into entrepreneurship....
- [We're looking for donations](https://80000hours.org/2013/09/we-re-looking-for-donations/): Do we provide useful research or coaching? Support our service: we’re looking for donations to develop 80,000 Hours. We set...
- [Case Study: Designing a new organisation that might be more effective than GiveWell's top recommendation](https://80000hours.org/2013/09/case-study-designing-a-new-organisation-that-might-be-more-effective-than-givewell-s-top-recommendation/): Several months ago, we wrote about an easy way to create a charity that’s more effective than GiveWell’s top recommendations....
- [Making a difference through social entrepreneurship: an interview with Tom Rippin](https://80000hours.org/2013/09/making-a-difference-through-social-entrepreneurship-an-interview-with-tom-rippin/): I spoke with Tom Rippin, founder and CEO of On Purpose, a leadership programme aimed at "attracting and developing talent...
- [Summary of our six month evaluation](https://80000hours.org/2013/09/summary-of-our-six-month-evaluation/): This is the final post (of a series of six) on our six month evaluation This report overviews our entire...
- [Trustee and Advisory Board Report](https://80000hours.org/2013/09/trustee-and-advisory-board-report/): Our trustees and advisory board have reviewed our six month evaluation. This report presents a summary report from each group,...
- [Team Plan](https://80000hours.org/2013/09/team-plan/): This is the fifth post (of a series of six) on our six month evaluation This report outlines our key...
- [Finance Report](https://80000hours.org/2013/09/finance-report/): This is the fourth post (of a series of six) on our six month evaluation This report outlines our key...
- [Evaluation of 80,000 Hours as Project](https://80000hours.org/2013/08/evaluation-of-80-000-hours-as-project/): This is the third post (of a series of six) on our six month evaluation In this report, we answer...
- [Metrics Report](https://80000hours.org/2013/08/metrics-report/): This is the second post (of a series of six) on our six month evaluation This post outlines the key...
- [Our Progress](https://80000hours.org/2013/08/our-progress/): This is the first post (of a series of six) on our six month evaluation The purpose of the evaluation...
- [How important are future generations?](https://80000hours.org/2013/08/how-important-are-future-generations/): At 80,000 Hours, we think it’s really important to find the causes in which you can make the most difference....
- [Our first career workshop](https://80000hours.org/2013/08/our-first-career-workshop/): Last month, 80,000 Hours ran its first ever career workshop! This post is a quick summary of the workshop: what...
- [Does your personality matter in picking a career?](https://80000hours.org/2013/08/does-your-personality-matter-in-picking-a-career/): In order to work out current best practice within career advising, we looked into personality testing. Several people I have...
- [Why the Myers Briggs test is not useful in picking a career](https://80000hours.org/2013/08/why-the-myers-briggs-test-is-not-useful-in-picking-a-career/): While investigating how to give good careers advice, we asked ourselves whether the Myers Briggs test, the world’s most widely...
- [Introduction to our career model](https://80000hours.org/2013/08/introduction-to-our-career-model/): Drawing on similarities between an individual planning their career and a startup business, we've realised the importance of learning and...
- [We're looking for a Director of Fundraising and a Finance Manager!](https://80000hours.org/2013/08/we-re-looking-for-a-director-of-fundraising-and-a-finance-manager/): Hopefully you've seen by now that 80,000 Hours is hiring! In addition to the positions advertised previously, we're also looking...
- [Show me the harm](https://80000hours.org/2013/07/show-me-the-harm/): Does Earning to Give do more harm than good? It is often claimed that philanthropists do more harm earning money...
- [How to assess the impact of a career](https://80000hours.org/2013/07/how-to-assess-the-impact-of-a-career/): How do you even begin going about trying to assess the impact of a career? It might seem impossible. But...
- [Your career is like a startup](https://80000hours.org/2013/07/your-career-is-like-a-startup/): We think that we can draw many useful insights about career planning from thinking about how startups operate successfully. There...
- [80,000 Hours is hiring!](https://80000hours.org/2013/07/80-000-hours-is-hiring/): We want to change the world by revolutionising something incredibly important: the way people think about and spend their careers....
- [Looking for a seriously high-impact job using your managerial skills?](https://80000hours.org/2013/07/looking-for-a-seriously-high-impact-job-using-your-managerial-skills/): We recently interviewed Roland Mathiasson, vice president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center (CCC), a leading global think tank which draws...
- [The Future of Humanity Institute is hiring a high-impact project manager](https://80000hours.org/2013/07/the-future-of-humanity-institute-is-hiring-a-high-impact-project-manager/): We recently secured funding for a Research Collaboration with Amlin Insurance focusing on systemic risks associated with risk modelling. This...
- [How important is keeping your options open?](https://80000hours.org/2013/07/how-important-is-keeping-your-options-open/): Why do so many elite graduates go into finance and consulting? At Princeton, for example, more than 30% enter finance...
- [We're changing our career coaching](https://80000hours.org/2013/07/we-re-changing-our-career-coaching/): We’re changing how we do our career coaching. For at least the next couple of months, we’re only going to...
- [Effective Animal Activism, a spin-off of 80,000 Hours, has hired a full-time Executive Director](https://80000hours.org/2013/07/effective-animal-activism-a-spin-off-of-80-000-hours-has-hired-a-full-time-executive-director/): Effective Animal Activism (EAA) will now become entirely independent from 80,000 Hours, and has a separate board of trustees consisting...
- [Maximizing your donations via a job](https://80000hours.org/2013/06/maximizing-your-donations-via-a-job/): Want a systematic approach to getting your dream job, whether for earning to give or for working at one of...
- [Want to make a real difference in development? AidGrade is hiring!](https://80000hours.org/2013/06/want-to-make-a-real-difference-in-development-aidgrade-is-hiring/): Want to really add value and innovate in international development? AidGrade, a fantastic new organisation with precisely this aim, are...
- [How to add value in international development: an interview with Eva Vivalt](https://80000hours.org/2013/06/how-to-add-value-in-international-development-an-interview-with-eva-vivalt/): I recently interviewed Eva Vivalt, who works for the World Bank and is the founder of AidGrade, a new organisation...
- [Where can I earn the most?](https://80000hours.org/2013/06/where-can-i-earn-the-most/): Since one way that you can have a big impact with your career is through earning to give, we want...
- [Why Earning to Give is often not the best option](https://80000hours.org/2013/06/why-earning-to-give-is-often-not-the-best-option/): A common misconception is that 80,000 Hours thinks Earning to Give is typically the way to have the most impact...
- [80,000 Hours in the Washington Post! - Our responses to the coverage](https://80000hours.org/2013/06/80-000-hours-in-the-washington-post-our-responses-to-the-coverage/): The concept of Earning to Give was featured in the Washington Post last week. See the article here. In combination...
- [80,000 Hours Mentioned in TED](https://80000hours.org/2013/06/80-000-hours-mentioned-in-ted/): Peter Singer gave a TED talk on "The Why and How of Effective Altruism," which you can watch here, which...
- [How to create a Donor-Advised Fund](https://80000hours.org/2013/06/how-to-create-a-donor-advised-fund/): What can you do if you're pursuing Earning to Give but aren't currently sure what organisation to donate to? You...
- [Can you measure the good you'll do](https://80000hours.org/2013/05/can-you-measure-the-good-you-ll-do/): The idea that it’s impossible to measure which career lets you make the most difference is silly. If it were...
- [The worst ethical careers advice in the world](https://80000hours.org/2013/05/the-worst-ethical-careers-advice-in-the-world/): What are you going to do with your life? If you’re like most young people, you care about making a...
- [What should I read if I'm new?](https://80000hours.org/2013/05/what-should-i-read-if-i-m-new/): Are you new to 80,000 Hours, and wondering where to start? We've put together this summary of our most popular...
- [The best career advice you never heard in a graduation speech](https://80000hours.org/2013/05/the-best-career-advice-you-ll-never-hear-in-a-graduation-speech/): “Follow your passion” is the stupidest career advice I’ve ever heard. Why? Because my passion in life is for singing...
- [Biases: how they affect your career decisions, and what to do about them](https://80000hours.org/2013/05/biases-how-they-affect-your-career-decisions-and-what-to-do-about-them/): A large and growing body of research suggests our reasoning is far from perfectly "rational. " This means that an...
- [How to double your donations with no extra effort](https://80000hours.org/2013/05/how-to-double-your-donations-with-no-extra-effort/): 80,000 hours is all about making a difference in an effective way and one of the most effective things you...
- [Estimation - Part II: How much will you earn?](https://80000hours.org/2013/05/estimation-part-ii-how-much-will-you-earn/): How much could I earn during my life as a lawyer? How many people could this campaign reach? How long...
- [Estimation - Part I: How to do it?](https://80000hours.org/2013/05/estimation-part-i-how-to-do-it/): Trying to answer questions about the impact of a career is difficult, and trying to decide between different career options...
- [Looking for a seriously high impact job using your analytical skills?](https://80000hours.org/2013/05/looking-for-a-seriously-high-impact-job-using-your-analytical-skills/): Recently we interviewed Holden Karnofsky, co-founder of the independent, nonprofit charity evaluator GiveWell. We recommend GiveWell as a leading source...
- [How important is networking for career success?](https://80000hours.org/2013/05/how-important-is-networking-for-career-success/): 
- [Intelligence matters more than you think for career success](https://80000hours.org/2013/05/intelligence-matters-more-than-you-think-for-career-success/): When you’re trying to have an impact, it's useful to know how successful you'll be in different careers so you...
- [Interview with Holden Karnofsky, co-founder of GiveWell](https://80000hours.org/2013/04/interview-with-holden-karnofsky-co-founder-of-givewell/): Holden Karnofsky is the co-founder and co-executive director of GiveWell, an independent, nonprofit charity evaluator. We recommend Givewell as a...
- [How much is 50p worth to you?](https://80000hours.org/2013/04/how-much-is-50p-worth-to-you/): Suppose we meet on the street one day and I tell you that, through no fault of my own, I’m...
- [How important is fitting in at work?](https://80000hours.org/2013/04/how-important-is-fitting-in-at-work/): For most people, having a career which is a good “fit” for their personality and interests is extremely high priority....
- [Is US gun control an important issue?](https://80000hours.org/2013/04/is-us-gun-control-an-important-issue/): After the shocking massacre in Connecticut it looks like gun control is going to draw a lot of attention from...
- [Tiny steps towards an incrementally better world](https://80000hours.org/2013/04/tiny-steps-towards-an-incrementally-better-world/): Robin Hanson is an American economist who recently blogged about an elegant way to help others at little personal cost....
- [Is most research a waste?](https://80000hours.org/2013/04/is-most-research-a-waste/): Worldwide, over US$100 billion is invested every year in supporting biomedical research, which results in an estimated 1 million research...
- [How to prioritise - Meta skills part 4](https://80000hours.org/2013/04/how-to-prioritise-meta-skills-part-iv/): Some activities have many more times more impact than others. For example, if you’re learning a new skill you’ll improve...
- [Dramatically increase your productivity by using a task management system - Meta-skills Part 3](https://80000hours.org/2013/04/dramatically-increase-your-productivity-by-using-a-task-management-system-meta-skills-part-3/): Many of us at 80,000 Hours have found that having a good task management system - a list of tasks...
- [How to finally do what you've been putting off - Meta skills part 2](https://80000hours.org/2013/04/how-to-finally-do-what-you-ve-been-putting-off/): Commitment devices have boosted my productivity from spending hours or even days procrastinating to consistently achieving my aims. The idea...
- [Increase your productivity to boost your impact - Meta skills part 1](https://80000hours.org/2013/04/increase-your-productivity-to-boost-your-impact/): To have impact you need to choose the right career. But that’s not all. If you can build your knowledge...
- [Opportunity to intern with 80,000 Hours](https://80000hours.org/2013/04/opportunity-to-intern-with-80-000-hours-178/): If you’re here, you probably have some idea of what 80,000 Hours is about. We’re trying to become the world’s...
- [How to improve your memory - Meta skills part 5](https://80000hours.org/2013/04/how-to-improve-your-memory/): Learn more effectively using a spaced repetition system If you can accelerate your learning then you’ll be able to learn...
- [Six Month Review of 80,000 Hours June - Nov 2012](https://80000hours.org/2013/04/six-month-review-of-80-000-hours-june-nov-2012/): In December we conducted the first review of our progress as a full-time organisation. In a spirit of transparency, we’re...
- [Should you plan your career?](https://80000hours.org/2013/03/should-you-plan-your-career/): Should you try to plan your career? On the one hand, goals provide direction and motivation. Especially if you care...
- [Internship opportunity in promoting charity cost-effectiveness](https://80000hours.org/2013/03/internship-opportunity-in-promoting-charity-cost-effectiveness/): Are you interested in learning how to research charity effectiveness? Want training in communicating the idea of effective giving? Or...
- [When to "go with your gut" in career choice](https://80000hours.org/2013/03/when-to-go-with-your-gut-in-career-choice/): People often talk about how you should just “go with your gut” when choosing a career. But how useful is...
- [How to create the world's most effective charity](https://80000hours.org/2013/03/how-to-create-the-world-s-most-effective-charity/): GiveWell’s charity recommendations – currently Against Malaria Foundation, GiveDirectly and the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative– are generally regarded as the most...
- [How much do taxes matter if you're giving to charity?](https://80000hours.org/2013/03/how-much-do-taxes-matter-if-you-re-giving-to-charity/): Suppose you're looking to donate as much as possible to charity, and are choosing between two jobs. Should you worry...
- [How to find out earnings for different jobs](https://80000hours.org/2013/02/how-to-find-out-earnings-for-different-jobs/): When you’re thinking about earning money to donate it to charity, you need compare different jobs on how much you’ll...
- [The single number that best predicts professor tenure: a case study in quantitative career planning](https://80000hours.org/2013/02/the-single-number-that-best-predicts-professor-tenure-a-case-study-in-quantitative-career-planning/): Cal Newport is the best-selling author of So Good They Can't Ignore You, which argues, as we have, against the...
- [Bringing it all together: high impact research management](https://80000hours.org/2013/02/bringing-it-all-together-high-impact-research-management/): There's a general misconception that researchers are the only people who really contribute towards scientific progress. But there's a lot...
- [Two questions you won't want to ask yourself but should](https://80000hours.org/2013/02/two-questions-you-won-t-want-to-ask-yourself-but-should/): Most of us spend a lot of time visualising scenarios we’d like to happen, thinking about reasons the things we...
- [Advice on going into a research career: An interview with Richard Thaler](https://80000hours.org/2013/02/advice-on-going-into-a-research-career-an-interview-with-richard-thaler/): I've recently been following a great new blog doing interviews with "research heroes" in the field of judgement and decision-making...
- [Common mistakes in careers advice: when should you trust sayings?](https://80000hours.org/2013/02/common-mistakes-in-careers-advice-when-should-you-trust-sayings/): “Look after the pennies, and the pounds will look after themselves. ” Often in careers advice, as in life generally,...
- [The best resources for planning your career](https://80000hours.org/2013/02/the-best-resources-for-planning-your-career/): When you’re choosing between career options you need detailed information on different aspects of your career so you can evaluate...
- [Vegetarian Research](https://80000hours.org/2013/02/vegetarian-research-the-value-and-the-need/): For-profit companies (including the meat, egg, and dairy industries) spend countless dollars each year on market research to figure out...
- [Encourage discussion, not defensiveness](https://80000hours.org/2013/01/encourage-discussion-not-defensiveness/): Rather than encouraging constructive discussion, presenting new ideas - especially about moral issues - can often spark confrontation. Why is...
- [Career Advice for High-Impact Activism](https://80000hours.org/2013/01/career-advice-for-high-impact-activism/): Nick Cooney is the Founder and Director of The Humane League – (http://www. effectiveanimalactivism. org/Top- charities) top recommended charity -...
- [How to choose a degree - putting it all together](https://80000hours.org/2013/01/how-to-choose-a-degree-putting-it-all-together/): It’s time. This is where you pull together all the information you have assembled to work out what you will...
- [10 steps to choosing your degree](https://80000hours.org/2013/01/10-steps-to-choosing-your-degree/): I talked earlier about how at university you should probably pick more mathematical ‘hard’ subjects over more artsy ones and...
- [How to choose a degree - what do employers want?](https://80000hours.org/2013/01/how-to-choose-a-degree-what-do-employers-want/): In my last post I looked at the role of degree choice for professional and academic careers. Now let’s branch...
- [How to choose a degree for Earning to Give and Research](https://80000hours.org/2013/01/how-to-choose-a-degree-for-earning-to-give-and-research/): One of the most important early career decisions many people face is what to study at university. This is the...
- [How to make a difference in research: An interview with Nick Bostrom](https://80000hours.org/2013/01/how-to-make-a-difference-in-research-an-interview-with-nick-bostrom/): Rob Wiblin and I interviewed Nick Bostrom, founding Director of the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford, about his career...
- [3 ways to broaden your career horizons](https://80000hours.org/2013/01/3-ways-to-broaden-your-career-horizons/): One huge barrier to making good career decisions is thinking too narrowly. There are just too many options, and too...
- [Save time through smart buying](https://80000hours.org/2013/01/save-time-through-smart-buying/): When people say that time is money, they mostly mean that you can earn money with your time. But it...
- [Trading, donating and charter cities: An interview with Ben Gilbert](https://80000hours.org/2013/01/trading-donating-and-charter-cities-an-interview-with-ben-gilbert/): Ben Gilbert’s an 80,000 Hours member who previously worked as a trader in the City, but now focuses his attention...
- [Should you go into research? - part 2](https://80000hours.org/2013/01/should-you-go-into-research-part-2/): Why do the best researchers get almost all the attention? One factor is the Matthew effect, in which “the rich...
- [Are you cheating career choice?](https://80000hours.org/2013/01/are-you-cheating-career-choice/): Often when faced with a really difficult question, people “cheat” by opting to answer an easier but related one, without...
- [The power of effective activism](https://80000hours.org/2012/12/the-power-of-effective-activism/): The power of persuasion for making a difference is often underappreciated. If you can convince just one other person to...
- [Our research on how to find a job you love](https://80000hours.org/2012/12/our-research-on-how-to-find-a-job-you-love/): Note: this post has been superseded by our job satisfaction page and supporting research page. Many people aren’t as satisfied...
- [How to judge your chances of success](https://80000hours.org/2012/12/how-to-judge-your-chances-of-success/): You want to make a difference. This means being as successful as possible in whatever high-impact path you pursue. In...
- [3 Ways to Advance Science](https://80000hours.org/2012/12/3-ways-to-advance-science/): There are three ways to contribute to scientific progress.  The direct way is to conduct a good scientific study and...
- [Christmas gifts, goats and cash-transfer charities](https://80000hours.org/2012/12/christmas-gifts-goats-and-cash-transfer-charities/): It’s getting closer to Christmas, and we’re running out of time to get presents for friends and family. It can...
- [Want to be successful? Know your odds.](https://80000hours.org/2012/12/want-to-be-successful-know-your-odds/): If you want to make a difference in your career, you need to think not just about which jobs have...
- [How to choose a research topic: An interview with Anders Sandberg](https://80000hours.org/2012/12/how-to-choose-a-research-topic-an-interview-with-anders-sandberg/): Ben and I spoke with Anders Sandberg, a James Martin research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute, about his...
- [Do you think you're better than average?](https://80000hours.org/2012/11/do-you-think-you-re-better-than-average/): Most people think they're better than the average person: that they're smarter, more likeable, more attractive. This tendency to think...
- [Is microcredit mostly hype?](https://80000hours.org/2012/11/is-microcredit-mostly-hype/): Microcredit has become one of the most popular ideas in charity. 2005 was named the Year of Microcredit. The microcredit...
- [Triumphs of intuition](https://80000hours.org/2012/11/triumphs-of-intuition/): Paramedics appear to make good, fast decisions based on "gut feeling": knowing what to do without knowing how you know....
- [Why don't people help others more? - part 2](https://80000hours.org/2012/11/why-don-t-people-help-others-more-part-2/): In part 1, I talked about some ways in which we might motivate people to be more altruistic. Providing a...
- [Why don't people help others more? - part 1](https://80000hours.org/2012/11/why-don-t-people-help-others-more-part-1/): As Peter Singer writes in his book The Life You Can Save, "he world would be a much simpler place...
- [A formula for the perfect job?](https://80000hours.org/2012/11/a-formula-for-the-perfect-job/): Career choice is complex. Could a simple decision rule help us? This idea seems worth paying serious attention to, as...
- [80,000 Hours is Recruiting!](https://80000hours.org/2012/11/80-000-hours-is-recruiting/): We're trying to build the world's best career advice organisation that helps you make a difference. That's a big project,...
- [Interview with Brian Tomasik](https://80000hours.org/2012/11/interview-with-brian-tomasik/): Brian Tomasik is a member of 80,000 Hours who has spent many years thinking and writing essays about how to...
- [The Best News You'll Hear All Year](https://80000hours.org/2012/11/the-best-news-you-ll-hear-all-year/): The folks at Charity Navigator get a lot of heat from people who care about charity evaluation. Their approach, up...
- [What's your true impact?](https://80000hours.org/2012/11/what-s-your-true-impact/): We often confuse our true impact with what we do directly. Instead of focusing on what you do directly, ask...
- [Find the gate](https://80000hours.org/2012/11/find-the-gate/): There’s an easy way to tell a smart dog from a stupid dog. There’s a fence in front of you,...
- [Should we stop interviewing people?](https://80000hours.org/2012/11/should-we-stop-interviewing-people/): Most employers rely heavily on interviews in recruiting. However, research suggests that the interview process is far from perfect. This...
- [Sunk Costs in Careers](https://80000hours.org/2012/10/sunk-costs-in-careers/): In my last post we looked at sunk costs. We saw that having paid for something distorts how you think...
- [How to be a high impact volunteer](https://80000hours.org/2012/10/how-to-be-a-high-impact-volunteer/): Lots of volunteering is definitely not actually about helping people. It usually doesn’t hurt, but neither does going for a...
- [Net Impact Survey: Hopeful News for Ethical Careers](https://80000hours.org/2012/10/net-impact-survey-hopeful-news-for-ethical-careers/): Net Impact, a US charity, has released a report on attitudes towards ethical careers. The report contains hopeful news for...
- [Good generals let their soldiers die in vain](https://80000hours.org/2012/10/good-generals-let-their-soldiers-die-in-vain/): In November 1914 Winston Churchill proposed a campaign to turn the tide of war on the Eastern Front. The plan...
- [Why most charity fundraisers cause harm](https://80000hours.org/2012/10/why-most-charity-fundraisers-cause-harm/): Most fundraisers don’t raise extra money for charity. Rather, they shift money from one charity to another. This means that...
- [Introducing THINK](https://80000hours.org/2012/10/introducing-think/): Not long ago, there were zero organizations focused on effective altruism. Over the last few years, we’ve seen an explosion...
- [Open Source Technology: A Career in Engineering](https://80000hours.org/2012/10/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...
- [How much is a volunteer worth?](https://80000hours.org/2012/10/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...
- [The most important unsolved problems in ethics](https://80000hours.org/2012/10/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...
- [How to do one year of work in four hours](https://80000hours.org/2012/10/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...
- [Why don't charities spend more on fundraising?](https://80000hours.org/2012/10/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...
- [When should I quantify? - Quantification - Part 4](https://80000hours.org/2012/10/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...
- [How to do important research](https://80000hours.org/2012/10/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...
- [Let's stop building schools](https://80000hours.org/2012/10/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...
- [Quantification as a Lamppost in the Dark - Quantification - Part 3](https://80000hours.org/2012/10/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...
- [How many lives does a doctor save? - Part 3 - Replacement](https://80000hours.org/2012/09/how-many-lives-does-a-doctor-save-part-3-replacement-84/): If I become a doctor, I won’t increase the total number of doctors by one. The NHS has a limited...
- [How to be a high impact philosopher, part II](https://80000hours.org/2012/09/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...
- [Quantum Quest: Pruning Procrastination](https://80000hours.org/2012/09/quantum-quest-pruning-procrastination/): In a series of posts, I will offer a perspective on the “quantum quest” - the evolving attempt to make...
- [Quantification - Part 2 - The Dangers](https://80000hours.org/2012/09/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...
- [Does money make you happy?](https://80000hours.org/2012/09/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...
- [How many lives does a doctor save? - Part 2 - Diminishing marginal returns](https://80000hours.org/2012/09/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...
- [Quantification - Part 1 - An Introduction](https://80000hours.org/2012/09/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...
- [Do you really know what job will make you happy?](https://80000hours.org/2012/09/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...
- [Is there such thing as a 'bad' charity?](https://80000hours.org/2012/09/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...
- [How good are the best?](https://80000hours.org/2012/09/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...
- [Should we sacrifice doing what we love to make a difference? part 2](https://80000hours.org/2012/08/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...
- [How much malaria is biodiversity worth?](https://80000hours.org/2012/08/how-much-malaria-is-biodiversity-worth/): Every day, almost everything we do is about prioritisation. Given how important prioritisation is, and how much people seem to...
- [Should we sacrifice doing what we love to make a difference? part 1](https://80000hours.org/2012/08/should-we-sacrifice-doing-what-we-love-to-make-a-difference-part-1/): We all want to find a career which makes us happy: but for many there seems to be a conflict...
- [How many lives does a doctor save?](https://80000hours.org/2012/08/how-many-lives-does-a-doctor-save/): An in-depth answer to 'how many lives do doctors save', and why becoming a doctor doesn't make as much difference as you might think.
- [Project Launch: Effective Animal Activism](https://80000hours.org/2012/08/project-launch-effective-animal-activism/): Among the goals of 80,000 hours is to provide resources to our community on the issues that matter most to...
- [How to find a job you'll love](https://80000hours.org/2012/08/how-to-find-a-job-you-ll-love/): If you want to be satisfied at work, what characteristics should you look for? Prestige, money, something you’re passionate about,...
- [Social interventions gone wrong](https://80000hours.org/2012/08/social-interventions-gone-wrong/): Lots of social interventions end up doing more harm than good. Many more make no difference at, and they're just...
- [What is going on at 80,000 Hours?](https://80000hours.org/2012/08/what-is-going-on-at-80-000-hours/): This is an exciting time for 80,000 Hours. One month ago we took on our first full-time staff members. Over...
- [Should you go into research? - part 1](https://80000hours.org/2012/08/should-you-go-into-research-part-1/): Should you go into a research career? Here’s one striking fact about academic research that bears on this question: in...
- [Don't 'do what you're passionate about' - part 2](https://80000hours.org/2012/08/don-t-do-what-you-re-passionate-about-part-2/): In the last post, I showed that we can’t blindly follow the widely-quoted careers guidance “do what you’re passionate about....
- [Don't 'do what you're passionate about' - part 1](https://80000hours.org/2012/08/don-t-do-what-you-re-passionate-about-part-1/): Common advice in choosing a career is “do what you’re passionate about. ” An article on lifehack begins: “If you...
- [Universalisability - Immoral Industries Part 3](https://80000hours.org/2012/07/universalisability-immoral-industries-part-3/): When I tell people that they might want to consider professional philanthropy as a career choice, they react in a...
- [Collective Action: working in unethical industries part 2](https://80000hours.org/2012/07/collective-action-working-in-unethical-industries-part-2/): In my last article I looked at how it sometimes the best option is to take a high-earning job, even...
- [The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator: A popular but flawed way of understanding your personality](https://80000hours.org/2012/07/the-myers-briggs-type-indicator-a-popular-but-flawed-way-of-understanding-your-personality/): It’s difficult to work out which jobs will suit you. To help with this problem, a variety of personality tests...
- [The wider consequences of giving away money](https://80000hours.org/2012/07/the-wider-consequences-of-giving-away-money/): Like most of the people here, I'm asking myself what I could do that would have a positive impact on...
- [Why Do People Love Charity Workers? pt 2](https://80000hours.org/2012/07/why-do-people-love-charity-workers-pt-2/): In the last post, I argued that self-sacrifice is not, on its own, relevant to the moral value of an...
- [What questions do you have about making a difference?](https://80000hours.org/2012/07/what-questions-do-you-have-about-making-a-difference/): How can you best use your time to make a difference? 80,000 Hours now has several people working full time...
- [Why do people love charity workers? pt 1](https://80000hours.org/2012/07/why-do-people-love-charity-workers-pt-1/): Many careers guides and agencies suggest that ethically minded folks go into the nonprofit sector. And some use the phrase...
- [Biases in career choice: Don't be misled by the category 'high impact career' when deciding between careers](https://80000hours.org/2012/07/biases-in-career-choice-don-t-be-misled-by-the-category-high-impact-career-when-deciding-between-careers/): I've noticed a bias in my thinking about career options that I'd like to help you avoid: I often group...
- [The high impact PA: how anyone can bring about ground-breaking research](https://80000hours.org/2012/07/the-high-impact-pa-how-anyone-can-bring-about-ground-breaking-research/): Suppose you could identify a really important research topic - one that could yield huge benefits to millions of people...
- [Following in Schindler's footsteps](https://80000hours.org/2012/06/following-in-schindler-s-footsteps/): Can it be ethical to take a job working for an immoral corporation if one does so with the aim...
- [On triage](https://80000hours.org/2012/06/on-triage/): Effective altruism focuses on efficiency. Any action that fails to effect the maximum possible reduction in suffering is considered suboptimal....
- [Fundraising for charity - A career for effective altruists?](https://80000hours.org/2012/05/fundraising-for-charity-a-career-for-effective-altruists/): Fundraising sometimes has a bad reputation, but there are a lot of reasons to think that being a fundraiser, or...
- [The flat margin effect](https://80000hours.org/2012/05/the-flat-margin-effect/): Here’s a claim to supplement the replacement effect (RE): The flat margin effect: If you take a job that seems...
- [How to be a high impact philosopher](https://80000hours.org/2012/05/how-to-be-a-high-impact-philosopher/): Philosophy is often impractical. That’s an understatement. It might therefore be surprising to think of a career as a philosopher...
- [Donation methods: credit vs cheque](https://80000hours.org/2012/05/donation-methods-credit-vs-cheque/): How much you give and the effectiveness of the organisations that you give to together determine the impact of your...
- [The haste consideration](https://80000hours.org/2012/04/the-haste-consideration/): Here’s a crucial issue for altruists. The Haste Consideration: Resources for improving the world are vastly more valuable if you...
- [Living to 1000: an interview with Aubrey de Grey](https://80000hours.org/2012/04/living-to-1000-an-interview-with-aubrey-de-grey/): In his recent talk, Aubrey de Grey argued that the SENS foundation’s life extension research should be the most important...
- [Where are the women?](https://80000hours.org/2012/04/where-are-the-women/): Women donate more than men. They are more likely to give, and they give more money. So why is the...
- [Heuristics for a good life](https://80000hours.org/2012/03/heuristics-for-a-good-life/): I wondered what careers or the like help other people the most. Tyler reposted my question, adding: (Let’s) rule out...
- [The replaceability effect: working in unethical industries part 1](https://80000hours.org/2012/03/the-replaceability-effect-working-in-unethical-industries-part-1/): High earning careers are often perceived as unethical careers. It’s not just that people think earning lots of money is...
- [Why doesn't everyone use match funding?](https://80000hours.org/2012/03/why-doesn-t-everyone-use-matching-donations/): For the last two years whenever I have felt charitable, rather than directly give away the money - to Village...
- [Review of Dead Aid](https://80000hours.org/2012/03/review-of-dead-aid/): Dambisa Moyo's best-selling 2009 book Dead Aid caused a considerable stir upon its release; written by a young African woman,...
- [What is an effective altruist?](https://80000hours.org/2012/03/what-is-an-effective-altruist/): 80,000 Hours is built around the idea of effective altruism. What does that mean?
- [The Road Less Travelled: Replaceability and Neglected Causes](https://80000hours.org/2012/02/the-road-less-travelled-replaceability-and-neglected-causes/): The replaceability issue often means that pursuing conventional ethical careers isn’t the way to have the most impact. Instead, it’s...
- [Lots of website updates on 80,000 Hours](https://80000hours.org/2012/02/lots-of-website-updates-on-80-000-hours/): The last month has been a big one for the 80,000 Hours website. Thanks to our comms and web team...
- [26th of September: Petrov Day](https://80000hours.org/2012/02/26th-of-september-petrov-day/): Here’s another candidate for Most Important Person Ever, albeit one whose footsteps will be harder - hopefully impossible - to...
- [5 ways to be misled by salary rankings](https://80000hours.org/2012/02/5-ways-to-be-misled-by-salary-rankings/): Suppose that you plan, like many members of Giving What We Can or the Giving Pledge, to give a significant...
- [In praise of Viktor Zhdanov](https://80000hours.org/2012/02/in-praise-of-viktor-zhdanov/): Until 2010, Viktor Zhdanov, didn't even have a Wikipedia page. No big deal, you say, unless you realize Viktor Zhdanov...
- [Software engineering: Britain vs Silicon Valley](https://80000hours.org/2012/02/software-engineering-britain-vs-silicon-valley/): Several British members of 80,000 hours, both students and people considering switching careers, have asked about entering the field of...
- [Entrepreneurship: a game of poker, not roulette](https://80000hours.org/2012/02/entrepreneurship-a-game-of-poker-not-roulette/): Follow-up to: Salary or startup? How do-gooders can gain more from risky careers In a previous post, I discussed how...
- [How hard is it to become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom?](https://80000hours.org/2012/02/how-hard-is-it-to-become-prime-minister-of-the-united-kingdom/): How to become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom? We analyse what kinds of people make it, and what your chances of making it might be.
- [Professional philanthropy vs professional influencing](https://80000hours.org/2012/02/professional-philanthropy-vs-professional-influencing/): Some facts about charity are so useful that they just have to be shared. Here’s one from the website of...
- [Pledge to fight neglected tropical diseases](https://80000hours.org/2012/02/pledge-to-fight-neglected-tropical-diseases/): Treating NTDs is one of the most cost-effective ways to improve people's lives. So if news stories were ordered by...
- [Practical ethics given moral uncertainty](https://80000hours.org/2012/01/practical-ethics-given-moral-uncertainty/): Practical ethics aims to offer advice to decision-makers embedded in the real world. In order to make the advice practical,...
- [Just what is making a difference: counterfactuals and career choice](https://80000hours.org/2012/01/just-what-is-making-a-difference-counterfactuals-and-career-choice/): When we think about how to make a difference in our careers, it is natural to think about what we...
- [High impact interview 1: Existential risk research at SIAI](https://80000hours.org/2012/01/high-impact-interview-1-existential-risk-research-at-siai/): The plan: to conduct a series of interviews with successful workers in various key candidates for high impact careers. The...
- [New donations recommendations](https://80000hours.org/2012/01/new-donations-recommendations/): Givewell and Giving What We Can have both recently updated their charity recommendations. As a response I've updated the 'Best...
- [Is banking harmful?](https://80000hours.org/2012/01/is-banking-harmful/): The basic argument for professional philanthropy is that, because giving your money away is so powerful, it's well worth the...
- [Policy careers](https://80000hours.org/2012/01/policy-careers/): The 80,000 Hours 'Banker vs. Aid Worker' media campaign has certainly succeeded in causing a stir, but many have been...
- [WikiCharities, for those who haven't seen it](https://80000hours.org/2012/01/wikicharities-for-those-who-haven-t-seen-it/): Just a quick note: In case you missed it in Sam's post on Health vs Education, some members of Giving...
- [Salary or startup? How do-gooders can gain more from risky careers](https://80000hours.org/2012/01/salary-or-startup-how-do-gooders-can-gain-more-from-risky-careers/): Consider Sam, a software engineer at Google. His employer ranks highly in both quality-of-life and salary rankings. Sam is a...
- [Health vs education](https://80000hours.org/2012/01/health-vs-education/): If you want to make a difference with your philanthropic donations it is important to donate to a good charity,...
- [Delayed Gratification? - Choosing When to Donate](https://80000hours.org/2011/12/delayed-gratification-choosing-when-to-donate/): Most charities spend money at about the rate at which they take it in, while most foundations pay out just...
- [It is Effectiveness, not Overhead that Matters](https://80000hours.org/2011/11/it-is-effectiveness-not-overhead-that-matters/): Would you rather help one person or 200 people, if it took the same effort? If you do what most...
- [Today Show](https://80000hours.org/2011/11/today-show/): 80,000 Hours founder Will Crouch appeared with Private Eye editor Ian Hislop on BBC Radio 4’s The Today Show. The...
- [William MacAskill of 80,000 Hours featured on the Today Programme](https://80000hours.org/2011/11/william-macaskill-of-80-000-hours-featured-on-the-today-programme/): Want to make a difference? Want to make the most different that you can? Become a banker. An ethical banker....
- [The best causes - updated](https://80000hours.org/2011/11/the-best-causes-updated/): If you’re reading this, I’ll assume you’re convinced by the philosophy of 80,000 Hours - so you won’t find an...
- [High Impact Science](https://80000hours.org/2011/11/high-impact-science/): Paul Ehrlich began his 1968 book, The Population Bomb, with this statement: The battle to feed all of humanity is...
- [Our Worst Subjects](https://80000hours.org/2011/11/our-worst-subjects/): “I prefer to give to local organizations. ” I've heard this a lot. Imagine a high school student who sits...
- [Estimation is the best we have](https://80000hours.org/2011/11/estimation-is-the-best-we-have/): This argument seems common to many debates: ‘Proposal P arrogantly assumes that it is possible to measure X, when really...

## Skills

- [Engineering skills](https://80000hours.org/skills/engineering/): Learn how to get started in an engineering career, and how you can use engineering skills to solve pressing global problems.
- [Experience with an emerging power (especially China)](https://80000hours.org/skills/emerging-power/): Become an expert on an emerging power to improve international coordination on global issues including AI, pandemics, and climate change.
- [Research skills](https://80000hours.org/skills/research/): Learn how to do research, and how you can use research skills to do good.
- [Policy and political skills](https://80000hours.org/skills/political-bureaucratic/): Working in policy can be a rewarding and high-impact way of changing the world for the better. Learn how to get started.
- [Software and tech skills](https://80000hours.org/skills/software-tech/): Learn to code, then apply your skills to something that really matters. Here's how to get started and how to use your coding skills for good.
- [Specialist knowledge relevant to a top problem](https://80000hours.org/skills/specialist-knowledge/): Which areas of specialist knowledge are most applicable to solving the world's most pressing problems?
- [Organisation-building](https://80000hours.org/skills/organisation-building/): Find out how to help build and boost great organisations through skills like management, operations, legal and financial oversight, entrepreneurship and fundraising.
- [Communicating ideas](https://80000hours.org/skills/communication/): Through communicating important ideas, you could end up inspiring many people to do far more good than you could ever have done by yourself.

## Podcast

- [Bonus: Guilt, imposter syndrome & doing good: 16 past guests share their mental health journeys](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/mental-health-impactful-careers-compilation/): 
- [Buck Shlegeris on controlling AI that wants to take over – so we can use it anyway](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/buck-shlegeris-ai-control-scheming/): 
- [Bonus: 15 expert takes on infosec in the age of AI](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/infosecurity-compilation/): 
- [Will MacAskill on AI causing a “century in a decade” — and how we're completely unprepared](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/will-macaskill-century-in-a-decade-navigating-intelligence-explosion/): 
- [Emergency pod: Judge plants a legal time bomb under OpenAI (with Rose Chan Loui)](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/rose-chan-loui-elon-musk-openai-case-update/): 
- [Allan Dafoe on why technology is unstoppable & how to shape AI development anyway](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/allan-dafoe-unstoppable-technology-human-agency-agi/): 
- [Emergency pod: Elon tries to crash OpenAI's party (with Rose Chan Loui)](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/rose-chan-loui-elon-musk-open-ai/): 
- [Bonus: AGI disagreements and misconceptions: Rob, Luisa, & past guests hash it out](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/ai-misconceptions-disagreements/): 
- [2024 highlightapalooza — the best of The 80,000 Hours Podcast this year](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/2024-highlights/): 
- [Sam Bowman on why housing still isn't fixed and what would actually work](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/sam-bowman-overcoming-nimbys-housing-policy-proposals/): 
- [Cameron Meyer Shorb on dismantling the myth that we can’t do anything to help wild animals](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/cameron-meyer-shorb-wild-animal-suffering/): 
- [Rose Chan Loui on OpenAI’s gambit to ditch its nonprofit](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/rose-chan-loui-openai-breaking-free-nonprofit/): 
- [Elizabeth Cox on the case that TV shows, movies, and novels can improve the world](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/elizabeth-cox-tv-movies-novels-change-the-world/): 
- [Sarah Eustis-Guthrie on why she shut down her charity, and why more founders should follow her lead](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/sarah-eustis-guthrie-founding-shutting-down-charity/): 
- [Bonus: Parenting insights from Rob and 8 past guests](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/bonus-parenting-insights-compilation/): 
- [Anil Seth on the predictive brain and how to study consciousness](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/anil-seth-predictive-brain-explaining-consciousness/): 
- [Sébastien Moro on the most insane things fish can do](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/sebastien-moro-fish-cognition-senses-social-lives/): 
- [Nate Silver on making sense of SBF, and his biggest critiques of effective altruism](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/nate-silver-effective-altruism-sbf-art-of-risk/): 
- [Peter Godfrey-Smith on interfering with wild nature, accepting death, and the origin of complex civilisation](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/peter-godfrey-smith-wild-animal-suffering-complex-life/): 
- [Venki Ramakrishnan on the cutting edge of anti-ageing science](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/venki-ramakrishnan-ageing-life-extension/): 
- [Ken Goldberg on why your robot butler isn’t here yet](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/ken-goldberg-robotics/): 
- [Ezra Karger on what superforecasters and experts think about existential risks](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/ezra-karger-forecasting-existential-risks/): 
- [Nathan Calvin on California’s AI bill SB 1047 and its potential to shape US AI policy](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/nathan-calvin-sb-1047-california-ai-safety-bill/): 
- [Meghan Barrett on challenging our assumptions about insects](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/meghan-barrett-insect-pain-consciousness-sentience/): 
- [Nick Joseph on whether Anthropic's AI safety policy is up to the task](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/nick-joseph-anthropic-safety-approach-responsible-scaling/): 
- [Jonathan Birch on the edge cases of sentience and why they matter](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/jonathan-birch-edge-sentience-uncertainty/): 
- [Sella Nevo on who's trying to steal frontier AI models, and what they could do with them](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/sella-nevo-securing-ai-model-weights/): 
- [Vitalik Buterin on defensive acceleration and how to regulate AI when you fear government](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/vitalik-buterin-techno-optimism/): 
- [Sihao Huang on the risk that US–China AI competition leads to war](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/sihao-huang-china-ai-capabilities/): 
- [Annie Jacobsen on what would happen if North Korea launched a nuclear weapon at the US](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/annie-jacobsen-nuclear-catastrophe-escalation/): 
- [Carl Shulman on government and society after AGI (Part 2)](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/carl-shulman-society-agi/): 
- [Carl Shulman on the economy and national security after AGI (Part 1)](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/carl-shulman-economy-agi/): 
- [Eric Schwitzgebel on whether the US is conscious](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/eric-schwitzgebel-world-weird-us-consciousness/): 
- [Rachel Glennerster on how “market shaping” could help solve climate change, pandemics, and other global problems](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/rachel-glennerster-market-shaping-incentives/): 
- [Matt Clancy on whether science is good](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/matt-clancy-whether-science-is-good/): 
- [Zach Weinersmith on how researching his book turned him from a space optimist into a "space bastard"](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/zach-weinersmith-space-settlement/): 
- [Dean Spears on why babies are born small in Uttar Pradesh, and how to save their lives](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/dean-spears-neonatal-mortality-kangaroo-mother-care/): 
- [Lewis Bollard on the 7 most promising ways to end factory farming, and whether AI is going to be good or bad for animals](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/lewis-bollard-factory-farm-advocacy-gains/): 
- [Zvi Mowshowitz on sleeping on sleeper agents, and the biggest AI updates since ChatGPT](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/zvi-mowshowitz-sleeper-agents-ai-updates/): 
- [Spencer Greenberg on causation without correlation, money and happiness, lightgassing, hype vs value, and more](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/spencer-greenberg-money-happiness-hype-value/): 
- [Bob Fischer on comparing the welfare of humans, chickens, pigs, octopuses, bees, and more](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/bob-fischer-comparing-animal-welfare-moral-weight/): 
- [Laura Deming on the science that could keep us healthy in our 80s and beyond](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/laura-deming-ending-ageing/): 
- [Hugo Mercier on why gullibility and misinformation are overrated](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/hugo-mercier-misinformation-mass-persuasion/): 
- [Randy Nesse on why evolution left us so vulnerable to depression and anxiety](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/randy-nesse-evolutionary-medicine-psychiatry/): 
- [Emily Oster on what the evidence actually says about pregnancy and parenting](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/emily-oster-pregnancy-parenting-careers/): 
- [Nathan Labenz on recent AI breakthroughs and navigating the growing rift between AI safety and accelerationist camps](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/nathan-labenz-ai-breakthroughs-controversies/): 
- [Nathan Labenz on the final push for AGI, understanding OpenAI's leadership drama, and red-teaming frontier models](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/nathan-labenz-openai-red-team-safety/): 
- [Lucia Coulter on preventing lead poisoning for $1.66 per child](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/lucia-coulter-lead-exposure-elimination-project/): 
- [Nita Farahany on the neurotechnology already being used to convict criminals and manipulate workers](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/nita-farahany-neurotechnology/): 
- [Jeff Sebo on digital minds, and how to avoid sleepwalking into a major moral catastrophe](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/jeff-sebo-ethics-digital-minds/): 
- [Bryan Caplan on why you should stop reading the news](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/bryan-caplan-stop-reading-the-news/): 
- [Alison Young on how top labs have jeopardised public health with repeated biosafety failures](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/alison-young-biosafety-lab-leaks/): 
- [Santosh Harish on how air pollution is responsible for ~12% of global deaths — and how to get that number down](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/santosh-harish-air-pollution/): 
- [Paul Niehaus on whether cash transfers cause economic growth, and keeping theft to acceptable levels](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/paul-niehaus-cash-transfers/): 
- [Ian Morris on whether deep history says we're heading for an intelligence explosion](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/ian-morris-deep-history-intelligence-explosion/): 
- [Seren Kell on the research gaps holding back alternative proteins from mass adoption](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/seren-kell-alternative-proteins/): 
- [Tantum Collins on what he’s learned as an AI policy insider at the White House, DeepMind and elsewhere](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tantum-collins-ai-policy-insider/): 
- [Anders Sandberg on war in space, whether civilisations age, and the best things possible in our universe](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/anders-sandberg-best-things-possible-in-our-universe/): 
- [Kevin Esvelt on cults that want to kill everyone, stealth vs wildfire pandemics, and how he felt inventing gene drives](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/kevin-esvelt-stealth-wildfire-pandemics/): 
- [Toby Ord on the perils of maximising the good that you do](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/toby-ord-perils-of-maximising-good/): 
- [Mustafa Suleyman on getting Washington and Silicon Valley to tame AI](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/mustafa-suleyman-getting-washington-and-silicon-valley-to-tame-ai/): 
- [Michael Webb on whether AI will soon cause job loss, lower incomes, and higher inequality — or the opposite](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/michael-webb-ai-jobs-labour-market/): 
- [Hannah Ritchie on why it makes sense to be optimistic about the environment](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/hannah-ritchie-environmental-optimism/): 
- [Jan Leike on OpenAI's massive push to make superintelligence safe in 4 years or less](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/jan-leike-superalignment/): 
- [Holden Karnofsky on how AIs might take over even if they’re no smarter than humans, and his 4-part playbook for AI risk](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/holden-karnofsky-how-ai-could-take-over-the-world/): 
- [Ezra Klein on existential risk from AI and what DC could do about it](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/ezra-klein-ai-and-dc/): 
- [Markus Anderljung on how to regulate cutting-edge AI models](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/markus-anderljung-regulating-cutting-edge-ai/): 
- [Lennart Heim on the compute governance era and what has to come after](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/lennart-heim-compute-governance/): 
- [Rohin Shah on DeepMind and trying to fairly hear out both AI doomers and doubters](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/rohin-shah-deepmind-doomers-and-doubters/): 
- [Elie Hassenfeld on two big-picture critiques of GiveWell's approach, and six lessons from their recent work](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/elie-hassenfeld-givewell-critiques-and-lessons/): 
- [Joe Carlsmith on navigating serious philosophical confusion](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/joe-carlsmith-navigating-serious-philosophical-confusion/): 
- [Ajeya Cotra on accidentally teaching AI models to deceive us](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/ajeya-cotra-accidentally-teaching-ai-to-deceive-us/): 
- [Tom Davidson on how quickly AI could transform the world](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tom-davidson-how-quickly-ai-could-transform-the-world/): 
- [Tim LeBon on how altruistic perfectionism is self-defeating](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tim-lebon-self-defeating-altruistic-perfectionism/): 
- [Johannes Ackva on unfashionable climate interventions that work, and fashionable ones that don't](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/johannes-ackva-unfashionable-climate-interventions/): 
- [Spencer Greenberg on stopping valueless papers from getting into top journals](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/spencer-greenberg-stopping-valueless-papers/): 
- [Robert Long on why large language models like GPT (probably) aren't conscious](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/robert-long-artificial-sentience/): 
- [Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasn't inevitable](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/christopher-brown-slavery-abolition/): 
- [Athena Aktipis on why cancer is actually one of the fundamental phenomena in our universe](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/athena-aktipis-cancer-cooperation-apocalypse/): 
- [Jeffrey Lewis on the most common misconceptions about nuclear weapons](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/jeffrey-lewis-common-misconceptions-about-nuclear-weapons/): 
- [John McWhorter on key lessons from linguistics, the virtue of creoles, and language extinction](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/john-mcwhorter-language-extinction/): 
- [Richard Ngo on large language models, OpenAI, and striving to make the future go well](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/richard-ngo-large-language-models/): 
- [Bear Braumoeller on the case that war isn't in decline](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/bear-braumoeller-decline-of-war/): 
- [Alan Hájek on puzzles and paradoxes in probability and expected value](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/alan-hajek-probability-expected-value/): 
- [Sharon Hewitt Rawlette on why pleasure and pain are the only things that intrinsically matter](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/sharon-hewitt-rawlette-hedonistic-utilitarianism/): 
- [Andreas Mogensen on whether effective altruism is just for consequentialists](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/andreas-mogensen-deontology-and-effective-altruism/): 
- [Will MacAskill on what we owe the future](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/will-macaskill-what-we-owe-the-future/): 
- [Samuel Charap on key lessons from five months of war in Ukraine](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/samuel-charap-key-lessons-from-five-months-of-war-in-ukraine/): 
- [Ian Morris on what big-picture history teaches us](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/ian-morris-big-picture-history/): 
- [Max Tegmark on how a 'put-up-or-shut-up' resolution led him to work on AI and algorithmic news selection](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/max-tegmark-ai-and-algorithmic-news-selection/): 
- [Nova DasSarma on why information security may be critical to the safe development of AI systems](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/nova-dassarma-information-security-and-ai-systems/): 
- [Lewis Dartnell on getting humanity to bounce back faster in a post-apocalyptic world](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/lewis-dartnell-getting-humanity-to-bounce-back-faster/): 
- [Will MacAskill on balancing frugality with ambition, whether you need longtermism, and mental health under pressure](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/will-macaskill-ambition-longtermism-mental-health/): 
- [Dr James Tibenderana on the state of the art in malaria control and elimination](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/james-tibenderana-malaria-control-and-elimination/): 
- [Chris Blattman on the five reasons wars happen](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/chris-blattman-five-reasons-wars-happen/): 
- [Bryan Caplan on whether lazy parenting is OK, what really helps workers, and betting on beliefs](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/bryan-caplan-parenting-workers-betting/): 
- [Joan Rohlfing on how to avoid catastrophic nuclear blunders](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/joan-rohlfing-avoiding-catastrophic-nuclear-blunders/): 
- [Karen Levy on fads and misaligned incentives in global development, and scaling deworming to reach hundreds of millions](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/karen-levy-misaligned-incentives-in-global-development/): 
- [Samuel Charap on why Putin invaded Ukraine, the risk of escalation, and how to prevent disaster](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/samuel-charap-why-putin-invaded-ukraine/): 
- [Michelle Hutchinson & Habiba Islam on balancing competing priorities and other themes from our 1-on-1 careers advising](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/michelle-hutchinson-habiba-islam-themes-from-careers-advising/): 
- [Matthew Yglesias on avoiding the pundit's fallacy and how much military intervention can be used for good](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/matthew-yglesias-pundits-fallacy-military-intervention/): 
- [Audrey Tang on what we can learn from Taiwan’s experiments with how to do democracy](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/audrey-tang-what-we-can-learn-from-taiwan/): 
- [Andrew Yang on our very long-term future, and other topics most politicians won’t touch](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/andrew-yang-very-long-term-future/): 
- [Jaime Yassif on safeguarding bioscience to prevent catastrophic lab accidents and bioweapons development](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/jaime-yassif-safeguarding-bioscience/): 
- [David Denkenberger on using paper mills and seaweed to feed everyone in a catastrophe, ft Sahil Shah](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/david-denkenberger-sahil-shah-using-paper-mills-and-seaweed-in-catastrophes/): 
- [Luisa Rodriguez on why global catastrophes seem unlikely to kill us all](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/luisa-rodriguez-why-global-catastrophes-seem-unlikely-to-kill-us-all/): 
- [David Wallace on the many-worlds theory of quantum mechanics and its implications](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/david-wallace-many-worlds-theory-of-quantum-mechanics/): 
- [Maha Rehman on working with governments to rapidly deliver masks to millions of people](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/maha-rehman-governments-masks-millions/): 
- [Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/varsha-venugopal-vaccinations-children-india/): 
- [Carl Shulman on the common-sense case for existential risk work and its practical implications](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/carl-shulman-common-sense-case-existential-risks/): 
- [Mushtaq Khan on using institutional economics to predict effective government reforms](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/mushtaq-khan-institutional-economics/): 
- [Holden Karnofsky on building aptitudes and kicking ass](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/holden-karnofsky-building-aptitudes-kicking-ass/): 
- [Holden Karnofsky on the most important century](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/holden-karnofsky-most-important-century/): 
- [Chris Olah on working at top AI labs without an undergrad degree](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/chris-olah-unconventional-career-path/): 
- [Chris Olah on what the hell is going on inside neural networks](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/chris-olah-interpretability-research/): 
- [Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/cal-newport-industrial-revolution-for-office-work/): 
- [Alexander Berger on improving global health and wellbeing in clear and direct ways](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/alexander-berger-improving-global-health-wellbeing-clear-direct-ways/): 
- [Dr Pardis Sabeti on the Sentinel system for detecting and stopping pandemics](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/pardis-sabeti-sentinel/): 
- [Max Roser on building the world's first great source of COVID-19 data at Our World in Data](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/max-roser-our-world-in-data/): 
- [Tom Moynihan on why prior generations missed some of the biggest priorities of all](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tom-moynihan-prior-generations/): 
- [Robert Wright on using cognitive empathy to save the world](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/robert-wright-cognitive-empathy/): 
- [Having a successful career with depression, anxiety, and imposter syndrome](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/depression-anxiety-imposter-syndrome/): 
- [Leah Garcés on turning adversaries into allies to change the chicken industry](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/leah-garces-chicken-industry/): 
- [Christian Tarsney on future bias and a possible solution to moral fanaticism](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/christian-tarsney-future-bias-fanaticism/): 
- [Mike Berkowitz on keeping the U.S. a liberal democratic country](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/mike-berkowitz-preserving-us-democracy/): 
- [Nina Schick on disinformation and the rise of synthetic media](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/nina-schick-disinformation-synthetic-media/): 
- [Kelly Wanser on whether to deliberately intervene in the climate](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/kelly-wanser-climate-interventions/): 
- [Ezra Klein on aligning journalism, politics, and what matters most](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/ezra-klein-journalism-most-important-topics/): 
- [Andy Weber on rendering bioweapons obsolete and ending the new nuclear arms race](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/andy-weber-rendering-bioweapons-obsolete/): 
- [Brian Christian on the alignment problem](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/brian-christian-the-alignment-problem/): 
- [Lewis Bollard on big wins against factory farming and how they happened](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/lewis-bollard-big-wins-against-factory-farming/): 
- [Ajeya Cotra on worldview diversification and how big the future could be](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/ajeya-cotra-worldview-diversification/): 
- [Owen Cotton-Barratt on epistemic systems & layers of defence against potential global catastrophes](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/owen-cotton-barratt-epistemic-systems/): 
- [Tristan Harris on the need to change the incentives of social media companies](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tristan-harris-changing-incentives-social-media/): 
- [Benjamin Todd on what the effective altruism community most needs (& how to analyse replaceability)](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/ben-todd-on-what-effective-altruism-most-needs/): 
- [Russ Roberts on whether it's more effective to help strangers, or people you know](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/russ-roberts-effective-altruism-empirical-research-utilitarianism/): 
- [Hilary Greaves on Pascal's mugging, strong longtermism, and whether existing can be good for us](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/hilary-greaves-comparing-existence-and-non-existence/): 
- [Benjamin Todd on the core of effective altruism and how to argue for it](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/ben-todd-on-the-core-of-effective-altruism/): 
- [Benjamin Todd on varieties of longtermism and things 80,000 Hours might be getting wrong](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/ben-todd-on-varieties-of-longtermism/): 
- [Mark Lynas on climate change, societal collapse & nuclear energy](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/mark-lynas-climate-change-nuclear-energy/): 
- [Shruti Rajagopalan on what India did to stop COVID-19 and how well it worked](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/shruti-rajagopalan-covid19-and-india/): 
- [Jennifer Doleac on ways to prevent crime other than police and prisons](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/jennifer-doleac-reforming-police-preventing-crime/): 
- [James Forman Jr on reducing the cruelty of the US criminal legal system](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/james-forman-jr-cruelty-in-the-us-criminal-legal-system/): 
- [Ben Garfinkel on scrutinising classic AI risk arguments](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/ben-garfinkel-classic-ai-risk-arguments/): 
- [Stuart Russell on the flaws that make today's AI architecture unsafe, and a new approach that could fix them](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/stuart-russell-human-compatible-ai/): 
- [A.J. Jacobs on radical honesty, following the whole Bible, and reframing global problems as puzzles](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/aj-jacobs-on-writing-reframing-problems-as-puzzles/): 
- [Danny Hernandez on forecasting and the drivers of AI progress](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/danny-hernandez-forecasting-ai-progress/): 
- [Marc Lipsitch on whether we're winning or losing against COVID-19](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/marc-lipsitch-winning-or-losing-against-covid19-and-epidemiology/): 
- [Tara Kirk Sell on COVID-19 misinformation, who's done well and badly, and what we should reopen first](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tara-kirk-sell-covid-19-misinformation-performance-reopen/): 
- [Michelle Hutchinson on what people most often ask 80,000 Hours](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/michelle-hutchinson-giving-career-advice/): 
- [Dr Greg Lewis on COVID-19 and reducing global catastrophic biological risks](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/greg-lewis-covid-19-global-catastrophic-biological-risks/): 
- [Emergency episode: Rob & Howie on the menace of COVID-19, and what both governments & individuals might be able to do to help](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/rob-howie-coronavirus-crisis/): 
- [Phil Trammell on how becoming a 'patient philanthropist' might allow you to do far more good](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/phil-trammell-patient-philanthropy/): 
- [Toby Ord on the precipice and humanity's potential futures](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/toby-ord-the-precipice-existential-risk-future-humanity/): 
- [Benjamin Todd on the key ideas of 80,000 Hours](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/ben-todd-key-ideas-of-80000hours/): 
- [Bonus episode: Arden & Rob on demandingness, work-life balance and injustice](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/arden-and-rob-on-demandingness/): 
- [Dr Cassidy Nelson on the twelve best ways to stop the next pandemic (and limit COVID-19)](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/cassidy-nelson-12-ways-to-stop-pandemics/): Dr Cassidy Nelson, a medical doctor and research scholar at Oxford University, explains 12 policies her research group says are urgently required.
- [Jeff Ding on China, its AI dream, and what we get wrong about both](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/jeffrey-ding-china-ai-dream/): 
- [Bonus episode: What we do and don’t know about the 2019-nCoV coronavirus](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/howie-rob-coronavirus-february-3rd/): 
- [Will MacAskill on the moral case against ever leaving the house, whether now is the hinge of history, and the culture of effective altruism](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/will-macaskill-paralysis-and-hinge-of-history/): 
- [David Chalmers on the nature and ethics of consciousness](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/david-chalmers-nature-ethics-consciousness/): 
- [Peter Singer on being provocative, EA, how his moral views have changed, & rescuing children drowning in ponds](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/peter-singer-advocacy-and-the-life-you-can-save/): 
- [Ambassador Bonnie Jenkins on 8 years of combating WMD terrorism](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/ambassador-bonnie-jenkins-peace-arms-control/): 
- [Bruce Schneier on how insecure electronic voting could break the United States — and surveillance without tyranny](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/bruce-schneier-security-secrets-and-surveillance/): 
- [Rob Wiblin on plastic straws, nicotine, doping, & whether changing the long term is really possible](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/rob-wiblin-on-many-things/): 
- [Vitalik Buterin on effective altruism, better ways to fund public goods, the blockchain's problems so far, and how it could yet change the world](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/vitalik-buterin-new-ways-to-fund-public-goods/): 
- [Paul Christiano on whether we should leave a helpful message for future civilisations — just in case humanity dies out](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/paul-christiano-a-message-for-the-future/): 
- [Helen Toner on the new 30-person research group in DC investigating how emerging technologies could affect national security](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/helen-toner-on-security-and-emerging-technology/): 
- [Accurately predicting the future is central to absolutely everything. Phil Tetlock has spent 40 years studying how to do it better.](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/philip-tetlock-forecasting-research/): 
- [Cass Sunstein on how social change happens, and why it's so often abrupt & unpredictable](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/cass-sunstein-how-change-happens/): Professor Cass R. Sunstein, legal scholar and best-selling author of Nudge, discusses his recent book How Change Happens on the 80,000 Hours podcast.
- [Pushmeet Kohli on DeepMind's plan to make AI systems robust & reliable, why it's a core issue in AI design, and how to succeed at AI research](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/pushmeet-kohli-deepmind-safety-research/): 
- [Tom Kalil on how to have a big impact in government & huge organisations, based on 16 years' experience in the White House](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tom-kalil-government-careers/): 
- [Animals in the wild often suffer a great deal. We ask Persis Eskander what — if anything — should we do about that](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/persis-eskander-wild-animal-welfare/): 
- [Mark Lutter on trying to end poverty by founding well-governed 'charter' cities, ft Tamara Winter](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/lutter-and-winter-chater-cities-innovative-governance/): 
- [Askell, Brundage & Clark on whether policy has a hope of keeping up with AI advances](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/openai-askell-brundage-clark-latest-in-ai-policy-and-strategy/): OpenAI’s Dactyl can manipulate objects; OpenAI Five can defeat humans at Dota 2. Amazingly, they both sprang from the same general-purpose reinforcement learning algorithm.
- [Kelsey Piper on whether journalists have room to write about important things](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/kelsey-piper-important-advocacy-in-journalism/): 
- [Glen Weyl on radical institutional reforms that make capitalism & democracy work better, and how to get them](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/glen-weyl-radically-reforming-capitalism-and-democracy/): 
- [Martin Gurri on the revolt of the public & crisis of authority in the information age](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/martin-gurri-revolt-of-the-public/): Politics in rich countries seems to be going nuts. What's the explanation? Rising inequality? The decline of manufacturing jobs? Excessive immigration?
- [We could feed all eight billion people through a nuclear winter. David Denkenberger is working to make it practical.](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/david-denkenberger-allfed-and-feeding-everyone-no-matter-what/): 
- [Rachel Glennerster on a year's worth of education for under a dollar and other 'best buys' in development](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/rachel-glennerster-best-buys-in-international-development/): 
- [Brian Christian on computer science algorithms that tackle fundamental and universal problems — and whether they can help us live better in practice](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/brian-christian-algorithms-to-live-by/): 
- [PhD or programming? Fast paths into aligning AI as a machine learning engineer, according to ML engineers Catherine Olsson & Daniel Ziegler](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/olsson-and-ziegler-ml-engineering-and-safety/): 
- [Philosopher Hilary Greaves on moral cluelessness, population ethics, probability within a multiverse, & harnessing the brainpower of academia to tackle the most important research questions](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/hilary-greaves-global-priorities-institute/): 
- [Economist Tyler Cowen says our overwhelming priorities should be maximising economic growth and making civilisation more stable. Is he right?](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tyler-cowen-stubborn-attachments/): 
- [Paul Christiano on how OpenAI is developing real solutions to the 'AI alignment problem', and his vision of how humanity will progressively hand over decision-making to AI systems](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/paul-christiano-ai-alignment-solutions/): 
- [Daniel Ellsberg on the creation of nuclear doomsday machines, the institutional insanity that maintains them, and a practical plan for dismantling them](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/daniel-ellsberg-doomsday-machines/): 
- [Amanda Askell on tackling the ethics of infinity, being clueless about the effects of our actions, and having moral empathy for intellectual adversaries](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/amanda-askell-moral-empathy/): 
- [If the US put fewer people in prison, would crime go up? Not at all, according to Open Philanthropy’s renowned researcher David Roodman.](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/david-roodman-becoming-a-world-class-researcher/): 
- [How well can we actually predict the future? Katja Grace on why expert opinion isn't a great guide to AI's impact and how to do better](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/katja-grace-forecasting-technology/): 
- [How much should you change your beliefs based on new evidence? Spencer Greenberg on the scientific approach to solving difficult everyday questions](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/spencer-greenberg-bayesian-updating/): 
- [Yew-Kwang Ng on ethics and how to create a much happier world](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/yew-kwang-ng-anticipating-effective-altruism/): 
- [Finding the best charity requires estimating the unknowable. Here’s how GiveWell tries to do that, according to researcher James Snowden.](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/james-snowden-givewell-research/): 
- [Tanya Singh on ending the operations management bottleneck in effective altruism](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tanya-singh-operations-bottleneck/): 
- [How the audacity to fix things without asking permission can change the world, demonstrated by Tara Mac Aulay](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tara-mac-aulay-operations-mindset/): How broken is the world? How inefficient is a typical organisation? Looking at Tara Mac Aulay’s life, the answer seems to be ‘very’.
- [Politics is so much worse because we use an atrocious 18th century voting system. Aaron Hamlin has a viable plan to fix it.](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/aaron-hamlin-voting-reform/): 
- [Oxford's Anders Sandberg on solar flares, the annual risk of nuclear war, and what if dictators could live forever?](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/anders-sandberg-extending-life/): 
- [Economist Bryan Caplan thinks education is mostly pointless showing off. We test the strength of his case.](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/bryan-caplan-case-for-and-against-education/): 
- [Allan Dafoe on trying to prepare the world for the possibility that AI will destabilise global politics](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/allan-dafoe-politics-of-ai/): 
- [Eva Vivalt's research suggests social science findings don’t generalize. So evidence-based development - what is it good for?](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/eva-vivalt-social-science-generalizability/): 
- [Where are the aliens? Anders Sandberg on three new resolutions to the Fermi Paradox and how we could easily colonise the whole universe](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/anders-sandberg-fermi-paradox/): 
- [Owen Cotton-Barratt on why daring scientists should have to get liability insurance](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/owen-cotton-barratt-regulating-risky-research/): If an accident is capable of triggering a global pandemic – hundreds of millions of lives might be at risk.
- [The careers and policies that can prevent global catastrophic biological risks, according to world-leading health security expert Dr Tom Inglesby](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tom-inglesby-health-security/): 
- [How exactly clean meat is created & the advances needed to get it into every supermarket, according to food scientist Marie Gibbons](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/marie-gibbons-clean-meat/): 
- [Why we have to lie to ourselves about why we do what we do, according to economist Robin Hanson](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/robin-hanson-on-lying-to-ourselves/): 
- [Stefan Schubert on why it’s a bad idea to break the rules, even if it’s for a good cause](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/stefan-schubert-considering-considerateness/): 
- [Jan Leike on how to become a machine learning alignment researcher](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/jan-leike-ml-alignment/): 
- [Leah Utyasheva on how to massively cut suicide rates in Sri Lanka, and her non-profit's plan to do the same around the world](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/leah-utyasheva-pesticide-suicide-prevention/): 
- [The world’s most intellectual foundation is hiring. Holden Karnofsky, founder of GiveWell, on how philanthropy can have maximum impact by taking big risks.](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/holden-karnofsky-open-philanthropy/): 
- [Bruce Friedrich makes the case that inventing outstanding meat replacements is the most effective way to help animals](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/bruce-friedrich-good-food-institute/): 
- [Samantha Pitts-Kiefer on her job worrying about any way nukes could get used](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/samantha-pk-nuclear-security/): 
- [Ofir Reich on using data science to end poverty and the spurious action/inaction distinction](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/ofir-reich-data-science/): 
- [Will MacAskill fears our descendants will probably see us as moral monsters. What should we do about that?](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/will-macaskill-moral-philosophy/): 
- [Michelle Hutchinson hopes to shape the world by shaping the ideas of intellectuals. Will global priorities research succeed?](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/michelle-hutchinson-global-priorities/): 
- [Phil Tetlock on predicting catastrophes, why keep your politics secret, and when experts know more than you](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/prof-tetlock-predicting-the-future/): 
- [Sharon Nuñez & Jose Valle on going undercover to expose animal cruelty, get rabbit cages banned, and reduce meat consumption](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/animal-equality-exposing-cruelty/): 
- [Claire Walsh on testing which policies work & how to get governments to listen to the results](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/claire-walsh-evidence-in-development/): 
- [Beth Cameron fought Ebola for the White House. Now she works to stop something even worse.](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/beth-cameron-pandemic-preparedness/): 
- [Spencer Greenberg on speeding up social science 10-fold & why plenty of startups cause harm](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/spencer-greenberg-social-science/): 
- [Nick Beckstead on how to spend billions of dollars preventing human extinction](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/nick-beckstead-giving-billions/): 
- [Christine Peterson on the '80s futurist movement and its lessons for today's idealists](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/christine-peterson-computer-security/): 
- [Lewis Bollard on ending factory farming as soon as possible](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/lewis-bollard-end-factory-farming/): 
- [Julia Galef on making humanity more rational, what EA does wrong, and why Twitter isn’t all bad](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/is-it-time-for-a-new-scientific-revolution-julia-galef-on-how-to-make-humans-smarter/): 
- [Toby Ord on why the long-term future of humanity matters more than anything else, and what we should do about it](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/why-the-long-run-future-matters-more-than-anything-else-and-what-we-should-do-about-it/): 
- [Alex Gordon-Brown on making millions for charity each year by working in quant finance](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/the-life-of-a-quant-trader-how-to-earn-and-donate-millions-within-a-few-years/): 
- [Howie Lempel on why we aren't worried enough about the next pandemic — and specifically what we can do to stop it.](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/we-are-not-worried-enough-about-the-next-pandemic/): What disaster is most likely to kill more than 10 million human beings in the next 20 years? Natural pandemics and new scientifically...
- [Dario Amodei on OpenAI and how AI will change the world for good and ill](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/the-world-needs-ai-researchers-heres-how-to-become-one/): 
- [David Spiegelhalter on risk, statistics, and improving the public understanding of science](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/prof-david-spiegelhalter-on-risk-statistics-and-improving-the-public-understanding-of-science/): 
- [Miles Brundage on the world's desperate need for AI strategists and policy experts](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/the-world-desperately-needs-ai-strategists-heres-how-to-become-one/): 

## Podcast (80k After Hours)

- [Christian Ruhl on why we're entering a new nuclear age — and how to reduce the risks](https://80000hours.org/after-hours-podcast/episodes/christian-ruhl-nuclear-catastrophic-risks-philanthropy/): 
- [Benjamin Todd on the history of 80,000 Hours](https://80000hours.org/after-hours-podcast/episodes/benjamin-todd-history-80k/): 
- [Alex Lawsen on avoiding 10 mistakes people make when pursuing a high-impact career](https://80000hours.org/after-hours-podcast/episodes/alex-lawsen-10-career-mistakes/): 
- [Hannah Boettcher on the mental health challenges that come with trying to have a big impact](https://80000hours.org/after-hours-podcast/episodes/hannah-boettcher-mental-health-challenges/): 
- [Luisa and Keiran on free will, and the consequences of never feeling enduring guilt or shame](https://80000hours.org/after-hours-podcast/episodes/luisa-keiran-free-will-guilt-shame/): 
- [Luisa and Robert Long on how to make independent research more fun](https://80000hours.org/after-hours-podcast/episodes/luisa-rob-long-independent-research/): 
- [Marcus Davis on founding and leading Rethink Priorities](https://80000hours.org/after-hours-podcast/episodes/marcus-davis-rethink-priorities/): 
- [Kuhan Jeyapragasan on effective altruism university groups](https://80000hours.org/after-hours-podcast/episodes/kuhan-jeyapragasan-effective-altruism-university-groups/): 
- [Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla on the Shrimp Welfare Project](https://80000hours.org/after-hours-podcast/episodes/andres-jimenez-zorrilla-shrimp-welfare-project/): 
- [Clay Graubard and Robert de Neufville on forecasting the war in Ukraine](https://80000hours.org/after-hours-podcast/episodes/clay-graubard-robert-de-neufville-forecasting-ukraine/): 
- [Michelle and Habiba on what they’d tell their younger selves, and the impact of the 1-1 team](https://80000hours.org/after-hours-podcast/episodes/michelle-habiba-advice-for-younger-selves/): 
- [Alex Lawsen on his advice for students](https://80000hours.org/after-hours-podcast/episodes/alex-lawsen-on-his-advice-for-students/): 
- [Rob and Keiran on the philosophy of The 80,000 Hours Podcast](https://80000hours.org/after-hours-podcast/episodes/rob-and-keiran-on-the-philosophy-of-the-80000-hours-podcast/): 
---

#
# Detailed Content


## AI guide

### The case for AGI by 2030

- Published: 2025-03-21
- Modified: 2025-04-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/agi/guide/when-will-agi-arrive/

In recent months, the CEOs of leading AI companies have grown increasingly confident about rapid progress: OpenAI's Sam Altman: Shifted from saying in November "the rate of progress continues" to declaring in January "we are now confident we know how to build AGI" Anthropic's Dario Amodei: Stated in January "I'm more confident than I've ever been that we're close to powerful capabilities... in the next 2-3 years" Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis: Changed from "as soon as 10 years" in autumn to "probably three to five years away" by January. What explains the shift? Is it just hype? Or could we really have Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) by 2030? In this article, I look at what's driven recent progress, estimate how far those drivers can continue, and explain why they're likely to continue for at least four more years. In particular, while in 2024 progress in LLM chatbots seemed to slow, a new approach started to work: teaching the models to reason using reinforcement learning. In just a year, this let them surpass human PhDs at answering difficult scientific reasoning questions, and achieve expert-level performance on one-hour coding tasks. We don't know how capable AI will become, but extrapolating the recent rate of progress suggests that, by 2028, we could reach AI models with beyond-human reasoning abilities, expert-level knowledge in every domain, and that can autonomously complete multi-week projects, and progress would likely continue from there. On this set of software engineering & computer use tasks, in 2020 AI...

---

### Why AGI could be here soon and what you can do about it: a primer

- Published: 2025-03-14
- Modified: 2025-04-04
- URL: https://80000hours.org/agi/guide/summary/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Career planning, Existential risk

I'm writing a new guide to careers to help artificial general intelligence (AGI) go well. Here's a summary of the bottom lines that'll be in the guide as it stands. Stay tuned to hear our full reasoning and updates as our views evolve. In short: The chance of an AGI-driven technological explosion before 2030 — creating one of the most pivotal periods in history — is high enough to act on. Since this transition poses major risks, and relatively few people are focused on navigating them, if you might be able to do something that helps, that's likely the highest-impact thing you can do. There are now many organisations with hundreds of jobs that could concretely help (many of which are non technical). If you already have some experience (e. g. age 25+), typically the best path is to spend 20–200 hours reading about AI and meeting people in the field, then applying to jobs at organisations you're aligned with — this both sets you up to have an impact relatively soon and advance in the field. If you can't get a job right away, figure out the minimum additional skills, connections, and credentials you'd need, then get those. Alternatively, contribute from your existing position by donating, spreading clear thinking about the issue, or getting ready to switch when future opportunities arise. If you're at the start of your career (or need to reskill), you might be able to get an entry-level job or start a fellowship right away in...

---


## Career guide pages

### Career Guide (audio version)

- Published: 2023-09-01
- Modified: 2024-10-23
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-guide/audio/



---

### Summary: How to find a fulfilling career that does good

> Just the bottom lines from our career guide. TL;DR: To have a fulfilling career, get good at something and then use it to tackle pressing global problems.

- Published: 2023-05-23
- Modified: 2024-09-18
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-guide/summary/

TL;DR: To have a fulfilling career that does good, build useful skills and use them to tackle pressing global problems. Rather than expect to discover your passion in a flash of insight, your job satisfaction will grow over time as you learn more about what kind of work fits you, master valuable skills, and use them to find engaging work that helps others. Move through these three career stages over time: Explore: and investigate your key uncertainties to find the best paths, rather than "going with your gut" or narrowing down too early. Make finding options that fit you best your key focus until you feel ready to bet on one for at least a few years. Build career capital: Look for jobs that let you build valuable skills, and also your reputation, connections, character, and financial runway to increase your career capital and accelerate you towards your longer-term vision. At the same time, invest in your personal development. Do this until you've taken the best opportunities to invest in yourself. Deploy: Use your career capital to tackle pressing global problems, and secure a job that meets your other personal criteria. When it comes to what to aim for longer-term, here are three key things to look for to make a positive impact more effectively: First, focus on more pressing social problems — those that are big in scale, neglected and solvable — rather than those that are popular or you...

---

### The end: A cheery final note - imagining your deathbed

> We summarise our entire career guide in one minute.

- Published: 2017-04-24
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-guide/end/
- Topics: Career advice & strategy

We're about to summarise the whole guide in one minute. But before that, imagine a cheery thought: you're at the end of your 80,000-hour career. You're on your deathbed looking back. What are some things you might regret? Perhaps you drifted into whatever seemed like the easiest option, or did what your parents did. Maybe you even made a lot of money doing something you were interested in, and had a nice house and car. But you still wonder: what was it all for? Now imagine instead that you worked really hard throughout your life, and ended up saving the lives of 100 children. Can you really imagine regretting that? To have a truly fulfilling life, we need to turn outwards rather than inwards. Rather than asking "What's my passion? ," ask "How can I best contribute to the world? " As we've seen, by using our fortunate positions and acting strategically, there's a huge amount we can all do to help others. And we can do this at little cost to ourselves, and most likely while having a more successful and satisfying career too. The entire guide, in one minute To have a good career, do what contributes. Rather than expect to discover your passion in a flash of insight, your fulfilment will grow over time as you learn more about what fits, master valuable skills, and use them to help others. (Part 1) To do what contributes, build useful skills and apply them...

---

### Part 9: All the evidence-based advice we found on how to be more successful in any job

> Much advice on how to be successful is wrong, or useless cliches. Here we cover the best advice we've found in the last 10 years that's backed by evidence.

- Published: 2017-04-07
- Modified: 2024-10-09
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-guide/how-to-be-successful/
- Topics: Career capital, Decision making, Doing good in your current job, Job satisfaction, Mental health, Personal fit

The trouble with self-help advice is that it's often based on barely any evidence. For example, how many times have you been told to "think positively" in order to reach your goals? It's probably the most popular piece of personal guidance, beloved by everyone from high school teachers to bestselling careers experts. One key idea behind the slogan is that if you visualise your ideal future, you're more likely to get there. The problem? Recent research found evidence that fantasising about your perfect life actually makes you less likely to make it happen. While it can be pleasant, it appears to reduce motivation because it makes you feel that you've already hit those targets. We'll cover some ways positive thinking can be helpful later in the article. Much other advice is just one person's opinion, or useless clichés. But at 80,000 Hours, we've found that there are a number of evidence-backed steps that anyone can take to become more productive and successful in their career, and life in general. And as we saw in an earlier article, people can keep improving their skills for decades. So we've gathered up all the best advice we've found over our last 10+ years of research. These are things that anyone can do in any job to increase their career capital and personal fit -- and, therefore, their positive impact. In many cases, the evidence isn't as strong as we'd like. Rather, it's the best we're...

---

### Part 3: No matter your job, here’s 3 evidence-based ways anyone can have a real impact

> Three ways to make a big positive impact without changing jobs: 1. Give 10% to effective charities. 2. Use your political influence. 3. Be a multiplier.

- Published: 2017-04-07
- Modified: 2024-10-29
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-guide/making-a-difference/
- Topics: Effective Altruism

No matter which career you choose, anyone can make a difference by donating to charity, engaging in advocacy, or volunteering. Unfortunately, many attempts to do good in this way are ineffective, and some actually cause harm. Take sponsored skydiving. Every year, thousands of people collect donations for good causes and throw themselves out of planes to draw attention to whatever charity they've chosen to support. This sounds like a win-win: the fundraiser gets an exhilarating once-in-a-lifetime experience while raising money for a worthy cause. What could be the harm in that? Quite a bit, actually. According to a study of two popular parachuting centres, over a five-year period (1991 to 1995) approximately 1,500 people went skydiving for charity and collectively raised more than £120,000. That sounds pretty impressive — until you consider a few caveats. First, the cost of the diving expeditions came out of the donations. So of the £120,000 raised, only £45,000 went to charity. Second, because most of the skydivers were first-time jumpers, they suffered a combined total of 163 injuries, resulting in an average hospital stay of nine days. In order to treat these injuries, the UK's National Health Service spent around £610,000. That means that for every £1 raised for the charities, the health service spent roughly £13, so the net effect was to reduce resources for health services. Ironically, many of the charities supported focused on health-related matters. Photo by Ann W, CC BY 2. 0...

---

### Part 12: One of the most powerful ways to improve your career -- join a community.

> Learn about joining a community can help you succeed and have a greater impact.

- Published: 2017-04-07
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-guide/community/
- Topics: Community & coordination

Courtesy of xkcd. Not many students are in a position to start a successful, cost-effective charity straight out of a philosophy degree. But when Thomas attended an "effective altruism" conference in London in 2018, he discovered an opportunity to start a nonprofit that could have a major impact on factory farmed animals. Through the community, he received advice and funding, and ended up in an incubation programme. Today, Thomas's charity, the Fish Welfare Initiative, has reduced the suffering of around one million factory farmed fish, and has an annual budget of over half a million dollars. If Thomas had just added loads of people on LinkedIn, this would have probably never happened. And this illustrates what many people miss about networking: the value of joining a great community. Finding the right community can help you gain hundreds of potential allies in one go. In fact, getting involved in the right community can be one of the best ways to make friends, advance your career, and have a greater impact. Many people we advise say that "finding their people" was one of the most important steps in their career, and life in general. What's more, a group of people working together can have more impact than they could individually. In this article, we'll explain how joining a community can help, and how to get involved. Reading time: 12 minutes Why joining a community is so helpful Nothing spells community like the letters...

---

### Part 5: The world’s biggest problems and why they’re not what first comes to mind

> What are the biggest problems and issues in the world that are the most important to solve? Here's what we learned after 10 years of research.

- Published: 2017-03-11
- Modified: 2025-03-28
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-guide/world-problems/
- Topics: Effective Altruism, Existential risk, Future generations & longtermism, Most pressing problems

We've spent much of the last 10+ years trying to answer a simple question: what are the world's biggest and most neglected problems? We wanted to have a positive impact with our careers, and so we set out to discover where our efforts would be most effective. Our analysis suggests that choosing the right problem could increase your impact by over 100 times, which would make it the most important driver of your impact. Here, we give a summary of what we've learned. Read on to hear why ending diarrhoea might save as many lives as world peace, why artificial intelligence might be an even bigger deal, and what to do in your own career to make the most urgent changes happen. In short, the most pressing problems are those where people can have the greatest impact by working on them. As we explained in the previous article, this means problems that are not only big, but also neglected and solvable. The more neglected and solvable, the further extra effort will go. And this means they're not the problems that first come to mind. If you just want to see what we think the answer is, go to our list of the world's most pressing problems. Reading time: 25 minutes. Why issues facing rich countries aren't always the most important — and why charity shouldn't always begin at home Most people who want to do good focus on issues in their home country... .

---

### Why should I read this guide?

> You’ll spend about 80,000 hours working in your career: 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, for 40 years. How to spend that time is one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make.

- Published: 2016-04-28
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-guide/introduction/

You'll spend about 80,000 hours working in your career: 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, for 40 years. So how to spend that time is one of the most important decisions you'll ever make. Choose wisely, and you will not only have a more rewarding and interesting life — you'll also be able to help solve some of the world's most pressing problems. But how should you choose? To answer this question, we set up an independent nonprofit and have done over 10 years of research alongside Oxford academics. Our only aim is to help you have the greatest possible positive impact. Along the way, we've discovered some surprising things, and over 10 million people have viewed our advice. Each dot illustrates one of the 80,000 hours in your career. If you could make your career just 1% more impactful, or 1% more enjoyable, it would be worth spending up to 1% of your career figuring out how to do so. That would be five months of full-time work — or 800 hours. Fortunately, this guide only takes about four. How can this guide help you? Back in 2011, we were students at Oxford in the UK. We wanted to figure out how we could do work we loved while having a positive impact. We wondered: should we work at a nonprofit? Go to grad school? Try to earn high salaries and give back through philanthropy? Give up and go...

---

### Part 11: All the best advice we could find on how to get a job

> A step-by-step guide to how to get a job, based on all the best advice we could find and what we've learned coaching thousands of people.

- Published: 2016-04-07
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-guide/how-to-get-a-job/
- Topics: How to get a job, Leverage

When it comes to advice on how to get a job, most of it is pretty bad. CollegeFeed suggests that you "be confident" as their first interview tip, which is a bit like suggesting that you should "be employable. " Many advisors cover the "clean your nails and have a firm handshake" kind of thing. One of the most popular interview videos on YouTube, with over 8 million views, makes the wise point that you definitely mustn't sit down until you're explicitly invited to do so by the interviewer. Who could ever recover from taking a seat a few seconds too early? Over the years, we've sifted through a lot of bad advice to find the nuggets that are actually good. We've also provided one-on-one coaching to thousands of people who are applying for jobs, and hired about 30 people ourselves, so we've seen what works from both sides. Here, we'll sum up what we've learned. The key idea is that getting a job is about convincing someone that you have something valuable to offer. So you should focus on doing whatever employers will find most convincing. That means instead of sending out lots of CVs, focus on getting recommendations and proving you can do the work. Read on to get a step-by-step guide. Reading time: 25 minutes The bottom line Getting a job is a sales process. Think of it from the employer's point of view, and do what the employer will...

---

### Part 4: Want to do good? Here's how to choose an area to focus on.

> To have the biggest impact, you'll want to work on the world's most pressing problems. This sounds obvious, but people often fail to put it into practice.

- Published: 2016-04-01
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-guide/most-pressing-problems/
- Topics: Career advice & strategy, Problem prioritisation, Reasoning well

If you want to make a difference with your career, one place to start is to ask which global problems most need attention. Should you work on education, climate change, poverty, or something else? The standard advice is to do whatever most interests you, and most people seem to end up working on whichever social problem first grabs their attention. That's exactly what our cofounder, Ben, did. At age 19, he was most interested in climate change. Here he is at a rally, in a suitably artistic shot: However, his focus on climate change wasn't the result of a careful comparison of the pros and cons of working on different problems. Rather, by his own admission, he'd happened to read about it, and found it engaging because it was sciency and he was geeky. The problem with this approach is that you might happen to stumble across an area that's just not that big, important, or easy to make progress on. You're also much more likely to stumble across the problems that already receive the most attention, which makes them lower impact. So how can you avoid these mistakes, and do more good? We've developed three questions to ask yourself to work out which social problems are most urgent -- where an extra year of work will have the greatest impact. It's based on work by Open Philanthropy, a foundation with billions of dollars of committed funds, and the (modestly named)...

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### Part 2: Can one person make a difference? What the evidence says.

> Many common ways to do good don't make as much difference as you first think. But it's possible to have a huge impact by being a little unconventional.

- Published: 2016-04-01
- Modified: 2024-11-14
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-guide/can-one-person-make-a-difference/
- Topics: Effective Altruism, Effective solutions, History, Moral philosophy, Reasoning well

It's easy to feel like one person can't make a difference. The world has so many big problems, and they often seem impossible to solve. So when we started 80,000 Hours -- with the aim of helping people do good with their careers -- one of the first questions we asked was, "How much difference can one person really make? " We learned that while many common ways to do good (such as becoming a doctor) have less impact than you might first think, others have allowed certain people to achieve an extraordinary impact. In other words, one person can make a difference -- but you might have to do something a little unconventional. In this article, we start by estimating how much good you could do by becoming a doctor. Then, we share some stories of the highest-impact people in history, and consider what they mean for your career. Reading time: 12 minutes How much impact do doctors have? Many people who want to help others become doctors. One of our early readers, Dr Greg Lewis, did exactly that. "I want to study medicine because of a desire I have to help others," he wrote on his university application, "and so the chance of spending a career doing something worthwhile I can't resist. " So, we wondered: how much difference does becoming a doctor really make? We teamed up with Greg to find out. Since a doctor's primary purpose is to improve health,...

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### Part 7: Which jobs put you in the best long-term position?

> One mistake many people make is to take jobs that don’t put them in a better long-term position. Why does this happen and how can you avoid it?

- Published: 2014-10-01
- Modified: 2025-04-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-guide/career-capital/
- Topics: Career capital, Fields, Now vs. Later, Personal fit

Mozart is one of the most famous child prodigies, but it's less widely known that his father was a world-famous music teacher, and started training him from age three. Mozart's sister was also an accomplished player. This is a painting of all three practicing together. Great skill requires lots of practice. People like to lionise the Mozarts, Malala Yousafzais, and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world -- people who achieved great success while young -- and there are all sorts of awards for young leaders, like the Forbes 30 Under 30. But these stories are interesting precisely because they're the exception. Most people reach the peak of their impact in their middle age. Income usually peaks in the 40s, suggesting that it takes around 20 years for most people to reach their peak productivity. Similarly, experts only reach their peak abilities between age 30 to 60, and if anything, this age is increasing over time. When researchers looked in more detail at these findings, they found that expert-level performance in established fields usually requires 10 to 30 years of focused practice. K. Anders Ericsson, a leader in this field of research, said after 30 years of research: I have never found a convincing case for anyone developing extraordinary abilities without intense, extended practice. For Mozart to succeed so young, he needed to start young. Mozart's father was a famous music teacher, and trained him intensely as a toddler... .

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### Part 6: Which jobs help people the most?

> You don’t need to be a doctor or a charity worker to help people. Drawing on over ten years of research, we outline five types of jobs that help others.

- Published: 2014-10-01
- Modified: 2024-10-28
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-guide/high-impact-jobs/
- Topics: Effective Altruism, Promising interventions

Why Superman was wrong to fight crime - comic from SMBC. Many people think of Superman as a hero. But he may be the greatest example of underutilised talent in all of fiction. It was a blunder to spend his life fighting crime one case at a time; if he'd thought a little more creatively, he could have done far more good. How about delivering vaccines to everyone in the world at superspeed? That would have eradicated most infectious disease, saving hundreds of millions of lives. Here we'll argue that a lot of people who want to "make a difference" with their career fall into the same trap as Superman. College graduates imagine becoming doctors or teachers, but these may not be the best fit for their particular skills. And like Superman fighting crime, these paths are often limited in the amount they could potentially contribute to solving a problem. In contrast, Nobel Prize winner Karl Landsteiner discovered blood groups, enabling hundreds of millions of lifesaving operations. He would have never been able to carry out that many surgeries himself. Below we'll introduce five ways you could use your career to help tackle the social problems you want to help work on (which we identified in the previous article): earning to give, communicating ideas, research, government and policy, and organisation-building. You can think of each of these as a valuable skill set that can help you make a bigger contribution to solving global problems... .

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### Part 10: How to make your career plan

> Detailed long-term career plans can be harmful, but it's still good to have some idea where you're going. Here's how to write out your plan.

- Published: 2014-08-17
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-guide/career-planning/
- Topics: Career planning

People like to think finding the right career is like finding their "perfect match" for life. It's not. People often come to us trying to figure out what they should do over the next 10 or 20 years. Others say they want to figure out "the right career" for them. The problem with all of this is that, as we've seen, your plan is almost certainly going to change: You'll change -- more than you think. The world will change -- many industries around today won't even exist in 20 years. You'll learn more about what's best for you -- it's very hard to predict what you're going to be good at ahead of time. In a sense, there is no stable "right career for you. " Rather, the best option will keep changing as the world changes and you learn more. Many people we've advised would never have predicted the job they've ended up doing. Long-term planning could even be counterproductive. There's a risk of becoming fixated on a specific plan, and failing to change your plans as your situation changes. All that said, giving up on planning and setting goals probably isn't wise either. As Eisenhower said, "Plans are useless but planning is essential. " Having some idea of where you'd like to end up can help you spot much better opportunities to advance. In fact, if you want to have a big positive impact, we'd argue that planning is even more important... .

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### Part 1: We reviewed over 60 studies about what makes for a dream job. Here's what we found.

> We reviewed over 60 studies. We found a dream job isn't highly paid or easy, and need not involve your "passion". Rather, focus on 6 key ingredients.

- Published: 2014-08-08
- Modified: 2025-01-06
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-guide/job-satisfaction/
- Topics: Job satisfaction, Mental health

We all want to find a dream job that's enjoyable and meaningful, but what does that actually mean? Some people imagine that the answer involves discovering their passion through a flash of insight, while others think that the key elements of their dream job are that it be easy and highly paid. We've reviewed three decades of research into the causes of a satisfying life and career, drawing on over 60 studies, and we didn't find much evidence for these views. Instead, we found six key ingredients of a dream job. They don't include income, and they aren't as simple as "following your passion. " In fact, following your passion can lead you astray. Steve Jobs was passionate about Zen Buddhism before entering technology. Maya Angelou worked as a calypso dancer before she became a celebrated poet and civil rights activist. Rather, you can develop passion by doing work that you find enjoyable and meaningful. The key is to get good at something that helps other people. Watch this video or read the full article (20 minutes). If you just want the raw research, see the evidence review. The bottom line To find a dream job, look for: Work you're good at. Work that helps others. Supportive conditions: engaging work that lets you enter a state of flow, supportive colleagues, lack of major negatives like unfair pay, and work that fits your personal life. Where we go wrong The...

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### Part 8: How to find the right career for you

> Career aptitude tests and gap years don't help you find the right career. Here's a step-by-step process to work out the career that suits you best.

- Published: 2014-08-08
- Modified: 2025-02-26
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-guide/personal-fit/
- Topics: Decision making, Exploration, Personal fit

Everyone says it's important to find a job you're good at, but no one tells you how. The standard advice is to think about it for weeks and weeks until you "discover your talent. " To help, career advisers give you quizzes about your interests and preferences. Others recommend you go on a gap yah, reflect deeply, imagine different options, and try to figure out what truly motivates you. But as we saw in an earlier article, becoming really good at most things takes decades of practice. So to a large degree, your abilities are built rather than "discovered. " Darwin, Lincoln, and Oprah all failed early in their careers, then went on to completely dominate their fields. Albert Einstein's 1895 schoolmaster's report reads, "He will never amount to anything. " Asking "What am I good at? " needlessly narrows your options. It's better to ask: "What could I become good at? " That aside, the bigger problem is that these methods aren't reliable. Plenty of research shows that while it's possible to predict what you'll be good at ahead of time, it's difficult. Just "going with your gut" is particularly unreliable, and it turns out career tests don't work very well either. Instead, you should be prepared to think like a scientist -- learn about and try out your options, looking outwards rather than inwards. Here we'll explain why and how. Oprah worked as a TV news anchor early in her career, eventually getting fired and being told...

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## Problem profiles

### Gradual disempowerment

- Published: 2025-04-04
- Modified: 2025-04-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/gradual-disempowerment/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence

Why might gradual disempowerment be an especially pressing problem? Advancing technology has historically benefited humanity. The invention of fire, air conditioning, and antibiotics have all come with some downsides, but overall they've helped humans live healthier, happier, and more comfortable lives. But this trend isn't guaranteed to continue. We've written about how the development of advanced AI technology poses existential risks. One prominent and particularly concerning threat model is that as AI systems get more powerful, they'll develop interests that are not aligned with humanity. They may, unbeknownst to their creators, become power-seeking. They may intentionally deceive us about their intentions and use their superior intelligence and advanced planning capabilities to disempower humanity or drive us to extinction. It's possible, though, that the development of AI systems could lead to human disempowerment and extinction even if we succeed in preventing AI systems from becoming power-seeking and scheming against us. In a recent paper, Jan Kulveit and his co-authors call this threat model gradual disempowerment. They argue for the following six claims: Large societal systems, such as economies and governments, tend to be roughly aligned to human interests. This rough alignment of the societal systems is maintained by multiple factors, including voting systems, consumer demand signals, and the reliance on human labour and thinking. Societal systems that rely less on human labour and thinking — and rely more on increasingly advanced and powerful AI systems — will be less aligned with human interests. AI systems may indeed outcompete human...

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### Understanding the moral status of digital minds

> We don't know how to assess whether future AI systems will have moral status. Here's why that could be a big problem.

- Published: 2024-09-11
- Modified: 2025-03-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/moral-status-digital-minds/
- Topics: Artificial sentience, Moral patients, World problems

Why might understanding the moral status of digital minds be an especially pressing problem? 1. Humanity may soon grapple with many AI systems that could be conscious In 2020, more than 1,000 professional philosophers were asked whether they believed then-current AI systems were conscious. Consciousness, in this context, is typically understood as meaning having phenomenal experiences that feel like something, like the experience of perception or thinking. Less than 1% said that yes, some then-current AI systems were conscious, and about 3% said they were "leaning" toward yes. About 82% said no or leaned toward no. But when asked about whether some future AI systems would be conscious, the bulk of opinion flipped. Nearly 40% were inclined to think future AI systems would be conscious, while only about 27% were inclined to think they wouldn't be. A survey of 166 attendees at the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness annual conference asked a similar question. Sixty-seven percent of attendees answered "definitely yes" or "probably yes" when asked "At present or in the future, could machines (e. g. robots) have consciousness? " The plurality of philosophers and majority of conference attendees might be wrong. But we think these kinds of results make it very difficult to rule out the possibility of conscious AI systems, and we think it's wrong to confidently assert that no AI could ever be conscious. Why might future AI systems be conscious? This question is wide open, but researchers have made some promising...

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### Factory farming

> Each year, 50 billion animals are raised and slaughtered in factory farms. Most experience extreme levels of suffering.

- Published: 2024-07-24
- Modified: 2025-04-07
- URL: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/factory-farming/
- Topics: Factory Farming, Most pressing problems, World problems

Introduction We're going to start by investigating how important we should consider ending factory farming to be — that is, how much good would be done if we solved the entire problem. We'll look at: How many animals are in farms and how we treat these animals The extent to which animals deserve our moral consideration, according to various moral theories How factory farming is likely to change in the future, as the quantity and quality of life of future factory farmed animals are also part of assessing the importance of the problem How we can compare factory farming with existential risks, which are the main category of other problems we consider most pressing We'll then look at whether there are ways to make progress and how neglected factory farming is before discussing how you can help solve this problem with your career. How many animals are in farms? Every year, we kill somewhere between 400 billion and 3 trillion vertebrates (e. g. cows, chickens, fish) — some are killed for sport and some are dissected for experiments, but the vast majority are either slaughtered for food or die in farms before they're old enough to be purposefully slaughtered. That doesn't mean there are trillions of animals in farms at any given time, as the lifespan of these animals is often less than a year. There are probably around 120–210 billion vertebrates alive in farms at any given time. If we include invertebrates (e. g. octopuses, insects, crabs, snails, shrimp)...

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### Risks of stable totalitarianism

- Published: 2024-06-19
- Modified: 2025-03-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/risks-of-stable-totalitarianism/
- Topics: Risks of stable totalitarianism

Why might the risk of stable totalitarianism be an especially pressing problem? Totalitarian regimes killed over 100 million people in less than 100 years in the 20th century. The pursuit of national goals with little regard for the wellbeing or rights of individuals makes these states wantonly cruel. The longer they last, the more harm they could potentially do. Could totalitarianism be an existential risk? Totalitarianism is a particular kind of autocracy, a form of government in which power is highly concentrated. What makes totalitarian regimes distinct is the complete, enforced subservience of the entire populace to the state. Most people do not welcome such subservience. So totalitarian states are also characterised by mass violence, surveillance, intrusive policing, and a lack of human rights protections, as well as a state-imposed ideology to maintain control. So far, most totalitarian regimes have only survived for a few decades. If one of these regimes were to maintain its grip on power for centuries or millennia, we could call it stable totalitarianism. All totalitarian regimes threaten their citizens and the rest of the world with violence, oppression, and suffering. But a stable totalitarian regime would also end any hope of the situation improving in the future. Millions or billions of people would be stuck in a terrible situation with very little hope of recovery — a fate as bad (or even worse) than extinction. Is any of this remotely plausible? For stable totalitarianism to ruin our entire future, three things have to happen:...

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### Nuclear weapons

> It’s very plausible that there will be a nuclear war this century. As a result, nuclear weapons remain an extremely pressing problem.

- Published: 2024-06-14
- Modified: 2024-10-16
- URL: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/nuclear-security/
- Topics: Nuclear war, Promising interventions, Top-recommended organisations, World problems

How likely is a nuclear war? From 1945 until 1991, much of the world lived in full knowledge that a constant threat of nuclear war loomed. Schoolkids did regular drills to prepare for nuclear attack; hundreds of thousands of fallout shelters were built across Europe and North America. An official pamphlet issued by the UK government in 1980 offering advice on surviving a nuclear attack. After the end of the Cold War, fear of nuclear war gradually fell out of the public consciousness. But while the landscape of the threat has changed, the risk remains surprisingly — and scarily — high. Surveys of experts and superforecasters are one way we can try to put a number on the chances of some kind of nuclear war. Here's a table of every estimate we could find since 2000: Depending on who you ask — and the exact definition of nuclear war you use — the typical annual risk of some kind of nuclear war is around 0. 25% to 2. 5% (although I'd guess that estimates >1% per year seem a little too high for the average year). Extrapolating, that suggests a 20% to 80% chance of nuclear war this century. Ultimately, the exact numbers aren't particularly important. The takeaway is that experts think that some kind of nuclear attack could very plausibly happen this century — and some even think it's more likely than not. How could a nuclear war come about? When I hear something like "There's...

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### Great power war

> Another great power conflict could cause unprecedented destruction. But there are ways to reduce the risks.

- Published: 2023-06-20
- Modified: 2025-03-18
- URL: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/great-power-conflict/
- Topics: Existential risk, Great power conflict, World problems

Why might preventing great power war be an especially pressing problem? A modern great power war — an all-out conflict between the world's most powerful countries — could be the worst thing to ever happen to humanity. Historically, such wars have been exceptionally destructive. Sixty-six million people died in World War II, likely the deadliest catastrophe humanity has experienced so far. Since World War II, the global population and world economy have continued to grow, nuclear weapons have proliferated, and military technology has continued to advance. This means the next world war could be even worse, just as World War II was much deadlier than World War I. It's not guaranteed that such a war will break out. And if it does, it may not escalate to such a terrible extent. But the chance can't be ignored. In fact, there are reasons to think that the odds of World War III breaking out this century are worryingly high. A modern great power war would be devastating for people alive today. But its effects could also persist long into the future. That's because there is a substantial chance that this century proves to be particularly important. Technologies with the potential to cause a global catastrophe or radically reshape society are likely to be invented. How we choose to develop and deploy them could impact huge numbers of our descendants. And these choices would be affected by the outcomes of a major war. To be more specific, there are three main...

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### Reducing global catastrophic biological risks

- Published: 2023-03-10
- Modified: 2023-11-27
- URL: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/reducing-global-catastrophic-biological-risks-for-ted-ed/

What is our analysis based on? I, Gregory Lewis, wrote this profile. I work at the Future of Humanity Institute on GCBRs. It owes a lot to helpful discussions with (and comments from) Christopher Bakerlee, Haydn Belfield, Elizabeth Cameron, Gigi Gronvall, David Manheim, Thomas McCarthy, Michael McClaren, Brenton Mayer, Michael Montague, Cassidy Nelson, Carl Shulman, Andrew Snyder-Beattie, Bridget Williams, Jaime Yassif, and Claire Zabel. Their kind help does not imply they agree with everything I write. All mistakes remain my own. This profile is in three parts. First, I explain what GCBRs are and why they could be a major global priority. Second, I offer my impressions (such as they are) on the broad contours of the risk landscape, and how these risks are best addressed. Third, I gesture towards the best places to direct one's career to reduce this danger. What are global catastrophic biological risks? Global catastrophic risks (GCRs) are roughly defined as risks that threaten great worldwide damage to human welfare, and place the long-term trajectory of humankind in jeopardy. Existential risks are the most extreme members of this class. Global catastrophic biological risks (GCBRs) are a catch-all for any such risk that is broadly biological in nature (e. g. a major pandemic). The plausibility of GCBRs The case that biological global catastrophic risks are a credible and urgent threat to humankind arises from a few different sources of evidence. All are equivocal. Experts express alarm about biological risks in general, and some weak evidence of...

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### Immigration restrictions

- Published: 2022-09-26
- Modified: 2023-12-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/immigration-restrictions/
- Topics: World problems

Why might immigration restrictions be a problem? Many people are hurt by the fact that they cannot legally move away from the country where they were born. Immigration restrictions can keep people in poverty, and/or force them to live in countries where they risk facing violence or oppression. Immigration restrictions also cause indirect harms. For example, they can prevent scientists from collaborating, which slows down the development of useful technologies that could help many people. Polls suggest that 750 million people worldwide would migrate if they could, and that migrants tend to be happier after they move, particularly if they move from poorer to richer countries. In 2021, 356,000 people were refused visas to the US alone. Here we'll go through five reasons to think that immigration restrictions should be loosened, and three reasons to think that this would be harmful. Arguments in favour of easing immigration restrictions 1. Restrictions contribute to global poverty. Many people live in poverty because economic productivity and wages in their home country are very low. For some such people, if they could move to a different country, they could earn many times as much and thereby escape poverty. Some economists have even suggested that if national borders were completely open, global GDP would double and extreme poverty would be largely eliminated. Already, migrants send hundreds of billions of dollars home to their families every year; these remittances are a substantial fraction of the GDP in many countries. If there were fewer immigration restrictions,...

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### Whole brain emulation

- Published: 2022-09-24
- Modified: 2024-11-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/whole-brain-emulation/
- Topics: Whole brain emulation

Why might whole brain emulation be a pressing issue? Whole brain emulation is a strategy for creating a kind of artificial intelligence by replicating the functionality of the human brain in software. It seems likely that we'll be able to emulate brains this century -- unless other forms of AI are created first, which then change our trajectory. Successful whole brain emulation could enable dramatic new forms of intelligence -- so steering the development of this technique could be crucial (see our full profile on preventing AI-related catastrophes for more). If digital people are created through whole brain emulation, this would likely cause rapid economic growth, and — because digital people won't die or physically age — their existence could lock in values for an extended period of time. In the worst cases, this could involve locking in stable totalitarianism or bringing about other suffering risks. While we're reasonably confident that it could be important to research the governance of whole brain emulation, we're not sure that accelerating this technology would be a good thing overall. Here are a few relevant considerations: Whole brain emulations could be more interpretable than other forms of human-level artificial intelligence. We have a huge amount of experience understanding human intelligence. This means that we may be more able to understand whole brain emulations than other forms of AI (and as a result prevent any unintended behaviour). Whole brain emulations could inherit human motives. For many forms of transformative AI, it's unclear...

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### Preventing the spread of false ideas on social media

- Published: 2022-09-24
- Modified: 2024-11-08
- URL: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/preventing-the-spread-of-false-ideas-on-social-media/
- Topics: False ideas on social media, Other pressing problems, World problems

Why might the spread of false ideas on social media be a pressing problem? It seems plausible that political discourse is significantly affected by the way many people now receive their information: through algorithms owned and run by social media companies. This could have a number of harmful effects, including: People's views could become increasingly far from reality. If voters form highly inaccurate and difficult-to-change views about the world, this could hurt policy over a long period of time. Governments could make information readily available -- for example, about an ongoing pandemic -- but if people cannot tell whether the information they are receiving is reliable, they won't act on this information. This is an example of a problem caused by a lack of epistemic security. We aren't sure how important these problems are, or how to best go about addressing them. It seems likely that more research would be valuable to: Assess how strong the evidence is for social media (or the internet in general) driving inaccurate views. Identify the extent to which this could impact the long-term future. What are the major arguments against this problem being pressing? The issue is receiving attention from social media companies who are well-positioned (though questionably incentivised) to work on it, which makes it harder for an individual to contribute to progress. For example, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other platforms all have policies for tackling misinformation (though of course we might expect conflicts of interest to reduce the effectiveness of these...

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### Wild animal suffering

> It's easy to imagine that wild animals live harmoniously with one another in a natural 'balance' — but advocates for wild animal welfare argue that this attitude ignores the huge amounts of suffering present in nature.

- Published: 2022-09-24
- Modified: 2025-01-29
- URL: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/wild-animal-welfare/
- Topics: World problems

Why might wild animal welfare be a pressing global issue? It's easy for us to think of the natural world (without human intervention) as unambiguously positive: to imagine that wild animals live harmoniously with one another in a natural 'balance. ' But advocates for wild animal welfare argue that this attitude ignores the huge amounts of suffering present in nature. Moreover, the large, healthy, adult vertebrates we usually picture (like foxes, songbirds, or lions) are a very small proportion of the overall wild animal population — almost all wild animals are actually juvenile invertebrates. This means that the actual day-to-day lives of wild animals are pretty different to how we'd expect. Animal lives are mostly quite short — in some species, only one in millions of juveniles survive to adulthood — and are filled with disease, parasitism, hunger, thirst, fear of predators, and suffering from heat or cold. Wild animals often die in very drawn-out, painful ways, and most die at a fraction of their possible lifespan. We can't know for sure what it's like to be a wild animal, but we can observe that many or even most wild animals live in conditions that would be considered extremely cruel to inflict on a human, or a domesticated animal. Very little effort goes towards trying to reduce the suffering of wild animals, even within the broader field of animal welfare. There might be good reasons for this, as we'll discuss below, but at present the...

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### Promoting positive values

- Published: 2022-09-23
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/promoting-positive-values/
- Topics: Improving values, World problems

Why might it be high impact to focus on broadly spreading positive values? Over human history, there have been many times where dominant groups have given less consideration to the interests of others, often minorities in the society or those with less power. But in the last 300 years, campaigns for equal consideration for people of different genders, sexualities, races, ethnicities, faiths, and abilities have made significant progress. Though such campaigns are still works in progress, these examples of 'moral circle expansion' suggest that positively shaping people's values is possible and can have big impacts, and that there could be promising opportunities to continue this progress. It seems likely that, if positive values were more widespread, this would help with a range of issues. These values include altruism and concern for those whose interests are often under-considered -- including members of the abovementioned groups as well as people from different countries, future generations, nonhuman animals, or potential machine intelligences. If it were possible to do effectively, promoting these values might improve the lives of many people suffering today and also be one way of reducing the chances of future moral catastrophes like continued factory farming or suffering of future potentially sentient machines. In general, this might be one of the broadest ways of helping with future problems that we're not even aware of yet. A recent book from our cofounder Professor William MacAskill, What We Owe the Future, presents the case that throughout human history, values change may have...

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### Risks from malevolent actors

- Published: 2022-09-23
- Modified: 2024-08-02
- URL: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/risks-from-malevolent-actors/
- Topics: Risks from malevolent actors, World problems

Why might risks from malevolent actors be an especially pressing problem? An essay by David Althaus and Tobias Baumann argues that when people with some or all of the so-called 'dark tetrad' traits -- narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and sadism -- are in positions of power or influence, this plausibly increases the risk of catastrophes that could harm many people alive today or even influence the long-term future. Developing better measures of these traits, they suggest -- as well as good tests of these measures -- could help us make our institutions less liable to be influenced by such actors. We could, for instance, make 'non-malevolence' a condition of holding political office or having sway over powerful new technologies. While it's not clear how large of a problem malevolent individuals in society are compared to other issues, there is historical precedent for malevolent actors coming to power -- for example, Hitler and Stalin plausibly had strong dark tetrad traits -- and perhaps this wouldn't have happened if there had been better precautions in place. If so, this suggests that careful measures could prevent future bad events of a similar scale (or worse) from taking place. There has been very little work on this topic that we know of. Learn more David Althaus and Tobias Baumann's essay Topic hub for risks from malevolent actors on the Effective Altruism Forum Podcast: Kevin Esvelt on cults that want to kill everyone, stealth vs wildfire pandemics, and how he felt inventing gene drives Podcast:...

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### ‘S-risks’

- Published: 2022-09-16
- Modified: 2024-01-10
- URL: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/s-risks/
- Topics: World problems

Why might s-risks be an especially pressing problem? We're concerned about impacts on future generations, such as from existential threats from pandemics or artificial intelligence. But these are primarily risks of extinction or of humanity's potential being permanently curtailed -- they don't put special emphasis on avoiding the chance of extreme amounts of suffering, in particular. Research into suffering risks or s-risks attempts to fill this gap. New technology, for example the development of artificial intelligence or improved surveillance technology, but also new nuclear or biological weapons, may well concentrate power in the hands of those that develop and control the technology. As a result, one possible outcome worse than extinction could be a perpetual totalitarian dictatorship, where people suffer indefinitely. But researchers on s-risks are often concerned with outcomes even worse than this. For example, what would happen if such a dictatorship developed the technology to settle space? And if we care about nonhuman animals or even digital minds, the possible scale of future suffering seems astronomical. After all, right now humanity is almost completely insensitive to the welfare of nonhuman animals, let alone potential future digital consciousness. We don't know how likely s-risks are. In large part this depends on how we define the term (we've seen various possible definitions). We think it's very likely that there will be at least some suffering in the future, and potentially on very large scales -- potentially vastly more suffering than has existed on Earth so far, especially if there...

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### Safeguarding liberal democracy

- Published: 2022-09-14
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/liberal-democracy/
- Topics: World problems

Why might safeguarding liberal democracy be a pressing issue? Liberal democracies seem more conducive to intellectual progress and economic growth than other forms of governance that have been tried so far, and perhaps also to peace and cooperation (at least with other democracies). Political developments that threaten to shift liberal democracies toward authoritarianism therefore may be risk factors for a variety of disasters (like great power conflicts), stagnation, or for society generally going in a more negative direction. More speculatively, it might be especially pressing to maintain liberal democratic norms in countries like the US, where the ideals have an established history, and there are important technological developments happening (like advanced artificial intelligence) that could impact the long-run future. For example, science and technology seem to be less thoroughgoingly tied to government and military operations in liberal democracies than in authoritarian regimes (though it's a matter of degree). If scientists and other civilian actors are more likely to prioritise AI safety vs military operations, e. g. because they are less influenced by national interests, this could be helpful. There are counterarguments to this: e. g. an authoritarian regime is also less subject to commercial incentives and might have more ability to shut down dangerous projects vs a liberal government working with private companies and scientists. But in general, because AI safety is in the public interest (and could become a widely supported cause), developing it under a regime that is, by definition, less accountable to its people seems worse. Moreover, the...

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### Civilisation resilience

- Published: 2022-09-01
- Modified: 2024-03-21
- URL: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/civilisation-resilience/
- Topics: Existential risk, World problems

Why might civilisation resilience be an especially pressing issue? If a catastrophe happens, we might be able to take action to significantly increase the chance that civilisation survives or gets rebuilt -- allowing us the possibility of a long and flourishing future. However, measures in this space receive very little attention today. A recent investigation by Luisa Rodriguez suggests that recovery from even the worst catastrophes — if they fall short of killing everyone — is relatively likely. For example, even if a nuclear disaster and resulting nuclear winter caused the deaths of 90–99. 99% of people, she estimates we'd still be ~90–97% likely to recover eventually. In short, this is because: Different populations would be spread out geographically and some would be less affected than others. There would be numerous groups, and as time went on, some groups would likely find the means to survive even if others died out. (That is, groups would be separated and thus their fates 'decorrelated. ') It seems like survivors would be able to subsist long enough to get back on their feet, given that humanity survived for thousands years without technology or society, and survivors would have access to supplies and memories left over from civilisation (which early humans didn't). Non-traditional agriculture (e. g. cultivating and eating algae) would likely be feasible, helping humanity survive the nuclear winter. The minimal viable population for genetic diversity (and even the survival of basic technological and social knowledge) is very small compared to the population of Earth... .

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### Preventing an AI-related catastrophe

> The future of AI is difficult to predict. But while AI systems could have substantial positive effects, there's a growing consensus about the dangers of AI.

- Published: 2022-08-25
- Modified: 2025-03-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/artificial-intelligence/
- Topics: AI safety technical research, Artificial Intelligence, Computer science, Existential risk, Long-term AI policy, Machine learning, Promising interventions, Top-recommended organisations

**Note from the author:** At its core, this problem profile tries to predict the future of technology. This is a notoriously difficult thing to do. In addition, there has been much less rigorous research into the risks from AI than into the other risks 80,000 Hours writes about (like (/preventing-catastrophic-pandemics/) or (/problem-profiles/climate-change/)). That said, there is a growing field of research into the topic, which I've tried to reflect. For this article I've leaned especially on (https://doi. org/10. 48550/arXiv. 2206. 13353) by Joseph Carlsmith at (https://www. openphilanthropy. org/) (also available as a (https://open. spotify. com/episode/5PokyqXCw4hpV5u0rc5Lio)), as it's the most rigorous overview of the risk that I could find. I've also had the article reviewed by (#acknowledgements). (Almost all are concerned about advanced AI's potential impact. ) {. small} Why do we think that reducing risks from AI is one of the most pressing issues of our time? In short, our reasons are: Even before getting into the actual arguments, we can see some cause for concern — as many AI experts think there's a small but non-negligible chance that AI will lead to outcomes as bad as human extinction. We're making advances in AI extremely quickly — which suggests that AI systems could have a significant influence on society, soon. There are strong arguments that "power-seeking" AI could pose an existential threat to humanity — which we'll go through below. Even if we find a way to avoid power-seeking, there are still...

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### Risks from atomically precise manufacturing

> Both the risks and benefits of advances in atomically precise manufacturing could be significant. Shaping the trajectory of this technology is highly neglected.

- Published: 2022-07-29
- Modified: 2024-01-10
- URL: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/atomically-precise-manufacturing/
- Topics: Accidental harm, Atomically precise manufacturing, Existential risk, World problems

Why could risks from atomically precise manufacturing be a pressing problem? Atomically precise manufacturing is a form of particularly advanced nanotechnology. With atomically precise manufacturing we could build products out of individual atoms and molecules, allowing us to perfectly create a very wide range of products with very few flaws. Effectively, this would be like having perfect 3D printers that can produce anything. Atomically precise manufacturing might be feasible, and there's incentive to develop it Molecular machines — tiny mechanical machines on the scale of just a few individual molecules — exist in nature, which means they're definitely possible to create. In fact, we've actually produced a wide variety of simple artificial molecular machines. With time, we may be able to design and produce machines as small and complex as biological organisms. This could be useful for a number of reasons: Cheap energy -- we may be able to produce even more efficient batteries and solar cells. The use of semiconductors in these devices means that they're already one of the things we make to the highest degree of precision — it's possible that even more precision could improve these devices further. Carbon capture and storage -- we may be able to produce cheap, high-performance nanoscale devices to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Medicine -- we may be able to produce devices on the scale of human cells for targeting medical issues. Cheap manufacturing -- we may be able to take apart most things (even, for example, trash) and...

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### More neglected areas in mental health

- Published: 2022-05-23
- Modified: 2024-02-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/neglected-mental-health/
- Topics: World problems

Why might mental health be a pressing global issue? Improving mental health seems like one of the most direct ways of making people better off, since it's specifically targeted at their subjective experience. Mental health in general gets much less attention than physical health from people thinking about how to make the world a better place because it's not as well understood. This means it's more neglected, but also likely means it's harder to make progress. There are several promising areas for research into mental health that appear to have not yet been adequately explored, for example new drug therapies. Improving mental health in the developing world might be an area where you can have a substantial impact, because it is particularly neglected by existing institutions and markets. Our guess is that improving physical health in poor countries is still likely to have a bigger impact on welfare for the same resources, given that there are several common diseases we can treat easily with more funding -- but we're not sure. There is also some chance that, like economic growth and better physical health, better mental health in a population could have positive indirect effects that accumulate over time. Learn more The Happier Lives Institute researches mental health interventions to assess their cost effectiveness and make recommendations — which we also discuss on our podcast with Elie Hassenfeld on two big-picture critiques of GiveWell's approach, and six lessons from their recent work From the Happier Lives Institute: Problem area...

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### Science policy and infrastructure

- Published: 2022-05-20
- Modified: 2024-05-23
- URL: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/science-policy-and-infrastructure/
- Topics: World problems

Why might science policy and infrastructure be a pressing issue? Scientific research has been an enormous driver of human welfare. However, science policy and infrastructure are not always designed well to incentivise research that most benefits society in the long term. For example, we've argued that some scientific and technological developments can increase risks of catastrophe, which better institutional checks might be able to help reduce. More prosaically, scientific progress is often driven more by what is commercially valuable, interesting, or prestigious than by considerations of long-run positive impact. In general, we favour differential development in science and technology over indiscriminate progress, which better science policies or institutional design may help enable. This suggests that there is room for improving systems shaping scientific research and increasing their benefits going forward. We're particularly keen on people creating structures or incentives to push scientific research in more positive and less risky directions. Learn more about science policy and infrastructure Givewell's overview of the area Example research questions about improving science policy and infrastructure Science policy as a possible EA cause area: problems and solutions Emergingtechpolicy. org, a website with expert advice and resources on US science and technology policy careers Podcast: Matt Clancy on whether science is good Podcast: Spencer Greenberg on stopping valueless papers from getting into top journals Podcast: Spencer Greenberg on causation without correlation, money and happiness, lightgassing, hype vs value, and more

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### High-leverage ways to speed up economic growth

- Published: 2022-05-20
- Modified: 2024-12-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/high-leverage-economic-growth/
- Topics: World problems

Why might economic growth be a pressing issue? Speeding up economic growth doesn't seem as useful as more targeted ways to improve the future, and in general we favour differential development. However, speeding up growth might still have large benefits, both for improving short-term and long-term welfare, and perhaps also for reducing existential threats. The causes of growth already see considerable research within economics, though this area is still more neglected than many topics. Which ways to increase economic growth seem especially promising? Potential strategies for increasing growth include trade reform (which also has the potential to reduce conflict), immigration reform, land use reform, and increasing aid spending and effectiveness. Institutional quality also seems to play a large role in development, so if there were a way to make improvements to institutions in developing countries, this could be an effective way to improve many people's lives. For instance, legal and political changes in China seem to have been key to its economic development from the 1980s onwards. For a discussion of the importance of governing institutions for economic growth, see our interview with a group trying to found cities with improved legal infrastructure in the developing world. (Keep in mind, however, these efforts are often best pursued by citizens of the relevant countries. There is also substantial disagreement about which institutions are best, and the answers will vary depending on a country's circumstances and culture. ) A new field that might be especially promising to work in is progress studies,...

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### Improving incentives and governance for global public goods

- Published: 2022-05-19
- Modified: 2025-02-14
- URL: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/global-public-goods/
- Topics: Global public goods, World problems

Why might developing better incentives for global public goods be particularly high impact? Many of the biggest challenges we face have the character of global 'public goods' problems -- meaning everyone is worse off because no particular actors are properly incentivised to tackle the problem, and they instead prefer to 'free ride' on the efforts of others. If we could make society better at providing public goods in general, we might be able to make progress on many challenges at once. Also, the space for possible interventions here seems enormous. One idea we've discussed that both has promise and faces many challenges is quadratic funding -- which is a funding scheme governments could implement that would create incentives for everyone to help make public goods happen by paying only the amount that reflects how much it would benefit them, such that no one would be required to altruistically shoulder more of the burden. Another potential approach here is improving political processes generally. Governments have enormous power and are the bodies we most often turn to to tackle public goods problems. Shifting how this power is used even a little can have substantial and potentially long-lasting effects. Check out our podcast episode with Glen Weyl to learn about current and fairly radical ideas in this space. A particularly helpful kind of intervention might be improving global governance -- many big problems come from our inability to coordinate and cooperate across national boundaries. Fixing this seems extremely difficult but high impact...

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### Improving individual reasoning or cognition

- Published: 2022-05-18
- Modified: 2024-03-14
- URL: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/improving-individual-reasoning-or-cognition/
- Topics: World problems

Why might it be particularly high impact to improve individual reasoning and cognition? The case for improving individual reasoning and cognition is similar to the case for improving institutional decision-making: better reasoning and cognitive capacities usually make for better outcomes, especially when problems are subtle or complex. And as with institutions, work on improving individual decision-making is likely to be helpful no matter what challenges come up in the future. Strategies for improving reasoning might include producing tools, trainings, or research into how to best make better forecasts or decisions, or come to sensible views on complex topics. Strategies for improving cognition might take a variety of forms -- for example, researching safe and potentially beneficial nootropics like creatine. This cause profile on research into pharmacological cognitive enhancement (including but not limited to nootropics) argues this research could rival some of the most cost-effective global health work in its potential for helping people today, and perhaps have longer-run benefits too. Focusing on individuals seems to us like it will usually be less effective for tackling global problems than taking a more institutional approach, because the decisions you are able to affect aren't as large. Also, we should expect it to be less neglected than many issues because there are pretty clean incentives for individuals to increase their cognition and decision-making ability: they can use it to improve many aspects of their lives, and there are no coordination or principal–agent problems. All that said, it may be more promising if...

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### Voting reform

- Published: 2022-05-18
- Modified: 2022-11-07
- URL: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/voting-reform/
- Topics: World problems

Why might voting reform be a pressing issue? We often elect our leaders with 'first-past-the-post'-style voting, but this can easily lead to perverse outcomes. Better voting methods could lead to better institutional decision-making, better governance in general, and better international coordination. Despite these potential benefits, ideas in this space often get little support. One reason might be that current political leaders -- those with the most power to institute reforms -- have little incentive to change the systems that brought them to power. This might make this area particularly difficult to make progress in, though we still think additional effort in this area may be promising. Another perhaps even more serious issue is the systematic lack of representation of future generations' interests in policymaking. To learn more about this issue and about potential solutions, see this recent paper by Will MacAskill and Tyler John. One group trying to address this issue in practice in the UK is the All Party Parliamentary Group for Future Generations. There is also the importance of voting security to prevent contested elections, discussed in our interview with Bruce Schneier. Learn more about voting reform Podcast: We use the worst voting system that exists. Here's how Aaron Hamlin is going to fix it. Center for Election Science EA Forum hub on institutions for future generations

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### Climate change

> Climate change will affect all our lives and gravely damage livelihoods around the world. But how pressing is climate change compared to other risks?

- Published: 2022-05-18
- Modified: 2024-11-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/climate-change/
- Topics: Climate change, Effective climate change interventions, Engineering, Future generations & longtermism, Government & policy, Research in relevant areas, World problems

If you have any feedback on this article – whether there's something we've got wrong, some wording we could improve, or you want to tell us you loved reading it – we'd really appreciate it if you could **tell us what you think** using (https://forms. gle/ZnLDhaqkX6jFK9Jb9). {. small} Could extreme climate change directly lead to the extinction of humanity? We're going to review the three most common ways people say climate change might directly cause human extinction: high temperatures, rising water, and disruption to agriculture. Worst case climate scenarios look very bad in terms of lives disrupted and lost. We're focusing on extinction because, for reasons we discuss here, we think reducing existential threats should be among humanity's biggest priorities – in part due to their significance for all future generations. In short, most scientists think it's pretty close to impossible for climate change to directly cause the extinction of humanity. In this generally grim area, this is a piece of good news people don't always appreciate. That said, we shouldn't be unconcerned about climate change — not only does it pose grave dangers short of extinction, we also think climate change indirectly raises the risk of extinction via making other threats worse, which we'll cover in the next section. How hot could it get? The hotter the Earth gets, the worse we can expect effects from climate change to be. So, to figure out whether climate change could directly cause extinction, we need to know how much...

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### Space governance

> Humanity’s long-run future could lie in space — it could go well, but that’s not guaranteed. What can you do to help shape the future of space governance?

- Published: 2022-02-14
- Modified: 2025-03-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/space-governance/
- Topics: Foundations, Future generations & longtermism, Other pressing problems, Space governance, Top-recommended organisations, World problems

Introduction Over the last four decades, the cost to launch a kilogram of payload (about the weight of a bunch of bananas) into space has fallen from roughly $50,000 (for NASA's Space Shuttle) to less than $1,500 (for SpaceX's Falcon Heavy). With its new reusable designs, SpaceX aims to further cut launch costs to around $10 per kilogram. Cheap, reusable rocket technology could mark the beginning of a new 'space race,' with the frequency of launches potentially increasing from hundreds per year to hundreds per day. It's worth taking seriously some of the crazier ways this could play out. If things go well, we could choose for our time on Earth to become just the first stage of a journey into space. We might eventually make use of an almost limitless supply of material resources orbiting around the Sun, and begin to establish self-sustaining communities living beyond Earth. In the longer run, very large numbers of people could live beyond our home planet. A spacefaring future for humanity would make us resilient to disasters local to one planet, and it could also just become varied and expansive compared to remaining Earthbound, in ways that are hard to imagine now. Ultimately, the sheer scale of the accessible universe makes the question of what we eventually do with and within it enormously important. If the human story ends before spreading beyond Earth, perhaps we would have missed out on almost all the valuable things we could have reached. But it's also...

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### Preventing catastrophic pandemics

> Are we prepared for the next pandemic? Pandemics — and biological risks like bioterrorism or biological weapons — pose an existential threat to humanity.

- Published: 2020-04-23
- Modified: 2025-01-29
- URL: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/preventing-catastrophic-pandemics/
- Topics: Biorisk strategy & policy, Catastrophic pandemics, Promising interventions, Top-recommended organisations

Some of the deadliest events in history have been pandemics. COVID-19 demonstrated that we're still vulnerable to these events, and future outbreaks could be far more lethal. In fact, we face the possibility of biological disasters that are worse than ever before due to developments in technology. The chances of such catastrophic pandemics — bad enough to potentially derail civilisation and threaten humanity's future — seem uncomfortably high. We believe this risk is one of the world's most pressing problems. And there are a number of practical options for reducing global catastrophic biological risks (GCBRs). So we think working to reduce GCBRs is one of the most promising ways to safeguard the future of humanity right now. ##Summary ###Scale {. no-toc} Pandemics — especially engineered pandemics — pose a significant risk to the existence of humanity. Though the risk is difficult to assess, some researchers estimate that there is a greater than 1 in 10,000 chance of a biological catastrophe leading to human extinction within the next 100 years, and potentially as high as 1 in 100. (See (/preventing-catastrophic-pandemics/#estimates). ) And a biological catastrophe killing a large percentage of the population is even more likely — and could contribute to (https://80000hours. org/articles/existential-risks/). ###Neglectedness {. no-toc} Pandemic prevention is currently moderately resourced. Even in the aftermath of the COVID-19 outbreak, (https://councilonstrategicrisks. org/nolan/biodefense-budget-breakdown/) in the US, for instance, has only grown modestly — from an estimated $17 billion in 2019 to $24 billion in 2023. One (https://forum. effectivealtruism. org/posts/pnincG5vW8Far8Ggg/how-well-funded-is-biosecurity-philanthropy) in April 2024 found that global...

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### Reducing global catastrophic biological risks

- Published: 2020-03-16
- Modified: 2024-11-26
- URL: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/preventing-catastrophic-pandemics/full-report/
- Topics: Biomedical Research, Biorisk strategy & policy, Catastrophic pandemics, Existential risk, Scientific research

This article is our full report into reducing global catastrophic biological risks. For a shorter introduction, see our (/problem-profiles/preventing-catastrophic-pandemics). {. small} What is our analysis based on? I, Gregory Lewis, wrote this profile. I work at the Future of Humanity Institute on GCBRs. It owes a lot to helpful discussions with (and comments from) Christopher Bakerlee, Haydn Belfield, Elizabeth Cameron, Gigi Gronvall, David Manheim, Thomas McCarthy, Michael McClaren, Brenton Mayer, Michael Montague, Cassidy Nelson, Carl Shulman, Andrew Snyder-Beattie, Bridget Williams, Jaime Yassif, and Claire Zabel. Their kind help does not imply they agree with everything I write. All mistakes remain my own. This profile is in three parts. First, I explain what GCBRs are and why they could be a major global priority. Second, I offer my impressions (such as they are) on the broad contours of the risk landscape, and how these risks are best addressed. Third, I gesture towards the best places to direct one's career to reduce this danger. Motivation What are global catastrophic biological risks? Global catastrophic risks (GCRs) are roughly defined as risks that threaten great worldwide damage to human welfare, and place the long-term trajectory of humankind in jeopardy. Existential risks are the most extreme members of this class. Global catastrophic biological risks (GCBRs) are a catch-all for any such risk that is broadly biological in nature (e. g. a major pandemic). I write from a broadly longtermist perspective: roughly, that there is profound moral importance in...

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### Improving decision making (especially in important institutions)

> Governments and other important institutions frequently have to make complex, high-stakes decisions based on the judgement calls of just a handful of people.

- Published: 2017-09-25
- Modified: 2025-03-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/improving-institutional-decision-making/
- Topics: Epistemics, Forecasting, Forecasting research & implementation, Institutional decision making, Reasoning well, World problems

What is this issue? Our ability to solve problems in the world relies heavily on our ability to understand them and make high-quality decisions. We need to be able to identify what problems to work on, to understand what factors contribute towards these problems, to predict which of our actions will have the desired outcomes, and to respond to feedback and change our minds. Many of the most important problems in the world are incredibly complicated, and require an understanding of complex interrelated systems, the ability to make reasonable predictions about the outcome of different actions, and the ability to balance competing considerations and bring different parties together to solve them. That means there are a lot of opportunities for errors in judgement to slip in. Moreover, in many areas there can be substantial uncertainty about even whether something would be good or bad — for example, does working on large, cutting-edge models in order to better understand them and align their goals with human values overall increase or decrease risk from AI? Better ways of answering these questions would be extremely valuable. Informed decision making is hard. Even experts in politics sometimes do worse than simple actuarial predictions, when estimating the probabilities of events up to five years in the future. And the organisations best placed to solve the world's most important problems — such as governments — are also often highly bureaucratic, meaning that decision-makers face many constraints and competing incentives, which are not always aligned...

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### Building effective altruism

> Effective altruism is about using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis.

- Published: 2017-03-20
- Modified: 2024-10-16
- URL: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/promoting-effective-altruism/
- Topics: Building effective altruism, Building the effective altruism community, Effective Altruism, Effective solutions, Operations at high impact organisations, Problem prioritisation, World problems

Why are the ideas of effective altruism important? Many attempts to do good fail Working out how to help others is difficult, and many attempts to make a difference fail. Most large US social programmes that have been rigorously evaluated, including those backed by expert opinion, turn out to produce weak or no effects, and in some cases negative effects. Within US education, 90% of interventions evaluated by the Institute of Education Sciences have weak or no effects. Within international aid, many projects fail, and for most programmes the effects are unknown. This suggests that if you get involved with a charitable programme without looking at the evidence, there's a decent chance you'll have no impact. Large differences in effectiveness between successful approaches Avoiding programmes which are harmful or which have no effect is obviously the right call. But even if you consider only strategies which have a positive effect, there are large differences in how much they help others. First, let's consider different global problems. If you want to help others, should you work on climate change, US education, animal welfare, or something else? When we used our framework to compare different global problems we found that you can do far more good working on some problems than others. For example, within US education, providing one year's worth of pre-kindergarten education costs between $6,400 and $8,000 per child. By contrast, in international health and development, the same amount of money can save a child's life through...

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### Land use reform

> Local laws often prohibit the construction of dense new housing, which drives up prices, especially in a few large high-wage urban areas. The increased prices transfer wealth from renters to landowners and push people away from centers of economic activity

- Published: 2016-04-14
- Modified: 2024-12-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/land-use-reform/
- Topics: Economic growth, Other pressing problems, World problems

What is this problem and how much does it matter? What is our analysis based on? Our analysis is mostly based on a cause overview from the Open Philanthropy, and the papers cited therein. We have also read The Gated City by Ryan Avent and Triumph of the City by Ed Glaeser. What is this problem and why is it pressing? Local governments in the US and other countries such as the UK or Australia typically have a variety of laws that limit what kinds of buildings can be constructed in different places, including limits on the number of stories or floorspace in a building. One effect of these policies is to prevent the construction of dense housing or offices. This drives up house and office prices and means fewer people can live in particularly desirable locations. This is thought to have multiple negative effects: Increasing income and wealth inequality by transferring money from renters to property owners, who tend to be richer. Rising property prices are arguably the biggest driver of growth in wealth inequality; Raising unemployment by preventing people from moving to get jobs in booming cities; Lowering labour productivity and technological advancement by preventing people from moving to work in the most productive firms, or locations with high economies of scale. Dense cities tend to be a disproportionate contributor to economic output and innovation; Unnecessarily limiting the number of people who can enjoy living in cities that are attractive to them in other...

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### Smoking in the developing world

> Smoking takes an enormous toll on human health - accounting for about 6% of all ill-health globally according to the best estimates. This is more than HIV and malaria combined. Despite this, smoking is on the rise in many developing countries as people become richer and can afford to buy cigarettes. There appears to be a range of policies which have been shown to reduce smoking rates, which are usually not applied in developing countries. The most natural ways to tackle the problem through your career include becoming a health policy expert, or advocacy through journalism, think tanks and politics. This is a particularly promising cause for people living in a developing country with high smoking rates.

- Published: 2016-04-06
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/tobacco/
- Topics: Global Health, World problems

What is the problem? The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that tobacco is the largest cause of preventable death in the world. Smoking is responsible for almost 6 million deaths each year or the loss of 140 million years of healthy life, with nearly 80% of the burden falling on low- and middle- income countries (LMIC), a burden amounting to more than malaria and HIV combined. Each death as a result of pack-a-day smoking shortens life by around 10 years, as shown by data in the United States. Collectively, smoking is responsible for 5-6% of all ill health globally according to the Global Burden of Disease study, and its share is rising over time. Why is this problem pressing? What is our recommendation based on? Many in the development and public health fields see the problem as an effective intervention for improving health. Reviews by global health charity evaluators and foundations Open Philanthropy, Giving What We Can, Copenhagen Consensus and the Centre for Global Development (CGD) were mostly positive that tobacco control is a cost-effective public health intervention, with CGD calling tobacco taxes "The Single Best Health Policy in the World". This page is largely based on their research. That the Gates Foundation, has committed US$125 million over 5 years, and the Bloomberg Foundation has committed US$220 million over 4 years provides confidence that respected philanthropists see this as a pressing issue. Why is it pressing? Tobacco use is increasing in low- and middle-income...

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### Global priorities research

> Global priorities research seeks to use new methods to determine in which causes funding to improve the world can have the biggest impact, and make a convincing case about this to people in a position to redirect large amounts of money.

- Published: 2016-04-05
- Modified: 2024-11-06
- URL: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/global-priorities-research/
- Topics: Global priorities research, Promising interventions, Research in relevant areas, Research into global priorities, Top-recommended organisations, World problems

What is global priorities research? The field of global priorities research is about rigorously investigating what the most important global problems are, how we should compare them to each other, and what kinds of interventions best address them. For example, how do we compare the value of more work on climate change vs global health vs preventing future pandemics? We might distinguish between foundational global priorities research on the one hand, and applied global priorities research on the other. We think both kinds of global priorities research can be very important, and this profile is about both. Foundational global priorities research Foundational global priorities research mainly lies at the intersection of economics and moral philosophy, though it may also involve tools from other disciplines. It looks at the highest-level issues concerning which global priorities most further the social good, especially from a long-term perspective. This means it would include topics like investigating the value of reducing existential risk vs other ways of doing good, how much to prioritise 'broad' interventions that positively affect many different issues at once vs more 'targeted' interventions that focus on a single issue, and what methodologies we should use to answer these questions. There are also more exotic-sounding topics for foundational global priorities research that nonetheless seem like they might be very important to us — for example: What's the chance that we are in some sense living in a simulation? Should we try to engage in 'acausal trade'? All these questions are relevant...

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### Global health

> Every year around ten million people in poorer countries die of illnesses that can be very cheaply prevented or managed, including malaria, HIV, tuberculosis and diarrhoea.

- Published: 2016-04-03
- Modified: 2024-11-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/health-in-poor-countries/
- Topics: Global Health, Promising interventions, Top-recommended organisations, World problems

What is the problem? Every year around 10 million people in poorer countries die of illnesses that can be very cheaply prevented or managed, including malaria, HIV, tuberculosis, and diarrhoea. Tens of millions more suffer from persistent undernutrition or parasitic diseases that cause them to be less mentally and physically capable than they otherwise would be. Why is this problem pressing? What is our recommendation based on? Focussing on basic health treatments in the developing world is supported by GiveWell, the Global Priorities Project, and the Copenhagen Consensus. In addition to that, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with which we share many values, spends most of its money on this cause. Our recommendation is a compilation of these organisations' findings, as well as basic data from the Global Burden of Disease and World Bank, among others. Why is it pressing? These diseases cause unnecessary suffering and death both to victims and their families. They also lead to a range of other negative effects: Lower educational attainment. Lethargy and reduced ability to think and work. Worse health later in life. Higher birth rates to compensate for infant mortality. In many cases, these diseases or their impacts can be largely eliminated with cheap technologies that are known to work and have existed for decades. For example: Malaria is prevented by insecticide-treated bed nets. Tuberculosis is almost always cured by sustained treatment with antibiotics (so-called DOTS). People with HIV live nearly normal lifespans, and rarely pass on the virus to others,...

---


## Career reviews

### Diplomacy

- Published: 2024-08-28
- Modified: 2025-02-27
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/diplomacy/

While working as a diplomat at the US embassy in post-Soviet Kazakhstan, Andy Weber got an odd question from his auto mechanic: Are you interested in purchasing some uranium? "Strange things were happening at that time," Weber told 80,000 Hours in an interview. "So I didn't just dismiss it out of hand. " His superiors were sceptical that the uranium really existed, but Weber pursued the lead for months. Weber's instincts paid off. Eventually, this tip helped the US recover 600 kg of uranium from an insecure facility in northeast Kazakhstan. Had a hostile actor acquired the material instead, they wouldn't even have had to enrich it — it was already weapons-grade. Though the work of international diplomacy isn't typically as urgent and high-stakes as discovering nuclear weapons materials, these careers offer significant opportunities for making a positive impact on the world. **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. This article was written by authors with a combined 20 years of experience working in US diplomacy. The views expressed in this piece are the authors' and do not represent those of the US government. We thank Andy Weber and Jasmine Dhaliwal for commenting on an earlier draft. Why might a...

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### Nuclear weapons safety and security

> Find out how you could use your career to prevent a nuclear war and reduce the risks posed by nuclear weapons.

- Published: 2024-04-29
- Modified: 2024-08-29
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/nuclear-weapons/
- Topics: Careers, Communication, Government & policy, Nuclear war, Research in relevant areas

In 1995, Jayantha Dhanapala chaired a pivotal conference that led to the indefinite extension of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. This meant committing 185 nations to never possessing nuclear weapons. Dhanapala's path started at age 17, when — after winning a competition with an essay about his hopes for a more peaceful world — he was flown from Sri Lanka to the US to meet Senator John F. Kennedy. That meeting led to a career in diplomacy (he had previously wanted to be a journalist), during which he focused on keeping the world safe from nuclear threats. His story shows that with dedication, persistence, and a little luck, it's possible to contribute to reducing the dangers of nuclear weapons and making the world a safer place. **In a nutshell:** Nuclear weapons continue to pose an (/articles/existential-risks/) to humanity. Reducing the risk means getting nuclear countries to improve their actions and preventing proliferation to non-nuclear countries. We'd guess that the highest impact approaches here involve working in government (especially the US government), researching key questions, or working in communications to advocate for changes. Why working to prevent nuclear conflict is high-impact The risk of a nuclear conflict continues to haunt the world. We think that the chance of nuclear war per year is around 0. 01–2% — large enough to be a substantial global concern. If a nuclear conflict were to break out, the total consequences are hard to predict, but at the very least, tens of...

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### Expert in AI hardware

- Published: 2023-09-11
- Modified: 2024-12-18
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/become-an-expert-in-ai-hardware/
- Topics: AI safety technical research, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science PhD, Engineering, Expert in AI hardware

In 1965, Gordon Moore observed that the number of transistors you can fit onto a chip seemed to double every year. He boldly predicted, "Integrated circuits will lead to such wonders as home computers automatic controls for automobiles, and personal portable communications equipment. " Moore later revised his estimate to every two years, but the doubling trend held, eventually becoming known as Moore's Law. This technological progress in computer hardware led to consistent doublings of performance, memory capacity, and energy efficiency. This was achieved only through astonishing increases in the complexity of design and production. While Moore was looking at chips with fewer than a hundred transistors, modern chips have transistor counts in the tens of billions and can only be fabricated by some of the most complex machinery humans have invented. Besides personal computers and mobile phones, these enormous gains in computational resources — "compute" — have also been key to today's rapid advances in artificial intelligence. Training a frontier model like OpenAI's GPT-4 requires thousands of specialised AI chips with tens of billions of transistors, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars each. As we have outlined in our AI risk problem profile, we think dangers from advanced AI are among the most pressing problems in the world. As they progress this century, AI systems — created with and running on AI hardware — may develop advanced capabilities and features that carry profound risks for humanity's future. Navigating those risks will require crucial work in...

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### US policy master's degrees

> Working in policy is among the most effective ways to have a positive impact in key fields. Getting a policy master’s degree can be a big help in this path.

- Published: 2023-08-31
- Modified: 2025-02-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/us-policy-masters-degrees/

Working in policy is among the most effective ways to have a positive impact in areas like AI, biosecurity, animal welfare, or global health. Getting a policy master's degree (e. g. in security studies or public policy) can help you pivot into or accelerate your policy career in the US. This two-part overview explains why, when, where, and how to get a policy master's degree, with a focus on people who want to work in the US federal government. The first half focuses on the "why" and the "when" and alternatives to policy master's. The second half considers criteria for choosing where to apply, specific degrees we recommend, how to apply, and how to secure funding. We also recommend this US policy master's database if you want to compare program options (see also this list of European programs maintained through our job board). This information is based on the personal experience of people working on policy in DC for several years, background reading, and conversations with more than two dozen policy professionals. ##Summary of Part 1 ####What's the value of a master's for policy work? A master's builds your (https://80000hours. org/articles/career-capital/) for specific paths like policy. The credential is useful and often necessary to get a policy job. Master's degrees also provide value through learning, skill-building, networking, exploration, and more. The relative importance of these factors depends on your background and goals, and may influence what degree to get (e. g. subject, location, type of graduate degree). ####If I want...

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### AI governance and policy

> Advanced AI systems could have massive impacts on humanity and potentially pose global catastrophic risks. There are opportunities...

- Published: 2023-06-20
- Modified: 2025-03-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/ai-policy-and-strategy/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Civil Service, Data science, Government & policy, Long-term AI policy, Machine learning, Research in relevant areas, Science policy & infrastructure, Software Engineering, Top-recommended careers, Top-recommended organisations

As advancing AI capabilities gained widespread attention in late 2022 and 2023, interest in governing and regulating these systems has grown. Discussion of the potential catastrophic risks of misaligned or uncontrollable AI has become more prominent, potentially opening up opportunities for policy that could mitigate the threats. There's still a lot of uncertainty about which AI governance strategies would be best. Many have proposed policies and strategies aimed at reducing the largest risks, which we discuss below. But there's no roadmap here. There's plenty of room for debate about what's needed, and we may not have found the best ideas yet in this space. In any case, there's still a lot of work to figure out how promising policies and strategies would work in practice. We hope to see more people enter this field to develop expertise and skills that will contribute to risk-reducing AI governance and policy. ##Summary **In a nutshell:** Advanced AI systems could have massive impacts on humanity and potentially pose global catastrophic risks. There are opportunities in the broad field of AI governance to positively shape how society responds to and prepares for the challenges posed by the technology. Given the high stakes, pursuing this career path could be many people's highest-impact option. But they should be very careful not to accidentally exacerbate the threats rather than mitigate them. "What you're doing has enormous potential and enormous danger. " — US President Joe Biden, to the leaders of the top AI companies...

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### Should you work at a frontier AI company?

- Published: 2023-06-20
- Modified: 2025-02-14
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/working-at-an-ai-lab/
- Topics: Accidental harm, AI safety technical research, Anthropic, Artificial Intelligence, Career advice & strategy, Career capital, DeepMind, OpenAI, Top-recommended careers

**In a nutshell:** If you want to help (/problem-profiles/artificial-intelligence/), working at a frontier AI company is an important option to consider, but the impact is hard to assess. These roles often come with great potential for career growth, and many could be (or lead to) highly impactful ways of reducing the chances of an AI-related catastrophe. However, there's also a risk of doing substantial harm, and there are roles you should probably avoid. #### Pros * Some roles have high potential for a big positive impact via reducing risks from AI * Among the best and most robust ways to gain AI-specific career capital * Highly compensated and prestigious #### Cons * Risk of contributing to or accelerating AI systems that could cause extreme harm * Financial and social incentives might make it harder to think objectively about risks * Stress, especially because of a need to carefully and repeatedly assess whether your role is harmful We think AI is likely to have transformative effects over the coming decades, and that reducing the chances of an AI-related catastrophe is one of the world's most pressing problems. So it's natural to wonder whether you should try to work at one of the companies that are doing the most to build and shape these future AI systems. As of summer 2024, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta, and Anthropic seem to be the leading...

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### AI safety technical research

> AI safety research — research on ways to prevent unwanted behaviour from AI systems — generally involves working as a scientist or engineer at major AI labs, in academia, or in independent nonprofits.

- Published: 2023-06-19
- Modified: 2025-04-04
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/ai-safety-researcher/
- Topics: AI safety technical research, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science PhD, Machine learning, Promising interventions, Research in relevant areas, Software Engineering, Top-recommended organisations

Progress in AI — while it could be hugely beneficial — comes with significant risks. Risks that we've argued could be existential. But these risks can be tackled. With further progress in AI safety, we have an opportunity to develop AI for good: systems that are safe, ethical, and beneficial for everyone. This article explains how you can help.

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### AI Safety technical research

- Published: 2023-04-25
- Modified: 2024-11-06
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/ai-safety-technical-research/

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### Information security in high-impact areas

> Organisations with influence, financial power, and advanced technology are targeted by actors seeking to steal or abuse these assets. A career in information security is a promising avenue to support high-impact organisations by protecting against these attacks, which have the potential to disrupt an organisation's mission or even increase existential risk.

- Published: 2022-12-19
- Modified: 2024-08-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/information-security/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Catastrophic pandemics, Computer Science PhD, Data science, Information security, Science policy & infrastructure

As the 2016 US presidential campaign was entering a fractious round of primaries, Hillary Clinton's campaign chair, John Podesta, opened a disturbing email. The March 19 message warned that his Gmail password had been compromised and that he urgently needed to change it. The email was a lie. It wasn't trying to help him protect his account — it was a phishing attack trying to gain illicit access. Podesta was suspicious, but the campaign's IT team erroneously wrote the email was "legitimate" and told him to change his password. The IT team provided a safe link for Podesta to use, but it seems he or one of his staffers instead clicked the link in the forged email. That link was used by Russian intelligence hackers known as "Fancy Bear," and they used their access to leak private campaign emails for public consumption in the final weeks of the 2016 race, embarrassing the Clinton team. While there are plausibly many critical factors in any close election, it's possible that the controversy around the leaked emails played a non-trivial role in Clinton's subsequent loss to Donald Trump. This would mean the failure of the campaign's security team to prevent the hack — which might have come down to a mere typo — was extraordinarily consequential. These events vividly illustrate how careers in infosecurity at key organisations have the potential for outsized impact. Ideally, security professionals can develop robust practices that reduce the likelihood that a single slip-up will result in...

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### Journalism

> For the right person, becoming a journalist could be very impactful.But the most influential positions in the field are highly competitive...

- Published: 2022-09-20
- Modified: 2024-07-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/journalism/
- Topics: Advocacy, Building effective altruism, Careers, Communication, False ideas on social media, Journalism

**In a nutshell:** For the right person, becoming a journalist could be very impactful. Good journalists help keep people informed, positively shape public discourse on important topics, and can provide a platform for people and ideas that the public might not otherwise hear about. But the most influential positions in the field are highly competitive, and journalists face a lot of mixed incentives that may detract from their ability to have a positive impact. #### Pros * The opportunity to spread important ideas to a large audience and shape public debate and opinion * Developing a strong network, versatile skills, and an understanding of the media that significantly increase your career capital * Involves creativity and learning about a variety of areas #### Cons * Competitive for most influential roles * Shrinking industry in US, somewhat poor outlook * Relatively low pay (and sometimes little job security) * Fast pace with constant deadlines #### Key facts on fit * Ability to write engaging pieces for a large audience very quickly * Comfort navigating an uncertain job market * Willingness to work long hours and in a competitive environment * A bachelor's degree from a top university is useful but not required Why journalism could be a high-impact career Some of the most promising ways to have a positive impact with a career in journalism include:...

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### Should you go to law school in the US to have a high-impact career?

> Law school can be valuable for people pursuing several promising high-impact career paths — but you should avoid some common mistakes.

- Published: 2022-09-08
- Modified: 2024-09-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/should-you-go-to-law-school/
- Topics: Careers, Law, Lawyer

## Summary Going to law school in the United States may help you pursue careers in policy that can address some of the world's most pressing problems. Being a practicing lawyer can also potentially have a high impact. The educational experience itself can offer meaningful career benefits. However, there are substantial downsides to law school, and it may be a poor fit depending on your personal circumstances. It's worth fully exploring what aims law school would help you accomplish, whether there are more promising alternatives, and whether you would find pursuing a career in law or policy fulfilling. #### Pros * You may have more access to impactful roles * You can develop a deep understanding of critical aspects of US policy * Law school imparts potentially valuable skills, connections, and opportunities #### Cons * Law school can be expensive, competitive, and stressful * There may be more promising alternative paths to achieving similar goals * Some legal careers are demanding and onerous ####Key facts on fit Pursuing a law degree is best for people who have a clear idea of how they want to use a policy career to have a positive impact. People with strong verbal reasoning, writing, and analytical skills will have an advantage in this path. It may be difficult for people who can't spend 50+ hours per week on schoolwork or for whom prolonged periods...

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### Data collection for AI alignment

> Many proposals to reduce risks from misaligned AI may need a lot of high-quality data from people that can be used to train machine learning models.

- Published: 2022-05-11
- Modified: 2024-09-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/alignment-data-expert/
- Topics: AI safety technical research, Artificial Intelligence, Careers, Data collection for AI alignment, Machine learning, Software Engineering, Top-recommended careers

**In a nutshell:** To reduce the risks posed by the rise of artificial intelligence, we need to figure out how to make sure that powerful AI systems do what we want. Many potential solutions to this problem will require a lot of high-quality data from humans to train machine learning models. Building excellent pipelines so that this data can be collected more easily could be an important way to support technical research into AI alignment, as well as lay the foundation for actually building aligned AIs in the future. If not handled correctly, this work risks making things worse, so this path needs people who can and will change directions if needed. Why might becoming an expert in data collection for AI alignment be high impact? We think it's crucial that we work to positively shape the development of AI, including through technical research on how to ensure that any potentially transformative AI we develop does what we want it to do (known as the alignment problem). If we don't find ways to align AI with our values and goals -- or worse, don't find ways to prevent AI from actively harming us or otherwise working against our values -- the development of AI could pose an existential threat to humanity. There are lots of different proposals for building aligned AI, and it's unclear which (if any) of these approaches will work. A sizeable subset of these approaches require humans to give data to machine learning...

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### China-related AI safety and governance paths

> China is a leading country in AI. If you have a background in China you may be able to help ensure its development benefits everyone.

- Published: 2022-02-10
- Modified: 2024-11-06
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/china-related-ai-safety-and-governance-paths/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence, China-related AI safety & governance, China-Western coordination, Machine learning

Expertise in China and its relations with the world might be critical in tackling some of the world's most pressing problems. In particular, China's relationship with the US is arguably the most important bilateral relationship in the world, with these two countries collectively accounting for over 40% of global GDP. These considerations led us to publish a guide to improving China–Western coordination on global catastrophic risks and other key problems in 2018. Since then, we have seen an increase in the number of people exploring this area. China is one of the most important countries developing and shaping advanced artificial intelligence (AI). The Chinese government's spending on AI research and development is estimated to be on the same order of magnitude as that of the US government, and China's AI research is prominent on the world stage and growing. Because of the importance of AI from the perspective of improving the long-run trajectory of the world, we think relations between China and the US on AI could be among the most important aspects of their relationship. Insofar as the EU and/or UK influence advanced AI development through labs based in their countries or through their influence on global regulation, the state of understanding and coordination between European and Chinese actors on AI safety and governance could also be significant. That, in short, is why we think working on AI safety and governance in China and/or building mutual understanding between Chinese and Western actors in these areas is likely...

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### Software engineering

> Software engineers can contribute directly to solving some of the world’s most pressing problems. There is a shortage of software engineers at the cutting edge of research into AI safety.

- Published: 2022-02-04
- Modified: 2024-11-06
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/software-engineering/
- Topics: AI safety technical research, Artificial Intelligence, Careers, Computer Science PhD, Earning to Give, Engineering, Found a tech startup, Income, Machine learning, Research in relevant areas, Software Engineering, Top-recommended organisations

On December 31, 2021, the most valuable company on Earth was Apple, worth around $3 trillion. After that came Microsoft, at $2. 5 trillion, then Google (officially Alphabet) at $1. 9 trillion, then Amazon at $1. 5 trillion. On December 31, 2020, the four most valuable companies were: Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. On December 31, 2019, the four most valuable companies were: Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. And on December 31, 2018, the four most valuable companies were: Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Google. If you're anything like me, you're starting to spot a pattern here. Revenue in software has grown from $400 billion in 2016 to $500 billion in 2021, and is projected to reach $800 billion by 2026. Software has an increasing and overwhelming importance in our economy -- and everything else in our society. High demand and low supply makes software engineering well-paid, and often enjoyable. But we also think that, if you're trying to make the world a better place, software engineering could be a particularly good way to help. ##In a nutshell: {. no-toc} Software engineering could be a great option for having a direct impact on the world's most pressing problems. If you have good analytical skills (even if you have a humanities background), you might consider testing it. Basic programming skills can be easy to learn and extremely useful even if you decide not to go into software engineering, which means trying this out could be particularly low cost. [col...

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### Founder of new projects tackling top problems

> Become a founder of an organisation tackling one of the world’s most pressing problems.

- Published: 2021-11-10
- Modified: 2024-11-21
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/founder-impactful-organisations/
- Topics: Charity Entrepreneurship, Founder of new projects

In 2010, a group of founders with experience in business, practical medicine, and biotechnology launched a new project: Moderna, Inc. After witnessing recent groundbreaking research into RNA, they realised there was an opportunity to use this technology to rapidly create new vaccines for a wide range of diseases. But few existing companies were focused on that application. They decided to found a company. And 10 years later, they were perfectly situated to develop a highly effective vaccine against COVID-19 — in a matter of weeks. This vaccine played a huge role in curbing the pandemic and has likely saved millions of lives. This illustrates that if you can find an important gap in a pressing problem area and found an organisation that fills this gap, that can be one of the highest-impact things you can do — especially if that organisation can persist and keep growing without you. **In a nutshell:** Founding a new organisation to tackle a pressing global problem can be extremely high impact. Doing so involves identifying a gap in a pressing problem area, formulating a solution, investigating it, and then helping to build an organisation by investing in strategy, hiring, management, culture, and so on — ideally building something that can continue without you. Why might founding a new project be high impact? If you can find an important gap in what's needed to tackle a pressing problem, and create an organisation to fill that gap, that's a highly promising route to...

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### Manager of a long-term philanthropic fund

- Published: 2021-10-22
- Modified: 2023-06-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/managing-philanthropic-funds/
- Topics: Donating effectively, Foundation Program Management, Grantmaker, Longtermist philanthropy, Philanthropic Advising, Research management

**In a nutshell:** Because some of the best opportunities for having an impact may lie centuries or millennia in the future, investing resources now -- in order to have many more resources available at that future time -- might be extremely valuable. Given that we currently have no way of (effectively and securely) investing resources over long time periods, figuring out how to set up and manage long-term philanthropic funds might be very valuable. Why might creating a long-term philanthropic fund be high impact? Some have argued that the best opportunities for making a difference may lie far in the future. If so, investing resources now in order to have many more resources available at that future time might be the best thing we can do. However, right now we have no way of effectively and securely investing resources over such long time periods. In particular, there are few (if any) financial vehicles that can be reliably expected to persist for more than 100 years, and stay committed to their intended use -- while also earning good investment returns. Figuring out how to set up and manage such a fund seems like it might be very worthwhile. Founders Pledge -- an organisation that encourages effective giving for entrepreneurs -- has launched one such fund. It seems likely that only a few people will be able to be involved in a project like this, as it's not clear there will be room for multiple funds or a large...

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### Investigate a potentially pressing but unexplored global issue

- Published: 2021-10-22
- Modified: 2023-06-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/explore-a-potentially-pressing-global-issue/
- Topics: Global priorities research, Investigate new problems, Most pressing problems, Problem prioritisation, Public intellectual, Research in relevant areas, Unconventional advice

**In a nutshell:** Working on neglected global problems that *could be* even more pressing than those we currently prioritise could be very high impact. If you identify such a problem, resources could be directed to address it much earlier than might have been done otherwise. On the other hand, if your research indicates a potential problem shouldn't be prioritised, then you can write up your findings for others, saving them time. This path isn't exactly *competitive* per se, but it seems very difficult to succeed, so we group it with highly competitive paths like becoming a public intellectual. Why might exploring a potentially pressing problem be high impact? There are many neglected global problems that could turn out to be as or even more pressing than those we currently prioritise most highly. We'd be keen to see more people explore them by acquiring relevant training and a network of mentors, and getting to know the relevant fields. If the problem area still seems potentially promising once you've built up a background, you could take on a project or try to build up the relevant fields, for instance by setting up a conference or newsletter to help people working in the area coordinate better. If, after investigating, working on the issue doesn't seem particularly high impact, then you've helped to eliminate an option, freeing up others' time and resources to be used better elsewhere. In either case, we'd be keen to see writeups of these explorations, for instance...

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### Research & advocacy promoting impactful climate solutions

- Published: 2021-10-22
- Modified: 2023-08-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/effective-altruist-approach-to-climate-change/
- Topics: Climate change, Effective Altruism, Effective climate change interventions, Government & policy, Research in relevant areas, Scientific research

**In a nutshell:** We suspect that different ways of tackling climate change vary significantly in their impact. This means focusing on the *most* effective methods is likely much higher impact -- especially if you focus on the most extreme risks from climate change. Why might taking an effective altruist approach to mitigating climate change be high impact? If the effectiveness of different approaches to mitigating climate change vary greatly, taking an effective altruist approach to climate change -- and focusing on the most effective ways of working on the problem -- could make a big difference. We don't have well-developed career advice in this area. But here are some rules of thumb for choosing approaches we think can help maximise your impact: 1. Focus on the most extreme risks where possible. The worse the potential effects of climate change are, the more pressing it is to reduce their likelihood. This is especially clear from a longtermist perspective, because more extreme outcomes are disproportionately likely to contribute to existential risk. That said, as we argue in our problem profile on extreme climate change, the direct extinction risks from climate change seem relatively small. As a result, we think that focusing on the ways in which climate change could increase other risks, like nuclear war or catastrophic pandemics would be a particularly good way of having an impact. 2. Pay attention to the best evidence on what kinds of interventions are the most cost effective in the long term... .

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### Organise an effective altruism local group

- Published: 2021-10-22
- Modified: 2023-06-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/organise-an-effective-altruism-group/
- Topics: Advocacy, Building effective altruism, Building the effective altruism community, Effective Altruism, Organise an effective altruism group

**In a nutshell:** The effective altruism community seeks to support people trying to have a large positive impact. Organising an effective altruism local or student group can be unusually high impact, because it's often possible to get several other people involved in working on pressing problems or supporting effective charities. Why might organising an effective altruism local group be high impact? As a part of the effective altruism community, we may have some bias here, but we think helping to build this community and make it more effective might be one way to do a lot of good. Organisers of student and local effective altruism groups run events to help people learn about, discuss, and make connections within effective altruism. Being an organiser can be unusually high impact, because it's often possible to get several other people involved in working on pressing problems or supporting effective charities, therefore creating a 'multiplier' on your lifetime impact. The ideas of effective altruism are still not widely known, so there's a lot of room for additional outreach and community building. This is especially true for students, who have what's often a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to spend a lot of time with other talented people who are interested in making the world a better place, and who still have the flexibility to change paths. We know several people who probably had more impact running a student group than they did in the first few years of their jobs after graduation. Read...

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### Expert on formal verification

- Published: 2021-10-21
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/formal-verification-expert/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Biomedical Research, Catastrophic pandemics, Computer science, Information security, Science policy & infrastructure

**In a nutshell:** Formal verification -- using formal methods of mathematics to prove (or disprove) whether algorithms will do what they're intended to do -- could be an important tool for the safe deployment of AI (and potentially for addressing other pressing problems). While we haven't looked into formal verification much, further research in this area and applying existing techniques to important issues both seem potentially promising to us. Why might becoming an expert in formal verification be high impact? 'Proof assistants' are programs used to formally verify that computer systems have various properties -- for example, that they are secure against certain cyberattacks -- and to help develop programs that are formally verifiable in this way. Currently, proof assistants are not well-developed, but the ability to create programs that can be formally verified to have important properties seems like it could be helpful for addressing a variety of issues, perhaps including AI safety and cybersecurity. So improving proof assistants seems like it could be very high value. For example, we might eventually be able to use proof assistants to generate programs for solving some parts of the AI alignment problem. This would require us to be able to correctly formally specify the sub-problems, for which training in formal verification is plausibly useful. We haven't looked into formal verification much, and although it seems potentially promising to us, you can see some pushback to this idea in this thread and this writeup of the path. You can...

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### Public intellectual

> This is a high risk but potentially very high impact path. Public intellectuals can do a lot of good by spreading important ideas -- when they succeed.

- Published: 2021-10-21
- Modified: 2024-07-26
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/public-intellectual/
- Topics: Academic Research, Advocacy, Building effective altruism, Global priorities research, Journalism, Public intellectual

**In a nutshell:** Public intellectuals popularise important ideas -- e. g. by writing books and blog posts, giving talks, or appearing on podcasts or other popular media. Becoming a public intellectual could be extremely impactful for the right person. However, we only sometimes recommend this career path, as it's especially competitive, and it's relatively easy to accidentally do harm if you end up promoting the wrong ideas -- or promoting good ideas in a way that puts people off. Why might becoming a public intellectual be high impact? Some people seem to have a very large positive impact by popularising important ideas -- often through writing books; giving talks or interviews; or writing blogs, columns, or open letters. Putting ideas on the map -- and shaping their understanding among the public -- can substantially impact social movements, policy, cultural change, and technological innovation. However, it's probably even harder to become a successful and impactful public intellectual than a successful academic, since becoming a public intellectual often requires a degree of success within academia while also having excellent communication skills and spending significant time building a public profile. Thus this path seems to us to be especially competitive and a good fit for only a small number of people. As with other advocacy efforts, it also seems relatively easy to accidentally do harm if you promote mistaken ideas, or even promote important ideas in a way that turns people off. (Read more about how to avoid accidentally doing harm. )...

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### Specialist in emerging global powers

- Published: 2021-10-21
- Modified: 2023-06-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/emerging-global-power-specialist/
- Topics: Biorisk strategy & policy, Government & policy, Long-term AI policy, Nuclear war, Politics, Research in relevant areas, Specialist in emerging global powers

**In a nutshell:** India and Russia seem likely to become increasingly important over the next few decades -- politically, militarily, economically, and technologically. Because of this, we expect that helping Western institutions better cooperate with Russian and Indian actors might be highly impactful, especially if you're early in your career (and therefore able to spend the next decade developing relevant expertise and advancing your career). Why might becoming a Russia or India specialist be high impact? We've argued that because of China's political, military, economic, and technological importance on the world stage, helping Western organisations better understand and cooperate with Chinese actors might be highly impactful. We think working with China represents a particularly promising path to impact. But a similar argument could be made for gaining expertise in other powerful nations, for example Russia or India. If you're at the beginning of your career, it may even be valuable to think about which countries are most likely to be particularly influential in a few decades, and focus on gaining expertise there. This is likely to be a better option for you if you are from one of these countries, or have spent a substantial amount of time there. The best paths to impact here likely require deep understanding of the relevant cultures and institutions, as well as language fluency (e. g. at the level where you might be able to write a newspaper article about longtermism in the language). If you are not from one of these...

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### Research management

- Published: 2021-10-21
- Modified: 2023-06-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/research-management/
- Topics: Global priorities research, Research in relevant areas, Research into global priorities, Research management, Scientific research

**In a nutshell:** We've argued that research focused on (https://80000hours. org/problem-profiles/global-priorities-research/), or on working out which problems are most pressing, can be very high impact. Research *managers* can multiply the impact of researchers by prioritising projects within an institution, coordinating research, fundraising, and producing communications that make research institutions more impactful. Why might research management be high impact? In general, we think that helping others have a greater positive impact than they would have had otherwise is sometimes underappreciated, and that it's an important and valid way to do good. Indeed, that's our strategy here at 80,000 Hours! Research managers enhance the impact of others' work by prioritising projects within an institution, coordinating research, fundraising, and producing communications to make the institution more impactful. In some cases, research managers also help set strategy for an organisation -- though this is usually in cases where they have previously been researchers themselves. Being a research manager seems valuable for many of the same reasons working in operations management does — these coordinating roles are crucial for enabling researchers and others to have the biggest positive impact possible. Learn more Read our older article on research management Read our career reviews for academic research and global priorities research Read about why we think global priorities research is so valuable

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### Become an executive assistant for someone doing especially high-impact work

- Published: 2021-10-21
- Modified: 2023-06-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/executive-assistant-for-an-impactful-person/
- Topics: Building the effective altruism community, High impact executive assistant, Operations at high impact organisations

**In a nutshell:** A good executive assistant can dramatically increase someone's impact. If you work for someone doing high-impact work, you might be able to boost their daily productivity by about 10%, just by freeing up time they would otherwise spend on tasks that don't take full advantage of their skills. That's equivalent to having one tenth (or more) as much impact as they have -- which could be *a lot*. Why might being an executive assistant for an impactful person be high impact? Some people may be extraordinarily productive compared to the average. (Read about this phenomenon in research careers. ) But these people often have to use much of their time on work that doesn't take the best advantage of their skills, such as bureaucratic and administrative tasks. This may be especially true for people who work in university settings — as many researchers do — but it is also often true of entrepreneurs, politicians, writers, and public intellectuals. Acting as an executive assistant for one of these people can dramatically increase their impact. By supporting their day-to-day activities and freeing up more of their time for work that other people can't do, you can act as a 'multiplier' on their productivity. We think that having a highly talented executive assistant can make someone 10% more productive, or perhaps more, which is like having one tenth (or more) as much impact as they have. If you're working for someone who is doing really valuable work, that's...

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### Policy careers focused on other pressing global issues

- Published: 2021-10-21
- Modified: 2024-02-23
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/policy-careers-focused-on-other-pressing-global-issues/
- Topics: Catastrophic pandemics, Civil Service, Climate change, Government & policy, Law, Long-term AI policy, Nuclear war, Policy careers, Science policy & infrastructure

**In a nutshell:** There are many options for making progress on policy: you can research which policy proposals make the most sense for the long-term future, advocate for specific proposals, or do implementation. We expect that many policy careers focused on longtermism could be as impactful as our highest-priority career paths, but we haven't learned enough about them to be confident about which are the most promising options or the best routes to entry. We do think that (/articles/government-policy/) will have a particularly high impact. Why might longtermist-oriented policy careers be high impact? There is likely a lot of policy work with the potential to positively affect the long-term future, and not all of it will fit into our longtermist priority paths of AI policy or biorisk policy. (We've written a separate article about policy work related to these particularly pressing problems. ) Outside of these areas, we aren't sure what might be best to aim for in policy. But working in an area that is plausibly important for safeguarding the long-term future seems like a promising way to build knowledge and career capital, so that you can judge later what policy interventions might be most promising for you to pursue. Possible areas include: Finding ways to safeguard political systems against authoritarian backsliding, for instance by improving the security of voting processes. Promoting international cooperation and peace, which also makes civilisation more robust. Working on...

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### Historian of large societal trends, inflection points, progress, or collapse

> Find out how to become a historian to help understand how technology and social change could affect the future.

- Published: 2021-10-21
- Modified: 2025-02-14
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/historian-of-societal-trends/
- Topics: Existential risk, Global priorities research, Historian of large societal trends, History

**In a nutshell:** Historical research into the long-term arc of history -- by looking at societal trends over time and key inflection points -- could help us better understand what might cause important technological and social shifts in the future. Why might becoming a historian of large social trends be high impact? Studying subjects relevant to the long-term arc of history may shed light on the range of changes that are possible (or probable) in our future. These subjects may include things like economic, intellectual, or moral progress from a long-term perspective; the history of social movements or philanthropy; or the history of wellbeing. Historians in these areas can help us better understand long trends and key inflection points, such as the Industrial Revolution and other promising topics. Our impression is that although many of these topics have received attention from historians and other academics some are comparatively neglected, especially from a more quantitative or impact-focused perspective. In general, there seem to be a number of gaps that skilled historians, anthropologists, or economic historians could help fill. Revealingly, Open Philanthropy commissioned their own studies of the history and successes of philanthropy because they couldn't find much existing literature that met their needs. Most existing research is not aimed at deriving action-relevant lessons. We expect there will be opportunities to do this kind of historical research outside of academia — as an independent researcher, within a foundation like Open Philanthropy, or within another research organisation within effective...

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### Forecasting and related research and implementation

> You can work on making better predictions of future events in order to guide decision-making by powerful governments and institutions.

- Published: 2021-10-19
- Modified: 2024-11-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/forecasting/
- Topics: Decision making, Economics PhD, Forecasting research & implementation, Institutional decision making, Research in relevant areas

**In a nutshell:** Small groups of decision-makers in governments and other institutions sometimes have to make extremely difficult judgement calls on high-stakes matters, like global catastrophic risks or the development or deployment of emerging technologies. But human judgement is often biased, and decision-makers don't always follow the right processes. We've seen evidence that it's possible to use rigorous forecasting techniques to improve our ability to predict future events, and by extension, to make good decisions. We'd like to see more people doing research into forecasting and other methods for improving institutional decision-making, as well as putting those methods into practice at important institutions. Why might forecasting research and implementation be high impact? Governments and other important institutions frequently have to make complex, high-stakes decisions based on judgement calls, often from just a handful of people. There's reason to believe that human judgements can be flawed in a number of ways, but can be substantially improved using more systematic processes and techniques. One of the most promising areas we've seen is using more rigorous forecasting methods to make better predictions about important future events. Improving the quality of foresight and decision-making in important institutions could improve our ability to solve almost all other problems. We'd like to help form a new community of researchers and practitioners who develop and implement these techniques. We're especially keen to help people who want to work on the areas most relevant to global catastrophic risks, such as nuclear security, AI, and...

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### Earning to give in quantitative trading

> We think most people's highest-impact options involve working directly on solving pressing global problems. But if you want to focus on having an impact by donating part of your income (earning to give) and will thrive in a quantitative trading role

- Published: 2021-10-19
- Modified: 2023-06-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/quantitative-trading/
- Topics: Asset Management, Donating effectively, Earning to Give, Earning to give in quant trading, EtG pros and cons, Finance, Quantitative hedge funds

**In a nutshell:** Quantitative traders use algorithms to trade on the financial markets for profit, typically at hedge funds and proprietary firms. We think most people's highest-impact options involve working directly on solving pressing global problems. But if you want to focus on having an impact by donating part of your income (earning to give) and will thrive in a quantitative trading role — which means having very strong mathematical skills, among other key qualifications — this is likely among your best options. Why earning to give in quantitative trading could be a high-impact option If you want to earn to give, and you have strong mathematical skills, quantitative trading is probably one of the options in which you can donate the most. A number of people we've advised over the years have successfully taken this path and made large donations, while also gaining valuable skills in management, software engineering, research, and other areas. They also tend to enjoy a culture that's high-performing and more 'nerdy' than is stereotypically the case in finance. One main caveat is that the industry faces many risks — these activities could become unprofitable due to regulation or competition — so it's important to make sure you also build strong career capital. There are also concerns that certain forms of quant trading could have a negative social impact — we'd encourage you to avoid strategies like this, and to stick to socially neutral or beneficial options. Generally speaking, whether a particular...

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### Biorisk research, strategy, and policy

> Explore how careers in biosecurity research, strategy, and policy can help reduce biorisks like engineered pandemics.

- Published: 2021-10-19
- Modified: 2024-12-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/biorisk-research/
- Topics: Biomedical Research, Biorisk strategy & policy, Catastrophic pandemics, COVID-19, Government & policy, Research in relevant areas, Scientific research, Top-recommended careers

When COVID-19 first began spreading rapidly in 2020, humanity found itself entering a race from far behind the starting line. We didn't know much about how the virus spread — we didn't even know whether we could get infected from the air we breathed or the surfaces we touched. We didn't know how likely transmission was outdoors, whether masks would be effective, or how quickly we could develop, produce, and distribute effective vaccines and treatments. In short, we were unprepared. And the next time something like COVID-19 comes along — or something far, far worse — it's not clear we'll be much better off. This review tells you how you could use your career to do something about it. At the most basic level, it involves ensuring that humanity is better prepared, so no virus ever catches us with our guard down again. We should have a much better understanding of how viruses spread so we can stop pandemics out of the gate. We need better systems for rapidly rolling out highly effective vaccines, treatments, and non-pharmaceutical interventions that will work against a wide range of threats. And we need policies, practices, and institutions that reduce the risk of new pandemics — particularly those caused by artificial pathogens, which we believe pose the greatest dangers — devastating the world once again. ### Enter your email and we'll mail you a book (for free). {. no-toc} We believe you can help tackle some of the world's biggest and most neglected problems,...

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### Research into global priorities

> You can help figure out which global problems are most pressing by working in global priorities research.

- Published: 2021-10-19
- Modified: 2024-11-13
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/global-priorities-researcher/
- Topics: Academic Research, Global priorities research, Research in relevant areas, Research into global priorities, Top-recommended careers

**In a nutshell:** We've changed our minds before about which problems are highest priority -- and which careers we think have the highest impact -- as a result of global priorities research. And we're not the only ones. This research can shift the direction of actors like us, as well as foundations and other nonprofits. This means that high-quality research into important questions about which issues to prioritise can be very impactful. Why might global priorities research be high impact? We've argued that one of the most important priorities is working out what the priorities should be. There's a huge amount that's not known about how to do the most good, and although this is one of the most important questions someone should ask, it has received little systematic study. The study of which actions do the most good is especially neglected if you take a long-term perspective, in which what matters most are the effects of our actions on future generations. This longtermist position has only been recently explored, and we know little about its practical implications. With more research, we could easily see our current perspective on global priorities shifting, so these questions have practical significance. The study of how to help others is also especially neglected from a high-level perspective. People have done significant work on questions like "How can we reduce climate change? " — but much less on the questions of "How pressing is climate change compared to health? " and "What methods...

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### Help build the effective altruism community

> Help grow, shape, and support organisations working to address global problems by working in the effective altruism community.

- Published: 2021-10-19
- Modified: 2024-11-13
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/work-in-effective-altruism-organisations/
- Topics: Building effective altruism, Building the effective altruism community, Effective Altruism, Founder of new projects, Operations at high impact organisations, Top-recommended careers, Top-recommended organisations

**In a nutshell:** The effective altruism community has lots of talented people who are motivated to work on whichever issues turn out to be most pressing in the future -- even if that means switching careers or areas. The community also has potential to grow substantially. Working at an organisation dedicated to growing, shaping, and supporting it -- and thereby helping build capacity to address pressing global problems -- could therefore be very impactful. Why might working in effective altruism organisations be high impact? We think building the effective altruism community is a promising way to build capacity to address pressing global problems in the future. This is because it seems possible that the community will grow a great deal, and it includes people who are willing to switch areas to work on whichever issues turn out to be most urgent in the future -- so it's robust to changes in priorities. We realise this may seem self-promotional, since 80,000 Hours is itself an effective altruism organisation. However, if we didn't recommend what we ourselves do, then we'd be contradicting ourselves. We also wouldn't want everyone to work on this area, since then we'd only build a community and never do anything. But we think it makes sense to recommend it as one of several high-impact paths you could take. What does this path involve? A key way to contribute to building the effective altruism community is to work at one of the organisations in the...

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### Grantmaker focused on pressing world problems

> In a grantmaking job, you can direct millions of dollars to tackle the world's most pressing problems.

- Published: 2021-10-19
- Modified: 2024-11-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/grantmaker/
- Topics: Donating effectively, Grantmaker, Philanthropic Advising

**In a nutshell:** There are many philanthropists interested in donating millions or even billions of dollars to tackle pressing world problems -- but there currently aren't enough grantmakers able to vet funding proposals. Because a randomly chosen proposal has little expected impact, grantmakers can have a large impact by helping philanthropists distinguish promising projects from less promising ones. Why might grantmaking be high impact? Effective organisations are not easy for donors to find. Open Philanthropy takes an effective altruism approach to advising philanthropists on where to give. It likely has over $10 billion of committed funds from Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna, and also advises other philanthropists. There are other 'angel donors' in the effective altruism community who could give around $1–10 million per year, but aren't at their maximum level of giving because they haven't been able to find and vet additional great donation opportunities. We also know a number of other billionaires are excited about effective altruism, and potentially interested in starting new foundations. One reason these donors don't give more is a lack of concrete 'shovel-ready' opportunities. This is partly due to a lack of qualified leaders able to run projects in the top problem areas (especially to found nonprofits working on research, policy, and community building). But another reason is a lack of grantmakers able to vet these opportunities or generate new projects themselves. A randomly chosen new project in this area likely has little expected impact -- there's some chance it...

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### Philosophy academia

- Published: 2019-08-07
- Modified: 2024-11-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/philosophy-academia/
- Topics: Academic Research, Careers, Moral philosophy, PhDs, Philosophy academia, Public intellectual, Research in relevant areas, Research into global priorities



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### Academic research

> Are academic careers a good option if you want to have a positive impact? A review of the pros and cons.

- Published: 2018-10-01
- Modified: 2024-11-06
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/academic-research/
- Topics: Academic Research, Careers, Fields, Forecasting research & implementation, Research into global priorities



---

### Congressional staffer

> Want to get a job in Congress? Here's what it takes to get one — and why it matters.

- Published: 2018-05-17
- Modified: 2024-11-06
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/congressional-staffer/
- Topics: Careers, Congressional staffer, Government & policy, Moral philosophy, Politics, Problem prioritisation



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### UK commercial law (for earning to give)

- Published: 2018-03-03
- Modified: 2024-07-04
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/uk-commercial-law-for-earning-to-give/
- Topics: Careers



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### Improving China-Western coordination on global catastrophic risks

- Published: 2018-02-28
- Modified: 2024-12-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/china-specialist/
- Topics: China-related AI safety & governance, China-Western coordination, Science policy & infrastructure, Specialist in emerging global powers, Top-recommended careers, Top-recommended organisations

**In a nutshell:** China will play an especially influential role in how many of the biggest challenges of the next century play out, including global catastrophic biological risks and — especially — developing emerging technologies like AI. But a lack of understanding and coordination between China and the West means we might not tackle those challenges as well as we can (and need to). Therefore, it will be very valuable to have more people specialising in the intersection of China and catastrophic risks and emerging technologies. Last summer, China unveiled a plan to become the world leader in artificial intelligence, aiming to create a $150 billion industry by 2030. "We must take initiative to firmly grasp this new stage of development for artificial intelligence and create a new competitive edge," the country's State Council said. The move symbolised the technological thrust of "the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation" promoted by President Xi Jinping. And it's not just AI. China is becoming increasingly important in the solution of other global problems prioritised by the effective altruism community, including biosecurity, factory farming, and nuclear security. But few in the community know much about the country, and coordination between Chinese and Western organisations seems like it could be improved a great deal. This suggests that a high-impact career path could be to develop expertise in the intersection between China, effective altruism, and pressing global issues. Once you have this expertise, you can use it to carry out research into...

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### Policy-oriented government jobs

- Published: 2017-10-05
- Modified: 2024-12-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/policy-oriented-civil-service-uk/
- Topics: Careers, Civil Service, Government & policy, Politics



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### Working at effective nonprofits

- Published: 2017-09-09
- Modified: 2024-11-14
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/effective-non-profits/
- Topics: Building effective altruism, Building the effective altruism community, Careers, Operations at high impact organisations



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### Machine Learning PhDs

> We explain why it’s a high-impact area, how to work out if it’s for you, and exactly how and where to apply.

- Published: 2017-06-19
- Modified: 2025-01-31
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/machine-learning-phd/
- Topics: AI safety technical research, Artificial Intelligence, Careers, Machine learning, Machine learning PhD



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### Working at effective altruist organisations

- Published: 2017-06-19
- Modified: 2024-07-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/working-at-effective-altruist-organisations/
- Topics: Building effective altruism, Building the effective altruism community, Careers, Effective Altruism, Operations at high impact organisations, Top-recommended organisations



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### Allied health professional

- Published: 2017-03-31
- Modified: 2024-07-02
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/allied-health-professional/
- Topics: Careers



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### Product manager in tech

> Product management is one of the best non-programming roles in the tech industry. It pays well and builds skills widely-applicable skills.

- Published: 2016-12-06
- Modified: 2023-09-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/product-manager-in-tech/
- Topics: Careers



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### Web designer

- Published: 2016-02-23
- Modified: 2023-09-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/web-designer/
- Topics: Careers, Web designer



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### Executive search

- Published: 2016-02-15
- Modified: 2023-06-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/executive-search/
- Topics: Careers



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### Nursing

> Pros and cons of being a nurse, who should become one, and how to do so.

- Published: 2016-02-15
- Modified: 2024-12-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/nursing/
- Topics: Careers, Nursing



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### Biomedical research

> Interested in understanding how the human body works? Become a biomedical researcher to find new ways to improve people’s health.

- Published: 2015-08-14
- Modified: 2024-12-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/biomedical-research/
- Topics: Biomedical Research, Biorisk strategy & policy, Catastrophic pandemics, Scientific research



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### Foundation grantmaker

- Published: 2015-07-30
- Modified: 2024-11-21
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/foundation-program-manager/
- Topics: Careers, Grantmaker



---

### Early-stage startup employee

- Published: 2015-07-22
- Modified: 2024-12-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/startup-early-employee/
- Topics: Careers, Early-stage startup employee



---

### Think tank research

> Working in a think tank for a few years early in your career is a plausible way to influence government policy for the better, and in the meantime gain...

- Published: 2015-07-13
- Modified: 2024-11-28
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/think-tank-research/
- Topics: Careers, Think tank research, Top-recommended organisations



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### Teaching

- Published: 2015-07-13
- Modified: 2025-01-28
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/teaching/
- Topics: Careers, Education



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### Pursuing fame in art and entertainment

- Published: 2015-07-13
- Modified: 2024-11-21
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/pursuing-fame-in-art-and-entertainment/
- Topics: Art & Entertainment, Careers



---

### Medical careers

> If you want to save lives, should you become a doctor? Surprisingly: maybe not. Find out which medical careers we recommend if you want to do good.

- Published: 2015-07-13
- Modified: 2024-11-22
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/medical-careers/
- Topics: Careers, Doing good in your current job, Medicine



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### Actuarial science

- Published: 2015-07-13
- Modified: 2024-11-26
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/actuarial-science/
- Topics: Careers



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### Marketing (for skill-building & earning to give)

- Published: 2015-06-30
- Modified: 2023-09-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/work-in-marketing/
- Topics: Careers, Marketing



---

### Computer Science PhD

> Thinking of pursuing a computer science PhD? Read this first to find out whether you should (or shouldn’t).

- Published: 2015-06-18
- Modified: 2023-12-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/computer-science-phd/
- Topics: Careers, Computer Science PhD



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### Economics PhDs

> An econ PhD is one of the most attractive graduate programs: if you get through, you have a high chance of landing a good research job in academia or...

- Published: 2015-06-17
- Modified: 2025-01-07
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/economics-phd/
- Topics: Academic Research, Careers, Economics PhD, Founder of new projects, Research in relevant areas



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### Data science (for skill-building & earning to give)

- Published: 2015-06-13
- Modified: 2025-03-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/data-science/
- Topics: Careers, Data science



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### Management consulting (for skill-building & earning to give)

- Published: 2015-03-31
- Modified: 2023-06-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/management-consulting/
- Topics: Careers, Consulting



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### Trading in quantitative hedge funds (for earning to give)

- Published: 2014-08-28
- Modified: 2022-12-14
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/trading-in-quantitative-hedge-funds/
- Topics: Careers, Earning to Give, Earning to give in quant trading



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### Front office finance (for skill-building & earning to give)

> Front facing finance still offers some of the highest pay available, making it a potential option for earning to give, however, we don't recommend it unless you could develop very strong motivation to succeed. The work load can be brutal, and is often boring. It's highly competitive and has high drop out rates. Moreover, the skills and knowledge you develop seem less useful than alternatives such as (/research/top-careers/profiles/consulting/) and (/research/top-careers/profiles/tech-entrepreneurship/).

- Published: 2014-08-21
- Modified: 2023-06-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/front-office-finance/
- Topics: Careers, Finance



---

### Party politics

- Published: 2014-08-21
- Modified: 2023-06-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/party-politics-uk/
- Topics: Careers, Party Politics, Politics



---

### Founding effective nonprofits (international development)

- Published: 2014-08-21
- Modified: 2024-11-14
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/founding-effective-global-poverty-non-profits/
- Topics: Building effective altruism, Careers



---

### Program manager in international organisations

- Published: 2014-08-21
- Modified: 2023-06-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/program-manager-in-international-organisations/
- Topics: Careers



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### Found a tech startup

- Published: 2014-08-06
- Modified: 2024-11-06
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/tech-entrepreneurship/
- Topics: Careers, Found a tech startup



---


## Career reports

### Management consulting

- Published: 2015-04-20
- Modified: 2024-08-08
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-guide/reports/management-consulting/
- Topics: Consulting

What is this career path? Management consultants provide advice to organisations to help improve performance. Consultants divide into two broad types: strategy and operations. Strategy consultants advise management teams on top-level decisions like prioritizing new markets to enter, developing price strategy, mergers and acquisitions, how much to invest in research and development, how to structure the organisation and how to deal with competitive threats. Operations consulting is more about how to implement strategy, for instance; how to improve the efficiency of the recruitment process, or implement a new sales strategy. Consultants may also specialise in highly technical areas. The industry is divided into the 'Big 3' strategy consulting firms (McKinsey, Bain, BCG), the 'Big 4' professional services firms (PwC, Ernst & Young, Deloitte, KPMG) who primarily do operations consulting (as well as auditing and accounting), and a large number of small 'boutique' companies, who often specialise in a particular type of situation or subject matter. The entry level title for undergraduates varies from firm to firm, but "analyst" is a common title. People in these positions often work for 2-3 years and then move on or go get MBAs (sometimes funded by the company they work for). "Associate" is a common title for new MBAs, or others entering with comparable qualifications. This can be a long-term position, but many people entering at this level move on after 2-3 years. What is the work like day-to-day? We recommend viewing an answer to this question on Quora. The WetFeet 2011...

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## Key articles

### Anonymous answers: could advances in AI supercharge biorisk?

- Published: 2024-10-11
- Modified: 2024-10-23
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/anonymous-answers-could-advances-in-ai-supercharge-biorisk/
- Topics: Career advice & strategy

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. ) To make them feel comfortable speaking candidly, we offered 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...

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### Anonymous answers: How can we manage infohazards in biosecurity?

- Published: 2024-09-26
- Modified: 2024-10-22
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/anonymous-answers-how-can-we-manage-infohazards-in-biosecurity/
- Topics: Biorisk strategy & policy, Career advice & strategy

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 To make them feel comfortable speaking candidly, we offered 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...

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

- Published: 2024-09-11
- Modified: 2024-10-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/anonymous-advice-what-are-the-best-ways-to-fight-the-next-pandemic/

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. To make them feel comfortable speaking candidly, we offered the experts 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. The group of experts includes policymakers serving in national governments, grantmakers for foundations, and researchers in both academia...

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

> Experts give their opinions about common misconceptions about biosecurity and pandemic prevention. They were granted anonymity for this piece.

- Published: 2024-02-26
- Modified: 2024-10-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/anonymous-misconceptions-about-biosecurity/
- Topics: Anonymous advice, Biorisk strategy & policy

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. The group of experts includes policymakers serving in national governments, grantmakers for foundations, and researchers in both academia and the private sector. Some of them identify as being...

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### How many lives does a doctor save? (Part 3)

- Published: 2023-07-21
- Modified: 2024-11-14
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/how-many-lives-does-a-doctor-save-part-3/
- Topics: Medicine

This is Part 3 of an updated version of a classic three-part series of 80,000 Hours blog posts. You can also read updated versions of Part 1 and Part 2. You can still read the original version of the series published in 2012. It's fair to say working as a doctor does not look that great so far. In general, the day-to-day work of medicine has had a relatively minor role in why people are living longer and healthier now than they did historically. When we try and quantify the benefit of someone becoming a doctor, the figure gets lower the better the method of estimation and already is low enough such that a 40-year medical career somewhere like the UK would be on a rough par with giving $20,000 dollars to a GiveWell top charity in terms of saving lives. Yet there is more to say. The tools we have used to arrive at estimates are general, so they are estimating something like the impact of the modal, median, or typical medical career. There are doctors who have plainly done much more good than my estimates of the impact of a typical doctor. So, what could a doctor do to really save a lot of lives? Doing doctoring better What about just being really, really good? Even if the typical doctor's work makes a worthwhile — but modest and fairly replaceable — contribution, maybe there are brilliant doctors that stand head-and-shoulders above the rest. The Gregory Houses (no relation)...

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### How many lives does a doctor save? (Part 2)

> Is medicine the most promising career path if you want to do good? This series of posts examines the impact of being a doctor in terms of saving lives.

- Published: 2023-07-21
- Modified: 2023-07-21
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/how-many-lives-does-a-doctor-save-part-2/
- Topics: Medicine

This is Part 2 of an updated version of a classic three-part series of 80,000 Hours blog posts. You can also read updated versions of Part 1 and Part 3. You can still read the original version of the series published in 2012. In the last post, we saw that although the reasons people live longer and healthier now have more to do with higher living standards than more medical care, medicine still plays a part. If you try and quantify how much medicine contributes to our increased longevity and health, then divide that amount by the number of doctors providing it, you get an estimate that a UK doctor saves ~70 lives over the course of their career. Yet this won't be a good model of how much good you would actually do if you became a doctor in the UK. For one thing, the relationship between more doctors and better health is non-linear. Here's a scatterplot for each country with doctors per capita on the x-axis and DALYs per capita on the y-axis (since you 'gain' DALYs for dying young or being sick, less is better): The association shows an initial steep decline between 0–50 doctors per 100,000 people, then levels off abruptly and is basically flat when you get to physician densities in richer countries (e. g. the UK has 300 doctors per 100,000 people). Assuming this is causation rather than correlation (more on that later), adding more doctors has diminishing marginal returns for population health. In other...

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### How many lives does a doctor save? (Part 1)

- Published: 2023-07-21
- Modified: 2023-07-21
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/how-many-lives-does-a-doctor-save-part-1/
- Topics: Medicine

This is Part 1 of an updated version of a classic three-part series of 80,000 Hours blog posts. You can also read updated versions of Part 2 and Part 3. You can still read the original version of the series published in 2012. Doctors have a reputation as do-gooders. So when I was a 17-year-old kid wanting to make a difference, it seemed like a natural career path. I wrote this on my medical school application: I want to study medicine because of a desire I have to help others, and so the chance of spending a career doing something worthwhile I can't resist. Of course, Doctors don't have a monopoly on altruism, but I believe the attributes I have lend themselves best to medicine, as opposed to all the other work I could do instead. They still let me in. When I show this to others in medicine, I get a mix of laughs and groans of recognition. Most of them wrote something similar. The impression I get from senior doctors who have to read this stuff is they see it a bit like a toddler zooming around on their new tricycle: a mostly endearing (if occasionally annoying) work in progress. Season them enough with the blood, sweat, and tears of clinical practice, and they'll generally turn out as wiser, perhaps more cantankerous, but ultimately humane doctors. Yet more important than me being earnest — and even me being trite — was that I was wrong. Medicine was...

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### Longtermism: a call to protect future generations

> It would be better for the future if we avoid extinction, manage our resources carefully, foster institutions that promote cooperation rather than violent conflict, and responsibly develop powerful technology.

- Published: 2023-03-28
- Modified: 2025-03-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/future-generations/
- Topics: Future generations & longtermism, Moral patients, Moral philosophy

When the 19th-century amateur scientist Eunice Newton Foote filled glass cylinders with different gases and exposed them to sunlight, she uncovered a curious fact. Carbon dioxide became hotter than regular air and took longer to cool down. Remarkably, Foote saw what this momentous discovery meant. "An atmosphere of that gas would give our earth a high temperature," she wrote in 1857. Though Foote could hardly have been aware at the time, the potential for global warming due to carbon dioxide would have massive implications for the generations that came after her. If we ran history over again from that moment, we might hope that this key discovery about carbon's role in the atmosphere would inform governments' and industries' choices in the coming century. They probably shouldn't have avoided carbon emissions altogether, but they could have prioritised the development of alternatives to fossil fuels much sooner in the 20th century, and we might have prevented much of the destructive climate change that present people are already beginning to live through — which will affect future generations as well. We believe it would've been much better if previous generations had acted on Foote's discovery, especially by the 1970s, when climate models were beginning to reliably show the future course of warming global trends. If this seems right, it's because of a commonsense idea: to the extent that we are able to, we have strong reasons to consider the interests and promote the welfare of future generations. That was true...

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### Anonymous advice: If you want to reduce AI risk, should you take roles that advance AI capabilities?

> Should you work on AI capabilities? We put this question to the AI experts we thought most qualified to answer it - and they don't all agree.

- Published: 2022-10-03
- Modified: 2024-01-23
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/ai-capabilities/
- Topics: AI safety technical research, Artificial Intelligence, Software Engineering

We've argued that preventing an AI-related catastrophe may be the world's most pressing problem, and that while progress in AI over the next few decades could have enormous benefits, it could also pose severe, possibly existential risks. As a result, we think that working on some technical AI research -- research related to AI safety -- may be a particularly high-impact career path. But there are many ways of approaching this path that involve researching or otherwise advancing AI capabilities -- meaning making AI systems better at some specific skills -- rather than only doing things that are purely in the domain of safety. In short, this is because: Capabilities work and some forms of safety work are intertwined. Many available ways of learning enough about AI to contribute to safety are via capabilities-enhancing roles. So if you want to help prevent an AI-related catastrophe, should you be open to roles that also advance AI capabilities, or steer clear of them? We think this is a hard question! Capabilities-enhancing roles could be beneficial or harmful. For any role, there are a range of considerations -- and reasonable people disagree on whether, and in what cases, the risks outweigh the benefits. So we asked the 22 people we thought would be most informed about this issue -- and who we knew had a range of views -- to write a summary of their takes on the question. We received 11 really interesting responses, and think that these are likely a...

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### How much do solutions to social problems differ in their effectiveness? A collection of all the studies we could find.

- Published: 2022-10-01
- Modified: 2023-01-23
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/charitable-interventions-differ/
- Topics: Unconventional advice

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### What if you lived every human life?

- Published: 2022-09-30
- Modified: 2022-10-04
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/what-if-you-lived-every-human-life/

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### In which career can you make the biggest contribution?

> Find out how to get more leverage to contribute to pressing world problems in many different career paths.

- Published: 2022-09-13
- Modified: 2023-12-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/leverage/
- Topics: Career advice & strategy, Leverage

One of the most common career paths for people who want to do good is healthcare. So we worked with a doctor, Greg Lewis, to estimate the number of lives saved by a typical clinical doctor in the UK. Greg estimated that the average doctor enables the people they treat to live several hundred years of extra healthy life over the course of their career -- equivalent to saving several lives. This is a lot of impact compared to most jobs, but it's less than many expect (and we think less than many of the careers we recommend most highly). One reason is that issues like health in rich countries already receive a (relatively) large amount of attention. In this article, we'll touch on another reason: the impact of a clinical doctor is limited by the number of people they can treat with their own two hands, which puts a cap on the potential size of their contribution. For instance, Greg decided to switch from clinical medicine to research into health policy, since an improvement to key government policies could affect millions of people -- far more than he could ever treat himself. This illustrates a broader point: careers that do good are often associated with certain job titles -- doctor, teacher, charity worker, and so on. Intuitively, people group careers into those that 'help' and everything else. But your job title isn't what matters -- what matters is the scale of the contribution you're able to make in solving...

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### What could an AI-caused existential catastrophe actually look like?

> Arguments for AI being risky are often very abstract. Here we explain several concrete ways an AI system might be able to actually gain power.

- Published: 2022-08-25
- Modified: 2024-09-26
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/what-could-an-ai-caused-existential-catastrophe-actually-look-like/
- Topics: AI safety technical research, Artificial Intelligence, Existential risk, Long-term AI policy

This article forms part of our explanation of (/problem-profiles/artificial-intelligence/). If you're interested in understanding not just *how* an AI system could cause an existential catastrophe, but also *why* we're worried things like this will happen, take a look at our full (/problem-profiles/artificial-intelligence). At 5:29 AM on July 16, 1945, deep in the Jornada del Muerto desert in New Mexico, the Manhattan Project carried out the world's first successful test of a nuclear weapon. From that moment, we've had the technological capacity to wipe out humanity. But if you asked someone in 1945 to predict exactly how this risk would play out, they would almost certainly have got it wrong. They may have thought there would have been more widespread use of nuclear weapons in World War II. They certainly would not have predicted the fall of the USSR 45 years later. Current experts are concerned about India–Pakistan nuclear conflict and North Korean state action, but 1945 was before even the partition of India or the Korean War. That is to say, you'd have real difficulty predicting anything about how nuclear weapons would be used. It would have been even harder to make these predictions in 1933, when Leo Szilard first realised that a nuclear chain reaction of immense power could be possible, without any concrete idea of what these weapons would look like. Despite this difficulty, you wouldn't be wrong to be concerned. In our problem profile on AI,...

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### Applying an unusual skill to a needed niche

- Published: 2021-11-15
- Modified: 2023-11-16
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/applying-an-unusual-skill-to-a-needed-niche/
- Topics: Applying an unusual skill to a needed niche

If you already have a strong existing skill set, is there a way to apply that to one of the key problems? If there's any option in which you might excel, it's usually worth considering, both for the potential impact and especially for the career capital; excellence in one field can often give you opportunities in others. This is even more likely if you're part of a community that's coordinating or working in a small field. Communities tend to need a small number of experts covering each of their main bases. For instance, anthropology isn't the field we'd most often recommend someone learn, but it turned out that during the Ebola crisis, anthropologists played a vital role, since they understood how burial practices might affect transmission and how to change them. So, the biorisk community needs at least a few people with anthropology expertise. This means that if you have an existing skill set that covers a base for a community within a top area, it can be a promising option, even if it's obscure. However, there are limits to what can be made relevant. We struggle to think of a way to connect some subjects directly to the top problem areas, so sometimes it will be better to retrain rather than apply an existing skill. If you have an unusual skill set, it's hard for us to give general advice online about how best to use it. Ideally, you can speak to experts in the problem areas you want...

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### Be more ambitious: a rational case for dreaming big (if you want to do good)

> Self-help often says you should be more ambitious. This isn't always good advice. But if you want to do good, here are 4 reasons it makes sense.

- Published: 2021-11-12
- Modified: 2024-03-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/be-more-ambitious/
- Topics: Being ambitious, Career advice & strategy, Effective Altruism, Risk

Self-help advice often encourages people to "dream big," "be more ambitious," or "shoot for the moon" -- is that good advice? Not always. When asked, more than 75% of Division I basketball players thought they would play professionally, but only 2% actually made it. Whether or not the players in the survey were making a good bet, they overestimated their chances of success... by over 37 times. This level of overconfidence is common, and means that "be more ambitious" may not always be the right advice. Some people even enjoy taking risks, which explains why they buy lottery tickets even though they lose money on average. Whether to be more ambitious depends on the domain and the person in question. However, if your aim is to have positive impact on the world, we think we can make a rational case for setting ambitious goals. In short, our advice is to do as much as you can to set up your life so that you can afford to fail, eliminate paths that might cause significant harm, and then aim as high as you can. As a slogan: limit downsides, then target upsides. The fraction of high school athletes who will go pro is tiny. Even among Division 1 college athletes, 44–76% believe they will go pro (depending on the sport), but typically under 2% actually make it -- the odds are best in baseball. ##In a nutshell: why to be more ambitious If you want to do good, here...

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### What is social impact? A definition

> Lots of people say having a social impact is one of their key goals. But what does it actually mean to have a social impact? Here's our definition.

- Published: 2021-10-01
- Modified: 2024-11-06
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/what-is-social-impact-definition/
- Topics: Effective Altruism, Future generations & longtermism, Moral philosophy, Reasoning well

Lots of people say they want to "make a difference," "do good," "have a social impact," or "make the world a better place" — but they rarely say what they mean by those terms. By getting clearer about your definition, you can better target your efforts. So how should you define social impact? Over two thousand years of philosophy have gone into that question. We're going to try to sum up that thinking; introduce a practical, rough-and-ready definition of social impact; and explain why we think it's a good definition to focus on. This is a bit ambitious for one article, so to the philosophers in the audience, please forgive the enormous simplifications. A simple definition of social impact If you just want a quick answer, here's the simple version of our definition (a more philosophically precise one -- and an argument for it -- follows below): Your social impact is given by the number of people whose lives you improve and how much you improve them, over the long term. This shows that you can increase your impact in two ways: by helping more people over time, or by helping the same number of people to a greater extent (pictured below). We say "over the long term" because you can help more people either by helping a greater number now, or taking actions with better long-term effects. This definition is enough to help you figure out what to aim at in many situations -- e. g. by roughly...

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### Moral uncertainty: how to act when you’re uncertain about what’s good

- Published: 2021-09-28
- Modified: 2024-03-21
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/moral-uncertainty/
- Topics: Decision making, Moral philosophy, Moral uncertainty

We can be uncertain about matters of fact, like whether it'll rain tomorrow, but we can also be uncertain about moral claims, like how much to value the interests of future generations. In the last decade, there has been more study of how to act when uncertain about what's of value, and our cofounder, Will MacAskill, has written a book on the topic. An approach that's common is to pick the view that seems most plausible to you, and to go with that. This has been called the 'my favourite theory' approach. But this approach seems bad. Consider a situation like this: You're at a restaurant and can order either foie gras or vegetarian risotto. You think there's a 55% chance that animal welfare has no moral significance, and a 45% chance that it does, which would mean it's deeply wrong to eat the foie gras. Personally, you'd find either meal equally delicious. The favourite theory approach would say you should act as if animal welfare doesn't matter, and so it's equally good to order either the foie gras or the risotto. But it seems clearly better to pick the risotto. Rather than go with your favourite theory, we think a more plausible approach is to consider a range of perspectives, and take the actions that seem best on balance. Exactly how to determine which actions seem best 'on balance' is highly debated, but we think one likely consequence is a type of moral caution -- if one plausible perspective...

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### Cluelessness: can we know the effects of our actions?

- Published: 2021-09-27
- Modified: 2023-05-23
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/cluelessness/
- Topics: Decision making, Moral philosophy, Reasoning well

Many people argue that the effects of our actions are so diverse and unpredictable that it's impossible to know whether they're ultimately good or bad — so it doesn't make sense to struggle to increase our impact. The pop version of the criticism is that if you save a life, that person might become the next Hitler — so your well-intentioned action might have actually resulted in the deaths of millions. This version of the criticism is silly: although there's some chance that the person whose life you save will be the next Hitler, it's so low that the possibility doesn't have much effect on the expected value. And just as you might save the next Hitler, you might also save the next Norman Borlaug, who saved hundreds of millions of lives. But the silly version of the argument does point at something real. Even if we set aside extreme scenarios like saving baby Hitler, every action we take causes ripple effects that extend indefinitely into the future. For instance, if you save a life, that person will likely have children (which could be good or bad for that child), and then those people will have children, and so on and so on. These ripple effects could have either enormously good or bad consequences — and we don't know what they'll be. This appears to make people who want to do good "clueless" about the ultimate effects of their actions. How might we respond to this argument? An initially attractive...

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### Counterfactuals and how they change our view of what does good

- Published: 2021-09-27
- Modified: 2024-04-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/counterfactuals/
- Topics: Decision making, Moral philosophy, Reasoning well

Imagine you're at the scene of an accident and you see an injured person. In your enthusiasm to help, you push the paramedics out of the way and perform CPR on the injured person yourself. You're successful and bring them back to consciousness, but because you're less well-trained than the paramedics, you cause permanent damage to the person's spine. If you had let the paramedics perform CPR instead, the injured person would have made a full recovery. In this case, your tangible impact was to save their life, but your true impact compared to the counterfactual was to cause the person spinal damage. This illustrates the idea that you can have a negative counterfactual impact, even while appearing to do good directly. Carefully considering counterfactuals can have a big effect on the best ways to make a difference in your life and career. For instance, if a charity fundraiser raises £1000, it may seem like their impact is the good that the charity can achieve with that £1000. However, the total amount donated to charity is roughly constant as a fraction of GDP each year. This means that, most likely, if the fundraiser hadn't raised that £1000, it would have eventually been given to another charity. So, the actual impact of the fundraiser is only positive if their charity is more cost-effective than the charity that would have received the money otherwise. Fundraisers for charities that are less cost-effective than average are likely having a negative impact. We've also given...

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### Expected value: how can we make a difference when we're uncertain what’s true?

> A brief introduction to what expected value is, how we can use it to work out what's best to do, and some of the main objections to it.

- Published: 2021-09-27
- Modified: 2024-09-30
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/expected-value/
- Topics: Decision making, Moral philosophy, Reasoning well

What is expected value? If someone offered you a free beer, but told you there's a 1% chance it contains poison, you wouldn't drink it. That's because the badness of drinking poison far outweighs the goodness of getting a free beer, so even though you're very unlikely to end up with poison, it's not worth drinking. We all make decisions about risk and uncertainty like this in our daily lives. And when trying to do good, we often face even greater uncertainty about the ultimate effects of our actions, especially when we consider all their long-term effects. In practice, we don't -- and can't -- know for sure what the effects of our actions will be. The best we can do is to consider all of the good and bad things that could result from an action, and weigh them by how likely we think they are to actually happen. So you should think of the possibility of dying in a car crash as twice as concerning if it's twice as likely. We call this the 'expected value' of our actions, which is the technical term for the sum of all the good and bad potential consequences of an action, weighted by their probability. (You can read more about the technical definition here; it's why in our definition of social impact, we say what matters is promoting 'expected wellbeing,' rather than just 'wellbeing. ') For example, if a disaster rescue effort has a 10% chance of saving 100 people, then...

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### Why some of your career options probably have 100x the impact of others

- Published: 2021-09-22
- Modified: 2023-11-27
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/careers-differ-in-impact/
- Topics: Effective Altruism, Foundations, Reasoning well

This article is the conclusion of our old 'key ideas' series, which we stopped updating in 2023. We'd suggest reading (/make-a-difference-with-your-career/) instead. We believe that some of the career paths open to you likely have over 100 times more positive impact than other paths you might take. Why? In our key ideas series, we've shown that you can have more impact by: Finding a bigger and/or more neglected problem Finding a path that gives you a bigger opportunity to contribute Finding work that fits you better We've also shown that there are big differences for each factor: Some problems seem hundreds of times more neglected relative to their scale than others. Some career paths let you make 100 times as big a contribution to solving those problems as others, via giving you more leverage or letting you support more effective solutions. You can have many times more impact in a path that's a good fit. On top of that, you can further increase your impact by having a good career strategy, such as by striking the right balance between investing in yourself and having an impact right away. Then also note that the differences multiply together, rather than merely add up. For instance, if you can find a problem where additional resources are three times as effective, and find a path where you can make three times the contribution, then you'll have nine times as much impact. One implication of this is that...

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### This could be the most important century

- Published: 2021-09-22
- Modified: 2024-08-29
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/the-most-important-century/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Future generations & longtermism, Global priorities research

Will the future of humanity be wild, or boring? It's natural to think that if we're trying to be sober and measured, and predict what will really happen rather than spin an exciting story, it's more likely than not to be sort of... dull. But there's also good reason to think that that is simply impossible. The idea that there's a boring future that's internally coherent is an illusion that comes from not inspecting those scenarios too closely. At least that is what Holden Karnofsky — founder of charity evaluator GiveWell and foundation Open Philanthropy — argues in his new article series, "The Most Important Century. " The bind is this: for the first 99% of human history, the global economy (initially mostly food production) grew very slowly: under 0. 1% a year. But since the Industrial Revolution around 1800, growth has exploded to over 2% a year. To us in 2020, that sounds perfectly sensible and the natural order of things. But Holden points out that in fact it's not only unprecedented, it also can't continue for long. The power of compounding increases means that to sustain 2% growth for just 10,000 years -- 5% as long as humanity has already existed -- would require us to turn every individual atom in the galaxy into an economy as large as the Earth's today. Not super likely. So what are the options? First, maybe growth will slow and then stop. In that case, we live today in the single miniscule slice in...

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### How to compare global problems for yourself

- Published: 2021-09-15
- Modified: 2024-09-29
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/comparing-problems-yourself/
- Topics: Career advice & strategy, Individual reasoning & cognition, Reasoning well

If you want to do your own research into which problems are pressing, below is a process you can work through. It's one stage of our full career planning process and accompanying planning template. Creating your own ranking of pressing problems according to your values and beliefs about the world is a lot of work, but it can also be really worthwhile, especially because it can give you more of an inside understanding of different global issues. You can also do a bit of both -- doing some of your own research and also sometimes deferring to others' reasoning. Going through this process will probably be valuable even if you only do it once. But it's also valuable to keep reflecting and learning more about global problems as you progress in your career. This is not only because the most pressing problems could change, but also because it's nearly impossible to settle such a complex question in one go, so you'll want to keep updating your views over time. Reflect on your values and worldview Which global issues you think are most pressing depends on what you think most matters morally, as well as what the world is like -- empirical judgements -- and how we can come to best understand it -- epistemic judgements. We'd encourage you to spend time thinking about your overall moral values and worldview at some point, and ideally before making a long-term commitment to a path. There's a vast amount we could theoretically...

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### How to balance impact and doing what you love

> Some might say to do what you love means giving up on having as much social impact. We think the two things don’t need to be in tension.

- Published: 2021-09-09
- Modified: 2024-08-16
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/do-what-you-love-vs-impact/
- Topics: Effective Altruism, Job satisfaction, Mental health, Personal fit

We think there's less tension between the two than is often supposed. Finding work you excel at and that helps others is fulfilling, and many of our readers say they've become happier in the process. Moreover, you'll have a greater impact if you do what you love and what fits with your personal life, because you'll have a greater chance of excelling in the long term. So enjoying your work and having an impact are often mutually supportive goals. This said, sometimes conflicts do arise. For instance, the higher-impact path may involve working harder than would be ideal for your happiness, or it can involve taking the risk of trying out several paths that don't go anywhere. How to handle these conflicts is a difficult issue. We may live in a uniquely important time in history, with the opportunity to influence the development of new technologies that could impact the long-term future and reduce existential risks. We also have many other opportunities to help others a great deal with comparatively little cost to ourselves. This motivates some of our readers to make impartially doing good the main focus of their careers. Some philosophers, such as Peter Singer, have argued that we have a moral obligation to do so. However, most of our readers see 'making a difference' in the way we've outlined as one among several important career goals, which may include other moral aims, supporting a family, or furthering other personal projects. Whatever your views on this topic, we...

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### 3 key career stages

> What are the key career stages? Our simple framework helps you know where you are and plan your next step.

- Published: 2021-09-09
- Modified: 2024-09-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/key-career-stages/
- Topics: Career advice & strategy, Exploration, Foundations, Now vs. Later, Risk

This article is part of our old 'key ideas' series, which we stopped updating in 2023. We'd suggest reading (/career-guide/career-planning) instead. If you want to have an impact, the aim is to find a job that has the potential to make a big contribution to a pressing problem, and that's a good fit for you. But how can you find a job like that? In the strategy section of our key ideas series, we discuss the value of exploration and career capital, as well as many other ideas, like why to be more ambitious. Here we sum them up into a simple career strategy. Three career stages How to find a great job in a sentence: get good at something that lets you effectively contribute to pressing global problems. To expand: First, make some best guesses about which longer-term roles seem best to aim towards, both in terms of impact and career capital. We've compiled a list of high-impact options to help you get started, as well as advice on comparing them. Your answer will only be a guess because it's so hard to predict where you'll succeed in the long term (and your views about which problems to focus on might change). We advocate taking an iterative approach, updating your best guess every 1–3 years. Once you have some best-guess longer-term roles, you can roughly follow these three stages: Explore: take low-cost ways to learn about and test...

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### Career exploration: when should you settle?

> How much career exploration should you do? We draw on research from computer science, psychology and elsewhere to provide a practical answer.

- Published: 2021-09-09
- Modified: 2024-01-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/career-exploration/
- Topics: Career advice & strategy, Exploration, Personal fit

Suppose you've researched different career paths, and now need to make a choice: 'Settle': commit to the path that seems best now. Explore: try other paths with the hope of finding something even better. What should you do? Steve Jobs liked to say you should "never settle," but there's a real balance to be struck between exploring and committing. Many hope to be able to find and commit to their career calling right away, but this is rarely possible because it's so hard to predict where you're going to succeed in the long term. Rather, you should approach your career like a scientist doing experiments. This means you should be prepared to test out several paths, if possible. While everyone would ideally do some career exploration, the interesting question is how much you should plan to explore, and how best to balance the costs of exploring with its upsides. There's been plenty of research in decision science, computer science, and psychology that can help us answer this question. In this article, we combine these findings with what we've learned from advising people one-on-one, and summarise some of the bottom lines. We'll argue that if you want a career that's not only satisfying but has a significant positive impact -- our focus at 80,000 Hours -- then the value of exploration is even higher. ##Career exploration in a nutshell * In addition to building career capital and having an impact, trying a job gives you 'information value' about which...

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### The best solutions are far more effective than others

> Most solutions to social problems don’t actually work very well.

- Published: 2021-09-08
- Modified: 2024-11-06
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/solutions/
- Topics: Effective Altruism, Reasoning well

Scared Straight was a government programme that received billions of dollars of funding, and was profiled in an award-winning documentary. The idea was to take kids who committed crimes, show them life in jail, and scare them into embracing the straight and narrow. The only problem? One meta-analysis found the programme made the kids more likely to commit crimes, and another more recent meta-analysis found it had no effect. Causing this much harm is rare, but when social programmes are rigorously tested, a large fraction of them don't work. So, even if you've chosen a pressing issue, it would be easy to end up working on a solution to it that has very little impact. Meanwhile, research finds that among solutions that do have positive effects, the best interventions within an area are far more cost effective than average -- often achieving over 10 and sometimes 100 times as much for a given unit of resources. Taking a career that lets you work on more effective solutions is one way to find a greater opportunity to contribute. In this article, we explain what we think the current research implies about how much solutions differ in effectiveness, why this should change how we approach making a difference, and how to find the best solutions within an area in practice. How much do solutions differ in how well they work? In recent years there's been a wave of advocacy to stop the use of plastic bags. However, convincing someone...

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### Why the problem you work on is the biggest driver of your impact

> If you want to help others, should you follow your passion? Probably not. You'll do far more good if you focus on bigger and more problem areas.

- Published: 2021-09-08
- Modified: 2024-09-29
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/your-choice-of-problem-is-crucial/
- Topics: Foundations, Most pressing problems, Problem prioritisation, Unconventional advice, User stories

If you want to make a difference, which issue is best to work on -- climate change, education, pandemics, or something else? People often think that making these kinds of comparisons is near impossible. The most common advice is that you should just work on whatever issue you're passionate about. But we believe some global problems are far bigger and more neglected than others, and so which issues you work on will probably be the biggest driver of your impact. An introduction to comparing global problems We'd like to see a great many global problems get more attention, but as individuals, the best we can do is identify the biggest gaps in existing efforts and help fill them. To find these gaps, one starting point is to look for problems that are: Important: if progress is made, how much social impact would result? Neglected: how much effort will be invested in this problem by others? Tractable: how easy is it to make progress per unit of resources? In this article, we'll argue that there are huge differences in how important and neglected different issues seem, which don't seem to be offset by differences in tractability. This means that by choosing a different issue, you might be able to increase how much impact you have by over 100 times. Some problems are bigger than others Climate change is widely considered one of the world's biggest problems, and we think it's even bigger than often supposed. While the most likely scenario...

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### Effective altruism

- Published: 2021-09-06
- Modified: 2024-08-29
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/effective-altruism/
- Topics: Effective Altruism, Foundations

It sounds obvious that it's better to help two people than one if the cost is the same. However, when applied to the world today, this obvious-sounding idea leads to surprising conclusions. In short, we believe we need a new approach to having an impact: effective altruism. Modern levels of wealth and technology have given some members of the present generation potentially enormous abilities to help others, while our common-sense views of what it means to be a good person have not caught up with this change. This means that some actions that are widely considered to 'do good' have dramatically greater positive consequences than others. For instance, the UK's National Health Service and many US government agencies are willing to spend over $30,000 to give someone an extra year of healthy life. This is a great use of resources by ordinary standards. However, research by GiveWell has found that it's possible to give an infant a year of healthy life by donating around $100 to one of the most cost-effective global health charities, such as the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF). This is about 0. 33% as much. This suggests that at least in terms of improving health, one career working somewhere like AMF might achieve as much as 300 careers focused on typical ways of doing good in a rich country. These kinds of health programmes offer such a good opportunity to do good that even the most prominent aid sceptics have offered few arguments against them. This is...

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### How to identify your personal strengths

> The best advice we’ve found on identifying your strengths, turned into a 3-step process, plus a list of personal strengths used by researchers.

- Published: 2021-03-09
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/personal-strengths/
- Topics: Ability, Career advice & strategy, Career capital, Leverage, Personal fit

Perhaps the most common approach to finding a good career is to identify your personal strengths, and then look for paths that match them. This article summarises the best advice I've found on how to identify your strengths, turned into a three-step process. It also includes lists of personal strengths that are most commonly used by researchers (to give you a language to describe your own) and a case study. But first, I wanted to give a warning that I think the 'match with strengths' approach to choosing a career seems a little overrated. Perhaps the biggest risk is limiting yourself based on your current strengths, and ignoring your potential to develop new, more potent strengths. This risk is most pressing for younger people, who don't yet have much data on what they're good at – making them more likely to guess incorrectly – and have decades ahead of them to develop new strengths. You should ask both 'what are my strengths? ' and also 'which strengths are worth building? ' More broadly, I've argued that it's often better to take the reverse approach to match with strengths: ask what the world most needs and then figure out how you might best help with that. This orientation helps you to focus on developing skills that are both valued in the market and that can be used to solve important global problems, which is key to finding a career that's both meaningful and personally rewarding. I also think the main reason to 'focus...

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### If you care about social impact, why is voting important?

> If you care about social impact, why is voting important? It's not just about your civic duty. We examine the research on US presidential elections.

- Published: 2020-10-28
- Modified: 2024-10-29
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/is-voting-important/
- Topics: Advocacy, Government & policy, Moral philosophy, Party Politics, Politics, Unconventional advice, Volunteering, Voting reform

Could one vote — your vote — swing an entire election? Most of us abandoned this seeming fantasy not too long after we learned how elections work. But the chances are higher than you might think. If you're in a competitive district in a competitive election, the odds that your vote will flip a national election often fall between 1 in 1 million and 1 in 10 million. That's a very small probability, but it's big compared to your chances of winning the lottery, and it's big relative to the enormous impact governments can have on the world. Each four years the United States federal government allocates $17,500,000,000,000, so a 1 in 10 million chance of changing the outcome of a US national election gives an average American some degree of influence over $1. 75 million. That means the expected importance of voting — the probability of changing an election's result multiplied by the impact if you do — might, depending on your personal circumstances, be very high. This could, in itself, be a good argument for voting. Fortunately there is a significant amount of academic research on the importance of elections and how likely one vote is to change the outcome, so I've pulled it together to estimate the average value of one vote for the right person. The answer, as you might expect, depends a great deal on the circumstances of any given election, and indeed most votes predictably have no impact. But there are common situations in which...

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### Research questions that could have a big social impact, organised by discipline

> Seeking inspiration for research questions? Discover examples of open questions that could have a big social impact.

- Published: 2020-08-27
- Modified: 2024-07-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/research-questions-by-discipline/
- Topics: Academic Research, Problem prioritisation, Research in relevant areas

People frequently ask us what high-impact research in different disciplines might look like. This might be because they’re already working in a field and want to shift their research in a more impactful direction. Or maybe they’re thinking of pursuing an academic research career and they aren’t sure which discipline is right for them.

In any case, below you will find a list of disciplines and a handful of research questions and project ideas for each one. They are meant to be illustrative, in order to help people who are working or considering working in these disciplines get a sense of what some attempts to approach them from a longtermist perspective might look like. They also represent projects that we think would be useful to pursue from a longtermist perspective.


About these research questions People frequently ask us what high-impact research in different disciplines might look like. This might be because they're already working in a field and want to shift their research in a more impactful direction. Or maybe they're thinking of pursuing an academic research career and they aren't sure which discipline is right for them. Below you will find a list of disciplines and a handful of research questions and project ideas for each one. They are meant to be illustrative, in order to help people who are working or considering working in these disciplines get a sense of what some attempts to approach them from a longtermist perspective might look like. They also represent projects that we think would be useful to pursue from a longtermist perspective. These lists are not meant to be exhaustive; nor are they meant to express a considered view on what we think the most valuable questions and projects in each area are. We've categorised the entries by discipline, though even if you're already a researcher in one discipline we'd encourage you to consider questions and projects from others as well. Working at the intersection of two fields, and using the tools from one to tackle questions from another, can be good ways to increase your impact, as these interfaces are often more neglected. There is some overlap between the disciplines listed below, and some repetition of questions that seemed like particularly good examples of research in more than one field... .

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### How to use your career to help reduce existential risk

- Published: 2020-08-14
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/how-to-reduce-existential-risk/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Career advice & strategy, Career capital, Careers, Earning to Give, Existential risk, Government & policy, Graduate school, Long-term AI policy, Organisation-building at effective nonprofits, Research in relevant areas, Research into global priorities, Top-recommended careers, World problems

In The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity our trustee Toby Ord argued that reducing existential risks -- the chances of e. g. catastrophic global pandemics, run-away climate change, or unaligned artificial intelligence -- should be a top global priority. But what does this mean in practical terms? How can you actually use your career to reduce existential risks? We think there are many different ways to help tackle these issues, and so various lines of work could be both very helpful and potentially a good fit for many readers. In short, the process we recommend for finding the best ways to help is: Think about which particular risks you want to focus on mitigating -- 'direct' existential risks like particularly severe pandemics, or 'indirect' existential risks (so-called 'risk factors'), like global political instability or lack of cooperation between major powers. (More below) Come up with ideas for careers that address these issues -- we think careers in research, government & policy, and nonprofits seem especially promising. (More below) Identify next steps to entering into those careers, compare them, and get started. (More below) In the rest of this article, we give more detail on how to follow each of these steps. 1. Choose which issues to focus on. Broadly speaking, you have three options for reducing existential risks: Directly working to reduce the world's largest and most neglected existential risks Directly working to reduce the largest and most neglected 'risk factors' (i. e. issues that amplify existential risk,...

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### Anonymous answers: the complete collection

- Published: 2020-06-05
- Modified: 2024-10-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/anonymous-answers/
- Topics: Anonymous advice, Unconventional advice

This collection contains excerpts from interviews with people whose work we respect and whose answers we offered to publish without attribution. This means that these quotes don't represent the views of 80,000 Hours, and indeed in some cases, individual pieces of advice explicitly contradict our own. Nonetheless, we think it's valuable to showcase the range of views on difficult topics where reasonable people might disagree. Did you just land on our site for the first time? After this you might like to read our career guide. It aims to show you how to find a fulfilling career that does good. [cards...

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### Essential Facts and Figures - COVID-19

> Summary of our understanding of the current science on key questions about COVID-19 (as of 3 April, 2020), as best we can given the state of the evidence and the fast moving situation.

- Published: 2020-04-03
- Modified: 2024-11-22
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/covid-19-key-facts/
- Topics: Careers, Catastrophic pandemics, Forecasting, World problems

This page aims to summarise our understanding of the current science on key questions about COVID-19 (as of 3 April, 2020), as best we can given the state of the evidence and the fast moving situation. We provide more explanation as well as sources in the footnotes. Symptoms and severity The most common reported symptoms are cough (appearing in about 80% of confirmed cases - meaning those who have been tested and found to be infected with the virus) and fever (80%-90%). Many also experience shortness of breath, usually later in the disease progression. Diarrhea and other GI symptoms have also been seen in some patients. Nasal congestion and runny nose seem uncommon (

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### Options for donating to fight COVID-19

> Many people have been asking about where they can donate to fight COVID-19, so we asked a couple of advisors for their quick thoughts.

- Published: 2020-03-27
- Modified: 2024-11-28
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/covid-19-options-for-donating/
- Topics: Catastrophic pandemics, Donating effectively, Earning to Give

Many people have been asking about where they can donate to fight COVID-19, so we asked a couple of advisors for their initial thoughts on which opportunities could be especially high-leverage. We haven't evaluated how these compare to donation opportunities in other areas, but if you are keen to donate specifically to COVID-19-related work then read on. 1. Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security Personally, I would donate to the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins (CHS), which researches biosecurity and advocates for better policy. It takes donations here, or you can donate through the Effective Altruism Funds. They've been one of the most influential sources of information and analysis for helping inform policymakers' response to the crisis, for instance releasing influential situation reports at least once a day since January 22nd. Getting the policy response right seems like a crucial lever in navigating the crisis, and requires comparatively little funding. They had a good track record of work on pandemic preparedness before the crisis, and received a large grant from Open Philanthropy in 2019. My best guess is that if the CHS has urgent funding needs during the crisis, those needs will be met by other donors, especially Open Philanthropy. However, the Center's budget is large, so in the longer term I expect it could make productive use of additional funding, helping to improve the policy response to future pandemics. This seems like an advantage to me (because I think future pandemics are a highly...

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### If you want to help the world tackle COVID-19, what should you do?

> There are five main things we need to tackle the crisis. How to find your best opportunity to help.

- Published: 2020-03-27
- Modified: 2024-11-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/covid-19-what-should-you-do/
- Topics: Biomedical Research, Biorisk strategy & policy, Catastrophic pandemics, Volunteering, World problems

To tackle the COVID-19 crisis, there are five main things we need to do: Research to understand the disease and to develop new treatments and a vaccine. Determine the right policies, both for public health and the economic response. Increase healthcare capacity, especially for testing, ventilators, personal protective equipment, and critical care. Slow the spread through testing & isolating cases, as well as mass advocacy to promote social distancing and other key behaviours, buying us more time to do the above. We also need to keep society functioning through the progression of the pandemic. Everyone can help stem the spread of COVID-19 by practicing proper hygiene and staying at home whenever possible. But if you want to do more, what can you do that's most effective? To maximise your impact, the aim is to identify a high-leverage opportunity to contribute to one of these bottlenecks that's a good fit for your skills. In this article, we'll discuss some opportunities to work within each of these five categories, and some rules of thumb to work out which might be highest-impact for you, drawing from the rest of our research on high-impact careers. We also provide a long list of specific projects we've seen proposed. We cover where to donate, in a separate article on donation opportunities to fight COVID-19. We'll also briefly consider whether to spend time working on COVID-19, or stick with your current path. The rest of the world's problems have not gone away, so if you're already...

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### Advice on how to read our advice

- Published: 2019-11-11
- Modified: 2023-11-27
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/advice-on-how-to-read-our-advice/
- Topics: About 80,000 Hours, Careers, Unconventional advice

We've found that readers sometimes interpret or apply our advice in ways we didn't anticipate and wouldn't exactly recommend. That's hard to avoid when you're writing for a range of people with different personalities and initial views. To help get on the same page, here's some advice about our advice, for those about to launch into reading our site. We want our writing to inform people's views, but only in proportion to the likelihood that we're actually right. So we need to make sure you have a balanced perspective on how compelling the evidence is for the different claims we make on the site, and how much weight to put on our advice in your situation. What follows is a list of points to bear in mind when reading our site, and some thoughts on how to avoid the communication problems we face. We've been wrong before, and we'll be wrong again We still have a lot to learn about how people can best have a positive impact with their careers. This means, unfortunately, that we make mistakes and change our advice over time. And this means that in a couple of years, we'll no longer stand by some of the claims we make today. Our positions can change because the world changes -- for instance, a problem that was more pressing in the past can receive lots of attention and become less pressing over time. Our positions can also change as we learn more -- for instance, we...

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### Before committing to management consulting, consider directly entering priority paths, policy, startups, and other options

- Published: 2019-11-03
- Modified: 2024-05-10
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/alternatives-to-consulting/
- Topics: Career advice & strategy, Career capital, Careers, Consulting, Fields, Personal fit

Many people we advise seem to think that management consulting is the best way to establish their career and gain career capital in their first one or two jobs after their undergraduate degree. Because of this, people we advise often don't spend much time generating additional options once they've received a management consulting offer, or considering alternatives before they apply to consulting in the first place. However, we think that for people who share our 'longtermist' view of global priorities, there are often even better options for career capital. We've even met people who already have PhDs from top programmes in relevant areas but who think they need to do consulting to gain even more career capital, which we think is rarely the best option. This is even more true of other prestigious generalist corporate jobs, such as investment banking, corporate law, professional services, and also perhaps to options like Teach for America (if you don't intend to go into education) and MBAs. We provide a little more detail on these alternatives below. We think this mistaken impression is in part due to our old career guide, which featured consulting and other prestigious corporate jobs prominently in our article on career capital. (We explain how our views have changed over time and the mistakes we made presenting them in the appendix. ) We want to clarify that while we think consulting is a good option for career capital early in your career (especially for practical "do-er" types), if you're able to...

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### How useful are longer-term career plans?

- Published: 2019-10-01
- Modified: 2022-12-14
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/career-planning/
- Topics: Career advice & strategy, Career planning, Other topics, Reasoning well

**New:** We've just launched our in-depth career planning process. It's the most comprehensive and up-to-date overview of all our advice on career planning, and includes a step-by-step career planning template. (/career-planning/process){. btn . btn-primary} (/career-planning/career-plan-template){. btn . btn-default} There are two main types of mistakes one can make with career plans: having an overly rigid and specific plan, and having no long-term plans at all. We see both issues in our advising. In the rest of this article, we give some arguments for and against long-term career planning, and explain how we aim to strike the balance between both types of mistake. "Plans are useless but planning is essential. " — Dwight D. Eisenhower ##In a nutshell We find it useful to break (/career-planning) into two parts: long-term options and next steps. Your long-term options are the global problems and broad career paths you aim to work on over the next 5 to 25 years. Your next step is what you'll do over the next couple of years to get there. How much to plan is a matter of balance. It's useful to both work backwards from broad high-impact paths you could take in the long-term, and to work forwards from the concrete opportunities that are open to you right now. We find people often err in both directions: many haven't spent much time thinking about which problems and careers might be highest-impact to work on in the long term, even though some long-term paths are much more...

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### Working in US AI policy

> The US Government is likely to be a key actor in how advanced AI is developed and used in society. Learn more about this career path.

- Published: 2019-01-31
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/us-ai-policy/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Government & policy, Long-term AI policy, Top-recommended organisations

This article was originally published in 2019. It was revised in July 2023 to reflect more recent developments and thinking. At 80,000 Hours, we think a significant number of people should build expertise to work on United States policy relevant to the long-term effects and potentially catastrophic risks of the development and use of artificial intelligence. In this article we go into more detail on this claim as well as discuss arguments in favour and against working in this area. We also briefly outline which specific career paths to aim for and discuss which sorts of people we think might suit these roles best. We have separate articles that cover a broader set of potential career paths in the AI governance and coordination space and in AI safety technical research. ## Summary * The US government is likely to be a key actor in how advanced AI is developed and used in society, whether directly or indirectly. * One of the main ways that AI might not yield substantial benefits to society is if there is a race to the bottom on AI safety. Governments are likely to be key actors that could contribute to an environment leading to such a race or could actively prevent one. * Good scenarios seem more likely if there are more thoughtful people working in government who have expertise in AI development and are concerned about its effects on society over the long-term. * In some ways, this may be a...

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### ML engineering for AI safety & robustness: a Google Brain engineer's guide to entering the field

- Published: 2018-11-02
- Modified: 2024-12-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/ml-engineering-career-transition-guide/
- Topics: AI safety technical research, Artificial Intelligence, Career advice & strategy, Computer science, Machine learning, Software Engineering, Top-recommended organisations, Unconventional advice

Technical AI safety is a multifaceted area of research, with many sub-questions in areas such as reward learning, robustness, and interpretability. These will all need to be answered in order to make sure AI development will go well for humanity as systems become more and more powerful. Not all of these questions are best tackled with abstract mathematics research; some can be approached with concrete coding experiments and machine learning (ML) prototypes. As a result, some AI safety research teams are looking to hire a growing number of Software Engineers and ML Research Engineers. Additionally, some research teams that may not think of themselves as focussed on 'AI Safety' per se, nonetheless work on related problems like verification of neural nets or learning from human feedback, and are often hiring engineers. Note that this guide was written in November 2018 to complement an in-depth conversation on the 80,000 Hours Podcast with Catherine Olsson and Daniel Ziegler on how to transition from computer science and software engineering in general into ML engineering, with a focus on alignment and safety. If you like this guide, we'd strongly encourage you to check out the podcast episode where we discuss some of the instructions here, and other relevant advice. *Update Feb 2022: The need for software engineers in AI safety seems even greater today than when this post was written (e. g. see (https://forum. effectivealtruism. org/posts/DDDyTvuZxoKStm92M/ai-safety-needs-great-engineers) by Andy Jones). You also don't need as much knowledge of AI safety to enter the field as this...

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### Ways people trying to do good accidentally make things worse, and how to avoid them

> Even when you try to do good, you can end up doing accidental harm. But there are ways you can minimise the risks.

- Published: 2018-10-16
- Modified: 2023-12-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/accidental-harm/
- Topics: Accidental harm, Careers, Existential risk, Unconventional advice

We advise people to work on problems that are important but neglected, and to try to increase the contribution they're able to have. These steps make it easier to have a big impact, but they also increase your potential to make things worse: the more important the problem, the worse it is to set it back; the more neglected an area, the more effect you have on its trajectory; and the more influence you have, the more it matters if you're wrong. This holds even if you're not doing anything directly harmful and trying to be cautious — it's easy to make things worse by accident, and indeed to make them much worse. In some areas of life, your downsides are relatively capped. If you try to write a great novel, and no one wants to publish it, the worst thing you've done is waste some time. But we'll show that when it comes to doing good — especially in 'fragile fields' — there are many ways to set back the broader field, and so the downsides aren't limited in the same way. The potential for negative impact can be as big or greater than the potential for positive. So if you're going to try to have an impact, and especially if you're going to be ambitious about it, it's very important to carefully consider how you might accidentally make things worse. This doesn't mean sticking to 'sure things' that everyone agrees with. To have a significant impact, you need...

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### Have a particular strength? Already an expert in a field? Here are the socially impactful careers 80,000 Hours suggests you consider first.

- Published: 2018-10-06
- Modified: 2023-09-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/advice-by-expertise/
- Topics: Applying an unusual skill to a needed niche, Career advice & strategy, Careers, Fields, World problems

This list is preliminary. We wanted to publish our existing thoughts on what to do with each skill, but can easily see ourselves changing our minds over the coming years. You can read about our general process and what career paths we recommend in our full article. Sometimes, however, it's possible to give more specific advice about what options to consider to people who already have pre-existing experience or qualifications, or are unusually good at a certain type of work. In this article, we provide a list of skills, and for each one give a list of socially-impactful options that people who are unusually good in that area should most often consider. We start with three "strengths" (quantitative, verbal & social, and visual). Then we go on to give advice for people with existing experience in fifteen specific fields. Bear in mind it's often possible to completely change field: we've seen people switch from philosophy to software engineering, and architecture into economics. Nonetheless, these are good starting points. The skill types also overlap, and you probably also have several of them. The aim is just to give you some tips on narrowing down your options more quickly. This article assumes you're already familiar with our problem profiles and top careers. It just summarises our bottom lines on how to narrow down, without giving all our reasoning. Advice for people with particular strengths Strong quantitative skills: mathematics, statistics, physics, computer science etc. If you have this skill set, the first...

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### Doing good together: how to coordinate effectively and avoid single-player thinking

> When we work together, we can do far more good in the world. We cover the basics of coordination and practical tips for doing it more effectively.

- Published: 2018-09-21
- Modified: 2024-11-08
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/coordination/
- Topics: Building effective altruism, Building the effective altruism community, Community & coordination, Effective Altruism, Foundations, Institutional decision making, Research into global priorities

Sapiens can cooperate in flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. That's why we rule the world, whereas ants eat our leftovers and chimps are locked up in zoos. The historian, Yuval Harari, claims in his book Sapiens that better coordination has been the key driver of human progress. He highlights innovations like language, religion, human rights, nation states and money as valuable because they improve cooperation among strangers. If we work together, we can do far more good. This is part of why we helped to start the effective altruism community in the first place: we realised that by working with others who want to do good in a similar way -- based on evidence and careful reasoning -- we could achieve much more. But unfortunately we, like other communities, often don't coordinate as well as we could. The effective altruism mindset can easily encourage a 'single-player' mindset – one which tries to identify the best course of action assuming what everyone else does is fixed. This can be a reasonable assumption in many circumstances, but once you're part of a community that does respond to your actions, it can lead to suboptimal actions. For instance, a single-player mindset can suggest trying to find a job that no one else would do, so that you're not replaceable. But in a community where others share your values, someone else is going to fill the most impactful positions. Instead, it's better to take a portfolio approach – think about the...

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### Should you play to your comparative advantage when choosing your career?

> Doing a job where you have the comparative advantage seems like an obviously good idea, but that may not always be the case.

- Published: 2018-08-14
- Modified: 2023-12-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/comparative-advantage/
- Topics: Career advice & strategy, Career capital, Effective Altruism, Personal fit, Reasoning well

"Do the job that's your comparative advantage" might sound like obvious advice, but it turns out to be more complicated. In this article, we sketch a naive application of comparative advantage to choosing between two career options, and show that it doesn't apply. Then we give a more complex example where comparative advantage comes back into play, and show how it's different from "personal fit". In brief, we think comparative advantage matters when you're closely coordinating with a community to fill a limited number of positions, like we are in the effective altruism community. Otherwise, it's better to do whatever seems highest-impact at the margin. In the final section, we give some thoughts on how to assess your comparative advantage, and some mistakes people might be making in the effective altruism community. The following are some research notes on our current thoughts, which we're publishing for feedback. We're pretty uncertain about many of the findings, and even how to best define the terms, and could easily see ourselves changing our minds if we did more research. Reading time: 10 minutes When does comparative advantage matter? A simple example where it doesn't Here's a case where you might think comparative advantage applies, but it actually doesn't. (We'll define terms more carefully in the next section. ) Imagine there are two types of role, research and outreach. There are also two people, Carlie and Dave, who are considering which role to take. Carlie would have 2 units of impact as a researcher...

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### Operations management in high-impact organisations

> We argue that operations management is one of the highest-impact roles in the effective altruism and existential risk communities right now, and address some common misconceptions about the roles.

- Published: 2018-03-31
- Modified: 2025-02-28
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/operations-management/
- Topics: Building effective altruism, Building the effective altruism community, Operations at high impact organisations, Organisation-building at effective nonprofits, Top-recommended organisations

**In a nutshell:** People in operations roles act as multipliers, maximising the productivity of others in the organisation via building systems that keep the organisation functioning effectively at a high level. As a result, people who excel in these positions require significant creativity, self-direction, social skills, and conscientiousness. If you're a good fit, operations could be the highest-impact role for you. This career review is based largely on our 2017 survey of talent needs and input from 12 people who have worked in these roles (often in leadership positions), including: Tara Mac Aulay, Caitlin Elizondo, and Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg from the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) Malo Bourgon and Alex Vermeer from the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) Amy Willey Labenz, who has worked at both MIRI and CEA Morgan Davis from the Open Philanthropy Project Tanya Singh, Carrick Flynn, and Andrew Snyder-Beattie from the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) at Oxford Kyle Scott, who has worked at both FHI and the Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative (BERI) Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh, who has worked at both FHI and the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) at Cambridge (However, the views presented here do not necessarily reflect those of everyone listed. ) We also drew on several articles and talks, including: Tanya Singh on the need for operations An operations panel at EAG A talk at EAG on the need for operations in AI safety Our article on research management...

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### Video: The world's biggest problems and why they're not what first comes to mind

- Published: 2018-03-12
- Modified: 2023-11-27
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/video-most-pressing-problems/

Learn more READ NEXT: What are the world's most urgent problems? The full article this video came from: Want to do good? Here's how to choose an area to focus on Check out the details of how we compare problems. Other copies of the video: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn.

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### The case for reducing existential risks

> What experts say are the most likely existential risks, why they're more likely than people think, and what we can do about them.

- Published: 2017-10-27
- Modified: 2024-11-06
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/existential-risks/
- Topics: Existential risk, Future generations & longtermism, Most pressing problems, Promising interventions

In 1939, Einstein wrote to Roosevelt: It may be possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium... and it is conceivable — though much less certain — that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. Just a few years later, these bombs were created. In little more than a decade, enough had been produced that, for the first time in history, a handful of decision-makers could destroy civilisation. Humanity had entered a new age, in which we faced not only existential risks from our natural environment, but also the possibility that we might be able to extinguish ourselves. ###Prefer a podcast? {. no-toc} Since publishing this article, we recorded two podcast episodes with Dr Toby Ord, an Oxford philosopher and trustee of 80,000 Hours, about existential threats. We think they are at least as good introductions as this article -- maybe better. Listen to them here: * (https://80000hours. org/podcast/episodes/toby-ord-the-precipice-existential-risk-future-humanity/) * (https://80000hours. org/podcast/episodes/why-the-long-run-future-matters-more-than-anything-else-and-what-we-should-do-about-it/) Prefer a book? Dr Toby Ord, an Oxford philosopher and 80,000 Hours trustee, has recently published The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity which gives an overview of the moral importance of future generations, and what we can do to help them today. We'll mail you the book (for free) Join the 80,000 Hours newsletter and we'll send you a...

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### If you want to do good, here’s why future generations should be your focus

- Published: 2017-10-24
- Modified: 2017-10-24
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/if-you-want-to-do-good-heres-why-future-generations-should-be-your-focus/
- Topics: Existential risk, Future generations & longtermism, Moral philosophy

Most people think we should have some concern for future generations, but this obvious sounding idea leads to a surprising conclusion. Since the future is big, there could be far more people in the future than in the present generation. This means that if you want to help people in general, your key concern shouldn’t be to help the present generation, but to ensure that the future goes well in the long-term. We call this the “value of the long-term” thesis. This thesis is often confused with the claim that we shouldn’t act to help the present generation. But the long-term value thesis is about what most matters - what we should do about it is a further question. It might turn out that the best way to help those in the future is to improve the lives of people in the present, such as through providing health and education. The difference is that the major reason to help those in the present is to improve the long-term. The arguments for and against the long-term value thesis is a fascinating area of research. Many of the key advances have been made by philosophers who have spent time in Oxford, like Derek Parfit, Nick Bostrom, Nick Beckstead, Hilary Greaves and Toby Ord. We’ve found it incredibly interesting to watch them deepen and refine these arguments over the last 10 or so years, and we see the long-term value thesis as one of the most important discoveries of effective altruism so far... .

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### Is it fair to say that most social programmes don't work?

- Published: 2017-07-21
- Modified: 2024-09-29
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/effective-social-program/
- Topics: Effective Altruism, Existential risk, Future generations & longtermism, Future of Humanity Institute, Reasoning well

Image courtesy of A&ETV Beyond Scared Straight. Learn more about the effectiveness of Scared Straight. Lots of government and charity programmes aim to improve education, health, unemployment and so on. How many of these efforts work? The vast majority of social programs and services have not yet been rigorously evaluated, and... of those that have been rigorously evaluated, most (perhaps 75% or more), including those backed by expert opinion and less-rigorous studies, turn out to produce small or no effects, and, in some cases negative effects. This estimate was made by David Anderson in 2008 on GiveWell's blog. At that time, he was Assistant Director of the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy. This has become a widely-quoted estimate, especially in the effective altruism community, and often gets simplified to "most social programmes don't work". But the estimate is almost ten years old, so we decided to investigate further. We spoke to Anderson again, as well as Eva Vivalt, the founder of AidGrade, and Danielle Mason, the Head of Research at the Education Endowment Foundation. We concluded that the original estimate is reasonable, but that there are many important complications. It seems misleading to say that "most social programmes don't work" without further clarification, but it's true that by focusing on evidence-based methods you can have a significantly greater impact. We'll go through the estimates made by Anderson, Vivalt and Mason in turn, discuss the complications, and try to reach an overall conclusion at the end. David Anderson's updated estimates David Anderson...

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### These skills make you most employable. Coding isn’t one -- can that be right?

> A data-driven ranking of which job skills make you most employable by 80,000 Hours, a career research group founded by Oxford academics.

- Published: 2017-07-14
- Modified: 2024-11-26
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/skills-most-employable/
- Topics: Fields, How to get a job

*Caveats: Our methodology is rough and has a number of important weaknesses, so don't put too much weight on the findings for now. See a brief (https://www. onetonline. org/skills/). Read on to see how we came up with the scores and a broader analysis of the question. You can also see the (https://docs. google. com/document/d/1h8OOkz1L7AZQvOYFbY3jgzh8yZMVKlZifSzdDEY07kU/edit). * Which job skills will make you most employable? Most data-driven analyses of this question that you might see in the media only look at which skills boost income or help you get a job. But this isn't all that matters. A skill could be highly paid, but only useful in a narrow range of jobs, giving you few options if you change your mind about what to do. A skill could also be highly paid right now, but at risk of being automated in the long-term. And ultimately people care about job satisfaction, and that is not much increased by higher income. We teamed up with Tee Ponsukcharoen, a Fellow from Insight Data Science, to try to make a better analysis. As well as looking at income, we rated skills on satisfaction, risk of automation, and breadth of applicability. The results were surprising. People assume that advancing technology means that coding and other STEM skills will be most valuable in the future. But our analysis found the opposite. Rather, the skills that gain the most from changing technology are social, analytical and management skills. In the rest of the article, we explain our...

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### Is it ever OK to take a harmful job in order to do more good? An in-depth analysis

> Why you should avoid harmful jobs, even if you’ll do more good. We look at how to analyse the situation and common options, like finance, law, and oil.

- Published: 2017-06-23
- Modified: 2024-11-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/harmful-career/
- Topics: Effective Altruism, Moral philosophy, Reasoning well

Should you be willing to: Work in a morally questionable part of finance in order to make large donations to charity (where you think the donations will have a greater positive impact than the harms done by the work)? Work in a factory farm and make the conditions less bad, causing less suffering overall? Join a political campaign you think might be harmful in order to gain connections (where you think the connections will let you have more positive impact than the harm done by working for the campaign)? Work at a lab developing dangerous biotech so that you can blow the whistle if you see something particularly dangerous happening? This post sets out 80,000 Hours's views on these issues. We look at how to analyse these situations using moral philosophy, and then apply the results to some common options, like finance, law, and the oil industry. We assume you're capable of taking the harmful option, and focus on the question: "Is it right to take it? " In summary: We believe that in the vast majority of cases, it's a mistake to pursue a career in which the direct effects of the work are seriously harmful, even if the overall benefits of that work seem greater than the harms. And within a job, we think you should avoid actions that seem very wrong from a commonsense perspective, even if you think it'll do more good overall. We think that this position is justified even if all you value, morally, are...

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### Guide to working in AI policy and strategy

- Published: 2017-06-07
- Modified: 2024-12-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/ai-policy-guide/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Career advice & strategy, Long-term AI policy, Promising interventions, Top-recommended organisations

Written by Miles Brundage a researcher who works on AI policy at the University of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, with help from the 80,000 Hours team and others acknowledged below. If you are a US citizen, we recommend starting with 'The case for building expertise to work on US AI policy, and how to do it' instead of this article. Why we wrote this 80,000 Hours' research suggests that one of the highest-impact opportunities to improve the world may be by positively shaping the development of artificial intelligence. The issue is large in scale and neglected by most people. Recent experience suggests it's possible to make steady progress in reducing the risks. See our profile of the problem for further explanation of why we believe this. The last few years have seen dramatic growth in the number of people doing technical research to figure out how we can safely program an artificial general intelligence, and we have a guide for people who are considering doing this kind of work. There is another topic that is just as important and has become relatively more neglected: improving AI policy and strategy. This includes questions like how can we avoid a dangerous arms race to develop powerful AI systems; how can the benefits of advanced AI systems be widely distributed; and how open should AI research be? If we handle these issues badly, it could lead to disaster, even if we can solve the technical challenges associated with controlling a machine...

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### Which industry has the highest-paying jobs?

> New tax data lets us accurately estimate which 11 jobs and industries are the highest paying on average, and for top performers.

- Published: 2017-05-10
- Modified: 2024-03-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/highest-paying-jobs/
- Topics: Art & Entertainment, Career advice & strategy, Consulting, Doctor, Earning to give in quant trading, Effective Altruism, EtG advice, Fields, Income, Investment Banking, Lawyer, Software Engineering

Which industry has the highest paying jobs? Simple question. Hard to answer. Until recently, good data wasn't available: tax returns weren't consistently categorised by job type until 2005. Many rankings of the highest-paying jobs are based on job seeker surveys from GlassDoor, and this almost entirely misses the highest-earning people. Other rankings, such as this one by US News, use median earnings rather than the mean, making them uninformative for industries with a wide spread of earnings. The government's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is much better, but it still doesn't properly sample the highest-earning people. But we've got hold of a forthcoming paper by three economists, Benjamin Lockwood (UPenn), Charles Nathanson (Northwestern University) and Glen Weyl (Yale) that combines the BLS figures with new tax data to accurately estimate the whole income distribution of the 11 highest-earning professions. This is the best ranking we're currently aware of. In this article, we explore this data, and how it could be used to estimate the expected lifetime income of different professions. At 80,000 Hours, we help people we find fulfilling careers with positive impact. Earning more money only makes you a little happier, but it can be used to have a big positive impact. If you're reading this, while you might not be in the top 1% of income in the US, you're very likely to be in the top 1% by income globally. This means you have enormous power to have a positive impact in the world by donating...

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### College advice

> Looking for college advice? Here’s what we know about how to choose a major, and what to do once you start studying.

- Published: 2017-04-21
- Modified: 2024-07-18
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/college-advice/
- Topics: Advice for undergraduates, Career capital

Here is some tentative college advice about how to choose an undergraduate course, and what to do once you start studying. It's based on our general knowledge and the experiences of people we've advised. We haven't yet done in-depth research into this area, so our views could easily change. Priorities Clarify what you want to get out of college. Four common priorities include: Studying – so you can get good grades or learn useful skills Social - many people meet their most important friends and romantic partners through their college network Preparing for your future career through work, side projects, or research Generally learning about yourself and the world On preparing for your future career, you're right at the start — so it usually makes sense to focus mainly on exploring promising future career options and building flexible career capital, rather than pursuing a single option (unless you've already identified something that seems clearly best). We discuss how to do that below. It's worth asking yourself how much you want to focus on each of these priorities, or whether you want to prioritise something else. It can help to make some guesses about potential longer-term career options to help inform this. For instance, if you're interested in research, then getting good grades is important to get into graduate school. We discuss how much time to spend studying below. You can use our career planning process to reflect on longer-term career options. Which degree subject? Here are some key factors...

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### Some further resources on high-impact careers

- Published: 2017-03-12
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/further-reading/
- Topics: Career advice & strategy, Careers, Effective Altruism, Institutional decision making, Problem prioritisation, Research into global priorities

Below is a list of books, essays and resources which we have found helpful in drawing up our career guide, and which we hope will help if you'd like to go into more detail. Enjoying your job and altruism Stumbling Upon Happiness, by Prof. Dan Gilbert, outlines the science of measuring happiness, and explains why we're so bad at judging what will make us happy. Flourish, by Prof. Martin Seligman, is a survey of the findings of positive psychology from the last couple of decades, by the founder of the field. A bit rambly (compared to his excellent earlier work), but full of fascinating ideas and examples. The How of Happiness, by Sonja Lyubomirsky, about the best ways to implement the findings of positive psychology to become a little happier each day. Give and Take, by Prof. Adam Grant, outlines the evidence that having an altruistic mindset can make you more successful, so long as you avoid burnout. It then goes on to explain how you can avoid burnout. Altruism, by Matthieu Ricard, makes a detailed argument that it's best both for yourself and the world if you focus on helping others. Giving Without Sacrifice, by Andreas Mogensen, which explores whether giving 10% of your income to charity will make you happier. How Rich Am I? , an online calculator comparing you to the rest of the world. Excited Altruism, an essay by Holden Karnofsky at GiveWell, which argues there isn't always conflict between doing the most good and doing...

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### Where's the best place to volunteer?

- Published: 2016-12-24
- Modified: 2022-12-14
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/volunteering/
- Topics: Unconventional advice, Volunteering

We talk a lot about where to donate, but people also often ask us about where is best to volunteer. This is not something we've researched, but here are some quick notes on the topic. First we'll discuss some ways in which volunteering can be overrated and not as impactful as it first seems. But then we'll go through how volunteering can be impactful in some circumstances, especially if you're trying to explore an area and build career capital, or are applying a particular skill you've developed. One problem with volunteering is that volunteers need to be managed. If untrained volunteers use up the time of trained managers, it's easy for them to cost the organisation more than the value they add to it. The reason many volunteering schemes persist is that volunteers are more likely to donate in the future. For instance, when FORGE cut their volunteering scheme to be more effective, they inadvertently triggered a big drop in donations. This also explains why many volunteering schemes involve unskilled work, like yard work or serving food — the aim of the scheme is just to get people involved, rather than directly have an impact. If you're skilled, it makes more sense to find a way to use those skills to do good, either by applying those skills to a pressing issue, or by using them to earn money and donate to pay other people to do the unskilled work. If volunteering schemes are mainly designed to get people to...

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### How to choose where to donate

- Published: 2016-11-09
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/best-charity/
- Topics: Donating effectively, Earning to Give, Effective Altruism

If you want to make a difference, and are happy to give toward wherever you think you can do the most good (regardless of cause area), how do you choose where to donate? This is a brief summary of the most useful tips we have. How to choose an effective charity First, plan your research One big decision to make is whether to do your own research or delegate your decision to someone else. Below are some considerations. If you trust someone else's recommendations, you can defer to them. If you know someone who shares your values and has already put a lot of thought into where to give, then consider simply going with their recommendations. But it can be better to do your own research if any of these apply to you: You think you might find something higher impact according to your values than even your best advisor would find (because you have unique values, good research skills, or access to special information — e. g. knowing about a small project a large donor might not have looked into). You think you might be able to productively contribute to the broader debate about which charities should be funded (producing research is a public good for other donors). You want to improve your knowledge of effective altruism and charity evaluation. Consider entering a donor lottery. A donor lottery allows you to donate into a fund with other small donors, in exchange for a proportional chance to be able to...

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### AI safety syllabus

> This is a syllabus of relevant background reading material and courses related to AI safety. It is intended as a guide for undergraduates in mathematics and computer science.

- Published: 2016-08-14
- Modified: 2024-11-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/ai-safety-syllabus/
- Topics: AI safety technical research, Artificial Intelligence, Career advice & strategy, Long-term AI policy, Top-recommended organisations

**Update April 2024:** This syllabus was written in August 2016. The field of AI safety has progressed substantially since then. If you're looking for up-to-date resources, we recommend: * The curriculum from the (https://course. aisafetyfundamentals. com/alignment) or the (https://course. aisafetyfundamentals. com/governance), both from (https://aisafetyfundamentals. com/) * Our (https://80000hours. org/problem-profiles/artificial-intelligence/#top-resources-to-learn-more) in our full problem profile on (https://80000hours. org/problem-profiles/artificial-intelligence/) * These (https://www. aisafetysupport. org/lots-of-links) collected by the team at AI Safety Support This page was written by Jan Leike, with contributions and comments by David Krueger, Jelena Luketina, Victoria Krakovna, Daniel Dewey, Laurent Orseau, and others. It is intended as a guide to working on technical aspects of AI safety. See our guide to working in AI policy and strategy for another approach. This is a syllabus of relevant background reading material and courses related to AI safety. It is intended as a guide for undergraduates in mathematics and computer science planning their degree, as well as people from other disciplines who are thinking about moving into AI safety. It includes tips how to design your degree, how to transition into research, and the relevant conferences. This is not intended as a general guide of how to become a researcher. Want to work on AI safety? We want to help. We've helped dozens of people formulate their plans, and put them in touch with academic mentors. If you want to work on AI safety: Get in touch Reading List We now recommend using the bibliography...

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### The best email scripts for cold-emailing

- Published: 2016-06-05
- Modified: 2023-11-27
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/email-scripts/
- Topics: Advice for undergraduates, How to get a job

Here's a collection of the most useful email scripts we've found for asking for introductions and small favours from people you don't know. It's a work in progress. Send suggestions on what to include to ben@80000hours. org. How to ask for an introduction A basic script from the Muse Hi , I hope all is well with you. As you know, I've been . I noticed that you're connected to and was hoping that you could introduce us for if you feel comfortable doing so. I've included an easy-to-copy blurb below, to provide context, but let me know if there's any other information I can provide. I appreciate your help! SOURCE Scott Britton Britton is a successful tech entrepreneur. Here's his advice. How to set up an informational interview Ramit Sethi An informational interview is an opportunity to meet someone who works in a position or industry you'd like to work in, where you can ask them questions about their job and get the inside scoop. Never, ever directly ask for a job in an informational interview. That's a big no-no. You can turn an informational interview into a potential job opportunity, but only if you approach it wisely. Here's the first step of that process: The email introduction for an informational interview. By the way, the best place to get informational interviews is via your alumni association. People who went to...

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### 9 ways to put yourself in a better position in any job

- Published: 2016-05-28
- Modified: 2023-11-27
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/career-capital-in-any-job/

This article has been replaced and expanded in a new piece of our career guide: All the evidence-based advice we found on how to be successful in any job.

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### A framework for comparing global problems in terms of expected impact

- Published: 2016-04-01
- Modified: 2024-07-23
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/problem-framework/
- Topics: Problem prioritisation, Reasoning well, Research into global priorities

Suppose you're trying to figure out whether to learn about health in developing countries; or whether to become a researcher in solar energy; or whether to campaign for criminal justice reform in the USA. Which of these areas is most effective to focus on? A year's work on some problems can help a lot more people than a year's worth of work on other problems. In fact, our analysis suggests that which problem areas you choose to work on may be the single biggest determinant of the social impact you have with your career. We often make use of an informal framework for comparing problems in terms of their potential for an additional person to have a positive impact: scale, neglectedness, solvability and personal fit. Here's a popular introduction to the framework. Applying the informal version of the framework is useful, and good enough for many situations, but it can lead to some issues like double counting. In this article, we outline a more precise, quantitative version of the framework, and give more details on how to apply it to make your own comparisons of areas. The framework was first created by Open Philanthropy. We further developed this process in collaboration with staff at the Future of Humanity Institute, a former research group at the University of Oxford that advised policy-makers and major decision-makers on how to prioritise global problems (learn more about global priorities research). This framework is just one tool we use to compare different global problems, and...

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### Everything you need to know about whether money makes you happy

> It's said "money can't buy happiness," but we've all felt the pull of financial success -- so what's the truth? Here's what science has to say.

- Published: 2016-03-02
- Modified: 2024-11-26
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/money-and-happiness/
- Topics: Income, Job satisfaction, Reasoning well

Last updated: March 2016. Full reading time: 15 minutes. Introduction It's a cliché that "you can't buy happiness", but at the same time, financial security is among most people's top career priorities. Moreover, when people are asked what would most improve the quality of their lives, the most common answer is more money. What's going on here? Who is right? A lot of the research on this question is of remarkably low quality. But there have been some recent major studies in economics that allow us to make progress. In particular, we now finally have survey data from hundreds of thousands of people all around the world. We've sifted through the best studies available to figure out what's really going on. The truth seems to lie in the middle: money does make you happy, but only a little. And this has many important implications about trade-offs you face in your life and career. * Recent surveys of hundreds of thousands of people, in over 150 countries, show that richer people report being more satisfied with their lives overall, but that the richer you become, the more money you need to increase your satisfaction further. This is because people spend money on the most important things first. Someone earning $100,000 per year is only a little more satisfied than someone earning $50,000. The best available study found that each doubling of your income correlated with a life satisfaction 0. 5 points higher on a scale of 1 to 10... .

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### What should you look for in a job? Introducing our framework.

- Published: 2015-07-10
- Modified: 2022-12-14
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/framework/
- Topics: Career advice & strategy

How can you compare two career options in terms of how satisfying and high-impact they'll be? It can seem near impossible to make comparisons like this, and it's true that it's hard. But we think it's still possible to make a lot of progress. In this article, we show how to break the comparison down into four factors. These form our career framework – the key ingredients of a fulfilling and high-impact career. Why we chose these factors is more fully explained in our career guide. We've used this framework to analyse hundreds of real career decisions, and think it captures most of the important factors. However, it's a work-in-progress, and we could see ourselves changing the emphasis of the framework over time. Summary Compare your options in terms of: Role impact - which option gives you the greatest opportunity to have a social impact? We often break this down into direct, advocacy and donations. Career capital - which option will put you in the best position for the future? Personal fit - in which option will you have the best chance of excelling? Supportive conditions - which option will give you the most job satisfaction, and will fit with the rest of your life? Other personal factors. How can we compare different careers? Short-term impact Let's start by considering your impact only in the short-term. We can break it into two components: Role impact - the extent to which the role gives you opportunities to have...

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### Best existing resources

- Published: 2015-07-10
- Modified: 2024-11-26
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/best-existing-resources/

This page is no longer kept up to date and we may no longer agree with all of the recommendations. On this page, we list some of the best sources of careers advice and information we've found elsewhere. Basic information on specific career paths Occupational Outlook Handbook from the US Bureau of Labour Statistics The online BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook has profiles on many broad categories of occupation provided by the US government. It's a good place to look to find lists of different occupations when you're just starting to think about your options. It also has job descriptions, skills required, pay, work environment information, and demand growth projections. ONET ONET is a US Department of Labour website that contains detailed profiles on different occupations. It is the most systematic and evidence-based source we've found that covers what jobs involve and what skills are required (collected via self-report1). For each job it has a summary report and you can see all their data on each job by clicking on the details tab in one of the job profiles. Prospects The UK equivalent to ONET, specializing in graduate careers, is Prospects. It also has career profiles broken down by sector, containing basic information such as what the role involves and salary at different levels. In-depth career profiles Wetfeet Two sites: You can register on wetfeet. com and get access to articles and Q&As with hiring managers at major companies. They also have schools. wetfeet. com which is a more comprehensive career advice...

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### Stop worrying so much about long-term career plans

> So many people are clearly desperate to plan out the next decade of their career, ending up anxious and overwhelmed. But this isn't the best way to approach

- Published: 2014-12-12
- Modified: 2021-01-13
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/stop-worrying-so-much-about-the-long-term/
- Topics: Career capital

Many people who ask us about their careers are clearly desperate to plan out the next decade of their career, or even their entire working life. As a result, they tended to feel anxious and even overwhelmed by the options available and the weight of the decisions in front of them. Might this be you? Some giveaways are phrases like “how can I find the right career for me? ” or “I’m trying to figure out what to do with my life”. To people who feel this way, we have this advice: stop worrying so much about the long-term. Don’t get us wrong, of course your career decisions are important. 80,000 Hours is built around the idea that you can make an incredible difference through your career choices, if you choose carefully. However, we don’t think that making a detailed career plan is a particularly good way to ensure that your career goes well in the long-term. A better idea, especially at the start of your career, is to make sure you get the next step right: focus on getting into a better position, and then worry about what comes next when more decisions arise. This may sound counter-intuitive. So why do I recommend it? Four reasons: 1. You have limited knowledge If you’re at the start of your career, then you probably don’t know much about the career options available, and how to make a difference in the world. It’s also very difficult to know which jobs you’ll enjoy most...

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### Some causes are better than others

- Published: 2014-12-11
- Modified: 2025-01-21
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/effective-or-not/
- Topics: Problem prioritisation, Reasoning well

We tend to imagine that organised attempts to make the world a better place are almost always successful, at least to some extent. However, this is simply not the case. GiveWell surveyed the literature on the effects of social interventions, concluding: We think that charities can easily fail to have impact, even when they're doing exactly what they say they are. In fact, our review of academic research has led us to believe that many of the problems charities aim to address are extremely difficult problems that foundations, governments and experts have struggled with for decades. Many well-funded, well-executed, logical programs simply haven't had the desired results. David Anderson, assistant director of the Coalition for Evidence Based Policy estimates: (1) The vast majority of social programs and services have not yet been rigorously evaluated, and (2) of those that have been rigorously evaluated, most (perhaps 75% or more), including those backed by expert opinion and less-rigorous studies, turn out to produce small or no effects, and, in some cases negative effects. Even within areas where interventions do work, the differences in effectiveness are often significant. The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab is a network of over 100 academics who carry out rigorous impact evaluations of interventions within international development. Within a program area, they often find that the best interventions are more than ten times as effective as others with the same aim, even when excluding entirely ineffective programs. To take one example, they studied interventions aiming to increase...

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### The difference between true and tangible impact

- Published: 2014-11-06
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/true-vs-tangible-impact/
- Topics: Effective Altruism, Personal fit, Problem prioritisation, Reasoning well

When people think about the impact of their actions, they tend to think only of the immediate results - what we call their tangible impact. But that is only part of the story. To get the full picture, you need to compare the world you bring about with the world as it would have been without your involvement. We call this your true impact. Here's an example to illustrate the difference. Imagine you're at the scene of an accident and you see an injured person. In your enthusiasm to help, you push the paramedics out of the way and perform CPR on the injured person yourself. You're successful and bring them back to consciousness, but because you're less well-trained than the paramedics, you cause permanent damage to the person's spine. If you had let the paramedics perform CPR instead, the injured person would have made a full recovery. In this case, your tangible impact was to save their life, but your true impact was to cause the person spinal damage. This example also illustrates that your true impact is what really matters. Even though the tangible impact of performing CPR was good - you saved a life - it wasn't in fact the right thing to do. It would have been even better if you hadn't acted, since the injured person would still have survived and would not have suffered spinal damage. The same is true when you seek to make a difference with your career. The true impact of...

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### Reasoning behind our framework

> On this page we outline why we use a framework and how we selected the factors to go in our framework.

- Published: 2014-10-26
- Modified: 2015-07-07
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/reasoning-behind-our-framework/

On this page, we outline the reasoning behind our framework. In particular, we explain (i) why we use a framework at all (ii) how we selected the factors (iii) our views about which factors are most important. Why use a framework at all? We want to compare career options in terms of how much impact they’ll let you have in the long-run. Ideally, we could precisely measure the impact of each option (perhaps in terms of how many lives you improve), and choose the best one. In practice, we’ll never be able to get a precise measurement - the impact of a career option is just far too complicated. However, that doesn’t mean that all options are equally good - it’s obvious that some options are better than others. Rather, it means we need to prioritise what we investigate, and identify the most important dimensions to compare your options on in the limited time available. The goal of a good framework is to identify the factors that are most high-priority to investigate (essentially those which have the highest value of information). How did we choose these factors? What makes one factor better than another? The importance of a factor within the framework depends on: Relevance: To what extent do differences in this factor correlate with long-run impact? Scale: How much do careers differ based on this factor? Measurability: How is it to find out about these differences in the time available? To take an example, whether you sit on...

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### 4 biases to avoid in career decisions

- Published: 2014-10-26
- Modified: 2024-11-22
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/4-biases-to-avoid-in-career-decisions/
- Topics: Career advice & strategy, Reasoning well

Over the last couple of decades, a large and growing body of research has emerged which shows that our decisions are far from rational. We did a survey of this research to find out what it means for your career decisions. It turns out that we likely don't know as much as we think we do, are overconfident, tend to think too narrowly and continue with paths that are no longer best for us. We need to be more sceptical of our decisions than we might be inclined to be; find ways to broaden our options; and take a more systematic and evidence-based approach to career choice. In what follows, we summarise the main sources of irrational bias and outline what you can do about them. 1. Thinking narrowly We often think too narrowly when considering what options are available to us, and what's important in comparing them. What's the evidence for this? There's evidence that in decision making, we "narrow frame" in two ways: first, we think too narrowly about what options are available to us. Second, we think too narrowly about what our objectives are in comparing those options. This is supported both by direct studies, and by the existence of more general biases: the availability heuristic, causing us to focus on options that are readily available; anchoring, a tendency to overweight the first piece of information given; status quo bias, an irrational preference for the current state of affairs, and the sunk cost fallacy, the...

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### Should you wait to make a difference?

- Published: 2014-10-26
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/should-you-wait/
- Topics: Ability, Career capital, Effective Altruism, Graduate school, Income, Research in relevant areas

If you're committed to making a difference with your career, you may well find that there is a tension between doing good now and laying the groundwork for doing good later. For example: Next year, you have two choices. You could work for an effective charity, making an immediate difference to its beneficiaries. Or you could go to graduate school and build up your career capital, (hopefully) allowing you to have a larger impact later. Alternatively, say you have a substantial sum of money. You could give it today, or you could invest it, allow it to grow, and then give the larger amount later. How can you go about deciding between these options? Here we present a summary of our findings. The full research has been published by Oxford University's Global Priorities Project. Summary of our findings Summary: should you donate money now or later? First, focus on saving enough to live for at least six months with no income, then start saving a reasonable amount for retirement (typical advice is 15% of income) and paying down any high interest rate debt. During this period, aim to give 1% so you stay engaged with giving and keep learning about which charities are most effective. After that, whether to give now or later depends on a couple of factors. If you're very uncertain about where's most effective to give, then it's probably best to invest the money and give it later. We'd recommend doing this in a donor-advised fund to...

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### Why and how to keep your options open

- Published: 2014-10-26
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/keeping-options-open/
- Topics: Career capital, Career planning, Exploration, Now vs. Later

Some of the steps you could take in your career open up a greater range of career options than others. The more paths a steps opens up, and the better these paths are in terms of impact, the more it "keeps your options open". For example, an undergraduate degree opens up a wide range of jobs: it is essential for around 25% of jobs, and an advantage in a huge number of others. By contrast, many vocational qualifications only prepare you for a single career and are of little use elsewhere. As a result, undertaking an undergraduate degree does far more to keep your options open than such vocational qualifications Our advice is to keep in mind the value of keeping your options open. This is especially true at the beginning of your career but remains relevant throughout. This page explores why it is so important, and what you can do about it. Why should I keep my options open? The reason to value career flexibility so highly is that which career options are the most effective changes over time. You won't always be able to predict these changes in advance, but if you keep your options open, you'll be able to keep switching into better paths as they come up. Try to avoid making the mistake of one person we know, who undertook a highly specialised hospitality degree only to discover several years later that he hated working in hotels... There are many reasons to expect the best...

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### Don't go with your gut (but check with it)

> People often talk about how you should just go with your gut instinct when choosing a career. But how useful is this advice, really?

- Published: 2014-10-25
- Modified: 2024-09-29
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/dont-go-with-your-gut-instinct/
- Topics: Ability, Career advice & strategy, Research in relevant areas

People often say you should just "go with your gut" or "follow your heart" when choosing a career. But how useful is this advice, really? A large body of research in psychology shows that our intuitions are often misleading. We're bad at judging what will make us most happy in the future. Our intuitions are only reliable when: The environment in which we’re making decisions is sufficiently predictable We have enough experience making similar decisions in similar environments We’ve had good feedback on past decisions What does all this mean for career choice? For the big questions like "in which career will I be most successful? " and "in which career can I have the most impact? " these conditions do not hold, so we shouldn't expect our gut instinct to be reliable. Generally career decisions are new, one-off and have unclear feedback, so it's difficult for our gut to learn how to handle them. However, our gut instinct should do a good job at some important inputs into career decisions, such as "do I like these people? ", "can I trust this person? ", "am I excited by this work? ". We may also be able to rely on our gut if its tapping into the experience of others. If you're experiencing a negative gut reaction to a career decision, it may be due to a problem with one of these factors. Overall, it's worth checking our intuitions when it comes to choosing a career. There are three steps to this: Ask whether...

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### Research reports

> Here we list some of our most in-depth career research reports that have not been featured on other pages.

- Published: 2014-10-04
- Modified: 2015-07-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/research-reports/

On this page, we list some of our most in-depth career research reports that have not been featured on the other pages. In-depth career research How many lives does a doctor save? A three part series, here, here, and here What’s the expected influence of becoming a politician? Read here. How hard is it to become Prime Minister of the UK? Read here. Entrepreneurship: A game of poker, not roulette. Read here. Biases Biases and how they affect your career decisions. The results of our survey of the literature on decision making biases. Read here. Personal fit and replaceability What does economics tell us about replaceability? Read here Intelligence matters more than you think for career success. Read here. Does the harm caused by banking outweigh the good done earning to give? Read here What’s your true impact? Read here Background Can you measure the good you’ll do? Read here. How altruists can benefit from risky careers. Read here. Degree choice A series of posts on how to choose a degree. Read the summary here. Read a more updated view here. What’s the financial return from doing a degree? Read here.

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### How to make a difference in any career

> It's possible to make a big difference in any career. On this page, we explain how.

- Published: 2014-10-04
- Modified: 2024-11-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/how-to-make-a-difference-in-any-career/

See this more up-to-date article on the same topic. Our main focus is on encouraging people to find and enter those careers with the highest potential for impact. However, there are plenty of times when we don't have total freedom to choose—because we've built up too much capital to change course, or because we're happy and fulfilled where we are, or because we have other constraints that make keeping our current jobs a priority. That doesn't mean you can't increase your impact! There are simple ways to make a big difference in any career—and we're not just talking about buying a charity wrist band or volunteering at the local soup kitchen. Here are five ways that anyone can ramp up the amount of good they're doing in the world: 1) Donate cost-effectively If you donate 10% of your income to effective charities, you’ll significantly help hundreds of people less fortunate than yourself, and perhaps save tens of lives. That’s probably more lives than developed-world doctors save, which is pretty incredible. Thanks to charity evaluators like GiveWell, finding the best giving opportunities takes little time. And don’t worry about missing the money—the balance of evidence suggests there’s a good chance you’ll end up happier. But if you’re concerned about this, why not try out giving with Giving What We Can? 2) Fundraise for great charities Compared to learning an entirely new skill set, it's relatively easy to raise a few hundred pounds for effective charities from your colleagues and friends, either...

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### The entrepreneur

> If you’ve got potential as an entrepreneur, attempt to found new effective non-profit organisations or innovative for-profits that benefit their customers and create positive externalities.

- Published: 2014-09-24
- Modified: 2024-02-08
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/entrepreneurship/

What do we mean by this strategy? If you've got potential as an entrepreneur, attempt to found new effective nonprofit organisations or innovative for-profits that benefit their customers and create positive externalities. Why is this strategy promising? There's a lot of scope for new high-impact organisations to be developed, but it's risky to put these ideas into practice. If you've got the right skills, then this can be an opportunity to have an outsized impact. In addition: People who are generally regarded as influential or high-impact have often founded effective organisations. For instance, Elon Musk, the founder of Solar City, Tesla and SpaceX. Within the nonprofit sector, we think founders of SCI and Against Malaria Foundation have had a big impact. Setting up new organisations involves innovation, which is a public good), so it's difficult to capture the gains for yourself. This means people are likely underincentivised to build new organisations (it's a market failure). When setting up a new organisation, the chance of failing is high, so people are under-incentivised to pursue it in order to gain personal status. Entrepreneurship is a good way to build career capital, because you'll learn quickly, and you'll develop a package of 'founder skills' that are highly useful and in-demand. Which options are best within this strategy? If interested in entrepreneurship, see our profiles on tech entrepreneurship and founding effective global poverty focused nonprofits.

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### The effective worker

> There are many nonprofit and for-profit organisations that have a large impact, which are short of specific types of human capital. If you’re a good fit for a high-impact organization, it’s an option worth considering.

- Published: 2014-09-24
- Modified: 2022-12-14
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/effective-work/

What do we mean by this strategy? There are many nonprofit and for-profit organisations that have a large impact, which are short of specific types of human capital. If you're a good fit for a high-impact organization, it's an option worth considering. By high-impact organisations we mean those that are well-run and work on an effective cause. For more, see here. What's our evidence this strategy is promising? Taking a job at an organisation with a social purpose is probably the most popular way to have an immediate impact with your career. We think there's a lot of truth in this view. There are many organisations that achieve great things that say they are constrained by an unusual type of human capital. For instance, GiveWell are constrained by people who are able to carry out their research. If you can provide this human capital, then you may have the opportunity to have an outsized impact. However, it's important to note some limitations. First, many organisations with a social purpose don't have much social impact. So, it's important to focus on working at effective organisations rather than just those with an explicitly social purpose. Second, the organisation may not be heavily constrained by the type of human capital you can offer. That's why it's important to focus on organisations where you're a good fit. Which options are best within this strategy? We haven't yet formally reviewed any organisations, though we have written about several, and of those we think that working...

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### Why and how to earn to give

> Some people have skills that are better suited to earning money than the other strategies. These people can take a higher earning career and donate the money to effective organisations.

- Published: 2014-09-24
- Modified: 2024-12-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/earning-to-give/
- Topics: Advocacy, Asset Management, Career capital, Consulting, Data science, Doctor, Donating effectively, Earning to Give, Effective Altruism, Engineering, Finance, Giving What We Can, Government & policy, Income, Investment Banking, Law, Medicine, Organisation-building at effective nonprofits, Personal fit, Research in relevant areas, Software Engineering

*I was earning more money than I ever had, I was earning more money than my parents. It was like "Wow — I just graduated from college, and I'm able to earn a lot of money. " So to give 50% seemed like the least I could be doing. * One of the ideas for which 80,000 Hours has become most known is called 'earning to give. ' Earning to give is the idea that instead of working directly to tackle a pressing problem, you take a job where you earn more money than you would have otherwise and donate much of the extra to fund others doing effective work on those problems. The basic case in its favour is that if you're a better fit for a higher-earning job than one directly working on, say, preventing catastrophic pandemics or fighting global poverty, you might be able to make a bigger contribution to these same causes via donating. This isn't usually seen as a canonically virtuous career path. But we think there's a lot to be said for it, and despite some serious potential downsides (which we'll discuss how to mitigate), we believe it should be on the shortlist for some of our readers to consider. For an idea of how it works in practice, consider the case of Jeff Kaufman who, along with his wife Julia Wise, is a parent of three children in Boston. Quartz: Jeff and Julia have tried to find the best way to...

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### How to do high impact research

> An introduction to how to have an impact in research: which graduate programs are best, what should you prioritise early career, and which topics are best?

- Published: 2014-09-24
- Modified: 2022-12-14
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/research/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Biomedical Research, Career capital, Climate change, Data science, Earning to Give, Future of Humanity Institute, Government & policy, Medical Researcher, Personal fit, Philosophy, Research in relevant areas, Research into global priorities

If you have good personal fit for a pressing area of research, it can be one of the highest-impact career options. Research can be pursued in several different ways — the one we have investigated the most is doing so within academia, for which we've written up a full career review. In this article we give an overview of how to pursue high impact research, whether within academia or outside it. What are the best graduate programs? We cover this in our article on career capital. What research should you do early career? Lots of people want to do high impact research while still a graduate student or postdoc. That's great if it's possible, but it's even more important to first establish your career. When we interviewed top biomedical researchers, this was a major theme of their advice. In the current academic system, it's very important to develop a strong publications record early, so do what you can to make that happen. It's also important to get great training, so seek out a top research group who will mentor you, even if it's not the area you'd ideally work long-term. What are the highest impact research topics? As your career becomes more established, you'll gain more and more freedom to choose the topics you want to work on. Which should you choose? Personal fit is especially important in research, because the most productive researchers have far more output than the median (as we argue below). Aim for a field...

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### The experimenter

> Finding a career that’s the right fit for you is important, but it’s also difficult to do just by thinking about it. It can therefore be a good strategy to try out a number of different areas in order to learn more about your own interests and skills.

- Published: 2014-09-24
- Modified: 2015-07-10
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/the-experimenter/

What do we mean by this strategy? Finding a career that’s the right fit for you is important, but it’s also difficult to do just by thinking about it. It can therefore be a good strategy to try out a number of different areas in order to learn more about your own interests and skills. It can be particularly useful to experiment with career paths where most of the impact comes from the highest-performing people, such as research, politics, and entrepreneurship. This way, you can learn more about what it would take for you to make it to the top. What’s our evidence this strategy is promising? Trying areas outside of your experience will help you explore your options more quickly, which is the key priority when you don’t know much about the world of careers. In particular, it can help you discover ‘unknown unknowns’ – important considerations you didn’t even realise existed. The value of testing out a path has often been an important consideration among the people we’ve coached. It can help you avoid getting stuck in a narrow area and missing a path that would have been a great fit. We’re biased to consider an overly narrow range of options. Which options are best within this strategy? Find the options that have the highest exploration value, while also keeping your options open. See how to assess exploration value here.

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### Self-developer

- Published: 2014-09-24
- Modified: 2015-07-10
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/self-developer/

What do we mean by this strategy? Enter careers that enable you to build a package of generally valuable skills, connections and credentials - ‘career capital’. What’s our evidence this strategy is promising? At the start of their careers, most people can significantly boost their abilities to make a difference over the rest of their careers by first investing in themselves. We think this is common sense, but it has also been supported by our investigations into specific ways to build career capital. For instance, we’ve found many examples of people who have been able to boost their income 20-100% within six months by learning to program. It’s important to focus on building career capital which will serve you well in many different scenarios, because it’s hard to predict where the best opportunities will be in the future. For instance, if you learn to program, then you’ll have decent employment prospects (including part-time and remote work), and you’ll also be in a better position to do research, entrepreneurship and contribute to non-profits. Which options are best within this strategy? If you want to maximise your self-development, focus on options that give you good opportunities to build career capital and are a strong personal fit. If there’s an area you think you could excel within, consider doing that, even if it’s not obviously “high-impact”. See how to assess options in terms of career capital. See how to assess options in terms of personal fit. Of the career paths we’ve investigated so...

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### Framework worksheet

- Published: 2014-09-24
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/worksheet/
- Topics: Career advice & strategy, Reasoning well

If you're already familiar with our framework, and want to apply it to compare several options within our how to choose process, you can use this worksheet, which collates all the key information onto one page. Comparison table We've made a table you can use to score each of your options. See a filled in example here. We've provided space for you to add your own factors, since our framework doesn't always perfectly capture the most important aspects of your situation. You might also want to focus on certain subfactors within each main factor. For instance, if you're particularly worried about burning out, then you could consider "burnout risk" as part of career capital; or if you're especially concerned to keep your options open you could make that a separate factor. Play around until it captures the most important factors for you. We've also provided space for you to add your own personal factors, because making a difference isn't the only thing that matters in most career decisions. See our page on job satisfaction for more information on what personal factors are often most important. Full list of assessment questions 1. Path impact potential The role impact of an option is the extent to which it gives you opportunities to make an immediate impact. Influence: What opportunities will I have to direct money and labour to effective causes? Direct impact: will I be able to work on effective causes directly with my own time? Earnings potential: how much do I...

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### To find work you love, don't (always) follow your passion

> Research shows that "follow your passion" is often bad advice. We explain why and how to do better.

- Published: 2014-09-18
- Modified: 2023-11-27
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/dont-follow-your-passion/
- Topics: Career advice & strategy, Job satisfaction, Research in relevant areas

Watch our Executive Director's TEDx talk, which has been viewed over 4. 7 million times, or read a more up-to-date article below (updated May 2016). "Follow your passion" has become a defining piece of career advice. Source: Google Ngram The idea is that the key to finding a great career is to identify your greatest interest – "your passion" – and pursue a career involving that interest. It's an attractive message: just commit to following your passion, and you'll have a great career. And when we look at successful people, they're often passionate about what they do. Now, we're fans of being passionate about your work. Research shows that intrinsically motivating work makes people a lot happier than a big pay cheque. We also think it's really important to find something you can excel at. However, there's four ways "follow your passion" can be misleading advice. One problem is that it suggests that passion is all you need. But even if you're interested in the work, if you lack the other key ingredients of job satisfaction that research has shown are important, you'll still be unsatisfied. If a basketball fan gets a job involving basketball, but works with people he hates, has unfair pay, or finds the work meaningless, he's still going to dislike his job. In fact, "following your passion" can make it harder to satisfy the other ingredients, because the areas you're passionate about are likely to be the most competitive, which makes it harder to find...

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### Improving decision making

- Published: 2014-08-28
- Modified: 2023-11-27
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/improving-decision-making/
- Topics: Forecasting research & implementation, Institutional decision making

This page has been replaced with our profile on Improving institutional decision-making.

---

### Promoting effective altruism

- Published: 2014-08-28
- Modified: 2023-11-27
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/promoting-effective-altruism/
- Topics: Building effective altruism, Building the effective altruism community, Operations at high impact organisations

Note that this page has been superseded by our problem profile about promoting effective altruism. What is this cause? Promoting effective altruism means activities which expand the capabilities of those trying to do good in a cause-neutral, evidence-based and outcome-orientated way. Interventions within this area include advocacy of key ideas in effective altruism and network-building. Some organisations in this cause include GiveWell, the Centre for Effective Altruism (our parent charity), the Copenhagen Consensus, Leverage Research, the donation pledge organisations (Giving What We Can, The Life You Can Save , the Giving Pledge) and ourselves. More broadly, you could also include organisations with an effectiveness-minded approach, like the Gates Foundation and Evidence Action. How is it different from global priorities research? Global priorities research is working out which opportunities have the most impact, while promoting effective altruism is building capacity to act on this research. In practice, both need to be carried out at the same time, and many organisations engage in a mixture of both. Why do we think it's high-priority? Promoting effective altruism is effective because it's a flexible multiplier on the next most high-priority cause. It's important because we expect the most high-priority areas to change a great deal, so it's good to build up general capabilities to take the best opportunities as they are discovered. Moreover, in the recent past, investing in promoting effective altruism has resulted in significantly more resources being invested in the most high-priority areas, than investing in them directly. For instance, for every...

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### Global priorities research

- Published: 2014-08-28
- Modified: 2024-07-23
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/global-priorities-research/
- Topics: Research into global priorities

Since publishing this profile, there has been further research on this cause. See our newer profile of the area. What is this cause? Global priorities research is activity aimed at working out which causes, interventions, organisations, policies, etc. do the most to make the world a better place. Organisations and projects within this cause include some policy think-tanks and some parts of economics. Within prioritisation research, we think the most high-priority area is long-run-focused cause-prioritisation. That is, research aimed at working out which causes do the most to make the world a better place in the long-run if we add more resources to them. Note that this research need not consist of detailed economic modelling. Global priorities research can also involve down-to-earth projects like investigating room for more funding or aggregating expert opinion. Organisations within the cause include the Copenhagen Consensus, GiveWell Labs, and the Global Priorities Institute. Why do we think it's high-priority? We think global priorities research is a highly effective cause, because: (i) we think there are likely to be large differences in the effectiveness of different causes, (ii) people don't have a good understanding of these differences, and (iii) without a better understanding, society is unlikely to take the best opportunities to do good. We also think working on this cause offers high value of information. Since there hasn't been a large systematic attempt to evaluate causes before, even if the project turns out not to produce useful answers, it'll still be highly useful to rule...

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### Job satisfaction research

> The full results of our literature survey into how to predict job satisfaction.

- Published: 2014-08-21
- Modified: 2024-11-26
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/job-satisfaction-research/
- Topics: Ability, Design, Income, Job satisfaction, Mental health, Personal fit, Research in relevant areas

Last updated: March 2016. This page outlines our research into the predictors of job satisfaction. Research process To survey the literature, we familiarised ourselves with the latest work on positive psychology by reading all of 'Flourish' and 'Learned Optimism' by Seligman, 'Stumbling on Happiness' by Gilbert, 'Drive' by Pink, and several review papers. We also did a Google Scholar search for relevant terms, read two textbooks on organisational psychology ('Work Psychology' by Arnold and Randall, and 'The Handbook Principles of Organisational Behaviour' by Locke (find a copy in this folder)), and two summaries of the job satisfaction literature in the OSH wiki. We weighed the messages of the literature against our impression of common sense, placing more weight on meta-analyses and consensus positions among psychologists. For more on our general research process, see our research principles. How robust are these findings? There appears to be broad consensus that the job characteristics model is a good predictor of job satisfaction. The other factors in our list don't have as wide consensus, but this page reflects our current synthesis of the evidence that we've read. With further research we can imagine adding or subtracting a factor or changing a factor's relative importance. For example, we previously put less weight on personal fit as important for job satisfaction. Predictors of job satisfaction To find out what the predictors of job satisfaction are, we started by looking at general theories of life satisfaction and human needs. We then investigated how these general...

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### Yardsticks: how to compare the scale of different social problems

- Published: 2014-08-20
- Modified: 2024-12-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/yardsticks/
- Topics: Economics, Individual reasoning & cognition, Problem prioritisation, Reasoning well

<h2>What are ‘yardsticks’, and why use them?</h2>

In order to <a href="/cause-selection">compare causes</a>, we want to estimate the impact of solving different social problems. The problem is, even if we had a precise notion of what counts as ‘impact’ (for instance, the amount of human welfare created), it’s not practical to estimate the effect of solving different problems in these terms, especially if you care about the long-run effects of our actions - it’s rarely practical to count how many people benefited from an outcome, or measure how large the benefits are.

This means we need to use rough yardsticks instead. A yardstick is a factor we expect to correlate with the positive impact of our actions (what we really care about), but which is easier to measure.

We use yardsticks (or metrics, or proximate goals) all the time in other domains when it’s difficult to measure what we really care about. For instance, schools award ‘grades’ - a yardstick for educational attainment, though we know that grades don’t capture everything that matters in education.

<h2>What are the properties of a good yardstick?</h2>

A good yardstick is a property of the world that is both:

<ol>
<li><strong>Relevant</strong>: increasing the amount of this property correlates with positive impact.</li>
<li><strong>Measurable</strong>: it’s easy to tell, given the resources you have available, whether this property is increasing or decreasing.</li>
</ol>

<h2>Which yardsticks should we use?</h2>

At 80,000 Hours, we don’t do research into which yardsticks best track positive impact, however, it’s a major research priority for our affiliates, the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford; the Global Priorities Project, which is part of the Centre for Effective Altruism; and our trustees. We seek to align our views with those of these groups, while also applying some weight to the views of economists and our understanding of what’s regarded as common sense among informed experts.

In the rest of this section, we outline our current views.

<h3>To measure short-run impact on welfare</h3>

To measure short-run impact, we often focus on ‘QALYs’ or ‘quality-adjusted life years’. The QALY is a metric for measuring health that is widely used within health economics. One QALY is a year of healthy life, and can be gained either by increasing the quality of someone’s health or extending how long they live. You can read more about how QALYs are defined <a href="https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8OdBVMpAjJHTnl1cXdLbHRKazA/edit?usp=drive_web">here</a>.

Of course, health is not the only component of welfare. Ideally, we’d be able to measure ‘well-being adjusted life years’ or ‘WALYs’. Unfortunately, such a metric has not yet been developed, so instead, we need to consider a patchwork of metrics to capture other aspects of wellbeing. One of the most important is income, though one can also look at life satisfaction, education outcomes, satisfaction of basic human rights and others.

Within income, we prefer to focus on the logarithm of income. It’s widely accepted that there are diminishing returns to the utility of income, such that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_utility">economists often talk about</a> the “law of diminishing marginal utility”. This law means you get more welfare from gaining $100 if you have $1,000 compared to when you have $10,000. Moreover, it’s thought that the returns are roughly logarithmic, in part due to empirical data, such as that shown in the chart below. There’s <a href="/2012/09/does-money-make-you-happy/">some evidence</a> that individual wellbeing hardly increases at all above a threshold of about £50,000, though this has been disputed (for instance see <a href="http://www.nber.org/papers/w18992">this review paper by Stevenson and Wolfers</a>.

The law of dimishing marginal utility, combined the belief that <a href="http://www.utilitarianism.net/singer/by/199704--.htm">all people have equal moral worth</a>, is a key reason many think it’s <a href="http://www.givewell.org/giving101/Your-dollar-goes-further-overseas">more important to focus on causes that help the developing world</a>.

We think it’s likely that animal suffering also deserves moral weight (for more, <a href="https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8OdBVMpAjJHT0VjYk5lR2lweEE/edit?usp=drive_web">see the writings of Peter Singer</a>).This means our yardsticks should also include animal welfare. The main group aiming to compare interventions aimed at animal welfare is <a href="http://www.animalcharityevaluators.org/">Animal Charity Evaluators</a>, who often use the metric of ‘years spent in factory farms avoided’. We’re very uncertain how to weigh this metric against QALYs or income.

<h3>The importance of the long-run</h3>

The preceding yardsticks focused on measuring short-run wellbeing. However, we think the wellbeing of future generations carries moral weight, so we also need yardsticks to measure long-run welfare.

Indeed, <a href="/2013/08/how-important-are-future-generations/">we find it plausible</a> that the impact of our actions on future generations is <em>more</em> important than the impact of our actions on short-run welfare, so yardsticks to measure the extent to which we’re putting civilization on a good long-run path may deserve higher weight than those in the previous section.

<h3>To measure long-run impact on welfare</h3>

Yardsticks for improving the long-run future need to be distinct from ‘future QALYs’ or something along those lines, because that’s far too hard to measure. Unfortunately, there’s no widely accepted metrics to use as proxies for our impact on the long-run future, but here are our current ideas.

Economists often focus on boosting GDP, or even better, a sustainability adjusted measure of GDP, such as the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_Sustainable_Economic_Welfare">Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare</a>. For instance, <a href="https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8OdBVMpAjJHdVRrcXRObUlsTkE/edit?usp=drive_web">Tyler Cowen has suggested</a> “The Principle of Growth”:

<blockquote>
  We should make political choices so as to maximize the rate of sustainable economic growth.
</blockquote>

Paul Romer <a href="http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/EconomicGrowth.html">has also said</a>:

<blockquote>
  For a nation, the choices that determine whether income doubles with every generation, or instead with every other generation, dwarf all other economic policy concerns.
</blockquote>

We put some weight on this view, because it appears to represent the view of economists, although don’t find the arguments very persuasive, mainly due to the reasons discussed in Chapter 3 of <a href="https://80000hours.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Beckstead-Nick-On-the-Overwhelming-Importance-of-Shaping-the-Far-Future-better-formatting.pdf">Nick Beckstead’s thesis</a>.

We’re more persuaded by <a href="https://80000hours.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Beckstead-Nick-On-the-Overwhelming-Importance-of-Shaping-the-Far-Future-better-formatting.pdf">Beckstead’s view</a> that we should focus on what’s likely to cause positive ‘path changes’ to the future trajectory of civilization.

We think the most important category of these path changes is likely to be ‘existential risks’ - events that could permanently curtail the future of civilization, such as a nuclear war. <a href="http://www.existential-risk.org/concept.pdf">Nick Bostrom has most famously argued</a> that, if concerned with the welfare of future generations, it’s most important to “maximise the probability of an OK outcome” i.e. avoid an existential risk.

The problem is that “reducing existential risk” or “causing positive path changes” are still relatively hard yardsticks to measure, so we want a sub-set of metrics that correlate with these but are easier to track.

We’re still highly unsure what these should be, though expect progress over the next couple of years. This means keeping options open is highly desirable, as is investing in more research.

Beyond that, our best guess is that the most dangerous risks will be human-caused rather than natural, and likely the result of new technology. This position is widely shared by researchers in this area within the Future of Humanity Institute, including <a href="http://www.existential-risk.org/concept.pdf">Nick Bostrom</a>, as well as others, such as the <a href="http://cser.org/emerging-risks-from-technology/">University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk</a>.

What yardsticks are best for measuring reduced chances of human-caused catastrophe? We’re highly uncertain, but suggest the following:

<ul>
<li>Level of collaboration</li>
<li>By this we mean extent to which humanity is able to act together to achieve common goals.</li>
<li>This is important to avoid dangerous arms races and deal with crises once they arise. </li>
<li>Level of wisdom</li>
<li>By this we mean the extent to which humanity is able to use our capabilities to good ends, through compromise, reflection, altruism and so on.</li>
<li>This is important so that society can spot and take steps to avert potential crises.</li>
<li>Differential technological development</li>
<li>By this we mean accelerating the development of technologies that are likely to be safe, and slowly down the development of others.</li>
<li>Some technologies seem more risky than others, so it would be better if these were slowed down, to allow for the development of other risk-reducing technologies, or the allow time for further gains to collaboration and wisdom.</li>
<li>Furthering global priorities research

<ul>
<li>By this we mean further research aimed at working out which yardsticks are best, and which causes are best in light of these yardsticks.</li>
<li>This is important because we’re highly uncertain about which yardsticks are best from the perspective of the long-run future, and research on this question is still in its infancy, so further progress would help to work out which projects are best.</li>
</ul></li>
<li>Capacity building

<ul>
<li>By this we mean effort to increase the resources and ability to coordinate of those who want to mitigate existential risk and improve the long-run future, through advocacy and community building.</li>
<li>This is also important because we’re highly uncertain about which yardsticks are best. General capacity aiming to improve the long-run future will be able to take whichever opportunities turn out to be best in the future.</li>
</ul></li>
</ul>

For more, see Chapter 14 of <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Superintelligence-Dangers-Strategies-Nick-Bostrom/dp/0199678111">‘Superintelligence’ by Nick Bostrom</a>. Toby Ord has also written about <a href="http://www.effective-altruism.com/the-timing-of-labour-aimed-at-reducing-existential-risk/">how to balance capacity building and research against other actions</a>.

<h2>Non-welfare values</h2>

So far, we’ve focused on yardsticks for human welfare in the long-term. You might think we should put extra weight on factors like ‘justice’ and ‘environmental diversity’ over and above their long-run effect on human welfare, because these factors also have intrinsic value.

We don’t explicitly factor in non-welfare values because:

<ol>
<li>There’s less agreement over their importance</li>
<li>They’re already included to a large degree, because a more just society is also likely one that’s better for long-run welfare.</li>
<li>It’s unclear how to compare them to welfare.</li>
</ol>

However, if you would like to add extra weight to a non-welfare value, then you could add them as further yardsticks.

<h3>Our overall position</h3>

We see the following as robustly good, though difficult to measure, yardsticks:

<ul>
<li>Level of collaboration</li>
<li>Level of wisdom</li>
<li>Furthering global priorities research</li>
<li>Capacity building</li>
</ul>

We also apply some weight to the following, which are all more measurable:

<ul>
<li>Long-term sustainable world GDP growth rate.</li>
<li>Short-run impact in terms of QALYs, log income, animal welfare etc.</li>
<li>Differential technological development.</li>
</ul>

All of the above are relatively high-level yardsticks, so often need to be further divided for practical purposes. For example, the first three yardsticks suggest that “improving institutional quality” and “promoting effective altruism” are good sub-yardsticks.

<h2>How robust are our views?</h2>

We think that research into which yardsticks are best is still in its infancy, so we anticipate gaining new significant information over the medium-term, which will cause our views to evolve.

This favors supporting causes that seem good from many perspectives, and keeping your options open.


Note this article was written in 2014 and doesn't fully reflect our views today. What are 'yardsticks', and why use them? In order to compare causes, we want to estimate the value of solving different social problems. The problem is, even if we had a precise notion of what counts as 'value' (for instance, the amount of human welfare created), it's not practical to estimate the effect of solving different problems in these terms, especially if you care about the long-run effects of our actions - it's rarely practical to count how many people benefited from an outcome, or measure how large the benefits are. This means that in order to compare the scale of different social problems, we need to use rough 'yardsticks' of comparison instead. A yardstick is a factor we expect to correlate with the positive impact of solving a social problem (what we really care about), but which is easier to measure. People use yardsticks (also called metrics, or proximate goals) all the time in other areas when it's difficult to measure what we really care about. For instance, schools award 'grades'. These are a yardstick to compare the educational attainment of two pupils, though we know that grades don't capture everything that matters in education. We don't do research ourselves into which yardsticks best track positive impact. However, it's a major research priority for our affiliates, the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford; the Global Priorities Project, which is part of the...

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### A checklist for making rational career decisions

> A list of the best advice we've found on how to assess your career options in the face of high uncertainty.

- Published: 2014-08-17
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/making-an-assessment/
- Topics: Career planning, Reasoning well

Career decisions are high-stakes, but involve a lot of uncertainty. To help you make better decisions, we’ve gathered up the best advice we found on making good decisions in the face of high uncertainty, both from business and decision making science.

Here’s a summary of what we’ve found, organized into a checklist you can apply to high stakes decisions.

This feeds into our <a href="/career-guide/how-to-choose">how to choose process</a> at step seven.

<h2>Before you start</h2>

<ul>
<li><strong>Have you structured the assessment?</strong> Rather than making a complete gut judgement, <a href="/2012/11/a-formula-for-the-perfect-job/">there’s evidence</a> that when making similar decisions (such as giving job interviews) you’ll make a better decision if you explicitly write out your key criteria, and assess based on those.</li>
</ul>

<h2>When assessing each factor</h2>

<ul>
<li><strong>Have you looked at relevant statistics, where available?</strong> Often <a href="/126-want-to-be-successful-know-your-odds">going with the ‘base rate’ is better than making an internal judgement</a>. This is called <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_class_forecasting">reference class forecasting</a>.</li>
<li><strong>Have you considered what a credible trustworthy person would say?</strong> When we don’t know much else and there’s no hard data on the question, <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/iao/common_sense_as_a_prior/">we find this a useful starting point</a>.</li>
<li><strong>Have you questioned your gut?</strong> Your gut is good at making decisions when you’ve made lots of similar decisions before, so it’s probably good at judging something like “would I get on with these people?”, but it’s bad at making novel decisions, like “how much will I earn in this career?” (see more on <a href="/2013/03/when-to-go-with-your-gut-in-career-choice/">when to go with your gut</a>).</li>
<li><strong>Have you asked yourself why you might be wrong?</strong> This can <a href="154-two-questions-you-won-t-want-to-ask-yourself-but-should">help to reduce bias</a>.</li>
<li><strong>Have you justified your answers to a friend?</strong> This can <a href="/165-biases-how-they-affect-your-career-decisions-and-what-to-do-about-them">help to reduce bias</a>.</li>
<li><strong>Have you focused on the future pros and cons of the options, rather than what you’ve done in the past?</strong> This can <a href="/2012/10/sunk-costs-in-careers/">help avoid the sunk cost fallacy</a>.</li>
</ul>

<h2>When combining the factors</h2>

<ul>
<li><strong>Have you considered the problem from many angles?</strong> Rather than basing your decision on one or two strong considerations, it’s often better to consider the issue from many independent perspectives weighted by their strength. For instance, see <a href="http://blog.givewell.org/2014/06/10/sequence-thinking-vs-cluster-thinking/">here</a>, <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/hzu/model_combination_and_adjustment/">here</a> and <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/hmb/many_weak_arguments_vs_one_relatively_strong/">here</a>.</li>
<li><strong>Have you weighed the evidence by its strength?</strong> As you learn more, update away from your prior guess based on the strength of what you learn. See an example <a href="/2012/12/how-to-judge-your-chances-of-success/">here</a>.</li>
</ul>

<h2>When making your final assessment</h2>

<ul>
<li><strong>Look for dominant options.</strong> If you’re lucky, you’ll find one option seems better or equal from all perspectives. You can then eliminate the option it dominates.</li>
<li><strong>Make an overall judgement.</strong> If one option doesn’t dominate, you’ll need to make a final overall judgement call.</li>
<li>When your options look very close and it’s hard to choose between them, this can feel somewhat agonizing. One comforting thought in these situations is that even if you choose the wrong option, the difference in how much worse it is, is likely to be slight - which is why it’s a tough call in the first place.</li>
</ul>


Career decisions are high-stakes, but involve a lot of uncertainty. To help you make better decisions, we've gathered up the best advice we found on how to assess your career options in the face of high uncertainty, both from business and decision making science. Here's a summary of what we've found, organized into a checklist you can apply to high stakes decisions. You can use it as part of our how to choose process. Before you start Have you structured the assessment? Rather than making a complete gut judgement, there's evidence that when making similar decisions (such as giving job interviews) you'll make a better decision if you explicitly write out your key criteria, and assess based on those. When assessing each criterion Have you looked at relevant statistics, where available? Often going with the 'base rate' is better than making an internal judgement. This is called reference class forecasting. Have you considered what a credible trustworthy person would say? When we don't know much else and there's no hard data on the question, we find this a useful starting point. Have you questioned your gut? Your gut is good at making decisions when you've made lots of similar decisions before, so it's probably good at judging something like "would I get on with these people? ", but it's bad at making novel decisions, like "how much will I earn in this career? " (see more on when to go with your gut). Have you asked yourself why you might be wrong? ...

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### 7 strategies for having an impact with your career

> A list of career strategies for making a difference.

- Published: 2014-08-10
- Modified: 2021-11-18
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/strategies/

We want to <a href="/career-guide/top-careers">find the best career opportunities in the world</a>. The problem is, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics lists <a href="http://www.bls.gov/ooh/a-z-index.htm">several thousand career profiles</a>, so we need ways to narrow down careers to find the most promising ones.

One way we narrow down careers is by identifying promising ‘strategies’ for impact. A strategy is a general method for having a big impact that applies to many different jobs.

On this page, we outline the main strategies we’ve identified so far and say which paths seem best within each. We’ve found all of these strategies useful for discovering and categorising the high impact paths <a href="/career-guide/career-profiles">we’ve investigated so far</a>, as well as analysing career choices with the people we coach. We sketch our reasoning for each individual strategy below.

As part of our <a href="/career-guide/how-to-choose">how to choose process</a>, you can use these strategies to get ideas for new options and as a checklist to compare the options you’ve already identified. If you’re considering an option fits with two or three of these strategies, that’s a good sign - don’t follow one to the exclusion of all the others.



<hr />

<h2>Strategies for putting you in a better long-term position</h2>

Early in your career, it’s normally more important to focus on setting yourself up to have a big impact in the long-term rather than having an immediate impact (see more on our <a href="/career-guide/criteria#how-to-weigh-these-criteria">criteria page</a>). In this section, we outline some strategies for building your long-run potential for impact.

The initial priority is to <em>explore</em> your options, so the first two strategies are about doing that. Then the next priority is to invest in your human capital, so the second two strategies are more focused on that.

<h3>1. Do something new and challenging that intrigues you</h3>

<h4>What do we mean by this strategy?</h4>

Do something that (i) is difficult, so that it stretches your abilities,(ii) is different to what you’ve done before and (iii) intrigues you, so that you’re motivated to work on it. Some common examples are living abroad somewhere without English speakers, switching sectors or trying a startup.

<h4>What’s our evidence this strategy is promising?</h4>

<ul>
<li>Trying areas outside of your experience will help you explore your options more quickly, which is the key priority when you don’t know much about the world of careers. In particular, it can help you discover ‘unknown unknowns’ - important considerations you didn’t even realise existed.</li>
<li>If it’s also challenging and intriguing, then it’s more likely to stretch your abilities, which will help you learn more, while also building skills.</li>
<li>It’s widely regarded as useful for young people to undergo a period of exploration before they settle into a career.</li>
</ul>

<h4>Which options are best within this strategy?</h4>

There are many possibilities and it depends on your situation. Often we just stumble across interesting opportunities that are easy to ignore because they seem a little risky - someone offers you a job somewhere you hadn’t considered working; you get given the option to study abroad for a year; or you come up with an idea for an interesting science project. Don’t dismiss these out of hand!

You can also think through the different career worlds and try to explore the ones you know least about, for instance: academia; finance; industry; the entrepreneurial tech community; the policy world; the nonprofit sector; the arts; and working within government. If you’ve never experienced one of these worlds, consider giving it a go - you could start with something small like shadowing someone or doing an internship. Alternatively, consider working within <a href="/articles/cause-selection/">a cause</a> you know very little about.

One potential downside of this strategy is that if you do something <em>completely</em> random it can cut down your opportunities elsewhere. So, don’t act on this strategy to the complete exclusion of the others. As always, it’s also best to start small then scale up your efforts as you learn more. If you’re unsure about switching sector, first speak to people in the career, then volunteer or intern, and only then switch jobs.

<h3>2. Learn more about a ‘high-variance’ career</h3>

<h4>What do we mean by this strategy?</h4>

Some career paths have extremely skewed outcomes. For instance, many people drop out of investment banking in the first couple of years, whereas others go on to earn tens of millions of dollars. Sometimes it’s possible to learn more about your how hard it would be for you to succeed in one of these careers by trying them out - perhaps first by doing something small like an internship, and then later working in them for a year or two. Since the potential outcomes are so skewed, this provides valuable information.

<h4>What’s our evidence this strategy is promising?</h4>

<ul>
<li>The value of testing out a path has often been an important consideration among the people we’ve coached.</li>
<li>We’ve found several career types with skewed outcomes that are possible learn much more about in just a couple of years, providing high value of information.</li>
</ul>

<h4>Which options are best within this strategy?</h4>

This strategy is best when long-term outcomes are very skewed, but it’s possible to learn about your prospects relatively quickly and cheaply.

Of <a href="/career-guide/career-profiles">the paths we’ve investigated so far</a>, the most high-variance are:

<ol>
<li>Valuable academic research</li>
<li>Tech entrepreneurship</li>
<li>Founding effective global poverty nonprofits</li>
<li>Journalism</li>
<li>Front office finance</li>
<li>Trading in quantitative hedge funds</li>
<li>High-end law</li>
</ol>

Those that seem the quickest and cheapest to test are:

<ol>
<li>Front office finance</li>
<li>Trading in quantitative hedge funds</li>
</ol>

<h3>3. Do something you can excel in</h3>

<h4>What do we mean by this strategy?</h4>

If you’ve discovered an activity in which you have a reasonable chance of being world-class if you work hard at it, consider doing it.

<h4>What’s our evidence this strategy is promising?</h4>

In our experience, we’ve found that being extremely good at something is often the best way to gain career capital, even if the area doesn’t immediately seem high-impact, because (i) it’s impressive, (ii) gives you access to other influential people, and (iii) means you’re developing world class skills. Being really good at something can also be a way to make a big difference, because in many fields the top performers produce most of the value.

For more reasons, see what we’ve written about the <a href="/career-guide/personal-fit#why-is-personal-fit-important">advantages of personal fit</a>.

<h4>Which options are best within this strategy?</h4>

This depends entirely on the individual. See our ideas on how to find the options with the best personal fit on our <a href="/career-guide/personal-fit#how-to-assess-personal-fit">personal fit page</a>.

<h3>4. Build valuable skills</h3>

<h4>What do we mean by this strategy?</h4>

Find a skill-set that’s in demand and transferable, and spend several years developing expertise in that skill.

<h4>What’s our evidence this strategy is promising?</h4>

At the start of your career, it’s likely you can significantly boost your abilities to make a difference over the rest of your career by investing in building skills. We think this is common-sense, but it has also been supported by our investigations to date. For instance, we’ve found many examples of people who have been able to boost their income 20-100% within six months by learning to program.

In particular, focus on skills that are (i) in-demand and (ii) transferable. If the skills are in-demand, then you’re likely to have decent employment prospects, and when you’re more established, you’ll be able to direct these skills towards supporting good causes. If the skills are also transferable, then they keep your options open, which is important because <a href="/2013/07/how-important-is-keeping-your-options-open/">it’s hard to predict where the best opportunities will be in the future</a>.

<h4>Which options are best within this strategy?</h4>

So far, we’ve identified the following skill-sets that seem relatively in demand and transferable:

<ul>
<li>Statistics</li>
<li>Machine learning</li>
<li>Programming</li>
<li>‘Founder skills’ i.e. the ability to autonomously launch a new project.</li>
</ul>

Other useful, transferable skills include:

<ul>
<li>Sales</li>
<li>Communication</li>
<li>Management</li>
<li>Networking</li>
<li>Personal productivity i.e. the ability to manage your time and motivate yourself.</li>
</ul>

You learn skills most quickly when you have good feedback, so you can measure your performance. On the job training and supporting, growth minded atmosphere are also important. Of <a href="/career-guide/career-profiles">the career paths we’ve investigated so far</a> some that seem particularly good for skill-building include:

<ul>
<li>Tech entrepreneurship</li>
<li>Software engineering</li>
<li>Trading in quantitative hedge funds</li>
<li>Economics PhD</li>
<li>Work in marketing</li>
<li>Consulting</li>
</ul>

See <a href="/blog?category=72">all our articles on skills</a>.

This concludes the section on strategies for building your long-run potential.

<hr />

<h2>Strategies for immediate impact</h2>

In the last section, we considered strategies for exploring your options and investing in yourself. Once you’ve done this, it’s time to move your focus towards using your skills and knowledge to make a difference. In this section, we consider four strategies for doing that.

<h3>1. Take a job at, or found, an effective organisation that’s a good fit for you</h3>

<h4>What do we mean by this strategy?</h4>

There are many nonprofit and for-profit organisations that have a large impact, which are short of specific types of human capital. If you’re a good fit for a high-impact organisation or think you’re in a good position to found one, that’s an option worth considering. By high-impact organisations we mean those that are well-run and work on an <a href="/articles/cause-selection/">effective cause</a>. For more, see <a href="/career-guide/career-profiles#organisations-considered">here</a>.

<h4>What’s our evidence this strategy is promising?</h4>

Taking a job at or founding an organisation with a social purpose is probably the most popular way to have an immediate impact with your career. We think there’s a lot of truth in this view. There are many organisations that achieve great things which say they are constrained by an unusual type of human capital. For instance, <a href="/2013/04/interview-with-holden-karnofsky-co-founder-of-givewell/">GiveWell are constrained</a> by people who are able to carry out their research. If you can provide this human capital, then you may have the opportunity to have an outsized impact.

However, it’s important to note some limitations. First, <a href="http://www.givewell.org/giving101/Accomplishing-Nothing">many organisations with a social purpose don’t have much social impact</a>. So, it’s important to focus on working at <em>effective organisations</em> rather than just those with an explicitly social purpose. Second, the organisation may not be heavily constrained by the type of human capital you can offer. That’s why it’s important to focus on organisations where you’re a <strong>good fit</strong>.

<ul>
<li>Taking a job at an organisation with a social purpose is seen as a common-sense way to make a difference.</li>
</ul>

We think founding organisations - entrepreneurship - is likely to offer even more scope for impact, though with higher risk. That’s because:

<ul>
<li>People who are generally regarded as influential or high-impact have often founded effective organisations. For instance, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_musk">Elon Musk</a>, the founder of Solar City, Tesla and SpaceX. Within the nonprofit sector, we think founders of <a href="http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/schistosomiasis-control-initiative">SCI</a> and <a href="http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/AMF">Against Malaria Foundation</a> have had a big impact.</li>
<li>Setting up new organisations involves innovation, which is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good">a public good</a>), so it’s difficult to capture the gains for yourself. This means people are likely underincentivised to build new organisations (it’s a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure">market failure</a>).</li>
<li>When setting up a new organisation, the chance of failing is high, so people are under-incentivised to pursue it in order to gain personal status.</li>
</ul>

<h4>Which options are best within this strategy?</h4>

We haven’t yet formally reviewed any organisations, though we <a href="/career-guide/career-profiles#organisations-considered">have written about several</a>, and of those we think that working at <a href="/blog?category=3">GiveWell</a> is a particularly attractive option. See <a href="/blog?category=2">all our articles on organisations</a>.

If you’re considering pursuing this strategy, ask yourself:

<ul>
<li>Is the organization likely to be particularly effective?</li>
<li>Does the organization provide excellent training?/Will founding this organisation provide good learning opportunities?</li>
<li>Does the organisation have a special need for someone with your skills?</li>
<li>Are your sure that you want to work within this sector in the long-term?</li>
</ul>

If interested in entrepreneurship, see our profiles on <a href="/career-guide/tech-entrepreneurship">tech entrepreneurship</a> and <a href="/career-guide/founding-effective-global-poverty-non-profits">founding effective global poverty focused nonprofits</a>.

<h3>2. If you’re a good fit, do research in a high-potential field</h3>

<h4>What do we mean by this strategy?</h4>

Some people are especially good at and interested in research - attempting to create new knowledge. If this is you, and have you have the opportunity to work in a field that seems particularly important, tractable and neglected, then this could be a way to have a large impact.

Most often, this strategy is carried out within academia, though it could also be in business, government, think tanks, or nonprofit research institutes.

<h4>What’s our evidence this strategy is promising?</h4>

Doing research is commonly regarded as a way to make a big difference, and we think this is broadly right: there are <a href="/articles/cause-selection/">many areas of research</a> with great humanitarian importance, and some researchers are many times more productive than others.<sup id="fnref-1907-1"><a href="#fn-1907-1" rel="footnote">1</a></sup> This suggests that someone with high-potential as a researcher may be able to have an outsized impact. Some additional evidence includes:

<ul>
<li>Many of the most apparently high impact people in history were researchers. such as <a href="/2011/11/high-impact-science/">Norman Borlaug</a> and those in <a href="http://www.scienceheroes.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=258&Itemid=27">this list</a>.</li>
<li>New knowledge is a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good">a public good</a>), so it’s difficult to capture the gains for yourself. This means people are likely underincentivised to build do research (it’s a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure">market failure</a>).</li>
<li>Since the chances of success are low, people are also under-incentivised to pursue it in order to gain personal status (though it’s <a href="/2014/04/the-undercover-economist-speaks-to-80-000-hours/">unclear how much weight to put on this</a>).</li>
</ul>

However, we think there’s an important qualification to be made to the common sense view. We think it’s important to focus on particularly ‘high-potential areas’. That’s because although every field of research has something to contribute and it’s difficult to predict where the next crucial discoveries will be made, some areas seem to offer significantly more potential for impact than others.

<ul>
<li>Doing research seems to be regarded as a common-sense way to have a big impact.</li>
</ul>

<h4>Which options are best within this strategy?</h4>

Early career:

<strong>We think it’s important to keep your options open</strong>, since we’ll have better information about which areas are most promising in the future. This favors entering disciplines that develop strong, transferable skill-sets that are in demand, such as statistics, programming and machine learning. This suggests starting your career within applied maths, physics, economics or computer science if those subjects are a good fit.

<strong>It’s important to bear in mind the job prospects.</strong> Fields vary dramatically in both the difficulty of getting an academic job post-PhD, and in the difficulty of finding jobs outside of academia. Within philosophy, for example, there are more new PhDs than academic jobs, and a philosophy PhD doesn’t naturally build skills relevant for other sorts of career. This makes it hard to become an academic within philosophy even if you have a PhD from a very good program. In contrast, <a href="http://qz.com/82743/a-phd-in-economics-is-the-only-one-worth-getting/">within economics the number of academic jobs matches the number of applications more closely</a>, and economics PhDs are well-regarded within policy and business.

<strong>Another important consideration is the extent to which one can have an impact outside of academia.</strong> Again, economics PhDs are well-regarded within policy and business, to a much greater degree than philosophy PhDs are. This is a point in favor of applied maths, economics, certain types of psychology and computer science.

After you’ve done your PhD, you can start to focus more on your immediate impact:

<strong>Consider entering fields that will allow you to contribute to <a href="/articles/cause-selection/">high-potential causes</a>.</strong> These are fields that seem particularly important, tractable and neglected, thus hold more potential for impact than others.

<strong>Within a field, how can you pick the best research question?</strong> We’ve listed <a href="/2012/10/how-to-do-important-research/">some ideas for heuristics</a>, and asked this question to four senior biomedical researchers (upcoming).

See <a href="/blog?category=18">all our articles on research</a>. So far, we have <a href="/career-guide/economics-phd">identified studying economics as a promising path</a>.

<h4>Is this strategy for you?</h4>

We think those who are a good fit for research have:

<ul>
<li>Particularly high intelligence.</li>
<li>High levels of grit and self-motivation, to persist for years in the face of a high chance of failure.</li>
<li>Social skills to build collaborations and secure funding.</li>
<li>Deep intrinsic interest in the relevant subject matter.</li>
</ul>

<h3>3. Earn to give</h3>

<h4>What do we mean by this strategy?</h4>

Some people have skills that are better suited to earning money than the other strategies. These people can take a higher earning career and donate the money to effective organisations.

<h4>What’s our evidence this strategy is promising?</h4>

<ul>
<li>Some people are unusually well-suited to earning money. They can take a high-earning job and donate enough to pay for several people to replace them in the nonprofit sector. Alternatively, earning to give is a way for anyone to make a difference, even if they don’t want to change which industry they work within.</li>
<li>This money wouldn’t have been donated otherwise, since people in high-earning careers don’t donate much of their income to charity.<sup id="fnref-1907-2"><a href="#fn-1907-2" rel="footnote">2</a></sup></li>
<li>This strategy is flexible: money can be readily reallocated to whichever organisation is most in need of funding at the time. </li>
<li>There’s also solid research into which nonprofits are most effective (for instance, as provided by <a href="http://www.givewell.org">GiveWell</a>, which you can take advantage of.</li>
<li>Some wealthy philanthropists have had a huge impact in the past, and it may be possible to replicate their success by pursuing careers in business. Cases of philanthropists who deliberately aimed to make money in order to donate it are rarer, but do exist. For instance, <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/8550747/Hedge-fund-boss-Chris-Hohn-gives-away-1bn-in-five-years.html">Britain’s largest philanthropist</a>, Chris Hohn, set up a hedge fund with the intention of donating much of the earnings.</li>
</ul>

Since this path is more unusual, we’ve carried out extensive research into its pros and cons, and <a href="http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10677-013-9433-4">have published a paper on the topic</a>. You can see a summary of our findings on our <a href="/earning-to-give">earning to give page</a>.

<h4>Which options are best within this strategy?</h4>

Of <a href="/career-guide/career-profiles">the paths we’ve investigated so far</a>, those that we’ve found to be highest earning (though also often risky and extremely competitive) are, in order:

<ol>
<li>Tech entrepreneurship</li>
<li>Trading in quantitative hedge funds</li>
<li>Front office finance</li>
<li>Consulting</li>
<li>High-end law</li>
<li>Medicine</li>
</ol>

Taking into account the level of competition, it’s also worth considering the following options:

<ol>
<li>Software engineering</li>
<li>Marketing</li>
</ol>

In practice, you shouldn’t only consider the earnings of different paths as they stand today. You should also consider:

<ol>
<li>What’s the value of the direct impact of the work? Might you cause harm?</li>
<li>Which option will provide the best career capital?</li>
<li>Will you be able to go through with making your donations, or will the culture cause you to give up?</li>
</ol>

Don’t forget, you may be able to have more impact inspiring others to donate than donating yourself. That suggests it may be better to do something you enjoy where you’ll get along with your colleagues than simply earning the most money.

<h4>Is this strategy for you?</h4>

Earning to give seems best when:

<ol>
<li>You have a strong comparative advantage in a high-earning job.</li>
<li>You’re particularly concerned to keep your options open about which cause to support.</li>
<li>You’re at the start of your career and want to build career capital (because high-earning jobs often build good career capital).</li>
<li>You think you can go through with donating a large percentage of your income, even if your colleagues don’t.</li>
</ol>

<h3>4. Take a job that enables you to advocate for high priority causes</h3>

<h4>What do we mean by this strategy?</h4>

By this strategy, we mean taking a job that gives you the ability to promote and unite people behind important ideas. These jobs often offer a combination of:

<ul>
<li>A public platform that can be used to reach a large number of people e.g. a journalist.</li>
<li>An influential network e.g. a lobbyist.</li>
<li>Influence over a large organisation e.g. the director of a foundation.</li>
<li>Credibility so that other people will listen to you e.g. an academic.</li>
</ul>

However, having one of these positions doesn’t guarantee that you’ll have a large impact. You also need to use the position to promote important, neglected ideas that can have a large impact if they spread.

<h4>What’s our evidence this strategy is promising?</h4>

Promoting important ideas is commonly regarded as a way to make a big difference, and many of those who are widely regarded as the most significant figures in history (e.g. <a href="http://ideas.time.com/2013/12/10/whos-biggest-the-100-most-significant-figures-in-history/">as compiled by TIME</a>) are political or cultural leaders, who were responsible for shaping the space of ideas. We think this is broadly right, and note some additional reasons in favor:

<ul>
<li>This strategy is flexible: you can use your position to promote whichever causes are most effective at the time.</li>
<li>Although someone else would have the position if you don’t take it, if you’re more motivated by social impact than average, it seems likely that you’ll better use the position to promote high-impact ideas. This is particularly true because there’s no market incentive to advocate effectively.</li>
<li>We’ve identified other studies of high-impact people who were advocates e.g. <a href="/2012/02/in-praise-of-viktor-zhdanov/">Viktor Zhadanov</a>.</li>
<li>In our experience, it seems you can often achieve more by mobilising others than just acting yourself. See more <a href="/2012/12/the-power-of-effective-activism/">here</a>.</li>
</ul>

<h4>Which options are best within this strategy?</h4>

Of <a href="/career-guide/career-profiles">the paths we’ve investigated so far</a>, those that we’ve found to provide the best advocacy potential are:

<ul>
<li>Party politics (high risk)</li>
<li>Journalism (high risk)</li>
<li>Valuable academic research</li>
<li>Foundation program officer</li>
<li>Program manager in international organisations</li>
<li>Policy-oriented civil service</li>
</ul>

Note that working at a nonprofit focused on campaigning would fall under the first strategy.

If considering this path, some important questions to ask yourself are:

<ol>
<li>How much career capital will I get out of this path, in case my advocacy efforts don’t pay off?</li>
<li>What causes do I intend to promote that are neglected?</li>
</ol>

See all our articles on advocacy <a href="/blog?category=113">here</a>.

<hr />

<h2>What other strategies are there, and which are best?</h2>

We don’t think the above is an exhaustive list of the best strategies for making a difference with your career. We expect the list to grow and change over time. In particular, we would like to do more historical studies of high impact people and try to better understand what strategies they used. We’re also very unsure which strategies are most promising for different people, and would like to learn more by doing <a href="/career-guide/career-profiles">in-depth studies of individual career paths</a>.

Of the strategies above, the first four strategies for immediate impact are very similar to the ‘five types of career’ (earning to give, influencer, improver, innovator and researcher) which we introduced right at the start of 80,000 Hours in 2011, so we feel relatively confident we’ll stick with them. The four strategies for building your long-run potential for impact, however, are newer, so more likely to change.

Another strategy that we’ve heard discussed is the idea of working in influential areas where you’re more focused on social impact than your colleagues, with the hope of spotting neglected opportunities to have a social impact. For instance, if a group of scientists were developing a new technology without much concern for the risk, there could be good opportunities for a socially motivated person to join the group and look out for cheap ways to reduce the risk that aren’t going to be taken otherwise.

We’ve also <a href="/2012/07/the-high-impact-pa-how-anyone-can-bring-about-ground-breaking-research/">discussed the idea</a> of taking an unglamorous role near a high-impact person with the idea of facilitating and amplifying their impact.

So far, however, we haven’t come across any concrete, widely applicable career paths that resemble either of these two strategies and are sufficiently distinct from advocacy or working at an organisation with good fit, so we haven’t included them.

<hr />

<em>Notes and References</em>

<div class="footnotes">
<hr />
<ol>

<li id="fn-1907-1">
Our impression from interviewing people in the field (for instance <a href="/blog?category=56">our interviews in biomedical research</a>) is that the idea that some researchers are many times more productive than others is regarded as common sense within science. Another strand of evidence is the <a href="/2012/08/should-you-go-into-research-part-1/">power-law distribution of citations per paper</a>. <a href="#fnref-1907-1" rev="footnote">↩</a>
</li>

<li id="fn-1907-2">
<a href="http://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/article/?id=9782">This study</a> showed that in the UK the rich only give about 1% of their income to charity, and the figures seem to only be slightly higher in the US e.g. <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/04/why-the-rich-dont-give/309254/">Ken Berger claims they give 1.3%</a>. <a href="#fnref-1907-2" rev="footnote">↩</a>
</li>

</ol>
</div>


This page is no longer kept up to date, and has been replaced with this one. A strategy is a general method for having a big impact that applies to many different jobs. While it’s important to focus on the particular decision at hand (for which our framework and how to choose process help), it’s also useful to have broad long-run aims for your career. Thinking in terms of career strategies can help you develop a long-run plan. On this page, we outline the best career strategies we’ve identified so far. Click through to learn more about each one and which options are best within each. Strategies for the start of your career The experimenter: Finding a career that’s the right fit for you is important, but it’s also difficult to do just by thinking about it. It can therefore be a good strategy to try out a number of different areas in order to learn more about your own interests and skills. The self-developer: When you’ve narrowed down which area you want to enter, focus on investing in yourself to build your career capital. Strategies for impact Once you've got a better idea of where to focus and started building your skills, it's time to turn your attention more directly to impact. Below are five strategies we've found for making a difference. Choose between these on the basis of personal fit. These strategies offer some combination of: track-record (high-impact people in the past have used them), potential for a...

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### Some of the most promising areas to work in

> Some careers have more opportunities to make a difference than others. See our list of top careers for making a difference, based on our in-depth research.

- Published: 2014-08-05
- Modified: 2018-04-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/articles/top-careers/

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Last updated: March 2025 This Privacy Notice explains how 80,000 Hours Limited and 80,000 Hours Foundation (together "80,000 Hours", "we", "us" or "our") collects, uses and shares personal information about you when you: visit any websites operated by us, including https://80000hours. org/ and any other sites or applications containing a link to this Privacy Notice (collectively "Websites"); or interact with us offline (for example, when you apply for a role within our organisations or volunteer at one of our events). It also provides details of the rights that you have under the UK General Data Protection Regulation (the "UK GDPR"). For the purposes of the UK GDPR, 80,000 Hours Limited and 80,000 Hours Foundation are "controllers" of your personal information as it is described in this Privacy Notice. This means we make decisions about how and why your information is used, and have a responsibility to make sure that your rights are protected when we do so. 80,000 Hours may have other privacy notices that apply to specific situations. To the extent you are provided with different privacy notices that are applicable, those notices will govern our interactions with you. We recommend you read this Privacy Notice together with our Cookie Notice and Terms of Use. If you have any questions, please contact us using the details in the "Who we are and how you can get in touch" section below. What personal information do we collect? When we refer to "personal information," we mean information which relates to an identified...

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### In-depth career advice

- Published: 2024-05-27
- Modified: 2024-12-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/indepth/



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### Work on a better future

- Published: 2024-05-20
- Modified: 2025-01-09
- URL: https://80000hours.org/betterfuture/



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### In-depth career guide

- Published: 2024-02-24
- Modified: 2024-02-24
- URL: https://80000hours.org/key-ideas-tier-meta/



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### We’re developing an AI safety careers handbook

- Published: 2024-01-23
- Modified: 2024-02-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/ai-book/

We're creating a new book compiling all of our most important advice for entering the field of AI safety and governance! It's still a work in progress, and we'd love to get your input. If you have thoughts on what you'd want from an AI safety careers handbook, please fill out this survey. There you can sign up to our mailing list to be among the first alerted when the new book is available. Here are some of the topics we plan to cover: The fundamental case for thinking the risk of an AI-related catastrophe is one of the world's most pressing problems Why AI safety and governance could be among the most impactful career paths What kinds of career strategies we recommend you pursue within these paths What kinds of work is already happening What you need to know to: Get started in a career path focused on helping reduce AI risk Test your fit for different types of roles Build career capital for the long (or medium) term Gain valuable skills that will help you contribute as much as you can We're also still assessing the demand for the book, so if you'd be excited to read it, please let us know! Below, we have a draft table of contents for the upcoming book. Click the links to see our most up-to-date thinking about these subjects. ##Our working table of contents * Introduction * Section 1: Preventing an AI-related catastrophe * (/problem-profiles/artificial-intelligence/#making-advances-extremely-quickly) * [The...

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### The most useful skills for making a difference

- Published: 2023-12-15
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/skills/
- Topics: Career capital

Early career, (/career-guide/career-capital/#how-can-you-get-the-best-career-capital-get-good-at-something-useful) you focus on building useful skills. So which skills are most useful for solving important global problems? Here's our list. We recommend choosing between these skills primarily based on which one you could be best at – (/career-guide/personal-fit/). Click through to the profiles to learn more about why we recommend them, how to get started learning them, and how to work out which is the best fit for you. Learn to get things done in the world's largest and most important institutions (particularly national governments), which often play a crucial role in tackling global problems. Help build and boost great organisations doing important work through skills like management, operations, legal and financial oversight, entrepreneurship, and fundraising. Learn how to do research, with the aim of eventually making intellectual advances on important questions about tackling global problems. Convey important ideas and information in a compelling way in order to help others focus on the right things and work more effectively. Learn to code and then apply your skills to build useful software or conduct analyses relevant to pressing problems. Learn about an emerging power (especially China) and use that experience to help improve global coordination in crucial areas... .

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### In-depth career guide

- Published: 2023-11-08
- Modified: 2023-11-08
- URL: https://80000hours.org/key-ideas-lin/



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### In-depth career guide

- Published: 2023-11-08
- Modified: 2023-11-08
- URL: https://80000hours.org/key-ideas-snap/



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### Translations of our content

- Published: 2023-09-05
- Modified: 2024-10-28
- URL: https://80000hours.org/about/translations/

Some people liked our content so much that they kindly and voluntarily translated it into other languages so more people could read it! We update our core content often, so some of these translations may not reflect updated versions. Do you know of any other translations of our content that are not already listed? Or would you like to volunteer to help translate our content? Please let us know here. Spanish Career guide 2017 version - Part 2: Can one person make a difference? What the evidence says. 2017 version - Part 11: All the best advice we could find on how to get a job Career reviews AI safety technical research Economics PhDs Founder of new projects tackling top problems Product manager in tech Pursuing fame in art and entertainment Think tank research Problem profiles Building effective altruism Factory farming Improving decision making (especially in important institutions) Preventing catastrophic pandemics Advanced series A framework for comparing global problems in terms of expected impact Be more ambitious: a rational case for dreaming big (if you want to do good) Longtermism: the moral significance of future generations The best solutions are far more effective than others This is your most important decision Ways people trying to do good accidentally make things worse, and how to avoid them Key articles Applying an unusual skill to a needed niche Government and policy in an area relevant to a top problem The best email scripts for cold-emailing Other articles About us: what do...

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### In-depth career guide

- Published: 2023-09-05
- Modified: 2023-09-07
- URL: https://80000hours.org/key-ideas-campaign-gdn/



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### In-depth career guide

- Published: 2023-09-04
- Modified: 2023-09-04
- URL: https://80000hours.org/key-ideas-youtubeengw/



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### In-depth career guide

- Published: 2023-09-04
- Modified: 2023-09-04
- URL: https://80000hours.org/key-ideas-youtubeengc/



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### In-depth career guide

- Published: 2023-09-04
- Modified: 2023-09-04
- URL: https://80000hours.org/key-ideas-campaign-meta/



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### In-depth career guide

- Published: 2023-09-02
- Modified: 2023-09-02
- URL: https://80000hours.org/key-ideas-campaign-yt/



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### Skill set page template

- Published: 2023-08-22
- Modified: 2023-11-28
- URL: https://80000hours.org/skill-set-page-template/

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### Test skill set page with sidebar

- Published: 2023-08-22
- Modified: 2023-08-22
- URL: https://80000hours.org/test-skill-set-page/

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### Share the career guide

> Sharing our career guide lets us help more people find a fulfilling career that does good. If you know someone who might find the guide useful, consider sharing it.

- Published: 2023-07-31
- Modified: 2023-09-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-guide-share/

Can you think of someone who might find our career guide helpful? Do you have a friend who: Has a career decision-point coming up, like graduating from their degree or considering changing jobs? Isn't sure what they want to do next, and needs help narrowing down their options? Cares a lot about making a big positive difference in the world? If so, consider sharing our guide with them. If they read the guide and switch career, your 5 minutes could really count. We'll send them a free copy if you fill out this form: They can choose between getting an ebook or a paperback copy mailed to their home, for free (with free shipping! ). Also, if you don't have a copy yet yourself, you can get one via signing up to our newsletter. ! (/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/80Kbook-twobooks-whitebkg-scaled-e1693395630953. jpg) ! (/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/80Kbook-ipad-black-1-e1693395814500. png) Can't think of anybody? If nobody comes to mind, you could just share the guide on social media — that way, people can check it out on their own! We really appreciate everybody who takes the time to share the guide around — many of the people who've found our advice most useful have found us this way. Examples of social media posts, for inspiration: ! (/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/IMG_8798-1. png) ! (/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Screenshot-2023-08-30-at-11. 24. 24. png) ! (/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Screenshot-2023-08-30-at-11. 25. 05. png) ! (/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Screenshot-2023-08-30-at-11. 24. 04. png) Thanks for helping us help more people find fulfilling careers that do good!

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### Advanced series: our most important and novel research on what makes for a high-impact career

> Our most important and novel research findings about how to increase the impact of our career.

- Published: 2023-05-23
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/advanced-series/
- Topics: Career capital, Community &amp; coordination, Effective Altruism, Exploration, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Leverage, Moral philosophy, Personal fit, Reasoning well

If you're already familiar with the ideas in our (/career-guide/), this series aims to deepen your understanding of how to increase the impact of your career. Browse through the titles below, and read whichever interests you. Here's a reminder about (/career-guide/introduction/#what-is-our-advice-based-on) and some tips on (/career-guide/introduction/#how-to-read-our-advice). ## 1. Introduction Why some career paths likely have 10 or 100 or even 1,000 times more impact than others, making your career your biggest opportunity to make a difference. ## 2. What does it mean to make a difference? We think 'making a difference' is best understood as being about the number of lives you improve and how much you improve them by -- regardless of who they are or when they're living. The case for why the best thing to do with your career could be making sure the future is as good as possible, and what that might imply. All careers involve *some* degree of negative impact. That said, in general, we recommend against taking a position which has substantial harm, even if the overall benefits of the work seem greater than the harms. ###Other articles: {. no-toc} * (/articles/moral-uncertainty/) * [Expected value: how...

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### Find a fulfilling career that does good

- Published: 2023-05-22
- Modified: 2023-05-23
- URL: https://80000hours.org/ebook/



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### The 80,000 Hours Podcast on Artificial Intelligence and related topics

> Ten curated episodes of The 80,000 Hours Podcast that quickly get you up to speed on the school of thought known as effective altruism.

- Published: 2023-05-16
- Modified: 2024-06-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/on-artificial-intelligence/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Existential risk, Foundations, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Long-term AI policy, Machine learning PhD, Top-recommended careers



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### 

- Published: 2023-04-05
- Modified: 2023-04-24
- URL: https://80000hours.org/book-giveaway-paused/

We've had to temporarily pause book giveaway signups through this page Meanwhile, explore our resources for planning a career that's fulfilling and does good. You have about 80,000 hours in your career, so your career choices are among the most important decisions you'll ever make. (/start-here) {. btn . btn-primary . btn-lg}

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### 80,000 Hours Cookie Notice

- Published: 2023-03-27
- Modified: 2025-04-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/cookie-notice/

80,000 Hours Limited and 80,000 Hours Foundation (together "80,000 Hours", "we", "us" or "our") use cookies on our websites ("Websites"). This Cookie Notice explains what cookies and similar technologies we use and why. You may access and change your cookie preferences at any time in cookie preferences. What are cookies and similar technologies? A cookie is a small piece of data (text file) that a website—when visited by a user—asks your browser to store information on your device, for example, to remember information about you, such as your language preference or login information. Those cookies are set by us and called first-party cookies. Find out more about the use of cookies on www. allaboutcookies. org. We also use third-party cookies—which are cookies from a domain different than the domain of the website you are visiting—for our analytics and marketing efforts. We also use other forms of technology (such as pixels and web beacons and, in apps, software development kits (usually referred to as SDKs)) which serve a similar purpose to cookies and which allow us to monitor and improve our Websites and email communications. When we talk about cookies in this notice, this term includes these similar technologies. ‍ Some of our Website pages include content displayed from a third party website, for example, YouTube or Facebook. In turn, your use of our Websites may result in some cookies being set and stored by these third parties, that are not controlled by us. In these circumstances, you should review the privacy and...

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### What others have said about 80,000 Hours

- Published: 2023-03-19
- Modified: 2024-10-27
- URL: https://80000hours.org/about/credibility/what-others-say-about-80000-hours/
- Topics: About 80,000 Hours




Media highlights Want to do more good? This movement might have the answer, TIME What's the best job to do good? , BBC Radio 4 Can Your Career Help Change the World? You Have 80,000 Hours to Try, The Wall Street Journal How to pick a career that counts: A simple guide to choosing a career where you can make an impact, Vox To help save the world, become a banker not a doctor, The Economist Don't follow your passion and think twice about medicine: the new rules of choosing a career, The Telegraph Doing Good, with Will MacAskill (#228), Making Sense with Sam Harris Where Can You Make The Biggest Difference? , Forbes Support for Startups: Y Combinator's non-profit mission, Financial Times For media inquiries, please contact press@80000hours. org. Endorsements This career guide is among the most thoughtful and grounded I've seen. Every college grad should read this. A ridiculously in-depth guide about how to find that perfect career for you. Based on evidence and good sense, not platitudes. This incredible group is helping people have a greater social impact with their careers. Few choices can be more important than what we will do with 80,000 hours of our...

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### Start here

> Your career is not only a major driver of your happiness — it’s probably also your biggest opportunity to have a positive impact on the world.

- Published: 2022-08-18
- Modified: 2025-04-09
- URL: https://80000hours.org/start-here/
- Topics: About 80,000 Hours

You have 80,000 hours in your career: 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year, for a solid 40 years. That's a huge amount of time. And it means that your career is not only a major driver of your happiness — it's probably also your biggest opportunity to have a positive impact on the world. We're a nonprofit that provides research and support to help talented people move into careers that tackle the world's most pressing problems. In other words, we want to help you make your 80,000 hours count. We try to provide the information and support we wish we'd had when we graduated: transparently explained, based on the best research available, willing to grapple with the big questions, and free. We aim to help you go from having no idea what to do, all the way to being in a fulfilling job that does good. To date, millions of people have read our advice, and thousands of people have told us they've changed careers based on it. Our hope is to get the next generation of young people focussed on tackling the world's most pressing problems, so that — collectively — we can solve them. Our top aim right now is to help people transition to careers reducing existential risk. We think these issues are among the biggest and most neglected challenges facing our generation — and so are where many of our readers can make the biggest positive difference. Our advice is focused on students...

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### What We Owe The Future

> What We Owe The Future releases August 16th. Read the introduction for free now.

- Published: 2022-08-12
- Modified: 2022-12-14
- URL: https://80000hours.org/what-we-owe-the-future/
- Topics: Future generations &amp; longtermism, Future of Humanity Institute, Long-term AI policy

What We Owe The FutureA Million-Year View Humanity's written history spans only 5,000 years. Our yet-unwritten future could last for millions more — or it could end tomorrow. Astonishing numbers of people could lead lives of great happiness or unimaginable suffering, or never live at all, depending on what we choose to do today. In What We Owe The Future, philosopher William MacAskill argues for 'longtermism': the idea that positively influencing the distant future is a key moral priority of our time. From this perspective, it's not enough to reverse climate change or avert the next pandemic. We must ensure that civilisation would rebound if it collapsed; and prepare for a planet where the smartest beings are likely to be digital, not human. If we make wise choices today, our grandchildren's grandchildren will have a better chance to thrive, and will know we did everything we could to give them a world full of justice, hope, and beauty. We'll send you the first section (for free) Join the 80,000 Hours newsletter and we'll send you the first section to your inbox. We'll also send you updates on our latest research, opportunities to work on longtermist issues, and news from the author. If you're already subscribed to our newsletter, email bella@80000hours. org to get your copy. [pullquote cite="Lydia...

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### User stories

- Published: 2022-07-22
- Modified: 2024-12-10
- URL: https://80000hours.org/stories/

Here are some examples of readers we're especially excited about, who are using their careers to help tackle the world's most pressing problems: (https://forum. effectivealtruism. org/posts/F9E8MwsPLiqSYhXJm/lessons-from-running-stanford-ea-and-seri) that their position as a student at Stanford gave them a great platform to spread important ideas. They began running EA Stanford, with support from a community building grant from the Centre for Effective Altruism, and were able to build up an especially-engaged EA group. Alongside other members of EA Stanford, Kuhan helped to start the (https://cisac. fsi. stanford. edu/stanford-existential-risks-initiative/content/stanford-existential-risks-initiative), which has helped hundreds of people learn about (/articles/existential-risks/). See (https://80000hours. org/about/credibility/what-others-say-about-80000-hours/).

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### What are the most pressing world problems? [Prob profiles V2]

> If you want to do as much good as you can with your career, what world problems should you try to tackle? Get ideas from our list.

- Published: 2022-05-31
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/our-current-list-of-pressing-world-problems/

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### In-depth career guide

- Published: 2022-04-25
- Modified: 2025-04-10
- URL: https://80000hours.org/key-ideas-campaign/



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### All articles

- Published: 2022-03-21
- Modified: 2024-01-30
- URL: https://80000hours.org/all-articles/



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### Career planning: our eight-week course to help you have a high-impact career

- Published: 2022-03-16
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-planning-landing-page/
- Topics: Career planning

How to plan a high-impact career: an eight-week course If you're wondering about what jobs to aim for in the longer term, or just want to step back and think systematically about your career and impact, you might want to sign up for our free career planning course. It takes everything we've learned about career planning and turns it into a series of tips, prompts, and resources, starting from your longer-term goals and working towards actionable next steps. Each week, we'll send you one article to read and a couple of prompts to reflect on. At the end, you'll have a complete career plan. ###Sign up for the course Make a career plan you feel confident in. We're a nonprofit, and everything we provide is free. We'll also send you monthly updates on our research and updates on high-impact job opportunities. You can unsubscribe from either in one click. {. smaller} ##Plan your career with our practical advice We've created a three-page summary of the advice in the full course. You can start clarifying your career plan right away by filling out our template. The entire course is available online. ##Why sign up for our course? A typical career is 80,000 hours...

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### Get our guide to what makes for a high-impact career

- Published: 2022-03-15
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/key-ideas-landing-page/
- Topics: Career capital, Community &amp; coordination, Effective Altruism, Exploration, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Leverage, Moral philosophy, Personal fit, Reasoning well

Your career is your biggest opportunity to make a difference. But how can you make the most of it? We've spent the last 10 years searching for the answer to that question. We've found that some of the paths open to you probably have far more impact than others, but they're often not what people are already focused on. This means we need to rethink social impact careers — and that by applying this new perspective, there's a chance you can find a career that's both higher impact and just as satisfying as your current path. ## Download our guide to social impact careers {. no-toc} Our in-depth key ideas guide can help you: * Get new ideas for high-impact careers * Compare your options in terms of impact * Make a plan you feel confident in We're a nonprofit, so everything we provide is free. {. small} We'll also send you monthly updates on our research and high-impact job opportunities. You can unsubscribe from either in one click. {. small} About our key ideas guide Read the two-minute summary In the guide, you'll learn about the ideas that have most changed our view of what makes for a high-impact career. We start with how to define impact, and then go on to three key drivers of your impact, which you can use to compare your options in terms of the difference they make. Finally, we introduce the most important elements...

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### style guide for sharing

- Published: 2022-03-11
- Modified: 2024-04-16
- URL: https://80000hours.org/style-guide-for-sharing/

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### 80k After Hours Podcast

- Published: 2022-02-28
- Modified: 2024-10-18
- URL: https://80000hours.org/after-hours-podcast/

## Resources on how to do good with your career — and anything else we feel like releasing. {. padding-top-smaller . margin-bottom-large} Subscribe with (https://feeds. transistor. fm/80k-after-hours), or anywhere you get podcasts: About the show 80k After Hours is a podcast by the team that brings you The 80,000 Hours Podcast. Like that show, it'll mostly still explore the best ways to do good — and some episodes will be even more laser-focused on careers than most original episodes. But we're also going to widen our scope, including things like how to solve pressing problems while also living a happy and fulfilling life, as well as releases that are just fun, entertaining, or experimental. It'll feature: 15-30 minute highlights versions of episodes from the original feed — for anyone too busy (or daunted! ) for our 2. 5+ hour interviews! Conversations between staff on the 80,000 Hours team More eclectic formats and topics — one episode could be a structured debate about 'human challenge trials'; the next a staged reading of a play about the year 2750 Niche content for specific audiences, such as high school students or active participants in the effective altruism community Extras and outtakes from interviews on the original feed 80,000 Hours staff interviewed on other podcasts Audio versions of our new articles and research 80k After Hours launched in 2022 to accommodate our growing and increasingly diverse audience — allowing us to...

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### Book giveaway

- Published: 2022-02-22
- Modified: 2025-02-14
- URL: https://80000hours.org/free-book/



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### Summary: what makes for a high-impact career?

- Published: 2021-09-14
- Modified: 2023-07-26
- URL: https://80000hours.org/key-ideas-2023/summary/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy, Effective Altruism, Foundations

This article summarises our old 'key ideas' series, which we stopped updating in 2023. We'd suggest reading (/career-guide/summary/) instead. TL;DR: Get good at something that lets you effectively contribute to big and neglected global problems. What ultimately makes for an impactful career? You can have more positive impact over the course of your career by aiming to: Help solve a more pressing problem. Many global issues should get more attention, but as individuals we should look for the biggest gaps in existing efforts. To do that, you can compare issues in terms of scale, neglectedness, and tractability. It turns out that some issues receive hundreds of times less attention relative to how big and solvable they seem. This means which issue you choose to work on is likely the biggest driver of your impact. In particular, our generation may see the rise of transformative technologies, which could lead to existential risks and make now a crucial moment that could affect the future for many generations to come -- but our current institutions are doing little to address these issues. We have a list of global issues we think are particularly pressing for more people to work on right now. Find a path that gives you a bigger opportunity to contribute to those problems. Some paths give you more leverage than others, in that they enable you to mobilise more resources (money, attention, skill) towards the most...

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### Career capital: how best to invest in yourself

- Published: 2021-09-09
- Modified: 2024-09-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/key-ideas-2023/career-capital/
- Topics: Career capital

This article is part of our old 'key ideas' series, which we stopped updating in 2023. We'd suggest reading (/career-guide/career-capital/) instead. A key strategic consideration is 'career capital' -- the skills, connections, credentials, and financial resources that can help you have a bigger impact in the future. Career capital is potentially a vital consideration because people seem to become dramatically more productive over their career. Our impression is that most people have little impact in their first couple of jobs, while productivity in most fields seems to peak at age 40–50. This suggests that by building the right career capital, you can greatly increase your impact, and that career capital should likely be one of your top considerations early in your career. This leaves the difficult question of which options help you gain the best career capital, putting you in the best position to take the highest-impact roles addressing the world's most pressing problems. How to gain the best career capital? We've noticed that people often think the best way to gain career capital is by doing prestigious jobs, such as consulting. We think consulting is a good option for career capital, but it's rarely the most direct route into our priority paths. You can see our write ups of individual priority paths for our thoughts on the best next steps to gain career capital within those paths. Some options stand out as good for a variety of...

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### Personal fit: why being good at your job is even more important than people think

- Published: 2021-09-08
- Modified: 2024-09-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/key-ideas-2023/personal-fit/
- Topics: Ability, Personal fit

This article is part of our old 'key ideas' series, which we stopped updating in 2023. We'd suggest reading (/career-guide/personal-fit/) instead. "Find work you're good at" is a truism, but we think many people still don't take it seriously enough. Finding the option where you have the best chance of excelling over the course of your career -- where you have your greatest 'personal fit' -- is one of the key determinants of your career's impact. In fact, after initially identifying some promising paths, we think it's often the most important factor. The first reason is that in many fields, data suggests that success is distributed unevenly. This is most pronounced in complex jobs like research or entrepreneurship. A key study of 'expert performance' concluded: A small percentage of the workers in any given domain is responsible for the bulk of the work. Generally, the top 10% of the most prolific elite can be credited with around 50% of all contributions, whereas the bottom 50% of the least productive workers can claim only 15% of the total work, and the most productive contributor is usually about 100 times more prolific than the least. In the most skewed fields like these, your expected impact is roughly just the value of outsized success multiplied by its probability -- from an impact point of view, you can roughly ignore the middling scenarios. But in most jobs there are still sizable differences in...

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### Speak with us

> Get free 1:1 career advice from one of our advisors. We can help you choose your focus, make connections, and find a fulfilling job.

- Published: 2021-08-23
- Modified: 2025-03-24
- URL: https://80000hours.org/speak-with-us/



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### This is your most important decision

- Published: 2021-07-20
- Modified: 2024-09-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/key-ideas-2023/make-a-difference-with-your-career/

This article is the introduction to our old 'key ideas' series, which we stopped updating in 2023. We'd suggest reading (/make-a-difference-with-your-career/) instead. When people think of living ethically, they most often think of things like recycling, fair trade, and volunteering. But that's missing something huge: your choice of career. We believe that what you do with your career is probably the most important ethical decision of your life. The first reason is the huge amount of time at stake. You have about 80,000 hours in your career: 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year, for 40 years. That's more time than you'll spend eating, socialising, and watching Netflix put together. And it means (unless you happen to be the heir to a large estate) that time is the biggest resource you have to help others. So if you can increase the overall impact of your career by just a tiny amount, it will likely do more good than changes you could make to other parts of your life. Or, to look at it another way, it's worth thinking a lot about how to make even just small improvements to your career. For instance, if you could increase the impact of your career by 1%, it would be worth spending up to 800 hours working out how to do that. Each dot illustrates one of the 80,000 hours in your career. You...

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### This is your most important decision

- Published: 2021-07-20
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/make-a-difference-with-your-career/
- Topics: About 80,000 Hours, Effective Altruism, Foundations, Moral philosophy, Reasoning well, Unconventional advice

When people think of living ethically, they most often think of things like recycling, fair trade, and volunteering. But that's missing something huge: your choice of career. We believe that what you do with your career is probably the most important ethical decision of your life. The first reason is the huge amount of time at stake. You have about 80,000 hours in your career: 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year, for 40 years. That's more time than you'll spend eating, socialising, and watching Netflix put together. And it means (unless you happen to be the heir to a large estate) that time is the biggest resource you have to help others. So if you can increase the overall impact of your career by just a tiny amount, it will likely do more good than changes you could make to other parts of your life. Or, to look at it another way, it's worth thinking a lot about how to make even just small improvements to your career. For instance, if you could increase the impact of your career by 1%, it would be worth spending up to 800 hours working out how to do that. Each dot illustrates one of the 80,000 hours in your career. You can read our key ideas series in under four of them. And that brings us to the second reason why your choice of career is so important: some careers give you the opportunity to do vastly more good for the...

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### Sam Harris newsletter

> You have 80,000 hours in your career. How can you best use them to help solve the world’s most pressing problems?

- Published: 2021-06-11
- Modified: 2023-11-28
- URL: https://80000hours.org/sam/

<h1>You've got 80,000 hours in your career.</h1>

How can you use them to solve the world's most pressing problems?

Our research and coaching helps you find the careers in which you can make the most difference.

 




You've got 80,000 hours in your career. We'll show you how to make them count. Learn more  

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### The 80,000 Hours Podcast

> In-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them.

- Published: 2021-05-25
- Modified: 2025-03-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/

## In-depth conversations about the world's most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them. {. padding-top-smaller . margin-bottom-large} Subscribe here, or anywhere you get podcasts: ## Selected episodes Having a successful career with depression, anxiety and imposter syndrome Recent episodes View all episodes for transcripts, links, highlights and more → ## Explore the archive Every episode has a full transcript and links to further reading. ## Quotes from the show I'm very, very concerned that North Korea today has an advanced biological weapons program. You don't need a lot of biological weapons to potentially kill billions of people... Fortunately, while we're not there yet, the science and the tools that are now available enable the possibility of making bioweapons obsolete... . they randomly determined when officers would take the training... so it's a really nice natural experiment. And they found that this one-day training program pretty dramatically reduced both...

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### Career planning course: thank you for signing up!

- Published: 2021-05-18
- Modified: 2021-05-27
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-planning/welcome/

In an hour you'll receive instructions for the course to your email, and tomorrow you'll get a link to Part 1. In the meantime, here's how to get started: Create your career plan template Ask a friend to join you, or ask to join the course facebook group to find potential discussion partners (though it's a bit of an experiment right now). If you're feeling keen, start part one. If you're new to 80,000 Hours, you could familiarise yourself with our most important ideas about how to have more impact and with this summary of our key advice on career planning. If you don't receive your email, check your spam folder, or try signing up with a different address. If you’re using Gmail, our emails may be delivered to your “Promotions” tab. To prevent this, you can manually drag our emails into your “Primary” tab or create a filter for all email sent from team@80000hours. org If you're new to our newsletter, we'll also sign you up to receive a monthly update on our research, and updates on high-impact job opportunities. You can unsubscribe from either of these, but remain on the course, by using the unsubscribe buttons in the footer of each email.

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### Putting your plan into action

- Published: 2021-05-16
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-planning/process/put-your-plan-into-action/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy, Career planning, How to get a job

Find the full career planning series here. *The most important sections in each article are marked with ★'s. ## The goal In the previous article, you finished your plan. Now it's time to focus on execution. How to execute successfully is not our main focus at 80,000 Hours, but there are a lot of other great resources that can help you. That said, the goal of this article is to take you through the most essential steps to overcome procrastination and get started. ★Define next actions To put your plan into practice, you'll want to pursue your most promising next career moves from Section 5. 2. 2 of your template — especially your Plan A. Most of your effort will go into your best-guess next career move, but it often makes sense to pursue several initially, and then pick one once you have concrete offers. To get into your next career moves, what do you need to do? Email a professor? Set up a meeting? Start a side project? Read a book? Make a demo? (You may also have more steps for investigating uncertainties from Part 7 that you haven't done yet. You can also add these to your list of next actions. ) Convert your answers into very concrete, small next actions. This makes them feel more manageable. Write out what you're going to do and when you'll do it. Setting 'implementation intentions' makes it significantly more likely that you'll follow through. Starting small can make it easier to...

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### How to investigate your career uncertainties and make a judgement call

- Published: 2021-05-16
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-planning/process/feedback-and-investigation/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy, Career planning, Decision making

Find the full career planning series here. The most important sections in each article are marked with ★'s. ## The goal The goal of this part of the career planning series is to help you make an overall judgement call about your plan after taking stock of, prioritising, and (perhaps) investigating your key uncertainties, so that you are ready to put it into action. You will also set points in the future at which you'll review and update your plan. ★Step back, reflect, and make your final list of key uncertainties Career planning involves so much uncertainty that it's easy to feel paralysed. To tackle your uncertainty, approach your investigation like a scientist. Make hypotheses, investigate them empirically, and update. You've listed key uncertainties throughout the articles in this series. Now we're going to gather them all up, check whether you've missed any, prioritise which to investigate, and work out what investigation to do. Gather up uncertainties You have accumulated key uncertainties through this process, including about: Which global problems are most pressing (and your values and worldview) Your best potential longer-term paths What your best next career steps should be What your backup options should be Copy and paste them into Section 7. 1. 1 of your template. Now here are some ways to reflect on your whole plan, check you haven't missed any key uncertainties, and start resolving some of them. Get some overall feedback Often what the people we advise find most helpful at this point...

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### Planning to adapt

- Published: 2021-05-16
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-planning/process/plan-to-adapt/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy, Career planning, Careers

Find the full career planning series here. The most important sections in each article are marked with ★'s. ## The goal Your career plan is likely to change because careers involve a huge amount of uncertainty. You'll learn a lot over time, both about the world and about your own preferences and skills. You'll also change ((https://80000hours. org/2015/02/we-change-more-than-we-expect-so-keep-your-options-open/)) and learn as you go, and the world will change — new opportunities will arise, and the top options today may get worse. All in all, you need to be prepared to adapt. One way to deal with this, as covered in the (https://80000hours. org/career-planning/process/determine-next-steps/), is to take next steps that let you learn and build transferable career capital, so you're in a better position no matter what happens. Another way to deal with the uncertainty is to make contingency plans for risks -- both personal and concerning your impact -- which is what we cover here. The goal is for you to: * Reflect on how you will keep developing your views going forward * Develop backup plans Stay open to change In Parts 2 and 3 of this series you thought about which global problems were most pressing and what you might be able to do to help solve them. But you will undoubtedly learn more about your opportunities and what the world needs as you go on. The questions are just much too big to be settled in a week...

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### How to figure out your next career step

- Published: 2021-05-16
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-planning/process/determine-next-steps/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy, Career planning, Careers, Decision making, Exploration, Now vs. Later

Find the full career planning series here. The most important sections in each article are marked with ★'s. ## The goal Now that you've clarified your (/career-planning/process/longer-term-paths/) and (/career-planning/process/clarify-your-strategic-focus/), you can use them to find the best next career move for you. These will usually be jobs, though they could also be education, side projects, or self-study. First you'll generate a long list of promising next career steps. Then we'll help you narrow down your options into a shortlist. You'll make your final best-guess decisions (https://80000hours. org/career-planning/process/feedback-and-investigation/). Two ways to generate ideas for next career steps Even if you won't be able to take a next career step for a while (maybe you need to stay in your current job for a while, or are still in school), it's worth having one to work toward. It's also useful to get really concrete at this stage, because specific opportunities often vary so much within a path. For instance, even if career path A is better than path B on average, the best opportunities within B can be much better than many of the opportunities within A. While we're keen for people to have longer-term plans, it's often worth spending as much or even more time searching for concrete next steps, even if they don't neatly fit into your longer-term plans. The first broad method we want to introduce for coming up with potential next steps is to start with where you want to end...

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### Clarifying your strategic focus

- Published: 2021-05-16
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-planning/process/clarify-your-strategic-focus/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy, Career capital, Career planning, Decision making, Exploration, Personal fit

Find the full career planning series here. The most important sections in each article are marked with ★'s. ## The goal Now that you have some (/career-planning/process/longer-term-paths/), you can assess your strategy for how you'll get there -- that is, what factors and rules of thumb you'll use to assess what next career steps you should take. By the end of this article, you will have determined your *strategic focus* -- your rough guide to how to choose among next career steps at this stage in your career -- as well as identified any other important strategic priorities to keep in mind. ★Factors for comparing your next career steps By 'next career steps' we have in mind roles or education opportunities (like going to grad school) that you could take for the next few months or few years right in front of you. In other words, we are turning to what your next substantial career phase should be. What factors should you use to compare your potential next steps? Here's a list of which factors typically matter. Below we'll discuss how important each factor is at different stages of your career. Immediate impact potential -- How much will the step help you contribute to solving a pressing problem (in expectation)? This depends on how pressing the problem is that it would allow you to address, the effectiveness of the intervention the next step helps you implement, how much leverage it gives you, and your...

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### How to generate ideas for longer-term paths

- Published: 2021-05-16
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-planning/process/longer-term-paths/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy, Career planning, Careers, Personal fit

Find the full career planning series here. The most important sections in each article are marked with ★'s. ## The goal This article covers *how* you might actually be able to help solve pressing global problems, and what your ideal role might look like over the longer term. At the end of it, you should have a shortlist of longer-term paths -- ideas for what you might aim toward doing in the next 5–20 years. Later in the series, we'll also use these to inform your (/career-planning/process/clarify-your-strategic-focus/) and (/career-planning/process/determine-next-steps/). It's possible to pick a great next career step without having a longer-term plan, but we think everyone would ideally have some kind of longer-term plan too. Having something you're aiming towards can keep you from drifting away from what you think is most impactful over the years (even if you later decide to change your plan due to learning more), and give you strategic direction in the nearer term. The horizon you use for your longer-term plan can also change depending on circumstances. For instance, as you get older, the time remaining decreases and career capital becomes a smaller factor, reducing the importance of longer-term planning. This is why we call it a long*er*-term plan rather than a long-term plan: it's what you plan to do beyond your next career move, however long that horizon is. What's coming up: 1. We start with some discussion of longer-term planning, including **why** to make longer-term plans...

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### Which global problems do you think are most pressing?

- Published: 2021-05-16
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-planning/process/your-views-of-global-problems/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy, Problem prioritisation, Reasoning well, World problems

Find the full career planning series here. The most important sections in each article are marked with ★'s. ## The goal You will think about which issues in the world might most need more attention. The goal is to generate a list of 5–15 global issues, roughly in order of priority, and **write them down** in your (https://80000hours. org/career-planning/career-plan-template/). For example: nuclear security, the possibility of extreme climate change, pandemics, or economic growth. You will also write down a list of key uncertainties about the list you generate. You don't necessarily need to have good opportunities to help tackle the problems you identify at this stage. We will discuss your options, taking into account your skill set and other factors, later on in the series. You also don't need to be certain about your ranking — in fact, you shouldn't be after only a short period of investigation. But a best guess is all you need to get started thinking about what to do next. ★Why compare global problems If you want to have an impact, and give everyone's needs equal consideration, it makes sense to ask what the world most needs, and then figure out how you might best help with that. We'll never have a complete answer to this question, but we think it's worth some serious thought. Different people will also have different answers due to having different moral views. Here we help you think through what the world most needs given your moral views...

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### What does a fulfilling, high-impact career look like for you?

- Published: 2021-05-16
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-planning/process/what-does-a-fulfilling-high-impact-career-look-like/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy, Career planning, Foundations, Job satisfaction, Personal fit

You might be able to use your career to greatly help hundreds of people, reduce the chance of global disasters, or have a big positive impact in another way -- while doing work that's also personally fulfilling. But working out how to do this is tricky, not least because it's hard to agree on what the terms 'help people', 'positive impact', and 'personally fulfilling' actually mean -- let alone craft goals that will help you achieve these things. We'll help you clarify these terms to get a sense of what you're aiming for. Find the full career planning series here. ## The goal You'll reflect on what you think positive impact means and write down a definition, plus learn about our framework for what to look for in a career to have more positive impact. This will give you a foundation to make progress in later articles in the series. You will also write out your top priorities for your own personal fulfillment, as well as any other moral values you hold, so that you can keep them in mind when comparing your options in future parts of this series. What is 'positive impact'? We find it useful to divide ultimate career goals into: Positive impact (considered 'impartially') Personal fulfillment Fulfillment of other moral values This series is mainly about the first aim: having more positive impact with your career (though we'll go over the other two briefly in a moment). So: What do we mean...

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### 8-week career planning course: career planning template

> Our 8-step career planner template is designed to help you write an in-depth and actionable career plan.

- Published: 2021-05-14
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-planning/career-plan-template/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy, Career planning, Decision making

This 8-step template is designed to help you write an in-depth and actionable career plan. The template is designed to be used alongside our in-depth career planning process, though it can also be used directly — we link to relevant sections of the process throughout. **Note:** We also have a shorter (/career-guide-template/) designed to accompany our (/career-guide/). Key parts of the career planner: What does a fulfilling, high-impact career look like for you? (What are your career goals? ) Clarify your views of which global problems are the most pressing Generate ideas for longer-term paths Clarify your strategic focus Determine your best-guess next career step Plan to adapt Get feedback, investigate key uncertainties, and make a judgement call Put your plan into action If you complete each part, you will have worked through the most important issues you need to think about when planning your career, considered your most promising career options, identified next steps to help you achieve your long term goals, and have all your answers sketched out in one place. ## Get your copy of the career planner (https://docs. google. com/document/d/1kmyGX4KMYzhHcrNSYp_K8joR3n2NP2zcUs02N9K45P0/copy) {. btn . btn-default} You can also see a (https://docs. google. com/document/d/1apCyRt7s6zR7RBoy9v2cipVlW0DGiFLUwDR1sxYL7NA/), which we've lightly edited for anonymity. ## Sign up to be guided through the template Get instructions and resources in your inbox to complete one section per week as part of our free career planning course. We'll also send you monthly updates on our...

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### Effective Altruism: Ten Global Problems — curated episodes from The 80,000 Hours Podcast

> Ten curated episodes from The 80,000 Hours Podcast explaining a selection of problems the effective altruism community is working to solve.

- Published: 2021-05-11
- Modified: 2024-06-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/effective-altruism-ten-global-problems/
- Topics: Academic Research, AI safety technical research, Biorisk strategy &amp; policy, Climate change, Existential risk, Factory Farming, Most pressing problems, Nuclear war, Research into global priorities



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### Planning a high-impact career: a summary of everything you need to know in 7 points

- Published: 2021-05-06
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-planning/summary/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy, Decision making

We took 10 years of research and what we've learned from advising 1,000+ people on how to build high-impact careers, compressed that into an eight-week course to create your career plan, and then compressed that into this three-page summary of the main points. (It's especially aimed at people who want a career that's both satisfying and has a significant positive impact, but much of the advice applies to all career decisions. ) 1. Use these factors to clarify what a successful career looks like. You can divide career aims into three categories: (i) impartial positive impact, (ii) personal priorities, and (iii) other moral values. We'd encourage you to make your own definition of each. We define 'impartial positive impact' as what helps the most people live better lives in the long term, treating everyone's interests as equal. You can analyse the impact of a career opportunity in terms of: How pressing the problem is that you'd work on How much of a contribution you could make in tackling the problem Your personal fit with the opportunity, which depends on your abilities and 'career capital' (skills, connections, and reputation) You'll have more impact by maximising the product of these three factors over your career. Because most people reach their peak productivity between ages 40 and 60, you need your work to be personally satisfying enough to stick with it for the long haul. Turning to personal priorities, research suggests that people are most satisfied...

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### Your biggest opportunity to make a difference: our guide to what makes for a high-impact career

> What makes for a high-impact career? Here's how to compare your options in terms of the difference they make.

- Published: 2021-03-02
- Modified: 2024-09-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/key-ideas-2023/
- Topics: Career capital, Community &amp; coordination, Effective Altruism, Exploration, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Leverage, Moral philosophy, Personal fit, Reasoning well

We stopped updating the key ideas series in 2023. If you're new to 80,000 Hours, we now recommend starting with our (/career-guide/), and then our (/advanced-series/) if you'd like something more in-depth. We've left the series up since some readers prefer it. Most of the individual articles are still part of the (/advanced-series/) and so kept up-to-date, but the others have been left as they were in early 2023. Your career is your biggest opportunity to make a difference. But how can you make the most of it? We've spent the last 10 years searching for the answer to that question. We've found that some of the paths open to you probably have far more impact than others, but they're often not what people are already focused on. This means we need to rethink social impact careers -- and that by applying this new perspective, there's a chance you can find a career that's both higher impact and just as satisfying as your current path. In the series, you'll learn about the ideas that have most changed our view of what makes for a high-impact career. We start with how to define impact, and then go on to three key drivers of your impact, which you can use to compare your options in terms of the difference they make. Finally, we introduce the most important elements of career strategy. There are about 20 key articles, which you can read over a weekend. At the...

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### Career planning and decision making — all our best resources

> Research-based, practical advice on career planning, decision-making and getting jobs for people who want a fulfilling career with positive impact.

- Published: 2020-12-20
- Modified: 2025-02-07
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-planning/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy, Career planning, Decision making, How to get a job

If good career planning can increase the positive impact you have with your career — or the satisfaction you get from it — by just 1%, then because a career is typically 80,000 hours long, it'd be worth spending 799 of those hours just planning. Fortunately, we'll be much faster, and think the rewards of good planning are much larger. The articles and career planning template on this page are designed to help you make the best possible decisions in planning out your career. They're in-depth and based on the best academic research and existing advice we could find. And we've tested and refined the advice in them over the years by advising over 1,000 people one-on-one. Follow the links below to make great career decisions, review your progress, and create a career plan you feel confident in. ## Make your career plan This template takes the most important exercises from our (/career-guide/), and organises them into a complete career plan. It starts with your longer-term goals, and then shows how to translate them into concrete next steps. Our (/career-guide/career-planning/) covers the key things you need to know about how to plan your career. ##Make an immediate career decision Do you need to decide between a couple of concrete options right now — such as which job offer to...

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### Effective Altruism: An Introduction — ten curated episodes from The 80,000 Hours Podcast

> Ten curated episodes of The 80,000 Hours Podcast that quickly get you up to speed on the school of thought known as effective altruism.

- Published: 2020-12-15
- Modified: 2024-06-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/effective-altruism-an-introduction/
- Topics: Effective Altruism, Foundations, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Moral philosophy



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### Career planning series: how to plan your high-impact career

> We've taken ten years of research and turned it into a free, in-depth career planning process, to help you make a career plan you feel confident in.

- Published: 2020-11-16
- Modified: 2024-10-07
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-planning/process/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy, Career planning

If you want a career that's both fulfilling and impactful, but are feeling unsure what to do, we've created this series to help you make a plan. The series will help you apply everything we've learned about career planning, drawing from academic research on decision making and our experience giving career advice to over 1,000 people. It's designed to be helpful no matter which issues you want to work on or what your skills are, and whether you're still a student or have been in a job for years. If you read the whole thing, you'll have considered the most important questions about your career, made a career plan you can feel confident in, and given yourself the best possible chance of finding work that's satisfying and makes a real difference. Career planning isn't necessarily an easy (or a particularly short) process. But you have 80,000 hours of working time in your life, so if you're lucky enough to have options for how to spend that time, it's worth really thinking about how to spend it best. ##Get the series in your inbox {. h3} Enter your email and we'll send you one part, each week. Sign up to complete the series as a weekly course. We'll email you an article a week alongside some questions to answer to help you write part of your career plan. We'll also send you updates on our research and updates on high-impact job opportunities... .

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### Contact us

- Published: 2020-04-13
- Modified: 2025-02-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/about/contact-us/

Please send feedback and general queries to info@80000hours. org. To submit a job to our job board, please fill out this short form. If our team decides that the job meets our inclusion criteria, then you should receive an email notifying you when it is live on our job board. You can apply to speak with our team about your career decisions and how to apply our research to your situation. We do not usually respond to individual career questions over email outside of this programme. If you have a question for a specific team member, you can find individual email addresses on our meet the team page. Stay updated on our research The best way to stay up to date with our research and announcements is to subscribe to our newsletter. You can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Track our progress as an organisation We communicate key developments on our blog and in our newsletter. We also release in-depth quarterly updates on our progress and metrics to our supporter group. To join this group, or to ask any other questions, please email info@80000hours. org. Translations We keep a store of translations of our content that people have kindly and voluntarily translated into other languages.

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### Redirect

- Published: 2020-04-02
- Modified: 2023-02-08
- URL: https://80000hours.org/r/



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### COVID-19: Analysis, resources and how you can help [visible to anyone with the link]

- Published: 2020-03-26
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/covid-19-preview/

80,000 Hours provides research and advice to help people find careers that help solve the world's most pressing problems. This page presents all our content related to the COVID-19 crisis, and other resources we've found helpful. It covers how to understand the crisis, how to tackle it, ideas for dealing with self-isolation, and how you could use your career to help prevent future pandemics. We're updating this page regularly. Please contact us to suggest improvements, opportunities to help, or if you notice mistakes. Last update: 2020-03-28 XX:XX GMT ##Understanding COVID-19 Here are some of the best primers we've found: * (https://www. youtube. com/watch? v=BtN-goy9VOY) * (https://medium. com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-die-f4d3d9cd99ca) * (https://www. ft. com/content/ed3fb63e-41ce-11ea-bdb5-169ba7be433d) and an (https://www. nytimes. com/interactive/2020/world/coronavirus-tips-advice. html) * (https://www. uptodate. com/contents/coronavirus-disease-2019-covid-19? fbclid=IwAR1RgCZKFEywtU6REGTqJPHBM-nPNXaGbi0E3gX8cuAiNyfVZo5WNrx2nuo) * (https://www. imperial. ac. uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020. pdf) If you'd like more detail, listen to (/podcast/episodes/rob-howie-coronavirus-crisis/), or (/podcast/episodes/rob-howie-coronavirus-crisis/#transcript). There's also a (#recommended-resources). ##Coping with COVID-19 These are difficult times. If you're social distancing or working from home for the first time, (https://forum. effectivealtruism. org/posts/aeAHECQMLHCGroAkC/finding-equilibrium-in-a-difficult-time) may be helpful. If you're feeling OK, but at a loose end while distancing, consider how you could help address the crisis (see below). You could also frame this time as an opportunity to work on (https://80000hours. org/career-guide/how-to-be-successful/), (/key-ideas/) or any of these...

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### COVID-19: Analysis, resources and how you can help

> Analysis and resources to help mitigate COVID-19.

- Published: 2020-03-19
- Modified: 2024-12-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/covid-19/
- Topics: Biorisk strategy &amp; policy, Catastrophic pandemics

80,000 Hours is a nonprofit that provides research and support to help people find careers that effectively tackle the world's most pressing problems. This page presents all our content related to the COVID-19 crisis and other useful resources. It covers key information about the crisis, how to use your time and money to tackle it effectively, ideas on how to personally cope, and how to use your career to help prevent future pandemics. 2020-08-13 Added podcast interview: (/podcast/episodes/shruti-rajagopalan-covid19-and-india/). 2020-05-28 We have stopped updating this page regularly. Through the summer, we will continue releasing articles and podcasts on (/covid-19/#help-prevent-the-next-pandemic). We will also continue updating our (/job-board/). 2020-05-21 Added 22 new (/job-board/covid-19/). 2020-05-20 Added podcast interview: (/podcast/episodes/marc-lipsitch-winning-or-losing-against-covid19-and-epidemiology/). 2020-05-13 Added a couple of new (/job-board/covid-19/). 2020-05-08 Added podcast interview: (/podcast/episodes/tara-kirk-sell-covid-19-misinformation-performance-reopen/). ##Understanding COVID-19 {#understanding-covid-19} Read our short summary: * (https://80000hours. org/articles/covid-19-key-facts/). Here are some more of the best primers we've found: * (https://www. youtube. com/watch? v=BtN-goy9VOY) * (https://www. cdc. gov/nchs/covid19/faq. htm) * (https://medium. com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-die-f4d3d9cd99ca) (and see...

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### The Precipice Book

> Toby Ord's new book on existential risk was released in March 2020. Get a free copy now.

- Published: 2020-03-04
- Modified: 2024-04-23
- URL: https://80000hours.org/the-precipice/

The PrecipiceExistential Risk & The Future of Humanity Humanity stands at a precipice. Our species could survive for millions of generations — enough time to end disease, poverty, and injustice; to reach new heights of flourishing. But this vast future is at risk. With the advent of nuclear weapons, humanity entered a new age, gaining the power to destroy ourselves, without the wisdom to ensure we won't. Since then, these dangers have only multiplied, from climate change to engineered pandemics and unaligned artificial intelligence. If we do not act fast to reach a place of safety, it may soon be too late. The Precipice explores the science behind the risks we face. It puts them in the context of the greater story of humanity: showing how ending these risks is among the most pressing moral issues of our time. And it points the way forward, to the actions and strategies we can take today to safeguard humanity's future. We'll mail you the book (for free) Join the 80,000 Hours newsletter and our partners at Impact Books will send you a free copy of the book (T&Cs here). We'll also send you updates on our latest research, opportunities to work on existential risk, and news from the author. If you're already on our newsletter, email us at book. giveaway@80000hours. org to get a copy... .

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### Calibration training

- Published: 2019-04-24
- Modified: 2022-09-23
- URL: https://80000hours.org/calibration-training/

This app will show whether you can tell how likely things are to be true & help you do better.

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### Recruiting terms & privacy policy

- Published: 2019-01-09
- Modified: 2022-01-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/legal/recruiting-terms/

###This policy is no longer in effect. As of 25th January 2022, this policy has been replaced by our (https://80000hours. org/legal/1-1-terms-privacy-policy/). Effective date: 17th January, 2019 By using our Service, you accept the practices described in this policy. Privacy Policy addendum This policy is an addendum to our general privacy policy, which specifically describes how we collect and process Personal Data in relation to the Service provided by our recruiting team. In brief We work closely with organisations in our priority paths to fill their most important roles. We use information available online (e. g. on LinkedIn) and submitted by you to us (e. g. when applying for our recruiting service) to match you with high impact roles. When we come across a role you might be a good fit for, we will either: Contact you to suggest you apply or discuss the opportunity with you. Directly share your contact details, and some of the information you have submitted to us, with the relevant employer. We will only share information in the context of positively recommending you for consideration for a role. We use our discretion when deciding what information to share with potential employers. If you wish to mark particular information as strictly confidential between you and 80,000 Hours, just tell us. Information we may collect Depending on the circumstances, we may collect, store, and use the following categories of personal information about you: Personal contact details such as name, title, addresses, telephone numbers, and email...

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### Donate to 80,000 Hours

- Published: 2018-10-29
- Modified: 2025-04-09
- URL: https://80000hours.org/support-us/donate/
- Topics: About 80,000 Hours

We're currently fundraising $1,700,000 to support our general activities (excluding marketing and grantmaking) until the middle of 2025. We have $1,500,000 left to raise. This page has more information (https://80000hours. org/donate/#about-us), (https://80000hours. org/donate/#our-track-record), and our (https://80000hours. org/donate#fundraising). If you'd like to donate, you can: (https://www. givingwhatwecan. org/en-GB/charities/80000-hours){. btn . btn-primary . margin-top-smallest} (mailto:jess@80000hours. org){. btn . btn-secondary . margin-top-smallest} About us At 80,000 Hours, we provide research and support to help people have high-impact careers. Our goal is to get talented people working on the world's most pressing problems. We focus on problems that threaten the long-term future, including risks from artificial intelligence and catastrophic pandemics. To achieve our goal, we: Reach people who might be interested through marketing, engaging and user-friendly content, and word-of-mouth. Introduce people to information, frameworks, and ideas which are useful for having a high-impact career and help them get excited about contributing to solving pressing global problems. Support people in transitioning to careers that contribute to solving pressing global problems. ‎ We provide four main services: We've written a (https://80000hours. org/career-guide/), dozens of cause area (https://80000hours. org/problem-profiles/#most-pressing-world-problems), and reviews of (https://80000hours. org/career-reviews/). In 2024, we had just over 6. 5 million visits to our website and our research newsletter went out to nearly 500,000 subscribers. We host (https://80000hours. org/podcast/) about the world's most pressing problems and how people can use their careers to solve them. In 2024, we had over...

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### Explore our research by topic

- Published: 2018-09-17
- Modified: 2019-03-27
- URL: https://80000hours.org/topics/



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### Psychology results in top journals - are they true? And can you guess which ones?

- Published: 2018-08-31
- Modified: 2022-09-23
- URL: https://80000hours.org/psychology-replication-quiz/

Does a heavier clipboard really get job applicants taken more seriously? Try your luck with this quiz.

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### What are the most pressing world problems?

> Which problems are the biggest, most tractable, and most neglected in the world - and what can you do about them?

- Published: 2018-08-16
- Modified: 2025-04-04
- URL: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Building effective altruism, Catastrophic pandemics, Climate change, Existential risk, Global priorities research, Institutional decision making, Most pressing problems, Problem prioritisation, Top-recommended careers, World problems

We prioritise problems that are **unusually large in scale, unduly neglected, and solvable**, because (/articles/problem-framework/). Right now problems that could pose (https://80000hours. org/articles/existential-risks/) tend to top our list, because they threaten not just those alive today but also humanity's entire future, and they remain neglected relative to their scale. Our list is also influenced by thinking that there's a realistic possibility of (https://80000hours. org/problem-profiles/artificial-intelligence/#making-advances-extremely-quickly) in the coming decades. This ranking is a best guess and a constant work in progress, meaning it's doubtless incomplete and mistaken in many ways. It also may not align with your worldview. So we encourage you to think through the question of which problems are most pressing (#make-your-own-list) too. Where you focus will also depend on your opportunities to contribute to each issue. To learn why we listed a specific problem and how you can help tackle it, click the profiles and see our (#problems-faq) below. ## Our list of the most pressing world problems {#most-pressing-world-problems} Advanced AI could greatly influence the future of humanity. If this goes badly, we think it could pose an existential threat. Pandemics are among the deadliest events in human history. Developments in biotechnology could make future pandemics even worse. Nuclear weapons were the first genuine man-made existential threat. Despite some...

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### Thanks for your interest

- Published: 2017-12-13
- Modified: 2021-10-07
- URL: https://80000hours.org/speak-with-us/waitlist/

Thanks for your interest We'll send you an invitation to apply as soon as possible. We hope to get back to you in approximately a month. In the meantime, you can learn more by reading our key ideas series, browsing our research and listening to our podcast. You could also discuss your career plans with people in the effective altruism community - conferences and local meetups are a great place to do this.

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### Apply for advising

> We’ve already helped over 5,000 people choose a focus, make connections, and find work that makes a difference.

- Published: 2017-10-26
- Modified: 2024-09-24
- URL: https://80000hours.org/speak-with-us/apply/

This form will give us a better understanding of your situation so we can see whether we're well positioned to help. Your answers will also help set the agenda for your advising call. We'll email you a copy of your answers after you submit the form.

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### Thank you

- Published: 2017-10-11
- Modified: 2020-08-26
- URL: https://80000hours.org/user-survey/thank-you/

Thank you for taking the time to fill out our survey. It’s really valuable to us to learn about ways our work affects our users, and your feedback helps us improve.

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### Application received

- Published: 2017-09-05
- Modified: 2024-05-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/speak-with-us/application-received/

Thank you for applying to speak with us. We've sent a copy of your application to your email address. We'll review your application, and we usually get back to people within about two weeks. If you have an urgent decision to make, please reach out to advising@80000hours. org with a brief explanation and we may be able to expedite your application. If you're using Gmail, our emails may be delivered to your "Promotions" tab. To prevent this, you can manually drag our emails into your "Primary" tab or (https://support. google. com/mail/answer/6579? hl=en) for all emails sent from advising@80000hours. org.

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### Find a fulfilling career that does good

- Published: 2017-04-20
- Modified: 2024-01-23
- URL: https://80000hours.org/book/



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### Job board

> Handpicked roles to help you tackle the world's most pressing problems with your career.

- Published: 2017-04-10
- Modified: 2023-08-16
- URL: https://80000hours.org/job-board/

Some of these roles directly address some of the world's most pressing problems, while others may help you build the career capital you need to have a big impact later. Get weekly emails of curated jobs Subscribers also receive updates on our latest research on finding a fulfilling and impactful career. You can opt out of research or jobs emails with one click.

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### Thank you

- Published: 2016-10-27
- Modified: 2019-03-27
- URL: https://80000hours.org/thank-you/

Thank you for taking our survey Your responses will keep 80,000 Hours continuously improving and allow us to help thousands of other people like yourself. We wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for all the people who have helped us along the way. We’re truly grateful for all your support and encouragement. If you’d like to further support our mission, you can do so here.

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### Get social impact career ideas

- Published: 2016-07-29
- Modified: 2023-05-30
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-quiz/

Our career quiz is no longer available. See our career guide for our current take on how to think about careers that have a positive impact and where your best opportunities may be.

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### Career Planning Tool Part 2

- Published: 2016-05-28
- Modified: 2022-03-22
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-planning-tool-part-2/

Start Part 2

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### Career Planning Tool

- Published: 2016-05-23
- Modified: 2023-02-06
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-planning/career-planning-tool/
- Topics: Career planning

**New:** We've just launched our in-depth career planning process. It's our most comprehensive overview of all our advice on (/career-planning/), and includes a step-by-step (https://80000hours. org/career-planning/career-plan-template/) you can use to plan your career. (It's designed to replace the process below, which we left for posterity. ) This tool is where we tie everything together from our career guide, and help you make your career plan. Part 1: We'll go over our key ideas and make sure you've got them down. Part 2: We'll make your A/B/Z plan and choose your next step. It can take anywhere from twenty minutes to an afternoon, depending on how thorough you want to be. Feel free to skip any section. If you do it in multiple sittings, make sure you keep the tab open so you don't lose your answers. Start By using this tool, you agree to the privacy policy of 80,000 Hours and of TypeForm (the platform this tool runs on). Any personal information you submit will be kept confidential within the 80,000 Hours team and the Centre for Effective Altruism, unless you give us written permission to share it more widely. If you'd prefer to use a Google Doc instead, go here.

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### Make a decision

- Published: 2016-04-13
- Modified: 2022-03-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-decision/

If you're facing a decision like 'which offer should I accept? ', 'where should I apply? ' or 'which major should I pursue? ', our decision-making tool asks you a series of questions to help you clarify your priorities, options and next steps, and checks you haven’t missed any important considerations. It's based on our more in-depth article. Start the process Whether you already have offers on the table, or are still figuring out where to apply, our decision-making tool can help you figure out your next step. It will ask you a series of questions we use in one-on-one coaching to clarify your situation, check you didn’t miss any important options or priorities, and make sure you’ve applied all the most important results of our research to your decision. When making career decisions, most people don’t use a process at all. But this is a mistake because (/articles/4-biases-to-avoid-in-career-decisions/). If you just "go with your gut," you’re likely to miss something. Other people use simple techniques like lists of pros and cons. But these don’t even address the most important bias - considering (https://80k. local/2013/01/3-ways-to-broaden-your-career-horizons/) - and can easily lead you to rationalise what you already believe. We developed our process using the research in decision-making science, and then we refined it during one-on-one coaching with hundreds of people. The process also checks that you’ve applied the key lessons of (/articles/). Though it won’t tell you what to...

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### Find a fulfilling career that does good

> This free career guide, based on over 10 years of research alongside academics at Oxford, will help you find fulfilling work that fits your skills and does good.

- Published: 2016-04-13
- Modified: 2025-04-10
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-guide/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy, Doing good in your current job, Effective Altruism, Moral philosophy, Personal fit

Introduction: Why read this guide? Answer: You have 80,000 hours in your career. That's a long time. Spend one or two of those hours on this guide to help you work out how to use the rest. We believe you might be able to find a career that is both more satisfying and has a greater positive impact. Start now Or read a (/career-guide/summary/) of the entire guide. Part 1: What makes for a dream job? Answer: Research shows that to have a fulfilling career, you should do something you're good at that makes the world a better place. Don't aim for a highly paid, easy job, or expect to discover your "passion" in a flash of insight. Find out the six key ingredients of fulfilling work: Learn more Part 2:How much difference can one person make? Answer: Many common ways to do good, such as becoming a doctor, have less impact than you might first think. Other, more unconventional options, have allowed certain people to achieve an extraordinary impact (including one particular Lieutenant Colonel in the Soviet military). Find out why your choice of career really matters for the world: Learn more Part 3:Can you change...

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### Problem quiz

> Answer 6 questions to filter our list of the world's most biggest problems, based on research with academics at the University of Oxford.

- Published: 2016-04-07
- Modified: 2018-08-16
- URL: https://80000hours.org/problem-quiz/

Here's the prototype of the quiz: Start now

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### Annual career review tool

- Published: 2016-02-17
- Modified: 2023-02-06
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-planning/annual-career-review/

This tool asks you a couple of questions to help you: Reflect on the past year Consider whether to change job Make a plan for the coming year We encourage people to do a quick review of their career plans about once a year. Annually is frequent enough to pick up important changes in your situation without too much delay, but infrequent enough to avoid spending too much time planning rather than doing. If you work through this tool, then your review for this year is done. All questions are optional. Feel free to skip any section. If you do it in multiple sittings, make sure you keep the tab open so you don't lose your answers. Start By using this tool, you agree to the privacy policy of 80,000 Hours and of TypeForm (the platform this tool runs on). Any personal information you submit will be kept confidential within the 80,000 Hours team and the Centre for Effective Altruism, unless you give us written permission to share it more widely.

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### Welcome to our newsletter

- Published: 2015-09-16
- Modified: 2025-01-21
- URL: https://80000hours.org/newsletter/step-2/



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### How to make tough career decisions

> A step-by-step process to help you make career decisions based on decision-making research.

- Published: 2015-08-28
- Modified: 2024-11-21
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-decision/article/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy, Decision making, Personal fit

Should I quit my job? Which of my offers should I take? Which long-term options should I explore? These decisions will affect how you spend years of your time, so the stakes are high. But they're also an area where you shouldn't expect your intuition to be a reliable guide. This means it's worth taking a more systematic approach. What might a good career decision process look like? A common approach is to make a pro and con list, but it's possible to do a lot better. Pro and con lists make it easy to put too much weight on an unimportant factor. More importantly, they don't encourage you to make use of the most powerful decision-making methods, which can greatly improve the quality of your decisions. Pro and con lists make it easy to put too much weight on an unimportant factor. In this article, we present a step-by-step process for making your next career decision. This process draws on the most useful discoveries in decision-making research and our experience advising thousands of people one-on-one. Career decisions usually involve a huge amount of uncertainty. If you sometimes feel stressed or anxious, this is normal. We can't make your next decision easy, but if you work through this process, we think you'll be more likely to avoid common mistakes and take the best next step you can. You can work through the article below, or use a simplified version in our...

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### Checklist for assessing options

- Published: 2015-08-26
- Modified: 2018-08-16
- URL: https://80000hours.org/checklist-for-assessing-options/

1. Score options on priorities Take your top two to five options, and score them from 1-5 on each of your priorities. We’re not suggesting that you should go with whichever option has the highest total score (see step 5), but explicitly assessing your options on each of your priorities should help you avoid getting misled by irrelevant factors. It also ensures that you’ve thought through each aspect of the decision. This is best done in a spreadsheet. You can use this template. 2. Question your gut Pay attention to where gut judgements feed into your ranking. Your gut is good at making decisions where you’ve made lots of similar decisions before, so it’s probably good at judging something like “Will I get on with the people I’m working with in this job? ” (if you’ve actually met them). But it’s bad at judging questions like “how much will I earn in this career? ” or is this cause effective? See more on when to go with your gut. 3. Consider why you might be wrong Ask yourself why you might be wrong about your ranking. This can help to reduce bias. 4. Focus on future pros and cons Check that you’ve focused on the future pros and cons of your options, rather than what you’ve done in the past. This can help you avoid the sunk cost fallacy. 5. Check you’re not relying on one or two strong considerations Have you considered the problem from many angles? Rather than basing your...

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### Get help from our community

- Published: 2015-07-08
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/community/
- Topics: Community &amp; coordination, Effective Altruism

Joining a community can be one of the best ways to increase your impact. First, it can enable you to make hundreds of connections in one go. Second, a group of people working together can have more impact than they could individually. Back in 2011, we helped to found the effective altruism community. It's a group of people devoted to using evidence and reason to figure out the most effective ways to help others -- whether through donations, political advocacy, or their careers. Many of our readers have made crucial connections within the effective altruism community. Learn about effective altruism If you want to learn about the ideas behind the community, you have a choice of introductions: Our podcast series: Effective Altruism: An Introduction A webpage: effectivealtruism. org from the Centre for Effective Altruism An academic article: Effective Altruism by our cofounder and Oxford philosopher Will MacAskill You can also join the Effective Altruism Newsletter, which is run by the (https://www. centreforeffectivealtruism. org/). You'll receive an introduction to the key ideas, a monthly update on new research, and notices of key conferences each year. This box subscribes you to the Effective Altruism Newsletter, not (https://80000hours. org/newsletter/)! {. small} Meet people interested in effective altruism How to meet people in person We think the best way to meet people in person is to attend an Effective Altruism Global(x) conference. Click the link to see all upcoming events. The EAGx series are locally organised conferences aimed at people new...

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### The highest-impact career paths our research has identified so far

> Our list of the most promising high-impact career paths for helping others.

- Published: 2015-07-08
- Modified: 2025-01-07
- URL: https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/
- Topics: Career capital, Careers, Categories of impactful careers, Other careers, Sometimes-recommended careers, Top-recommended careers

The highest-impact career for you is the one that allows you to make the biggest contribution to solving one of (https://80000hours. org/problem-profiles/). Early on, (/career-guide/career-capital/#how-can-you-get-the-best-career-capital-get-good-at-something-useful) you focus on building useful skills – in a separate article you can see (/skills/). After that, you have to apply them. On this page, we provide reviews of over 20 specific career paths that put these skills to use tackling the world's most pressing problems. ##The highest-impact career paths our research has identified so far {#our-priority-paths} Most of these paths are difficult to enter, and it's common to start by investing years in (/skills/) before pursuing them. But if any might be a good fit for you, we encourage you to seriously consider it. We've ranked these paths roughly in terms of our take on their expected impact, holding personal fit for each fixed and given (/problem-profiles/). But your personal fit matters a lot for your impact, and there is a lot of variation *within* each path too — so the best opportunities in one lower on the list will often be better than most of the opportunities in a higher-ranked one. Improve organisational, political, and societal decision-making about AI to reduce catastrophic risks. The development of AI could transform society. Help increase the chance it's...

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### Acknowledgements

- Published: 2015-05-14
- Modified: 2023-03-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/support-us/acknowledgements/
- Topics: About 80,000 Hours

We're extremely grateful to all those who have supported us over the years. 80,000 Hours wouldn't be possible if it weren't for the help of many, many people. We're deeply grateful for your support and for this opportunity to have a big impact. Some of the people and groups we'd especially like to thank are: Our donors. All our users, particularly those who have provided us with detailed feedback and taken the time to fill out our many surveys. Everyone who has worked at 80,000 Hours in the past, whether as staff, contractors, volunteers, or interns. The team at Effective Ventures Operations (and previously the Centre for Effective Altruism), who have provided us with operations support. Everyone who has taken the time to advise us on our strategy and content. All the field-experts who speak to the people we advise about their careers. Our trustees and external advisors.

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### Search results

- Published: 2015-04-21
- Modified: 2023-12-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/search/



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### Advising terms & privacy policy

- Published: 2014-12-05
- Modified: 2022-01-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/legal/advising/

###This policy is no longer in effect. As of 25th January 2022, this policy has been replaced by our (https://80000hours. org/legal/1-1-terms-privacy-policy/). Effective date: 31st May 2018 By applying for and using our Service, you accept the practices described in this policy. Advising Disclaimer We can give you information about your career options that we hope is useful; but how you choose to use this information is up to you. We don’t take responsibility for the outcomes of your choices. Moreover, while the aim of our Service is to provide you with information about how to help the world, we don’t support courses of action that may be harmful to your physical or mental well being. Our advisors are not professionally qualified career advisors. We recommend you use our advice alongside a professionally qualified advisor. Please note that though we take reasonable precautions to keep your Personal Data private, we do not take responsibility for damages caused by data that is accidentally leaked or stolen. Advising Privacy Policy addendum This policy is an addendum to our general privacy policy, which specifically describes how we collect and process Personal Data in relation to the Service provided by our advising team. When you apply for and use our Service, we may collect and process Personal Data and Special Category Data for the following purposes: To provide and maintain our Service To notify you about changes to our Service To gather analysis or valuable information so that we can...

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### Welcome to our newsletter

- Published: 2014-12-01
- Modified: 2024-01-26
- URL: https://80000hours.org/newsletter/welcome/

Thank you for joining. We'll do our best to help you have a greater impact with your career. To claim your book, open the welcome email and click the links near the start. We'll be sending: A few introductory emails guiding you through how we can help One important idea from our research every week (plus new releases and events) A weekly list of top job opportunities You can unsubscribe in one click (it's in the footer of our emails). If you're using Gmail, our emails may be delivered to your "Promotions" tab. To prevent this, you can manually drag our emails into your "Primary" tab or (https://support. google. com/mail/answer/6579? hl=en) for all emails sent from team@80000hours. org. What's next? Our podcast features in-depth conversations about how to best tackle the world's most pressing problems. We release an episode roughly every two weeks -- subscribe here. If you'd like more regular research updates and news, follow our Twitter account. If you'd like to start learning about impactful careers right away, dive into our career guide. Get started

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### Tell us about your experience with 80,000 Hours, so that we can improve our programmes

- Published: 2014-10-30
- Modified: 2022-08-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/user-survey/



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### Alumni

> Our alumni are some of the people we've worked with who have been most dedicated to making a difference with their careers.

- Published: 2014-10-04
- Modified: 2018-08-16
- URL: https://80000hours.org/alumni/

Within our community, we have a group of about one hundred and fifty 80,000 Hours alumni members. The group is comprised of the people we've worked with who have been most dedicated to strategically making a difference with their careers, and are most interested in collaborating with other people in the community. Most have significantly changed their career plans after engaging with us. They help each other to succeed in their careers, see drafts of our in-progress work, and can ask us questions or request research. To join the alumni members group: Apply to our coaching - if you're accepted, you will be automatically considered. Write up the story of how your career plans changed to have more impact to be featured on our blog. Find out more here. Fill out our impact survey and get referred by two other alumni.

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### Financial accounts

- Published: 2014-09-03
- Modified: 2025-04-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/about/credibility/evaluations/financial-accounts/

General notes This page is updated roughly once a year, most recently in May 2024. For more information about where our money comes from, see our donors page. All USD amounts on the page represent a consolidated figure for US and UK budget/spending. Conversions from GBP to USD use the exchange rate on January 1 unless otherwise stated. Please email info@80000hours. org if you have any questions about the contents of this page. Current financial situation You can find our most recent two-year review (2021-2022) here. 2024 budget Notes: These amounts are rounded, so may not add up exactly to the sum shown. Non-operating expenses are expenses unrelated to core operations, such as foreign exchange losses. 2023 spending review Notes: These amounts are rounded, so may not add up exactly to the sum shown. Historical data Financial and staff inputs over time Notes: "Number of full-time equivalent staff" includes primary staff members and, prior to our spinout on April 1, 2025, the staff hours allocated to us by our parent organisations, the Effective Ventures group. It does not include contractors. 2023 and 2024 use the exchange rate on January 1 to exchange from GBP to USD. Between 2017 and 2022 we use the average of all daily exchange rates within the relevant year. We aren't confident which exchange rates were used before 2017, due to a change in accounting systems. We recently update the 2019 income reported here, from $5. 18M to $7. 18M,...

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### Research process and principles

> A list of the principles we use to guide our research.

- Published: 2014-08-29
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/about/credibility/research-principles/
- Topics: About 80,000 Hours

Our articles are based on over 10 years of speaking to experts, reviewing the best research we can find, learning from a growing network of professionals and advisors, and speaking to advisees about individual career decisions. Approach to research Use of experts and academic literature When we first encounter a question, we usually aim to work out: (i) who are the relevant experts? (ii) what would they say about this question? We call what they would say 'expert common sense,' and we think it often forms a good position to work from (more). People who are experts on a topic can sometimes be systematically biassed about some questions — e. g. if the question is "how important is this domain? " we should expect experts to be biassed as a group toward thinking it's more important, since usually only people who think a domain is important will choose to become experts in it. We try to correct for this by filtering expert views through our own judgement in cases like this, as well as talking to accomplished generalists with some distance from the field. Who counts as an expert on a question? This is a hard question. We try to look at how much past experience with the topic someone has, how well their past work seems to hold up, and how much they are focused on the very particular issues we are trying to understand. We also use our own judgement to assess how well their claims of expertise hold...

---

### Our mistakes

- Published: 2014-08-29
- Modified: 2025-03-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/about/credibility/evaluations/mistakes/

We continuously strive to learn from our actions and improve our practices. The mistakes page represents a selection of lessons learned from our self-evaluations, but it is not exhaustive. We may do further updates to this page in the light of new reflections or developments. Two-year review 2021–2022 Our content about FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried Prior to the collapse of FTX in November 2022 and the subsequent indictment of its CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, we had held Sam up as a positive example of earning to give on the 80,000 Hours website. We also interviewed Sam on our podcast. To say the least, we no longer believe Sam is a positive example for our readers. We have removed most references to him on our site, but we have preserved the 'reader story' we wrote about him and the podcast episode page with notes about the collapse of FTX for the public record. We believe we shouldn't have prominently featured Sam on the website. Featuring him in this way is a mistake we deeply regret and feel humbled by. We have now updated our vetting procedures for these types of stories. We also regret some elements of the way we handled the podcast episode, which you can read more about here. More generally, the collapse of FTX has led us to ask many challenging questions that we are continuing to wrestle with about best practices in effective altruism, moral philosophy, and the potential for harm in careers. We have begun the...

---

### Evaluations

- Published: 2014-08-28
- Modified: 2023-04-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/about/credibility/evaluations/
- Topics: About 80,000 Hours

We're committed to continually reflecting on our performance so that we can be as effective as possible. We share all our evaluations so that others can learn from our mistakes. Two-year review 2021–2022 The review See our financial reports Annual review November 2020 The annual review See our financial reports Annual review December 2019 The annual review See our financial reports Annual review December 2018 The annual review See our financial reports Annual review December 2017 The annual review See our financial reports Annual review December 2016 The annual review Has 80,000 Hours justified its costs? Plan change statistics Quick update May 2015 - June 2016 The update Update on number of plan changes July 2016 Annual review May 2015 Summary Review of progress Review of program performance and metrics Plans for the coming year Update since May 2015 and Y Combinator Finance report Mid-year review June - Sept 2014 The review Updated summary business plan Annual review April 2013 - May 2014 Summary Annual review Review of progress Review of program performance and costs Website progress review Finance report Team plan Summary business plan Advisory board report Impact evaluation Review of program performance and costs Plan change analysis and cost-effectiveness Earning to give evaluation What impact has 80,000 Hours had? Coaching evaluation Evaluation of our impact survey Strategic review The strategic review Business model overview Coaching requests analysis Six month review Dec 2012 - March 2013 Summary Our progress Metrics report Evaluation of 80,000 Hours as project Trustee performance...

---

### Our impact and credibility

- Published: 2014-08-28
- Modified: 2025-04-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/about/credibility/
- Topics: About 80,000 Hours

Research process and principles We explain the process and principles we use to guide our work here. For each individual article on our site, we justify our claims in footnotes, appendices, or other reports. If you see a claim that isn't backed up by a link or citation, you can assume there's no further justification. We ask experts in the relevant area to check our articles for mistakes before we publish them. We try to make it easy to critique our work by providing a summary of our key findings, explaining our research process, and flagging key judgement calls and uncertainties. Transparency We publish: In-depth self-evaluations most years Updates on our progress and key metrics every quarter that you can subscribe to by inquiring at info@80000hours. org Our annual accounts A summary of the mistakes we've made as an organisation Impact Over 10 million people have visited our website and thousands of people have shifted their career plans based on our advice. Read about: Our year-on-year impact via our self-evaluations 80,000 Hours in the media and endorsements A few of our readers who we're especially excited about Acknowledgements We're extremely grateful to all those who have supported us over the years. 80,000 Hours wouldn't be possible if it weren't for the help of many, many people. We're deeply grateful for your support and for this opportunity to have a big impact. Some of the people and groups we'd especially like to thank are: Our donors All our users, particularly those who...

---

### Legal disclaimer

- Published: 2014-08-20
- Modified: 2025-02-26
- URL: https://80000hours.org/legal/

Our Disclaimer We can give you information about your career options that we hope is useful; but how you choose to use this information is up to you. We don't take responsibility for the outcomes of your choices. While the aim of our site is to provide you with information about how to help the world, we don't support courses of action that may be harmful to your physical or mental well being. 1-1 advice qualification Our coaches are not professionally qualified career advisors. We recommend you use our advice alongside a professionally qualified advisor. Links All links from this web site have been selected using a standard links protocol. Links are provided for information and convenience only. We cannot accept responsibility for the sites linked to, or the information found there. A link does not imply an endorsement of a site; likewise, not linking to a particular site does not imply lack of endorsement. Accuracy While we have taken every care to compile accurate information and to keep it up-to-date, we cannot guarantee its correctness and completeness. The information provided on this site does not constitute business, medical or other professional advice, and is subject to change. Availability We cannot guarantee uninterrupted access to this website, or the sites to which it links. We accept no responsibility for any damages arising from the loss or use of this information. Copyright Notice Unless otherwise noted, all materials on this website are © 2025 – all rights reserved. Please contact us...

---

### All our research

> A list of all our research into careers that make a difference.

- Published: 2014-08-08
- Modified: 2024-08-29
- URL: https://80000hours.org/research/

# All our research We've been researching how to increase the impact of your career since 2011. Here's a list of everything we've published. ## Advanced series This series presents the most novel and important findings from our research since 2011. It covers which global problems are most pressing, how you can best contribute to solving these problems, and how to plan your career based on your individual strengths and situation. Read our advanced series ## Selected highlights The issue you choose to work on is probably the most important factor that determines the expected value of your career. If you want to maximise your chance of having a big positive impact, you should work on an issue that's large in scale, solvable, and neglected. Our problem profile series analyses a number of global problems in these terms. The one-line summary of our career advice is: *to have a fulfilling career, build useful skills and use them to tackle pressing global problems*. Our series on skills can help you figure out which skills to focus on and how to get started building them. The highest-impact careers are those which allow you to make the biggest...

---

### Work with us

- Published: 2014-08-05
- Modified: 2025-04-02
- URL: https://80000hours.org/about/work-with-us/

<a href="//s3.amazonaws.com/eightythousand.org/posts/images/202/original/WholeTeam1.jpg?1374519929"><img src="//s3.amazonaws.com/eightythousand.org/posts/images/202/large/WholeTeam1.jpg?1374519929" alt="Wholeteam1" /></a>The core 80,000 Hours team in summer 2013

<hr />

We’re looking for bright and ambitious people to help us in our mission to make the world a better place in a considered, evidence-based way. We want to become the place to go for the most talented and dedicated people for advice on how to maximise the impact of their careers. To find out why working for 80,000 Hours is a great opportunity, <a href="/recruitment#why_work_for_80000_hours">see below</a>.

We are always looking for interns to join us on our Graduate Volunteer Scheme, for which you can apply by filling out <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1UOrtl2KUvuEF041_TsbJ9iKy6JgkpAhbRPvjr33AaNs/viewform">this form</a>. You can see more details below. We do not currently anticipate considering applications until our next recruitment round in late 2014, so if you require a reply before then please let us know at recruitment  centre for effective altruism  org.

We are not currently recruiting for any employee roles. We advertised for several jobs in early 2014, but stopped taking applications for them at 5pm GMT on February 28th.

All jobs and internships are based at our office in the centre of Oxford. We can often provide free accommodation to interns, and rent out accommodation to new employees.

<h2 id="internships-on-our-graduate-volunteer-scheme">Internships on our Graduate Volunteer Scheme</h2>

We are recruiting for people to volunteer with us full-time in Oxford. We run a Graduate Volunteer Scheme on which people intern with us, generally for at least three months and often for longer (although we are also interested in students who want to volunteer with us over the summer). We can often provide accommodation in a house with other volunteers and staff, free lunch, and expenses of up to £8 a day based on financial need, especially for longer-term interns. As you would play an important role for a significant period, we would make sure it didn’t leave you out of pocket.

There are lots of different areas to work on, and there’s plenty of flexibility to adjust the role so it plays to your strengths and development aims. We make it our responsibility to ensure your time here allows you to grow as much as possible, as well as just being lots of fun! The scheme has proved very popular with our current interns, with a stimulating and dedicated atmosphere in the office and a lively and welcoming community outside office hours. Perhaps the strongest evidence of this is that many have extended their stays repeatedly. Once you have applied, we are happy to connect you with a current intern to discuss what it’s like to work here.

We’re looking for hardworking individuals with a strong desire for personal development who are deeply interested in making the world a better place in an effective way.

Interested? For more information about being a Graduate Volunteer or intern at 80,000 Hours, <a href="http://home.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/careers/graduate-volunteer-scheme">go here</a>, and to apply, <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1UOrtl2KUvuEF041_TsbJ9iKy6JgkpAhbRPvjr33AaNs/viewform">fill out this form</a>.

<h2 id="what-are-we-looking-for">What are we looking for?</h2>

The specifics of what we’re looking for depends on role and details can be found in the job descriptions. In general, we’re looking for people who have many of the following traits:

<ul>
    <li>Self-motivated, hard-working, and independent</li>
    <li>Able to deal with pressure and unfamiliar problems</li>
    <li>Have a strong desire for personal development</li>
    <li>Able to quickly master complex, abstract ideas, and solve problems</li>
    <li>Able to communicate clearly and persuasively in writing and in person</li>
    <li>Comfortable working in a team and quick to get on with new people</li>
    <li>Able to lead a team and manage a complex project</li>
    <li>Keen to work with a young team in a startup environment</li>
    <li>Deeply interested in making the world a better place in an effective way, using evidence and research</li>
    <li>A good understanding of the aims of 80,000 Hours and the Centre for Effective Altruism</li>
</ul>

We’re particularly interested in hearing from anyone with experience in the following areas:

<ul>
    <li>Communications</li>
    <li>Writing</li>
    <li>Research</li>
    <li>Fundraising</li>
    <li>Entrepreneurship</li>
    <li>Leadership</li>
    <li>Management</li>
    <li>Media</li>
    <li>Design</li>
    <li>Marketing</li>
    <li>Economics</li>
    <li>Psychology</li>
    <li>Coaching</li>
    <li>Advising</li>
    <li>Operations</li>
    <li>Accounting</li>
    <li>Programming (especially Ruby on Rails)</li>
</ul>

<h2 id="why-work-for-80000-hours">Why work for 80,000 Hours?</h2>

<a href="//s3.amazonaws.com/eightythousand.org/posts/images/204/original/cea_weekend_away_small.jpg?1374521302"><img src="//s3.amazonaws.com/eightythousand.org/posts/images/204/large/cea_weekend_away_small.jpg?1374521302" alt="Cea_weekend_away_small" /></a>

<hr />

First and foremost, “making the world a better place” is our bottom line and central aim. If you work for 80,000 Hours, you can directly help hundreds of other people have more impact with their careers. We work on this project because we think it’s the best way for us to make a contribution. Developing ways to monitor our own impact is one of our biggest priorities.

But there’s more:

<h3 id="be-part-of-something-incredibly-exciting">Be part of something incredibly exciting</h3>

We want to completely change the way people think about their careers, which we find to be an unbelievably exciting and motivating project.

“It’s really exciting to be at the forefront of research on how to do the most good with your career. It’s such an important and neglected area of research, and all our findings are immediately applicable and decision relevant to real people’s lives.” - Roman Duda, Product Manager

<h3 id="do-work-thats-important-challenging-and-varied">Do work that’s important, challenging and varied</h3>

Everyone wants a job they love, as well as one that makes a difference. Job satisfaction seems to come from challenge, contribution, and variety. Working on the fundamentally interesting, neglected and important question: “how can we help people choose the best careers?” turns out to be a pretty good way to achieve these things!

“One of my favorite parts of working for 80,000 Hours was that there was always something new. I got a lot of choice in what I was working on and there was a lot of task diversity. I got to see my projects to completion and had a high degree of autonomy.” - Xio Kikauka, intern

<h3 id="work-with-incredible-people">Work with incredible people</h3>

Everyone who works for us is talented, dedicated and ambitious, and there’s a wide community of awesome people in Oxford for you to meet. When I asked people in the office for what they most liked about working here, “great people” came up the most.

““The best thing about working for CEA is definitely the people. I have never before met such an intelligent, motivated and interesting team with a genuine desire to change the world for the better.” - Stephanie Crampin, intern

<h3 id="meet-incredible-people">Meet incredible people</h3>

We work closely with academics at the University of Oxford: we share offices with the Future of Humanity Institute and are affiliated with the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, based in the same building. Our careers coaching program is attracting some of the most inspiring and interesting people in the world: we’re currently getting so many requests we have to turn away 80% of them.

“The people I work with are some of the smartest, most dedicated and interesting people I know. I’ve learned so much from them, and the network that I’ve become part of is packed full of ridiculously impressive people.” - Roman Duda

<h3 id="become-the-most-impressive-person-you-can">Become the most impressive person you can</h3>

Helping you to fulfil your potential to make a huge difference is one of the most important things we can do, so we make personal development a priority. We’ll tailor your work so you can develop the skills you want, as well as explicitly setting aside time each week to work on personal development and self improvement.

“I feel like I’ve made a real contribution to the charity as part of the group and had the motivation to make myself better and stronger as a person whilst doing it.” - Stephanie Crampin

Everyone really wants to help everyone else on the team, as we all care deeply about enabling each other to reach our highest potential, so that we can all improve the world as much as possible.” - Roman Duda

<h3 id="find-exciting-future-job-opportunities">Find exciting future job opportunities</h3>

One of our interns in 2012 spun off the organisation Effective Animal Activism with our help. We’re growing an amazing network of people and organisations working on the highest impact opportunities in the world - we’re in contact with some pretty impressive individuals like Nick Bostrom of FHI and Holden Karnofsky of GiveWell.

If you work for us, you’ll also have:

<h3 id="autonomy">Autonomy</h3>

We go for a “professional, but autonomous” work culture. We set high standards, but avoid pointless rules. For example, we encourage our employees to set a work routine that works for them and stick to it, but have no strict office hours.

<h3 id="responsibility">Responsibility</h3>

As we’re a new and growing organisation, there’s a lot of opportunity to take on responsibility much earlier than you would in a large corporation. Many of our interns develop management experience by working with volunteers.

<h3 id="input">Input</h3>

We want everyone to have a say in how 80,000 Hours is run. We hold weekly team meetings to give everyone an input, and also run weekly lunchtime sessions on some specific area of what we’re working on to get input and feedback.

It’s also just a ton of fun! The team is very sociable and we do lots of things together besides work: weekly dinners and pub trips, movie nights, and much more.

Finally, there’s no better place to try and figure out your own career path. We can’t emphasise this one enough - it’s something we’ve found ridiculously valuable. One of the best ways to figure out the answers to your questions is to discuss them with other people who are thinking about the same issues. You’ll be in an environment surrounded by other people who are ambitious about making a difference with the careers, giving you ample opportunity to do this. We give each other constant feedback and advice on future career plans, and also offer formal careers advice to everyone who works with us.

“I genuinely don’t think there’s a better place in the world to work if you want to figure out what to do with your own career. The time I’ve spent working for 80,000 Hours this past year has been invaluable and made me realise there are so many more exciting possibilities available to me than I originally thought.” - Jess Whittlestone, Director of Communications

<a href="//s3.amazonaws.com/eightythousand.org/posts/images/201/original/ceaweekendaway.jpg?1374252079"><img src="//s3.amazonaws.com/eightythousand.org/posts/images/201/large/ceaweekendaway.jpg?1374252079" alt="Ceaweekendaway" /></a>


Our aim is to help as many people as possible pursue high-impact careers. We do this by providing research-based career advice for talented young people who want to have a big social impact. We're aware that factors like gender, race, and socioeconomic background can affect people's willingness to apply for roles for which they meet many but not all the suggested attributes. We'd especially like to encourage people from underrepresented backgrounds to apply to our roles, even if you don't meet all of the suggested criteria. Current positions Expression of interest: podcast host Expression of interest: podcast chief of staff Expression of interest: writer-researcher Expression of interest: senior product manager Interested in hearing about other promising vacancies? Visit our job board, which lists hundreds of vacancies working on our top recommended problems. You can also sign up for our newsletter, where we advertise any open positions at 80,000 Hours. Team members Arden Koehler (Website Director) and Luisa Rodriguez (Podcast Host).

---

### Join our newsletter

- Published: 2014-08-05
- Modified: 2024-01-26
- URL: https://80000hours.org/newsletter/

<ul>
    <li><a title="Student Groups" href="https://80000hours.org/student-groups/">Student Groups</a></li>
</ul>


Get started planning a career tackling the world's most pressing problems. You can unsubscribe in one click, and we'll never pass on your email. ###Why subscribe? Join our community of over 350,000 people and receive: * A free guide on what makes for an impactful career. * A free book — choose from 3 options. T&Cs here. * One idea every week on how to increase your impact + what we've been reading. * Weekly updates on job opportunities.

---

### Stay updated

- Published: 2014-08-05
- Modified: 2023-06-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/about/stay-updated/

<h2 id="want-to-stay-updated-on-our-newnbspresearch">Want to stay updated on our new research?</h2>

Follow our blog by liking us on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/80000Hours">Facebook</a> or follow us on <a href="https://twitter.com/80000Hours">Twitter</a>. You can receive our monthly research highlights by subscribing to our newsletter.

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<h2 id="want-to-track-our-progress-as-annbsporganisation">Want to track our progress as an organisation?</h2>

We communicate key developments on our blog and in our newsletter.

To see what’s going on inside the team in-depth, see our <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/80k_updates">weekly updates feed</a>, which you can also subscribe to.

You can also follow our <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19Qv4mNUb4i2btSFClBzUlc2RwckVALO58G9q2UUnYlA/edit#gid=0">weekly metrics</a>.

If you have more questions, contact <a href="mailto:ben@80000hours.org">ben@80000hours.org</a>.


Want to stay updated on our new research? The best way to stay up to date with our research and announcements is to subscribe to our newsletter. You can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Want to track our progress as an organisation? We communicate key developments on our blog and in our newsletter. We also release in-depth quarterly updates on our progress and metrics to our supporter group. To join this group, or to ask any other questions, please email info@80000hours. org.

---

### Our donors

- Published: 2014-08-05
- Modified: 2024-11-06
- URL: https://80000hours.org/about/donors/

We greatly appreciate all the support we receive to keep 80,000 Hours running!

The vast majority of our donations come from individuals, who give because they expect us to deliver a large social impact. We haven’t accepted any donations from corporations. Our donors range from large philanthropists, to former coaching alumni, to members of the effective giving community who donate 10% or more of their income.

As of April 2014, we have received just under £301,000 in donations. To see our income and expenses to date in more detail, please see the financial report in our latest six month evaluation. Find out more about donating to us <a href="/donate">here</a>.

<h2 id="our-major-supporters">Our major supporters</h2>

The following people have donated over £10,000 to 80,000 Hours.

<h3 id="section">£50,000 - 100,000</h3>

<img src="https://i.imgur.com/2CK33Ns.png" alt="" width="222" />

Frederick Mulder Charitable Trust
Founder of The Funding Network, art dealer

<img src="https://i.imgur.com/8cTkmzh.png" alt="" width="222" />

Matt Wage
Analyst at major quantitative trading firm, coaching alumnus

<h3 id="section-1">£25,000 - 50,000</h3>

<img src="https://i.imgur.com/0SuCETc.png" alt="" width="222" />

Patrick Brinich-Langlois
Software engineer

Luke Ding
Former hedge fund manager at Brevan Howard

<img src="https://i.imgur.com/NBgBY8G.png" alt="" width="222" />

Julia Wise and Jeff Kaufman
Google software engineer and social worker, members

<h3 id="section-2">£10,000 - 25,000</h3>

<img src="https://i.imgur.com/SfBUd51.jpg" alt="" width="222" />

Jaan Tallinn
Co-founder of Skype, Kazaa, MetaMed

<img src="https://i.imgur.com/u4ZE52g.png" alt="" width="222" />

The Van Houten Fund
University of Oxford project fund, bequeathed by Georges van Houten

<img src="https://i.imgur.com/ghHCZkd.png" alt="" width="222" />

Tony Purnell
Founder of Pi Research, Professor of Engineering at Cambridge

Anonymous

Anonymous

<p style="color: #2a2e30;">We’re also grateful for the support of our affiliate, the University of Oxford Future of Humanity Institute, with whom we share office space.</p>


We very much appreciate all the financial support that we receive from our donors. As of May 2024, we had received around £30. 9 million in donations from individual philanthropists, grantmakers, and foundations. Our largest donor is Open Philanthropy, whose mission is to help others as much as possible with the resources available. Their main funders are Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz, a co-founder of Facebook and Asana. We haven't accepted any donations from corporations in exchange for promotion. To see our income and expenses to date in more detail, please see the financial report in our latest accounts. If you're interested in donating, find out more. We also appreciate the non-financial support we've received from many other people and organisations over the years. The people and organisations below have donated over £25,000 to 80,000 Hours.

---

### Meet the team

> Meet the team behind 80,000 Hours.

- Published: 2014-08-05
- Modified: 2025-04-09
- URL: https://80000hours.org/about/meet-the-team/
- Topics: About 80,000 Hours

<h3>Core team</h3>



<hr />

&nbsp;

<h3>Centre For Effective Altruism Support Staff</h3>



<hr />

<h3></h3>

<h3>Our Advisors</h3>



<hr />

<h3></h3>

<h3>Volunteer Community</h3>




Primary staff Founders Freelancers Our Board of Directors The long-term members of our board of directors are still being finalised. Our External Advisors These are some of the external experts we consult in our research and decision-making processes.

---

### Support us

- Published: 2014-08-05
- Modified: 2024-11-06
- URL: https://80000hours.org/support-us/

We wouldn't be here today if it weren't for all the people who have helped us along the way. We're truly grateful for all your support and encouragement. Here are a few ways you can help us: Tell us how we've affected your careerThis is vital for measuring our impact, which allows us to fundraise and improve our research. Please drop a note to (mailto:info@80000hours. org). Tell your friends about usThink of your one or two friends who would be most interested, and recommend they check us out – we've found many of our biggest success stories this way. Make a donationWe rely on donations to fund our work. Learn how to donate ### Recommend someone to work with us Our biggest bottleneck right now is (/about/work-with-us/) who are an excellent fit. Recommendations are seriously appreciated. ### Share our content on social media You can find us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. ### Stay updated Stay updated on our progress as an organisation to learn about how else you can help.

---

### About us: what do we do, and how can we help?

> We offer career coaching and in-depth research on the careers that do the most to solve the world’s most pressing problems.

- Published: 2014-08-05
- Modified: 2025-04-09
- URL: https://80000hours.org/about/
- Topics: 80000 Hours, About 80,000 Hours

Why 80,000 Hours? You have about 80,000 working hours in your career: 40 years x 50 weeks x 40 hours. If you want to have a positive impact with your life, your choice of career is probably your best opportunity to do that. That means it's worth thinking hard about how to use this time most effectively. If you can make your career 1% higher impact (whatever that means to you), it would in theory be worth spending up to 800 hours working out how. We aim to help you work out how you can best use your 80,000 hours to help others, and to take action on that basis. We believe you can increase your impact by much more than 1%, and it'll take a lot less than 800 hours. Learn more about why we think your choice of career is the biggest ethical decision you'll ever make and how we can help you have more impact. What do we do? 80,000 Hours provides research and support to help talented people move into careers that tackle the world's most pressing problems. We're a nonprofit funded by philanthropic donations, and everything we provide is free. What we offer: Our online guides — our career guide, which covers our core advice, as well as four other guides, which cover which global problems are most pressing, skills to focus on building early in your career, ideas for new high-impact career paths, and how to make a career plan Our podcast —...

---

### Home

> You have 80,000 hours in your career. How can you best use them to help solve the world’s most pressing problems?

- Published: 2014-07-30
- Modified: 2025-04-02
- URL: https://80000hours.org/

<h1>You've got 80,000 hours in your career.</h1>

How can you use them to solve the world's most pressing problems?

Our research and coaching helps you find the careers in which you can make the most difference.

 




You've got 80,000 hours in your career. We'll show you how to make them count. Learn more  

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### New releases

> Research, interviews and case studies on social impact career choice.

- Published: 2014-07-30
- Modified: 2021-04-26
- URL: https://80000hours.org/latest/



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## Blog post

### To understand AI, you should use it. Here's how to get started.

- Published: 2025-04-04
- Modified: 2025-04-08
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2025/04/to-understand-ai-you-should-use-it-heres-how-to-get-started/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Most pressing problems, Uncategorised

To truly understand what AI can do — and what is coming soon — you should make regular use of the latest AI services. This article will help you learn how to do this. 1. You have a team of experts Think of ChatGPT as a team of experts, ready to assist you. Whenever you have a question, task, or problem, consider who you'd want in the room if you could talk to — or hire — anyone in the world. Here are some of the experts I work with on a regular basis: Programmer: write, debug, and explain code. I'm an experienced software developer, yet more than 95% of the code I ship is now written by AI. Manager: plan and debug my days, weeks, and months. There's an example transcript in section four below. Product designer: ideate, create prototypes, design and critique user interfaces, and analyse user interview transcripts. Writer and editor: give feedback on my writing, rewrite things, write entire drafts based on a rough dictation, proofread, and fix markdown. Data analyst: write SQL queries, analyse spreadsheets, create graphs, and infographics. Language tutor: do written exercises and have spoken conversations in French and Icelandic. Intern: extract data from text, get key quotes from an interview, resize a folder of images, merge a spreadsheet, and write an SQL query. Handyman: answer household questions, such as how to clad a shed or reset a washing machine. Some of the specialists I consult less frequently but...

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### We're shifting our strategic approach to focus more on AGI

- Published: 2025-04-04
- Modified: 2025-04-04
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2025/04/strategic-approach/
- Topics: Updates

## Summary **In a sentence:** We are shifting our strategic focus to put our proactive effort towards helping people work on safely navigating the transition to a world with AGI, while keeping our existing content up. **In more detail:** We think it's plausible that frontier AI companies will develop AGI by 2030. Given the (https://80000hours. org/problem-profiles/artificial-intelligence/), and the fairly limited amount of work that's been done to reduce these risks, 80,000 Hours is adopting a new strategic approach to focus our efforts in this area. During 2025, we are prioritising: 1. Deepening our understanding as an organisation of how to improve the chances that the development of AI goes well 2. Communicating why and how people can contribute to reducing the risks 3. Connecting our users with impactful roles in this field 4. And fostering an internal culture which helps us to achieve these goals We remain focused on impactful careers, and we plan to keep our existing written and audio content accessible to users. However, we are narrowing our focus as we think that most of the very best ways to have impact with one's career now involve helping make the transition to a world with AGI go well. This post goes into more detail on (/2025/04/strategic-approach/#why), (/2025/04/strategic-approach/#achieve), what we think the (/2025/04/strategic-approach/#community) might be, and answers some (/2025/04/strategic-approach/#questions). Why we're updating our strategic direction Since 2016, we've ranked 'risks from artificial intelligence'...

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### Shrinking AGI timelines: a review of expert forecasts

- Published: 2025-03-21
- Modified: 2025-04-10
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2025/03/when-do-experts-expect-agi-to-arrive/
- Topics: AI safety technical research, Artificial Intelligence, Artificial sentience, China-related AI safety &amp; governance, China-Western coordination, Data collection for AI alignment, Expert in AI hardware, Forecasting research &amp; implementation, Information security, Long-term AI policy, Non-technical roles in leading AI labs

As a non-expert, it would be great if there were experts who could tell us when we should expect artificial general intelligence (AGI) to arrive. Unfortunately, there aren't. There are only different groups of experts with different weaknesses. This article is an overview of what five different types of experts say about when we'll reach AGI, and what we can learn from them (that feeds into my full article on forecasting AI). In short: Every group shortened their estimates in recent years. AGI before 2030 seems within the range of expert opinion, even if many disagree. None of the forecasts seem especially reliable, so they neither rule in nor rule out AGI arriving soon. In four years, the mean estimate on Metaculus for when AGI will be developed has plummeted from 50 years to five years. There are problems with the definition used, but the graph reflects a broader pattern of declining estimates. Here's an overview of the five groups: AI experts 1. Leaders of AI companies The leaders of AI companies are saying that AGI arrives in 2–5 years, and appear to have recently shortened their estimates. This is easy to dismiss. This group is obviously selected to be bullish on AI and wants to hype their own work and raise funding. However, I don't think their views should be totally discounted. They're the people with the most visibility into the capabilities of next-generation systems, and the most knowledge of the technology. And they've also been among the...

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### Expression of Interest: Podcast Host

- Published: 2025-03-14
- Modified: 2025-04-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2025/03/podcast-host/
- Topics: Uncategorised

Help shape the most important conversation of our time We're looking for someone exceptional to join 80,000 Hours as a Podcast Host, helping us build a media platform that properly covers recursively self-improving AGI and its implications. Why this matters Frontier AI systems are developing rapidly, with capabilities progressing much faster than most expected even a few years ago. If development continues at its current pace we could see an 'intelligence explosion' in which AI takes over AI research and rapidly self-improves, starting in as little as 2-7 years. This is the defining issue of our time and decisions made in the next decade could shape humanity's long-term future in profound ways. Yet the public conversation around AGI remains completely inadequate. Mainstream sources neglect the issue entirely for the most part. When AGI is discussed, it's often covered superficially and fails in one of various ways: naive optimism and hype reflexive dismissiveness focusing only on immediate issues like job displacement or copyright violations uncritically accepting narratives from actors with strong financial interests in the industry. The extremely profound implications of developing AI, then AGI, and then superintelligence are basically ignored. We believe there's a critical opportunity to fill this gap by scaling up our podcast from occasional in-depth interviews to a more comprehensive media platform with multiple weekly pieces covering AGI-related developments, risks, governance, and alignment efforts in a substantive way. Our goal would be to have consistent coverage of: all the key categories of risks associated with AGI the...

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### Expression of Interest: Podcast Chief of Staff

- Published: 2025-03-14
- Modified: 2025-04-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2025/03/podcast-chief-of-staff/
- Topics: Uncategorised

Help shape the most important conversation of our time We're looking for someone exceptional to join 80,000 Hours as Chief of Staff for our podcast team, helping us build a media platform that properly covers recursively self-improving AGI and its implications. Why this matters Frontier AI systems are developing rapidly, with capabilities progressing much faster than most expected even a few years ago. If development continues at its current pace we could see an 'intelligence explosion' in which AI takes over AI research and rapidly self-improves, starting in as little as 2-7 years. This is the defining issue of our time and decisions made in the next decade could shape humanity's long-term future in profound ways. Yet the public conversation around AGI remains completely inadequate. Mainstream sources neglect the issue entirely for the most part. When AGI is discussed, it's often covered superficially and fails in one of various ways: naive optimism and hype reflexive dismissiveness focusing only on immediate issues like job displacement or copyright violations uncritically accepting narratives from actors with strong financial interests in the industry. The extremely profound implications of developing AI, then AGI, and then superintelligence are basically ignored. We believe there's a critical opportunity to fill this gap by scaling up our podcast from occasional in-depth interviews to a more comprehensive media platform with multiple weekly pieces covering AGI-related developments, risks, governance, and alignment efforts in a substantive way. Our goal would be to have consistent coverage of: all the key categories of risks...

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### Understanding trends in our AI job postings

- Published: 2025-03-14
- Modified: 2025-03-14
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2025/03/trends-in-ai-jobs/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Uncategorised

This week, let's review key trends in the jobs we've found that may help mitigate AI risk, including: Growth in the number of postings in the field The types of organisations that are hiring The most in-demand skills The experience level required for these roles We've ranked catastrophic risks from AI as the world's most pressing problem since 2016, but it's only in the last few years that the topic has really hit the mainstream. As AI has advanced rapidly and the risks have become more salient, we've seen many more jobs available to help mitigate the dangers. The number of AI-related jobs we posted on our job board rose throughout 2023 and then plateaued in 2024. But in January 2025, we posted the most AI-relevant jobs yet! In 2023, we posted an average of 63 AI-related roles per month. In 2024, the average rose to 105 — a 67% increase. Over this time, nonprofit jobs have been the most common, though they were briefly overtaken by both company and government jobs in early 2024. This trend could reflect our vantage point. As a nonprofit that works closely with other nonprofits, we may be best positioned to find and assess high-impact roles in this sector while potentially missing other great roles in sectors more opaque to us. That said, one reason we've prioritised AI risk reduction is the potential failure of market and political mechanisms to produce a proportionate response to the challenge. So it's not that surprising that nonprofits...

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### Expression of interest: senior product manager

- Published: 2025-03-10
- Modified: 2025-03-10
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2025/03/senior-product-manager-eoi/
- Topics: Uncategorised

80,000 Hours is considering hiring a full-time, senior product manager to lead on iterating on and improving the 80,000 Hours website. They would research, propose, and implement product changes to make the 80,000 Hours website more useful and delightful for talented people interested in having a high impact career. **To express interest in this role, please complete (https://docs. google. com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdYe-X1OJi356hedlLIU4O4yp0Yr6eU0175CtlJemZ7h5vNpQ/viewform? usp=dialog). ** **Note:** This announcement is for an expression of interest rather than a job opening. If we launch a formal hiring round, we'll email everyone who filled out this expression of interest to invite them to fill out an application for the role. If you would like to be informed about the hiring round, please fill out an EOI. 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...

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### Ask a career advisor: how to compete with AI models in the job market and whether to stay in the US government

- Published: 2025-02-28
- Modified: 2025-03-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2025/02/ask-an-advisor-volume-two/
- Topics: Uncategorised

This week, we answer more of our newsletter subscriber's career questions! I'll tackle: Whether to stay in US AI policy under a new administration How to think about AI's coming impacts on your career prospects **Question one:** *I'm a junior studying computer science at a good state school (3. 7 GPA). I've done a couple standard tech internships and have decent coding projects, but nothing amazing. Everyone keeps talking about how AGI is going to automate basically all jobs and/or kill us within 3 years. * *I'm worried I'm totally screwed — by the time I graduate next year, will there even be entry level jobs left? Should I just give up trying to build a resume and coast through my last year? * *I know the standard advice is "just keep learning and preparing" but it feels pointless if I'm going to graduate into a world where AIs can do everything better than me anyway. Help? * Laura: This is a difficult question, but I think it's important to ask. I certainly don't have all the answers, because the future is uncertain — perhaps especially now. That said, I do think there are sensible steps to take to navigate the trajectory of AI and its global impact First, let's address the immediate concern about the job market. While AI is already changing the landscape of work, entry-level jobs haven't disappeared. The 80,000 Hours job board has hundreds of entry-level openings, and other job...

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### Expression of interest: writer-researcher

- Published: 2025-02-19
- Modified: 2025-03-10
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2025/02/expression-of-interest-writer-researcher/
- Topics: Uncategorised

80,000 Hours plans to hire more full-time writer-researchers to help us communicate more about why and how to help people use their careers to help society safely navigate a transition to a world with transformative AI. **To express interest in this role, please complete (https://docs. google. com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfUffZQs-tIhC3Slz9RPppKLvGQYeB2oyhQUeLqdZjRo_9-Iw/viewform? usp=dialog). ** **Note:** This announcement is for an expression of interest rather than a job opening. If we launch a formal hiring round, we'll email everyone who filled out this expression of interest to invite them to fill out an application for the role. If you would like to be informed about the hiring round, please fill out an EOI. 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 In this role, you would: Research and write...

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### Ask a career advisor: how mid-career people can help with AI and how to survive a job hunt

- Published: 2025-02-17
- Modified: 2025-02-17
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2025/02/ask-a-career-advisor-switching-to-ai-and-surviving-job-hunt/
- Topics: Uncategorised

This week, we're answering our newsletter subscribers' career questions. Question one: I've been working over 20 years as a software engineer, and participated in a few publications as a research engineer. I'm open to getting deeper into research, in fact I'm starting a PhD in computer science. I'm close to 50, but most of the career advice I see from 80,000 Hours seems focused on younger folk. I'm wondering about reorienting towards global issues; does it make sense to continue with my current PhD? Drop it for one directly related to (e. g. ) AI? Drop the PhD and just apply as a research engineer to appropriate companies with such engineers? Or just leave it to the next generation? Sudhanshu: I would pretty much never say "leave it to others" — there might not be many others, and experienced folks like you often have a lot to offer. We are always hearing from impactful organisations all the time who want experienced, mid-career people to join them in key roles. With 20 years as a software engineer, I'd be excited if you could apply that experience directly to a pressing world problem, unless you've gotten some evidence to suggest that you need some new skills. I think it makes sense to try your hand at just working directly on the problem you think is most important before moving on to other options. If you do think working on reducing AI risk is the most important...

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### Transcripts for Bastian

- Published: 2025-01-27
- Modified: 2025-01-27
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2025/01/transcripts-for-bastian/
- Topics: Uncategorised

This content is password protected. To view it please enter your password below: Password:

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### How quickly could robots scale up?

- Published: 2025-01-21
- Modified: 2025-01-24
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2025/01/how-quickly-could-robots-scale-up/
- Topics: Uncategorised

This post was written by Benjamin Todd in his personal capacity and originally posted on benjamintodd. substack. com. Today robots barely have the dexterity of a toddler, but are rapidly improving. If their algorithms and hardware advance enough to handle many physical human jobs, how quickly could they become a major part of the workforce? Here's some order of magnitude estimates showing it could happen pretty fast. Robot cost of production Today's humanoid robots cost about $100,000, with perhaps 10,000 units produced annually. But manufacturing costs tend to plummet with scale: For solar energy, every doubling of production was associated with a 20% decline in costs. In other industries, we see estimates ranging from 5-40%, so 20% seems a reasonable middle point. That means a 1000x increase in production (10 doublings), should decrease costs 10x to $10,000/unit. That's around the cost of manufacturing a car. However, humanoid robots only use about 10% the materials of a car, so it's plausible they could eventually become another 10x cheaper, or $1000 each. Though, it's also possible the elements for fine motor control remain far more difficult to manufacture. Let's add 2x to account for that. Robot operating costs If a robot costs $10,000 and lasts for three years working 24/7, the hardware costs $0. 40 per hour. At $2000 each, the hardware would only be 8c per hour. There would also be maintenance costs. You could easily spend 10% of capital costs maintaining a car per year, and robots will be more complex and...

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### It looks like there are some good funding opportunities in AI safety right now

- Published: 2025-01-10
- Modified: 2025-01-14
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2025/01/it-looks-like-there-are-some-good-funding-opportunities-in-ai-safety-right-now/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence

This post was written by Benjamin Todd in his personal capacity and originally posted on benjamintodd. substack. com. The AI safety community has grown rapidly since the ChatGPT wake-up call, but available funding doesn't seem to have kept pace. However, there's a more recent dynamic that's created even better funding opportunities, which I witnessed as a recommender in the most recent Survival and Flourishing Fund grant round. Most philanthropic (vs. government or industry) AI safety funding (>50%) comes from one source: Good Ventures, via Open Philanthropy. But they've recently stopped funding several categories of work (my own categories, not theirs): Many Republican-leaning think tanks, such as the Foundation for American Innovation "Post-alignment" causes such as digital sentience or regulation of explosive growth The rationality community, including LessWrong, Lightcone, SPARC, CFAR, MIRI High school outreach, such as Non-Trivial In addition, they are currently not funding (or not fully funding): Many non-US think tanks, who don't want to appear influenced by an American organisation (there's now probably more than 20 of these) They do fund technical safety non-profits like FAR AI, though they're probably underfunding this area, in part due to difficulty hiring for this area the last few years (though they've hired recently) Political campaigns, since foundations can't contribute to them Organisations they've decided are below their funding bar for whatever reason (e. g. most agent foundations work). Open Philanthropy is not infallible so some of these might still be worth funding. Nuclear security, since it's on average less cost-effective than direct...

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### What happened with AI in 2024?

- Published: 2025-01-03
- Modified: 2025-01-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2025/01/what-happened-with-ai-2024/
- Topics: Uncategorised

The idea this week: despite claims of stagnation, AI research still advanced rapidly in 2024. Some people say AI research has plateaued. But a lot of evidence from the last year points in the opposite direction: New capabilities were developed and emerged Research indicates existing AI can accelerate science And at the same time, important findings about AI safety and risk came out (see below). AI advances might still stall. Some leaders in the field have warned that a lack of good data, for example, may impede further capability growth, though others disagree. Regardless, growth clearly hasn't stopped yet. Meanwhile, the aggregate forecast on Metaculus of when we'll see the first "general" AI system — which would be highly capable across a wide range of tasks — is 2031. All of this matters a lot, because AI poses potentially existential risks. We think making sure AI goes well is a top pressing world problem. If AI advances fast, this work is not only important but urgent. Here are some of the key developments in AI from the last year: New AI models and capabilities OpenAI announced in late December that its new model o3 achieved a large leap forward in capabilities. It builds on the o1 language model (also released in 2024), which has the ability to deliberate about its answers before responding. With this more advanced capability, o3 reportedly: Scored a breakthrough 87. 5% on ARC-AGI, a test designed to be particularly hard for leading AI systems Pushed the...

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### 2024 in review: some of our top pieces from this year

- Published: 2024-12-20
- Modified: 2024-12-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2024/12/2024-in-review-some-of-our-top-pieces-from-this-year/
- Topics: Uncategorised

This week, we're looking back at some of our top content from the year! Here are some of our favourite and most important articles, posts, and podcast episodes we published in 2024: Articles Factory farming — There's a clear candidate for the biggest moral mistake that humanity is currently making: factory farming. We raise and slaughter 1. 6-4. 5 trillion animals a year on factory farms, causing tremendous amounts of suffering. The moral status of digital minds — Understanding whether AI systems might suffer, be sentient, or otherwise matter morally is potentially one of the most pressing problems in the world. Should you work at a frontier AI company? — Working at a frontier AI company is plausibly some people's highest-impact option, but some roles could be extremely harmful. So it's critical to be discerning when considering this option — and particularly open to changing course. We've previously written about this topic, but explored it in more depth this year while taking account of recent developments, such as prominent departures at OpenAI. Risks of stable totalitarianism — Some of the worst atrocities have been committed by totalitarian rulers. In the future, the threat posed by these regimes could be even greater. Nuclear weapons safety and security — Nuclear weapons continue to pose an existential threat to humanity, but there are some promising pathways to reducing the risk. Other posts AI for epistemics — Our president and founder, Benjamin Todd, wrote about one of the most exciting ideas he's heard about recently: using...

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### Two key tips for giving season

- Published: 2024-12-06
- Modified: 2024-12-06
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2024/12/giving-season/
- Topics: Uncategorised

It's giving season! Cue excitement... or dread? If you're anything like me, December is a busy time. You're wrapping up projects, reviewing the past year's work, planning for holidays, and buying gifts. (Not to mention, drafting a newsletter! ) So "giving season" — the time of year when most charitable donations are made — may just feel like one more thing to do. But donating is one of the most important decisions you can make. Consider that: If you have an average UK/US income and donate 10% of it, this year you can save a child who would otherwise have died of malaria. There are other cause areas where you can potentially have an even bigger impact. Of course, the high stakes of giving can make it feel even worse to rush it, and even more daunting. I've definitely struggled to live up to my ideals when faced with this. I can confirm that New Year's Eve is not when you want to deal with details like finding a quick online payment method. And I used to be the executive director of Giving What We Can and a grantmaker for the EA Infrastructure Fund — so if you also struggle with this, you're not alone! My bottom line advice is: find ways to make fewer decisions. They're stressful and time consuming. Below are two key tips that work for me and make my giving season slightly less hectic. 1. Take a pledge The biggest factor in ensuring I donate reliably is my...

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### Why we get burned out — and what helps

- Published: 2024-11-08
- Modified: 2024-11-08
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2024/11/burnout/
- Topics: Uncategorised

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. That said, there are many different ways...

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### What are experts in biosecurity worried about?

- Published: 2024-10-25
- Modified: 2024-10-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2024/10/what-are-experts-in-biosecurity-worried-about/
- Topics: Uncategorised

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. " (Read more) "The timelines in which we will need to tackle major technical challenges have collapsed. " (Read more) "Every new technology...

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

- Published: 2024-10-08
- Modified: 2025-03-18
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2024/10/updates-to-our-problem-rankings-on-factory-farming-climate-change-and-more/
- Topics: Climate change, Factory Farming, Uncategorised, World problems

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. Here are the biggest changes: We now rank factory farming among the top problems in the world. (See why. ) We've simplified the list into three categories: top most pressing problems, a new category for 'emerging challenges,' and other pressing problems...

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### Why experts and forecasters disagree about AI risk

- Published: 2024-09-16
- Modified: 2024-09-17
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2024/09/why-experts-and-forecasters-disagree-about-ai-risk/
- Topics: Uncategorised

This week we're highlighting: Our new interview with Ezra Karger on what superforecasters and experts think about existential risks The Forecasting Research Institute's report on its Existential Risk Persuasion Tournament results Our problem profile on preventing an AI-related catastrophe 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. But the groups showed little convergence after extensive debate, suggesting some deep-rooted disagreements. Ezra's research found some key differences in how these groups view the world: Sceptics tend to see change as gradual, while concerned experts anticipate more abrupt shifts. There were divergent...

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### Updates to our research about AI risk and careers

- Published: 2024-08-30
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2024/08/updates-to-our-research-about-ai-risk-and-careers/
- Topics: Uncategorised

This week, we're sharing new updates on: Top career paths for reducing risks from AI An AI bill in California that's getting a lot of attention The potential for catastrophic misuse of advanced AI Whether to work at frontier AI companies if you want to reduce catastrophic risks 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, and we're excited to encourage (even) more people to get involved now vs before. Governments are also more poised to take action now than they appeared to be just a few years ago. AI governance is still a less developed field than AI...

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### Mpox and H5N1: assessing the situation

- Published: 2024-08-16
- Modified: 2024-12-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2024/08/h5n1-and-mpox-assessing-the-situation/
- Topics: Uncategorised

The idea this week: mpox and a bird flu virus are testing our pandemic readiness. Would we be ready for another pandemic? It became clear in 2020 that the world hadn't done enough to prepare for the rapid, global spread of a particularly deadly virus. Four years on, our resilience faces new tests. Two viruses have raised global concerns: Mpox — formerly known as monkeypox — has been declared a public health emergency of international concern by the World Health Organisation based on its spread from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to nearby countries. H5N1 — a strain of bird flu — has been spreading among animals in the United States and elsewhere, with a small number of infections reported in humans. Here's what we know about each: Mpox Mpox drew international attention in 2022 when it started spreading globally, including in the US and the UK. During that outbreak, around 95,000 cases and about 180 deaths were reported. That wave largely subsided in much of the world, in part due to targeted vaccination campaigns, but the spread of another strain of the virus has sharply accelerated in Central Africa. The strain driving the current outbreak may be significantly more deadly. Around 22,000 suspected mpox infections and more than 1,200 deaths have been reported in the DRC since January 2023. . These numbers may be artificially low because of insufficient tracking. The virus has spread to several African countries that haven't previously seen any infections, and children appear to be...

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### Why Orwell would hate AI

- Published: 2024-08-06
- Modified: 2024-08-06
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2024/08/why-orwell-would-hate-ai/
- Topics: Uncategorised

The idea this week: totalitarian regimes killed over 100 million people in less than 100 years — and in the future they could be far worse. That's because advanced artificial intelligence may prove very useful for dictators. They could use it to surveil their population, secure their grip on power, and entrench their rule, perhaps indefinitely. I explore this possibility in my new article for 80,000 Hours on the risk of stable totalitarianism. This is a serious risk. Many of the worst crimes in history, from the Holocaust to the Cambodian Genocide, have been perpetrated by totalitarian regimes. When megalomaniacal dictators decide massive sacrifices are justified to pursue national or personal glory, the results are often catastrophic. However, even the most successful totalitarian regimes rarely survive more than a few decades. They tend to be brought down by internal resistance, war, or the succession problem — the possibility for sociopolitical change, including liberalisation, after a dictator's death. But that could all be upended if technological advancements help dictators overcome these challenges. In the new article, I address: Whether totalitarianism constitutes an existential risk How a totalitarian regime could come to dominate the world What it would take for such a regime to last forever If any of this is even remotely plausible To be sure, stable totalitarianism doesn't seem to be the most likely course for the future. An aspiring permanent dictator would face formidable barriers, and — while AI could help them — other actors may use AI to...

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### Advisor [Applications closed]

- Published: 2024-08-02
- Modified: 2025-03-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2024/08/open-position-advisor-2024/
- Topics: Uncategorised

##Summary **Please note applications for this role have now closed** We're looking for a new advisor to join our team and talk one-on-one to talented, altruistic applicants in order to help them find high-impact careers. **Location**: London, UK (preferred). We're open to remote candidates and can support UK visa applications. **Salary**: Salaries will vary based on skills and experience, but to give a rough sense, a starting salary for someone with five years of highly relevant experience would be in excess of £66,000 per year. The role 80,000 Hours provides free research and support to help people find careers tackling the world's most pressing problems. We're keen to hire another advisor to talk to talented and altruistic people in order to help them find high-impact careers. It's a great sign you'd enjoy being an 80,000 Hours advisor if you've enjoyed managing, mentoring, or teaching. We've found that experience with coaching is not necessary — backgrounds in a range of fields like medicine, research, management consulting, and more have helped our advisors become strong candidates for the role. For example, Laura González-Salmerón joined us after working as an investment manager, Abigail Hoskin completed her PhD in Psychology, and Matt Reardon was previously a corporate lawyer. But it's also particularly useful for us to have a broad range of experience on the team, so we're excited to hear from people with all kinds of backgrounds. The core of this role is having one-on-one conversations with people to help them plan...

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### Open position: Head of Video

- Published: 2024-07-24
- Modified: 2024-08-26
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2024/07/open-position-head-of-video/
- Topics: Uncategorised

##Summary **Applications for this position are generally closed — but if you heard about this role from a podcast episode, or from another direct referral, we're happy to still consider your application. ** **Please write the name of the podcast episode or referral source in the application form, in the 'Additional information' field. ** We're looking for a Head of Video to start, and run, a new video programme at 80,000 Hours. **Location**: London, UK (preferred). We're open to remote candidates and can support UK visa applications. **Salary**: Varies depending on skills, fit, and experience. A skilled applicant with 5 years of relevant experience would be paid approx. £80,000. **To apply** please complete (https://80000hours. formstack. com/forms/headofvideo_2024) by 11:59pm on August 25, 2024. More detail below, or watch our video about this role (shorter, shareable version (https://youtube. com/shorts/lFL63A82ms8)): Why this role? 80,000 Hours provides free research and support to help people find careers tackling the world's most pressing problems. Users can engage with our research in many forms: as longform articles published on our site, as a paperback book received via our book giveaway, as a podcast, or in smaller chunks via our newsletter. But we have relatively little support available in video format. Time spent on the internet is increasingly spent watching video, and for many people in our target audience, video is the main way that they both find entertainment and learn about topics that matter to them. We think that one of the best ways we could...

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### Open position: Marketer

- Published: 2024-07-18
- Modified: 2025-03-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2024/07/open-position-marketer-2024/
- Topics: Uncategorised

##Summary **Applications for this position are generally closed — but if someone reached out to you about this role from 80,000 Hours directly, we are still very happy to speak to you! ** We're looking for a new Marketer to help us reach our target audience at scale, by managing channels within marketing, contributing to our strategy, and helping to deploy our yearly budget of $3m. **Location**: London, UK (preferred). We're open to remote candidates and can support UK visa applications. **Salary**: Varies depending on skills, fit, and experience. An applicant with no relevant experience would be paid approx. £58,000; an applicant with 4 years of relevant experience would be paid approx. £65,000. **To apply** please complete (https://80000hours. formstack. com/forms/marketer_2024) by 11:59pm on 18th August 2024. Why this role? 80,000 Hours provides free research and support to help people find careers tackling the world's most pressing problems. Since the launch of our marketing programme in 2022, we've increased the hours that people spend engaging with our content by 6. 5x, reached millions of new users across different platforms, and now have over 500,000 newsletter subscribers. We're also the largest single source of people getting involved in the effective altruism community, according to the most recent EA Survey. Even so, it seems like there's considerable room to grow further — we're not nearly at the ceiling of what we think we can achieve. So, we're looking for a new marketer to help us bring the marketing team to its full potential... .

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### Open position: Head of Marketing

- Published: 2024-07-18
- Modified: 2024-10-24
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2024/07/open-position-head-of-marketing-2024/
- Topics: Uncategorised

##Summary **Applications for this position are generally closed — but if you heard about this role from a podcast episode or from a member of 80,000 Hours staff, we're happy to still consider your application. ** **Please write the name of the member of 80,000 Hours staff or podcast episode in the application form, in the 'Additional information' field. ** We're looking for a new Head of Marketing to lead our efforts to reach our target audience at scale, by setting and executing on a strategy, managing and building a team, and deploying our yearly budget of $3m. **Location**: London, UK (preferred). We're open to remote candidates and can support UK visa applications. **Salary**: Varies depending on skills, fit, and experience. A skilled applicant with 5 years of relevant experience would be paid approx. £80,000. **To apply** please complete (https://80000hours. formstack. com/forms/headofmarketing_2024) by 11:59pm on 18th August 2024. Why this role? 80,000 Hours provides free research and support to help people find careers tackling the world's most pressing problems. Since the launch of our marketing programme in 2022, we've increased the hours that people spend engaging with our content by 6. 5x, reached millions of new users across different platforms, and now have over 500,000 newsletter subscribers. We're also the largest single source of people getting involved in the effective altruism community, according to the most recent EA Survey. Even so, it seems like there's considerable room to grow further — we're not nearly at the ceiling of what we think...

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### Mental health and your career: our top resources

- Published: 2024-07-16
- Modified: 2024-07-16
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2024/07/handling-mental-illness-in-your-career/
- Topics: Mental health, Uncategorised

The idea this week: people pursuing altruistic careers often struggle with imposter syndrome, anxiety, and moral perfectionism. And we've spent a lot of time trying to understand what helps. More than 20% of working US adults said their work harmed their mental health in 2023, according to a survey from the American Psychological Association. Jobs can put a strain on anyone. And if you aim — like many of our readers do — to help others with your career, your work may feel extra demanding. Work that you feel really matters can be much more interesting and fulfilling. But it can also sometimes be a double-edged sword — after all, your success doesn't only matter for you but also for those you're trying to help. So this week, we want to share a roundup of some of our top content on mental health: An interview with our previous CEO on having a successful career with depression, anxiety, and imposter syndrome — this is one of our most popular interviews ever. It gives a remarkably honest and insightful account of what struggles with mental health can feel like from the inside, how they can derail a career, and how you can get back on track. It also provides lots of practical tips for how you can navigate these issues, and tries to offer a corrective to common advice that doesn't work for everyone. An interview with therapist Hannah Boettcher on the mental health challenges that come with trying to have a...

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### Does your vote matter? What the research says

- Published: 2024-06-21
- Modified: 2024-06-21
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2024/06/does-your-vote-matter-what-the-research-says/
- Topics: Uncategorised

The idea this week: the cynical case against voting and getting involved in politics doesn't hold up. Does your vote matter? Around half of the world's population is expected to see national elections this year, and voters in places like Taiwan, India, and Mexico have already gone to the polls. The UK and France both recently scheduled elections. And of course, the 2024 US national election campaigns are off and running, with control of the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the White House in contention — as well as many state houses, governorships, and other important offices. Sometimes people think that their vote doesn't matter because they're just a drop in the ocean. But my colleague Rob has explored the research on this topic, and he concluded that voting can actually be a surprisingly impactful way to spend your time. So it's not just your civic duty — it can also be a big opportunity to influence the world for the better. That's because, while the chance your vote will change the outcome of an election is small, it can still matter a lot given the massive impact governments can have. To take a simple model: if the US government discretionary spending is $6. 4 trillion over four years, and you have a 1 in 10 million chance of changing the outcome of the national election, then in expectation you have some degree of influence over $640,000 of government spending. When this is true, it's hard to justify not taking...

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### Dive into our most in-depth research on careers

- Published: 2024-06-10
- Modified: 2024-06-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2024/06/dive-into-advanced-series/
- Topics: Uncategorised

The idea this week: your career choices may be much more important than you think — and we have a lot of resources to help you think them through. Your career is one of your biggest opportunities to make a difference in the world and also have a rewarding and interesting life. That's why we wrote our career guide — to help people create a career plan that's aimed at having a positive impact and a fulfilling career. But there's a lot of ground to cover, so we couldn't do it all in a single book. That's why we wrote our advanced series. It covers our most in-depth research on questions like: What does it mean to "make a difference"? What is "longtermism," and why does it matter? Is it ever OK to take a harmful job? Can we balance doing what we love with having a positive impact? What role should finding your personal strengths play in your career? How should you coordinate with others when trying to do good? How long should you explore different career options? And a whole lot more! We hope the articles in our advanced series help you tackle these questions and accelerate you along your path to an impactful career. See the whole series here or just browse selected topics below. Part 1: Introduction This is your most important decision Part 2: Making a difference What is social impact? A definition Longtermism: a call to protect future generations Is it ever OK to...

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

> This is the most interesting idea for a startup that I've heard recently.

- Published: 2024-05-19
- Modified: 2024-08-29
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2024/05/project-idea-ai-for-epistemics/
- Topics: Uncategorised

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. In the short term,...

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### Where are all the nuclear experts?

- Published: 2024-05-10
- Modified: 2024-05-10
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2024/05/where-are-all-the-nuclear-experts/
- Topics: Uncategorised

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. And all that's before we start talking about the war in Ukraine. In this new nuclear age, we're going to really need those nuclear experts. So, we spoke to some existing experts to find out what you could be...

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### Particularly impactful career paths you might have overlooked

- Published: 2024-04-26
- Modified: 2024-04-26
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2024/04/overlooked-career-paths/
- Topics: Uncategorised

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: 1. Journalism 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. The article — based in part on my personal experience in journalism — covers how to have an impact, how...

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### Particularly neglected causes you could work on

- Published: 2024-03-15
- Modified: 2024-03-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2024/03/particularly-neglected-causes/
- Topics: Uncategorised

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, and the future of sentient life, may extend far beyond Earth and even the solar system. But whether this potential expansion goes well or badly is far from...

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### Expression of interest: Writer and writer-researcher

- Published: 2024-03-15
- Modified: 2025-03-24
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2024/03/writer-writer-researcher-eoi/
- Topics: Uncategorised

We are no longer accepting expressions of interest for this role. Please check our (https://80000hours. org/about/work-with-us/) page or (https://80000hours. org/job-board/) to learn about future opportunities at 80,000 Hours. **Note:** This announcement is for an expression of interest rather than a job opening. It's possible we will launch a formal hiring round within the next month or two. If we do run a formal hiring round, we'll email everyone who filled out this expression of interest to invite them to fill out an application for the role. If you would like to be informed about the hiring round, please fill out an EOI. 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...

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

- Published: 2024-03-01
- Modified: 2024-03-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2024/03/the-case-for-taking-your-technical-expertise-to-the-field-of-ai-policy/
- Topics: Uncategorised

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. Lennart Heim, an AI governance researcher, provides more details about why these skills are useful in a recent blog post. We've spoken to experts who work in...

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### Open roles: Operations team

- Published: 2024-02-27
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2024/02/open-positions-operations-team/
- Topics: Uncategorised

####Applications to these positions are now closed. ###Summary {. no-toc} Our operations team exists to build the organisation and systems that keep 80,000 Hours on track to achieve our (https://80000hours. org/about/) of getting talented people working on the world's most pressing problems. Over the next year, we're spinning out of (https://ev. org/), our fiscal sponsor. We'll need to design and build the systems that enable us to operate independently — all while growing our team and keeping 80,000 Hours' day-to-day operations running. We're looking for: * **People operations specialists and associates** to help us make 80,000 Hours a great place to work and hire the people we need to fulfil our mission. * **Business operations specialists and associates** to build, manage, and optimise the internal systems we need to run effectively as an organisation. **Location**: London, UK (preferred). We're also open to remote candidates whose working hours overlap with at least four hours between 9AM–6PM UK time. **Salary**: Approximately £50,000 to £75,000, depending on the role and your experience. **To apply**, please complete (https://forms. gle/tMKNViToT4uypcyDA) by 11PM GMT on Sunday, March 24, 2024. We welcome you to apply for more than one role if interested — please just indicate this on the form when asked! 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...

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### Why you might not want to work on nuclear disarmament (and what to work on instead)

- Published: 2024-02-22
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2024/02/why-you-might-not-want-to-work-on-nuclear-disarmament/
- Topics: Uncategorised

In 1955, ten years after Robert Oppenheimer, Leslie Groves, and the 130,000 workers of the Manhattan Project built the first atomic bomb, the United States had 2,400 and Russia had 200. At present, the USA has over 3,000, Russia has over 4,000, and China is building an arsenal of hundreds. Most of these are hydrogen bombs many times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These modern arsenals no longer require a bomber plane to deliver them — ICBMs can throw bombs around the earth in half an hour. When we sleep, we sleep as targets of nuclear weapons. A global thermonuclear war would be the most horrifying event to happen in humanity's history. If cities were targeted, at the very least, tens of millions would instantly die just like the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Survivors described the scenes of those explosions as "just like Hell" and "burning as if scorching Heaven. " Afterwards, hundreds of millions could starve due to economic collapse. It's also possible the ozone layer would be damaged for years and temperatures would drop us into a nuclear winter. In the worst case scenario, this would render the northern hemisphere uninhabitable for years, causing an existential catastrophe. Faced with this possible future, why don't we agree it's too horrible to allow and find a way to disarm? Since the invention of nuclear weapons, there have been efforts to push nuclear states to disarm, both for moral and practical reasons. Intuitively, this also...

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### Our new series on building skills

- Published: 2024-02-14
- Modified: 2024-02-14
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2024/02/skills-pages-launch/
- Topics: Uncategorised

If we were going to summarise all our advice on how to get career capital in three words, we'd say: build useful skills. In other words, gain abilities that are valued in the job market — which makes your work more useful and makes it easier to bargain for the ingredients of a fulfilling job — as well as those that are specifically needed in tackling the world's most pressing problems. So today, we're launching our series on the most useful skills for making a difference — which you can find here. It covers why we recommend each skill, how to get started learning them, and how to work out which is the best fit for you. Each article looks at one of eight skill sets we think are most useful for solving the problems we think are most pressing: Policy and political skills Organisation-building Research Communicating ideas Software and tech skills Experience with an emerging power Engineering Expertise relevant to a top problem Why are we releasing this now? We think that many of our readers have come away from our site underappreciating the importance of career capital. Instead, they focus their career choices on having an impact right away. This is a difficult tradeoff in general. Roughly, our position is that: There's often less tradeoff between these things than people think, as good options for career capital often involve directly working on a problem you think is important. That said, building career capital substantially increases the impact you're...

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### Announcing Niel Bowerman as the next CEO of 80,000 Hours

- Published: 2024-01-31
- Modified: 2024-01-31
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2024/01/announcing-niel-bowerman-ceo/
- Topics: Uncategorised

We're excited to announce that the boards of Effective Ventures US and Effective Ventures UK have approved our selection committee's choice of Niel Bowerman as the new CEO of 80,000 Hours. I (Rob Wiblin) was joined on the selection committee by Will MacAskill, Hilary Greaves, Simran Dhaliwal, and Max Daniel. 80,000 Hours is a project of EV US and EV UK, though under Niel's leadership, it expects to be spinning out and creating an independent legal structure, which will involve selecting a new board. We want to thank Brenton Mayer, who has served as 80,000 Hours interim CEO since late 2022, for his dedication and thoughtful management. Brenton expressed enthusiasm about the committee's choice, and he expects to take on the role of chief operations officer, where he will continue to work closely with Niel to keep 80,000 Hours running smoothly. By the end of its deliberations, the selection committee agreed that Niel was the best candidate to be 80,000 Hours' long-term CEO. We think Niel's drive and attitude will help him significantly improve the organisation and shift its strategy to keep up with events in the world. We were particularly impressed by his ability to use evidence to inform difficult strategic decisions and lay out a clear vision for the organisation. Niel started his career as a climate physicist and activist, and he went on to co-found and work at the Centre for Effective Altruism and served as assistant director...

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### Practical steps to form better habits in your life and career

- Published: 2024-01-23
- Modified: 2024-03-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2024/01/forming-new-habits/
- Topics: Uncategorised

The idea this week: developing skills and habits takes time, effort, and using the right techniques. At the start of a new year, we often reflect on how to improve and develop better habits. People often want to exercise more or become better at self-study. I, for one, wanted to consistently get to work earlier. But actually making progress requires more than just wanting it — it takes a systematic approach. Doing this is a key part succeeding at your current job, improving your career trajectory, and even just being more fulfilled generally. (Read more in our article on all the evidence-based advice we found on how to be more successful in any job. ) You want to take something that's a problem in your life and find a solution that becomes second nature. For example, for some people, getting to work at an early hour is just part of their normal routine — they barely have to think about it. But if that's not the case for you – like it wasn't for me – you'll need to make a conscious change, and work on it until it becomes second nature. But lots of things block us from forming these new habits and skills. The key is closing the loop — get feedback about your problem, analyse why you haven't adopted the habit yet, make a change, test it out, and repeat: Feedback – track your progress and your errors, or get coaching. Debug – reflect on what has gone...

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### 2023 in review: some of our top pieces from last year

- Published: 2024-01-08
- Modified: 2024-01-09
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2024/01/2023-in-review/
- Topics: Uncategorised

As we kick off 2024, we're taking a moment to look back at our 2023 content. We published a lot of pieces aimed at helping our readers have more impactful careers, including a completely updated career guide, our revamped advanced series, around 35 podcast episodes, dozens of blog posts, and a bunch of updates to our career reviews and problem profiles. We'd like to highlight some of the new content that stands out to us: Standout blog posts How to cope with rejection in your career — Luisa Rodriguez, one of the hosts of The 80,000 Hours podcast, wrote this powerful personal piece about her experience with career rejection, the unexpected benefits of getting rejected, and helpful tips for dealing with it that have worked for her. If you have ever struggled with rejection, I think this piece might help you feel less alone. My thoughts on parenting and having an impactful career — Michelle Hutchinson, the director of the one-on-one programme at 80,000 Hours, wrote this thoughtful reflection on her decision to become a parent, the effects of parenthood on her career and social impact, and the challenges and benefits of being a parent in a community of people trying to have an impactful career. Some thoughts on moderation in doing good — in this post, 80,000 Hours founder Ben Todd addressed why moderation may be underrated by people trying to have a big social impact and how to avoid the pitfalls of extremism. This piece thoughtfully offers actionable...

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### An apology for our mistake with the book giveaway

- Published: 2024-01-05
- Modified: 2024-02-06
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2024/01/an-apology-for-our-mistake-with-the-book-giveaway/
- Topics: Uncategorised

80,000 Hours runs a programme where subscribers to our newsletter can order a free, paperback copy of a book to be sent to them in the mail. Readers choose between getting a copy of our career guide, Toby Ord's The Precipice, and Will MacAskill's Doing Good Better. This giveaway has been open to all newsletter subscribers since early 2022. The number of orders we get depends on the number of new subscribers that day, but in general, we get around 150 orders a day. Over the past week, however, we received an overwhelming number of orders. The offer of the free book appears to have been promoted by some very popular posts on Instagram, which generated an unprecedented amount of interest for us. While we're really grateful that these people were interested in what we have to offer, we couldn't handle the massive uptick in demand. We're a nonprofit funded by donations, and everything we provide is free. We had budgeted to run the book giveaway projecting the demand would be in line with what it's been for the past two years. Instead, we had more than 20,000 orders in just a few days — which we anticipated would run through around six months of the book giveaway's budget. We've now paused taking new orders, and we're unsure when we'll be able to re-open them. Also, because of this large spike in demand, we had to tell many people who subscribed to our newsletter hoping to get a physical book...

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### Special podcast holiday release: One highlight from every episode in 2023

- Published: 2023-12-31
- Modified: 2023-12-31
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2023/12/best-of-2023-podcast-highlights/
- Topics: Uncategorised

Happy new year! We're celebrating with a special podcast holiday release: our favourite highlights from each episode of the show that came out in 2023. That's 32 of our favourite ideas packed into one episode that's so bursting with substance it might be more than the human mind can safely handle. Find this episode wherever you get podcasts: There's something for everyone here: Ezra Klein on punctuated equilibrium Tom Davidson on why AI takeoff might be shockingly fast Johannes Ackva on political action versus lifestyle changes Hannah Ritchie on how buying environmentally friendly technology helps low-income countries Bryan Caplan on rational irrationality on the part of voters Jan Leike on whether the release of ChatGPT increased or reduced AI extinction risks Athena Aktipis on why elephants get deadly cancers less often than humans Anders Sandberg on the lifespan of civilisations Nita Farahany on hacking neural interfaces ... plus another 23 such gems from the rest of our 2023 guest lineup. And they're in an order that our audio engineer Simon Monsour described as having an "eight-dimensional-tetris-like rationale. " I don't know what the hell that means either, but I'm curious to find out. And remember: if you like these highlights, note that we release 20-minute highlights reels for every new episode over on our sister feed, which is called 80k After Hours. So if you're struggling to make time to listen to every single one, you can always get some of the best bits of our episodes. We hope for all...

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### Announcing our plan to become an independent organisation

- Published: 2023-12-29
- Modified: 2024-03-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2023/12/announcing-plan/
- Topics: Uncategorised

We are excited to share that 80,000 Hours has officially decided to spin out as a project from our parent organisations and establish an independent legal structure. 80,000 Hours is a project of the Effective Ventures group — the umbrella term for Effective Ventures Foundation and Effective Ventures Foundation USA, Inc. , which are two separate legal entities that work together. It also includes the projects Giving What We Can, the Centre for Effective Altruism, and others. We're incredibly grateful to the Effective Ventures leadership and team and the other orgs for all their support, particularly in the last year. They devoted countless hours and enormous effort to helping ensure that we and the other orgs could pursue our missions. And we deeply appreciate Effective Ventures' support in our spin-out. They recently announced that all of the other organisations under their umbrella will likewise become their own legal entities; we're excited to continue to work alongside them to improve the world. Back in May, we investigated whether it was the right time to spin out of our parent organisations. We've considered this option at various points in the last three years. There have been many benefits to being part of a larger entity since our founding. But as 80,000 Hours and the other projects within Effective Ventures have grown, we concluded we can now best pursue our mission and goals independently. Effective Ventures leadership approved the plan. Becoming our own legal entity will allow us to: Match our governing structure to...

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### Not sure where to donate this year? Here’s our advice.

- Published: 2023-12-15
- Modified: 2024-01-06
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2023/12/giving-season-advice/
- Topics: Uncategorised

The idea this giving season: figuring out where to donate is tricky, but a few key tips can help. There are lots of pressing problems in the world, and even more possible solutions. We mostly focus on careers, but donating to effective organisations tackling these problems — if you can — is another great way to help. But how can you figure out where it's best to donate? Our article on choosing where to donate lays out how you can make this choice. First, you have to decide whether: You want to defer to someone you think is trustworthy, shares your values, and has already evaluated charities. Just following their recommendations can save you work. (We discuss some options below. ) You want to do your own research instead, which might allow you to find unusually high-impact options matched to your specific values, plus improve your knowledge of effective giving. You can also enter a donor lottery — learn more about them here. If you decide to do your own research, you can use our article to figure out how much time you should spend. For example, we think young people might especially benefit from doing research since they'll learn lessons about charity evaluation that they can apply for a long time in the future. If you do your own research, we recommend you: Decide which global problems you think are most pressing right now. Find the best organisations within your top 2–3 problem areas. Choose the one that's furthest from...

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### A note of appreciation for your efforts to help others

- Published: 2023-11-10
- Modified: 2024-01-06
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2023/11/a-note-of-appreciation-for-your-efforts-to-help-others/
- Topics: Uncategorised

The idea this week: it's incredible how dedicated many of you are to helping others. One of my favourite parts of working on the one-on-one advising team is getting to see the important work so many people are doing up close. It's incredibly inspiring to learn about the thoughtful, dedicated steps you're taking to have an impact. In our conversations, we get to directly express appreciation for each person's efforts. But we only get to do that for a fraction of readers, and only occasionally. So I wanted to take this chance to say thank you to all of you working so hard and intentionally to help others. There are countless ways to make a difference — different problems needing solutions and different approaches to tackle them. I can't speak to nearly all of those here. But I do want to highlight a few examples of work I know many of you are doing that I find deeply admirable. To those working long hours at a challenging job in order to donate a significant portion of your salary to effective organisations — thank you. It's hard to stay motivated when the work itself doesn't feel valuable. It's hard to make time outside a full-time job to thoughtfully decide where your money can do the most good. And it can be tough being surrounded by people with different values who get to directly enjoy the fruits of their labour rather than using it to reduce suffering. I admire you for taking...

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### New opportunities are opening up in AI governance

- Published: 2023-11-03
- Modified: 2024-03-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2023/11/new-ai-governance-opportunities/
- Topics: Uncategorised

The news this week: major new initiatives show governments are taking AI risks seriously — but there's still a long way to go. From DC to London and beyond, leaders are waking up to AI. They see potential dangers from the technology on the horizon. Take the White House. This week, President Joe Biden announced a sweeping new executive order to respond to the risks potentially posed by advanced AI systems, including risks to national security. Read our career review on AI governance and coordination. The new order includes the following: A requirement for AI labs working on the most powerful models to share information about safety tests and training plans Direction to the National Institute of Standards and Technology to create standards for red teaming and assessing the safety of powerful new AI models Efforts to reduce the risk of AI-related biological threats and to mitigate cybersecurity vulnerabilities Provisions on fraud, privacy, equity, civil rights, workers' rights, and international coordination Vice President Kamala Harris also announced the creation of the United States AI Safety Institute this week, which will help evaluate and mitigate dangerous capabilities of AI models. And the US government is making a big push to hire more AI professionals. They've extended the deadline for applying to the Presidential Innovation Fellowship in light of this push. And it's not just the US that's taking action on AI risks. In the UK, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak convened the AI Safety Summit this week to bring together national leaders,...

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### We've made mistakes in our careers — here's what we learned

- Published: 2023-10-06
- Modified: 2024-03-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2023/10/staff-career-mistakes/
- Topics: Uncategorised

The idea this week: you can learn a lot from mistakes. In that spirit, we're sharing six stories of mistakes that staff at 80,000 Hours think they've made in their careers. And if you're interested in hearing more, we strongly recommend a recent episode of our podcast, 80k After Hours, about 10 mistakes people make when pursuing a high-impact career. 1. Not asking for help A mistake I have frequently made, and still sometimes do, is not asking for help with applications. I usually feel awkward about others reading my letters or essays or practicing interview questions, and I also don't want to waste my friends' time. But whenever I end up asking for help, it improves my applications significantly, and people are usually happy to help. (I enjoy giving feedback on applications as well! ) -Anemone Franz, advisor 2. Ruling out an option too quickly I first became concerned about risks from artificial intelligence in 2014, when I read Superintelligence. The book convinced me these risks were serious. And more importantly, I couldn't find persuasive counterarguments at the time. But because I didn't have a background in technical fields — I thought of myself as a writer — I concluded there was little I could contribute to the field and mostly worked on other problems. Now I think this was a mistake. I could have used my time in grad school to research this neglected issue and nascent field, which I now write about often. It's good to keep in...

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### Building career capital: some new advice on three paths

- Published: 2023-09-29
- Modified: 2024-03-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2023/09/building-career-capital/
- Topics: Uncategorised

The idea this week: building career capital is a key part of having an impactful career over the long term — and we have new content about some specific paths you might take. If you want to do good with your career, we usually don't recommend trying to have an impact right away. We think most people should spend their early career getting good at something useful. Find more details in our career guide chapter on career capital. Here's some of our new content on specific ways to potentially build career capital: 1. US policy master's degrees We recently published an in-depth review of US policy master's degrees. Working in policy can be an excellent way to have a positive impact on many top problems, including AI, biosecurity, great power conflict, animal welfare, global health, and more. The first part details the value of policy master's degrees with a focus on the US — though some of the information is likely to apply more broadly. We think this is one of the best ways to get career capital for a career in US policy. The second part covers specifics about how to choose which program to apply to based on reputation and personal fit, advice for preparing your application, and information on how to fund your degree. 2. Should you work at a leading AI lab? Another way to gain valuable career capital is to work in a high-performing team, especially in new and rapidly growing fields. We recently published...

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### What you should know about our updated career guide

- Published: 2023-09-19
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2023/09/what-you-should-know-about-our-updated-career-guide/
- Topics: Uncategorised

The question this week: what are the biggest changes to our career guide since 2017? Read the new and updated career guide here, by our founder Benjamin Todd and the 80,000 Hours team. Our 2023 career guide isn't just a fancy new design — here's a rundown of how the content has been updated: 1. Career capital: get good at something useful In our previous career guide, we argued that your primary focus should be on building very broadly applicable skills, credentials, and connections — what we called transferable career capital. We also highlighted jobs like consulting as a way to get this. However, since launching the 2017 version of the career guide, we came to think a focus on transferable career capital might lead you to neglect experience that can be very useful to enter the most impactful jobs — for example, experience working in an AI lab or studying synthetic biology. OK, so how should you figure out the best career capital option for you? Our new advice: get good at something useful. In more depth — choose some valuable skills to learn, and that are a good fit for you, and then find opportunities that let you practise those skills. And then have concrete back-up plans and plan Bs in mind, rather than relying on general 'transferability. ' This focus on skills is important because you're much more likely to have an impact if you're good at what you do — and research suggests it can take years...

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### Open positions: 1on1 team

- Published: 2023-09-07
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2023/09/open-positions-1on1-team/
- Topics: Uncategorised

**Applications for these positions have now closed. ** We're looking for candidates to join our 1on1 team. The 1on1 team at 80,000 Hours talks to people who want to have a positive impact in their work and helps them find career paths tackling the world's most pressing problems. We're keen to expand our team by hiring people who can help with at least one (and hopefully more! ) of the following responsibilities: Advising: talking one-on-one to talented and altruistic applicants in order to help them find high-impact careers. Running our headhunting product: working with hiring managers at the most effective organisations to help them find exceptional employees. Improving our systems: building tech-based systems to support our team members. If you think you'd be interested in taking on more than one of these duties, and enjoy wearing multiple hats in your job, we strongly encourage you to apply. The start dates of these roles are flexible, although we're likely to prioritise candidates who can start sooner, all else equal. These roles have starting salaries from £50,000 to £85,000 (depending on skills and experience) and are ideally London-based. We're able to sponsor visa applications. ##How to apply To apply for a role as an (#advising-role-descript-23), (#headhunting-role-descript-23), or (#systems-role-descript-23), please fill out this (https://form. typeform. com/to/xEmqceLU) by **11PM GMT on Sunday, October 8, 2023. ** We expect the application to take around an hour. If you have any issues submitting the form, reach out to (mailto:violet@80000hours. org). We're aware that factors like...

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### Announcing the new 80,000 Hours career guide

- Published: 2023-09-04
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2023/09/career-guide-launch/
- Topics: Uncategorised

From 2016 to 2019, 80,000 Hours' core content was contained in our persistently popular career guide. (You may also remember it as the 80,000 Hours book: 80,000 Hours — Find a fulfilling career that does good). Today, we're re-launching that guide. Among many other changes, in the new version: We've substantially changed our recommendations on career capital. We have significantly improved and extended our article on career planning. We improved our advice on personal fit and career exploration. We added sections on why community-building, government and policy, and organisation-building careers could be high impact. We focus more on avoiding harm (in line with our updates following the collapse of FTX), and explicitly discuss Sam Bankman-Fried when talking about earning to give. We are more upfront about 80,000 Hours' focus on existential risk in particular (while also discussing a wide variety of cause areas, including global health, animal welfare, existential risk and meta-causes). We've updated the more empirical sections of the guide using more up-to-date papers and data. You can read the guide here or start with a 2-minute summary. It's also available as a printed book (you can get a free copy by signing up for our newsletter or buy it on Amazon), audiobook, podcast series or ebook (available as a . pdf or . epub). We'd appreciate you sharing the new guide with a friend! You can send them a free copy using this link. Many of the people who've found our advice most useful in the past...

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### What the past can tell us about how AI will affect jobs

- Published: 2023-09-01
- Modified: 2024-03-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2023/09/what-the-past-can-tell-us-about-how-ai-will-affect-jobs/
- Topics: Uncategorised

The idea this week: AI may be progressing fast — but that doesn't mean it will rapidly transform the economy in the near term. Large language models like ChatGPT are becoming more and more powerful and capable. We've already started to see a few examples where human workers are plausibly being replaced by AI. As these models get even more skilled, will they substantially replace human workers? What will happen to the labour market? To try to answer these questions, I spoke to labour economist Michael Webb, for the latest episode of The 80,000 Hours Podcast. He's worked for Google DeepMind, in the UK government, and at Stanford University. Michael argues that new technologies typically take many decades to fully replace specific jobs. For example, if you look at two of the biggest general-purpose technologies of the last 150 years — robots and software — it took 30 years from the invention of each technology to get to 50% adoption. It took 90 years for the last manual telephone operator to lose their job from automation. So if we look to the past as a guide, it may suggest that if AI systems do replace human workers, it will take many decades. But why does it take so long for very obviously useful technologies to be widely adopted? Here are three reasons: Adopting new innovative technologies can take lots of money and time. Companies have to decide it's worth the risk to redesign their systems, rethink a set of processes...

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### Why you might consider switching careers — and what it takes to do it

- Published: 2023-08-29
- Modified: 2024-03-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2023/08/why-you-might-consider-switching-careers-and-what-it-takes-to-do-it/
- Topics: Uncategorised

The idea this week: switching careers can be terrifying — but it can also be the key to finding more satisfying and impactful work. Trust me — I've tested my fit for at least four different career paths before landing where I am now. After a first job in teaching, I explored: Academic philosophy Journalism Nonprofit research and communications When I graduated from university with a degree in philosophy, I didn't know what to do next, but I knew I wanted to find a job that helped others and wasn't harmful. I looked for roles at nonprofits nearby and ended up getting hired at a special education school. I loved many parts of the job and the students I worked with, but when the opportunity arose to get my master's in special education, I realised I didn't envision spending my whole career in the field. I had gotten involved with local vegan advocacy and an effective altruism group, and I was curious if there were even more impactful opportunities I could pursue with my career. I once thought that most of my impact would come through donating — but a lot of the people I was talking to were discussing the idea that career choice could be even more impactful than charitable giving (especially since teaching wasn't particularly lucrative in my case). But what should I actually do? I started testing my fit for returning to academic philosophy, by auditing graduate seminars on ethics, and also for journalism, by drafting...

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### Operations management: how I found the right career path for me

- Published: 2023-08-11
- Modified: 2024-03-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2023/08/operations-management-how-i-found-the-right-career-path-for-me/
- Topics: Uncategorised

The idea this week: how I learned a lot about my skills by testing my fit for operations work. Like a lot of students, I spent much of my final year at university unsure what to do next. Should I pursue further studies, start out on a career path, or something else? I was excited about having an impact with my career, and I thought I might be a good fit for policy work — which seemed like a way I could contribute to solving pressing world problems. I figured this would involve further studies, so I looked into applying for graduate school. Check out our career reviews page, where we discuss key categories of job skills, the priority paths we think might have the most impact over the long term, and promising avenues for pursuing career capital. But I was probably deferring too much to my sense of what others thought would be high-impact work, rather than figuring out how I could best contribute over the course of my career. I ended up doing the 80,000 Hours career planning worksheet — and it helped me to generate a longer list of options and questions. It pointed me toward something I hadn't considered: doing something that would help me test my fit for lots of different kinds of work. I realised that becoming athletic union president, a student representative role I'd long been interested in, would give me experience with different kinds of work. It involved marketing, policy writing, working...

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### What recent events mean for AI governance career paths

- Published: 2023-08-07
- Modified: 2024-03-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2023/08/what-recent-events-mean-for-ai-governance-career-paths/
- Topics: Uncategorised

The idea this week: AI governance careers present some of the best opportunities to change the world for the better that we've found. Last week, US Senator Richard Blumenthal gave a stark warning during a subcommittee hearing on artificial intelligence. He's become deeply concerned about the potential for an "intelligence device out of control, autonomous, self-replicating, potentially creating diseases, pandemic-grade viruses, or other kinds of evils — purposely engineered by people, or simply the result of mistakes, no malign intention. " Read our review of AI governance and coordination career paths to see how you could get involved. We've written about these kinds of dangers — potentially rising to the extreme of an extinction-level event — in our problem profile on preventing an AI-related catastrophe. "These fears need to be addressed, and I think can be addressed," the senator continued. "I've come to the conclusion that we need some kind of regulatory agency. " And the senator from Connecticut isn't the only one: The White House has led a coalition of the top AI companies to coordinate on risk-reducing measures, and they recently announced a joint voluntary commitment to some key safety principles. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have been directly involved in these efforts, with the president himself saying the technology will require "new laws, regulation, and oversight. " Four top companies developing advanced AI systems — Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI — launched a new industry body called the Frontier Model Forum, which they say is "focused on...

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### Why many people underrate investigating the problem they work on

- Published: 2023-07-31
- Modified: 2024-03-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2023/07/why-i-think-many-people-underrate-investigating-the-problem-they-work-on/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy, Unconventional advice

The idea this week: thinking about which world problem is most pressing may matter more than you realise. I'm an advisor for 80,000 Hours, which means I talk to a lot of thoughtful people who genuinely want to have a positive impact with their careers. One piece of advice I consistently find myself giving is to consider working on pressing world problems you might not have explored yet. Check out our list of the world's most pressing problems — or read our advice on how to think about the question for yourself. Should you work on climate change or AI risk? Mitigating antibiotic resistance or preventing bioterrorism? Preventing disease in low-income countries or reducing the harms of factory farming? Your choice of problem area can matter a lot. But I think a lot of people under-invest in building a view of which problems they think are most pressing. I think there are three main reasons for this: 1. They think they can't get a job working on a certain problem, so the argument that it's important doesn't seem relevant. I see this most frequently with AI. People think that they don't have aptitude or interest in machine learning, so they wouldn't be able to contribute to mitigating catastrophic risks from AI. But I don't think this is true. There are potentially really impactful roles for reducing AI risk in: AI governance and coordination Operations management Information security Communications And more Many roles in these fields don't necessarily need you to...

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### What the war in Ukraine shows us about catastrophic risks

- Published: 2023-06-30
- Modified: 2023-06-30
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2023/06/what-the-war-in-ukraine-shows-us-about-catastrophic-risks/
- Topics: Careers, Great power conflict, Uncategorised

A new great power war could be catastrophic for humanity — but there are meaningful ways to reduce the risk. We're now in the 17th month of the war in Ukraine. But at the start, it was hard to foresee it would last this long. Many expected Russian troops to take Ukraine's capital, Kyiv, in weeks. Already, more than 100,000 people, including civilians, have been killed and over 300,000 more injured. Many more will die before the war ends. The sad and surprising escalation of the war shows why international conflict remains a major global risk. I explain why working to lower the danger is a potentially high-impact career choice in a new problem profile on great power war. As Russia's disastrous invasion demonstrates, it's hard to predict how much a conflict will escalate. Most wars remain relatively small, but a few will become terrifyingly large. US officials estimate about 70,000 Russian and Ukrainian soldiers have died in battle so far. That means this war is already worse than 80% of all the wars humanity has experienced in the last 200 years. But the worst wars humanity has fought are hundreds of times larger than the war in Ukraine currently is. World War II killed 66 million people, for example — perhaps the single deadliest event in human history. Author's figure. See the data here. Data source: Sarkees, Meredith Reid and Frank Wayman (2010). Resort to War: 1816 – 2007. Washington DC: CQ Press Barring the use of nuclear weapons,...

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### How to cope with rejection in your career

- Published: 2023-06-18
- Modified: 2024-01-06
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2023/06/career-rejection/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy

The idea this week: getting rejected from jobs can be crushing — but learning how to deal with rejection productively is an incredibly valuable skill. I've been rejected many, many times. In 2015, I applied to ten PhD programs and was rejected from nine. After doing a summer internship with GiveWell in 2016, I wasn't offered a full-time role. In 2017, I was rejected by J-PAL, IDinsight, and Founders Pledge (among others). Around the same time, I was so afraid of being rejected by Open Philanthropy, I dropped out of their hiring round. I now have what I consider a dream job at 80,000 Hours: I get to host a podcast about the world's most pressing problems and how to solve them. But before getting a job offer from 80,000 Hours in 2020, I got rejected by them for a role in 2018. That rejection hurt the most. If rejection really brings you down, it may be worth taking a look at our resources on looking after your mental health. I still remember compulsively checking my phone after my work trial to see if 80,000 Hours had made me an offer. And I still remember waking up at 5:00 AM, checking my email, and finding the kind and well-written — but devastating — rejection: "Unfortunately we don't think the role is the right fit right now. " And I remember being so sad that I took a five-hour bus ride to stay with a friend so I wouldn't have to be...

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### Practical steps to take now that AI risk is mainstream

- Published: 2023-06-06
- Modified: 2024-03-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2023/06/practical-steps-to-take-now-that-ai-risk-is-mainstream/
- Topics: Uncategorised

AI risk has gone mainstream. So what's next? Last Tuesday's statement on AI risk has hit headlines across the world. Hundreds of leading AI scientists and other prominent figures — including the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind — signed the one-sentence statement: Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war. This mainstreaming of concerns about the risk of extinction from AI represents a substantial shift to the strategic landscape — and should, as a result, have implications on how best to reduce the risk. Read more about extinction risks from AI. How has the landscape shifted? Pictures from the White House Press Briefing. Meme from @kristjanmoore. The relevant video is here. So far, I think the most significant effect of the changes in the way these risks are viewed can be seen in changes in political activity. World leaders — including Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak, Emmanuel Macron — have all met leaders in AI in the last few months. AI regulation was a key topic of discussion at the G7. And now it's been announced that Biden and Sunak will discuss extinction risks from AI as part of talks in DC next week. At the moment, it's extremely unclear where this discussion will go. While I (tentatively) think that there are actions that governments could be taking, it's possible that governments will act in a way that could increase the risk overall. But it...

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### The public is more concerned about AI causing extinction than we thought

- Published: 2023-05-26
- Modified: 2024-03-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2023/05/the-public-is-more-concerned-about-ai-causing-extinction-than-we-thought/
- Topics: Existential risk

What does the public think about risks of human extinction? We care a lot about reducing extinction risks and think doing so is one of the best ways you can have a positive impact with your career. But even before considering career impact, it can be natural to worry about these risks — and as it turns out, many people do! In April 2023, the US firm YouGov polled 1,000 American adults on how worried they were about nine different potential extinction threats. It found the following percentages of respondents were either "concerned" or "very concerned" about extinction from each threat: We're particularly interested in this poll now because we have recently updated our page on the world's most pressing problems, which includes several of these extinction risks at the top. Knowing how the public feels about these kinds of threats can impact how we communicate about them. For example, if we take the results at face value, 46% of the poll's respondents are concerned about human extinction caused by artificial intelligence. Maybe this surprisingly high figure means we don't need to worry as much as we have over the last 10 years about sounding like 'sci fi' when we talk about existential risks from AI, since it's quickly becoming a common concern! How does our view of the world's most pressing problems compare? Well, our top two problems, existential risks from AI and catastrophic pandemics, rank lower in the poll than...

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### Give feedback on the new 80,000 Hours career guide

- Published: 2023-05-25
- Modified: 2023-06-06
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2023/05/give-feedback-on-the-new-80000-hours-career-guide/
- Topics: Uncategorised

We've spent the last few months updating 80,000 Hours' career guide (which we previously released in 2017 and which you've been able to get as a physical book). This week, we've put our new career guide live on our website. Before we formally launch and promote the guide — and republish the book — we'd like to gather feedback from our readers! How can you help? First, take a look at the new career guide. Note that our target audience for this career guide is approximately the ~100k young adults most likely to have high-impact careers, in the English-speaking world. Many of them may not yet be familiar with many of the ideas that are widely discussed in the effective altruism community. Also, this guide is primarily aimed at people aged 18–24. When you're ready, there's a simple form to fill in: Give feedback Thank you so much! Extra context: why are we making this change? In 2018, we deprioritised 80,000 Hours' career guide in favour of our key ideas series. Our key ideas series had a more serious tone, and was more focused on impact. It represented our best and most up-to-date advice. We expected that this switch would reduce engagement time on our site, but that the key ideas series would better appeal to people more likely to change their careers to do good. However, the drop in engagement time which we could attribute to this change was larger than we'd expected. In addition, data from our user...

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### How 80,000 Hours has changed some of our advice after the collapse of FTX

- Published: 2023-05-12
- Modified: 2023-05-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2023/05/how-80000-hours-has-changed-some-of-our-advice-after-the-collapse-of-ftx/
- Topics: Accidental harm, Being ambitious, Career advice &amp; strategy

Following the bankruptcy of FTX and the federal indictment of Sam Bankman-Fried, many members of the team at 80,000 Hours were deeply shaken. As we have said, we had previously featured Sam on our site as a positive example of earning to give, a mistake we now regret. We felt appalled by his conduct and at the harm done to the people who had relied on FTX. These events were emotionally difficult for many of us on the team, and we were troubled by the implications it might have for our attempts to do good in the world. We had linked our reputation with his, and his conduct left us with serious questions about effective altruism and our approach to impactful careers. We reflected a lot, had many difficult conversations, and worked through a lot of complicated questions. There's still a lot we don't know about what happened, there's a diversity of views within the 80,000 Hours team, and we expect the learning process to be ongoing. Ultimately, we still believe strongly in the principles that drive our work, and we stand by the vast majority of our advice. But we did make some significant updates in our thinking, and we've changed many parts of the site to reflect them. We wrote this post to summarise the site updates we've made and to explain the motivations behind them, for transparency purposes and to further highlight the themes that unify the changes. We also support many efforts to push for broader...

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### Some thoughts on moderation in doing good

> How much should you do what seems right to you, even if it seems extreme or controversial, vs how much should you moderate your views and actions based on other perspectives?

- Published: 2023-05-05
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2023/05/moderation-in-doing-good/
- Topics: Accidental harm, Problem prioritisation

Here's one of the deepest tensions in doing good: How much should you do what seems right to you, even if it seems extreme or controversial, vs how much should you moderate your views and actions based on other perspectives? If you moderate too much, you won't be doing anything novel or ambitious, which really reduces how much impact you might have. The people who have had the biggest impact historically often spoke out about entrenched views and were met with hostility — think of the civil rights movement or Galileo. Moreover, simply following ethical 'common sense' has a horrible track record. It used to be common sense to think that homosexuality was evil, slavery was the natural order, and that the environment was there for us to exploit. And there is still so much wrong with the world. Millions of people die of easily preventable diseases, society is deeply unfair, billions of animals are tortured in factory farms, and we're gambling our entire future by failing to mitigate threats like climate change. These huge problems deserve radical action — while conventional wisdom appears to accept doing little about them. On a very basic level, doing more good is better than doing less. But this is a potentially endless and demanding principle, and most people don't give it much attention or pursue it very systematically. So it wouldn't be surprising if a concern for doing good led you to positions that seem radical or unusual to the rest of society... .

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### Why we’re adding information security to our list of priority career paths

- Published: 2023-04-28
- Modified: 2024-03-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2023/04/why-were-adding-information-security-to-our-list-of-priority-career-paths/
- Topics: Careers, Information security, Software Engineering

Information security could be a top option for people looking to have a high-impact career. This might be a surprising claim — information security is a relatively niche field, and it doesn't typically appear on canonical lists of do-gooder careers. But we think there's an unusually strong case that information security skills (which allow you to protect against unauthorised use, hacking, leaks, and tampering) will be key to addressing problems that are extremely important, neglected, and tractable. We now rank this career among the highest-impact paths we've researched. In the introduction to our recently updated career review of information security, we discuss how poor information security decisions may have played a decisive role in the 2016 US presidential campaign. If an organisation is big and influential, it needs good information security to ensure that it functions as intended. This is true whether it's a political campaign, a major corporation, a biolab, or an AI company. These last two cases could be quite important. We rank the risks from pandemic viruses and the chances of an AI-related catastrophe among the most pressing problems in the world — and information security is likely a key part of reducing these dangers. That's because hackers and cyberattacks — from a range of actors with varying motives — could try to steal crucial information, such as instructions for making a super-virus or the details of an extremely powerful AI model. This means that even if the people...

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### Are we doing enough to stop the worst pandemics?

> If you're looking for a career working on a problem that is massively important, relatively neglected, and potentially very tractable, reducing biorisk might be a terrific option.

- Published: 2023-04-21
- Modified: 2024-03-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2023/04/are-we-doing-enough-to-stop-the-worst-pandemics/
- Topics: Biomedical Research, Catastrophic pandemics, COVID-19

COVID-19 has been devastating for the world. While people debate how the response could've been better, it should be easy to agree that we'd all be better off if we can stop any future pandemic before it occurs. But we're still not taking pandemic prevention very seriously. A recent report in The Washington Post highlighted one major danger: some research on potential pandemic pathogens may actually increase the risk, rather than reduce it. Back in 2017, we talked about what we thought were several warning signs that something like COVID might be coming down the line. It'd be a big mistake to ignore these kinds of warning signs again. It seems unfortunate that so much of the discussion of the risks in this space is backward-looking. The news has been filled with commentary and debates about the chances that COVID accidentally emerged from a biolab or that it crossed over directly from animals to humans. We'd appreciate a definitive answer to this question as much as anyone, but there's another question that matters much more but gets asked much less: What are we doing to reduce the risk that the next dangerous virus — which could come from an animal, a biolab, or even a bioterrorist attack — causes a pandemic even worse than COVID-19? 80,000 Hours ranks preventing catastrophic pandemics as among the most pressing problems in the world. If you would be a good fit for a career working to...

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### How much should you research your career?

- Published: 2023-04-18
- Modified: 2024-03-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2023/04/how-much-should-you-research-your-career/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy

In career decisions, we advise that you don't aim for confidence — aim for a stable best guess. Career decisions have a big impact on your life, so it's natural to want to feel confident in them. Unfortunately, you don't always get this luxury. For years, I've faced the decision of whether to focus more on writing, organisation building, or something else. And despite giving it a lot of thought, I've rarely felt more than 60% confident in one of the options. How should you handle these kinds of situations? The right response isn't just to guess, flip a coin, or "follow your heart. " It's still worth identifying your key uncertainties, and doing your research: speak to people, do side projects, learn about each path, etc. Sometimes you'll quickly realise one answer is best. If we plot your confidence against how much research you've done, it'll look like this: But sometimes that doesn't happen. What then? Stop your research when your best guess stops changing. That might look more like this: This can be painful. You might only be 51% confident in your best guess, and it really sucks to have to make a decision when you feel so uncertain. But certainty is not always achievable. You might face questions that both (i) are important but (ii) can't realistically be resolved — which I think is the situation I faced. However, if you've done your research and your best guess has stopped changing, then you've probably done the research...

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### What our research has found about AI — and why it matters

- Published: 2023-03-31
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2023/03/concerned-about-recent-ai-progress-heres-our-best-resources-to-understand-whats-going-on/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence

Everyone's suddenly talking a lot about artificial intelligence — and we have many helpful resources for getting up to speed. With the release of GPT-4, Bing, DALL-E, Claude, and many other AI systems, it can be hard to keep track of all the latest developments in artificial intelligence. It can also be hard to keep sight of the big picture: what does this emerging technology actually mean for the world? This is a huge topic — and a lot is still unknown. But at 80,000 Hours, we've been interested in and concerned about AI for many years, and we've researched the issue extensively. Now, even major media outlets are taking seriously the kinds of things we've been worried about. Given all the excitement in this area, we wanted to share a round-up of some of our top content and findings about AI from recent years. Some of our top articles on AI: Preventing an AI-related catastrophe — Have you ever wondered why some people think advanced AI could pose an existential threat? This problem profile explains the case for AI risk — as well as some important objections. What could an AI-caused catastrophe actually look like? — This article tries to give a more concrete picture of worst-case scenarios. Anonymous advice on increasing AI capabilities — We asked knowledgeable people in the field for their views on whether people who want to reduce AI risk should work in roles that could further...

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### Why you should think about virtues — even if you're a consequentialist

- Published: 2023-03-17
- Modified: 2024-03-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2023/03/why-you-should-think-about-virtues-even-if-youre-a-consequentialist/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy, Moral philosophy

The idea this week: virtues are helpful shortcuts for making moral decisions — but think about consequences to decide what counts as a virtue. Your career is really ethically important, but it's not a single, discrete choice. To build a high-impact career you need to make thousands of smaller choices over many years — to take on this particular project, to apply for that internship, to give this person a positive reference, and so on. How do you make all those little decisions? If you want to have an impact, you hope to make the decisions that help you have a bigger impact rather than a smaller one. But you can't go around explicitly estimating the consequences of all the different possible actions you could take — not only would that take too long, you'd probably get it wrong most of the time. This is where the idea of virtues — lived moral traits like courage, honesty, and kindness — can really come in handy. Instead of calculating out the consequences of all your different possible actions, try asking yourself, "What's the honest thing to do? What's the kind thing to do? " A few places I find 'virtues thinking' motivating and useful: When I am facing a difficult work situation, I sometimes ask myself, "What virtue is this an opportunity to practise? " For example, maybe now is a great opportunity to practise being honest — even when it's difficult or embarrassing. Sometimes I get socially anxious. When that happens...

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### 80,000 Hours two-year review: 2021 and 2022

- Published: 2023-03-08
- Modified: 2024-11-13
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2023/03/80000-hours-two-year-review-2021-and-2022/
- Topics: Uncategorised

We've released our review of our programmes for the years 2021 and 2022. The full document is available for the public, and we're sharing the summary below. You can find our previous evaluations here. We have also updated our mistakes page. 80,000 Hours delivers four programmes: website, job board, podcast, and one-on-one. We also have a marketing team that attracts users to these programmes, primarily by getting them to visit the website. Over the past two years, three of four programmes grew their engagement 2-3x: Podcast listening time in 2022 was 2x higher than in 2020 Job board vacancy clicks in 2022 were 3x higher than in 2020 The number of one-on-one team calls in 2022 was 3x higher than in 2020 Web engagement hours fell by 20% in 2021, then grew by 38% in 2022 after we increased investment in our marketing. From December 2020 to December 2022, the core team grew by 78% from 14 FTEs to 25 FTEs. Ben Todd stepped down as CEO in May 2022 and was replaced by Howie Lempel. The collapse of FTX in November 2022 caused significant disruption. As a result, Howie went on leave from 80,000 Hours to be Interim CEO of Effective Ventures Foundation (UK). Brenton Mayer took over as Interim CEO of 80,000 Hours. We are also spending substantially more time liaising with management across the Effective Ventures group, as we are a project of the group. We had previously held up Sam Bankman-Fried as a positive example of...

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### What Bing’s chatbot can tell us about AI risk — and what it can’t

- Published: 2023-03-05
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2023/03/what-bings-chatbot-can-tell-us-about-ai-risk-and-what-it-cant/
- Topics: Uncategorised

You may have seen the new Bing. It's impressive — and, reportedly, unhinged: manipulating people, threatening users and even telling one reporter it loved him. You may also have seen me writing about the risk of an AI-related catastrophe. I'm not just concerned about AI going wrong in minor ways: I think that there's a small but possible chance of an existential catastrophe caused by AI within the next 100 years. Read more: What could an AI-caused existential catastrophe actually look like? Here's my view on Bing: Bing does tell us a little about how careful we can expect large corporations to be when deploying AI systems. But Bing isn't very dangerous, and isn't an example of the sorts of misaligned AI that we should be most worried about. (Before moving on, I should disclose that my brother, Jacob Hilton, used to work for OpenAI, the AI lab behind both Bing and ChatGPT. ) How does Bing chat work? Bing chat (like ChatGPT) is based on a large language model. A large language model is a machine learning algorithm that is basically trained to continue whatever text it is given as input. It writes an article from a headline or continues a poem from the first few lines. But a good chat assistant would do more than just continue whatever text you give it. So, somehow, engineers need to take a large language model and turn it into a kind, helpful, useful...

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### Expression of interest: headhunting lead (closed)

- Published: 2023-02-24
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2023/02/expression-of-interest-headhunting-lead/
- Topics: Uncategorised

We are no longer accepting expressions of interest for this role. Please check our (https://80000hours. org/about/work-with-us/) page or (https://80000hours. org/job-board/) to learn about future opportunities at 80,000 Hours. 80,000 Hours is considering hiring a headhunting lead to build out the headhunting service we provide to other organisations. They will work with the Director of 1-on-1 to set and execute a strategy which uses our team of advisors' unique network to find and recommend talented and altruistic candidates for high impact roles. We're looking for someone who: Has multiple years of experience in project management, research, or strategy, this could include roles in consulting, product management, or at early-stage startups or nonprofits. Enjoys thinking about and working with different people in a variety of contexts, including maintaining relationships with major stakeholders, and developing models of people's strengths to match them to specific roles. Has a strong understanding of 80,000 Hours' focus areas. This role is based in London, UK. The salary will vary based on your skills and experience, but the starting salary for someone with five years of relevant experience would be in excess of £70,000 per year. To express interest in this role, please complete this form. **Note:** This announcement is for an expression of interest, rather than a job opening. We'll likely launch a formal hiring round within the next month or two, but aren't sure exactly when. By filling out this form you're giving us more information about who might be interested...

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### Expression of interest: systems hire (closed)

- Published: 2023-02-24
- Modified: 2024-02-22
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2023/02/expression-of-interest-systems-hire/
- Topics: Uncategorised

We are no longer accepting expressions of interest for this role. Please check our (https://80000hours. org/about/work-with-us/) page or (https://80000hours. org/job-board/) to learn about future opportunities at 80,000 Hours. 80,000 Hours is considering hiring someone to work on building tech-based systems for the 1on1 team. We're looking for someone with an operations mindset who is excited about learning new tech tools and furthering 80,000 Hours' mission Right now, we are open to both full or part time applicants. We are also currently open to both London-based (preferred) or remote applicants. We can sponsor visas. Starting salary for a full-time position: ~£50,000-65,000, varies based on experience, location, and other factors. **Note:** This announcement is for an **expression of interest**, rather than a job application. We'll likely launch a formal hiring round within the next month or two, but aren't sure exactly when. By filling out this form, you're giving us more information about who might be interested in this role. This information will help us decide whether to run a hiring round and how to structure it. **If we do run a formal hiring round, we'll email everyone who filled out this expression of interest, inviting them to fill out an application for the role**. If you don't hear back from us, we probably decided not to run a hiring round; please don't take it as a rejection! You should feel very welcome to apply to future ads for 80,000 Hours positions (which we'll list (https://80000hours. org/about/work-with-us/) and...

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### How much do solutions to social problems differ in their effectiveness? A collection of all the studies we could find.

> In a 2013 paper, Dr Toby Ord reviewed data that compared about 100 health interventions in developing countries in terms of how many years of illness they prevent per dollar. He discovered some striking facts about the data.

- Published: 2023-02-14
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2023/02/how-much-do-solutions-differ-in-effectiveness/
- Topics: Climate change, Effective Altruism, Effective solutions, GiveWell, Global Health, Promising interventions

In a 2013 paper, Dr Toby Ord reviewed data compiled in the second edition of the World Bank's Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries, which compared about 100 health interventions in developing countries in terms of how many years of illness they prevent per dollar. He discovered some striking facts about the data: The best interventions were around 10,000 times more cost effective than the worst, and around 50 times more cost effective than the median. If you picked two interventions at random, on average the better one would be 100 times more cost effective than the other. The distribution was heavy-tailed, and roughly lognormal. In fact, it almost exactly followed the 80/20 rule -- that is, implementing the top 20% of interventions would do about 80% as much good as implementing all of them. The differences between the very best interventions were larger than the differences between the typical ones, so it's more important to go from 'very good' to 'very best' than from 'so-so' to 'very good. ' He published these results in The Moral Imperative towards Cost-Effectiveness in Global Health, which became one of the papers that started the effective altruism movement. (Note that Ord is an advisor to 80,000 Hours. ) This data appears to have radical implications for people interested in doing good in the world; namely, by working on one of the best interventions in global health, you could achieve about as much as 50 people working on typical interventions in that area... .

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### Is the world getting better or worse?

- Published: 2023-02-09
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2023/02/is-the-world-getting-better-or-worse/
- Topics: World problems

The question this week: is the world getting better or worse? **In a nutshell:** while there are some positive global trends, there are important ways the world is getting worse. We've looked at how your career can help solve these, in particular: * (https://80000hours. org/problem-profiles/factory-farming/) * (https://80000hours. org/problem-profiles/factory-farming/) * (https://80000hours. org/problem-profiles/climate-change/) * (https://80000hours. org/problem-profiles/artificial-intelligence/) * (https://80000hours. org/problem-profiles/preventing-catastrophic-pandemics/) Three ways the world's getting better 1. Poverty has decreased. Lots of stats about trends in the world – even ones that seem good to some people – are complicated to evaluate overall. But here's a long-term trend, based on solid data, that seems uncontroversially good: Living in extreme poverty is exceedingly difficult. And it's not just the share of the population in extreme poverty that's fallen. Since 1990, the absolute number has fallen too. 2. We're healthier than ever before. For a start, child mortality rates have fallen steeply in the last 100 years, as has the absolute number of children dying before reaching the age of five. We're close to eradicating polio and guinea worm disease, and we're gradually getting a grip on malaria. Read more about using your career to cost-effectively prevent disease in poorer countries Overall, life expectancy in every continent is at its highest point ever and is increasing. 3. Renewable energy generation is rising. While global temperatures are soaring and carbon dioxide emissions continue to increase, we're also producing more...

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### Open position: Content associate

> 80,000 Hours is looking for a content associate to help us improve and grow the impact of the 80,000 Hours website, which provides free research and advice to help people use their careers to address the world’s most pressing problems.

- Published: 2023-01-23
- Modified: 2023-01-23
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2023/01/open-position-content-associate/
- Topics: Uncategorised

**80,000 Hours is looking for a content associate to help us improve and grow the impact of the 80,000 Hours website, which provides free research and advice to help people use their careers to address the world's most pressing problems. ** As a content associate, you would review 80,000 Hours articles to ensure they are up to date, well presented, and error free, help us collect user feedback, provide analytical support, and generate ideas for the team (more on responsibilities below). We'd like to support the person in this role to take on more responsibility over time; one possibility would be to move to become the primary author / researcher of new articles. About the 80,000 Hours web team 80,000 Hours provides free research and support to help people find careers tackling the world's most pressing problems. We've had over 10 million visitors to our website (with over 100,000 hours of reading time per year), and more than 3,000 people have told us that they've significantly changed their career plans due to our work. We're also the largest single source of people getting involved in the effective altruism community, according to the most recent EA Community Survey. Our articles are read by thousands, and are among the most important ways we help people shift their careers towards higher-impact options. The role As a content associate, you would: Support the 80,000 Hours web team flexibly across a range of articles and projects. Proofread 80,000 Hours articles before release, suggest style...

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### My thoughts on parenting and having an impactful career

> Having kids can be challenging for anyone, and there may be unique challenges for people who aim to have a positive impact with their career.

- Published: 2023-01-20
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2023/01/parenting-impactful-career/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy, Personal fit

When my husband and I decided to have children, we didn't put much thought into the broader social impact of the decision. We got together at secondary school and had been discussing the fact we were going to have kids since we were 18, long before we found effective altruism. We made the actual decision to have a child much later, but how it would affect our careers or abilities to help others still wasn't a large factor in the decision. As with most people though, the decision has, in fact, had significant effects on our careers. Raising my son, Leo — now three years old — is one of the great joys of my life, and I'm so happy that my husband and I decided to have him. But having kids can be challenging for anyone, and there may be unique challenges for people who aim to have a positive impact with their careers. I'm currently the director of the one-on-one programme at 80,000 Hours and a fund manager for the Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund. So I wanted to share my experience with parenting and working for organisations whose mission I care about deeply. Here are my aims: Give readers an example of a working parent who also thinks a lot about 80,000 Hours' advice. Discuss some of the ways having kids is likely to affect the impact you have in your career, for people who want to consider that when deciding whether to have kids. Discuss challenges people...

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### The quick, medium, and long versions of career planning

> Without making time to check in on the big career questions, you might stay too long at a job, miss opportunities for doing more good, or fail to push yourself to grow — I’ve certainly been there before.

- Published: 2023-01-19
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2023/01/the-quick-medium-and-long-versions-of-career-planning/
- Topics: Career planning

I think it's a good idea to consider how you're feeling about your career each year. At least, intellectually I think it's good. In practice, I find it really hard. Compared to others I know, I'm not as naturally drawn to personal reflection and goal-setting. I intended to reflect on my own career over the festive period... and ended up bailing because I found it too stressful. But it is important! Without making time to check in on the big career questions, you might stay too long at a job, miss opportunities for doing more good, or fail to push yourself to grow — I've certainly been there before. So I suggest doing a career review this January — but committing to a realistic volume of work. You can start small. You can also try getting help — ask a friend to act as an "accountability buddy" or apply to talk one-on-one with someone from 80,000 Hours. I'm committing to do it too this month — that's one of the reasons I'm writing this newsletter! Here are some of our tools and resources that you could use at whatever level of detail works for you: The quick version (30–60 minutes) Try our annual career review tool These guided questions help you reflect on the last year, consider whether to change your job, and make a plan for this year. Find new options on our job board If your plan involves changing...

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### 2022 in review

> As 2023 gets underway, we’re taking a look back at the content we produced in 2022 and highlighting some particular standouts. We published a lot of new articles and podcasts to help our readers have impactful careers — below are some of our favourite pieces from the year.

- Published: 2023-01-05
- Modified: 2024-03-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2023/01/2022-in-review/
- Topics: Uncategorised

As 2023 gets underway, we're taking a look back at the content we produced in 2022 and highlighting some particular standouts. We published a lot of new articles and podcasts to help our readers have impactful careers — below are some of our favourite pieces from the year. Standout posts and articles My experience with imposter syndrome — and how to (partly) overcome it 80,000 Hours team member Luisa Rodriguez wrote this powerful and insightful piece on a challenge many people face when trying to have an impactful career. In it, she describes clearly what it's like to have imposter syndrome from her own first-hand experience and provides a lot of helpful advice and guidance on how to manage it. I think a lot of people will benefit from reading it. Know what you're optimising for Alex Lawsen, one of 80,000 Hours' advisors, has noticed that people often fall into the trap of trying to optimise the wrong things — like students who spend so much time worrying that their homework is neatly written, rather than actually understanding and learning from the material. The piece offers practical advice for overcoming this issue. Anonymous advice: If you want to reduce AI risk, should you take roles that advance AI capabilities? This is a really challenging question that we are still struggling with, and this post was one way we have grappled with it. We asked 22 people we trust as thoughtful and informed...

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### How we’re thinking about where to donate to charity this year

> Charitable giving can be hugely impactful — if you’re careful about where you donate. One of the simplest ways to have an impact with your career is to donate a portion of your income. But if you’re going to do that, *where* you donate can make a huge difference.

- Published: 2022-12-23
- Modified: 2024-03-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2022/12/how-were-thinking-about-where-to-donate-to-charity-this-year/
- Topics: Donating effectively, Earning to Give

Charitable giving can be hugely impactful — if you're careful about where you donate. One of the simplest ways to have an impact with your career is to donate a portion of your income. But if you're going to do that, where you donate can make a huge difference. Within a cause area, the best charities could be 10 times better than typical charities, and hundreds of times better than poorly performing charities. 650 million people — 8% of the world's population — live in extreme poverty. That's surviving on less than $2. 15 a day (in 2017 prices). Meanwhile, if you earn over $25,000 a year in the US, you're probably in the richest ~10% of the world's population. You can send money directly to the world's poorest people with minimal overhead via GiveDirectly. And that's just a start. GiveWell estimates that through donating to its top charities (focused on extremely cost-effective, evidence-backed public health interventions), your donation will go 5–10 times further than a direct cash transfer. And we'd guess that if you target donations towards effective organisations tackling the world's most pressing problems, you can do even more good. So, this giving season, we've updated our guide to picking where to donate: How to choose where to donate. Personally, I haven't yet decided where I'll be donating this year. I've been impressed with lots of the work I've seen from Rethink Priorities. The Animal Welfare Fund might represent a...

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### Four values at the heart of effective altruism

> Effective altruism isn’t about any particular way of doing good, like AI alignment or distributing malaria nets. Rather, it’s a way of thinking.

- Published: 2022-12-09
- Modified: 2024-03-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2022/12/four-values-at-the-heart-of-effective-altruism/
- Topics: Effective Altruism

What actually is effective altruism? Effective altruism isn't about any particular way of doing good, like AI alignment or distributing malaria nets. Rather, it's a way of thinking. Last summer, I wrote a new introduction to effective altruism for effectivealtruism. org. In it, I tried to sum up the effective altruism way of thinking in terms of four values. (I wrote this newsletter before FTX collapsed, but maybe that makes it even more important to reiterate the core values of EA. ) Prioritisation. Resources are limited, so we have to make hard choices between potential interventions. While helping 10 people might feel as satisfying as helping 100, those extra 90 people really matter. And it turns out that some ways of helping achieve dramatically more than others, so it's vital to really try to roughly compare ways we might help in terms of scale and effectiveness. Impartial altruism. It's reasonable and good to have special concern for one's own family, friends, life, etc. But when trying to do good in general, we should give everyone's interests equal weight — no matter where or even when they live. People matter equally. And we should also give due weight to the interests of nonhumans. Open truth-seeking. Rather than starting with a commitment to a certain cause, consider many different ways to help and try to find the best ones you can. Put serious time into deliberation and reflection, be constantly curious for new evidence, and be...

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### Why being open to changing our minds is especially important right now

- Published: 2022-11-25
- Modified: 2024-03-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2022/11/why-being-open-to-changing-our-minds-is-especially-important-right-now/
- Topics: Foundations, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Moral philosophy, Now vs. Later, Unconventional advice

If something surprises you, your view of the world should change in some way. We've argued that you should approach your career like a scientist doing experiments: be willing to test out many different paths and gather evidence about where you can have the most impact. More generally, this approach of open truth-seeking — being constantly, curiously on the lookout for new evidence and arguments, and always being ready to change our minds — is a virtue we think is absolutely crucial to doing good. One of our first-ever podcast episodes was an interview with Julia Galef, author of The Scout Mindset (before she wrote the book! ). Julia argues — in our view, correctly — that it's easy to end up viewing the world like a soldier, when really you should be more like a scout. Soldiers have set views and beliefs, and defend those beliefs. When we are acting like soldiers, we display motivated reasoning: for example, confirmation bias, where we seek out information that supports our existing beliefs and misinterpret information that is evidence against our position so that it seems like it's not. Scouts, on the other hand, need to form correct beliefs. So they have to change their minds as they view more of the landscape. Acting like a scout isn't always easy: There's lots of psychological evidence suggesting that we all have cognitive biases that cloud our thinking. It can sometimes be really painful to admit you...

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### Regarding the collapse of FTX

- Published: 2022-11-16
- Modified: 2022-12-16
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2022/11/regarding-the-collapse-of-ftx/
- Topics: Uncategorised

The collapse of FTX is likely to cause a tremendous amount of harm – to customers, employees, and many others who have relied on FTX. We are deeply concerned about those affected and, along with our community, are grappling with how to respond. Though we do not know for sure whether anything illegal happened, we unequivocally condemn any immoral or illegal actions that may have taken place. Prior to this, we had celebrated Sam Bankman-Fried's apparent success, had held him up as a positive example of someone pursuing a high-impact career, and had written about how we encouraged him to use a strategy of earning to give (for example here). We feel shaken by recent events, and are not sure exactly what to say or think. In the meantime, we will start by removing instances on our site where Sam was highlighted as a positive example of someone pursuing a high-impact career, since, to say the least, we no longer endorse that. We are leaving up discussions of Sam in places that seem important for transparency, for example this blog post on the growth of effective altruism in 2021. In the coming weeks and months we will be thinking hard about what we should do going forward and ways in which we should have acted differently. If you are out there trying the best you can to use your career to help solve the world's most pressing problems with honesty and integrity, we also want to say we support and...

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### The importance of considering speculative ideas

> If you want to do the most good you can, it can be a good sign to be working on something that sounds a little weird. Our list of the most pressing problems has some pretty widely accepted concerns, to be sure: we care about mitigating climate change, preventing nuclear war, and ensuring good governance.

- Published: 2022-10-30
- Modified: 2024-03-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2022/10/the-importance-of-considering-speculative-ideas/
- Topics: Foundations, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Moral philosophy, Now vs. Later, Unconventional advice

Let's admit it: some of the things we think about at 80,000 Hours are considered weird by a lot of other people. Our list of the most pressing problems has some pretty widely accepted concerns, to be sure: we care about mitigating climate change, preventing nuclear war, and ensuring good governance. But one of our highest priorities is preventing an AI-related catastrophe, which sounds like science fiction to a lot of people. And, though we know less about them, we're also interested in speculative issues — such as atomically precise manufacturing, artificial sentience, and wild animal suffering. These aren't typically the kind of issues activists distribute flyers about. Should it make us nervous that some of our ideas are out of the mainstream? It's probably a good idea in these cases to take a step back, reexamine our premises, and consult others we trust about our conclusions. But we shouldn't be too shocked if some of our beliefs end up at odds with common sense — indeed, I think everyone has good reason to be open to believing weird ideas. One of the best reasons for this view relates to another of 80,000 Hours' top priorities: preventing catastrophic pandemics. I'd guess few people think it's strange to be concerned about pandemics now, as COVID-19 has killed more than 6 million people worldwide and thrown the global economy into chaos. But 80,000 Hours has been worried about pandemics for a while — we...

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### Open position: Recruiter

- Published: 2022-10-19
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2022/10/open-position-recruiter/
- Topics: Uncategorised

**Applications for this position have now closed. ** ###Summary {. no-toc} We're hiring a recruiter to help us grow the 80,000 Hours team. Not being able to hire fast enough is one of our biggest bottlenecks as an organisation. The person in this role will directly address this by helping us to source candidates, run hiring rounds, and scale our recruitment processes as we grow. They'll be key to increasing 80,000 Hours' impact over the coming years. You might be a great fit if you: * **Have a strong understanding of effective altruism / longtermism. ** * **Have excellent organisational / project management skills. ** * **Are a clear communicator, both in writing and in person. ** * **Would enjoy interacting with and evaluating people. ** This is a full-time role. Ideally, you'd be based at our London office, but we're open to remote candidates (as long as you're able to work within UK working hours). We're willing to consider candidates who are available to start anytime between **December 2022 and August 2023** — so please consider applying even if you're not available immediately. The starting salary for someone with one year of highly relevant experience is **£59,200 per year. ** The role You'll be managed by Sashika Coxhead, our Head of Recruiting, and will have the opportunity to work closely with hiring managers from other teams. Initial responsibilities will include: Project management of active recruiting rounds. For example, overseeing the candidate pipeline and logistics of hiring rounds, making decisions on initial...

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### Do recent breakthroughs mean transformative AI is coming sooner than we thought?

> If transformative AI is coming sooner than expected, work to ensure this transformation goes well (rather than disastrously) is even more urgent.

- Published: 2022-08-24
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2022/08/is-transformative-ai-coming-sooner-than-we-thought/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence

Is transformative AI coming sooner than we thought? It seems like it probably is, which would mean that work to ensure this transformation goes well (rather than disastrously) is even more urgent than we thought. In the last six months, there have been some shocking AI advances: PaLM exhibited human-level ability to explain jokes DALL-E 2 can interpret artistic styles Socratic models can combine "common sense" across domains This caused the live forecast on Metaculus for when "artificial general intelligence" will arrive to plunge — the median declined 15 years, from 2055 to 2040. You might think this was due to random people on the internet over-updating on salient evidence, but if you put greater weight on the forecasters who have made the most accurate forecasts in the past, the decline was still 11 years. Last year, Jacob Steinhardt commissioned professional forecasters to make a five-year forecast on three AI capabilities benchmarks. His initial impression was that the forecasts were aggressive, but one year in, actual progress was ahead of predictions on all three benchmarks. Particularly shocking were the results on a benchmark of difficult high school maths problems. The state-of-the-art model leapt from a score of 7% to 50% in just one year — more than five years of predicted progress. (And these questions were hard — e. g. a Berkeley PhD student scored ~75%. ) I recently did an informal poll of people I trust who are interested in the AI safety field. Several reported no change to their estimates...

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### Expression of interest: Head of Operations

- Published: 2022-07-28
- Modified: 2022-08-18
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2022/07/expression-of-interest-head-of-operations/
- Topics: Uncategorised

####Applications to this position are now closed. ##Summary 80,000 Hours is considering hiring a Head of Operations to oversee our internal operations as we scale. We're looking for someone who has: * At least two years of experience in **operations/organisational management-focused roles**, including roles in consulting, project management, and at early-stage startups or nonprofits. * At least one year of experience with **managing others**. * A strong understanding of **effective altruism and/or longtermism**. If you might be interested, please submit this (https://forms. gle/3G3mffcMTLNcCfcA8) — it only takes about two minutes to complete! Because this isn't a position we're actively hiring for, we have a higher bar than usual for inviting candidates to the next stage of the process, and won't be able to respond to all enquiries we receive. If you don't hear from us, you're still very welcome to apply for future roles at 80,000 Hours. 80,000 Hours 80,000 Hours provides research and support to help people switch into careers that effectively tackle the world's most pressing problems. We've had over 8 million visitors to our website, and more than 3,000 people have told us that they've significantly changed their career plans due to our work. We're also the largest single source of people getting involved in the effective altruism community, according to the most recent EA Survey. The internal systems team This role is on the internal systems team, which is here to build the organisation and systems that support 80,000 Hours to...

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### Open position: Marketer

- Published: 2022-07-25
- Modified: 2022-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2022/07/open-position-marketer-2022/
- Topics: Uncategorised

Applications for this position are now closed. We're looking for a new marketer to help us expand our readership and scale up our marketing channels. We'd like to support the person in this role to take on more responsibility over time as we expand our marketing team. 80,000 Hours provides free research and support to help people find careers tackling the world's most pressing problems. We've had over 8 million visitors to our website, and more than 3,000 people have told us that they've significantly changed their career plans due to our work. We're also the largest single source of people getting involved in the effective altruism community, according to the most recent EA Survey. Even so, about 90% of US college graduates have never heard of effective altruism, and we estimate that just 0. 5% of students at top colleges are highly engaged in EA. As a marketer with 80,000 Hours, you would help us achieve our goal of reaching all students and recent graduates who might be interested in our work. We anticipate that the right person in this role could help us grow our readership to 5–10 times its current size, and lead to hundreds or thousands of additional people pursuing high-impact careers. We're looking for a marketing generalist who will: Start managing (and eventually own) our two largest existing marketing channels: Sponsorships with people who have large audiences, primarily on YouTube (influencer marketing). Paid advertisements on Facebook and Instagram (digital marketing). Take on management of some other...

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### Know what you’re optimising for

> This idea is about being deliberate in what you’re trying hard to achieve. It’s about trying to ensure that the subject of the majority of your effort is in fact the most important thing.

- Published: 2022-06-15
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2022/06/know-what-youre-optimising-for/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy, Career capital, Decision making, Earning to Give, Institutional decision making, Job satisfaction, Reasoning well, Unconventional advice

There is (sometimes) such a thing as a free lunch You live in a world where most people, most of the time, think of things as categorical, rather than continuous. People either agree with you or they don't. Food is healthy or unhealthy. Your career is 'good for the world,' or it's neutral, or maybe even it's bad -- but it's only the category that matters, not the size of the benefit or harm. Ideas are wrong, or they are right. Predictions end up confirmed or falsified. In my view, one of the central ideas of effective altruism is the realisation that 'doing good' is not such a binary. That as well as it mattering that we help others at all, it matters how much we help. That helping more is better than helping less, and helping a lot more is a lot better. For me, this is also a useful framing for thinking rationally. Here, rather than 'goodness,' the continuous quantity is truth. The central realisation is that ideas are not simply true or false; they are all flawed attempts to model reality, and just how flawed is up for grabs. If we're wrong, our response should not be to give up, but to try to be less wrong. When you realise something is continuous that most people are treating as binary, this is a good indication that you're in a situation where it's unusually easy to achieve something you care about. Because if most people don't see...

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### Let's get serious about preventing the next pandemic

- Published: 2022-05-31
- Modified: 2023-12-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2022/05/prevent-future-pandemics-with-these-projects/
- Topics: Biorisk strategy &amp; policy, Catastrophic pandemics, COVID-19, Existential risk, Open Philanthropy

I recently argued that it's time for our community to be more ambitious. And when it comes to preventing pandemics, it's starting to happen. Andrew Snyder-Beattie is a programme officer at Open Philanthropy, a foundation which has more than $1 billion available to fund big pandemic-prevent projects. He and Ethan Alley (co-CEO at Alvea) recently wrote an exciting list of projects they'd like to see get founded, including: An international early detection centre Actually good PPE Rapid and broad-spectrum antivirals and vaccines A bioweapons watchdog Self-sterilising buildings Refuges One of these ideas is already happening. Alvea aims to produce a cheap, flexible vaccine platform using a new type of vaccine (DNA vaccines), starting with an Omicron-specific shot. In two months, they hired 35 people and started preclinical trials. The above are technical solutions, which make it possible for a relatively small number of people to make a significant difference to the problem. But policy change is also an important angle. Guarding Against Pandemics was an effort to lobby the US government for $30 billion in funding for pandemic prevention. Unfortunately the relevant bill didn't pass, but the sum at stake made it clearly worth trying. Efforts in the UK might be more successful -- the country is currently refreshing its biosecurity policy. If you might be able to help make big biosecurity projects happen: Get in touch with Andrew about working on large biosecurity projects. If you're interested in helping on UK policy, check out the Centre for Long-Term Resilience... .

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### Effective altruism and the current funding situation

- Published: 2022-05-16
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2022/05/ea-and-the-current-funding-situation/
- Topics: Accidental harm, Effective Altruism

This is a cross-post from the (https://forum. effectivealtruism. org/posts/cfdnJ3sDbCSkShiSZ/ea-and-the-current-funding-situation) written by 80,000 Hours cofounder Prof. Will MacAskill. We're posting it here because we think it presents a particularly useful perspective on the current funding situation in the (https://80000hours. org/community/), which we're part of. In 2021 we wrote about the (https://80000hours. org/2021/07/effective-altruism-growing/), and (https://80000hours. org/2021/08/effective-altruism-allocation-resources-cause-areas/) that are of particular interest to us and the wider community. In this article, Will reflects on the growth of the effective altruism (EA) community, particularly growth in the amount of funding that could be put towards new projects, and calls for a (https://80000hours. org/articles/be-more-ambitious/) to ensure that the moral opportunity offered by this funding is put to the best possible use. This post gives an overview of how I'm thinking about the "funding in EA" issue, building on many conversations. Although I'm involved with a number of organisations in EA, this post is written in my personal capacity. You might also want to see my EAG talk which has a related theme, though with different emphases. For helpful comments, I thank Abie Rohrig, Asya Bergal, Claire Zabel, Eirin Evjen, Julia Wise, Ketan Ramakrishnan, Leopold Aschenbrenner, Matt Wage, Max Daniel, Nick Beckstead, Stephen Clare, and Toby Ord. Main points EA is in a very different funding situation than it was when it was founded. This is both an enormous responsibility and an incredible opportunity. It means the norms and...

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### Leadership change at 80,000 Hours

- Published: 2022-05-05
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2022/05/leadership-change-at-80000-hours/
- Topics: About 80,000 Hours, Updates

Hi readers! We've decided for Howie to become CEO and for me to become President of 80,000 Hours. After ten years in the role, I'd become less excited about overseeing several aspects of the organisation's on-going operation. We asked the board to investigate, and their recommendation was that Howie Lempel is the best person to take the org to its next level of scale. In the President role I hope I'll be able to focus on my most valuable contributions – providing advice on org strategy & the website, writing, and helping with outreach – and won't have set responsibilities. I also have a growing list of other projects in effective altruism that I'm excited to explore. Howie and I expect the transition to be smooth – in part because Howie is already doing several parts of the role as Chief of Staff. We intend for Howie to officially become CEO this week, and to complete the transfer in about a month. I'm excited to explore this new role and for 80,000 Hours to continue growing and getting the next generation working on the world's most pressing problems. Ben Note from Howie: Hi everyone, I'm really looking forward to taking on this new role and leading 80,000 Hours as we continue to grow. I'm going to send an initial update on our plans as part of our post-Q2 email update. I don't currently expect them to include any major changes to our strategic direction and I'm excited about our four...

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### My experience with imposter syndrome — and how to (partly) overcome it

- Published: 2022-04-21
- Modified: 2024-10-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2022/04/imposter-syndrome/
- Topics: Being ambitious, Career advice &amp; strategy, Mental health, Unconventional advice

**In a nutshell:** I have imposter syndrome, and I suspect many other people trying to have a big impact with their career do, too. For a long time, imposter syndrome massively limited the impact of my career by causing me to rule out potentially impactful options and affecting my day-to-day job performance and satisfaction — but through talk therapy and other tools, I've mostly overcome it. If you think you might struggle with imposter syndrome, tackling it may be one of the most important forms of personal development you can do. It was for me. I've felt like an imposter since my first year of university. I was accepted to the university that I believed was well out of my league — my 'stretch' school. I'd gotten good grades in high school, but I'd never seen myself as especially smart: I wasn't selected for gifted programmes in elementary school like some of my friends were, and my standardised test scores were in the bottom half of those attending my university. I was pretty confident I got into the university because of some fluke in the system (my top hypothesis was that I was admitted as part of an affirmative action initiative) — and that belief stayed with me (and was amplified) during the decade that followed. Throughout that decade, there was evidence that I really was good at my work at different points, but I could always come up with an explanation for why...

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### Open position: writer

- Published: 2022-04-19
- Modified: 2022-05-17
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2022/04/open-position-writer/
- Topics: Uncategorised

Applications to this position are now closed. **80,000 Hours is looking for full-time staff writers to publish well-researched articles to help people use their careers to help solve the world's most pressing problems. ** About the 80,000 Hours web team 80,000 Hours provides free research and support to help people find careers tackling the world’s most pressing problems. We’ve had over 8 million visitors to our website (with over 100,000 hours of reading time per year), and more than 3,000 people have told us that they’ve significantly changed their career plans due to our work. We’re also the largest single source of people getting involved in the effective altruism community, according to the most recent EA Community Survey. Our articles are read by thousands, and are among the most important ways we help people shift their careers towards higher-impact options. The role As a writer, you would: Research, outline, and write new articles for the 80,000 Hours website — e. g. new career reviews. Rewrite or update older articles with information and resources — e. g. about rapidly evolving global problems. Generate ideas for new pieces. Talk to experts and readers to help prioritise our new articles and updates. Generally help grow the impact of the site. Some of the types of pieces you could work on include: Research articles — e. g. How replaceable are the top candidates in large hiring rounds? Why the answer flips depending on the distribution of applicant ability. Career reviews — e. g. for software...

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### Open position: Operations specialist

- Published: 2022-03-11
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2022/03/open-position-operations-specialist/
- Topics: Uncategorised

####Applications to this position are now closed. ##Summary 80,000 Hours' mission is to get talented people working on the world's most pressing problems. We expect to increase our staff count by ~50% in 2022, and to continue scaling from there. We're looking for an operations specialist to help build the organisation and systems that will support this growth. They'll run the team that manages our office, help scale our internal processes as we grow, and oversee a range of other projects according to their personal fit and our needs as an organisation (e. g. helping to analyse our user survey or organise our team retreat). Location: London, England. Salary: ~£58,400 for someone with one year of relevant experience (higher for candidates with more experience). To apply, please complete (https://80000hours. typeform. com/opsspecialist) by 11pm GMT on Sunday, April 3, 2022. 80,000 Hours 80,000 Hours provides research and support to help students and graduates switch into careers that effectively tackle the world's most pressing problems. Over one million people visit our website each year, and more than 3,000 people have told us that they've significantly changed their career plans due to our work. We're also the largest single source of people getting involved in the effective altruism community, according to the most recent EA Survey. The Internal Systems team The Internal Systems team is here to build the organisation and systems that support 80,000 Hours to achieve its mission. We oversee 80,000 Hours' office, finances, and impact evaluation,...

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### Expression of interest: writer

- Published: 2022-03-09
- Modified: 2024-01-04
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2022/03/expression-of-interest-writer/
- Topics: Uncategorised

**80,000 Hours is considering hiring a writer. ** * As a writer at 80,000 Hours, you'd **research and write articles read by thousands of people** trying to do good with their careers. * We're looking for someone with **a preexisting understanding of our organisation's priorities (including longtermism and effective altruism)**, plus great communication skills, an aptitude for research and writing, and the ability to learn quickly. * This is a **full-time, London-based** role, with a starting salary of around **£58,000–£68,000**. **Note:** This announcement is an **expression of interest**, rather than a formal hiring round. We'll likely launch a formal round soon, but aren't sure exactly when. We think learning more about who might be interested in this role will help us better plan and expedite our hiring round when we do run it. Because of this, we have a high bar for considering enquiries, and won't be able to respond to everyone who reaches out. If you don't hear back from us, please don't take it as a rejection! You should feel very welcome to respond to future ads for 80,000 Hours positions (which we'll list (https://80000hours. org/about/work-with-us/) and on our (https://80000hours. org/job-board/)). Why 80,000 Hours? 80,000 Hours' mission is to get talented people working on the world's most pressing problems. The effective altruism community, of which we are a part, is growing in reach and now includes funding bodies with over $40 billion to allocate in total. But how do we make sure people are pursuing the...

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### 23 career choice heuristics

- Published: 2022-03-07
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2022/03/23-career-choice-heuristics/
- Topics: Career capital, Exploration, Personal fit, Uncategorised

**Note:** This is a cross-post from the (https://forum. effectivealtruism. org/posts/oyEq9BJZq3qBD33ig/23-career-choice-heuristics), written by Jack Ryan and Olivia Jimenez -- not by authors at 80,000 Hours. We decided to post it here because we liked it and thought our audience might enjoy it! We decided to make a list of all of the career choice heuristics we could think of — see below. Many of these are stated as if completely true, even though we think they aren't. We invite you to add any additional heuristics you have in the comments of the original post. Scale, number helped — do something that impacts many people positively Scale, degree helped — do something that impacts people to a great positive degree Neglectedness — do something that few others are doing or that won't be done counterfactually Tractability — do something that makes significant progress on a problem Moments of progress — notice where progress happens in your life and find a career path that integrates those Strong team — if you haven't worked well alone, join an excellent team Likable people — join a team of people that you like Mental well-being — do something that is optimized for being good for your mental health Team smarter than you — join a team where most people are smarter than you Be a thought or org leader — roughly, there are two types of leaders – thought leaders and org leaders; figure out which type you are more likely to be and...

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### Introducing 80k After Hours

- Published: 2022-02-28
- Modified: 2022-06-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2022/02/introducing-80k-after-hours/
- Topics: Uncategorised

As The 80,000 Hours Podcast has developed over the last few years, we’ve found ourselves experimenting more with different types of content. Things like audio versions of some of our best articles, or less formal chats between team members, or novel topics (like our episode on having a successful career with depression, anxiety, and imposter syndrome). But different types of content have different audiences, and some people who love classic episodes with Rob will understandably have no interest in experimental episodes with other folks on the team (or vice versa: maybe some people love everyone else on the team but can’t stand Rob! ) That’s why we’ve created 80k After Hours. It’s a new podcast that includes a much wider variety of content than you’ve come to expect from the original feed. It’ll mostly still explore the best ways to do good — and some episodes will be much more laser-focused on careers than most original episodes — but we’re going to feel more comfortable with throwing things up there just because they’re fun or entertaining too. We’ll also feel fine with producing some content for much narrower audiences. One of our inaugural episodes with Alex Lawsen — on his advice to students — won’t be for everyone. But if you’re a student, a teacher, or a parent, it might be one of the highest-value things we can offer. And sometimes we’ll release content that’ll be hard to follow unless you’ve seriously engaged with effective altruism — whereas we usually try...

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### Expression of interest: popular writing consultant

- Published: 2022-02-07
- Modified: 2022-04-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2022/02/expression-of-interest-popular-writing-consultant/
- Topics: Uncategorised

**80,000 Hours is considering contracting a popular writing consultant. ** * As a popular writing consultant, you’d **give us advice and feedback on our writing to make it more compelling**, and thereby expand our reach. * We’re looking for someone with an **exceptionally strong track record of producing or editing widely read popular writing**. * We expect to generate **5–10 hours of work per month**, with a minimum compensation of around **£80 per hour**. **Note:** This announcement is an **expression of interest**, rather than a formal hiring round. We're not sure what the field of candidates is like, and want to get a sense of that before deciding whether to do a hiring round. Because of this, we have a high bar for considering enquiries, and typically won’t be able to respond to everyone who reaches out. If you don’t hear back from us, please don't take it as a rejection! You should feel very welcome to respond to future ads for 80,000 Hours positions (which we'll list (https://80000hours. org/about/work-with-us/) and on our (https://80000hours. org/job-board/)). Why 80,000 Hours? 80,000 Hours' mission is to get talented people working on the world's most pressing problems. The effective altruism community, of which we are a part, is growing in reach and now includes funding bodies with over $40 billion to allocate in total. But how do we turn all those resources into long-term impact? This is the problem 80,000 Hours is trying to solve. We've had over 8 million visitors to...

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### When to worry about replaceability, and when not to

- Published: 2022-01-31
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2022/01/replaceability/
- Topics: Uncategorised

This content is password protected. To view it please enter your password below: Password:

---

### Open position: Head of Job Board

- Published: 2022-01-27
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2022/01/open-position-head-of-job-board/
- Topics: Uncategorised

80,000 Hours is hiring a Head of Job Board to lead the <a href="https://80000hours.org/job-board/">job board</a>. They will be responsible for setting and executing strategy to grow the job board's impact, as well as managing and hiring the job board team.

More than 180,000 users visited the job board in 2021. Over the next few years, we hope to grow the job board to the point where millions of people per year use it to find out about impactful jobs.

This role is based in London, UK. The salary will vary based on your skills and experience, but the starting salary for someone with five years of relevant experience would be approximately £72,000 per year.

To apply for this role, please complete <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScmQaABPRi9LTgkIyYlf_cXBN0gnIMoFrZ9Syyapth9hwAnHQ/viewform">this application form</a> by 11pm GMT on Sunday, 27 February 2022.

We are offering a £1000 referral bonus to anyone outside the Centre for Effective Altruism who suggests a successful candidate we didn't otherwise have on our radar.  Please email <a href="mailto:niel@80000hours.org">niel@80000hours.org</a> with your referrals.


####Applications to this position are now closed. ###Summary 80,000 Hours is hiring a Head of Job Board to lead the (https://80000hours. org/job-board/). They will be responsible for setting and executing strategy to grow the job board's impact, as well as managing and hiring the job board team. More than 180,000 users visited the job board in 2021. Over the next few years, we hope to grow the job board to the point where millions of people per year use it to find out about impactful jobs. This role is based in London, UK. The salary will vary based on your skills and experience, but the starting salary for someone with five years of relevant experience would be approximately £72,000 per year. To apply for this role, please complete (https://docs. google. com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScmQaABPRi9LTgkIyYlf_cXBN0gnIMoFrZ9Syyapth9hwAnHQ/viewform) by 11pm GMT on Sunday, 27 February 2022. We are offering a £1000 referral bonus to anyone outside the Centre for Effective Altruism who suggests a successful candidate we didn't otherwise have on our radar. Please email (mailto:niel@80000hours. org) with your referrals. 80,000 Hours 80,000 Hours' mission is to get talented people working on the world's most pressing problems. We're a part of the effective altruism community, which is growing in reach and now includes funding bodies with over $40 billion to allocate in total. But how do we turn all those resources into long-term impact? This is the problem 80,000 Hours is trying to solve. Over one million people visit the 80,000 Hours website...

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### Our advisors want to talk with more people than ever before

- Published: 2022-01-25
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2022/01/our-advisors-want-to-talk-with-more-people-than-ever-before/
- Topics: About 80,000 Hours, Updates

Last year, 80,000 Hours’ advisors spoke to more people than ever before -- and we are hoping to help even more people this year! If 80,000 Hours’ content resonates with you, and you want to get help applying the ideas to your career, then <a href="https://80000hours.org/speak-with-us?int_campaign=2022+blog+post">apply to speak with our team</a>.

<h2>What we did in 2021</h2>

2021 was a landmark year for the 80,000 Hours one-on-one team:

<ul>
<li><strong>We had over 800 advising calls.</strong> That’s the most calls per year in our 10-year history!</li>
<li><strong>We hired two new advisors</strong>, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-lawsen-3b176121b/">Alex Lawsen</a> and <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-reardon-021a9b3a/">Matt Reardon</a>, to join <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/habiba-i-5a1aa194/">Habiba Islam</a> on the team. That means we now have more people focused on helping people one-on-one than ever before.</li>
<li><strong>We spoke to about 50% of people who applied</strong> -- and when we didn’t speak to people ourselves, we often connected them with someone else, or sent them resources to help with their career planning.</li>
</ul>

We plan to continue to expand our service and help more people to find high-impact careers in 2022. So if it sounds like we can help you, apply now!


Last year, 80,000 Hours' advisors spoke to more people than ever before -- and we are hoping to help even more people this year! If 80,000 Hours' content resonates with you, and you want to get help applying the ideas to your career, then apply to speak with our team. What we did in 2021 2021 was a landmark year for the 80,000 Hours one-on-one team: We had over 800 advising calls. That's the most calls per year in our 10-year history! We hired two new advisors, Alex Lawsen and Matt Reardon, to join Habiba Islam on the team. That means we now have more people focused on helping people one-on-one than ever before. We spoke to about 50% of people who applied -- and when we didn't speak to people ourselves, we often connected them with someone else, or sent them resources to help with their career planning. We plan to continue to expand our service and help more people to find high-impact careers in 2022. So if it sounds like we can help you, apply now! APPLY TO SPEAK WITH OUR TEAM How can we help? We'd like to help more people, like you, find high-impact careers. Here are some of the things we can do on a free call: Talk through cause prioritisation: We can help you think through what global problems you want to work on and how that impacts your career decision. Consider your options: We can examine what different paths would look like,...

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### The twelve 80,000 Hours 2021 releases that affected our staff most

- Published: 2022-01-19
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2022/01/best-of-2021/
- Topics: About 80,000 Hours

In 2021, we released over 20 new articles and blog posts, plus over 30 new podcast episodes. It was a lot to keep up with! So I asked my colleagues at 80,000 Hours to recommend some of their favourites from last year. Below are their top picks. Podcast episode #100 — Having a successful career with depression, anxiety, and imposter syndrome Lots of the team found Keiran Harris's interview with our chief of staff, Howie Lempel, particularly powerful (and a few of us, myself included, have struggled with many of the issues Howie discusses) — so much so that the majority of my colleagues thought of this release first when I asked them to recommend their favourite. Alex Lawsen, one of our advisors, describes the episode's impact on him: "I had to listen to Howie's podcast episode over the course of a few days because of how intense its effect on me was; although I've never had an episode as difficult as the one he described, the thought patterns felt very familiar. The advice he gives is just about the best I've ever heard on mental health: things like noticing when something has become aversive and then making it a top priority, pre-writing an email in case of something like a mental health crisis to minimise the negative repercussions, or considering whether you should see a therapist or seek a diagnosis -- all advice I've taken and benefited hugely from. I've now shared the episode with more people than...

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### Insider insights from people reviewing their own careers

- Published: 2022-01-17
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2022/01/career-reviews-from-our-community/
- Topics: Careers, Fields, Uncategorised

The people who know the most about a career path are usually the people following that path themselves. Luckily, some members of the effective altruism community have written about their jobs, including insider tips on how to get into similar positions, and how to have an impact once you're there. Here are a few we think are especially exciting. This anonymous congressional staffer gave a fascinating overview of how they managed to land their role just after graduating college. We think that (/articles/government-policy/) in an area directly related to a top global problem is a crucial category of high-impact career. If you're in the UK, check out this (https://forum. effectivealtruism. org/posts/J4LkAy9vJmzGPJqBH/working-in-parliament-how-to-get-a-job-and-have-an-impact). Kyle Fish was studying for a PhD in biomedical engineering when 80,000 Hours introduced him to his future cofounder, Grigory Khimulya. In this blog post, Kyle -- now CTO of (https://www. telisbio. com/) -- writes about his startup's work accelerating drug development to reduce (/problem-profiles/global-catastrophic-biological-risks/). Check out our review of (/career-reviews/founder-impactful-organisations/). The (https://www. fhi. ox. ac. uk/) (FHI) at the University of Oxford does some of the world's best research into existential risks and (/articles/future-generations/)... .

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### Open position: Advisor

- Published: 2022-01-17
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2022/01/open-position-advisor/
- Topics: Uncategorised

####Applications to this position are now closed. We're looking for new colleagues to join our team of advisors. Our advisors talk one-on-one to talented and altruistic applicants in order to help them find the highest impact career they can. We've found that experience with coaching is not necessary - everything from management consulting to global priorities research has helped someone be a good fit. London-based role with starting salary around £65,000. 80,000 Hours' mission 80,000 Hours' mission is to get talented people working on the world's most pressing problems. The effective altruism community, of which we are a part, is growing in reach and now includes funding bodies with over $40 billion to allocate in total. But how do we turn all those resources into long-term impact? This is the problem 80,000 Hours is trying to solve. We've had over 8 million visitors to our website, and more than 3,000 people have now told us that they've significantly changed their career plans due to our work. 80,000 Hours is also the largest single source of people getting involved in the effective altruism community, according to the most recent EA Survey. The 1on1 team The 1on1 team at 80,000 Hours takes people from "interested in the ideas and want to help" to "actually working to solve pressing world problems. " For example, Sophie Rose applied for advising in 2019. We helped her decide to focus on biosecurity and start working in the field. She co-founded One Day Sooner and...

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### The growth of effective altruism: what does it mean for our priorities and level of ambition?

- Published: 2021-11-11
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2021/11/growth-of-effective-altruism/
- Topics: Building effective altruism, Effective Altruism, Foundations

Lots of people have claimed that effective altruism hasn't been growing in recent years. In a recent talk, I argue that it has. I then explore how this growth has changed the priorities for the movement, and argue that we should be more ambitious. The talk was given at Effective Altruism Global in London in October 2021. You can see the video and a transcript below. The talk was 30 minutes, followed by a Q&A with audience-submitted questions. It summarises several recent pieces of research, including Is effective altruism growing? , How are resources allocated across causes? , Why to be more ambitious, and Why we need more megaprojects. I added an explanation of why the large amount of additional funding available doesn't mean that it's easy to fundraise (and why me talking about a 'funding overhang' was probably a mistake). A better framing is that there is a lot of funding available for any projects that can clear the current funding bar, but this bar is still pretty high. Finally, I suggest that the recent success of Sam Bankman-Fried is an additional reason to aim high. First, he shows that it's possible. Back in 2015, perhaps only about 1,000 people were seriously directing their careers on the basis of effective altruism. And now one of them has made billions of dollars to donate, and become the world's richest person under 30 -- that's not bad odds! Second, the increase in the funding...

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### Effective altruism in a nutshell

- Published: 2021-10-18
- Modified: 2023-07-27
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2021/10/effective-altruism-in-a-nutshell/
- Topics: Effective Altruism

Let's say you're planning to buy a new laptop -- well, how do you choose that laptop? You're probably not going to pick randomly. And you're probably not even going to choose the prettiest one either. I'm guessing that you'll put a bit of research into it. And that's just common sense. You'll likely cross-reference a couple of different sources, try to find a laptop that's endorsed by a few people you respect. Or maybe you go on a review site like Wirecutter to find what the reviewers consider the 'best deal. ' You also might not even be married to the idea of getting a laptop at all -- if the underlying thing you want to do is your work, maybe you should get a desktop and just use your phone when on the move. At the end of the process, you would have hoped to get the outcome you really wanted, without spending too much time figuring it out. But when it comes to doing good, most people don't instinctively apply the same rigorous and practical mindset they do in other parts of their life. We're more likely to volunteer our time at a place that's easy to get to, give money to whichever charity knocks on our door, or focus on an issue just because it grabbed our attention when we were young. To people in the effective altruism community, that seems like a pretty significant mistake. If you're someone who cares, you might spend many...

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### Open position: Head of Marketing

- Published: 2021-08-10
- Modified: 2021-09-08
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2021/08/open-position-head-of-marketing/
- Topics: Updates

Applications for this position have now closed. We’re looking for a Head of Marketing to help us expand our readership and be the founding member of our marketing team. We’re hoping to find someone who could take on the Head of Marketing position immediately. However, we’re also open to hiring a candidate with less experience who we could support to take on the responsibilities of a Head of Marketing over time. To apply for the more junior position instead, please see our Marketer job description. 80,000 Hours provides free research and support to help people find careers tackling the world’s most pressing problems. We’ve had over 8 million visitors to our website, and more than 3,000 people have told us that they’ve significantly changed their career plans due to our work. We’re also the largest single source of people getting involved in the effective altruism community, according to the most recent EA Survey. Even so, about 90% of U. S. college graduates have never heard of effective altruism, and just 0. 5% of students at top colleges seem highly engaged in EA. As Head of Marketing, your aim would be to help us reach all students and recent graduates who might be interested in our work. We anticipate this could increase our readership up to five times, and lead to hundreds more people pursuing high-impact careers. We’re looking for a senior marketing generalist who will: Develop our marketing strategy. For example, you’d generate ideas for major marketing initiatives, decide which to pursue,...

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### Open position: Marketer

- Published: 2021-08-10
- Modified: 2021-09-08
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2021/08/open-position-marketer/
- Topics: Updates

Applications for this position have now closed. We’re looking for a Marketer to help us expand our readership and be the founding member of our marketing team. We’d like to support the person in this role to take on more responsibility over time and eventually become our Head of Marketing. We’re also open to hiring someone more senior, who could take on the Head of Marketing role immediately. To apply for the Head of Marketing position instead, please see the job description here. 80,000 Hours provides free research and support to help people find careers tackling the world’s most pressing problems. We’ve had over 8 million visitors to our website, and more than 3,000 people have told us that they’ve significantly changed their career plans due to our work. We’re also the largest single source of people getting involved in the effective altruism community, according to the most recent EA Survey. Even so, about 90% of U. S. college graduates have never heard of effective altruism, and just 0. 5% of students at top colleges seem highly engaged in EA. As 80,000 Hours’ Marketer, your aim would be to help us reach all students and recent graduates who might be interested in our work. We anticipate this could increase our readership up to five times, and lead to hundreds more people pursuing high-impact careers. We’re looking for a marketing generalist who will: Run experiments in new ways to reach readers. For example, you could set up a referral campaign with a book...

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### How are resources in effective altruism allocated across issues?

- Published: 2021-08-09
- Modified: 2023-12-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2021/08/effective-altruism-allocation-resources-cause-areas/
- Topics: Effective Altruism, Reasoning well

How are the resources in effective altruism allocated across cause areas? Knowing these figures, for both funding and labour, can help us spot gaps in the current allocation. In particular, I'll suggest that broad longtermism seems like the most pressing gap right now. This is a follow on from my first post, where I estimated the total amount of committed funding and people, and briefly discussed how many resources are being deployed now vs. invested for later. These estimates are for how the situation stood in 2019. I made them in early 2020, and made a few more adjustments when I wrote this post. As with the previous post, I recommend that readers take these figures as extremely rough estimates, and I haven't checked them with the people involved. I'd be keen to see additional and more thorough estimates. Update Oct 2021: I mistakenly said the number of people reporting 5 for engagement was ~2300, but actually this was the figure for people reporting 4 or 5. Allocation of funding Here are my estimates: What it's based on: Using Open Philanthropy's grants database, I averaged the allocation to each area 2017–2019 and made some minor adjustments. (Open Phil often makes 3yr+ grants, and the grants are lumpy, so it's important to average. ) At a total of ~$260 million, this accounts for the majority of the funding. (Note that I didn't include the money spent on Open Phil's own expenses, which might increase the meta line by around...

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### Is effective altruism growing? An update on the stock of funding vs people

- Published: 2021-07-28
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2021/07/effective-altruism-growing/
- Topics: Building effective altruism, Building the effective altruism community

See a brief update Aug 2022. In 2015, I argued that funding for effective altruism -- especially within meta or longtermist areas -- had grown faster than the number of people interested in it, and that this was likely to continue. This meant that there was a funding overhang, leading to a series of skill bottlenecks. A couple of years ago, I wondered if this trend was starting to reverse. There hadn't been any new donors on the scale of Good Ventures, which meant that total committed funds were growing slowly, giving the number of people a chance to catch up. However, the spectacular asset returns of the last few years, and creation of FTX, seem to have shifted the balance back towards funding. Now the funding overhang seems even larger in absolute terms than 2015. In the rest of this post, I make some rough guesses at total committed funds compared to the number of interested people, to see how the balance of funding vs. talent might have changed over time. This will also give us an update on whether effective altruism is growing -- with a focus on what I think are the two most important metrics: the stock of total committed funds, and committed people. This analysis also made me make a small update in favour of giving now vs. investing to give later. Here's a summary of what's coming up: How much funding is committed to effective altruism...

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### Expression of interest: experienced writer

- Published: 2021-06-30
- Modified: 2021-07-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2021/06/expression-of-interest-experienced-writer/
- Topics: Uncategorised

80,000 Hours is considering hiring full-time writers who have demonstrable experience writing for the public and who have a preexisting interest in and understanding of our organisation's priorities including longtermism and effective altruism. This announcement is an expression of interest, rather than a role we have formally opened. Because of this, we have a high bar for responding to enquiries (see below), and typically won’t be able to respond. If we don't respond, please don't take it as a rejection! You should feel very welcome to respond to future ads for 80,000 Hours positions. 80,000 Hours provides research and support to help people switch into careers that effectively tackle the world’s most pressing problems. The 80,000 Hours website gets 1-2 million unique visitors and sees over 100,000 hours of reading time per year. We are also one of the top sources of new members of the effective altruism community. If you join us as a writer, you'd likely be one of the most widely-read writers in effective altruism. Writers at 80,000 Hours produce pieces that communicate important ideas and arguments, inform readers about pressing global problems, and give advice to help readers pursue high impact career paths. Some examples: Research pieces -- e. g. How replaceable are the top candidates in large hiring rounds? Why the answer flips depending on the distribution of applicant ability Key advice articles -- e. g. Ways people trying to do good accidentally make things worse, and how to avoid them Career reviews -- e. g. for being...

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### 80,000 Hours Annual Review — November 2020

- Published: 2021-05-14
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2021/05/80000-hours-annual-review-nov-2020/
- Topics: About 80,000 Hours, Updates

We've released our 2020 annual review. The full document is available as a Google Doc, and we've copied the summary below. Progress in 2020 80,000 Hours provides research and support to help people switch into careers that effectively tackle the world's most pressing problems. Our goal for 2020 was to continue all our programmes (key ideas and other web content, podcast, job board, advising, and headhunting) with the aim of growing the number of plan changes we cause. We also aimed to grow team capacity at a moderate rate (+2. 5 FTE as well as onboarding Habiba), so that we're working towards our longer-term vision, but going slowly enough that we can continue to focus on improving our programmes, resolving key uncertainties, and preserving culture. I thought we made good progress on continued delivery (e. g. released 64% more content with +30% inputs & fixed some gaps in key ideas), though we missed our target for the number of advising calls. On plan change impact, we tracked 11 net new 'top plan changes' and 188 'criteria-based plan changes'. My best guess at the ratio of plan changes to full-time equivalents (FTE) for 2018–2019 went down 20% from what I estimated last year, though my estimate for 2016–2017 went up. I became more confident that 80,000 Hours is useful to the most promising new longtermist EAs. Otherwise, I didn't make significant updates about our cost effectiveness. We don't think we produced as many plan changes in 2018 or 2019 as we...

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### How much do people differ in productivity? What the evidence says.

> We did a survey of academic research about how much people differ in productivity. This is a quick summary of what we found.

- Published: 2021-05-07
- Modified: 2024-11-28
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2021/05/how-much-do-people-differ-in-productivity/
- Topics: Ability, Career advice &amp; strategy

People sometimes point out that performance is 'power law' distributed, e. g. they'll point out that the top 10% of scientists get 5x more citations over their career than the other 90% of scientists, or that the top 1% of startup founders get 80% of the equity value. But is this true? And if so, what does it imply? I think these differences in performance can be really important, and their significance is often not properly appreciated. But it's also often oversold. To better understand how much people predictively differ in productivity, Max Daniel of Open Philanthropy and I did an informal review of the academic research. We found there's relevant research in several fields (often pursued independently) including economics, organisational psychology, expert performance, scientometrics, and physics. We aimed to get an overview of what's out there and combine it with our own understanding to see if we could draw any practical lessons for hiring managers or people planning their careers. Here's a summary of some of the data we found in the review: And here's a 10-point summary of what we learned. (See the full write up here, and discussion on the EA Forum. ) 1) 'Power law' sounds catchy, but identifying which distribution to use is hard to do, statistically. Distinguishing power laws from log-normal distributions is notoriously difficult, and many papers fail at doing this correctly. If anything, log-normal distributions usually seem like a better fit. Very often we just won't be able to tell based only on the...

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### Launching a new resource: 'Effective Altruism: An Introduction'

- Published: 2021-04-15
- Modified: 2021-04-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2021/04/launching-a-new-resource-effective-altruism-an-introduction/
- Topics: Foundations

Today we're launching a new podcast feed that might be useful to you or someone you know. It's called Effective Altruism: An Introduction, and it's a carefully chosen selection of ten episodes of The 80,000 Hours Podcast, with various new intros and outros to guide folks through them. We think that it fills a gap in the introductory resources about effective altruism that are already out there. It's a particularly good fit for people who: prefer listening over reading, or conversations over essays have read about the big central ideas, but want to see how we actually think and talk want to get a more nuanced understanding of how the community applies EA principles in real life — as an art rather than science. The reason we put this together now, is that as the number of episodes of The 80,000 Hours Podcast show has grown, it has become less and less practical to suggest that new subscribers just 'go back and listen through most of our archives. ' We hope EA: An Introduction will guide new subscribers to the best things to listen to first in order to quickly make sense of effective altruist thinking. Across the ten episodes, we discuss: What effective altruism at its core really is The strategies for improving the world that are most popular within the effective altruism community, and why they’re popular The key disagreements between researchers in the field How to ‘think like an effective altruist’ How you might figure out how to...

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### Why I find longtermism hard, and what keeps me motivated

- Published: 2021-02-22
- Modified: 2023-03-23
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2021/02/why-i-find-longtermism-hard/
- Topics: Future generations &amp; longtermism

I find working on longtermist causes to be — emotionally speaking — hard: There are so many terrible problems in the world right now. How can we turn away from the suffering happening all around us in order to prioritise something as abstract as helping make the long-run future go well? A lot of people who aim to put longtermist ideas into practice seem to struggle with this, including many of the people I've worked with over the years. And I myself am no exception — the pull of suffering happening now is hard to escape. For this reason, I wanted to share a few thoughts on how I approach this challenge, and how I maintain the motivation to work on speculative interventions despite finding that difficult in many ways. This issue is one aspect of a broader issue in effective altruism: figuring out how to motivate ourselves to do important work even when it doesn't feel emotionally compelling. It's useful to have a clear understanding of our emotions in order to distinguish between feelings and beliefs we endorse and those that we wouldn't — on reflection — want to act on. What I've found hard First, I don't want to claim that everyone finds it difficult to work on longtermist causes for the same reasons that I do, or in the same ways. I'd also like to be clear that I'm not speaking for 80,000 Hours as an organisation. My struggles with the work I'm not doing tend to...

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### Rob Wiblin on how he ended up the way he is

- Published: 2021-02-03
- Modified: 2023-09-28
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2021/02/rob-wiblin-on-how-he-ended-up-the-way-he-is/
- Topics: Moral philosophy, Unconventional advice, User stories

Today we put out an interview with our Head of Research, Rob Wiblin, on our podcast feed. The interviewer is Misha Saul, a childhood friend of Rob's who he has known for over 20 years. While it's not an episode of our own show, we decided to share it with subscribers because it's fun, and because it touches on personal topics that we don't usually get to cover in our own interviews. They cover: How Rob's parents shaped who he is (if indeed they did) Their shared teenage obsession with philosophy, which eventually led to Rob working at 80,000 Hours How their politics were shaped by growing up in the 90s How talking to Rob helped Misha develop his own very different worldview Why The Lord of the Rings movies have held up so well What was it like being an exchange student in Spain, and was learning Spanish a mistake? Marriage and kids Institutional decline and historical analogies for the US in 2021 Making fun of teachers Should we stop eating animals?

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### Rob Wiblin on self-improvement and research ethics

- Published: 2021-01-13
- Modified: 2023-05-30
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2021/01/rob-wiblin-on-self-improvement-and-research-ethics/
- Topics: Economics, Moral philosophy, Psychology, Research in relevant areas, Unconventional advice

Today on our podcast feed, we're releasing a crosspost of an episode of the Clearer Thinking Podcast: 022: Self-Improvement and Research Ethics with Rob Wiblin. Rob chats with Spencer Greenberg, who has been an audience favourite in episodes 11 and 39 of the 80,000 Hours Podcast, and has now created this show of his own. Among other things they cover: Is trying to become a better person a good strategy for self-improvement? Why Rob thinks many people could achieve much more by finding themselves a line manager Why interviews on this show are so damn long Is it complicated to figure out what human beings value, or actually simpler than it seems? Why Rob thinks research ethics and institutional review boards are causing immense harm Where prediction markets might be failing today, and how we could tell. You can get the interview in your podcasting app by either subscribing to the '80,000 Hours Podcast', or Spencer's show 'Clearer Thinking'. You might also want to check out Spencer's conversation with another 80,000 Hours researcher: 008: Life Experiments and Philosophical Thinking with Arden Koehler.

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### Notes on good judgement and how to develop it

> Good judgement is the ability to weigh complex information and is a valuable career asset. Find out what we know about how to develop good judgement.

- Published: 2020-09-09
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2020/09/good-judgement/
- Topics: Ability, Forecasting research &amp; implementation, Reasoning well

Judgement, which I roughly define as 'the ability to weigh complex information and reach calibrated conclusions,' is clearly a valuable skill. In our simple analysis of which skills make people most employable, using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics across the US economy, 'judgement and decision making' came out top (though meant in a broader sense than we do). My guess is that good judgement is even more important when aiming to have a positive impact. What follows are some notes on why good judgement matters, what it is, and what we know about how to improve it. Why good judgement is so valuable when aiming to have an impact One reason is lack of feedback. We can never be fully certain which issues are most pressing, or which interventions are most effective. Even in an area like global health – where we have relatively good data on what works – there has been huge debate over the cost effectiveness of even a straightforward intervention like deworming. Deciding whether to focus on deworming requires judgement. This lack of feedback becomes even more pressing when we come to efforts to reduce existential risks or help the long-term future, and efforts that take a more 'hits based' approach to impact. An existential risk can only happen once, so there's a limit to how much data we can ever have about what reduces them, and we must mainly rely on judgement. Reducing existential risks and some of the other...

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### Career success: five philosophies

> What drives career success? Discover five different theories on how to be successful in your career.

- Published: 2020-09-01
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2020/09/career-success/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy

People have many different beliefs about what drives career success. These different beliefs lead to different philosophies of career advice, which have different implications for how to choose a career. Here I outline what I take to be five common philosophies of career success, some rough thoughts on which is correct, what they imply, and why most of them differ from mainstream careers advice. Five philosophies Here's a short overview of each one, made extreme to clearly illustrate the differences: 1. Find your unique career match There's a narrow range of careers that match you really well, and which will let you be happy and productive, while most won't be a good fit. Your aim should be to try to understand your unique profile of strengths and find the job that best matches them. I'd say this is the philosophy of most 'standard' career advice. If you speak to a career advisor, they will typically be unwilling to say that some paths are generally 'better' than another, but instead maintain that it's all about finding the right match. Most career books spend plenty of time getting you to reflect on your interests and personality, and then encourage you to look for careers that match them. Career tests work in part on the same principle. I'd also put the advice to 'follow your passion' in this category. One interesting version of this philosophy is the idea that obsessive interest is necessary for outsized success, combined with the idea that people...

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### Why I've come to think global priorities research is more important than I thought

- Published: 2020-08-13
- Modified: 2023-03-24
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2020/08/global-priorities-research-update/
- Topics: Academic Research, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Global Priorities Institute, Global priorities research, Philanthropic Advising, Research into global priorities

We've rated global priorities research (GPR) as one of our top priority areas for some time, but over the last couple of years I've come to see it as even more promising. The field of GPR is about rigorously investigating what the most important global problems are, how we should compare them, and what kinds of interventions best address them. For example, how to compare the relative importance of tackling global health vs. existential risks. It also considers questions such as how much weight to put on longtermism and the value of future generations, or whether we should give now or later. I'd be keen to see more investment in the field, both in absolute terms and relative to the portfolio of effort within the effective altruism community. Here are some reasons why. Each reason is weak by itself, but taken together they've caused me to shift my views. Positive recent progress I think the Global Priorities Institute has made good progress, which makes me optimistic about further work. One form of work is putting existing ideas about global priorities on a firmer intellectual footing, of which I think Hilary Greaves and Will MacAskill's strong longtermism paper is a great example. This kind of work is useful because it encourages the ideas to be taken seriously within academia, and also helps to uncover new flaws in them. Another form of work is aimed at directly changing the priorities of the effective altruism community or other altruists. I think Philip Trammell's...

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### The emerging school of patient longtermism

- Published: 2020-08-07
- Modified: 2023-12-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2020/08/the-emerging-school-of-patient-longtermism/
- Topics: Future generations &amp; longtermism, Now vs. Later, Research into global priorities

One of the parts of effective altruism I've found most intellectually interesting recently is 'patient longtermism'. This is a school of thinking that takes longtermism seriously, but combines that with the idea that we're not facing an unusually urgent threat to the future, or another urgent opportunity to have a long-term impact. We may still be facing threats to the future, but the idea is that they're not more pressing today than the threats we'll face down the line. (I discuss three other forms of longtermism here. ) Broadly, patient longtermists argue that instead of focusing on reducing specific existential risks or working on AI alignment and so on today, we should expect that the crucial moment for longtermists to act lies in the future, and our main task today should be to prepare for that time. It's not a new idea –- Benjamin Franklin was arguably a patient longtermist, and Robin Hanson was writing about it by 2011 -- but there has been some interesting recent research. Three of the most prominent arguments relevant to patient longtermism recently have been made by three researchers in Oxford, who have now all been featured on our podcast (though these guests don't all necessarily endorse patient longtermism overall): The argument that we're not living at the most influential time ever (aka, the rejection of the 'hinge of history hypothesis') by Will MacAskill, written here and discussed on our podcast. The argument that we should focus on saving & growing our resources to spend...

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### Misconceptions about effective altruism

> William MacAskill on 4 top misconceptions about effective altruism.

- Published: 2020-08-07
- Modified: 2024-10-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2020/08/misconceptions-effective-altruism/
- Topics: Building effective altruism, Earning to Give, Effective Altruism

Effective altruism is widely misunderstood, even among its supporters. A 2019 paper — The Definition of Effective Altruism by Will MacAskill — lists some of the most common misconceptions. It's aimed at academic philosophers, but works as a general summary as well. In short, effective altruism is commonly viewed as being about the moral obligation to donate as much money as possible to evidence-backed global poverty charities, or other measurable ways of making a short-term impact. In fact, the core idea of effective altruism is not about any specific way of doing good. Rather, the core idea is that some ways of contributing to the common good are far more effective than typical. In other words, 'best' is far better than 'pretty good', and that seeking out the best will let you have far more impact. (If I were writing a business book, I would say it's the '80/20 principle' applied to doing good. ) Insofar as people interested in effective altruism do in practice focus on specific ways of doing good, donating to global health charities is just one. As I'll explain below, a majority focus on different issues, such as seeking to help future generations by reducing global catastrophic risks, or reducing animal suffering by ending factory farming. And they often do this by working on high-risk high-return projects rather than evidence-backed ones, and through research, policy-change and entrepreneurship rather than donations. What unites people interested in effective altruism is they pose the question – how can I...

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### Ideas for high-impact careers beyond our priority paths

- Published: 2020-08-03
- Modified: 2024-11-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2020/08/ideas-for-high-impact-careers-beyond-our-priority-paths/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Careers, Categories of impactful careers, Fields, Founder of new projects, Government &amp; policy, Historian of large societal trends, Journalism, Public intellectual, Research management

Below we list some more career options beyond our priority paths that seem promising to us for positively influencing the long-term future. Some of these are likely to be written up as priority paths in the future, or wrapped into existing ones, but we haven't written full profiles for them yet—for example policy careers outside AI and biosecurity policy that seem promising from a longtermist perspective. Others, like information security, we think might be as promising for many people as our priority paths, but because we haven't investigated them much we're still unsure. Still others seem like they'll typically be less impactful than our priority paths for people who can succeed equally in either, but still seem high-impact to us and like they could be top options for a substantial number of people, depending on personal fit—for example research management. Finally some—like becoming a public intellectual—clearly have the potential for a lot of impact, but we can't recommend them widely because they don't have the capacity to absorb a large number of people, are particularly risky, or both. Who is best suited to pursue these paths? Of course the answer is different for each one, but in general pursuing a career where less research has been done on how to have a large impact within it—especially if few of your colleagues will share your perspective on how to think about impact—may require you to think especially critically and creatively about how you can do an...

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### What 80,000 Hours learned by anonymously interviewing people we respect

- Published: 2020-06-18
- Modified: 2020-08-18
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2020/06/lessons-from-anonymous-interviews/
- Topics: Anonymous advice

We recently released the fifteenth and final installment in our series of posts with anonymous answers. These are from interviews with people whose work we respect and whose answers we offered to publish without attribution. It features answers to 23 different questions including “How have you seen talented people fail in their work? ” and “What's one way to be successful you don't think people talk about enough? ”. We thought a lot of the responses were really interesting; some were provocative, others just surprising. And as intended, they spanned a wide range of opinions. For example, one person had seen talented people fail by being too jumpy: “It seems particularly common in effective altruism for people to be happy to jump ship onto some new project that seems higher impact at the time. And I think that this tendency systematically underestimates the costs of switching, and systematically overestimates the benefits — so you get kind of a ‘grass is greener’ effect. In general, I think, if you’re taking a job, you should be imagining that you’re going to do that job for several years. If you’re in a job, and you’re not hating it, it’s going pretty well — and some new opportunity presents itself, I think you should be extremely reticent to jump ship. I think there are also a lot of gains from focusing on one activity or a particular set of activities; you get increasing returns for quite a while. And if you’re switching between things often, you...

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### Anonymous answers: Are there myths you feel obliged to support publicly? And five other questions.

- Published: 2020-06-05
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2020/06/anonymous-answers-myths-and-other-questions/
- Topics: Anonymous advice, Unconventional advice

It's alarming whenever someone says "this is obviously the best thing to do", when in reality we have very little information in so many spaces. The following are excerpts from interviews with people whose work we respect and whose answers we offered to publish without attribution. This means that these quotes don't represent the views of 80,000 Hours, and indeed in some cases, individual pieces of advice explicitly contradict our own. Nonetheless, we think it's valuable to showcase the range of views on difficult topics where reasonable people might disagree. The advice is particularly targeted at people whose approach to doing good aligns with the values of the effective altruism (EA) community, but we expect most of it is more broadly useful. This is the fifteenth and final in this series of posts with anonymous answers. You can find the complete collection here. We've also released an audio version of some highlights of the series, which you can listen to here, or on the 80,000 Hours Podcast feed. Did you just land on our site for the first time? After this you might like to read about 80,000 Hours' key ideas.

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### Policy and research ideas to reduce existential risk

- Published: 2020-04-27
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2020/04/longtermist-policy-ideas/
- Topics: Academic Research, Existential risk, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Government &amp; policy, Promising interventions, Research in relevant areas

In his book The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, 80,000 Hours trustee Dr Toby Ord suggests a range of research and practical projects that governments could fund to reduce the risk of a global catastrophe that could permanently limit humanity's prospects. He compiles over 50 of these in an appendix, which we've reproduced below. You may not be convinced by all of these ideas, but they help to give a sense of the breadth of plausible longtermist projects available in policy, science, universities and business. There are many existential risks and they can be tackled in different ways, which makes it likely that great opportunities are out there waiting to be identified. Many of these proposals are discussed in the body of The Precipice. We've got a 3 hour interview with Toby you could listen to, or you can get a copy of the book mailed you for free by joining our newsletter: Policy and research recommendations Engineered Pandemics Bring the Biological Weapons Convention into line with the Chemical Weapons Convention: taking its budget from $1. 4 million up to $80 million, increasing its staff commensurately, and granting the power to investigate suspected breaches. Strengthen the WHO's ability to respond to emerging pandemics through rapid disease surveillance, diagnosis and control. This involves increasing its funding and powers, as well as R&D on the requisite technologies. Ensure that all DNA synthesis is screened for dangerous pathogens. If full coverage can't be achieved...

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### Anonymous contributors answer: How should the effective altruism community think about diversity?

- Published: 2020-04-27
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2020/04/anonymous-answers-diversity/
- Topics: Anonymous advice, Building effective altruism, Effective Altruism, Unconventional advice

I genuinely think you get snowball effects from the composition of a community. If a group of people are similar in a certain way, you're more likely to get more people like that. I think you can end up in bad situations where you have basically no people from X group in the movement, and then that maybe means you can't ever get people from X group in the movement. That seems really bad to me. The following are excerpts from interviews with people whose work we respect and whose answers we offered to publish without attribution. This means that these quotes don't represent the views of 80,000 Hours, and indeed in some cases, individual pieces of advice explicitly contradict our own. Nonetheless, we think it's valuable to showcase the range of views on difficult topics where reasonable people might disagree. This entry is most likely to be of interest to people who are already aware of or involved with the effective altruism (EA) community. But it's the fourteenth in this series of posts with anonymous answers — many of which are likely to be useful to everyone. You can find the complete collection here. We've also released an audio version of some highlights of the series, which you can listen to here, or on the 80,000 Hours Podcast feed. Did you just land on our site for the first time? After this you might like to read about 80,000 Hours' key ideas.

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### What programmes will 80,000 Hours provide (and not provide) within the effective altruism community?

> We aim to sum up what we intend to provide and what we can’t within effective altruism, to make it easier for other groups to fill these gaps.

- Published: 2020-04-14
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2020/04/which-programmes-within-ea/
- Topics: Building effective altruism, Effective Altruism, Founder of new projects

There are many career services that would be useful to the effective altruism community, and unfortunately 80,000 Hours is not able to provide them all. In this post, I aim to sum up what we intend to provide and what we can't, to make it easier for other groups to fill these gaps. 80,000 Hours' online content is also serving as one of the most common ways that people get introduced to the effective altruism community, but we're not the ideal introduction for many types of people, which I also list in the section on online articles. You can see our full plans in our annual review. Target audience Our aim is to do the most we can to fill the key skill gaps in the world's most pressing problems. We think that is the best way we can help to improve the lives of others over the long term. We think that the best way to do this is – given our small team – to initially specialise on a single target audience, and gradually expand the audience over time. Given this, most of our effort (say 50%+) is on advice and support for English-speaking people age 20-35 who might be able to enter one of our current priority paths. We also aim to put ~30% of our effort into other ways of addressing our priority problems (AI, biorisk, global priorities research, building EA, nuclear security, improving institutional decision-making, extreme climate risks) or potential priority problems, some...

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### 200+ opportunities to work on COVID-19, and 60+ places to get funding

- Published: 2020-04-05
- Modified: 2020-05-28
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2020/04/opportunities-to-work-on-covid-19/
- Topics: COVID-19

Below is a list of opportunities to help the global response to COVID-19. The list focuses on opportunities in research, policy, technology and startups, especially in the US and UK, and includes jobs, volunteering opportunities, and opportunities to receive funding. It accompanies our article on how to volunteer to help tackle the crisis most effectively. **Warning: we have not carefully reviewed the organisations and opportunities on this list, and they should not be taken as recommendations. ** Most items on this list are included simply on the grounds that we have seen the project endorsed by a relevant expert or institution, or even just that we (as non-experts) have glanced at the project and thought it seemed at least somewhat promising. Please (https://forms. gle/74mk2Tkag79VRxTa9) to suggest improvements and additions to this list. ### Groups that are hiring or seeking volunteers {#hiring} This list was last updated on 2020-04-10. We are no longer updating this list, though you may still find it useful. We're adding new COVID-19 opportunities to our job board. Tip: Open this page on desktop to search by role type, sector, or date added. Tip: Use the filter button to search by role type, sector, or date added. ##Want to help the world tackle COVID-19? Read our guide on how to use your time to tackle the crisis most effectively. Read more → Also see: *...

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### 80,000 Hours Annual Review - December 2019

> We review our progress and mistakes over 2019, and plans for 2020.

- Published: 2020-04-05
- Modified: 2020-04-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2020/04/annual-review-dec-2019/
- Topics: Updates

We’ve released our 2019 annual review here. It summarises our annual impact evaluation, and outlines our progress, plans, mistakes and fundraising needs. The document was initially prepared in Nov 2019. We delayed its release until we heard back from some of our largest donors so that other stakeholders would be fully informed about our funding situation before we asked for their support. Most claims should be taken to be made “as of November 2019. ” We include: A 3-page summary of Ben’s personal reflections on progress at 80,000 Hours (80k). A 6-page summary of 80k’s progress during 2019 and plans for 2020. A 7-page summary of updates on historical impact. If you would like to go into more detail, we also provide the following optional sections: The full review, which includes: metrics; progress by programme; team time allocation; mistakes; cost-effectiveness; strategy updates; priorities for 2020; predictions about 2020; budgets; fundraising targets. Appendices providing more detail on the above, especially our evaluations of each programme and data on contributors to EA movement building. You can find our previous evaluations here.

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### Good news about COVID-19

- Published: 2020-04-03
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2020/04/good-news-about-covid-19/
- Topics: Biorisk strategy &amp; policy, Catastrophic pandemics, COVID-19, Forecasting

Many of us feel depressed about the COVID-19 situation, and it is without doubt a horrible tragedy. But millions of people are rising to the occasion, and there's a lot of good news mixed in with the bad. The media has a tendency to give extra coverage to bad news, because readers find negative stories more eye-catching. So in the interest of balance, here are some positive things we've learned in the last week while writing articles on how to tackle the coronavirus crisis through temporary work, donations, or policy, and compiling over 250 job opportunities and 60 funding sources. Some countries are turning COVID-19 away at the door, while others are turning the tide of the pandemic As you can see in this chart, COVID-19 remains mostly controlled in South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. Taiwan is barely visible down there at the bottom, while Singapore actually hasn't had enough deaths to make it onto the figure yet. *Thanks to the wizards at Our World in Data for (https://ourworldindata. org/coronavirus), which produces all the graphs in this story. Note this is a logarithmic graph, so each increment is 10x as high as the last one. * Once they emerge from their 'lockdowns', other places can potentially copy the methods which these three countries have shown can work. COVID-19 may also be controlled in Hong Kong, Japan and China, which are reporting few new cases. (Unfortunately Hong Kong and Japan aren't testing enough people to be sure, and China...

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### The coronavirus crisis and our new review of how to prevent the worst possible pandemics

- Published: 2020-03-21
- Modified: 2020-09-04
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2020/03/coronavirus-crisis-new-gcbr-profile/
- Topics: Existential risk

At the time of this writing, COVID 19 -- a flu-like respiratory disease causing fever and pneumonia -- has killed over 11,000 people and has likely infected over 2 million. The growth in new cases is exponential, although cases are slowing substantially in places where strict containment measures have been instituted. Cities are shutting down around the world. Although it is very hard to predict what will happen, it seems likely this outbreak will end up being among the worst economic and humanitarian disasters of the last 100 years. Yesterday we put out a detailed interview and set of 70 links covering what both individuals and governments can do to fight the coronavirus crisis. We will be producing plenty more on this topic and it will all be posted on our COVID-19 landing page. COVID-19 is proof that a global pandemic can happen in the 21st century. It has also shown how underprepared we are as a world to coordinate with one another and deal with disasters like these. Unfortunately, it's possible for things to get much worse than COVID-19. From the perspective of preventing threats to the long term future of humanity, preventing global catastrophic biological risks (GCBRs) is especially important. GCBRs are risks from biological agents that threaten great worldwide damage to human welfare, and place the long-term trajectory of humankind in jeopardy. GCBRs seem much more likely to arise from engineered pandemics than natural ones. Natural pandemics, though horrific, have not so far often been able to...

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### Anonymous contributors answer: What are the biggest flaws of the effective altruism community?

- Published: 2020-03-02
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2020/03/anonymous-answers-flaws-effective-altruism-community/
- Topics: Anonymous advice, Building effective altruism, Effective Altruism, Unconventional advice

I'm extremely pro peer-updating in general, but from the perspective of the community as a whole -- I'd much rather a lot of people having a lot of personally formed views. The following are excerpts from interviews with people whose work we respect and whose answers we offered to publish without attribution. This means that these quotes don't represent the views of 80,000 Hours, and indeed in some cases, individual pieces of advice explicitly contradict our own. Nonetheless, we think it's valuable to showcase the range of views on difficult topics where reasonable people might disagree. This entry is most likely to be of interest to people who are already aware of or involved with the effective altruism (EA) community. But it's the thirteenth in this series of posts with anonymous answers — many of which are likely to be useful to everyone. You can find the complete collection here. We've also released an audio version of some highlights of the series, which you can listen to here, or on the 80,000 Hours Podcast feed. Did you just land on our site for the first time? After this you might like to read about 80,000 Hours' key ideas.

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### Anonymous contributors answer: What are the biggest flaws of 80,000 Hours?

- Published: 2020-02-21
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2020/02/anonymous-answers-flaws-80000hours/
- Topics: About 80,000 Hours, Anonymous advice, Effective Altruism, Unconventional advice

I think we're currently too far in the direction of "there's like 10 legitimate career paths for people involved in effective altruism, and no others". That's crazy, there are dozens and dozens of career paths where you could make a difference. A huge difference -- you might make the difference. The following are excerpts from interviews with people whose work we respect and whose answers we offered to publish without attribution. This means that these quotes don't represent the views of 80,000 Hours, and indeed in some cases, individual pieces of advice explicitly contradict our own. Nonetheless, we think it's valuable to showcase the range of views on difficult topics where reasonable people might disagree. The advice is particularly targeted at people whose approach to doing good aligns with the values of the effective altruism (EA) community, but we expect most of it is more broadly useful. This is the twelfth in this series of posts with anonymous answers. You can find the complete collection here. We've also released an audio version of some highlights of the series, which you can listen to here, or on the 80,000 Hours Podcast feed. Did you just land on our site for the first time? After this you might like to read about 80,000 Hours' key ideas.

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### Anonymous contributors answer: Should the effective altruism community grow faster or slower? And should it be broader, or narrower?

- Published: 2020-02-17
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2020/02/anonymous-answers-effective-altruism-community-and-growth/
- Topics: Advocacy, Anonymous advice, Building effective altruism, Effective Altruism, Unconventional advice

I want anyone in effective altruism to think "wow, this is such a great community to be part of -- I think this is great! ", rather than feeling really ambivalent, or even stressed, or finding themselves often annoyed at other people. The following are excerpts from interviews with people whose work we respect and whose answers we offered to publish without attribution. This means that these quotes don't represent the views of 80,000 Hours, and indeed in some cases, individual pieces of advice explicitly contradict our own. Nonetheless, we think it's valuable to showcase the range of views on difficult topics where reasonable people might disagree. This entry is most likely to be of interest to people who are already aware of or involved with the effective altruism (EA) community. But it's the eleventh in this series of posts with anonymous answers — many of which are likely to be useful to everyone. You can find the complete collection here. We've also released an audio version of some highlights of the series, which you can listen to here, or on the 80,000 Hours Podcast feed. Did you just land on our site for the first time? After this you might like to read about 80,000 Hours' key ideas.

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### Anonymous contributors answer: What's some underrated general life advice?

- Published: 2020-02-13
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2020/02/anonymous-answers-general-life-advice/
- Topics: Anonymous advice, Mental health, Unconventional advice

When you're at school, you can just spend hundreds of hours really getting to know someone, and you just never really get time for that as an adult. And so if you lose an old friend, then you've just lost this huge investment. The following are excerpts from interviews with people whose work we respect and whose answers we offered to publish without attribution. This means that these quotes don't represent the views of 80,000 Hours, and indeed in some cases, individual pieces of advice explicitly contradict our own. Nonetheless, we think it's valuable to showcase the range of views on difficult topics where reasonable people might disagree. The advice is particularly targeted at people whose approach to doing good aligns with the values of the effective altruism (EA) community, but we expect most of it is more broadly useful. This is the tenth in this series of posts with anonymous answers. You can find the complete collection here. We've also released an audio version of some highlights of the series, which you can listen to here, or on the 80,000 Hours Podcast feed. Did you just land on our site for the first time? After this you might like to read about 80,000 Hours' key ideas.

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### Anonymous contributors answer: How honest & candid should high-profile people really be?

- Published: 2020-02-09
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2020/02/anon-answers-honesty/
- Topics: Anonymous advice

I feel like I've observed a lot of situations at big companies, where you can see this person acting as though they're in *Game of Thrones*. And you come back in two years and... they just haven't gotten anywhere. The following are excerpts from interviews with people whose work we respect and whose answers we offered to publish without attribution. This means that these quotes don't represent the views of 80,000 Hours, and indeed in some cases, individual pieces of advice explicitly contradict our own. Nonetheless, we think it's valuable to showcase the range of views on difficult topics where reasonable people might disagree. The advice is particularly targeted at people whose approach to doing good aligns with the values of the effective altruism (EA) community, but we expect most of it is more broadly useful. This is the ninth in this series of posts with anonymous answers. You can find the complete collection here. We've also released an audio version of some highlights of the series, which you can listen to here, or on the 80,000 Hours Podcast feed. Did you just land on our site for the first time? After this you might like to read about 80,000 Hours' key ideas.

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### Anonymous contributors answer: What's one way to be successful you don't think people talk about enough?

- Published: 2020-01-28
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2020/01/anon-answers-one-way-successful/
- Topics: Anonymous advice, Career advice &amp; strategy, Unconventional advice

It's just so valuable to have someone who's totally on board with the mission of the organisation they're working for, and happy to do just absolutely whatever matters. The following are excerpts from interviews with people whose work we respect and whose answers we offered to publish without attribution. This means that these quotes don't represent the views of 80,000 Hours, and indeed in some cases, individual pieces of advice explicitly contradict our own. Nonetheless, we think it's valuable to showcase the range of views on difficult topics where reasonable people might disagree. The advice is particularly targeted at people whose approach to doing good aligns with the values of the effective altruism (EA) community, but we expect most of it is more broadly useful. This is the eighth in this series of posts with anonymous answers. You can find the complete collection here. We've also released an audio version of some highlights of the series, which you can listen to here, or on the 80,000 Hours Podcast feed. Did you just land on our site for the first time? After this you might like to read about 80,000 Hours' key ideas.

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### Anonymous contributors answer: What mistakes do people most often make when deciding what work to do?

- Published: 2019-12-17
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2019/12/anon-answers-what-to-work-on/
- Topics: Anonymous advice, Effective Altruism, Foundations, Unconventional advice, World problems

Doing something you don't enjoy or aren't particularly good at for 1 or 2 years isn't a tragedy -- but doing it for 20 or 30 years is. You can get a sense for what the most effective role is from outside, but you'll only find out if you enjoy it by actually doing it, so people should be way more willing to jump ship. The following are excerpts from interviews with people whose work we respect and whose answers we offered to publish without attribution. This means that these quotes don't represent the views of 80,000 Hours, and indeed in some cases, individual pieces of advice explicitly contradict our own. Nonetheless, we think it's valuable to showcase the range of views on difficult topics where reasonable people might disagree. The advice is particularly targeted at people whose approach to doing good aligns with the values of the effective altruism (EA) community, but we expect most of it is more broadly useful. This is the seventh in this series of posts with anonymous answers. You can find the complete collection here. We've also released an audio version of some highlights of the series, which you can listen to here, or on the 80,000 Hours Podcast feed. Did you just land on our site for the first time? After this you might like to read about 80,000 Hours' key ideas.

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### Anonymous contributors answer: What bad habits do you see among people trying to improve the world?

- Published: 2019-12-09
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2019/12/anonymous-answers-bad-habits/
- Topics: Accidental harm, Anonymous advice, Career advice &amp; strategy, Effective Altruism, Unconventional advice

In general, if you're doing interesting things, and you're learning new things -- then you're doing fine; you're not in a state of emergency where you need to be panicking about whether you're doing the wrong thing. The following are excerpts from interviews with people whose work we respect and whose answers we offered to publish without attribution. This means that these quotes don't represent the views of 80,000 Hours, and indeed in some cases, individual pieces of advice explicitly contradict our own. Nonetheless, we think it's valuable to showcase the range of views on difficult topics where reasonable people might disagree. The advice is particularly targeted at people whose approach to doing good aligns with the values of the effective altruism (EA) community, but we expect most of it is more broadly useful. This is the sixth in this series of posts with anonymous answers. You can find the complete collection here. We've also released an audio version of some highlights of the series, which you can listen to here, or on the 80,000 Hours Podcast feed. Did you just land on our site for the first time? After this you might like to read about 80,000 Hours' key ideas.

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### Anonymous answers: How risk-averse should talented young people be about their careers?

- Published: 2019-11-29
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2019/11/anonymous-answers-risk-aversion/
- Topics: Ability, Anonymous advice, Being ambitious, Career capital, Risk, Unconventional advice

... doing a bit of good is well-regarded and you feel like a valuable member of society. Doing something that has a 1 in 20 chance of having a huge impact, but 19 times out of 20 you're just wasting your time — that doesn't seem very appealing, including to me. So I would just expect that to be significantly under-attended to. The following are excerpts from interviews with people whose work we respect and whose answers we offered to publish without attribution. This means that these quotes don't represent the views of 80,000 Hours, and indeed in some cases, individual pieces of advice explicitly contradict our own. Nonetheless, we think it's valuable to showcase the range of views on difficult topics where reasonable people might disagree. The advice is particularly targeted at people whose approach to doing good aligns with the values of the effective altruism (EA) community, but we expect much of it is more broadly useful. This is the fifth in this series of posts with anonymous answers. You can find the complete collection here. We've also released an audio version of some highlights of the series, which you can listen to here, or on the 80,000 Hours Podcast feed. Did you just land on our site for the first time? After this you might like to read 80,000 Hours' career guide.

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### Anonymous contributors answer: If you were 18 again, what would you do differently this time around? And other personal career reflections.

- Published: 2019-11-22
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2019/11/anonymous-answers-personal-reflections/
- Topics: Anonymous advice, Career advice &amp; strategy, Unconventional advice

I would know that I don't want to go into academia, or be a technical person... So I would abandon that, and instead take easy classes and get really good grades, and learn about the things that seemed most interesting and important to me. The following are excerpts from interviews with people whose work we respect and whose answers we offered to publish without attribution. This means that these quotes don't represent the views of 80,000 Hours, and indeed in some cases, individual pieces of advice explicitly contradict our own. Nonetheless, we think it's valuable to showcase the range of views on difficult topics where reasonable people might disagree. The advice is particularly targeted at people whose approach to doing good aligns with the values of the effective altruism (EA) community, but we expect much of it is more broadly useful. This is the fourth in this series of posts with anonymous answers. You can find the complete collection here. We've also released an audio version of some highlights of the series, which you can listen to here, or on the 80,000 Hours Podcast feed. Did you just land on our site for the first time? After this you might like to read about 80,000 Hours' key ideas.

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### Anonymous answers: What’s the thing people most overrate in their career?

- Published: 2019-11-18
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2019/11/anonymous-answers-most-overrated/
- Topics: Anonymous advice, Career capital, Career planning, Exploration, Now vs. Later, Personal fit, Unconventional advice

I've never met anyone where I've thought "wow, this person learned so much from consulting, and now they're really good at analysing a problem and helping me out. " The following are excerpts from interviews with people whose work we respect and whose answers we offered to publish without attribution. This means that these quotes don't represent the views of 80,000 Hours, and indeed in some cases, individual pieces of advice explicitly contradict our own. Nonetheless, we think it's valuable to showcase the range of views on difficult topics where reasonable people might disagree. The advice is particularly targeted at people whose approach to doing good aligns with the values of the effective altruism (EA) community, but we expect much of it is more broadly useful. This is the third in this series of posts with anonymous answers. You can find the complete collection here. We've also released an audio version of some highlights of the series, which you can listen to here, or on the 80,000 Hours Podcast feed. Did you just land on our site for the first time? After this you might like to read about 80,000 Hours' key ideas.

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### Anonymous answers: How have you seen talented people fail in their work?

- Published: 2019-10-10
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2019/10/anonymous-advice-fail-at-work/
- Topics: Anonymous advice, Career advice &amp; strategy, Careers, Unconventional advice

Maybe it's fine to drive yourself by force of will if it's really important and it's temporary, but if you try to build a career around that... things can go badly. The following are excerpts from interviews with people whose work we respect and whose answers we offered to publish without attribution. This means that these quotes don't represent the views of 80,000 Hours, and indeed in some cases, individual pieces of advice explicitly contradict our own. Nonetheless, we think it's valuable to showcase the range of views on difficult topics where reasonable people might disagree. The advice is particularly targeted at people whose approach to doing good aligns with the values of the effective altruism (EA) community, but we expect much of it is more broadly useful. This is the second in this series of posts with anonymous answers. You can find the complete collection here. We've also released an audio version of some highlights of the series, which you can listen to here, or on the 80,000 Hours Podcast feed. Did you just land on our site for the first time? After this you might like to read about 80,000 Hours' key ideas.

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### Anonymous advice: What's good career advice you wouldn’t want to have your name on?

> The following are excerpts from interviews with people whose work we respect and who would like to remain anonymous.

- Published: 2019-10-03
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2019/10/anonymous-advice-careers/
- Topics: Anonymous advice, Career advice &amp; strategy, Unconventional advice

Trying to give any sort of general career advice -- it's a nightmare. All of this stuff, you just kind of need to figure it out for yourself. Is this actually applying to me? Am I the sort of person who's too eager to change jobs, or too hesitant? Am I the sort of person who works themselves too hard, or doesn't work hard enough? The following are excerpts from interviews with people whose work we respect and whose answers we offered to publish without attribution. This means that these quotes don't represent the views of 80,000 Hours, and indeed in some cases, individual pieces of advice explicitly contradict our own. Nonetheless, we think it's valuable to showcase the range of views on difficult topics where reasonable people might disagree. The advice is particularly targeted at people whose approach to doing good aligns with the values of the effective altruism (EA) community, but we expect much of it is more broadly useful. This is the first in a series of posts with anonymous answers to a range of questions. You can find the complete collection here. We've also released an audio version of some highlights of the series, which you can listen to here, or on the 80,000 Hours Podcast feed. Did you just land on our site for the first time? After this you might like to read about 80,000 Hours' key ideas.

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### Rob Wiblin on plastic straws, nicotine, doping, & whether changing the long term is really possible

- Published: 2019-09-25
- Modified: 2021-06-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2019/09/rob-wiblin-on-many-things/
- Topics: Foundations

Today on our podcast feed, we're releasing some interviews I recently recorded for two other shows, Love Your Work and The Neoliberal Podcast.   To listen, subscribe to the 80,000 Hours Podcast by searching for 80,000 Hours wherever you get your podcasts, or find us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or SoundCloud. If you've listened to absolutely everything on our podcast feed, you'll have heard four interviews with me already, but fortunately I think these two don't include too much repetition, and I've gotten a decent amount of positive feedback on both.   First up, I speak with David Kadavy on Love Your Work.   This is a particularly personal and relaxed interview. We talk about all sorts of things, including nicotine gum, plastic straw bans, whether recycling is important, how many lives a doctor saves, why interviews should go for at least 2 hours, how athletes doping could be good for the world, and many other fun topics.   At some points we even actually discuss effective altruism and 80,000 Hours, but you can easily skip through those bits if they feel too familiar.   The second interview is with Jeremiah Johnson on the Neoliberal Podcast. It starts at 2 hours and 15 minutes into this recording.   Neoliberalism in the sense used by this show is not the free market fundamentalism you might associate with that term. Rather it's a centrist or even centre-left view that supports things like social liberalism, multilateral international institutions, trade, high rates of migration, racial justice, inclusive institutions,...

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### Have we helped you have a bigger social impact? Our annual impact survey 2019

- Published: 2019-09-17
- Modified: 2019-09-17
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2019/09/have-we-helped-you-have-a-bigger-social-impact-our-annual-impact-survey/
- Topics: Updates

Briefly, once a year, we at 80,000 Hours ask you to tell us if we've helped you have a larger social impact. We and our donors need to know which of our programs are helping people enough to continue or scale up, and it's only by hearing your stories that we can make these decisions well. You can also let us know where we've fallen short, which helps us fix problems with our advice. So, if our podcast, job board, articles, advising or other services have somehow contributed to your life or career plans, please take 3–10 minutes to let us know how: https://80000hours. org/impact-survey/ We've refreshed the survey this year, hopefully making it easier to fill out than in the past. We'll keep this appeal up for the next week, but it would be great if you could fill it out now so we can start working through your stories. Thanks so much!

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### How replaceable are the top candidates in large hiring rounds? Why the answer flips depending on the distribution of applicant ability

- Published: 2019-08-13
- Modified: 2024-12-17
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2019/08/how-replaceable-are-top-candidates-in-large-hiring-rounds/
- Topics: Ability, Career advice &amp; strategy, Reasoning well, Replaceability, Unconventional advice

As more and more people apply for a job, the value of each extra application goes down. But does it go down quickly, or only very gradually? This question matters, because for many of the jobs we discuss, lots of people apply and the application process is highly competitive. When this happens, some of our readers have the sense that, if a lot of people are already applying for a job, there's no point in them applying as well. After all, there must be someone else suitable in the applicant pool already — someone who would do a similarly good job, even if you were to turn down an offer. So, the logic goes, if you take the job, you're fully 'replaceable', and therefore not having much social impact. By contrast, 80,000 Hours and many of the organisations we help with hiring often feel differently, saying: Even when many people would be interested in taking a job, the difference between the best and the second best applicant is often large. So losing your best option would still be really costly. Even when you have a large applicant pool, it's useful to keep hearing about more potential hires, in the hope of finding someone who'll be significantly more productive than everyone you're currently aware of. Which of these positions is correct? I threw together some simple models in an Excel spreadsheet to explore this disagreement. In short, which picture is correct depends on the distribution of job applicant productivity, in particular,...

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### Rob Wiblin on human nature, new technology, and living a happy, healthy & ethical life

- Published: 2019-05-13
- Modified: 2024-11-26
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2019/05/rob-wiblin-on-living-well/
- Topics: Unconventional advice

Today we cross-posted to our podcast feed some interviews Rob did recently on two other podcasts — Mission Daily (from 2m) and The Good Life (from 1h13m). Some of the content will be familiar to regular listeners or readers — but if you're at all interested in Rob's personal thoughts, there should be quite a lot of new material to make listening worthwhile. The first interview is with Chad Grills. They focused largely on new technologies and existential risks, but also discuss topics like: Why Rob is wary of fiction Egalitarianism in the evolution of hunter gatherers How to stop social media screwing with politics Careers in government versus business The second interview is with Prof Andrew Leigh — the Shadow Assistant Treasurer in Australia. This one gets into more personal topics than Rob usually covers, like: What advice would he give to his teenage self? Which person has most shaped his view of living an ethical life? His approach to giving to the homeless What does he do to maximise his own happiness? Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world's most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. The 80,000 Hours Podcast is produced by Keiran Harris.

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### 80,000 Hours Annual Review - December 2018

> We review our progress and mistakes over 2018, and plans for 2019.

- Published: 2019-05-07
- Modified: 2024-11-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2019/05/annual-review-dec-2018/
- Topics: Updates

This annual review summarises our annual impact evaluation, and outlines our progress, plans, weaknesses and fundraising needs. It's supplemented by a more detailed document that acts as a (less polished) appendix adding more detail to each section. Both documents were initially prepared in Dec 2018. We delayed their release until we heard back from some of our largest donors so that other stakeholders would be fully informed about our funding situation before we asked for their support. Except where otherwise stated, we haven't updated the review with data from 2019 so empirical claims are generally "as of December 2018. " You can also see a glossary of key terms used in the reviews. You can find our previous evaluations here. What does 80,000 Hours do? 80,000 Hours aims to solve the most pressing skill bottlenecks in the world's most pressing problems. We do this by carrying out research to identify the careers that best solve these problems, and using this research to provide free online content and in-person support. Our work is especially aimed at helping talented graduates aged 20-35 enter higher-impact careers. The content aims to attract people who might be able to solve these bottlenecks and help them find new high-impact options. The in-person support aims to identify promising people and help them enter paths that are a good fit for them by providing advice, introductions and placements into specific positions. Currently, the problems we're most...

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### Recap: why do some organisations say their recent hires are worth so much?

- Published: 2019-05-05
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2019/05/why-do-organisations-say-recent-hires-are-worth-so-much/
- Topics: Building effective altruism, EtG pros and cons, Top-recommended careers

Our 2018 survey found that for a second year, a significant fraction of organisations reported that they'd want to be compensated hundreds of thousands or sometimes millions of dollars for the loss of a recent hire for three years. There was some debate last October about whether those figures could be accurate, why they were so high, and what they mean. In the current post, I outline some rough notes summarising the different explanations for why people in the survey estimated that the value of recent hires might be high, though I don't seek firm conclusions about which considerations are playing the biggest role. In short, we consider four explanations: The estimates might be wrong. There might be large differences in the value-add of different hires. The organisations might be able to fundraise easily. Retaining a recent hire allows the organisation to avoid running a hiring process. Overall, we take the figures as evidence that leaders of the effective altruism community, when surveyed, think the value-add of recent hires at these organisations is very high -- plausibly more valuable than donating six figures (or possible even more) per year to the same organisations. However, we do not think the precise numbers are a reliable answer to decision-relevant questions for job seekers, funders, or potential employers. We think it's likely that mistakes are driving up these estimates. Even ignoring the high probability of mistakes, the implications of the data depend heavily on exactly what is driving the results. We are...

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### Career advice I wish I'd been given when I was young

- Published: 2019-04-30
- Modified: 2023-12-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2019/04/career-advice-i-wish-id-been-given-when-i-was-young/
- Topics: Anonymous advice, Career advice &amp; strategy, Careers, Foundations, Unconventional advice

Note: A reader who prefers to remain anonymous -- but whose career we think did a lot of good -- passed us this list of advice which they were grateful to have received, or wish they'd been given when they were younger. We thought it was very interesting, including where it doesn't line up exactly with our usual views, and so are publishing it here with their permission. The advice is targeted towards people sympathetic to the principles of effective altruism, especially those with an interest in public policy careers, but we think much of it is more broadly useful. Don't focus too much on long-term plans. Focus on interesting projects and you'll build a resumé that stands out -- take on multiple part-time consultancies and volunteer projects in parallel to quickly build it out. Back in my 30s, most of the things on my resumé were projects that involved 10% of my time each, and about half of them didn't pay me any money. Those projects sounded fancy and helped me to get good full-time jobs later on. Find good thinkers and cold-call the ones you most admire. Many years ago I was lucky that people like Peter Singer, Peter Unger, John Broome, and Derek Parfit were kind enough to respond to my letters. (Any readers who are famous should take the time to respond to strangers' emails. ) I was similarly lucky that some of the policy professionals whose work I was most impressed with replied to me when...

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### Find your highest impact role: 104 new vacancies in our February 2019 job board updates

- Published: 2019-02-25
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2019/02/february-job-board-updates/
- Topics: Updates

Our job board continues to get big updates each 2 week, and now lists 235 vacancies, with 104 additional opportunities in the last month. If you're actively looking for a new role, we recommend checking out the job board regularly - when a great opening comes up, you'll want to maximise your time to prepare. The job board is a curated list of the most promising positions to apply for that we're currently aware of. They're all high-impact opportunities at organisations that are working on some of the world's most pressing problems: Check out the job board → They're demanding positions, but if you're a good fit for one of them, it could be your best opportunity to have an impact. If you apply for one of these jobs, or intend to, please do let us know. A few highlights from the last month

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### Find your highest impact role: 77 new vacancies in our December job board updates

- Published: 2018-12-22
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2018/12/find-your-highest-impact-role-77-new-vacancies-in-our-december-job-board-updates/
- Topics: Updates

Thanks to the sterling work of Maria Gutierrez, our job board continues to get big updates each 2 week, and now lists 169 vacancies, with 77 additional opportunities in the last month. If you're actively looking for a new role, we recommend checking out the job board regularly - when a great opening comes up, you'll want to maximise your time to prepare. The job board is a curated list of the most promising positions to apply for that we're currently aware of. They're all high-impact opportunities at organisations that are working on some of the world's most pressing problems: Check out the job board → They're demanding positions, but if you're a good fit for one of them, it could be your best opportunity to have an impact. If you apply for one of these jobs, or intend to, please do let us know. A few highlights from the last month

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### A simple checklist for overcoming life and career setbacks

- Published: 2018-12-19
- Modified: 2022-12-14
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2018/12/dealing-with-setbacks/
- Topics: Mental health

At 80,000 Hours we focus a lot on developing ambitious plans to dramatically improve the world. Something we haven't written so much about is how to overcome the challenges - heartbreak, rejection, failure, illness, grief, conflict and more - that are sure to arise as we attempt to follow through on those plans, and which risk throwing us off course. We don't have particular expertise on this topic, but I wanted to share an approach that me and some friends have found useful, and which might help you as well. When bad things happen in life, the thoughts we then have about them have a big impact on how much they harm us. Even where we can't avoid the direct suffering inflicted by a problem, we can at least avoid hurting ourselves further, by ruminating about it and getting trapped in a cycle of negative thoughts. In the case of the minor annoyances we face every day, maintaining our equanimity can almost entirely eliminate the harm they cause us. And even when we face serious adversity, ensuring we think about it the right way can limit the damage, and save us from falling into depression or another negative spiral. (Though this list isn't really suitable for seriously traumatic events. ) To help myself with this, I've made a checklist of questions I try to work through when something unpleasant happens, in order to reframe the situation and get over it as quickly as possible. The basic idea is similar to cognitive...

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### Think twice before talking about 'talent gaps' — clarifying nine misconceptions

- Published: 2018-11-12
- Modified: 2024-12-17
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2018/11/clarifying-talent-gaps/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy, Career capital, Effective Altruism, Foundations, Reasoning well, Replaceability

After pushing the idea of 'talent gaps' in 2015, we've noticed increasing confusion about the term. This is partly our fault. So, here's a quick list of common misconceptions about talent gaps and how they can be fixed. This is all pretty rough and we're still refining our own views, but we hope this might start to clarify this issue, while we work on better explaining the idea in our key content. 1. Problem areas are constrained by specific skills, not 'talent' Problem areas are rarely generically 'talent constrained'. They're instead constrained by specific skills and abilities. It's nearly always clearer to talk about the specific needs of the field, ideally down to the level of specific profiles of people, rather than talent and funding in general. For instance, work to positively shape the development of AI is highly constrained by the following: ML researchers, especially those able to do field-defining work, who are interested in and understand AI safety, the alignment problem, and other issues relevant to the long-term development of AI. People skilled in operations, especially those able to run nonprofits with under 50 people or academic institutes, and who are interested in and understand issues related to the long-term development of AI. Strategy and policy researchers able to do disentanglement research in pre-paradigmatic fields. People with the policy expertise and career capital to work in influential government positions who are also knowledgeable about and dedicated to the issue. Often when people talk about a field being 'talent...

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### Second October job board update

- Published: 2018-10-24
- Modified: 2018-10-24
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2018/10/second-october-job-board-update/
- Topics: Uncategorised

Our job board now lists 142 vacancies, with 38 additional opportunities since the last update 3 weeks ago. If you’re actively looking for a new role, we recommend checking out the job board regularly - when a great opening comes up, you’ll want to maximise your preparation time. The job board remains a curated list of the most promising positions to apply for that we're currently aware of. They’re all high-impact opportunities at organisations that are working on some of the world’s most pressing problems: Check out the job board → They're demanding positions, but if you’re a good fit for one of them, it could be your best opportunity to have an impact. If you apply for one of these jobs, or intend to, please do let us know. A few highlights from the last month

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### New article: Have a particular strength? Already an expert in a field? Here are the socially impactful careers 80,000 Hours suggests you consider first.

- Published: 2018-10-24
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2018/10/new-article-advice-by-expertise/
- Topics: Applying an unusual skill to a needed niche, Career advice &amp; strategy

We've published a new article that summarises our advice based on your strengths and link you to the most relevant articles for you to read: This list is preliminary. We wanted to publish our existing thoughts on what to do with each skill, but can easily see ourselves changing our minds over the coming years. You can read about our general process and what career paths we recommend in our full article. Sometimes, however, it's possible to give more specific advice about what options to consider to people who already have pre-existing experience or qualifications, or are unusually good at a certain type of work. In this article, we provide a list of skills, and for each one give a list of socially-impactful options that people who are unusually good in that area should most often consider. We start with three "strengths" (quantitative, verbal & social, and visual). Then we go on to give advice for people with existing experience in fifteen specific fields. Bear in mind it's often possible to completely change field: we've seen people switch from philosophy to software engineering, and architecture into economics. Nonetheless, these are good starting points. The skill types also overlap, and you probably also have several of them. The aim is just to give you some tips on narrowing down your options more quickly. This article assumes you're already familiar with our problem profiles and top careers. It just summarises our bottom lines on how to narrow down, without giving all our...

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### New article: Ways people trying to do good accidentally make things worse, and how to avoid them

- Published: 2018-10-22
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2018/10/new-article-accidental-harm/
- Topics: Accidental harm

We've published a new article about how to avoid accidentally causing harm through your career: "We encourage people to work on problems that are neglected by others and large in scale. Unfortunately those are precisely the problems where people can do the most damage if their approach isn't carefully thought through. If a problem is very important, then setting back the cause is very bad. If a problem is so neglected that you're among the first focused on it, then you'll have a disproportionate influence on the field's reputation, how likely others are to enter it, and many early decisions that could have path-dependent effects on the field's long-term success. We don't particularly enjoy writing about this admittedly demotivating topic. Ironically, we expect that cautious people - the folks who least need this advice - will be the ones most likely to take it to heart. Nonetheless we think cataloguing these risks is important if we're going to be serious about having an impact in important but 'fragile' fields like reducing extinction risk. In this article, we'll list six ways people can unintentionally set back their cause. You may already be aware of most of these risks, but we often see people neglect one or two of them when new to a high stakes area - including us when we were starting 80,000 Hours. " Read the full article...

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### What skills or experience are most needed within professional effective altruism in 2018? And which problems are most effective to work on? New survey of organisational leaders.

- Published: 2018-10-08
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2018/10/2018-talent-gaps-survey/
- Topics: Building effective altruism, Building the effective altruism community, Career capital, Effective Altruism, Operations at high impact organisations, Organisation-building at effective nonprofits, Personal fit, World problems

Read this to see the 2019 data. Update April 2019: We think that our use of the term 'talent gaps' in this post (and elsewhere) has caused some confusion. We've written a post clarifying what we meant by the term and addressing some misconceptions that our use of it may have caused. Most importantly, we now think it's much more useful to talk about specific skills and abilities that are important constraints on particular problems rather than talking about 'talent constraints' in general terms. This page may be misleading if it's not read in conjunction with our clarifications. What are the most pressing needs in the effective altruism community right now? What problems are most effective to work on? Who should earn to give and who should do direct work? We surveyed managers at organisations in the community to find out their views. These results help to inform our recommendations about the highest impact career paths available. Our key finding is that for the questions that we asked 12 months ago, the results have not changed very much. This gives us more confidence in our survey results from 2017. We also asked some new questions, including about the monetary value placed on our priority paths, discount rates on talent and how current leaders first discovered and got involved in effective altruism. Below is a summary of the key figures, some caveats about the data's limitations, an explanation of the survey method, and a discussion of what these numbers mean. Note:...

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### New career review on becoming an academic researcher: Highlights on your chances of success, which fields have highest GRE scores, & having impact outside research

- Published: 2018-10-04
- Modified: 2024-11-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2018/10/career-review-academic-research/
- Topics: Academic Research

We recently published a new career review on becoming an academic researcher by Jess Whittlestone. It covers issues such as: Entry requirements and what it takes to excel. What are your chances of success? How to maximise your impact within academia. How to assess your personal fit at each stage of your career. Which field are best to enter? How to establish your career early on, and trade-off impact against career advancement. Review of the pros and cons of the path. Check out our career review of academic research → Here are some extracts from the full profile. -- Research isn't the only way academics can have a large impact When we think of academic careers, research is what first comes to mind, but academics have many other pathways to impact which are less often considered. Academics can also influence public opinion, advise policy-makers, or manage teams of other researchers to help them be more productive. If any of these routes might turn out to be a good fit for you, then it makes the path even more attractive. We'll sketch out some of these other paths: 1. Public outreach Peter Singer's career began in an ordinary enough way for a promising young academic, studying philosophy at Oxford University. But he soon started moving in a different direction from his peers, by seriously trying to change the views and behaviour of the general public on important moral issues. Singer's first book, Animal Liberation, is one of the most widely-read books...

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### October job board update

- Published: 2018-10-03
- Modified: 2018-10-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2018/10/october-job-board-update/
- Topics: Uncategorised

Our job board now lists 128 vacancies, with 45 additional opportunities since last month. If you’re actively looking for a new role, we recommend checking out the job board regularly - when a great opening comes up, you’ll want to maximise your preparation time. The job board remains a curated list of the most promising positions to apply for that we're currently aware of. They’re all high-impact opportunities at organisations that are working on some of the world’s most pressing problems: Check out the job board → They're demanding positions, but if you’re a good fit for one of them, it could be your best opportunity to have an impact. If you apply for one of these jobs, or intend to, please do let us know. A few highlights from the last month

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### List of 80,000 Hours content from the last 4 months, summary of what was most popular, and plans for future releases.

- Published: 2018-10-01
- Modified: 2023-11-24
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2018/10/research-review-4-months/
- Topics: Updates

Cross posted from the Effective Altruism Forum. Here's your regular reminder of everything 80,000 Hours has released over the last four months, since our last roundup. If you'd like to get these updates more regularly, you can join our newsletter. We've done a major redesign of our job board, increasing the number of vacancies listed there from ~20 to over 100. It has doubled its traffic since the first half of the year, and is now one of the five most popular pages on the whole site. High impact job board We've released two in-depth articles that should be of special interest to the community: These are the world's highest impact career paths according to our research. This is an update of our top recommended careers. Should you play to your comparative advantage when choosing your career? New theoretical content on the relevance of comparative advantage, and thoughts on how to practically evaluate it. We released 9 podcast episodes totalling 19. 5 hours, covering lots of key topics in EA in significant depth (in chronological order): How the audacity to fix things without asking permission can change the world, demonstrated by Tara Mac Aulay Tanya Singh on ending the operations management bottleneck in effective altruism Finding the best charity requires estimating the unknowable. Here's how GiveWell tries to do that, according to researcher James Snowden. Prof Yew-Kwang Ng is a visionary economist who anticipated many key ideas in effective altruism decades ago. Here's his take on ethics and how to create...

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### Recent research we've published: Our top 10 careers for social impact; Congressional staffing; Comparative advantage; And can you guess which psychology experiments will replicate?

- Published: 2018-09-30
- Modified: 2018-09-30
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2018/09/recent-research-weve-published-our-top-10-careers-for-social-impact-congressional-staffing-comparative-advantage-and-can-you-guess-which-psychology-experiments-will-replicate/
- Topics: Careers

We recently published a number of new articles that you might have missed if you don't follow us on social media (Facebook and Twitter) or our research newsletter. Probably our most important release for this year is this article summarising many of our key findings since we started in 2011: These are the world’s highest impact career paths according to our research It outlines our new suggested process anyone can use to generate a short-list of high-impact career options given their personal situation. It then describes the top five key categories of career we most often recommend, which should produce at least one good option for almost all graduates, and why we're enthusiastic about them. It goes on to list and explains the top 10 “priority paths” we want to draw attention to, because we think they can enable to right person to do a particularly large amount of good for the world. Second, if you're trying to figure out which job is the best fit for you, or how to coordinate with other people - for example the effective altruism community - you will want to read: Should you play to your comparative advantage when choosing your career? Third, if you'd like to influence government or work in politics, you should check out our comprehensive review of the pros and cons of being a Congressional Staffer and how to become one: Congressional staffers have surprising power over budgets & legislation. Here's what it takes to become one. Fourth, US...

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### American with a science PhD? Get a fast-track into AI and STEM policy by applying for the acclaimed AAAS Science & Technology Fellowship by Nov 1.

- Published: 2018-09-18
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2018/09/aaas-science-technology-policy-fellowship/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Government &amp; policy, Long-term AI policy, Scientific research

Within just four years of finishing her PhD in biophysics, Jessica Tuchman Mathews was Director of Global Issues for President Carter's National Security Council. In her first year in the role she helped put together a nuclear non-proliferation pact among 15 countries including the US and the Soviet Union. Later in her career, Jessica served as Deputy to the Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs, wrote a weekly column for the Washington Post, and most recently served as President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an influential Washington-based foreign policy think tank. What launched such an successful career? In our conversation with Jessica, she argued it was the AAAS Science & Technology (S&T) Policy Fellowship. Jessica was selected as one of their inaugural fellows in 1973. In this article we argue that for eligible people interested in our top recommended problem areas and S&T policy careers the AAAS S&T Policy Fellowship is a valuable springboard that could rapidly advance your career as it did for Jessica. ###Summary * At 80,000 Hours, we think the AAAS Science & Technology (S&T) Policy Fellowship is one of the best routes into US S&T policy careers. * AAAS S&T Policy Fellows are highly regarded within the US government. * If you are a US citizen with a STEM or social science PhD, or an engineering masters and three years of industry experience, you can (https://www. aaas. org/page/stpf/become-fellow-application). We would also like to hear from you. * We discuss eligibility requirements...

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### Randomised experiment: If you're genuinely unsure whether to quit your job or break up, then you probably should

- Published: 2018-08-25
- Modified: 2024-05-06
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2018/08/randomised-experiment-if-youre-really-unsure-whether-to-quit-your-job-or-break-up-you-really-probably-should/
- Topics: Reasoning well, Unconventional advice

One of my favourite studies ever is 'Heads or Tails: The Impact of a Coin Toss on Major Life Decisions and Subsequent Happiness' by economist Steven Levitt of 'Freakonomics'. Levitt collected tens of thousands of people who were deeply unsure whether to make a big change in their life. After offering some advice on how to make hard choices, those who remained truly undecided were given the chance to use a flip of a coin to settle the issue. 22,500 did so. Levitt then followed up two and six months later to ask people whether they had actually made the change, and how happy they were out of 10. People who faced an important decision and got heads - which indicated they should quit, break up, propose, or otherwise mix things up - were 11 percentage points more likely to do so. It's very rare to get a convincing experiment that can help us answer as general and practical a question as 'if you're undecided, should you change your life? ' But this experiment can! I wish there were much more social science like this, for example, to figure out whether or not people should explore a wider variety of different jobs during their career (for more on that one see our articles on how to find the right career for you and what job characteristics really make people happy). The widely reported headline result was that people who made a change in their life as a result of the coin...

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### 80,000 Hours user data is affected by the Typeform data breach

> On Monday we learnt that Typeform, a popular service we’ve used to create some of our online forms, has suffered a significant data security breach. Many 80,000 Hours users have have completed one or more of these forms, and a subset of their form responses were among the information that was stolen from Typeform.

- Published: 2018-07-05
- Modified: 2018-07-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2018/07/typeform-data-breach/
- Topics: Updates

On Monday we learnt that Typeform, a popular service we’ve used to create some of our online forms, has suffered a significant data security breach. Many 80,000 Hours users have completed one or more of these forms, and a subset of their form responses were among the information that was stolen from Typeform.

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### Yes, a career in commercial law has earning potential. We still don’t recommend it.

- Published: 2018-03-08
- Modified: 2018-03-08
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2018/03/law-career-review-blog/
- Topics: Lawyer

Going into law isn’t going out of style. Law ranks among the top five career options for students and is one of the most popular degree courses at undergraduate level.What explains its persistent appeal? While people go into law for a number of reasons, many are motivated to make a difference through public interest and pro bono work.

Law is also one of the highest paying professions, however, so working directly on social justice issues isn’t the only way you can do good as a lawyer. If you enjoy commercial work and can secure a place at a high-paying firm, you can also have an impact by donating some of your earnings to charity. We call this <a href="https://80000hours.org/articles/earning-to-give/#top">earning to give</a>.

If you target your donations to highly effective charities, this could be just as high-impact as public interest law. Newly qualified lawyers at top-ranked firms can expect to earn upwards of £70,000. Donating 10% of this take-home pay would be enough to save somebody’s life by buying anti-malaria bednets. If you are one of the approximately 5% who makes partner, you could earn over £1m each year - enough to fund a whole team of researchers, advocates or non-profit entrepreneurs.

In this profile, we explore the pros and cons of law for earning to give. We focus on high-end commercial law – where the money is – and hope to discuss public interest law in a separate review. It’s based on the legal training and experience of the primary author of this profile, Natalie Cargill, as well as conversations with lawyers from a range of practice areas. We’ve also drawn on academic literature, surveys by the Law Society, and publicly-available salary data.


Going into law isn’t going out of style. Law ranks among the top five career options for students and is one of the most popular degree courses at undergraduate level. What explains its persistent appeal? While people go into law for a number of reasons, many are motivated to make a difference through public interest and pro bono work. Law is also one of the highest paying professions, however, so working directly on social justice issues isn’t the only way you can do good as a lawyer. If you enjoy commercial work and can secure a place at a high-paying firm, you can also have an impact by donating some of your earnings to charity. We call this earning to give. If you target your donations to highly effective charities, this could be just as high-impact as public interest law. Newly qualified lawyers at top-ranked firms can expect to earn upwards of £70,000. Donating 10% of this take-home pay would be enough to save somebody’s life by buying anti-malaria bednets. If you are one of the approximately 5% who makes partner, you could earn over £1m each year - enough to fund a whole team of researchers, advocates or non-profit entrepreneurs. In this profile, we explore the pros and cons of law for earning to give. We focus on high-end commercial law – where the money is – and hope to discuss public interest law in a separate review. It’s based on the legal...

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### Blog: A new recommended career path for effective altruists: China specialist

- Published: 2018-03-08
- Modified: 2020-02-13
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2018/03/china-careers-blog/
- Topics: Government &amp; policy

Last summer, China unveiled a plan to become the world leader in artificial intelligence, aiming to create a $150 billion industry by 2030. “We must take initiative to firmly grasp this new stage of development for artificial intelligence and create a new competitive edge,” the country’s State Council said. The move symbolised the technological thrust of "the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation" promoted by President Xi Jinping. And it’s not just AI. China is becoming increasingly important in the solution of other global problems prioritised by the effective altruism community, including biosecurity, factory farming and nuclear security. But few in the community know much about the country, and coordination between Chinese and Western organisations seems like it could be improved a great deal. This suggests that a high-impact career path could be to develop expertise in the intersection between China, effective altruism and pressing global issues. Once you’ve attained this expertise, you can use it to carry out research into global priorities or AI strategy; work in governments setting relevant areas of China-West policy, advise Western groups on how to work together with their Chinese counterparts, and other projects that we’ll sketch below...

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### Annual review December 2017

> We review our progress and mistakes over 2017, and plans for 2018.

- Published: 2017-12-24
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2017/12/annual-review/
- Topics: Updates

Summary This year, we focused on "upgrading" - getting engaged readers into our top priority career paths. We do this by writing articles on why and how to enter the priority paths, providing one-on-one advice to help the most engaged readers narrow down, and introductions to help them enter. Some of our main successes this year include: We developed and refined this upgrading process, having been focused on introductory content last year. We made lots of improvements to coaching, and released 48 pieces of content. We used the process to grow the number of rated-10 plan changes 2. 6-fold compared to 2016, from 19 to 50. We primarily placed people in AI technical safety, other AI roles, effective altruism nonprofits, earning to give and biorisk. We started tracking rated-100 and rated-1000 plan changes. We recorded 10 rated-100 and one rated-1000 plan change, so with this change, total new impact-adjusted significant plan changes (IASPC v2) doubled compared to 2016, from roughly 1200 to 2400. That means we've grown the annual rate of plan changes 23-fold since 2013. (If we ignore the rated-100+ category, then IASPCv1 grew 31% from 2017 to 2016, and 12-fold since 2013. ) This meant that despite rising costs, cost per IASPC was flat. We updated our historical and marginal cost-effectiveness estimates, and think we've likely been highly cost-effective, though we have a lot of uncertainty. We maintained a good financial position, hired three great full-time core...

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### Guide to effective holiday giving in 2017

- Published: 2017-12-22
- Modified: 2020-08-04
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2017/12/effective-holiday-giving-in-2017/
- Topics: Earning to Give

It's that wonderful time of year again - the time I have to rush out a blog post about effective holiday giving before heading off for the Christmas break. Here's our article on how to find the best charity to give to. In short we now recommend giving to the Effective Altruism Funds - this allows you to delegate the decision to world experts who research the most effective places to give full time. It's fast and really hard to do better. Alternatively, if you'd like to try something new, check out donor lotteries. They're a great innovation for small to medium sized donors, though take a minute to fully understand. If you want to do your own research, my holiday giving guide from last year is still a good starting point, as are the recent posts by the researchers at GiveWell and the Open Philanthropy on where they're giving. A possible new year's resolution Thinking longer term, this is the time of year that many people take the Giving What We Can pledge to donate 10% of their income to the most impactful organisations than can find. Last year 318 people did so over the holidays, and Giving What We Can is running a pledge drive again this year. Donating 10% is one of the more straightforward ways you can have more social impact. We've written up the case for taking it. For a lot of our readers it offers the chance to greatly improve or save many lives...

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### Why you should consider applying for grad school (but make sure you're aware of the potential drawbacks of attending!)

- Published: 2017-11-17
- Modified: 2024-12-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2017/11/consider-applying-for-a-phd-program-now/
- Topics: Academic Research, Graduate school, PhDs

Last updated: Aug 2018. Application deadlines for US PhD programs are coming up over the next month (as of Nov 2017). We think many of our readers who are considering grad school at some point in the next few years should apply this year. We're writing this informal list of pros and cons now because a number of people we've recently given career coaching to have been much more reluctant to apply for grad school than we think is justified. Why should they take the option seriously? You have to plan far ahead of time. If you apply now you will only begin the program late next year. Even if you don't feel ready to start a PhD today, you should consider whether you will be in a year's time. If you aren't sure, applying keeps that option open. We've spoken to many people considering grad school who intended to work for a few years first, but then had their situation change and grad school suddenly seem like a much better option. Early in your career, your plans can change more often than you expect. An increasing number of the paths we recommend, especially in research and policy, are much easier to pursue with a PhD. For example, if you want to work on improving our ability to control pandemics, the best options appear to be research (most likely in academia but perhaps also foundations or the private sector), or policy reform (in think tanks, government agencies, Congress, or...

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### What are the most important talent gaps in the effective altruism community?

- Published: 2017-11-03
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2017/11/talent-gaps-survey-2017/
- Topics: Building effective altruism, Building the effective altruism community, Effective Altruism, Operations at high impact organisations

Note that this article is from 2017. For more up-to-date findings, see our new 2018 survey, which asked most of the same questions and some additional ones. Update April 2019: We think that our use of the term 'talent gaps' in this post (and elsewhere) has caused some confusion. We've written a post clarifying what we meant by the term and addressing some misconceptions that our use of it may have caused. Most importantly, we now think it's much more useful to talk about specific skills and abilities that are important constraints on particular problems rather than talking about 'talent constraints' in general terms. This page may be misleading if it's not read in conjunction with our clarifications. What are the highest-impact opportunities in the effective altruism community right now? We surveyed leaders at 17 key organisations to learn more about what skills they need and how they would trade-off receiving donations against hiring good staff. It's a more extensive and up-to-date version of the survey we did last year. Below is a summary of the key numbers, a link to a presentation with all the results, a discussion of what these numbers mean, and at the bottom an appendix on how the survey was conducted and analysed. We also report on two additional surveys about the key bottlenecks in the community, and the amount of donations expected to these organisations. Key figures Willingness to pay to bring forward hires We asked how organisations would have to be compensated...

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### Our 20 most popular pieces of research

- Published: 2017-10-23
- Modified: 2017-10-23
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2017/10/our-20-most-popular-pieces-of-research/
- Topics: Uncategorised

I recently wanted to see what content we've written in the past are still popular with readers. Our most visited pages are articles in our career guide, or tools like our career quiz, problem quiz and career decision tool, around which the site is designed. And of course anything that was released recently tends to attract a lot of readers. So let's look at the others. These are the pieces we've written that i) were most visited over the last three months, and ii) were written more than six months ago, iii) not a tool or part of our career guide. Enjoy! What are the 10 most harmful jobs? * Problem profile: Why Bill Gates and others are concerned about AI, and what to do about it To find work you love, don't (always) follow your passion* Career review: Why an economics PhD might be the best graduate program Career review: If you want to change the world for the better, should you work in a think tank? Artificial Intelligence safety syllabus Which skills make you most employable? * Problem profile: Why helping to end factory farming could be the most important thing you could do Is global health the most pressing problem to work on? Everything you need to know about whether money makes you happy Quiz: Can you guess which social interventions work? How would you spend $500,000,000,000? Problem profile of global priorities research. Career review: Thinking of learning about data science? Read this first. Problem profile: Why preparing the...

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### New problem profile: Improving institutional decision-making

- Published: 2017-10-07
- Modified: 2017-10-07
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2017/10/new-problem-profile-improving-institutional-decision-making/
- Topics: Government &amp; policy

A few weeks ago we released a new problem profile focussed on improving decision-making in major societal institutions: When powerful people make dumb choices it hurts us all. Here’s how to fix it. In 2003, the United States chose to invade Iraq. Most now agree this decision was deeply flawed, costing trillions of dollars and thousands of lives. Exactly what went wrong here is a contested and controversial issue. At best, the decision-making process severely lacked rigour, and at worst, it was heavily biased. The government justified the invasion thanks to the intelligence community’s claim that it was “highly probable” that Iraq possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) – but this statement was ambiguous. Policymakers took that to indicate near-100% certainty, and made decisions accordingly. 1 But “highly probable” could easily also be interpreted as 80% certainty, or 70% – carrying very different practical implications. Those involved didn’t really think through the relevant probabilities, or consider how likely the estimates were to be wrong, or the implications if they were. Others have suggested that the US had already decided to invade Iraq, and that this decision influenced intelligence collection – not the other way around. This a particularly extreme example of what’s known as motivated reasoning – a tendency to reason in ways that support whatever conclusion one wants to be true. The call to invade hinged on the subjective impressions of a few key people – subjective impressions that later turned out to be wrong, made by people with complex...

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### New career review: Policy-oriented civil service (with a UK focus)

- Published: 2017-10-07
- Modified: 2017-10-07
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2017/10/new-career-review-policy-oriented-civil-service-with-a-uk-focus/
- Topics: Government &amp; policy

We have a new career review focussed on government jobs developing policy, with a focus on the UK: Working in the government you can have a big impact on pressing global problems. Here's how to get started. On the Sunday after Labour’s landslide victory in 1997, Tony Blair rang Alan Milburn to tell him he was going to be a minister in the Department of Health. Blair said: ‘We haven’t got a health policy. Your job is to get us one. ’1 Milburn ‘was hungry for ideas’1 and met with a civil servant: Graham Winyard, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer. According to Winyard, this meeting was where the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) was born. 1 NICE helps the National Health Service decide which treatments are evidence-based and cost-effective. Although its approach is controversial,2 NICE is seen internationally as a role model for how to make evidence-based decisions about health spending. 3 The editor of the British Medical Journal described it as ‘conquering the world’ and thought it might ‘prove to be one of Britain’s greatest cultural exports’. 4 What if you could have this kind of impact? There are civil servants working on some of the world’s most urgent problems, from how to prevent nuclear proliferation to encouraging economic growth in the developing world. Like Winyard, they often have opportunities to play a central role in solving these problems. In this profile we cover why it’s possible to have a significant impact as a civil servant, how you can get...

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### Which professions are paid too much given their value to society?

- Published: 2017-06-27
- Modified: 2022-12-14
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2017/06/which-jobs-do-economists-say-create-the-largest-spillover-benefits-for-society/
- Topics: Art &amp; Entertainment, Fields, Found a tech startup, Income

Many jobs have spillover effects on the rest of society. For instance, the value of new treatments discovered by biomedical researchers is far greater than what they or their employers get paid, so they have positive spillovers. Other jobs have negative spillovers, such as those that generate pollution. A forthcoming paper, by economists at UPenn and Yale, reports a survey of the economic literature on these spillover benefits for the 11 highest-earning professions. There's very little literature, so all these estimates are very, very uncertain, and should be not be taken literally. But it's interesting reading - it represents a survey of what economists think they know about this topic, and it's surprisingly little. Here are the bottom lines – see more detail on the estimates below. (Note that we already discussed an older version of this paper, but the estimates have been updated since then. ) We calculated mean income for 2005 in an earlier article. We increased income by 30% to account for nominal wage growth since then. The paper uses the expressions spillover and 'externality'. An 'externality' is a technical term for a 'cost or benefit that affects a party who did not choose to incur that cost or benefit. ' The authors of the paper call it an 'externality' when someone who buys a service does (or does not) benefit after taking account of the cost of purchasing it. This is a nonstandard usage, but fine for our purpose of assessing the overall social...

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### The Schwarzman Scholarship: An exciting opportunity to learn more about China and get a Masters in Global Affairs

- Published: 2017-06-13
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2017/06/the-schwarzman-scholarship-an-exciting-opportunity-to-learn-more-about-china-and-get-a-masters-in-global-affairs/
- Topics: China-related AI safety &amp; governance, China-Western coordination, Government &amp; policy, Specialist in emerging global powers

Co-authored with Helen Toner. In general, living in a foreign country - for example, by studying there - is a great way to learn about the country, its language, people, and culture. There's one country in particular we think it would be very valuable for some of our readers to become knowledgable about: China. It's the world's largest country by population, and gets closer every year to being the largest global economy too. On the international stage, China is the probably world's second most influential country. Its influence in economic, geopolitical, and cultural terms looks set to continue to grow throughout the course of the 21st century. All of this means that China is likely to play a larger and larger role in all kinds of areas, including topics we care a great deal about, like factory farming, pandemic preparedness, preserving international peace and cooperation, and AI research. Being familiar with China is likely to provide unique and high-value opportunities to people working in those areas. What's more, there aren't yet many westerners with deep (or even passing) familiarity with China, which suggests that now is an especially valuable time to be learning more. If you'd like to become knowledgable about China, there is a promising new way to do that: the Schwarzman Scholarship program. Modelled on the Rhodes Scholarship, the Schwarzman Scholarship is targeted at high achieving students from around the world with an interest in leadership, entrepreneurship, and international affairs. Each year, the program accepts up to 200...

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### How much do hedge fund traders earn?

- Published: 2017-05-10
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2017/05/how-much-do-hedge-fund-traders-earn/
- Topics: Asset Management, Earning to give in quant trading, Economics, Income, Investment Banking, Quantitative hedge funds

Hedge fund trading may be the highest paying job in the world, so to learn more, we spoke with a former manager at one of the world's leading hedge funds. They gave us the following information, which allowed us to make a rough estimate of the typical earnings of hedge fund traders. We also ran this document past several other people in the industry and asked them to point out mistakes. We found that junior traders typically earn $300k - $3m per year, and it's possible to reach these roles in 4 - 8 years. Senior portfolio managers can easily earn over $10m per year, though average earnings are probably lower. Read on for the details. We're interested in this option because it could allow you to donate a lot to charity – what we call "(/earning-to-give)". Whether or not that's a good idea depends on many other factors, such as your reduced potential to good directly through your work, and even the possibility of causing harm. It's also an extremely competitive option that won't be a good fit for many. In this post, we only explore the question of how much staff in hedge funds earn. (Also note we're focused more on discretionary traders than purely quantitative traders, which have a different career progression. ) How do hedge funds make money and how is it shared among the employees? Hedge funds trade in financial markets on behalf of clients in exchange for annual fees,...

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### Most people report believing it's incredibly cheap to save lives in the developing world

- Published: 2017-05-09
- Modified: 2023-11-28
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2017/05/most-people-report-believing-its-incredibly-cheap-to-save-lives-in-the-developing-world/
- Topics: Reasoning well

One way that people can have a social impact with their career is to donate money to effective charities. We mention this path in our career guide, suggesting that people donate to evidence-backed charities such as the Against Malaria Foundation, which is estimated by GiveWell to save the lives of children in the developing world for around $7,500 . Alyssa Vance told me that many people may see this as highly ineffective relatively to their optimistic expectations about how much it costs to improve the lives of people. I thought the reverse would be true - folks would be skeptical that charities in the developing world were effective at all. Fortunately Amazon Mechanical Turk makes it straightforward to survey public opinion at a low cost, so there was no need for us to sit around speculating. I suggested a survey on this question to someone in the effective altruism community with a lot of experience using Mechanical Turk - Spencer Greenberg of Clearer Thinking - and he went ahead and conducted one in just a few hours. You can work through the survey people took yourself here and we've put the data and some details about the method in a footnote. The results clearly vindicated Alyssa: It turns out that most Americans believe a child can be prevented from dying of preventable diseases for very little - less than $100. In fact, 40% of people believed the 'most effective charities' could save a life...

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### How accurately does anyone know the global distribution of income?

- Published: 2017-04-06
- Modified: 2022-12-14
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2017/04/how-accurately-does-anyone-know-the-global-distribution-of-income/
- Topics: Effective Altruism, Income, Reasoning well, Uncategorised

How much should you believe the numbers in figures like this? People in the effective altruism community often refer to the global income distribution to make various points: The richest people in the world are many times richer than the poor. People earning professional salaries in countries like the US are usually in the top 5% of global earnings and fairly often in the top 1%. This gives them a disproportionate ability to improve the world. Many people in the world live in serious absolute poverty, surviving on as little as one hundredth the income of the upper-middle class in the US. Measuring the global income distribution is very difficult and experts who attempt to do so end up with different results. However, these core points are supported by every attempt to measure the global income distribution that we've seen so far. The rest of this post will discuss the global income distribution data we've referred to, the uncertainty inherent in that data, and why we believe our bottom lines hold up anyway. Will MacAskill had a striking illustration of global individual income distribution in his book Doing Good Better, that has ended up in many other articles online, including our own career guide:       The data in this graph was put together back in 2012 using an approach suggested by Branko Milanovic, at the time lead economist in the World Bank's research department, and author of The Haves and the Have-Nots. Incidentally, Milanovic went on to achieve...

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### What skills are effective altruist organisations short of? Results from our survey.

> A survey of the skills that are most lacking in the effective altruism community.

- Published: 2017-03-19
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2017/03/what-skills-are-effective-altruist-organisations-missing/
- Topics: Building the effective altruism community, Effective Altruism, How to get a job

Note we've replaced this survey with one that's more comprehensive and up-to-date. In August 2016, we surveyed 16 organisations in the effective altruism community about their hiring needs, and to what extent they are constrained by talent compared to funding. What follows is a summary of the results, grouped by question asked. You can see the list of organisations surveyed in the footnotes. Note that since the survey was carried out over six months ago, some of the information may no longer be up to date. We intend to repeat the survey in August 2017, and will report back on how the situation has changed. What types of talent does your organisation need? Here are the options provided on the survey, along with the number of organisations which stated that they were looking to hire people for these roles: (Note that this table is not weighted by budget or team size, although we do not expect that this would materially affect the results. ) In open feedback, several respondents also mentioned that the community is most in need of specialist researchers rather than generalist researchers. Some other skill sets which were not included as options, but which were mentioned more than twice in the open feedback include: Economists, in 3 cases. Math and AI researchers, in 2 cases. Policy experts, in 2 cases. Scientists, especially biologists, in 3 cases. Also see the longer list of skill sets needed by the community at the end of this summary... .

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### 5 reasons not to go into education

> Many people who want to make a difference are interested in careers in education. But there's many reasons education doesn't look like the best cause to enter.

- Published: 2017-01-16
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2017/01/5-reasons-not-to-go-into-education/
- Topics: Education, Reasoning well

First published June 2015. Updated February 2017. When we first speak to people interested in doing good with their careers, they often say they want to get involved in education in the US or the UK. This could mean donating to a school, doing education policy work, or becoming a teacher. However, we haven't prioritised careers in education at 80,000 Hours. We don't dispute that education is a highly important problem – a more educated population could enable us to solve many other global challenges, as well as yield major economic benefits. The problem is that it doesn't seem to be very easy to solve or neglected (important elements of our problem framework). So, it looks harder to have a large impact in education compared to many other areas. In the rest of this post, we'll give five reasons why. The following isn't the result of in-depth research; it's just meant to explain why we've deprioritised education so far. Our views could easily change. Note that in this post we're not discussing education in the developing world. 1. It's harder to help people in the US or UK Everyone in the US or UK is rich by global standards: the poorest 5% of Americans are richer than the richest 5% of Indians (and that's adjusted for the difference in purchasing power, see an explanation and the full data). In general additional resources go further the poorer someone is, and working on US or UK education means focusing on helping those...

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### The effective altruism guide to donating this giving season

- Published: 2016-12-28
- Modified: 2024-11-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2016/12/the-effective-altruism-guide-to-donating-this-giving-season/
- Topics: Earning to Give, Effective Altruism, Top-recommended organisations

People in the effective altruism community aim to use evidence and careful reasoning to work out how to best promote the wellbeing of all. To find the highest-impact charities this giving season, they’ve done tens of thousands of hours of research and published over 50,000 words of analysis this month. We read it all, and summed up the main recommendations by area.

But which of the 9 problem areas listed should you personally give to? We’ve got you covered here too. This tool asks you six questions and adjusts the ranking based on your beliefs:

<a href="https://www.guidedtrack.com/programs/zjnd6ox/run" class="btn btn-primary" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Quiz: Which problem should you give to? &rarr;</a>

In the full post, you can find (i) how we came up with the list, (ii) more advice on how to narrow down the list, (iii) more information on each charity.


Update Dec 2017: This post has been mostly superseded by our key article on finding the best charity which suggests giving to the Effective Altruism Funds. GiveWell and Open Philanthropy have released new posts on where their staff are giving in 2017 - don't miss the section from Nick Beckstead. GiveWell and Animal Charity Evaluators have updated their lists of recommended charities. A contributor to the EA Forum has again investigated charities focussed on positively shaping the development of artificial intelligence. People in the effective altruism community aim to use evidence and careful reasoning to work out how to best promote the wellbeing of all. To find the highest-impact charities this giving season, they've done tens of thousands of hours of research and published over 50,000 words of analysis this month. We read it all, and summed up the main recommendations by area below (not in priority order): Biosecurity Blue Ribbon Study Panel on Biodefense Climate change Cool Earth Criminal justice (US-focused) Alliance for Safety and Justice Cosecha Effective altruism promotion and research Centre for Effective Altruism 80,000 Hours Factory farming Animal Charity Evaluators Compassion in World Farming Global health and development Against Malaria Foundation Schistosomiasis Control Initiative Mental health Strong Minds Nuclear security Ploughshares fund Risks from artificial intelligence Machine Intelligence Research Institute But which of the 9 problem areas listed below should you personally give to? We've got you covered here too. This tool asks you six questions and adjusts the ranking based on your beliefs: Quiz:...

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### 80,000 Hours annual review Dec 2016

- Published: 2016-12-24
- Modified: 2024-12-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2016/12/annual-review-dec-2016/
- Topics: Updates

Summary 2016 was an excellent year for 80,000 Hours. Here are some highlights – full details follow. Metrics In our last review in May 2015, we set the goal of 50 significant plan changes per month by October 2016. That month, we actually recorded over 200. To make it harder to grow by adding lots of small plan changes, in October 2015 we started "impact rating" the plan changes, and tracking the impact-weighted total. 31 Dec 2015, we set the target of tripling the monthly rate of impact-adjusted plan changes over the year, which we achieved in November 2016. We now track about 150 impact-adjusted significant plan changes (IASPC) per month. Impact and cost-effectiveness Our costs in 2016 were £250,000, up 13% on 2015. Considering that our staff could have earned to give instead, the total opportunity cost is perhaps £350,000 – £500,000. Since our last review, the ratio of costs to IASPC fell almost 3-fold. In 2016, we caused 115 people to take the Giving What We Can (GWWC) 10% pledge. GWWC estimates this is worth about £5 million in donations to their recommended charities (counterfactually-adjusted, time-discounted, dropout adjusted). So this alone plausibly justifies our costs, although our aim is to solve talent gaps rather than funding gaps. In addition, the plan changes since our last review now include three people who each intend to donate over $100m over their lifetimes, and we've advised several other...

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### Has 80,000 Hours justified its costs?

- Published: 2016-12-23
- Modified: 2023-10-31
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2016/12/has-80000-hours-justified-its-costs/
- Topics: Updates

We set up 80,000 Hours because we thought it could become one of the most effective charities in the world. The idea was to achieve a multiplier – with a small amount of our time, we could enable thousands of others to spend their careers on whatever is most effective, and achieve thousands of times as much as we could individually. In this post, we examine whether 80,000 Hours has generated enough impact to justify its costs over our history, and make some rough estimates of our multiplier. Because it's hard to estimate what would have happened if 80,000 Hours had never existed, all of these estimates are very uncertain, and can be debated. However, there are multiple ways we've plausibly justified our costs to date. In this document, we sketch out some of these pathways. We're not aiming to be fully rigorous. Rather, consider the examples as a group. If only a few turn out to be genuine cases of impact, we'll have justified our costs many times over. Is this the wrong question? 80,000 Hours is a startup. Asking whether we've justified our costs to date is like asking whether Google was profitable in 2000. The aim of 80,000 Hours is to grow, and have a far larger impact years in the future. Most of the value of donations to 80,000 Hours comes from the chance that these donations enable us to grow 10-times...

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### End of year update on plan changes

- Published: 2016-12-22
- Modified: 2020-08-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2016/12/metrics-report-2016/
- Topics: Updates

This is an update on the number of significant plan changes we’ve caused as of the end of Nov 2016.

We define a significant plan change as:

<blockquote>
  Someone tells us that 80,000 Hours caused them to change the career path they intend to pursue, in a way that they think increases their lifetime impact.
</blockquote>

More on what counts as a significant plan change <a href="https://80000hours.org/2015/07/new-definition-of-a-significant-plan-change/">here</a>.

Our total number of plan changes as of the end of Nov 2016 is <strong>1,854</strong>, and after impact-adjusting these it’s <strong>1,504.8</strong>.


This is an update on the number of significant plan changes we’ve caused as of the end of Nov 2016. We define a significant plan change as: Someone tells us that 80,000 Hours caused them to change the career path they intend to pursue, in a way that they think increases their lifetime impact. More on what counts as a significant plan change here. Our total number of plan changes as of the end of Nov 2016 is 1,854, and after impact-adjusting these it’s 1,504. 8. Here’s a summary of our key figures: Impact-adjustment of plan changes In October 2015, we started rating plan changes with a value of 0. 1, 1 or 10 based on our estimate of their counterfactual impact, in order to track the quality of plan changes over time. Read more. Number of plan changes Here's the breakdown by year: Note that we only started collecting plan changes in 2013, but started outreach in 2011. This means the 2013 figures reflect three years of work rather than one, so our growth from 2013 to 2014 was better than it looks from these charts. Also, the figures for 2016 don’t include December, so our year-on-year growth rates will be somewhat higher once all of 2016 is included. Our month-on-month growth rates over 3 years are faster than our year-on-year growth rates, because we grew quickly during 2016. Here are our...

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### 80,000 Hours has a funding gap

- Published: 2016-12-08
- Modified: 2020-08-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2016/12/80000-hours-has-a-funding-gap/
- Topics: Building effective altruism

Over the past three years, we’ve grown almost 36-fold, more than tripling each year. This is measured in terms of our key metric - the number of impact-adjusted significant plan changes each month. At the same time, our budget has only increased 27% per year. Given this success, we think it’s time to take 80,000 Hours to the next level of funding. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be preparing our full annual review and fundraising documents, but here’s a preview. Overall, the 2017 target is to triple, measured in terms of impact-adjusted significant plan changes per month (which will mean over 3,000 over the year). We’ll do this by continuing to improve the advice, and starting to scale up marketing, with the aim of becoming the default source of career advice for talented, socially-motivated graduates. Concretely, here’s some priorities we could pursue: Dramatically improve the career reviews and problem profiles, so we have in-depth profiles of all the best options. This will help our existing users make better changes, and bring in more traffic. Upgrading - develop mentors and specialist content for the most high-potential users, such as those who want to work on AI risk, policy, EA orgs and so on. We now have a large base of engaged users (1300+ through the workshop, 80,000+ on newsletter), so there’s a lot of follow-up we could do to get more valuable plan changes from them. Create...

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### How much is one vote worth?

- Published: 2016-11-04
- Modified: 2022-03-22
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2016/11/why-the-hour-you-spend-voting-is-the-most-socially-impactful-of-all/
- Topics: Government &amp; policy, Party Politics, Politics

Just 537 votes in Florida would have been enough to change the outcome of the 2000 election from George Bush to Al Gore — a margin of 0. 009% (recount pictured above). And that wasn’t even the closest-won state that year: in New Mexico the margin was a mere 366 votes. People say it’s your civic duty to vote, but it also seems like it’s very unlikely your vote will make a difference. Who is right? Is voting really valuable, or a waste of time? We looked into the research on this, especially regarding the US Presidential election, though similar reasoning will apply to election overseas. The answer, surprisingly, is that the single hour you spend voting for the President and Congress can be the most important thing you do with an hour each four years — and we expect similar numbers for other kinds of elections outside the USA. It also looks like there are effective techniques you can use to 'get out the vote', if you want to do more than just vote yourself. The impact of your vote largely depends on 2 things, which we’ll investigate in turn: The chances of your vote changing the election outcome. How much better for the world as a whole one candidate is, compared to another. At first blush it might seem that the chances of your one vote changing the election outcome are zero. But while the chances are low, they aren't zero. They could be as high as 1...

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### Update on 80,000 Hours May 2015 - June 2016

- Published: 2016-09-08
- Modified: 2021-11-18
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2016/09/update-on-80000-hours-may-2015-june-2016/
- Topics: Updates

This is a quick update on our progress over the last year. Our next in-depth annual review, in which we’ll vet everything in more depth, will be in January 2017.

<h2>Our impact across the year</h2>

Here’s our key metrics for the top of our funnel. Ultimately we care about significant plan changes, which we report right below.

<img src="https://80000hours.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Unique-visitors-to-site.png" alt="Unique visitors to site" width="1741" height="568" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-36077" />
<img src="https://80000hours.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/New-newsletter-subscribers.png" alt="New newsletter subscribers" width="1379" height="354" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-36076" />

Our newsletter now has a total of over 50,000 subscribers, which we think makes it the largest in the effective altruism community (most others have about 10,000). Our total traffic also just overtook GiveWell, which we think is the next largest by traffic (we had 880,000 users over the 12 months ending June, compared to 860,000 when calculated the same way.)


This is a quick update on our progress over the last year. Our next annual review, in which we’ll vet everything in more depth, will be around January 2017. Some key takeaways: Compared to the previous year, the rate of new newsletter subs increased about 16-fold, and rate of new impact-adjusted significant plan changes increased 3-fold. We now have over 50,000 on our list, and have recorded over 870 impact-adjusted significant plan changes in total. We've continued to find impressive plan changes, and plan changers from previous years have continued to have an impact (see examples below). Over the year, cost per plan change halved. During the year, we (i) went through Y Combinator (ii) greatly improved the online career guide, which now has about 100,000 unique readers per month, (iii) released Doing Good Better and (iv) developed a new 4h career workshop. We had some disruptive team changes at the start of the period, but settled down to a strong team in the middle of the year. We've added three great hires: Rob Wiblin (formerly CEO of CEA), Peter McIntyre (co-founder of EA Australia), and Jesse Avshalomov (former Head of Growth and Product at Teespring). Going forward, we'll focus on an outreach campaign to students Sept-Nov 2016, then improving the online guide in early 2017. Our aim is for the guide to become the best source of career advice for talented, socially-motivated, young graduates. Our...

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### Trevor decided to move from a nonprofit to a for-profit to do more good in the long run. Was it the right call?

- Published: 2016-08-03
- Modified: 2021-11-17
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2016/08/plan-change-story-building-skills-in-the-private-sector-to-have-more-impact-in-the-long-run/
- Topics: Career capital

This is part of our series of profiles of people who changed their career in a major way in order to have more impact because of their exposure to 80,000 Hours. I recently spoke to Trevor Shorb about how his career plans changed as a result of 80,000 Hours. After finishing university, Trevor worked in the Peace Corps in El Salvador and planned to work for an NGO in the developing world. But after reading our advice, he decided to gain skills in the private sector first, in order to have a bigger impact in the long run. Today Trevor does business development for an international education company in emerging markets in Latin America. He plans to start a nonprofit or for-profit in the developing world in the future. How and why did he make this transition? Read our interview with him to find out. How did you find out about 80,000 Hours and effective altruism, and what were you planning on doing with your career before that? I first became interested in effective altruism when I read “The Life You Can Save” around the time I graduated college and had committed to serve in the Peace Corps. Before that I had undergone a fundamental change in perspective. Recruited to college to play lacrosse, I was fully dedicated to the pursuit of being the best and leading the team. A case of chronic Lyme disease led to multiple operations and much time spent in doctor’s offices. After years of treatment...

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### Is deep work the most underappreciated skill for career success? An interview with Cal Newport.

- Published: 2016-08-02
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2016/08/is-deep-work-the-most-underappreciated-skill-for-career-success-an-interview-with-cal-newport/
- Topics: Individual reasoning &amp; cognition, Uncategorised, Unconventional advice

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king - or so the saying goes. In his new book, Deep Work, Cal Newport argues that when it comes to deep concentration, we have become the land of the blind. He believes that the ability to do focused work is essential for career success, but becoming increasingly rare. And the fewer people are capable of deep work, the more of an edge you should be able to get by being the exception. We think Cal is one of the most interesting thinkers working on the issue of career strategy, so recommend you check it out. We interviewed Cal to learn more. Quick summary of the book Cal defines "deep work" as "the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task". In his previous book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, Cal argues it's better to focus on gaining career capital rather than "following your passion" (we agree). Part one of Deep Work takes off where his previous book ends – he argues that deep work is essential to gaining valuable career capital. In short: Deep work is increasingly valuable in the modern economy because it's what allows you to master new intellectual skills and produce creative breakthroughs. People able to do both of these can take work that's unlikely to be automated and reach the top of their fields, which is becoming increasingly important as top performers are becoming more dominant of their fields. At the same...

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### Update on number of significant plan changes

- Published: 2016-07-14
- Modified: 2020-08-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2016/07/update-on-number-of-significant-plan-changes/
- Topics: Updates

This is a brief update on the number of significant plan changes we’ve caused as of the end of Dec 2015.

We define a significant plan change as:

<blockquote>
  Someone tells us that 80,000 Hours caused them to change the career path they intend to pursue, in a way that they think increases their lifetime impact.
</blockquote>

More on what counts as a significant plan change <a href="https://80000hours.org/2015/07/new-definition-of-a-significant-plan-change/">here</a>.

Our total number of significant plan changes as of the end of Dec 2015 is <strong>453</strong>.

Here’s a summary of our key figures:


This is a brief update on the number of significant plan changes we’ve caused as of the end of Dec 2015. We define a significant plan change as: Someone tells us that 80,000 Hours caused them to change the career path they intend to pursue, in a way that they think increases their lifetime impact. More on what counts as a significant plan change here. Our total number of significant plan changes as of the end of Dec 2015 is 453. Here’s a summary of our key figures: Note: “YoY growth rate” stands for “year-on-year growth rate”. Also note that our financial cost figures for 2015 are preliminary. Impact-adjustment of significant plan changes In October 2015 we decided to start estimating the relative value of the significant plan changes, so that we had a better sense of our overall impact. To do this, we now score each significant plan change with a value of 0. 1, 1 or 10. The score is meant to represent how much extra counterfactual impact will result from a plan change. A typical plan change scored 10 is someone who, in large part due to us, switched to working at a highly effective organisation like GiveWell, became a major donor (>$100k/year) to effective organisations, or become a major advocate of effective causes. A typical plan change scored 1 is someone who has taken the Giving What We Can...

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### Maria Gutierrez on doing good through art, Costa Rica and why 80,000 Hours changed her career

> In 2014 Maria had a general desire to improve the world, but no idea how to put that into practice. She didn't see any way to do good using her art.

- Published: 2016-06-02
- Modified: 2024-11-18
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2016/06/interview-with-maria-gutierrez-about-doing-good-through-art/
- Topics: Art &amp; Entertainment, Effective Altruism, Job satisfaction, Personal fit, Unconventional advice

This week I interviewed Maria Gutierrez to learn more about how 80,000 Hours had changed her career plans. For the last year Maria has been our freelance graphic designer, producing most of the artwork on our site today.

I sped up the recording so it is quick to listen to:

<iframe width="100%" height="150" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" allow="autoplay" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/267171511&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=false&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true&visual=true"></iframe>

<div style="font-size: 10px; color: #cccccc;line-break: anywhere;word-break: normal;overflow: hidden;white-space: nowrap;text-overflow: ellipsis; font-family: Interstate,Lucida Grande,Lucida Sans Unicode,Lucida Sans,Garuda,Verdana,Tahoma,sans-serif;font-weight: 100;"></div>

<h2>Summary of the interview</h2>


<ul><li>In 2014 Maria had a general desire to improve the world, but no idea how to put that into practice. She didn't see any way to do useful work while using her creative skills and was frustrated by this.</li>
<li>She stumbled onto 80,000 Hours and effective altruism while browsing the internet, and its 'honesty' immediately resonated with her. It provided a much more concrete way to assess what would actually be useful to do than she previously had. It was the first time she had considered 'earning to give' as a way to do good.</li>
<li>She realised that she could do a lot of good by using her artistic skills to contribute to any organisation that does exceptional work. She decided to make her first contribution by working for us.</li>
<li>Maria decided to move back to Costa Rica to dramatically lower her cost of living, and thereby be able to donate more. This is possible because all the work she does is online for groups in the US and UK. She recommends other people think about doing the same thing, and we suggest some careers that are particularly promising for remote work.</li>
<li>We discuss how the 80,000 Hours framework can be applied to others in the creative arts, and challenge the view that such skills are not valuable.</li>
<li>Long term, Maria is weighing up earning to give as a fine artist, against doing 'direct work' as a designer for non-profits or for-profits that she thinks are having a large social impact.</li>
<li>This raises tricky issues about personal fit, and which sacrifice she is willing to make and which she isn't. Maria doesn't think she could be happy without being challenged artistically. She also thinks she would burn out doing pure marketing.</li>
<li>Finally, we discuss RISE (Red de Impacto Sustenible y Effectivo), en effective altruism inspired organistion for Costa Rica, which she intends to launch with a friend. Maria explains why she doesn't want to take donations away from charities that work in countries poorer than Costa Rica.</li></ul>



This week I interviewed Maria Gutierrez to learn more about how 80,000 Hours had changed her career plans. For the last year Maria has been our freelance graphic designer, producing most of the artwork on our site today. I sped up the recording so it is quick to listen to: Summary of the interview In 2014 Maria had a general desire to improve the world, but no idea how to put that into practice. She didn't see any way to do useful work while continuing to use her creative skills and was frustrated by this. She stumbled onto 80,000 Hours and effective altruism while browsing the internet, and its 'honesty' immediately resonated with her. It provided a concrete way to assess what would actually be useful to do where previously she had no way to think this through. It was the first time she considered 'earning to give' as a way to do good. She realised that she could do a lot of good by using her artistic skills to help grow any organisation that does exceptional work. She decided to start by offering to work for us. Maria decided to move back from New York to Costa Rica in order to dramatically lower her cost of living, and thereby be able to donate more. This is possible because all of her work is done remotely, for teams in the US and UK. She recommends other people seriously consider doing the same thing, and we suggest some careers and...

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### The rent is too damn high — should you work on reforming land use regulations?

> Local laws often prohibit the construction of dense new housing, which drives up prices, especially in a few large high-wage urban areas.

- Published: 2016-05-11
- Modified: 2021-11-18
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2016/05/the-rent-is-too-damn-high-should-you-work-on-reforming-land-use-regulations/
- Topics: Other pressing problems

We've released a new 'problem profile' on reform of how land is used in cities. Local laws often prohibit the construction of dense new housing, which drives up prices, especially in a few large high-wage urban areas. The increased prices transfer wealth from renters to landowners and push people away from centres of economic activity, which reduces their ability to get a job or earn higher wages, likely by a very large amount. An opportunity to tackle the problem which nobody has yet taken is to start a nonprofit or lobbying body to advocate for more housing construction in key urban areas and states. Another option would be to try to shift zoning decisions from local to state governments, where they are less likely to be determined by narrow local interests, especially existing land-owners who benefit from higher property prices. In the profile we cover: The main reasons for and against thinking that working on land use reform is among the best uses of your time. How to use your career to make housing in prospering cities more accessible to ordinary people. Read our full profile on land use reform.

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### New report: Is climate change the biggest problem in the world?

> How does climate change rank amongst the worlds biggest problems? Should you use your career to work on this problem?

- Published: 2016-05-11
- Modified: 2016-05-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2016/05/how-can-we-buy-more-insurance-against-extreme-climate-change/
- Topics: Uncategorised

We've released a new 'problem profile' on the risks posed by extreme climate change. There is a small but non-negligible chance that unmitigated greenhouse emissions will lead to very large increases in global temperatures, which would likely have catastrophic consequences for life on Earth. Though the chance of catastrophic outcomes is relatively low, the degree of harm that would result from large temperature increases is very high, meaning that the expected value of working on this problem may also be very high. Options for working on this problem include academic research into the extreme risks of climate change or whether they might be mitigated by geoengineering. One can also advocate for reduced greenhouse emissions through careers in politics, think-tanks or journalism, and work on developing lower emissions technology as an engineer or scientist. In the profile we cover: The main reasons for and against thinking that the 'tail risks' of climate change are a highly pressing problem to work on. How climate change scores on our assessment rubric for ranking the biggest problems in the world How to use your career to lower the risk posed by climate change. Read our full profile on the most extreme risks from climate change. .

---

### Why and how to work on nuclear security

- Published: 2016-04-12
- Modified: 2016-07-21
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2016/04/how-and-why-to-work-on-nuclear-security/
- Topics: Uncategorised

We've released a new 'problem profile' on the risks posed by nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons that are currently armed have the potential to kill hundreds of millions of people directly, and billions through subsequent effects on agriculture. There are many examples in history of instances in which the US or Russia came close to accidentally or deliberately using their nuclear weapons. Fortunately, nuclear security is already a major topic of interest for governments, inter-governmental organisations and think tanks. However, this does make it harder for any additional individual to influence the outcome. Most opportunities to reduce the risks posed by nuclear weapons seem to be through work in the military or foreign policy establishments, or research in the think tanks that offer them ideas on how to lessen the risk of nuclear conflict. In the profile we cover: The main reasons for and against thinking that nuclear security is a highly pressing problem to work on. How to use your career to ensure nuclear weapons are never used. Read our full profile on nuclear security.

---

### How and why to use your career to make artificial intelligence safer

> We've released a new 'problem profile' on the risks posed by artificial intelligence.

- Published: 2016-04-07
- Modified: 2016-06-13
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2016/04/why-and-how-to-use-your-career-to-make-artificial-intelligence-safe/
- Topics: Existential risk, World problems

We've released a new 'problem profile' on the risks posed by artificial intelligence. Many experts believe that there is a significant chance we’ll create artificially intelligent machines with abilities surpassing those of humans - superintelligence - sometime during this century. These advances could lead to extremely positive developments, but could also pose risks due to catastrophic accidents or misuse. The people working on this problem aim to maximise the chance of a positive outcome, while reducing the chance of catastrophe. Work on the risks posed by superintelligent machines seems mostly neglected, with total funding for this research well under $10 million a year. The main opportunity to deal with the problem is to conduct research in philosophy, computer science and mathematics aimed at keeping an AI’s actions and goals in alignment with human intentions, even if it were much more intelligent than us. In the profile we cover: The main reasons for and against thinking that the future risks posed by artificial intelligence are a highly pressing problem to work on. How to use your career to reduce the risks posed by artificial intelligence. Read our full profile on the risks posed by artificial intelligence.

---

### The case for and against using your career to combat smoking

> Smoking takes an enormous toll on human health - accounting for about 6% of all ill-health globally according to the best estimates.

- Published: 2016-04-06
- Modified: 2016-04-06
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2016/04/the-case-for-dedicating-your-career-to-tobacco-control/
- Topics: Global Health, World problems

We've released a new problem profile on reducing tobacco use in the developing world. Smoking takes an enormous toll on human health - accounting for about 6% of all ill-health globally according to the best estimates. This is more than HIV and malaria combined. Smoking continues to rise in many developing countries as people become richer and can afford to buy cigarettes. There are ways to lower smoking rates that have been shown to work elsewhere, such as informing people who are unaware about how much smoking damages their health, as well as simply increasing the price of cigarettes through taxes. These are little used in developing countries, suggesting there is a major opportunity to improve human health by applying the World Health Organization's recommended anti-tobacco programs. In the profile we cover: The main reasons for and against thinking that smoking in the developing world is a highly pressing problem to work on. How to use your career to reduce the health damage caused by smoking. Read our profile on tobacco control in the developing world.

---

### Why and how to work on cause prioritisation research

> Global priorities research seeks to use new methods to determine in which causes funding to improve the world can have the biggest impact.

- Published: 2016-04-05
- Modified: 2016-04-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2016/04/why-and-how-to-work-on-cause-prioritisation-research/
- Topics: World problems

We've released a new problem profile on global priorities research based on our investigation of the area in 2014. Governments, charities, intergovernmental organisations, and social enterprises spend large amounts of money to improve the world but there is currently little research to guide them on what priorities they should focus on at the highest level. Global priorities research seeks to use new methods to determine in which causes funding to improve the world can have the biggest impact, and make a convincing case about this to people in a position to redirect large amounts of money. In the profile we cover: The main reasons for and against thinking that global priorities research is a highly pressing topic to work on. How to use your career to make progress in this research area. Read our profile on global priorities research.

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### Is global health the most pressing problem to work on?

- Published: 2016-04-04
- Modified: 2016-04-04
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2016/04/why-and-how-to-work-on-global-health-problems/
- Topics: Global Health, World problems

Every year around ten million people in poorer countries die of illnesses that can be very cheaply prevented or managed, including malaria, HIV, tuberculosis and diarrhoea. In many cases these diseases or their impacts can be largely eliminated with cheap technologies that are known to work and have existed for decades. Over the last 60 years, death rates from several of these diseases have been more than halved, suggesting particularly clear ways to make progress. In our full 'problem profile on health in poor countries' we cover: The main reasons for and against thinking that this is the most pressing problem to work on. How to use your career to combat diseases of poverty. Read our profile on health in poor countries.

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### Why and how to use your career to work on biosecurity

> Natural pandemics and new scientifically engineered pathogens could potentially kill millions or even billions of people. 

- Published: 2016-04-03
- Modified: 2016-04-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2016/04/why-and-how-to-use-your-career-to-work-on-biosecurity/
- Topics: Existential risk, World problems

We've released a new profile on biosecurity. Natural pandemics and new scientifically engineered pathogens could potentially kill millions or even billions of people. Moreover, future progress in synthetic biology is likely to increase the risk and severity of pandemics from engineered pathogens. But there are promising paths to reducing these risks through regulating potentially dangerous research, improving early detection systems and developing better international emergency response plans. In the profile we cover: The main reasons for and against thinking that biosecurity is a highly pressing problem. How to use your career to work on reducing the risks from pandemics. Read our profile on biosecurity.

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### Why and how to use your career to end factory farming

> Each year, 50 billion animals are raised and slaughtered in factory farms. Most experience extreme levels of suffering. 

- Published: 2016-04-03
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2016/04/new-profile-on-factory-farming/
- Topics: Factory Farming, World problems

We've released a new problem profile on factory farming. 50,000,000,000 animals are raised and slaughtered in factory farms globally each year. Most experience extreme levels of suffering over the course of their lives. But there are promising paths to improving the conditions of factory farmed animals and to reducing meat consumption. In the profile we cover: The main reasons for and against thinking that factory farming is a highly pressing problem. How to use your career to work on ending factory farming. Read our profile on factory farming.

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### We'll pay you up to £1,000 to write a career review for us

> To get more career reviews written quickly we are going to experiment with allowing readers to submit them themselves.

- Published: 2016-03-30
- Modified: 2016-09-28
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2016/03/write-career-reviews-for-us-as-a-freelancer/
- Topics: Uncategorised

Update: Unfortunately, due to staff limitations we cannot accept any more freelance career reviews. -- You can earn £1,000 by writing a review of a career path that's sufficiently good for us to publish it on our site. At the same time you'll help tens of thousands of people choose a career path with more social impact. We are willing to pay £1,000 if you send us something that's as good as, or better, than what we could have done ourselves, and only needs minor revisions; £300 if it’s usable but requires significant input from us; and £150 if it’s a helpful input into one of our reviews. Before you start, send an email to rob@80000hours. org to confirm the title you'll work on. Some example reviews that we think have an appropriate level of detail to target include Economics PhD, Journalism, and Marketing. An outstanding career profile is Medical Careers. Here's a list of all our career profiles (including some ones in an old format and some that are both much longer and shorter than the 3 above). To help you get started see our list of headings we fill out when writing career reviews, and a list of links we often refer to. In most cases you will want to speak to 1-3 people in the relevant career to collect information to include. You'll probably find it easiest to write about a career or course of study you've done yourself, or one you would consider for yourself. Five reviews...

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### Which skills make you most employable?

> There’s lots of skills you could learn. How can we narrow them down to the most useful ones?

- Published: 2016-03-26
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2016/03/which-skills-make-you-most-employable/
- Topics: Career capital, How to get a job

<img src="http://80000hours.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/super-mario-bros1.jpg" alt="super-mario-bros1" width="500" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-35155" />

<h2>Summary</h2>

We correlated 35 key transferable skills with salaries, then rated them on how easy they are to learn, and combined them into 11 categories.

Based on this analysis, the five skills to learn that will most boost your employability are:

<ol>
<li>Learning how to learn and personal productivity</li>
<li>Persuasion and negotiation</li>
<li>Science</li>
<li>Communication</li>
<li>Analysis and problem solving</li>
</ol>

This analysis is still preliminary, so we wouldn’t put too much weight on it.


This article has been superseded by our new analysis of the skills that make you most employable. Summary We correlated 35 key transferable skills with salaries, then rated them on how easy they are to learn, and combined them into 11 categories. Based on this analysis, the five skills to learn that will most boost your employability are: Learning how to learn and personal productivity Persuasion and negotiation Science Communication Analysis and problem solving This analysis is still preliminary, so we wouldn't put too much weight on it. Which skills are transferable and have good earnings prospects? There's lots of skills you could learn. How can we narrow them down to the most useful ones? Here's two criteria: Are the skills transferable? Transferable skills are more valuable because they better keep your options open, and they're less vulnerable to sudden changes in the job market. Whereas if you're an expert at making a certain type of widget, you better hope demand for that widget stays high. Are the skills associated with high income? High income is a proxy for how in demand the skills are. Laurence Shatkin, who runs the blog Career Laboratory, did an analysis based on these two factors. We'll summarise what he learned, then propose some extensions. Shatkin used the O*NET's database, which has data on the salaries of hundreds of jobs in the US, as well as which skills are most important in them. He took O*NET's list of 35 transferable skills, then then correlated the...

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### Will high stress kill you, save your life, or neither?

> If you’re working on a lake and also using your laptop to look at pictures of lakes, you might need a harder job.

- Published: 2016-02-26
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2016/02/should-you-look-for-a-low-stress-job/
- Topics: Job satisfaction, Mental health

Many people assume stress is obviously bad, and lots of people tell us they want to find a “low stress job”. But a <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Upside-Stress-Why-Good/dp/1583335617">new book</a> (and <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/kelly_mcgonigal_how_to_make_stress_your_friend?language=en">TED talk</a> with over 10 million views) by psychologist Kelly McGonigal claims that stress is only bad if you think it is, and that stress can make us stronger, smarter and happier. So are most people wrong, or is stress only bad if you have the wrong attitude towards it?

We did a survey of the literature, and found that as is often the case, the truth lies in between. Stress can be good in some circumstances, but some of McGonigal’s claims also seem overblown.

<ul>
<li><strong>In summary, whether work demands have good or bad effects seems to depend on the following things:</strong>
</li>
</ul>


Many people assume stress is obviously bad, and lots of people tell us they want to find a "low stress job". But a new book (and TED talk with over 10 million views) by psychologist Kelly McGonigal claims that stress is only bad if you think it is, and that stress can make us stronger, smarter and happier. So are most people wrong, or is stress only bad if you have the wrong attitude towards it? We did a survey of the literature, and found that as is often the case, the truth lies in between. Stress can be good in some circumstances, but some of McGonigal's claims also seem overblown. In summary, whether work demands have good or bad effects seems to depend on the following things: Source for social support. Source for altruism. Our main conclusions are: The consensus among researchers seems to be that stress is good when it's moderate in intensity (not too low or too high) and when it's short-term, rather than on-going. Intense and on-going stress is strongly linked to poor health, including a weakened immune system, heart disease, depression and anxiety disorders, and higher chance of death. Some studies have found a correlation between negative health outcomes and believing that stress is bad for your health, but it is hard to draw causal conclusions from these findings. However, there is experimental evidence that reframing stress as an opportunity rather than as a threat leads to better performance and...

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### Interview: trying to change the resources industry from the inside

> Benjamin Todd interviewed Michael Dello-Iacovo about his attempts to do good as a geophysicist inside the Australian mining industry.

- Published: 2016-02-25
- Modified: 2016-02-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2016/02/interview-trying-to-change-the-resources-industry-from-the-inside/
- Topics: Earning to Give, Engineering

Benjamin Todd interviewed Michael Dello-Iacovo about his attempts to do good as a geophysicist inside the Australian mining industry. What does the job involve? I’m a geophysicist working for a resources company in Australia. The resources industry is broad, and includes exploration, mining and oil and gas production. Roles in the resources industry include geologists, environmental scientists, engineers (of almost all types), information technology, and a host of others. All of these potentially involve some intermittent field work. I’ll focus on geophysics and geology, as these are the roles I’m most familiar with. Note that this summary is focussed on private oil & gas and mining companies, not government or research organisations. While the roles may be similar in these organisations, the culture, salary and other perks are likely not. As a resources geophysicist, my work ranges from data processing (which is actually more enjoyable and challenging than it sounds), interpreting and developing geological models and spending time in the field, where my role becomes more one of contractor management, environmental/safety auditing and data quality management. Being in a technical role, I don’t have a lot of meetings (perhaps 2-3 formal meetings per week), and a lot of time is spent behind a computer screen. Why did you take this job? I first decided to enter the resources industry part-way through my university science degree because I had a long-time love of rocks and minerals, I liked physics, I wanted a career that paid well, and I wanted to do...

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### Help build our career guide as a freelance web engineer

> We'd like to hire a freelance web engineer to work 2-3 days per week developing our career guide for the next six months.

- Published: 2016-02-24
- Modified: 2016-02-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2016/02/we-are-looking-for-a-freelance-product-engineer-to-build-our-interactive-career-guide-and-help-millions-of-graduates-have-a-greater-social-impact-1000-for-referrals/
- Topics: Uncategorised

We'd like to hire a freelance web engineer to work 2-3 days per week developing our career guide for the next six months. The role will be similar to the product engineer position we advertised in the fall, except freelance and for six months. In the next few months, you'd work on: (i) adding features to the career quiz and testing them (ii) restructuring the site around a new package of intro materials (iii) testing ways to boost our key conversions. You'd also play the role of lead developer, and act as the point person for any technical issues in the team. The ideal candidate would have one year web development experience, and an eye for design. The site is built in WordPress, though we use angular JS for the front-end of the quiz. Apply now For more info, contact direct. ben at 80000hours. org.

---

### New career review: web designer

> What is the best career for someone whose main strengths are in visual design? We’ve released a new career review on web design.

- Published: 2016-02-23
- Modified: 2016-02-23
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2016/02/new-career-review-web-designer/
- Topics: Design

<img src="https://80000hours.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/maxresdefault-1024x576.jpg" alt="maxresdefault" width="1024" height="576" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-35037" />

What is the best career for someone whose main strengths are in visual design?

<strong>To start figuring that out we’ve released <a href="https://80000hours.org/career-guide/top-careers/profiles/web-designer/">a new career review on web design</a>.</strong>

Here’s a quick summary:

<em>Pros</em>

<ul>
<li>Web designers can work on a broad range of high impact projects because they are in-demand across many types of organisations, including charities, governments and startups.</li>
<li>As a backup, web designers can enter paths with good pay, like UX design ($80,000 median salary), and earn to give. </li>
</ul>

<em>Cons</em>

<ul>
<li>Good design is hard to measure, which makes it hard to prove your abilities to potential employers, meaning entry and progression can be difficult.</li>
</ul>

<em>Who should do it?</em>

<ul>
<li>You should consider web design if you studied graphic design or a related field; you’ve already spent several years developing web-design skills; and you are persuasive enable you to get a foot in the door when you’re starting out. </li>
<li>However if you have the technical skills to do web development, we recommend you do that instead, since it wins over web design on most dimensions (salary, number of jobs, job growth rate, quality of work is easier to measure).</li>
</ul>

<strong><a href="https://80000hours.org/career-guide/top-careers/profiles/web-designer/">Read the full review</a>.</strong>


What is the best career for someone whose main strengths are in visual design? To start figuring that out we’ve released a new career review on web design. Here’s a quick summary: Pros Web designers can work on a broad range of high impact projects because they are in-demand across many types of organisations, including charities, governments and startups. As a backup, web designers can enter paths with good pay, like UX design ($80,000 median salary), and earn to give. Cons Good design is hard to measure, which makes it hard to prove your abilities to potential employers, meaning entry and progression can be difficult. Who should do it? You should consider web design if you studied graphic design or a related field; you’ve already spent several years developing web-design skills; and you are persuasive enable you to get a foot in the door when you’re starting out. However if you have the technical skills to do web development, we recommend you do that instead, since it wins over web design on most dimensions (salary, number of jobs, job growth rate, quality of work is easier to measure). Read the full review. Please comment with any important corrections or additions.

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### What the literature says about the earnings of entrepreneurs

> It depends a lot on what kind of business you're trying to run.

- Published: 2016-02-19
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2016/02/what-the-literature-says-about-the-earnings-of-entrepreneurs/
- Topics: Income, Risk

This piece is part of our series on high impact entrepreneurship. Sign up to our newsletter and we'll email you with the rest of the series. Summary Until recently, academics lumped 'entrepreneurs' together with all the 'self-employed'. A new paper, however, split the self-employed into those who owned incorporated businesses and those who don't. (Though note that the incorporated self-employed are still very different from startup founders. ) Self-employed people who own incorporated businesses earn about 50% more than people with regular jobs. Most of this is due to them being more educated and working harder. However, even if you correct for these factors, it seems like shifting into owning an incorporated business boosts income by about 18%. The unincorporated self-employed (mostly running things like hairdressers, restaurants, corner shops etc. ) earn less than salaried workers on average. Once you try to compare like-for-like workers, you find that when people switch into unincorporated self-employment, 50% earn less than they would as a salaried worker (but gain more freedom), and 30% earn more. The overall average is about the same. Introduction It's widely believed that entrepreneurs earn more than salaried workers. However, until recently the research did not seem to back this up. In fact, the findings of several studies in 1989 presented a puzzle: entrepreneurs appeared to earn less than their salaried counterparts. In his 2013 book The Founder's Dilemmas, Noam Wasserman (an Associate Professor at Harvard Business School) set it out starkly: One recent study supports the notion that... . many founders...

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### Use our tool to decide whether you're on the right career path

> Once you’re done and have decided what steps to take, you can relax about your career trajectory for another 12 months!

- Published: 2016-02-18
- Modified: 2016-02-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2016/02/annual-career-check-in/
- Topics: Uncategorised

You know how you should review your career at least once a year to make sure that you’re on the right path and set goals for the coming year? You did that already, right? Oh, no? Well, in that case we’ve created a tool to make it quick and easy. Just answer the questions, and we’ll email you your answers when you’re done. There are only six key questions: Do your annual career review   Once you're done and have decided what steps to take, you can relax about your career trajectory for another 12 months!

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### Is nursing or headhunting the best career for you?

> What are the pros and cons of these careers, and who do they best suit?

- Published: 2016-02-17
- Modified: 2016-02-17
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2016/02/new-career-reviews-of-headhunting-and-nursing/
- Topics: Medicine

Read our full review of nursing. Read our full review of executive search.   One of the most frequent criticisms of our career recommender is that it usually recommends highly competitive options that are beyond the reach of most people. Furthermore, it disproportionately recommends careers for people with strong mathematical skills. To begin to address this we have written two shallow career reviews of options that are both less competitive and less quantitative - nursing and executive search (also known as headhunting). Both are primarily 'earning to give' careers. Try our career recommender to get personalised career ideas. Join our newsletter for regular updates about all our new career reviews. What were the bottom lines? Nursing: is quite well paid in some countries, with a low risk of unemployment provides a launching pad for a career in medical management is satisfying work for most nurses, with flexibility around hours, though nurse 'burn out' at unusually high rates offers the opportunity to study advanced nursing degrees which are even better paid. On the other hand, we expect more nurses in the developed world will improve health outcomes only a small amount we are cautious about recommending a nursing degree to high-school leavers because it won't be much use to them if they decide not to become nurses - and it is hard to predict what career you will want from a young age. Executive search: is also well paid, with large commissions for the best performers is accessible to people with...

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### How important is finding a career that matches your strengths?

> One of the most common ideas in career advice is that finding a good career is a matter of finding the role that uniquely matches you. But is that right?

- Published: 2016-02-17
- Modified: 2024-12-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2016/02/how-important-is-finding-a-career-that-matches-your-strengths/
- Topics: Job satisfaction, Personal fit

One of the most common ideas in career advice is that finding a good career is a matter of finding the role that uniquely matches who you are. You'll be fantastic at the career that best matches you, and terrible at other careers, so the mission should be to find the career that's the best match. We haven't found much support for this idea so far. The most in-depth attempt to study "match" is Holland-types, but several meta-analyses have found no or only a very weak relationship between Holland-type match and performance (or job satisfaction). On the other hand, we've encountered some important general predictors of success. For instance, hundreds of studies have found that the smarter you are, the more likely you are to succeed in almost every career. With a general predictor like intelligence, more is always better - it's not that it means you'll do well in some jobs but worse in others depending on your "match". However, a new line of research into "strengths" might shift the picture. There have been two attempts - the Virtues in Action (VIA) Signature Strengths test and Strengths Finder - to determine people's character strengths, and study the importance of leading a career in line with them. We did a review of the literature to see whether we should incorporate them into our advice, which we summarise below. We found that strengths don't seem especially useful for choosing a career in the first place; however, once you're in a career,...

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### Doing good through for-profits: Wave and financial tech

> Lincoln Quirk is saving people 70% of the cost of sending money back to their families in east Africa.

- Published: 2016-02-15
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2016/02/doing-good-through-for-profits-lincoln-quirk-and-wave/
- Topics: Effective Altruism, Found a tech startup, Software Engineering

Get the rest of our series on doing good through start-ups by signing up to our newsletter. Wave is one of the most high potential social impact for-profit startups we're aware of, and it was co-founded by someone in our effective altruism community - Lincoln Quirk. Wave allows immigrants to send money from North America to relatives in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Ethiopia with much lower fees than if they used Western Union or MoneyGram. (Though Wave existing is nothing to do with 80,000 Hours, someone we recently coached chose to work for Wave and help them expand into the UK. ) Why is Wave such an important company? Previously, if immigrants wanted to send remittances, they had to use Western Union or MoneyGram. Both the sender and receiver would have to go to a physical outlet to make the transfer, and worst of all, the sender would have to pay 10% in transfer costs! Lincoln Quirk and his cofounder Drew Durbin have built software that allows instant transfers from a mobile phone in the US or Canada to a mobile phone in Eastern Africa or Ethiopia - and they only charge 3%, a saving of 7%. For each dollar of revenue that they make, they are saving $2. 33 for someone in the world's poorest countries. Assuming a 20% profit margin, the figure is $12 in savings for each $1 of profit. The potential positive impact of this idea is huge. Annual global remittances are $450 billion, several times the total...

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### Rule-breaking in children predicts future success

- Published: 2016-02-11
- Modified: 2016-02-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2016/02/rule-breaking-in-children-predicts-future-success/
- Topics: Personal fit

A paper was recently released looking into which personality factors in childhood predict success in education and work. The study followed participants over a 40 year period and attempted to control for intelligence and socioeconomic background. Much of it is exactly what you would expect. But here are some quotes that are more surprising (emphases ours). Note of course that the result has not yet been replicated: In general, we found significant relations for childhood IQ and SES with educational attainment that is in line with the sociological and psychological models (see Blau & Duncan, 1967; Eccles, 2005). As there is much previous research on the validity of these predictors for educational success (e. g. , Gottfredson, 2002; Gustafsson & Undheim, 1996; Kuncel et al. , 2004), we will focus our discussion on student characteristics and behaviors. Educational attainment was best predicted by defiance of parental authority, sense of inferiority, and teacher-rated studiousness. The effects were still significant after including IQ and parental SES as predictors... . First, students with high rule breaking and defiance of parental authority might be more competitive in the school context and more visible in interactions in the classroom. This might lead to at least higher oral grades compared with students with lower levels of rule breaking and defiance and to more demanding and encouraging teacher behavior. Rosenbaum (2001) demonstrated that teachers used not only the students’ cognitive abilities to determine grades but also students’ noncognitive behaviors. However, because of the archival nature of...

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### We can learn a lot from Tara, who left pharmacy to work in effective altruism

> Tara saved lives working as a pharmacist in Bhutan - no really we checked, and she totally did - but she nevertheless left to try to find something better.

- Published: 2016-02-10
- Modified: 2023-11-24
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2016/02/we-can-learn-a-lot-from-tara-who-left-pharmacy-to-work-in-effective-altruism/
- Topics: Building effective altruism, Medicine

Tara saved lives working as a pharmacist in Bhutan - no really we checked, and she totally did - but she nevertheless left to try to find something better. This is part of our series of profiles of people who changed their career in a major way in order to have more impact because of their exposure to 80,000 Hours. Today Tara Mac Aulay is the head of operations in the Centre for Effective Altruism. But just two years ago she was working as a pharmacist. How and why did she make this transition? Her career path is sufficiently fascinating it's worth telling the story form the start. Tara was extremely conscientious and hard-working from a very young age. As a result she was able to finish high school and start studying at university at the young age of 16, rather than the usual 18 or 19. She managed to do this while at the same time i) redesigning the staff and inventory management for an Australian restaurant chain, then, because this saved them so much money, being promoted to a more senior role to ii) travel around the country to make major changes to failing stores to save them from closure. As a teenager! Needless to say, this entrepreneurialism and ambition allowed her to develop a wide range of professional skills at a young age. At the age of 15 she applied to study pharmacy, motivated by a desire for 'direct impact' by improving the health of customers. While...

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### Plan change story: interview with Dillon Bowen, founder of Effective Altruism group at Tufts University

- Published: 2016-02-08
- Modified: 2024-11-18
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2016/02/plan-change-story-interview-with-dillon-bowen-leader-of-effective-altruism-at-tufts-university/
- Topics: Building effective altruism, Economics PhD

I recently interviewed Dillon Bowen, who runs the EA student group at Tufts University, about how his career plans changed as a result of interacting with 80,000 Hours. Dillon’s original plan was to do a Philosophy PhD and then go into philosophy academia. After going to a talk at Tufts by our co-founder Will MacAskill and receiving career coaching from 80,000 Hours, he started taking classes in economics, now intends to do an <a href="https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/economics-phd/">Economics PhD</a> instead.

More details of the key points from the interview are below.

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I recently interviewed Dillon Bowen, who runs the EA student group at Tufts University, about how his career plans changed as a result of interacting with 80,000 Hours. Dillon's original plan was to do a Philosophy PhD and then go into philosophy academia. After going to a talk at Tufts by our co-founder Will MacAskill and receiving career coaching from 80,000 Hours, he started taking classes in economics, now intends to do an Economics PhD instead. More details of the key points from the interview are below. Summary of the interview Dillon's original career plan was to go into philosophy academia - he was extremely passionate about it and couldn't imagine doing anything else. He was introduced to Peter Singer and GiveWell in an Intro to Ethics class at Tufts. Midway through his second year at university, Dillon went to a talk at Tufts by our co-founder Will MacAskill. Will recommended to Dillon that he study Economics and/or Computer Science instead of philosophy. Dillon was unsure whether he would enjoy Economics and Computer Science, but he signed up for career coaching with 80,000 Hours to explore whether he should change his career plan. In his coaching session he was told about the End of History Illusion - that our interests change much more often than we expect them to. Thinking about how much his interests have changed in the past made him more open to trying out economics and computer science. As a result of this he took classes in...

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### The value of coordination

> When you’re part of a community doing the most good becomes much more of a coordination problem.

- Published: 2016-02-08
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2016/02/the-value-of-coordination/
- Topics: Community &amp; coordination, Effective Altruism, Personal fit, Reasoning well

This article is now superceded by a more in-depth piece. This post is intended for people who are already familiar with our key content. If you're new, read the basics first. In assessing your positive impact on the world, you need to look at the additional good you do after taking into account what would have happened if you hadn't acted. But how can you evaluate this? One way is the "single player approach" - consider what would happen if you act and what would happen if you don't act, holding everyone else constant, and then look at the difference between the two scenarios. This approach worked pretty well in the early days of effective altruism, but it starts to break down once you're part of a community of thousands of people who will change their behaviour depending on what you do. When you're part of a community, the counterfactuals become more complex, and doing the most good becomes much more of a coordination problem - it's a multiplayer rather than a single player game. In this post, I'll list five situations where this insight can help us to become even more effective, and I'll suggest new rules of thumb that I think might be the best guide in a multiplayer world. This is a complex topic, so the answers I give are still tentative. I'm keen to see many more people in the community start thinking about these issues, and preparing the community for its next level of scale... .

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### 10 steps to a job in politics

- Published: 2016-01-27
- Modified: 2017-07-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2016/01/10-steps-to-a-job-in-politics/
- Topics: Party Politics

Sacia B and Hugh T speak to Maria A while campaigning for the Greens in Canada. I recently interviewed 4 people who work in government, the civil service, and political parties in the UK. Here is a synthesis of the steps they consider most useful for starting a career in politics. Net-work to get-work. Go to as many political and think tank events as you can. Talk to people. Ask advice. Make friends. Copy your heroes. Read biographies of people whose careers/impact you’d like to emulate. Copy what they did. Be there. Physically spend time in the places you’d like to end up. That means visiting Parliament (you can sit and watch the Commons and Lords, and attend select committees). Have a drink at the Red Lion pub, where MPs and researchers hang out. Attend the annual Party Conference of your Party. Enter the meme-space of the political class. Listen to the Radio 4 Today Programme every morning. (Have a break at weekends). How would you answer the interviewer’s questions? What questions would you ask? Watch Newsnight in the evening. Apply for the Civil Service Fast Stream. It’s an amazing, underrated and potentially high-impact career. The assessment process in itself is good practice, and you’ll meet some cool people if you get through to the assessment center. If you don’t get in first time, keep trying. Organise a meeting with your local MP. Ask them for career advice. Hit the streets. Deliver leaflets and canvass for your local Party –...

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### Just how bad is being a CEO in big tobacco?

> Last year I wrote about the most harmful careers and had encouraging smoking at the top. But how bad is it exactly?

- Published: 2016-01-21
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2016/01/just-how-bad-is-being-a-ceo-in-big-tobacco/
- Topics: Accidental harm, Earning to Give, Income, Reasoning well

In 1994 the CEOs of the largest tobacco companies all testified before congress that they thought nicotine was not addictive and were widely mocked. How much were they paid relative to the damage they were doing? Last year I wrote about the most harmful careers and had encouraging smoking at the top. But how bad is it exactly? Two researchers recently put together some data that can help us estimate this and the numbers are pretty remarkable. They compared the number of deaths caused by a cigarette company with the amount the CEO was paid. For this they used market share in the cigarette industry as a proxy for harm, and the WHO's old estimate that 5. 6 million people die due to cigarettes each year - now up to 6 million. Doing some calculations, it looks to me like across the companies they could track, which collectively make up 45% of the global market, CEOs are paid $23 for each premature death resulting from the existence of their firms. Note that there are other moral and practical reasons not to take jobs that do harm, but here we will focus just on the direct damage caused. The authors draw a comparison to the life-saving treatments available if these CEOs wanted to make up for their harmful work by donating to charity: If it is assumed that all of the CEOs analyzed are attempting to maximize their income in order to give to charities to save lives , these low...

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### Is now the time to do something about AI?

> Open Philanthropy recently released a review of research on when human level artificial intelligence will be achieved. The main conclusion of the report was we’re really uncertain

- Published: 2016-01-13
- Modified: 2017-05-28
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2016/01/is-now-the-time-to-do-something-about-ai/
- Topics: Existential risk

Open Philanthropy recently released a review of research on when human level artificial intelligence will be achieved. The main conclusion of the report was we’re really uncertain. But the author (Luke Muehlhauser, an expert in the area) also gave his 70% confidence interval: 10-120 years. That’s a lot of uncertainty. And that’s really worrying. This confidence interval suggests the author puts significant probability on human-level artificial intelligence (HLAI) occurring within 20 years. A survey of the top 100 most cited AI scientists also gave a 10% chance that HLAI is created within ten years (this was the median estimate; the mean was a 10% probability in the next 20 years). This is like being told there’s a 10% chance aliens will arrive on the earth within the next 20 years. Making sure this transition goes well could be the most important priority for the human race in the next century. (To read more, see Nick Bostrom’s book, Superintelligence, and this popular introduction by Wait But Why). We issued a note about AI risk just over a year ago when Bostrom’s book was released. Since then, the field has heated up dramatically. In January 2014, Google bought Deepmind for $400m. This triggered a wave of investment into companies focused on building human-level AI. A new AI company seems to arrive every week. This, Bostrom’s book and a landmark conference in Puerto Rico, helped to trigger a major rise in investment into AI safety research. Several tens of millions of dollars...

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### Where should you donate to have the most impact during giving season 2015?

- Published: 2015-12-24
- Modified: 2024-12-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/12/where-should-you-donate-to-have-the-most-impact-in-giving-season-2015/
- Topics: Donating effectively

<img src="http://80000hours.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/maxresdefault.jpg" alt="maxresdefault" width="1920" height="1080" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-34915" />

Many of our readers choose to give away substantial sums over the ‘giving season’ around Christmas and New Year. Where should they give so that their money has the biggest social impact?

This post is based on a combination of my existing knowledge, some judgement calls based on three years working in effective altruism, and brief consultation with the people involved in the groups below. It's not based on in-depth research, and the recommendations could easily change. Take this post as a starting point for your own analysis.

<em>Note that we’re looking for the charities that help others the most, treating everyone's welfare as equal. If you have a particular attachment to a specific cause, you’ll need to factor that in separately.</em>

This flowchart is a summary of the advice below. Read on for more details.


Many of our readers choose to give away substantial sums over the 'giving season' around Christmas and New Year. Where should they give so that their money has the biggest social impact? This post is based on a combination of my existing knowledge, some judgement calls based on three years working in effective altruism, and brief consultation with the people involved in the groups below. It's not based on in-depth research, and the recommendations could easily change. Take this post as a starting point for your own analysis. Note that we're looking for the charities that help others the most, treating everyone's welfare as equal. If you have a particular attachment to a specific cause, you'll need to factor that in separately. This flowchart is a summary of the advice below. Read on for more details. 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 Straightforward advice for most donors Our advice in one line is give to GiveWell's top recommended charity, Against Malaria Foundation. GiveWell does a huge amount of research to find the charities that achieve the most social impact per dollar, and they're the best group doing this we know. Against Malaria Foundation is an extremely efficient, transparent, organisation. It implements a highly evidence-backed, cheap, intervention that makes a big difference - insecticide treated malaria nets - and has huge room for more funding. Every $5 you give means one extra malaria net is distributed on the ground, and every $3000 you donate is expected to save a life, and have many other benefits... .

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### Podcast with Ben West, who expects to donate tens of millions for charity through tech entrepreneurship

- Published: 2015-12-24
- Modified: 2024-11-18
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/12/interview-with-ben-who-expects-to-donate-eight-figures-for-charity-through-tech-entrepreneurship/
- Topics: Earning to Give, Found a tech startup

I recently interviewed Ben West (second to left), the founder of Health eFilings. After reading 80,000 Hours' website, Ben entered tech entrepreneurship - from software engineering - in order to 'earn to give'. Amazingly, Ben pledged to donate any money he made above the minimum wage. His company helps American physicians file paperwork with the US government, and collect 'performance based pay', much more easily. Several other 80,000 Hours alumni have ended up working in his company. You can read a summary of the key points from the interview below. Summary of the interview Ben West was influenced by Peter Singer's work when he was young to start donating his income. Four years ago he was a software engineer donating to New Harvest, a meat substitute organisation. He spent almost a decade at a large healthcare IT company, which helped to prepare him for what he's doing now. He doesn't think he could have successfully started this company without having experience in the health IT sector first. He learned about 80,000 Hours through a link on the blog Overcoming Bias. Reading our work on entrepreneurship made him willing to consider starting his own business despite the fact that he's risk averse by nature. He then spoke with some other well-informed people, including Carl Shulman (who volunteered for 80,000 Hours in the early days), who gave him more information about what the path involved. Ben was turned down by Y Combinator but soon afterwards teamed up with a serial entrepreneur, which...

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### Who should found a startup? Podcast with the founder of Entrepreneur First

- Published: 2015-12-21
- Modified: 2024-11-18
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/12/podcast-with-founder-of-entrepreneur-first-about-being-a-startup-founder/
- Topics: Earning to Give

<img src="http://80000hours.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/entrepreneur-first-about-big_image_url-1409560875.jpg" alt="entrepreneur-first-about-big_image_url-1409560875" width="1920" height="1275" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-34921" />

I recently interviewed Matt Clifford (left), the Co-founder &amp; Chief Executive at <a href="http://www.joinef.com/">Entrepreneur First</a>, which describes itself as “<em>Europe’s leading pre-seed investment programme for technical founders who want to work on hard problems.</em>” You can read a summary below.

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I recently interviewed Matt Clifford (left), the Co-founder & Chief Executive at Entrepreneur First, which describes itself as "Europe's leading pre-seed investment programme for technical founders who want to work on hard problems. " It's a follow on from our 2013 interview. You can read a summary below. Summary of the interview It's hard to predict who'll succeed as a founder, but it's a great option if you're well suited to it, so if you think you might succeed, it's valuable to try it out. (Read more). If you found a technology startup in a major hub and build your network (especially the Bay Area, but also London, Boston and Berlin), there are a lot of good exit opportunities if your company fails, because there are many people in the hub who value the skill set. So, the cost of trying isn't that high. If you do a startup outside of a major hub in a culture where failure is less acceptable, the cost of trying is much higher. Entrepreneur First graduates normally find it easy to get another job in the technology sector if their startup fails. If you're trying to decide whether to do a startup, first try to lower the costs of testing out the path as much as possible. This is the aim of Entrepreneur First. Then, ask yourself why you expect to be above average. The median founder makes nothing, so you need to have reason to expect you're above average. Being smart and hard working...

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### Even if we can't lower catastrophic risks now, we should do something now so we can do more later

- Published: 2015-12-18
- Modified: 2022-04-06
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/12/even-if-we-cant-lower-catastrophic-risks-now-we-should-do-something-now-so-we-can-do-more-later/
- Topics: Existential risk

Does that fit with your schedule Mr President? A line of argument I frequently encounter is that it is too early to do anything about ‘global catastrophic risks’ today (these are also sometimes called ‘existential risks’). For context, see our page on assessing the biggest problems in the world, evaluation of opportunities to lower catastrophic risks and our review of becoming an AI safety researcher. This line of argument doesn’t apply so much to preventing the use of nuclear weapons, climate change, or containing disease pandemics - the potential to act on these today is about at the same level as it will be in the future. But what about new technologies that don’t exist yet: artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, atomically precise manufacturing, and others we haven’t thought about yet? There’s a case that we should wait until they are closer to actually being developed - at that point we will have a much better idea of: what form those technologies will take, if any at all; what can be done to make them less risky; who we need to talk to to make that happen. Superficially this argument seems very reasonable. Each hour of work probably does get more valuable the closer you are to a ‘critical juncture in history. ’ Things clearly could have been done directly to change nuclear weapons policy and the direction of the Cold War in the 40s and 50s. But in the 1920s? In the 19th century? Not so much. Better to keep your...

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### What’s the easiest way anyone can have a big social impact?

> Let’s suppose you want to minimise sacrifice and maximise the good you do. What should you choose?

- Published: 2015-12-16
- Modified: 2021-11-18
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/12/whats-the-easiest-way-anyone-can-have-a-big-social-impact/
- Topics: Earning to Give

Many people want a career that contributes to the world, that helps others live happier lives. To do this, some become teachers, some work in the nonprofit sector, and others work in many other sectors. Sometimes this involves significant personal sacrifice - at the very least, “socially good” jobs usually have lower earnings.

Let’s suppose you want to minimise sacrifice and maximise social impact. What should you choose then? What would be good is a career option that’s:

<ol>
<li>Open to most of our audience (college grads in developed countries).</li>
<li>Involves little or no sacrifice.</li>
<li>Has as large a social impact as possible, with high confidence.</li>
</ol>

I think a path like this exists, as I’ll argue in the rest of this post. I call it the <em>easy baseline</em>:

<ol>
<li>Take whichever job you’d find most personally fulfilling.</li>
<li>Give 10% of your income to the world’s poorest people.</li>
</ol>

As of 2008, you can give your income to the world’s poorest people through <a href="https://www.givedirectly.org/">GiveDirectly</a>, a charity that provides one-off cash transfers to the poorest people in Kenya via mobile app. Every $1 you give results in $0.90 in the hands of one of the world’s poorest people. This intervention could soak up billions of dollars in the coming years, so could be pursued by many people.

If you want to have a social impact with your career, giving 10% is the easiest thing you can do, and I think almost everyone reading this should do it. You can take <a href="https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/get-involved/join/">a public pledge</a> to do so in just a few minutes.

Below I'll explain in more detail why doing so is such an attractive option.


Many people want a career that contributes to the world, that helps others live happier lives. To do this, some become teachers, some work in the nonprofit sector, and others work in many other sectors. Sometimes this involves significant personal sacrifice - at the very least, “socially good” jobs usually have lower earnings. Let’s suppose you want to minimise sacrifice and maximise social impact (definition). What should you choose then? What would be good is a career option that’s: Open to most of our audience (college grads in developed countries). Involves little or no sacrifice. Has as large a social impact as possible, with high confidence. I think a path like this exists, as I’ll argue in the rest of this post. I call it the easy baseline: Take whichever job you’d find most personally fulfilling. Give 10% of your income to the world’s poorest people. As of 2008, you can give your income to the world’s poorest people through GiveDirectly, a charity that provides one-off cash transfers to the poorest people in Kenya via mobile app. Every $1 you give results in $0. 90 in the hands of one of the world’s poorest people. This intervention could soak up billions of dollars in the coming years, so could be pursued by many people. If you want to have a social impact with your career, giving 10% is the easiest thing you can do, and I think almost everyone reading this should do it. You can take a public pledge to...

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### Plan change story: from neuroscience academia to cost-effectiveness research

- Published: 2015-12-08
- Modified: 2016-01-14
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/12/plan-change-story-from-neuroscience-academia-to-cost-effectiveness-research/
- Topics: Giving What We Can, Organisation-building at effective nonprofits

<img src="https://80000hours.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Screen-Shot-2015-12-08-at-6.37.43-PM-1024x501.png" alt="Screen Shot 2015-12-08 at 6.37.43 PM" width="1024" height="501" class="alignleft size-large wp-image-34899" />

Hauke did a PhD in Neuroscience and was planning to go into academia. But after reading our research, he changed his plans and applied to jobs in German politics, consulting, tech-startups and our parent organisation, the Centre for Effective Altruism. He’s now Director of Research at <a href="https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/">Giving What We Can</a>, where he researches which charities most effectively alleviate extreme poverty.


Hauke did a PhD in Neuroscience and was planning to go into academia. But after reading our research, he applied to all our top recommended careers: jobs in German politics, consulting, tech-startups and our parent organisation, the Centre for Effective Altruism. He’s now Director of Research at Giving What We Can, where he researches which charities most effectively alleviate extreme poverty. Hauke’s story Background Hauke studied Cognitive Psychology at Jacobs University Bremen in Germany. As a first year undergraduate he took a course on Global Challenges, which outlined major world problems, like extreme poverty and climate change. This got him more interested in using his career to make a difference. Also, during a semester abroad at University College London, he attended a lecture by Michael Worton which encouraged students to seek leadership positions so that they can change the world for the better. After finishing his Bachelor’s degree, he started a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, with the intention of pursuing a career in academia, doing basic research in Neuroscience. In his words: I think everyone who goes to university is implicitly exposed to the 'basic research is the most noble / high impact pursuit ever' meme. During his PhD he was also a Research Fellow at Joshua Greene’s Moral Cognition Lab at Harvard, and published several papers in neuroscience. How did Hauke’s plans change? During his PhD, Hauke became more sceptical of whether basic research was the most high value thing he could do with his...

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### Lehua closed down her fundraising startup after reading our blog: plan change story

- Published: 2015-12-03
- Modified: 2021-11-18
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/12/plan-change-report-lehua-gray-closed-down-her-fundraising-startup-when-she-realised-it-wouldnt-have-impact/
- Topics: Fundraising

Learning about 'counterfactual analysis' threw some puts on sunglasses cold water on Lehua's startup idea. Lehua Gray's story is an interesting 'significant plan change' because she increased her social impact simply by realising what she was doing was not accomplishing anything when the true counterfactual was taken into account. Lehua is an entrepreneur in Texas who studied environmental sciences but afterwards taught herself coding. In late 2014, along with two co-founders she had just met at the eBay Hackathon, she founded a company that offered charities an innovative fundraising platform and took a cut of the money raised. Her role in the startup was a combination of coding, UX and sales. The team’s hope was to make the viral nature of the ‘ice-bucket challenge’ replicable. In their platform, someone would donate money to a charity, but it would only actually be delivered if, say, 3 friends who they nominated matched their donation. They might also be offered the option to do a public challenge on social media that would spread the fundraiser instead of donating the full amount, as in the ‘ice-bucket challenge’. Over a period of 9 months they had built this platform and were improving it while some charities tested it out. However, in the first half of 2015 Lehua started following me on Facebook and so started regularly encountering and reading new 80,000 Hours’ blog posts about how to have more social impact. As a result, Lehua started to have more doubts that her project was actually...

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### How to pursue a career in research to lower the risks from superintelligent machines: a new career review.

- Published: 2015-12-01
- Modified: 2017-05-28
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/12/how-to-pursue-a-career-in-research-to-lower-the-risks-from-superintelligent-machines-a-new-career-review/
- Topics: Existential risk, Machine Intelligence Research Institute

This is a summary of our full career review on artificial intelligence risk research. Have you read the profile and think you want to contribute to artificial intelligence risk research? Fill out this form and we'll see if we can help. Many people we coach are interested in doing research into artificial intelligence (AI), in particular how to lower the risk that superintelligent machines do harmful things not intended by their creators - a field usually referred to as 'AI risk research'. The reasons people believe this is a particularly pressing area of research are outlined in sources such as: The book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by University of Oxford philosopher Prof Nick Bostrom. This more accessible introduction from Wait But Why. This GiveWell cause investigation. This cause description and associated papers from the Global Priorities Project. Our goal with this career review was not to assess the cause area of AI risk research - on that we defer to the authors above. Rather we wanted to present some concrete guidance for the growing number of people who want to work on the problem. We spoke to the leaders in the field, including top academics, the head of MIRI and managers in AI companies, and the key findings are: Some organisations working on this problem, particularly those with strong academic affiliations, appear to be 'talent constrained', in that they find it harder to identify researchers they'd like to hire than to raise funding. However, this is a recent development, and...

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### Working at effective altruist organisations: good or bad for career capital?

- Published: 2015-11-30
- Modified: 2020-07-27
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/11/working-at-effective-altruist-organisations-good-or-bad-for-career-capital/
- Topics: Building effective altruism, Career capital

Working in effective altruism directly is a good way to build career capital in some respects, and a bad way in others. How about on balance? Many people in our community are interested in working at “effective altruist” (EA) organisations, which I define as organisations whose leaders aim to do the most good on the basis of evidence and reason, and explicity identify as part of the effective altruism movement (see a list). These jobs are often seen as higher-impact and more fulfilling than alternatives, but there’s a common worry: they’ll provide worse career capital, putting you in a worse position in the long-term. I argued here that career capital might not be a strong enough consideration to outweigh the additional impact. In this post, I’ll explore whether the career capital you get from working at EA orgs really is worse than the alternatives. I’ll outline arguments give for and against, arguing the career capital is better than is often assumed. Arguments against working in effective altruist organisations for career capital Less prestige The jobs are less prestigious - few people have heard of organisations like GiveWell or the Center for Effective Altruism - and so these jobs don’t provide as impressive general-purpose credentials as working at a brand name employer like Google or McKinsey. Less concrete career progression The jobs don’t come with an obvious career path. If you work at CEA for a couple of years, it doesn’t obviously lead into other jobs. In contrast, if you do...

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### Why you should focus more on talent gaps, not funding gaps

- Published: 2015-11-27
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/11/why-you-should-focus-more-on-talent-gaps-not-funding-gaps/
- Topics: Donating effectively, Effective Altruism, EtG pros and cons, Reasoning well

Update April 2019: We think that our use of the term 'talent gaps' in this post (and elsewhere) has caused some confusion. We've written a post clarifying what we meant by the term and addressing some misconceptions that our use of it may have caused. Most importantly, we now think it's much more useful to talk about specific skills and abilities that are important constraints on particular problems rather than talking about 'talent constraints' in general terms. This page may be misleading if it's not read in conjunction with our clarifications. Update Aug 2021: See this update on how the balance of funding and people has changed the last five years. Many members of the effective altruism community see making a difference primarily in terms of moving money to fill funding gaps rather than moving talent to fill talent gaps. This seems to me to be one of the community's more serious mistakes, which causes us to: Put too much weight on earning to give and fundraising. Put too little weight on gaining expertise and developing the skills needed for direct work. Overlook pressing causes that aren't funding constrained. In the rest of the post, I'll: Outline what I mean by talent gaps. Suggest why the community might be biased towards focusing on funding gaps. Argue there are whole cause areas we've completely overlooked due to this focus. Argue that many of the causes the community does support are also more talent constrained than funding constrained. Argue that the importance...

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### One of the most exciting new effective altruist organisations: An interview with David Goldberg of the Founders Pledge

- Published: 2015-11-26
- Modified: 2015-11-27
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/11/one-of-the-most-exciting-new-effective-altruist-organisations-an-interview-with-david-goldberg-of-the-founders-pledge/
- Topics: Building effective altruism, Found a tech startup, Founder of new projects

It’s my pleasure to introduce David Goldberg to those who in the effective altruism community who don’t yet know him. He’s behind the Founders Pledge, which in just 8 months has raised $64 million in legally binding pledges of equity, is growing fast, and has got some very exciting (but currently confidential) plans in the works. I met him when I was representing 80,000 Hours at the Founders Forum conference earlier this year and introduced him in more depth to the idea of effective altruism, which he’s now built into the core of the Founders Pledge’s mission. Tell us about your background I did my undergraduate work at UCLA in Political Science and Public Policy and then continued with postgraduate study at the University of Cambridge focusing on International Relations. My plan was to get a PhD and then stay in academics and shape International Security policy. However a year in, I realised that the practical impact of my work would be marginal at best, so I finished with a Master’s degree and began to look for opportunities that would actually have a discernible effect on the world. I got involved with Founders Forum For Good -- the precursor to what I do now with the Founders Pledge -- where I focused on helping social entrepreneurs build and scale businesses. Before all that, I spent a couple years in finance in the US, started and sold a business in Europe, and ran a chain of Segway dealerships in California. All...

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### Take the growth approach to evaluating startup nonprofits, not the marginal approach

- Published: 2015-11-26
- Modified: 2021-11-17
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/11/take-the-growth-approach-to-evaluating-startup-non-profits-not-the-marginal-approach/
- Topics: Effective Altruism, Found a tech startup, Founder of new projects

<img src="http://80000hours.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Screen-Shot-2015-11-26-at-1.31.35-AM.png" alt="Screen Shot 2015-11-26 at 1.31.35 AM" width="1196" height="637" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-34862" />

<em>In its first 2 years, Google made no revenue. Did this indicate it was a bad idea to invest or work there?</em>
<br>
We spent the summer in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Combinator_(company)">Y Combinator</a>, and one of the main things we learned about is how Y Combinator identifies the best startups. What we learned made me worry that many in the effective altruism community are taking the wrong approach to evaluating startup non-profits.

In summary, I’ll argue:

<ol>
<li>There’s two broad approaches to assessing projects - the marginal cost-effectiveness approach and the growth approach.</li>
<li>The community today often wrongly applies the marginal approach to fast growing startups.</li>
<li>This means we’re supporting the wrong projects and not investing enough in growth.</li>
</ol>

At the end I’ll give some guidelines on how to use the growth approach to evaluate non-profits.


In its first 2 years, Google made no revenue. Did this indicate it was a bad idea to invest or work there? We spent the summer in Y Combinator, and one of the main things we learned about is how Y Combinator identifies the best startups. What we learned made me worry that many in the effective altruism community are taking the wrong approach to evaluating startup nonprofits. In summary, I’ll argue: There’s two broad approaches to assessing projects - the marginal cost-effectiveness approach and the growth approach. The community today often wrongly applies the marginal approach to fast growing startups. This means we’re supporting the wrong projects and not investing enough in growth. At the end I’ll give some guidelines on how to use the growth approach to evaluate nonprofits. Two approaches to assessing projects Suppose you want to identify the startup that will generate the most (time-discounted) profit. The social impact equivalent is to find the project that will generate the largest long-run social impact per dollar invested. What rules of thumb should you use to identify these projects? Here’s two broad approaches (with the social impact equivalent in brackets): The marginal approach: Which project generated the largest profit (social impact minus costs) per dollar invested over the last year? Can we expect these levels of return to hold up at the margin? If so, invest. The growth approach: Does the project have a high growth rate, large total market (address an important problem), good product (have an...

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### Stop assuming 'declining returns' in small charities

- Published: 2015-11-24
- Modified: 2021-11-18
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/11/stop-talking-about-declining-returns-in-small-organisations/
- Topics: Uncategorised

Amazon is one of the world's largest companies and is still achieving lower marginal costs as it gets larger. Organisations with just a few people will frequently do much better as they get larger. We often hear people in our community state, as if obvious, that becoming the 5th employee of an organisation creates less impact than becoming the 4th employee. Similarly, later donations are thought to create less impact than earlier donations. This sentiment was widespread in recent discussion about whether to donate to Giving What We Can, discussions on the EA forum about where to donate, and in discussions I’ve had with people about where to work. The reason stated is “diminishing marginal returns”. The first staff members take the best opportunities, so the extra opportunities available at the margin are worse, so each extra staff member has less impact. The problem is, assuming diminishing returns to small organisations contradicts basic economic theory. According to economics, as an organisation scales up, there’s two opposing forces: Economies of scale. Diminishing returns. Economies of scale are a force for increasing returns, and they win out while still at a small scale, so the impact of the 5th staff member can easily be greater than the 4th. Economies of scale are caused by: Gains from specialisation. In a one person organisation, that person has to do everything - marketing, making the product, operations and so on. In a larger organisation, however, you can hire a specialist to do each function, which...

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### Are our most engaged readers overweighting career capital?

- Published: 2015-11-19
- Modified: 2018-09-18
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/11/safe-credentials-are-not-always-the-best-way-to-career-capital/
- Topics: Career capital, Now vs. Later

We’ve spoken a lot about the importance of building career capital. But now, it seems like some of our most engaged readers are putting more weight than we think they should career capital, and not enough on short-run impact. A situation many people face is something like the following: The interesting project: Do something where there’s a small chance you really excel, achieve something exceptional and have a big impact. The safe project: Do something that offers a clear path to good options in the future. The first option is usually something like doing a for-good startup, capitalising on a side project, or taking an unusual job with a mentor. The second is usually something like doing consulting, working at a prestigious large firm or doing graduate study. The debate usually boils down to the following: the first path has a higher impact, but the second offers better career capital. Then people reason that since career capital is more important than impact early in their career, they should go with the second option. That’s often going to be the right answer, but here’s a couple of reasons it might be a mistake. You might be biased There’s several biases that push in favour of the safe project. Ambiguity aversion. Usually it’s relatively clear what the safe project involves and what concrete next steps it’ll lead to (e. g. do consulting, then you can either continue with that, or do an MBA, or go into industry etc. ). Take the interesting option, however,...

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### In case you missed it: Open Phil would like to fund a science policy think tank

- Published: 2015-11-18
- Modified: 2020-09-04
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/11/in-case-you-missed-it-open-phil-would-like-to-fund-a-science-policy-think-tank/
- Topics: Science policy &amp; infrastructure

It appears to us that the strongest scientific funders have little interest in policy analysis and advocacy, while the strongest funders of policy analysis and advocacy tend not to take interest in the scientific research issues discussed in this post. We’re interested in the idea of combining – in a dedicated organization – great scientists and great policy analysts, in order to put in the substantial amount of work needed to develop and promote the best possible proposals for improving science policy and infrastructure. It would be a high-risk, potentially very high-return project to attempt. We aren’t aware of any attempts to do something along these lines at the moment, and we think it could be a risk worth taking. So far, we haven’t been able to find a person or organization who seems both qualified and willing to lead the creation of the sort of organization described in this post. We plan to continue looking for such a person or organization, while continuing to discuss, refine and reflect on these ideas. If you might be able to get into a position where you'll have the right expertise in a couple of years, that could be a good option to pursue. Check in with Open Phil to learn more about what they're looking for. Read more. Read example research questions on science policy and infrastructure.

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### Why and how to found a (GiveWell) nonprofit

- Published: 2015-11-13
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/11/why-and-how-to-found-a-givewell-non-profit/
- Topics: Founder of new projects, GiveWell

We've argued against nonprofit jobs as an early career move, because many have little impact and you often don't get good career progression. However, there's a certain type of nonprofit opportunity that we think is very exciting: start a nonprofit focused on implementing an evidence-backed intervention in international development i. e. try to make the next Against Malaria Foundation. Why? There's lots of evidence-backed interventions that don't have a well-run, transparent organisation implementing them. Scaling up many of these interventions can be expected to have a big impact. There's a huge pool of funding for nonprofits going after these opportunities, most notably from GiveWell, but also foundations like Gates and CIFF, as well as government aid agencies. These groups would like to fund more nonprofits, but can't find enough that meet their criteria. We've talked about this opportunity for years - see our exploratory career profile on it - and it has become even more pressing recently. The money flowing through GiveWell is growing rapidly, but the pipeline of nonprofits isn't. GiveWell recently made a post about exactly the sorts of nonprofits they'd like to fund: Charities that implement GiveWell's priority programs: vitamin A supplementation, immunizations, conditional cash transfers, micronutrient fortification, or even bednets and deworming (since our top charities that focus on the latter two have limited room for more funding). More Charities implementing potential priority programs that are particularly challenging, particularly those revolving around (a) treatment of treatable conditions in a hospital or clinic setting; (b) behavior change for...

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### The story of 80,000 Hours (podcast)

- Published: 2015-11-12
- Modified: 2015-11-13
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/11/the-story-of-80000-hours-podcast/
- Topics: Uncategorised

Here's a podcast with me by Campus Kudos on: How 80,000 Hours got started. How I ended up working at 80,000 Hours. What it was like being in Y Combinator as a nonprofit. Our plans for the next year. I'd also recommend checking out Campus Kudos. Often the best way to learn about a career and get a job is to speak to lots of people already in that path, but when you're at college it's hard to get the right connections. Campus Kudos aims to solve exactly this problem. If you're a US student, you can sign up and be introduced to people willing to answer your career questions and provide free mentoring. Check it out and let me know how you get on (ben@80000hours. org). Listen to the podcast

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### Why even our readers should save enough to live for 6-24 months

- Published: 2015-11-10
- Modified: 2022-12-14
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/11/why-everyone-even-our-readers-should-save-enough-to-live-for-6-24-months/
- Topics: Career planning, Income

<img src="http://80000hours.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/grand_canyon_airports_runway_a_2560x1440_vehiclehi.com-1.jpg" alt="grand_canyon_airports_runway_a_2560x1440_vehiclehi.com (1)" width="1500" height="844" class="alignright size-full wp-image-34830" />
<br><br>
Your 'personal runway' is how many months you can easily live if you stopped working. It’s a product of the cash and sellable assets you have on hand, your living expenses, and your ability to draw on your friends and family in times of need.

For instance, if you have $10,000 of savings and live on $1,000 per month, your personal runway is 10 months. If you could quickly and comfortably move back in with your parents or stay on a friend’s couch, cutting your living expenses by $500 a month, then your personal runway is 20 months. If you have non-work income, that boosts your runway further. If you’re lucky enough to have a family who would support you indefinitely in a productive lifestyle, then your runway is indefinitely long.

I think most people we advise should aim to have at least 6 - 12 months’ personal runway, and up to 12 - 24 could be good for flexibility.

I’ve noticed some people in the community who don’t have much runway and don’t appear to be saving, because they are donating a lot of income or doing very low wage work. Unless you have family or friends who’ll support you, you should cut back on donations and save until you’ve got enough runway.

Some more detail follows.


Your 'personal runway' is how many months you can easily live if you stopped working. It's a product of the cash and sellable assets you have on hand, non-work income, your living expenses, and your ability to draw on your friends and family in times of need. For instance, if you have $10,000 of savings and live on $1,000 per month, your personal runway is 10 months. If you could quickly and comfortably move back in with your parents or stay on a friend's couch, cutting your living expenses by $500 a month, then your personal runway is 20 months. If you're lucky enough to have a family who would support you indefinitely in a productive lifestyle, then your runway is indefinitely long. I think most people we advise should aim to have at least 6 - 12 months' personal runway, and up to 12 - 24 could be good for flexibility. I've noticed some people in the community who don't have much runway and don't appear to be saving, because they are donating a lot of income or doing very low wage work. Unless you have family or friends who'll support you, you should cut back on donations and save until you've got enough runway. Some more detail follows. Why do you need personal runway? Having a reasonable amount of personal runway is important both for your career capital and your wellbeing. Personal runway is valuable for your career capital because it gives you options and makes it...

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### Our new tool can help you make the right career decision

- Published: 2015-11-04
- Modified: 2021-01-07
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/11/our-new-tool-can-help-you-make-the-right-career-decisions/
- Topics: Uncategorised

We’ve released a new tool to help you think through career decisions, such as which major to study, which jobs to apply for, and which of various offers to accept. We’ve tested it in one-on-one coaching over the last six months, and are now making it freely available. These decisions can both be very important and very difficult. This tool will make these decisions easier by walking you through a step-by-step process, asking you the questions we use during coaching, and checking that you’ve applied the most important results of our research. We designed the process using the scientific literature on decision making to reduce bias and it has received positive feedback from many users: Try out the tool. Share it on Facebook or Twitter. It won’t tell you what to do, but it will make sure you haven’t missed anything obvious, are asking the right questions, and have a clear next step. It takes about 30 min to run through. We will continue to improve the tool in coming months based on your feedback and our experience in coaching. If you know a friend or family member trying to make a career decision you might also like to pass it on to them!

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### Common investing mistakes in the effective altruism community

- Published: 2015-10-28
- Modified: 2024-11-26
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/10/common-investing-mistakes-in-the-effective-altruism-community/
- Topics: Earning to Give, Income, Reasoning well

This was written in 2015 and no longer reflects all my current thinking, though I think still makes some good points. Many in our community are investing money to donate later, as well as saving for retirement and emergencies. Here's some mistakes I'm concerned they're making when investing. I'm not a qualified financial advisor, and this should not be taken as investment advice. For speed, I'm also not referencing all my claims and this piece isn't as thoroughly researched as normal - I just want to get the ideas out there. Please do your own research before making any investments. This post is based on personal interests of mine, and was not written in work time. This post is aimed at people who already understand the basics of personal finance and investing. Some starting points for an introduction are here and here. In summary: Don't expect to earn 7-10% returns from US equities. It's more likely to be 1-7%. Adjust your assumptions about retirement savings and giving now vs. giving later calculations accordingly. The baseline portfolio is the global market portfolio, roughly 40% international stocks (half US, a quarter emerging and a quarter other developed markets), 20% corporate bonds, 30% international government bonds, and 15% real assets. If you don't think you can beat the market, this is much closer to what you should invest in than 100% US equities. Divide your savings into a personal component and an altruistic component. Make sure you're saving enough in the personal component...

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### How to write a career plan

- Published: 2015-10-20
- Modified: 2022-03-22
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/10/how-to-write-a-career-plan/
- Topics: Uncategorised

**New:** We've just launched our in-depth career planning process. It's the most comprehensive and up-to-date overview of all our advice on career planning, and includes a step-by-step career planning template. (/career-planning/process){. btn . btn-primary} (/career-planning/career-plan-template){. btn . btn-default} We see lots of career planning mistakes. Some people simply don't have a plan, and hope the future will figure itself out. This leads them to take steps that seem attractive in the short-run but don't help in the long-run e. g. we've met quite a few people who ended up regretting doing a philosophy PhD. Other people try to figure out "what to do with their lives", or make a detailed "10 year plan". That doesn't work either. Instead, we recommend: Have a plan, but make it flexible - we call this flexible plan a "vision". Review your plan at least once a year. Think like a scientist testing a hypothesis. Make sure you gain flexible career capital, that way you'll be in a better position no matter what the future holds. Think of choosing a career like a scientist: have hypotheses you want to test rather than a fixed plan. For long-term readers, what's new? 1. New content on how to make your "vision" We added a new step-by-step process for making your plan based on "ABZ planning", an idea we found in Reid Hoffman's excellent book "The Start-Up of You". Here's the process we recommend: First start by asking: What does the world...

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### Startup employees don't earn more

> We estimate typical startup salaries and equity compensation, and find early-employees don't earn more than large company employees.

- Published: 2015-10-07
- Modified: 2022-12-14
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/10/startup-salaries-and-equity-compensation/
- Topics: Early-stage startup employee, Income, Software Engineering

Image by Sebastiaan ter Burg. License: CC-BY-SA 2. 0 Since the average startup founder who makes it to Series A earns more than a large company employee, many believe that early-stage startup employees also earn more (albeit less than founders). Dustin Moskovitz has even claimed that startup early employees have better earnings prospects than founders. We've looked at the data, and this does not seem to be true on average. There are strong reasons why people might want to work at a startup (e. g. career capital), and it's true the employees of the most successful startups will earn more; but someone deciding between working at a startup vs. a bigger company should rarely be making the decision based on income. On average, startup early employees earn at most only a little more than developers at larger companies. Three estimates of how much startup early employees earn, including both equity and salary According to AngelList, early-stage backend developers, for example, generally get about $110,000 in salary and . 7% equity (salary data from Riviera is similar). While the startup salary data is fairly clear, it's hard to know how to value the equity portion of their compensation. Below are three different methods for doing so, which all show that developers at early-stage startups at most earn only a little more than they would at a large tech company. 1) Using average exit values Let's assume the 0. 7% equity stake will eventually get diluted down to . 35% at time of exit (a typical...

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### New opportunities to work in effective altruism

- Published: 2015-10-06
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/10/new-opportunities-to-work-in-effective-altruism/
- Topics: Uncategorised

Our parent organisation, the Centre for Effective Altruism, is doing a recruitment round, and is hiring for a lot of positions. If you'd like to work at an effective altruist organisation, these are some great opportunities: Giving What We Can: Director of Growth Giving What We Can: Research Analyst Global Priorities Project: Director of Policy Global Priorities Project: Research Fellow Effective Altruism Outreach: Events Manager Effective Altruism Outreach: Project Manager Centre for Effective Altruism: Office Manager Centre for Effective Altruism: Director of US Operations Centre for Effective Altruism: Finance Manager Centre for Effective Altruism: Full Stack Marketer Centre for Effective Altruism: Effective Altruism Strategy Fellow Centre for Effective Altruism: Development Manager 80,000 Hours: Product Engineer Find more details. Please email recruitment centreforeffectivealtruism org if you have any queries or would like to request any alternate arrangements to the usual application process.

---

### The return to coding bootcamps may not remain so high forever

- Published: 2015-09-21
- Modified: 2015-09-23
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/09/the-return-to-coding-bootcamps-may-not-remain-so-high-forever/
- Topics: Software Engineering

We have <a href="https://80000hours.org/2014/06/case-series-why-and-how-to-learn-programming/">been positive</a> about learning to code as a way to gain useful skills for earning to give or doing directly valuable work, and <a href="https://80000hours.org/career-guide/top-careers/profiles/software-engineering/">promoted software engineering as a career path</a>.

We are not the only ones who have noticed that this is a pretty great opportunity. <a href="http://blog.linkedin.com/2015/09/17/as-coding-bootcamps-grow-the-skills-gap-could-shrink/">From the LinkedIn blog</a>:

<blockquote>
  Technical talent is in high demand. As of publishing this post, a LinkedIn job search for “Software Engineers” in the US reveals more than 100,000 open jobs. Adding a couple more tech-related roles (“User Designer,” “Data Scientist”) increases the total to more than 200,000 job openings. Job seekers looking to meet job requirements can enroll in a Master’s degree program, but that comes with a 2-year opportunity cost. Now, a shorter path is emerging: fully immersive coding bootcamps.
  
  Coding bootcamps typically last 6-12 weeks and require participants to show up to a class in person. Bootcamps are a relatively new model, but they’re a growing trend that could help close the skills gap. Tapping into the Economic Graph, we compiled aggregated data on over 150 bootcamp programs and more than 25,000 LinkedIn members who have indicated they are attending or have attended bootcamps to identify emerging trends.
</blockquote>


We have been positive about learning to code as a way to gain useful skills for earning to give or doing directly valuable work, and promoted software engineering as a career path. We are not the only ones who have noticed that this is a pretty great opportunity. From the LinkedIn blog: Technical talent is in high demand. As of publishing this post, a LinkedIn job search for “Software Engineers” in the US reveals more than 100,000 open jobs. Adding a couple more tech-related roles (“User Designer,” “Data Scientist”) increases the total to more than 200,000 job openings. Job seekers looking to meet job requirements can enroll in a Master’s degree program, but that comes with a 2-year opportunity cost. Now, a shorter path is emerging: fully immersive coding bootcamps. Coding bootcamps typically last 6-12 weeks and require participants to show up to a class in person. Bootcamps are a relatively new model, but they’re a growing trend that could help close the skills gap. Tapping into the Economic Graph, we compiled aggregated data on over 150 bootcamp programs and more than 25,000 LinkedIn members who have indicated they are attending or have attended bootcamps to identify emerging trends. The growth is fast enough and significant enough to potentially lower wages for software engineers: In 2011, fewer than one hundred LinkedIn members indicated they had graduated from bootcamp programs. In 2014, more than 8,000 members completed coding bootcamps and added them to their profiles, reflecting a rise in acceptance of...

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### Join us as product engineer, build our interactive career guide, and help millions of graduates have a greater social impact. $1000 for referrals.

- Published: 2015-09-20
- Modified: 2024-11-29
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/09/join-us-as-product-engineer-build-our-interactive-career-guide-and-help-millions-of-graduates-have-a-greater-social-impact-1000-for-referrals/
- Topics: Uncategorised

Our aim is to help as many graduates as possible maximise the social impact of their careers. We're looking for a web product engineer to lead the development of our interactive career guide. If you're a good fit, this job is an exceptionally high-impact opportunity. And the role will give you fantastic self-development. You'll be taking a major role in a Y Combinator-funded nonprofit, that's one of the founding organisations in the effective altruism movement, affiliated with Oxford University, and has grown engagement 25-fold in the last four months. We're looking for a full stack web engineer with design skills, who's really into effective altruism, and ready to take the lead on project with huge potential for impact. The position will be in Oxford initially, then we'll likely move to the Bay Area. Some remote work is possible. If interested, fill out our short application form and we'll arrange a meeting to tell you more. If you know someone else who might be a good fit, ask them to apply and tell ben@80000hours. org. If we hire them and we didn't know them already, we'll give you $1,000. What's the role? We've done four years of research into how to best choose a career with social impact. Now we want to use that research to make the career guide that every socially-motivated graduate uses. As product engineer: You'd lead on building our interactive guide. We'd like to make a straight-forward, fun, personalised process that guides graduates through everything they need to...

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### Are too many people going into biomedical research - or too few?

- Published: 2015-09-15
- Modified: 2024-12-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/09/are-too-many-people-going-into-biomedical-research-or-too-few/
- Topics: Academic Research, Biomedical Research

Are too many people going into biomedical research or too few? As we explore in our new review of the career there are probably too many people entering the field. Biomedical research is a very promising way to make the world a better place if you have a high chance of being a top researcher, but for most people it's a very tough road and entering could be a costly mistake. In the rest of the post, we'll explain why and help you figure out whether it might be for you. Biomedical research is a good path—if you're a good fit. We sometimes encounter people who might be a good fit for biomedical research, but who are skeptical about its potential impact. We think this might be misguided because: There are exciting areas of research that could offer enormous upside, such as anti-aging research, neural implants, gene therapy and synthetic biology. Potentially very high returns to research with comparatively low costs. According to one estimate, the prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease in the US in the 1970's and 1980's alone had $31 trillion of associated gains. This is on the order of 60 times as large as all spending on medical research over the period. Another analysis estimates that a 1% reduction in cancer mortality in the US would be worth $500 billion (in comparison, the current research budget is only around 5 billion). Constrained by good researchers. Senior researchers we've spoken to have told us...

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### Will effective altruism destroy the arts? No.

- Published: 2015-09-13
- Modified: 2024-12-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/09/will-effective-altruism-destroy-the-arts-no/
- Topics: Art &amp; Entertainment, Effective Altruism

A recent article on the Washington Post expressed concern that the growth of effective altruism could seriously reduce funding for the arts. It even mentions that the Bonfils-Stanton Foundation recently decided to focus 100% on funding the arts and culture, in part because "philanthropy, directly or indirectly influenced by the effective altruist approach, is increasingly focused on problems perceived as more pressing". This was astonishing to me. Here's why effective altruism is not going to destroy the arts. 1) Only a couple of percent of American philanthropy is influenced by effective altruism, and it's not taking funding from the arts. Explicitly "effective altruist" giving is well under $100m per year, only 0. 03% of the total Americans give to charity each year. If we look more broadly to giving that has an effective altruist style, even if it doesn't explicitly use the label, the Gates Foundation is the largest proponent. But the Gates Foundation spends about $4bn per year, only 1% of the total Americans give to charity each year. It seems hard to claim that more than a couple of percent of American philanthropy is even remotely influenced by effective altruism. One study found that only 3% of American donors give based on the relative performance of the nonprofits they donate to. Only 4% of total American giving even goes to international causes, compared to 5% given to the arts; and arts funding grew 9% last year, compared to international giving which shrank 2%. The day when effective altruist donors...

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### What do journalists say about journalism as a high-impact career?

- Published: 2015-09-03
- Modified: 2015-09-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/09/what-do-journalists-say-about-journalism-as-a-high-impact-career-interviews-with-dylan-matthews-derek-thompson-and-shaun-raviv/
- Topics: Careers, Journalism, Journalist

I interviewed three journalists who have written articles that promote important causes: Dylan Matthews, Derek Thompson, and Shaun Raviv.


Ta-Nehisi Coates' "The Case for Reparations" seemed to have a significant impact on the national debate about race. Photo credit: Sean Carter Photography. I interviewed three journalists who have written articles that promote important causes: Dylan Matthews (for example, on a guaranteed basic income); Derek Thompson (for example, on effective giving); and Shaun Raviv (for example, on open borders). Key takeaways: The impact of journalism is difficult to quantify as it tends to take the form of having an incremental shift in public perception of an issue, though it clearly sometimes has major impact. By focusing on neglected topics like animal welfare or open borders, you may be able to have a comparatively larger impact by bringing attention to the cause. A strong indicator for whether you’re a good fit for journalism is simply how much you can write per day.

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### What do leaders of effective nonprofits say about working in nonprofits?

- Published: 2015-09-01
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/09/what-do-leaders-of-effective-non-profits-say-about-working-in-non-profits-interviews-with-givedirectly-deworm-the-world-initiative-development-media-international-schistosomiasis-control-initiativ/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy, Careers, Organisation-building at effective nonprofits

<figure class="wp-caption">
<img src="http://80000hours.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Rob-Mather.jpg" />

<figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Rob Mather - founder and CEO of GiveWell’s top rated charity, Against Malaria Foundation. Photo credit:
<a href="http://www.andrewtesta.co.uk/">Andrew Testa.</a></figcaption>

</figure>

I reached out to leaders at GiveDirectly, Against Malaria Foundation, Deworm the World Initiative (part of Evidence Action), Schistosomiasis Control Initiative and Development Media International to ask for their views. Here are their responses.


Rob Mather - founder and CEO of GiveWell's top rated charity, Against Malaria Foundation. Photo credit: Andrew Testa. What do leaders in GiveWell's top-recommended charities have to say about working in nonprofits as a career choice? I reached out to leaders at GiveDirectly, Against Malaria Foundation, Deworm the World Initiative (part of Evidence Action), Schistosomiasis Control Initiative and Development Media International to ask for their views. Here are their responses.

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### How can doctors do the most good? An interview with Dr Gregory Lewis

- Published: 2015-08-28
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/08/how-can-doctors-do-the-most-good-an-interview-with-dr-gregory-lewis/
- Topics: Effective Altruism, Medicine, Reasoning well, Uncategorised

Gregory Lewis is public health doctor training in the east of England. He studied medicine at Cambridge, where he volunteered for Giving What We Can and 80,000 Hours. He blogs at The Polemical Medic.  This interview was conducted as part of the research I did for Will MacAskill's book, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference. Greg's story is discussed in the fourth and fifth chapters of that book. Pablo Stafforini: To get us started, can you tell us a bit about your background, and in particular about your reasons for deciding to become a doctor? Gregory Lewis: Sure. I guess I found myself at the age of 14 or so being fairly good at science and not really having any idea of what to do with myself. I had some sort of vague idea of wanting to try to make the world a better place, in some slightly naive way. So I sort of thought, "What am I going to do with myself? " And my thoughts were pretty much verbatim, "Well, I'm good at science and want to do good. Doctors are good at science and they want to do good. Therefore, I want to be a doctor. " So based on that simple argument, I applied to medical school, got in, spent the following six years of my life in medical school qualifying as a doctor, and here I am today. Pablo: I suppose that at some point between the age of fourteen and the present...

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### How to explore in your career

- Published: 2015-08-19
- Modified: 2015-08-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/08/how-to-explore-in-your-career/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy

Tony Blair tried to make it in rock n roll before going into politics. We often talk about the benefits of trying out several different paths, especially early in your career. But changing job too often has costs. How can you explore effectively? Here's a couple of ideas from our recently updated page on why and how to explore. Tips for exploring 1. Use your natural exploration opportunities There are times when, money permitting, society gives you a free pass to do something random: In a “gap year” between school and university, or just after you graduate. In your high school and university summer holidays. In university courses that aren’t your major. Take advantage of these opportunities as much as you can. 2. Use the “graduate school reset” After you graduate from university, you can do something unusual and risky for a few years, then go to graduate school, then begin a regular professional career as if not much happened. More specifically: You can take one to two years out before doing a PhD, and by the time you graduate, it probably won’t matter. Sometimes you can use a Masters degree to transition into a new field. You can do a law degree and become a lawyer or go into policy. Consulting, finance and many corporate jobs accept people directly out of MBAs, so if you can get into an MBA program, these are an option. More generally, your twenties are a great time for exploration, since you probably don’t...

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### What are the 10 most harmful jobs?

- Published: 2015-08-14
- Modified: 2024-11-26
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/08/what-are-the-10-most-harmful-jobs/
- Topics: Accidental harm, Career advice &amp; strategy, Unconventional advice

We spend most of our time discussing the most helpful careers that you should take. We just created a three minute career recommender to highlight some of the options with the largest positive social impact for you. As most of the people we talk to are deciding between reasonable to excellent options, this seems like the right focus. But which careers are the worst? Here we try to guess which mainstream jobs are most likely to do significant harm. As almost no one we know is considering careers of this kind we have limited our investment in this research; it's an initial exploration of the topic, based on general knowledge and a review of the key figures. Here are the criteria: The job has to be legal. Needless to say, organised crime is a harmful career! More than one in a million people has to work in the job in the OECD, so it can't be incredibly obscure or specific. It can't be harmful only if you're particularly incompetent (for example, being a bad teacher), deliberately trying to do a bad job, or violating the profession's code of ethics. It's easy to think of jobs that are useless and just transfer money from one person to another. But being unproductive alone isn't enough to make a top ten list. There are also notable industries that cause harm, but are so large that each person involved is only responsible for a small share of the damage. We list a bunch of...

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### Try the new 80,000 Hours 'Career Recommender' - it could change your life

- Published: 2015-08-11
- Modified: 2023-12-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/08/try-the-new-80000-hours-career-recommender-it-could-change-your-life/
- Topics: Career planning

We just added a new and very cool feature to our website: <a href="https://80000hours.org/career-quiz/">the ‘career recommender’</a>.

It takes about 3 minutes to use and might end up significantly changing the course of your career.

Our goal is to ask you just a questions and then tell you in what careers you can have the greatest social impact.

If that sounds ambitious, that’s because it is! But the thousand of people who have already used it during testing it have found it surprisingly useful.

It should at least throw up options you should seriously consider before you do something else. So:

<ol>
<li><a href="https://80000hours.org/career-quiz/">Use the Career Recommender</a>.</li>
<li>Once you’re done, it can email you your suggestions so you can read more about them later.</li>
<li><a href="https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https://80000hours.org/career-quiz/">Share it on social media and perhaps change the lives of your friends and family for the better</a>.</li>
</ol>

<figure>
<img src="http://80000hours.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Screen-Shot-2015-08-10-at-10.39.44-pm.png" alt="Screen Shot 2015-08-10 at 10.39.44 pm" width="2190" height="1072" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-34619" />

<figcaption>Would you get these results? Try it and find out!</figcaption>

</figure>

<br>

We expect the career recommender to remain a core part of our career guide in the future. It’s already useful, but it will become much more so over time as our research expands and we:

<ul>
<li>‘Review’ and rate a wider range of paths, especially those in which people can achieve great things without having to have far above average quantitative or language skills.</li>
<li>Change the questions to more precisely measure people’s skills.</li>
<li>Check that it gives good answers for any possible set of inputs.</li>
</ul>

<h2>Stay informed of significant updates by <a href="https://80000hours.org/about/stay-updated/">signing up to our twice monthly research newsletter</a>.</h2>


We just added a new and very cool feature to our website: the 'career recommender'. It takes about 3 minutes to use and might end up significantly changing the course of your career. Our goal is to ask you just a questions and then tell you in what careers you can have the greatest social impact. If that sounds ambitious, that's because it is! But the thousand of people who have already used it during testing it have found it surprisingly useful. It should at least throw up options you should seriously consider before you do something else. So: Use the Career Recommender. Once you're done, it can email you your suggestions so you can read more about them later. Share it on social media and perhaps change the lives of your friends and family for the better. Would you get these results? Try it and find out! We expect the career recommender to remain a core part of our career guide in the future. It's already useful, but it will become much more so over time as our research expands and we: 'Review' and rate a wider range of paths, especially those in which people can achieve great things without having to have far above average quantitative or language skills. Change the questions to more precisely measure people's key abilities. Check that it gives good answers for any possible set of inputs. Stay informed of significant updates by signing up to our research newsletter.

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### 4 reasons working at a foundation is better than you think

- Published: 2015-08-10
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/08/4-reasons-working-at-a-foundation-is-better-than-you-think/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy, Careers, Foundation Program Management

If you're an all-rounder who wants to make a difference, consider working as a <a href="https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/foundation-program-manager/">foundation grantmaker</a>. Grantmaking can seem like an unglamorous profession - reviewing hundreds of applications for funding isn't the most exciting sounding role - but it has some major upsides if you want to make the world a better place.


Melinda Gates visiting one of her foundation's projects. If you're an all-rounder who wants to make a difference, consider working as a foundation grantmaker. Grantmaking can seem like an unglamorous profession - reviewing hundreds of applications for funding isn't the most exciting sounding role - but it has some major upsides if you want to make the world a better place. Influence millions of dollars Foundation program officers are in charge of deciding where foundations donate money. At major foundations they control around $10 million in grants every year. When the amount of money influenced is this large, even a small improvement to the allocation of grants can have a big impact. Our guess is that if you work within a good cause, there's a good chance you'll have more impact than in earning to give. Influence the direction of non-profits Foundation grantmakers can influence what non-profits do. For example, GiveWell's Open Philanthropy was started due to the influence of the foundation Good Ventures: We did not have the idea for the Open Philanthropy (previously GiveWell Labs) until Good Ventures expressed a high degree of interest in our work. Having a major funder encourage us to think about how we would allocate large amounts of money caused us to think more deeply about the matter than we would have otherwise. " Key questions about philanthropy, part 1: What is the role of a funder? - GiveWell Blog Foundation grantmakers can also help non-profits run more effectively by connecting them to useful...

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### Summary of our annual review May 2015

- Published: 2015-08-05
- Modified: 2020-08-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/08/summary-of-our-annual-review-may-2015/
- Topics: Updates

We’ve just published our annual review for the period ending April 2015. In case you’re new to 80,000 Hours, this is what we do: we advise talented graduates on how to maximise the social impact of their careers. Currently, we do this through our online guide and one-on-one coaching. We help graduates find the meaningful careers they want, while moving more talent to the world’s most pressing problems. The key documents in the review are: Our review of progress Our plans for the next year An update on our progress while in Y Combinator since May In brief, this year we made major improvements to our online guide, leading to 400% growth in the monthly rate of significant plan changes (our key impact metric). Our President wrote a book that Steve Levitt described as “required reading for anyone interested in making the world better,” we quickly met our fundraising stretch target, and we were admitted to the world’s top startup accelerator, Y Combinator. We did all this despite a smaller budget and two staff with long-term illness. We also made plenty of mistakes. In total, to date we’ve caused 188 significant plan changes. As a result of our help, these people: Have founded five professional non-profits that likely wouldn’t exist without us. Have entered careers such as research and politics. Intend to donate at least an extra £6. 9m to high-impact charities within the next three years. We’ve...

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### What's it like being a nonprofit in Y Combinator?

- Published: 2015-08-05
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/08/why-is-80000-hours-in-y-combinator-as-a-non-profit-and-whats-it-like/
- Topics: Early-stage startup employee, Found a tech startup, Uncategorised

Now the obligatory Tech Crunch article is out, I'm thrilled to announce we've been in Y Combinator (YC) since June. YC is widely regarded as the world's best startup accelerator, and has supported companies such as AirBnB, Reddit and Dropbox. It provides investment and intensive coaching over three months. I've had a lot of questions about YC over the last couple of days. Here's answers to the most common questions, plus an update on our progress since we were admitted. FAQ What do you get as a nonprofit in YC, and why did you join? Instead of $120,000 of investment, you get a $100,000 donation. Otherwise, you're treated almost exactly the same as a for-profit. This means: There are two partners who look after you. You meet them once every 1-2 weeks. We're looked after by Dalton Caldwell and Paul Bucheit, the founder of Gmail. Kate Courteau, head of the nonprofit program also looks out for us. You can also request office hours with any of the other 20 or so partners. We've had great office hours with Kevin Hale, the founder of Wufoo, on web design, and Sam Altman, the President of YC, on strategy. We've also had some very useful legal help from YC's lawyers. Paul Graham is retired, but you get to meet him once. Unfortunately, we didn't yet. There's a dinner each Tuesday where they bring in a tech leader to talk off-the-record, and you get to chat to your batchmates and the partners. There's also...

---

### Plans for the coming year May 2015

- Published: 2015-08-05
- Modified: 2023-03-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/08/plans-for-the-coming-year-may-2015/
- Topics: Updates

This report explains our strategy and plans for the next year, and is part of our annual review. Moving from discovery phase to growth phase We've seen the last three years as our "discovery phase" (as explained in our last business plan). We didn't immediately focus on growth because first we wanted to answer the following questions: Could we make significant progress on the issue of how best to choose a career with social impact? Would people listen to our research and change their career plans? Would they follow through with these plan changes and actually increase their impact? Could we bring about these plan changes scalably and cost-effectively? Do we have a working funding model? Answering these questions took time, especially because it usually takes people a year or so to change their plans, and it takes another year or more to see if they have followed through. Today, however, we think we can answer "yes" to each question. We believe this means that 80,000 Hours is a project with potentially huge impact: 31% of graduates say making an impact in their work is "essential", but they have little idea what to do except work in the social sector or give up ("sell out"). So most of their potential impact is wasted. We can potentially fix that. As a result, we now intend to move into a "growth phase". Our career guide and coaching currently bring...

---

### Review of progress May 2015

- Published: 2015-08-05
- Modified: 2020-08-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/08/review-of-progress-may-2015/
- Topics: Updates

In this post, which is part of our annual review, we review our achievements, challenges and mistakes over the year ending May 2015. Key achievements Our major achievements this year include the following: We made major improvements to our online guide, leading to 400% growth in the monthly rate of significant plan changes. Our President, Will, wrote a book, which was released last week. We quickly met our fundraising stretch target. We were also admitted to the world’s top startup accelerator, Y Combinator. We did all this with a smaller budget than last year and despite two staff suffering from long-term illness. Improvements to our online guide At the start of 2014, our website had little more than a blog - we had just a one page summary of our advice. By April 2015, we had a twenty page online guide with four sections and 16 career profiles. Following the launch of the new content in September 2014, unique page views of the guide reached 46,000 per month by April. Monthly newsletter sign-ups also went up to 313, twenty times the number from the equivalent period last year. As a result, we estimate that our online content alone is causing six significant plan changes per month, four times the rate in early 2014. (And that’s before taking account of the fact that significant plan changes will lag significantly behind traffic because it takes time to change...

---

### Review of program performance May 2015

- Published: 2015-08-05
- Modified: 2022-12-14
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/08/review-of-program-performance/
- Topics: Updates

Summary In this report, which is part of our annual review, we review how our programs performed over the last year (ending April 2015). The key metric we use to measure the performance of our programs is "significant plan changes". A significant plan change is when someone tells us that they probably changed the career path they were going to follow because of us. This year, the number of plan changes caused by our online guide rose from about 1. 3 per month at the start of 2014 to about 6. 5 per month - 400% growth. The rate of newsletter sign ups per month through the website - our key engagement metric - also grew 1600%. Due to a shift in focus, we coached about a third as many people in 2014 as we had in 2013, and spent less time per person. As a result, significant plan changes caused by coaching declined from 21 in 2013 to 3 in 2014. They picked up again in early 2015 as we increased time spent coaching. In total to date, we've now recorded 188 significant plan changes, up from 107 at the time of our last evaluation in April 2014. We estimate we're adding about 10 per month at the margin (6. 5 from guide, 2 from other (mainly community) and the remainder from coaching), up from 2 per month near the start of 2014. The average cost per plan change...

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### Can you have more impact working in a foundation than earning to give?

- Published: 2015-07-30
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/07/can-you-have-more-impact-working-in-a-foundation-than-earning-to-give/
- Topics: Donating effectively, Earning to Give, Effective Altruism, Foundation Program Management

Photo credit: Flickr - Refracted Moments Key points Working to improve grants at a foundation could well be more effective in terms of the impact of the money moved than earning to give. Which is better will usually come down to how good your personal opportunities are to make money, or get a job at a large foundation working on an important cause. If you know of a cause area or organisation that is many times more effective than what any foundations you could work at would make grants to, then earning to give is likely to be better. There are other issues, like the impact on your long-term career trajectory, that you have to consider as well as the direct impact of the money you move. As soon as we thought of the idea of earning to give, we started thinking of ways to beat it. One idea that was floated in the very early days of 80,000 Hours was working in a foundation to allocate grants to more effective causes and organisations. Since a foundations grantmaker might allocate tens of millions of funding, far more than they could earn, maybe they could have a greater impact this way? In this post, we provide a model for comparing the impact of foundations grantmaking and earning to give, which some people may find useful for specific scenarios where they have more info on the inputs. We also provide some very tentative estimates using the model to demonstrate how it works... .

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### ‘Replaceability’ isn’t as important as you might think (or we’ve suggested)

- Published: 2015-07-27
- Modified: 2024-12-17
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/07/replaceability-isnt-as-important-as-you-might-think-or-weve-suggested/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy, Economics, Replaceability, Unconventional advice

<figure>
<img src="http://80000hours.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/mJNoza3.jpg" alt="mJNoza3" width="2048" height="1357" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-34555" />

<figcaption>Often if you turn down a skilled job, the role simply won't be filled at all because there's no suitable substitute available. For this and other reasons we don't place as much weight as we used to on the idea of 'replaceability'.</figcaption>

</figure>
<br>

When we started 80,000 Hours, one of the key ideas we presented was the replaceability argument:

<blockquote>
  Suppose you become a surgeon and perform 100 life saving operations. Naively it seems like your impact is to save 100 people’s lives. If you hadn’t taken the job, however, someone else likely would have taken it instead. So your true (counterfactual) impact is less than the good you do directly.
</blockquote>

I still think this is a good argument, but I’m not sure how relevant it is when comparing real career options.

In particular, I see the argument often being used incorrectly in the following two ways:

<ol>
<li>Ignoring direct harm: Suppose you’re considering taking a job that some people think is harmful (e.g. certain parts of the financial sector) in order to donate, do advocacy or build skills. You reason “if I don’t take the job, someone else will instead, so the potential harm I’ll do directly doesn’t matter”.</p></li>
<li><p>Ignoring direct impact: Suppose you’re considering working at a high-impact nonprofit. You reason “if I don’t take the job, someone else will instead, so I won’t have much impact.”</p></li>
</ol>

<p>I disagree with both of these claims in most circumstances. Why?


Often if you turn down a skilled job, the role simply won't be filled at all because there's no suitable substitute available. For this and other reasons we don't place as much weight as we used to on the idea of 'replaceability'. When we started 80,000 Hours, one of the key ideas we presented was the replaceability argument: Suppose you become a surgeon and perform 100 life saving operations. Naively it seems like your impact is to save 100 people's lives. If you hadn't taken the job, however, someone else likely would have taken it instead. So your true (counterfactual) impact is less than the good you do directly. I still think this is a good argument, but I'm not sure how relevant it is when comparing real career options. In particular, I see the argument often being used incorrectly in the following two ways: Ignoring direct harm: Suppose you're considering taking a job that some people think is harmful (e. g. certain parts of the financial sector) in order to donate, do advocacy or build skills. You reason "if I don't take the job, someone else will instead, so the potential harm I'll do directly doesn't matter". Ignoring direct impact: Suppose you're considering working at a high-impact nonprofit. You reason "if I don't take the job, someone else will instead, so I won't have much impact. " I disagree with both of these claims in most circumstances. Why? The replaceability argument only establishes that your true impact in a job is...

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### Update: how many extra donations have we caused?

- Published: 2015-07-26
- Modified: 2015-09-16
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/07/update-how-many-extra-donations-have-we-caused/
- Topics: Earning to Give

One way 80,000 Hours has an impact is by increasing the amount our users donate to high-impact charities. As part of our annual review, we did a quick update to the figures from our last review. The process we used wasn’t as thorough as we would have liked, but provides some encouraging evidence of our impact. What we did We identified the largest donors we know of who (i) have made significant plan changes according to our definition and (ii) say they intend to earn to give. We asked them the following questions via email: How much have you donated over the last three years? How much do you expect to donate over the next three years? Where to? How much of this is attributable to 80,000 Hours? (meaning what wouldn’t have been given if 80,000 Hours didn’t exist). How much have you pledged to give as part of GWWC or otherwise? For those people who responded last year, we asked for an extra year of data. You can see the answers and case studies from last year’s review in the appendix here. We received responses from all ten people asked. Each intends to give to whichever charities they believe to be highest-impact (in practice, this mostly means effective altruist organisations or charities recommended by GiveWell or Giving What We Can). Also included in our results is last year’s highest donor (“A”), who declined to report this year due to concerns about anonymity (although “A” is still earning to give)... .

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### 80,000 Hours finance report April 2015

- Published: 2015-07-26
- Modified: 2021-11-18
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/07/80000-hours-finance-report-april-2015-2/
- Topics: Updates

In this report, we outline our income, expenses, projected budget and financial situation as of the end of March 2015.


In this report, we outline our income, expenses, projected budget and financial situation as of the end of March 2015. All figures are in British pounds. Historical Spending Audited budget, Jan 2014 – Dec 2014 Q1 2014 Q2 2014 Q3 2014 Q4 2014 2014 Totals 80,000 Hours Employees 10,328 10,136 10,878 11,414 42,757 80,000 Hours’ share of central employees 6,658 8,599 4,597 4,555 24,409 Intern expenses and accommodation 6,023 3,772 2,119 2,136 14,051 Office 4,127 3,280 1,869 2,345 11,621 Chapters, communications and events 278 1,152 1,371 17 2,818 Technical, research and online activities 654 416 1,093 1,996 4,160 Charges on donations 11 17 85 102 215 Legal and financial 7 1,034 233 176 1,449 Training, conferences and travel 514 -1,780 5,181 809 4,723 Miscellaneous minor expenses (incurred by CEA) 600 663 192 411 1,866 Miscellaneous minor expenses (incurred by 80,000 hours) 1,044 156 4,332 5,726 11,257 Total of all expenditure 30,245 27,444 31,951 29,687 119,326 Annual currency gain/loss -2,957 total of all costs 116,369 Summary annual budget 2012 2013 2014 Totals Employees 11,835 49,352 76,884 Intern expenses and accommodation 5,727 49,470 14,045 Office 2,039 11,729 11,621 Student groups, communications and events 489 6,566 2,818 Technical 639 418 4,160 Charges on donations 716 3,328 215 Legal and financial 839 1011 1,571 Training, travel and conferences (new category in 2014) 4,723 Miscellaneous expenses 885 2134 3,358 Total of all costs 23,171 124,008 119,326 What drove the spending decrease? ...

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### Is wealth inequality so extreme that it's OK to be a ruthless trader?

- Published: 2015-07-22
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/07/is-wealth-inequality-so-extreme-that-its-ok-to-be-a-ruthless-trader/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy, EtG pros and cons, Income, Quantitative hedge funds

Wealth inequality globally is incredibly high. Perversely, this can be an argument in favour of working in finance. Many people are concerned that 'earning to give' in the financial industry is overall harmful for the world, even if you give away most of your income to outstanding charities. To figure out if this is true, we have been researching the size of the harms, and benefits, caused by finance. (Though please note 80,000 Hours is not just about earning to give and in fact we think it's the best path for only a small share of our readers. ) One of the concerns we've investigated is that certain parts of quantitative finance are a socially-useless competition between traders that only changes who gets some amount of income, not that someone gets it. I think this is the case, but the incredible amount of inequality in the world makes this argument against working in finance fairly weak. If you are working in 'low-latency arbitrage', make a random clever trade on a stock exchange and beat some other trader to a profit by 1 millisecond, whose pocket is this money coming from? A poor African farmer? No, they have no wealth to take. A middle class American family? It's possible, but most of their wealth, if they have any, is probably in their house or bank account. We don't have perfect figures here, but looking at reasonable estimates, you're more than 80% likely to be competing against someone in the top...

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### LinkedIn finds the most common ways in and out of every career

- Published: 2015-07-22
- Modified: 2015-07-23
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/07/linkedin-finds-the-most-common-ways-in-and-out-of-every-career/
- Topics: Career capital, How to get a job, Uncategorised

We recently wrote a career profile on medicine which said that one of the most common exit opportunities for physicians was into academia. How exactly did we know that? LinkedIn has mined their enormous dataset to find the most frequent career transitions for people from a huge range of different professions. It turns out that the most frequent transfer for a physician or surgeon is to become a university professor, presumably studying or teaching medicine itself. Most roles have several common options. I strongly recommend playing around with it and reading their analysis. It turns out that ‘sales’ is a huge skill area and one of the most common next steps for people from a very wide range of professions. Almost every business needs some people to work on sales! You can use this both to see what your natural next career moves are, and figure out what indirect paths you can use to get into a particular different position you have in mind. It doesn’t do the reverse lookup itself yet, so you’ll need to guess which options are most likely to lead you into the one you want. We’ll be incorporating the wisdom of this tool into our career profiles as we update them. The broad skill groupings they classified seemed to me to be: Sales, hospitality and logistics (blue) Health and education (red) Information technology (pink) Practical trades, manufacturing and engineering (orange) Marketing and writing (green) Management, consulting and government relations (purple) Design and making the world...

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### Systemic change becomes non-systemic change and vice versa

- Published: 2015-07-21
- Modified: 2015-07-23
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/07/systemic-change-becomes-non-systemic-change-and-vice-versa/
- Topics: Uncategorised, Unconventional advice

As you might have heard, there is an active debate among the 80,000 Hours community about the effectiveness of attempts to change societal systems - such as laws, institutions or social norms - versus so-called “non-systemic” approaches, such as funding health treatments directly, or becoming a teacher. Sometimes these debates become quite heated. To put my cards on the table, I lean towards systemic change being a more promising approach, at least given my skills. Hence, I’ve studied public policy and worked in a Government think tank myself. I also see one of the major long-run impacts of 80,000 Hours to be changing social norms about how people think about how they spend their working life. But I find it hard to get too passionate with those who lean the other way. One reason for this was well explained in a comment by my friend Catriona Mackay: I think that people on the whole are biased towards against non-systemic change (i. e if you did a survey asking whether it's best to treat the causes or the symptoms of poverty, almost everyone would answer 'causes', even if there were strong evidence that both were effective in terms of increasing net well-being), and so it's likely that non-systemic causes are more underfunded, so I can contribute more. On the other hand, I think that scaling up proven health solutions and cash grants and so on are also ways of contributing to systemic/revolutionary change. I'm a big old Social Justice Warrior type...

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### We’ve caused 188 significant plan changes

- Published: 2015-07-21
- Modified: 2020-08-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/07/weve-caused-188-significant-plan-changes/
- Topics: Updates

The results of our annual impact survey are in, so we can give an update on the number of significant plan changes we’ve caused as of the end of April 2014. “Significant plan change” is the key metric we use to track our impact. See a definition. Results of the annual impact survey The survey was open from November 2014 to early March this year. We promoted it throughout February, on our newsletter, our blog and social media as well as in-person. To encourage responses, we offered a $200 prize to one randomly selected respondent. This resulted in 218 responses, of which 85 people answered “yes” to the following question: “Has your engagement with 80,000 Hours caused you to significantly change your career plans? ” How many of the people who said “yes” count as having made significant plan changes according to our criteria? First, we removed 13 people who were already captured last year (though worth noting is that five of these people seem to have made a second significant shift in plans due to us). Second, we removed a further 18 people who didn’t seem to make our criteria. The main reason was that they didn’t list a specific shift in plans, and instead listed an intention to shift in the future or only gave a very vague response. It’s likely that some of these people would count as significant plan changes if we asked...

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### New definition of a significant plan change

- Published: 2015-07-21
- Modified: 2015-10-30
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/07/new-definition-of-a-significant-plan-change/
- Topics: Uncategorised

We’re changing how we define “significant plan changes”. The “significant plan change” is the key metric we track month-to-month to measure our impact. It’s related to our total impact as follows: (Number of significant plan changes) multiplied by (the value of the average significant plan change) We evaluate the value of a significant plan change once every year or two (see our last evaluation). This means the more difficult judgement calls concerning our impact (such as whether plan changes are really improvements, and the extent to which they would have been caused by other groups anyway) are isolated into a separate evaluation process that we perform less frequently. Our new definition for a significant plan change is: A sig plan change =df Someone tells us that 80,000 Hours caused them to change the career path they intend to pursue, in a way that they think increases their lifetime impact. In practice, this means: They fill out one of our surveys saying “yes” to “has your engagement with 80,000 Hours caused you to significantly change your career plans? ” They tell us what path they changed from and what path they now intend to pursue. They tell us what sort of engagement with us caused the change (e. g. reading an article vs. coaching vs. speaking to someone in our community). They believe this will result in greater impact (rather than just higher job satisfaction or other benefits). Here are some examples of changes that would count: They had no idea what they...

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### If you want to save lives, should you study medicine? Probably not.

- Published: 2015-07-20
- Modified: 2022-12-14
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/07/if-you-want-to-save-lives-should-you-study-medicine-probably-not/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy, Doctor, Medicine, Reasoning well, Unconventional advice

About 1 in 200 people become doctors, many of them because they want to cure the sick and generally make the world a better place. Are they making the right decision? To help answer that question, we've produced an exploratory career profile on medical careers. The conclusion of our research is that most people skilled enough to make it in a field as challenging as medicine could have a bigger social impact through an alternative career. The best research suggests that doctors do much less to improve the health of their patients than you might naturally expect. Health is more determined by lifestyle factors, and most of the treatments that work particularly well could be delivered with a smaller number of doctors than already work in the UK or USA. However, medicine is high earning and highly fulfilling, and we expect there are more promising opportunities to help others through biomedical research, public health, health policy and (e. g. hospital) management. Overall, we think going to medical school would be the best way to have a social impact only if someone felt they were a significantly better fit for medicine than the other options we recommend. Dr Greg Lewis, a practicing physician in the UK, wrote most of the career profile. Key findings Having more physicians in the developed world has a surprisingly small impact on the health of recipients. A extra doctor might expect to increase their patients' health enough to create 4 years of extra healthy life for each...

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### Disagreeing about what's effective isn't disagreeing with effective altruism

- Published: 2015-07-16
- Modified: 2023-12-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/07/disagreeing-about-whats-effective-isnt-disagreeing-with-effective-altruism/
- Topics: Effective Altruism, Reasoning well, Uncategorised

Lately I have had the uncanny experience of reading supposed 'rebuttals' of effective altruism that just say a bunch of things that I and most of my colleagues agree with. As we are some of the most involved people in the effective altruism movement, this is strange to say the least. What is going on here is that effective altruism is both a narrow core idea, and a bunch of associated ideas. Some of these associated ideas happen to be widely held by people who describe themselves as effective altruists - others don't even meet that standard. What is the core idea? Effective altruism is the use of evidence and analysis to take actions that help others as much as possible. Many of my colleagues would want to add here that you 'should' use evidence and reason to help others as much as possible. But there is no consensus on whether engaging in 'effective altruism' is a moral duty, or just something we should be enthusiastic about because we care about others. What about the associated ideas? I could listed dozens, but some are: It's highly effective to give to GiveWell recommended charities; Randomised controlled trials are a great way to figure out what works in development; Animal welfare is an important thing to worry about; Humans run a serious risk of a horrible catastrophe in the next century; Earning a lot of money and giving it away is a good career path; And many others. Now, notice that none...

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### Get the chance to save the world with this one weird trick

- Published: 2015-07-16
- Modified: 2015-07-16
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/07/get-the-chance-to-save-the-world-with-this-one-weird-trick/
- Topics: Career capital, Now vs. Later

When I was an undergraduate I came to fully understand the depth of the world’s problems: tens of billions of animals were suffering in factory farms, humanity faced the risk of catastrophic nuclear war, billions continue to live in horrendous poverty, and that was just the start. I wanted to solve these problems, but when I tried to take concrete steps I mostly felt powerless and frustrated. I was right to feel powerless. As an undergraduate there was relatively little I could do to directly solve anything. I had no income to give; no insights that hadn’t been had; and no platform from which to ask people to change their behaviour. I really didn’t want the world to be incinerated in a nuclear apocalypse, but - fortunately - nuclear security policy isn’t set by random Australian undergraduates who happen to think they know what’s best. Luckily for most of us, this powerlessness need only be a temporary, if unpleasant, condition. If you are a high school student or undergraduate frustrated about your limited influence in the world, there’s one thing you need to be working to get. With it comes the ability to change things. Some younger people manage to get a lot of it very quickly, but the majority of us will have the most of it between 40 and 60, so you need to keep a long-term view. A lot of our advice for young people is geared towards helping them accumulate more of it. We call this...

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### What people miss about career capital: exceptional achievements

- Published: 2015-07-13
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/07/what-people-miss-about-career-capital-exceptional-achievements/
- Topics: Advice for undergraduates, Career capital, How to get a job

Pooja Chandrashekar is a good demonstration that sometimes the best way to show people you can achieve amazing things is just to achieve amazing things. (Photo by J. Lawler Duggan/For The Washington Post) When we talk about "career capital" it seems people first imagine "brand name" jobs e. g. working at Google, McKinsey, or getting a credential like a law degree or graduate study at a prestigious university. And it's true these paths all boost your career capital. But I think there's another important component of career capital that's often neglected. A big part of having really strong career capital is having eye-catching, valuable achievements. Eye-catching achievements make you stand out, another form of credential. Standing out helps you to meet successful people, building your connections. The process of getting exceptional achievements usually involves pushing yourself too, so it correlates with learning strong skills. Overall, striving for eye-catching achievements seems at least as important as gaining prestige or conventional credentials - so if you only focus on the latter you could be making a mistake. One example to illustrate (but of course not prove! ) the point: Pooja Chandraskekar, who this year was one of the few students in the world to be admitted to all the Ivy League Universities. Among much else, she developed a mobile app that predicts whether a person has Parkinson's disease with 96% accuracy. She needed these achievements to make her stand out among all the other people who have "ticked the boxes" of good grades, SATs...

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### Defining 'Earning to Give'

- Published: 2015-07-13
- Modified: 2015-07-13
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/07/defining-earning-to-give/
- Topics: Earning to Give, Foundations

We’ve found there’s sometimes been confusion about what ‘earning to give’ means. Here’s our working definition. You’re earning to give if and only if: You deliberately pursue a career that is high-earning (given your options) in order to do good through your donations AND You donate a very significant proportion of your earnings, where for someone earning more than the average in rich countries, ‘very significant’ means at least 20% of income. As with all the technical terms the effective altruism community has introduced, we should worry about how the meaning of that term might change over time as it gets more widely used. For 'earning to give' I think the biggest concern is that the qualifying bar for % donations goes down: I think someone who's in a high-earning career but only giving 2% shouldn't count as 'earning to give,' but I can foresee scenarios in which people start using the term that way. Of course, for someone who is not able to take a very high-earning career, the bar for % donations should be lower. Sometimes I hear 'earning to give' to be used almost synonymously with 'donating': I think, though, that it's more useful to keep the concept of 'earning to give' focused on a specific career strategy, rather than simply donating in whatever career you're already in.

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### Why you usually shouldn't work at nonprofits straight after graduation

- Published: 2015-07-08
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/07/why-you-usually-shouldnt-work-at-non-profits-straight-after-graduation/
- Topics: Advice for undergraduates, Career capital, Career planning, Exploration, Foundations, Organisation-building at effective nonprofits

I recently gave a TEDx talk at Cambridge University, where I argue that, most of the time, graduates who want to have a big social impact shouldn’t go straight to work at a charity.


I recently gave a TEDx talk at Cambridge University, where I argue that, most of the time, graduates who want to have a big social impact shouldn't go straight to work at a charity: Often working at a nonprofit is seen as the standard path if you want to make a difference. But based on our career framework, it doesn't look like it's the best option most of the time, especially early in your career. Here's why: Most nonprofits have little impact A significant fraction of social interventions don't work, and this means that the nonprofits who implement these interventions don't have any impact. Poor skill development Nonprofits are usually small and have a shoestring budget, which means there's little room for training or career development compared to organisations in the for-profit sector. Poor option value It's much easier to transition from the corporate sector into nonprofits than vice versa, so if you want to try both, it's better to start outside of nonprofits, then enter later. As I've found, my views on this aren't idiosyncratic. I'm in the process of interviewing the heads of highly effective nonprofits, asking for what they'd advise socially motivated graduates to do straight after university. Once of the questions I asked was "Suppose you could advise a graduate in the humanities from a good university, who is happy to pursue any career path in the short-term, but would like to work in international development nonprofits in the long-term, what concretely would you...

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### Effective altruists love systemic change

- Published: 2015-07-08
- Modified: 2022-12-14
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/07/effective-altruists-love-systemic-change/
- Topics: About 80,000 Hours, Earning to Give, Effective Altruism, Global priorities research, Government &amp; policy, Moral philosophy, Party Politics, Politics, Top-recommended careers, Uncategorised

<figure>
<img src="https://80000hours.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/undercar.jpg" alt="undercar" width="900" height="832" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-34403" />

<figcaption>Effective altruists are out working every day to fix society's systemic problems. It's time to definitely rebut the claim that we don't care about systemic change.</figcaption>

</figure>
<br>

Yesterday we <a href="https://80000hours.org/2015/07/80000-hours-thinks-that-only-a-small-proportion-of-people-should-earn-to-give-long-term/">put to rest</a> the idea that 80,000 Hours, and effective altruists more generally, are only enthusiastic about ‘earning to give’. While some people should earn to give, we expect the right share is under 20%, and think that ‘earning to give’ is now more popular among the people who follow our advice than it ideally would be.

Today I want to put to rest another common misunderstanding about effective altruism and 80,000 Hours: that we are against systemic change.

Despite being the most <a href="http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2015/06/effective-altruist-philosophers.html">widespread</a> <a href="http://qz.com/110616/what-peter-buffett-doesnt-understand-about-the-world/">critique</a> of <a href="https://bostonreview.net/forum/logic-effective-altruism/angus-deaton-response-effective-altruism">effective</a> altruism, the idea is bizarre on its face. We are pragmatists at heart, and always looking for any ways to more effectively make the world a better place.

Why couldn’t pursuing broad-scale legal, cultural or political changes be the most effective approach to making the world a better place? The answer is simply that they could!

So there is nothing <em>in principle</em> about the idea of maximising the social impact of your work that rules out, or even discourages, seeking systemic change.

What about in practice, though? Here are some systemic changes people who identify as effective altruists are working on today:

<ul>
<li>Most of the recent <a href="http://www.openphilanthropy.org/">Open Philanthropy</a> research and grants, on immigration reform, criminal justice reform, macroeconomics, and international development, are all clearly focussed on huge structural changes of various kinds.</li>
<li>The <a href="http://openborders.info/">OpenBorders.info</a> website also researches and promotes the option of dramatic increases in migration from poor to rich countries.</li>
<li>A new startup called EA Policy, recommended for support by my colleagues at EA Ventures, is trialling making submissions to open policy forums held by the US government over this summer.</li>
<li>Our colleagues at the <a href="http://www.globalprioritiesproject.org">Global Priorities Project</a> research the most important policy priorities for governments, and how they can establish better cost-benefit and decision-making processes.</li>
<li>One of <a href="http://www.givewell.org">GiveWell’s</a> main goals from the beginning, perhaps it’s primary goal, has been to change the cultural norms within nonprofits, and the standards by which they are judged by donors. They wanted to make it necessary for charities to be transparent with donors, and run projects that actually helped recipients. They have already significantly changed the conversation around charitable giving.</li>
<li>Giving What We Can representatives have met with people in the UK government about options for improving aid effectiveness. One of the first things I wrote when employed by Giving What We Can was about <a href="https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/blog/2013-04-04/was-tutankhamun-a-billion-times-more-important-than-you">appropriate use of discounts rates</a> by governments thinking about health services. Until recently one Giving What We Can member, who we know well, was working at the UK’s aid agency DfID.</li>
<li>Some 80,000 Hours alumni, most of whom unfortunately would rather remain anonymous, are going into politics, think-tanks, setting up a labour mobility organisations or businesses that facilitate remittance flows.</li>
<li>Several organisations focussed on existential risk (FHI, CSER and FLI jump to mind) take a big interest in government policies, especially those around the regulation of new technologies, or institutions that can improve inter-state cooperation and preclude conflict.</li>
<li>80,000 Hours alumni and effective altruist <a href="http://www.animalcharityevaluators.org/recommendations/top-charities/">charities</a> work on or donate to lobbying efforts on animal welfare, such as Humane Society US-FARM, or are activists working for dramatic society-wide changes in how humans view the moral importance of non-human animals.</li>
</ul>

It looks to me like it’s more accurate to say that effective altruists &lt;3 systemic change.

We’re not done though.


Yesterday we put to rest the idea that 80,000 Hours, and effective altruists more generally, are only enthusiastic about 'earning to give'. While some people should earn to give, we expect the right share is under 20%, and think that 'earning to give' is now more popular among the people who follow our advice than it ideally would be. Today I want to put to rest another common misunderstanding about effective altruism and 80,000 Hours: that we are against working on systemic change. Despite being the most widespread critique of effective altruism, the idea is bizarre on its face. We are pragmatists at heart, and always looking for any ways to more effectively make the world a better place. Why couldn't pursuing broad-scale legal, cultural or political changes be the most effective approach to making the world a better place? The answer is simply that it could! So there is nothing in principle about the idea of maximising the social impact of your work that rules out, or even discourages, seeking systemic change. What about in practice, though? Here are some people who identify as effective altruists working on systemic change: Most recent Open Philanthropy research and grants, on immigration reform, criminal justice reform, macroeconomics, and international development, are clearly focussed on huge structural changes of various kinds. The OpenBorders. info website collates research on and promotes the option of dramatic increases in migration from poor to rich countries. A new startup called EA Policy, recommended for financial support by...

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### 80,000 Hours thinks that only a small proportion of people should earn to give long term

- Published: 2015-07-06
- Modified: 2024-11-21
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/07/80000-hours-thinks-that-only-a-small-proportion-of-people-should-earn-to-give-long-term/
- Topics: Career capital, Earning to Give, EtG advice, EtG pros and cons, Finance, Personal fit, Uncategorised

Norman Borlaug didn't make millions, his research just saved millions of lives. One of the most common misconceptions that we've encountered about 80,000 Hours is that we're exclusively or predominantly focused on earning to give. This blog post is to say definitively that this is not the case. Moreover, the proportion of people for whom we think earning to give is the best option has gone down over time. To get a sense of this, I surveyed the 80,000 Hours team on the following question: "At this point in time, and on the margin, what portion of altruistically motivated graduates from a good university, who are open to pursuing any career path, should aim to earn to give in the long term? " (Please note that this is just a straw poll used as a way of addressing the misconception stated; it doesn't represent a definitive answer to this question). Will: 15% Ben: 20% Rob: 10% Roman: 15% Instead, we think that most people should be doing things like politics, policy, high-value research, for-profit and nonprofit entrepreneurship, and direct work for highly socially valuable organizations. The misconception persists for a few reasons: when 80,000 Hours first launched, we led with the idea of earning to give very heavily as a marketing strategy; it was true that we used to believe that at least a large proportion of people should aim to earn to give long-term; earning to give is much simpler and more memorable than our other recommendations; and earning to...

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### In some careers your parents can give you a huge boost. Should you do what they did?

- Published: 2015-07-03
- Modified: 2023-09-18
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/07/in-some-careers-your-parents-can-give-you-a-huge-boost-should-you-do-what-they-did/
- Topics: How to get a job, Party Politics, Personal fit, Politics, Unconventional advice

Would Angelina Jolie have been as successful if her father wasn't Jon Voight? In our talks we often note that in the past people typically went into the same career as their parents, but today young people are free to choose from a much wider range of options that might suit them better. That's true, and it's a great thing. However, there are still sometimes reasons to follow in your parents' footsteps. New research shows that working in the same field as a successful parent can give your odds of success a huge boost. Surely some of what's going on here is that the child of a star parent is more likely to try to enter the same field in the first place, but part must also be that they are more likely to succeed when they do so. Some, perhaps even most, of that effect will be due to to unfair and zero-sum nepotistic advantage, and so shouldn't be actively exploited. But part of it must also be down to nothing immoral: you will start learning about the work incidentally from a young age, you'll happen to make useful contacts as you grow up, and your parent may even be able to offer you personal coaching. Unfortunately, the boost seems to be largest in fields where performance is hardest to measure (it's smaller in sport and science) or where a brand surname matters, as in politics. Here are the results for some of the most competitive positions in society:...

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### Why are wages less stable in skilled professions?

- Published: 2015-07-03
- Modified: 2020-06-04
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/07/why-are-wages-less-stable-in-skilled-professions/
- Topics: Income

<blockquote>
  There is some evidence, in fact, that markets for highly skilled workers, such as engineers and other specialized professionals, exhibit systematic periods of boom and bust…
</blockquote>

Earnings tend to fluctuate significantly more in highly skilled professions than in others, rising to high levels for a number of years before plunging and, ultimately, rising again. Why is this the case? Here’s the explanation put forward by Harvard economist George Borjas in his leading textbook on Labor Economics.

<h2>What’s going on?</h2>


There is some evidence, in fact, that markets for highly skilled workers, such as engineers and other specialized professionals, exhibit systematic periods of boom and bust... Earnings tend to fluctuate significantly more in highly skilled professions than in others, rising to high levels for a number of years before plunging and, ultimately, rising again. Why is this the case? Here’s the explanation put forward by Harvard economist George Borjas in his leading textbook on Labor Economics. What’s going on? In most professions which are low-skilled or have low barriers to entry, wages stay relatively constant over time. This is because as the number of jobs increases, people are easily able to move into that profession to take those jobs and only minor wage increases will be needed to tempt them across. Similarly, if the number of jobs decreases, workers will move away into other professions with better prospects. In this way, the supply of labor easily follows demand, and wages in the profession stay reasonably constant. However, the situation is rather different when it comes to some highly skilled professions. To see why, let’s take it step by step. Say there is a sudden demand for more engineering graduates. People cannot just move straight across from other professions to fill the new roles as they don’t have the qualifications. As a result, the demand for engineers remains higher than the supply, and wages go up as companies compete to hire from the limited pool of engineers. Seeing the...

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### I want to make a difference. Should I work in marketing?

- Published: 2015-07-02
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/07/i-want-to-make-a-difference-should-i-work-in-marketing/
- Topics: Marketing

If you want to make a difference, should you work in marketing? The short answer: probably not. Although marketing may have positive effects through informing consumers, there's also arguments that marketing is harmful, so it's overall effect is unclear.

However, marketing is a valuable, transferable skill. So spending several years in marketing keeps your options open and could open up positions in high-impact organisations.

It's also well paid, so worth considering for earning to give.

Overall, it's worth considering as an early career option, especially if you're stronger on verbal rather than quantitative skills, and don't want to work in consulting (which is also highly paid and keeps your options open).

Read <a href="https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/work-in-marketing/">our full new career profile</a>.


If you want to make a difference, should you work in marketing? The short answer: probably not. Although marketing may have positive effects through informing consumers, there's also arguments that marketing is harmful, so it's overall effect is unclear. However, marketing is a valuable, transferable skill. So spending several years in marketing keeps your options open and could open up positions in high-impact organisations. It's also well paid, so worth considering for earning to give. Overall, it's worth considering as an early career option, especially if you're stronger on verbal rather than quantitative skills, and don't want to work in consulting (which is also highly paid and keeps your options open). Read our full new career profile.

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### What are your chances of getting elected to Congress, if you try?

> Calculation of the chances of being elected to Congress if you reach certain posts.

- Published: 2015-07-02
- Modified: 2022-12-14
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/07/what-are-your-odds-of-getting-into-congress-if-you-try/
- Topics: Advocacy, Congressional staffer, Government &amp; policy, Lawyer, Party Politics, Party Politics, Politics

The short answer to this question is 'very low'. In total there are 535 seats in Congress and 320 million people living in the USA. At any point then, just 1 in 600,000 people living in the USA are members of Congress. In a competition this insanely selective, only a small share of the population will have what it takes to seriously pursue a career in national politics. Some people who seem like they could be in with a chance - great undergraduate results, high verbal intelligence, charisma and persuasiveness - come to us looking for advice on their career. If you were one of these people and actually tried to become a member of Congress, your odds would be much higher than 1 in 600,000 - but how much higher exactly? It's not straightforward to find a way to make progress. Nevertheless, we think we have found an approach that can get us in the right ballpark for some kinds of people. The method we will use is called reference class forecasting. In reference class forecasting you find a group that you are a member of and see what share of people in that group succeed. Who makes it to Congress? If you want to know how closely you resemble existing members of Congress the paper to start with is 'Membership of the 114th Congress: A Profile', from the Congressional Research Service. It is full of striking facts about who is in Congress and who isn't. A few...

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### What’s the best way to spend $20,000 to help the common good?

- Published: 2015-06-28
- Modified: 2015-06-29
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/06/whats-the-best-way-to-spend-20000-to-help-the-common-good/
- Topics: Donating effectively

I recently came across the following question posted by Paul Buchheit (the founder of Gmail):

<blockquote>Assume that I'm going to get rid of $20,000 and my only concern is the "common good". Which of these is the best use of the money: give it to the Gates foundation, buy a hybrid car, invest it in a promising startup, invest it in the S&P500, give it to the US government, give it to a school, other?
</blockquote>

Many of our users donate money as way to do good with their careers, and I liked this way of posing the question - it's both broad and concrete. So I spent an hour writing out a rough answer.

I’ll take each option in turn and eliminate the worst ones, then compare a shortlist at the end.


I recently came across the following question posted by Paul Buchheit (the founder of Gmail): Assume that I'm going to get rid of $20,000 and my only concern is the "common good". Which of these is the best use of the money: give it to the Gates foundation, buy a hybrid car, invest it in a promising startup, invest it in the S&P500, give it to the US government, give it to a school, other? We provide advice on how to maximise the social impact of your career based on several years of research alongside academics at Oxford, and many of our users donate money as a way to do good with their careers. I liked this way of posing the question - it's both broad and concrete. So I spent an hour writing out a rough answer, to serve as an introduction to some of our key ideas. I’ll take each option in turn and eliminate the worst ones, then compare a shortlist at the end. Buy a hybrid car The main benefit of a hybrid car is reduced CO2 emissions. The average car in the US emits about 4 tons of CO2 per year. If you could cut this to zero (to get an upper bound on how good a more efficient car could be), then you’d reduce emissions by 4 tons of CO2 per year. Economists have made a variety of estimates of the social cost of a ton of CO2. A recent survey of over...

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### I want to make a difference. Should I become a philosopher?

- Published: 2015-06-27
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/06/i-want-to-make-a-difference-should-i-become-a-philosopher/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy, Moral philosophy, PhDs, Philosophy

To most people, this question sounds like a joke. I think that’s the wrong reaction. (Full career profile on philosophy PhDs <a href="https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/philosophy-phd/">here</a>)

I think research into philosophy (certainly, at least, moral philosophy, and some other areas in political philosophy, epistemology and decision theory), is <a href="https://80000hours.org/2012/05/how-to-be-a-high-impact-philosopher/">potentially</a> <a href="https://80000hours.org/2012/09/how-to-be-a-high-impact-philosopher-part-ii/">extremely</a> <a href="https://eightythousand.wpengine.com/2012/10/the-most-important-unsolved-problems-in-ethics/">valuable</a>. The impact of philosophy on the world seems to me to have been vast. Aristotle, Aquinas and Augustine shaped much of Christian ethics. Locke heavily influenced the American constitution. Peter Singer helped give rise to both the animal welfare movement and to the effective altruism community, and Nick Bostrom has catalyzed concern for existential risks, in particular risks from artificial intelligence. If you include aspects of the Bible (such as the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule), the writings of Budda and the writings of Confucius as philosophy, as I think you should, then most people for most of civilization have had large chunks of their lives shaped by the philosophical views of the time...


To most people, this question sounds like a joke. I think that's the wrong reaction. (Full career profile on philosophy PhDs here) I think research into philosophy (certainly, at least, moral philosophy, and some other areas in political philosophy, epistemology and decision theory), is potentially extremely valuable. The impact of philosophy on the world seems to me to have been vast. Aristotle, Aquinas and Augustine shaped much of Christian ethics. Locke heavily influenced the American constitution. Peter Singer helped give rise to both the animal welfare movement and to the effective altruism community, and Nick Bostrom has catalyzed concern for existential risks, in particular risks from artificial intelligence. If you include aspects of the Bible (such as the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule), the writings of Budda and the writings of Confucius as philosophy, as I think you should, then most people for most of civilization have had large chunks of their lives shaped by the philosophical views of the time. Some of the impact philosophy has had, though, has clearly been negative. Marx's ideas were referenced in the rise of Communism, which was a Bad Thing; Nietzsche has been cited as an influence on National Socialism which was a Very Bad Thing; Ayn Rand gave rise to Objectivists who are, like, really annoying. (Note that whether or not these movements correctly interpreted or acted upon the views of these philosophers is beside the point - if your aim is to have an impact, you need to bear in...

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### Should you go into journalism to make a difference?

- Published: 2015-06-25
- Modified: 2015-06-26
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/06/should-you-go-into-journalism-to-make-a-difference/
- Topics: Journalism

We just completed an <a href="https://80000hours.org/career-guide/top-careers/profiles/journalism">exploratory profile on journalism</a>. To write the profile, we interviewed an NPR correspondent and a writer for the New Yorker, and spent a day reading the best advice we could find on the career.

When it comes to having a social impact, journalism might not be the first career you think of, but we think it's actually a pretty good option, because you can use it as a platform to promote neglected causes to a big audience. The main downside is its competitiveness, which is exasperated by reductions in the number of positions over the last decade. Spending a couple of years in journalism is also better for career capital than it first looks, because you can use it the build a good network.

Read <a href="https://80000hours.org/career-guide/top-careers/profiles/journalism">the rest of the profile</a>.


We just completed an exploratory profile on journalism. We interviewed an NPR correspondent and a writer for the New Yorker, and spent a day reading the best advice we could find on the career. When it comes to having a social impact, journalism might not be the first career you think of, but we think it's actually a pretty good option, because you can use it as a platform to promote neglected causes to a big audience. The main downside is its competitiveness, which is exacerbated by reductions in the number of positions over the last decade. Spending a couple of years in journalism is also better for career capital than it first looks, because you can use it the build a good network. Read the rest of the profile.

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### Should you do a computer science PhD?

- Published: 2015-06-20
- Modified: 2015-06-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/06/should-you-do-a-computer-science-phd/
- Topics: Graduate school, PhDs

We've released a new exploratory profile on computer science PhD's in the US. Our recommendation in the profile: A computer science PhD offers the chance to become a leading researcher in a highly important field with potential for transformational research. Especially consider it if you want to enter computer science academia or do high-level research in industry and expect to be among the top 30% of PhD candidates. Read the rest of the profile.

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### Why an economics PhD might be the best graduate program

- Published: 2015-06-18
- Modified: 2015-06-18
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/06/why-an-economics-phd-might-be-the-best-graduate-program/
- Topics: Economics PhD, Graduate school, PhDs

We've released an <a href="https://80000hours.org/career-guide/top-careers/profiles/economics-phd">exploratory profile on doing an Economics PhD in the US</a>, concluding that it looks like one of the most promising graduate study options for people who want to make a difference.

Our recommendation in the profile:

<blockquote>
  An economics PhD is one of the most attractive graduate programs: if you get through, you have a high chance of landing a good research job in academia or policy – promising areas for social impact – and you have back-up options in the corporate sector since the skills you learn are in-demand (unlike many PhD programs). You should especially consider an economics PhD if you want to go into research roles, are good at maths (i.e. quant GRE score above 165) and have a proven interest in economics research.
</blockquote>

Read <a href="https://80000hours.org/career-guide/top-careers/profiles/economics-phd">the rest of the profile</a>.


We've released an exploratory profile on doing an Economics PhD in the US, concluding that it looks like one of the most promising graduate study options for people who want to make a difference. Our recommendation in the profile: An economics PhD is one of the most attractive graduate programs: if you get through, you have a high chance of landing a good research job in academia or policy – promising areas for social impact – and you have back-up options in the corporate sector since the skills you learn are in-demand (unlike many PhD programs). You should especially consider an economics PhD if you want to go into research roles, are good at maths (i. e. quant GRE score above 165) and have a proven interest in economics research. Read the rest of the profile.

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### Advice on entering a US economics PhD from the UK with a non-quantitative background

- Published: 2015-06-16
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/06/advice-on-entering-a-us-economics-phd-from-the-uk-with-a-non-quantitative-background/
- Topics: Economics PhD, Graduate school, How to get a job, PhDs

We asked someone with a philosophy undergraduate degree from the UK who was  applying to economics PhD's in the US, for advice on how others with a similar background might be able to get into a US economics PhD program.

Here is what they said:


We asked someone with a philosophy undergraduate degree from the UK who was applying to economics PhD's in the US, for advice on how others with a similar background might be able to get into a US economics PhD program (which are much more highly respected than PhD programs in the UK). Here is what they said (quoting): If you have done an undergrad that is not economics or maths, the switch won't be straightforward. US PhDs require a lot of demonstrated mathematical ability / university courses, and like to see some economics courses (as you'd expect). Realistically you're looking at minimum 1 year transition; most likely 2 year transition; possibly 3 year transition before you start a PhD. The most straightforward route is to do either the one year economics diploma at Cambridge or the two-year masters at LSE (which has a year diploma at the beginning). These courses are designed for people who have done other subjects for undergrad, and if you do well in the first year you can progress on to do a masters. If you perform highly in the masters program, and line up some good references, you stand a shot at getting into a US PhD program at the end (and an even better shot of getting into an UK PhD). The Oxford 2 year masters could work, but it's not designed for people who have done other undergrads. This means it is much harder to get in, and would probably be quite difficult...

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### Announcing the effective altruism handbook

> A new Effective Altruism handbook has been released, which features some of 80,000 Hours' ideas about high impact careers.

- Published: 2015-06-15
- Modified: 2015-06-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/06/announcing-the-effective-altruism-handbook/
- Topics: Building effective altruism

<a href="http://effective-altruism.com/ea/hx/effective_altruism_handbook/"><img src="//eighty-thousand-hours-wp-production.s3.amazonaws.com/2015/05/EA-Handbook.png" alt="Effective Altruism Handbook" width="300" height="450" class="alignright size-full wp-image-34171" /></a>A new Effective Altruism handbook has been released, which features some of 80,000 Hours' ideas about high impact careers.

This handbook is made up of blog pieces and essays that are freely available online, and has been compiled by Ryan Carey, and released with some assistance from the Centre for Effective Altruism.

It has 24 mini-chapters altogether, split into five sections What is Effective Altruism, Charity Evaluation, Career Choice, Cause Selection and Organizations. Its foreword by Will MacAskill and Peter Singer, is new, as are concluding letters by seven effective altruist organizations. A lot of discussions have gone into deciding which writings are the best for describing the main concepts of effective altruism, so that’s another reason to check it out.

The rest of the essays are freely available online, and were compiled by Ryan Carey with the support of the Centre for Effective Altruism.


A new Effective Altruism handbook has been released, which features some of 80,000 Hours' ideas about high impact careers. This handbook is made up of blog pieces and essays that are freely available online, and has been compiled by Ryan Carey, and released with some assistance from the Centre for Effective Altruism. It has 24 mini-chapters altogether, split into five sections What is Effective Altruism, Charity Evaluation, Career Choice, Cause Selection and Organizations. Its foreword by Will MacAskill and Peter Singer, is new, as are concluding letters by seven effective altruist organizations. A lot of discussions have gone into deciding which writings are the best for describing the main concepts of effective altruism, so that’s another reason to check it out. The rest of the essays are freely available online, and were compiled by Ryan Carey with the support of the Centre for Effective Altruism.

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### New profile on a new career path: data science

> If you have a PhD in a quantitative subject, or if you’re the type of person who would enjoy a quantitative PhD, you should consider data science as an option. You are particularly likely to be well suited if you want to do research that produces immediate and tangible results, and are able to clearly present quantitative findings to people without technical backgrounds.

- Published: 2015-06-13
- Modified: 2015-06-13
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/06/new-profile-on-a-new-career-path-data-science/
- Topics: Data science

<img src="https://80000hours.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Data-science.png" alt="Data science" width="1185" height="883" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-34312" />

We've released a new <a href="https://80000hours.org/career-guide/top-careers/profiles/data-science/">exploratory profile on data science</a>.

Our recommendation in the profile:

<blockquote>
  If you have a PhD in a quantitative subject, or if you’re the type of person who would enjoy a quantitative PhD, you should consider data science as an option. You are particularly likely to be well suited if you want to do research that produces immediate and tangible results, and are able to clearly present quantitative findings to people without technical backgrounds.
</blockquote>

Read <a href="https://80000hours.org/career-guide/top-careers/profiles/data-science/">the rest of the profile</a>.


We've released a new exploratory profile on data science. Our recommendation in the profile: If you have a PhD in a quantitative subject, or if you’re the type of person who would enjoy a quantitative PhD, you should consider data science as an option. You are particularly likely to be well suited if you want to do research that produces immediate and tangible results, and are able to clearly present quantitative findings to people without technical backgrounds. Read the rest of the profile.

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### New in-depth profile on software engineering

- Published: 2015-06-11
- Modified: 2015-06-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/06/new-in-depth-profile-on-software-engineering/
- Topics: Software Engineering

We've released a major update to our career profile on software engineering.

See the updated profile <a href="https://80000hours.org/career-guide/top-careers/profiles/software-engineering-large-tech-firms/">here</a> and the full report on which it's based <a href="https://80000hours.org/career-guide/reports/software-engineering-at-large-tech-firms/">here</a>.

Our recommendation in the profile:

<blockquote>
  Software engineering at large tech-firms is a highly promising option that’s especially easy to test out. If you have good analytical skills (even if you are from a humanities background), you should strongly considering testing it.
</blockquote>

Topics explored in the full report include:

<ul>
<li>How to test out your fit for software engineering.</li>
<li>Using software engineering to pursue high-impact projects on the side.</li>
<li>A comparison of US and UK earnings - we found that average salaries are 40% higher in the US than in the UK, 80% higher in Silicon Valley than in London, and starting salaries for bootcamp graduates are around twice as high in Silicon Valley as in London.</li>
<li>What software engineering is like day to day and the key stages of progression.</li>
</ul>


We've released a major update to our career profile on software engineering. See the updated profile and the full report on which it's based. Our recommendation in the profile: Software engineering at large tech-firms is a highly promising option that’s especially easy to test out. If you have good analytical skills (even if you are from a humanities background), you should strongly considering testing it. Pros: You gain a great set of skills that are in short supply, which gives you great bargaining power and opens up a wide range of options, including founding or joining early-stage startups, continuing in large tech-firms, data science, quantitative finance, research and remote freelance work. Excellent working conditions, with flexible hours that are shorter than in many corporate jobs and ability to work remotely. In the US, the pay is relatively high, especially early on in your career (many can start on $100,000), making it a good option for earning to give. Cons: Mid and late stage earnings lower than in many other professional jobs. Less opportunity to develop non-technical soft skills. Topics explored in the full report include: How to test out your fit for software engineering. Using software engineering to pursue high-impact projects on the side. A comparison of US and UK earnings - we found that average salaries are 40% higher in the US than in the UK, 80% higher in Silicon Valley than in London, and starting salaries for bootcamp graduates are around twice as high in Silicon Valley as...

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### The winner takes all economy

> It’s said that we live in an increasingly “winner takes all” economy. The following chart provides a nice illustration.

- Published: 2015-06-10
- Modified: 2015-06-10
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/06/the-winner-takes-all-economy/
- Topics: Income

It’s said that we live in an increasingly “winner takes all” economy. The following chart provides a nice illustration.

<a href="http://investorfieldguide.com/the-rich-are-getting-richer/"><img src="//eighty-thousand-hours-wp-production.s3.amazonaws.com/2015/05/Aggregate-Profit-Margin-by-Profit-Margin-Quintile.png" alt="From “The Rich are Getting Richer” by The Investor Field Guide (click image for link)" width="652" height="471" class="size-full wp-image-33951" /></a> From “The Rich are Getting Richer” by The Investor Field Guide (click image for link)

It shows that from the mid-90s, the companies with the largest profit margins have seen their profit margins expand dramatically - from about 15% to over 20%.

Those at the bottom have seen their profit margins shrink, and the middle 60% have seen little change. The winners are increasingly taking it all.


It’s said that we live in an increasingly “winner takes all” economy. The following chart provides a nice illustration. From “The Rich are Getting Richer” by The Investor Field Guide (click image for link) It shows that from the mid-90s, the companies with the largest profit margins have seen their profit margins expand dramatically - from about 15% to over 20%. Those at the bottom have seen their profit margins shrink, and the middle 60% have seen little change. The winners are increasingly taking it all. The effect is concentrated in technology, finance, healthcare and consumer staples. Here’s a break down of the chart by sector. What’s causing the trend? To me, the three main drivers seem to be the rise of software, the internet and globalization. These create larger markets that can be reached more quickly, so a small initial advantage ends up resulting in a greater profit than in the past. Consider the invention of a new type of software product. Everyone who makes a version of the product can sell it cheaply and immediately across the world, using the internet to distribute. This means that whoever makes the best version of the product can quickly capture most of the market. Once they’ve established a dominant position, they’ll be hard to dislodge. Technology allows the development of strong barriers to entry, often through proprietary technology and network effects. Globally recognised brands provide further barriers. For instance, after Google created the best search service, they...

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### Donating to Giving What We Can is higher impact than donating to GiveWell recommended charities.

> If you give to Giving What We Can, you'll have more impact than giving directly to GiveWell top recommended charities.

- Published: 2015-06-09
- Modified: 2015-06-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/06/donating-to-giving-what-we-can-is-higher-impact-than-donating-to-givewell-recommended-charities/
- Topics: Building effective altruism, Donating effectively, Giving What We Can

<a href="http://givingwhatwecan.causevox.com/">Giving What We Can is fundraising</a>. When I last checked, they had only reached £70,000 of their £150,000 target.

Last year, <a href="http://blog.givewell.org/2015/04/13/givewells-money-moved-and-web-traffic-in-2014/">more than $28m was donated to Give Directly, AMF, SCI and Deworm the World</a> - the charities recommended by GiveWell and Giving What We Can. In contrast, Giving What We Can (GWWC) spent under $200,000. My claim in this post is that if you donate to these top recommended charities, you’ll have even more impact (at the margin) if you donate to Giving What We Can instead.

GWWC is closely affiliated with 80,000 Hours, so I’m likely to be biased in GWWC's favour. However, I feel strongly enough that I think it’s worth writing on the topic anyway.

Here’s three reasons why to donate to GWWC.


Giving What We Can is fundraising. When I last checked, they had only reached £70,000 of their £150,000 target. Last year, more than $28m was donated to Give Directly, AMF, SCI and Deworm the World - the charities recommended by GiveWell and Giving What We Can. In contrast, Giving What We Can (GWWC) spent under $200,000. My claim in this post is that if you donate to these top recommended charities, you’ll have even more impact (at the margin) if you donate to Giving What We Can instead. GWWC is closely affiliated with 80,000 Hours, so I’m likely to be biased in GWWC's favour. However, I feel strongly enough that I think it’s worth writing on the topic anyway. Here’s three reasons why to donate to GWWC. 1. It’s very likely that $1 donated to GWWC yields more than $1 of value to top recommended charities. GWWC recently released a new evaluation of their cost-effectiveness. They found that GWWC has spent about $440,000 as of the end of 2013, while GWWC members had donated an extra $2. 4m to GWWC recommended charities which wouldn’t have been donated otherwise. Moreover, at the end of 2013, GWWC had raised a further $146m+ of pledged future income (today the figure is over $400m! ). After adjusting for drop out from the pledge, money that would have been given anyway, and time-discounting, GWWC estimates that these pledges have a net present value of $26m to top recommended charities. So GWWC’s overall historical leverage ratio is...

---

### The rise of income inequality and what it means for your career

> What's driving the increasing in income inequality and what does it mean for your career?

- Published: 2015-06-08
- Modified: 2015-06-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/06/rise-of-income-inequality/
- Topics: Income

One of the most important (though <a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson?language=en">maybe regrettable</a>) long-term trends effecting the outlook of many careers is the rise in income inequality. In countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom, the difference in earnings between the best and worst paid has risen sharply for the last few decades, with the top earners taking a higher and higher proportion of total income. From the early 1900s to the 1970s, income inequality gradually decreased. However, in Anglo-Saxon countries it began to rise again from the late 1970s. The rise was sharpest in the United States, where the income share of the top decile of earners rose from 33% to 48% in forty years, while the share of the top percentile rose from 8% to 17%. In Japan and the rest of Western Europe on the other hand, inequality was either steady or rose much more gradually.

Increasing income inequality means a better outlook for many high-earning careers. It may also reflect trends in which skills are most in-demand and useful as technology changes, making it important to understand if you want good <a href="/career-guide/framework/career-capital/">career capital</a> in the future. Finally, it may mean the financial rewards of being at the top of a profession (compared to the middle) are increasing, and this means the importance of <a href="/articles/personal-fit/">personal fit</a> is increasing.

<a href="http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/pdf/F9.7.pdf"><img src="//eighty-thousand-hours-wp-production.s3.amazonaws.com/2015/05/Piketty-Graph.png" alt="The top decile income share: Europe and the U.S., 1900-2010" width="652" height="443" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-33911" /></a>
<em>This graph is taken from Pikkety (2014)</em> 

In the rest of this post, we'll look at the reasons economists have put forth for the increase in income inequality, and speculate on whether the trend will continue.


One of the most important (though maybe regrettable) long-term trends effecting the outlook of many careers is the rise in income inequality. In countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom, the difference in earnings between the best and worst paid has risen sharply for the last few decades, with the top earners taking a higher and higher proportion of total income. From the early 1900s to the 1970s, income inequality gradually decreased. However, in Anglo-Saxon countries it began to rise again from the late 1970s. The rise was sharpest in the United States, where the income share of the top decile of earners rose from 33% to 48% in forty years, while the share of the top percentile rose from 8% to 17%. In Japan and the rest of Western Europe on the other hand, inequality was either steady or rose much more gradually. Increasing income inequality means a better outlook for many high-earning careers. It may also reflect trends in which skills are most in-demand and useful as technology changes, making it important to understand if you want good career capital in the future. Finally, it may mean the financial rewards of being at the top of a profession (compared to the middle) are increasing, and this means the importance of personal fit is increasing. This graph is taken from Piketty (2014) In the rest of this post, we'll look at the reasons economists have put forth for the increase in income inequality,...

---

### Why I stopped Earning to Give

> I stopped in mid-2014, and I do not plan to do it again. Instead, I am now writing a master’s thesis in philosophy, and I aim for a career in that field.

- Published: 2015-06-06
- Modified: 2015-06-06
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/06/why-i-stopped-earning-to-give/
- Topics: EtG pros and cons

I have earned to give for 2.5 years as an Analyst and then Associate in the mergers and acquisitions team of an industrial conglomerate in Sweden. I stopped in mid-2014, and I do not plan to earn to give again. Instead, I am now writing a master’s thesis in philosophy, and I aim for a career in that field. In this post, I will describe my primary reasons for not earning to give with a focus on my main thought—that it seems easier to perform in work that one loves. My aim is not to argue against anyone earning to give; I think it is good that there is more awareness these days that earning to give is an option and others may find that it suits them better than it suits me. My purpose is rather to share my experience in case it might be of interest to people considering earning to give. Also, the recommendation from 80,000 Hours is only earn to give if you have good personal fit with the career, which fits my impression.

<h3>My three main reasons for not earning to give are:</h3>

<ol>
<li>I seem to perform much better when I work directly on issues that that I think are most important from an altruistic perspective. I feel that it is difficult to be enthusiastic enough about the work in business.</li>
<li>I see few giving opportunities that I would like to support through earning to give.</li>
<li>It is challenging to have different values from one’s colleagues.</li>
</ol>


I have earned to give for 2. 5 years as an Analyst and then Associate in the mergers and acquisitions team of an industrial conglomerate in Sweden. I stopped in mid-2014, and I do not plan to earn to give again. Instead, I am now writing a master’s thesis in philosophy, and I aim for a career in that field. In this post, I will describe my primary reasons for not earning to give with a focus on my main thought—that it seems easier to perform in work that one loves. My aim is not to argue against anyone earning to give; I think it is good that there is more awareness these days that earning to give is an option and others may find that it suits them better than it suits me. My purpose is rather to share my experience in case it might be of interest to people considering earning to give. Also, the recommendation from 80,000 Hours is only earn to give if you have good personal fit with the career, which fits my impression. This post is just Simon K's own views and doesn't represent the views of 80,000 Hours. My background I received a bachelor’s degree from University of Gothenburg in Sweden in philosophy, also taking courses in economics and international relations. I enrolled for one year in the master’s program in philosophy at New York University. I then interned for the FAO in Stockholm and studied more economics and statistics. I volunteered for GiveWell...

---

### New TEDx talk released!

> To find fulfilling work, don't follow your passion.

- Published: 2015-05-18
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/05/new-tedx-talk-released/
- Topics: About 80,000 Hours, Career advice &amp; strategy, Job satisfaction, Unconventional advice

Check out the TEDx talk video by our Executive Director and co-founder Benjamin Todd.

In it, Ben sets out what we've learned through our research about finding fulfilling work. Rather than following your passion, find something you're good at that helps others. If you aim to <em>do what's valuable</em>, passion for your work will emerge. And you can also make a big difference with your life.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MKlx1DLa9EA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

If you like what you see, please go ahead and share the video. We’d like to get it listed on the main TED channel!


Check out the TEDx talk video by our Executive Director and co-founder Benjamin Todd. In it, Ben sets out what we've learned through our research about finding fulfilling work. Rather than following your passion, find something you're good at that helps others. If you aim to do what's valuable, passion for your work will emerge. And you can also make a big difference with your life. If you like what you see, please go ahead and share the video. We'd like to get it listed on the main TED channel!

---

### New in-depth profile on management consulting

- Published: 2015-05-11
- Modified: 2015-06-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/05/new-in-depth-profile-on-management-consulting/
- Topics: Consulting

We've released a major update to our career profile on management consulting.

See the updated profile <a href="https://80000hours.org/career-guide/top-careers/profiles/management-consulting/">here</a>.

See the new in-depth report upon which it's based <a href="https://80000hours.org/career-guide/reports/management-consulting/">here</a>.

Overall, our recommendation is similar to before:

<blockquote>
  Consider a job in consulting if you have strong academic credentials and you aren’t sure about your long-term plans and want to experience work in a variety of business environments, or you want to pursue earning-to-give but not a good fit for quantitative trading or technology entrepreneurship.
</blockquote>

But we've gone much more in-depth into:

<ul>
<li>The chances of becoming a partner, showing that it's about 10% but requires a great deal of dedication.</li>
<li>Common exit options, showing that consultants enter a very wide range of fields when they leave.</li>
<li>What proportion of people who want to become consultants actually make it.</li>
<li>The potential for direct impact, arguing it's worse than other common alternatives.</li>
</ul>

This is our first 'medium-depth' career profile, and we hope it will act as a template for further work.

<em>Thank you to Nick Beckstead for carrying out the research.</em>


We've released a major update to our career profile on management consulting. See the updated profile here. See the new in-depth report upon which it's based here. Overall, our recommendation is similar to before: Consulting is a promising path, offering good career capital that keeps your options open and high earnings. However, it’s highly competitive and we have a limited understanding of its potential for direct impact. Consider a job in consulting if you have strong academic credentials, aren’t sure about your long-term plans and want to experience work in a variety of business environments, don't have a high-impact alternative immediately available, or you want to earn to give but are not a good fit for quantitative trading or technology entrepreneurship. But we've gone much more in-depth into: The chances of becoming a partner, arguing that about 10% make it but it requires a great deal of dedication. Common exit options, showing that consultants enter a very wide range of fields when they leave. What proportion of people who want to become consultants actually make it. The potential for direct impact, arguing it's worse than other common alternatives. This is our first 'medium-depth' career profile, and we hope it will act as a template for further work. Thank you to Nick Beckstead for carrying out the research.

---

### Our advice in three minutes

> We've summarised the 9 major types of career change that our members have taken as a result of our career advice.

- Published: 2015-04-23
- Modified: 2021-11-18
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/04/our-advice-in-three-minutes/
- Topics: Uncategorised

What are the key ways people change their career plans after reading <a href="/career-guide/">our career guide</a> and then speaking to <a href="/career-advice/">our advisers</a>? Below I’m going to list some of the most common changes people currently make: it’s a three minute intro to some of the key lessons you can take from our advice.


What are the most common ways people change their career plans after reading our career guide and then speaking to our advisers? Below I’m going to list some of the most common changes people currently make: it’s a three minute intro to some of the key lessons you can take from our advice. 1. Consider studying a fundamental, applied, quantitative subject Many advisees have switched to studying Computer Science, Economics or Statistics. Why? These degrees seem to offer the best, most flexible career capital. Applied, quantitative skills are more valued by employers and open more doors. This is reflected in higher earning potential (although it’s difficult to extract cause from correlation). People who do fundamental, quantitative subjects are often seen as smarter, so these subjects help to signal your ability. It’s easier to go from a more to a less quantitative subject, so quantitative subjects are an excellent way to keep your options open. More fundamental subjects are also better at keeping your options open than more narrowly focused subjects. For example, from Economics you can go into many other social sciences, but not the other way around; similarly, statisticians can work basically everywhere. On the other hand, while Petroleum Engineering graduates earn the most on average, their fate is tied to the oil industry. Since it’s hard to predict what will happen to that industry, it’s probably better to study something more flexible. Economics is also especially good because there are an especially large number of academic...

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### The four big challenges

- Published: 2015-04-23
- Modified: 2024-12-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/04/four-big-challenges/
- Topics: World problems

The 80,000 Hours community is involved with many different causes - from scientific research to social justice - but there are four big (rather ambitious!) causes that have, so far, gathered the most support.

These are the four big challenges our community has set itself. They are all huge, but they also seem especially solvable, or especially neglected, and this means working within them offers the opportunity to make huge difference over the coming decades...


The 80,000 Hours community is involved with many different causes - from scientific research to social justice - but there are four big (rather ambitious! ) causes that have, so far, gathered the most support. These are the four big challenges our community has set itself. They are all huge, but they also seem especially solvable, or especially neglected, and this means working within them offers the opportunity to make huge difference over the coming decades. 1. End extreme global poverty About a billion people live on less than $1. 25 per day. That figure is adjusted for purchasing parity, i. e. less than what you could buy in the US for $1. 25 each day in 2005. As a result, more than 800 million go to bed hungry each day, more than 6 million die each year from preventable diseases, and about a billion people can't read or write. But this can be solved. The number of people in poverty is going down rapidly. Some project that by 2030 it may only take $20bn per year to bring everyone in the world above the $1. 25 poverty line - only 0. 5% of the US Federal government's budget. In the meantime, there are many cheap, effective and evidence-backed interventions that can do a lot of good, including malaria net distribution, cash-transfers and mass deworming. By furthering these through donations, campaigning or directly working in a charity, anyone can make a big difference. There are other policy reforms that could also have...

---

### 10 new organisations founded due to 80,000 Hours

- Published: 2015-04-09
- Modified: 2020-08-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/04/10-new-organisations-founded-due-to-80000-hours/
- Topics: Updates

One of our key reasons for founding 80,000 Hours was the “multiplier argument”:

When we graduated, we had two options: (i) pursue whichever career paths we thought were highest impact or (ii) do research to find <em>even better</em> career paths and spread that research to enable hundreds of people to take those paths instead of us, having hundreds of times as much impact. Given our progress at that point, it seemed like the second option was possible, and therefore higher-impact.

So, three years later, how is it turning out?


One of our key reasons for founding 80,000 Hours was the “multiplier argument”: When we graduated, we had two options: (i) pursue whichever career paths we thought were highest impact or (ii) do research to find even better career paths and spread that research to enable hundreds of people to take those paths instead of us, having hundreds of times as much impact. Given our progress at that point, it seemed like the second option was possible, and therefore higher-impact. So, three years later, how is it turning out? Normally, we evaluate our impact by looking at “significant plan changes”. So far, we’ve tracked 174 of them (as we’ll explain in an upcoming evaluation). That makes over 300,000 hours of work reallocated, which compares favourably to about 30,000 hours spent running 80,000 Hours. A different approach to estimating our impact is to look at how many new organisations have been founded because of us. If it’s more than one, that also suggests our impact is greater than our costs. In fact, there have now been five effective altruist non-profits with paid-staff founded in part due to us. There have also been three voluntary non-profits and two for-profit startups founded. In each case, there’s a good chance the organisation wouldn’t have existed without 80,000 Hours. We’ve listed these organisations and how we’ve helped them here. So is our impact greater than our costs? It’s hard to measure the...

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### Get paid to do existential risk reduction research

- Published: 2015-04-07
- Modified: 2015-04-07
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/04/get-paid-to-do-existential-risk-reduction-research/
- Topics: Academic Research, Existential risk

<img src="//eighty-thousand-hours-wp-production.s3.amazonaws.com/2015/04/cser.png" alt="cser" width="1025" height="188" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-32291" />

<a href="http://cser.org">The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk</a> (CSER) is hiring for postdoctoral researchers. Existential risk reduction is a high-priority area on the analysis of the <a href="http://globalprioritiesproject.org/">Global Priorities Project</a> and <a href="http://www.givewell.org/">GiveWell</a>. Moreover, CSER report that they have had a successful year in grantwriting and fundraising, so the availability of research talent could become a significant constraint over the coming months. Here is Sean's announcement:

<blockquote>
  The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (University of Cambridge; <a href="http://cser.org">http://cser.org</a>) is recruiting for postdoctoral researchers to work on the study of extreme risks arising from technological advances. We have several specific projects we are recruiting for: responsible innovation in transformative technologies; horizon-scanning and foresight; ethics and evaluation of extreme technological risks, and policy and governance challenges associated with emerging technologies.
  
  However, we also have the flexibility to hire one or more postdoctoral researchers to work on additional projects relevant to CSER's broad aims, which include impacts and safety in artificial intelligence and synthetic biology, biosecurity, extreme tail climate change, geoengineering, and catastrophic biodiversity loss. We welcome proposals from a range of fields. The study of technological x-risk is a young interdisciplinary subfield, still taking shape. We're looking for brilliant and committed people, to help us design it. Deadline: April 24th. Details <a href="http://www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/6554/">here</a>, with more information on our website.
</blockquote>


The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) is hiring for postdoctoral researchers. Existential risk reduction is a high-priority area on the analysis of the Global Priorities Project and GiveWell. Moreover, CSER report that they have had a successful year in grantwriting and fundraising, so the availability of research talent could become a significant constraint over the coming months. Here is Sean's announcement: The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (University of Cambridge; http://cser. org) is recruiting for postdoctoral researchers to work on the study of extreme risks arising from technological advances. We have several specific projects we are recruiting for: responsible innovation in transformative technologies; horizon-scanning and foresight; ethics and evaluation of extreme technological risks, and policy and governance challenges associated with emerging technologies. However, we also have the flexibility to hire one or more postdoctoral researchers to work on additional projects relevant to CSER's broad aims, which include impacts and safety in artificial intelligence and synthetic biology, biosecurity, extreme tail climate change, geoengineering, and catastrophic biodiversity loss. We welcome proposals from a range of fields. The study of technological x-risk is a young interdisciplinary subfield, still taking shape. We're looking for brilliant and committed people, to help us design it. Deadline: April 24th. Details here, with more information on our website.

---

### Education research: Interview with Dan Greene

> If you’d like to work in education research and design to make a difference, how should you go about it? We recently asked Dan Greene for his thoughts.

- Published: 2015-03-12
- Modified: 2023-09-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/03/education-research-interview-with-dan-greene/
- Topics: PhDs

<img src="//eighty-thousand-hours-wp-production.s3.amazonaws.com/2015/02/danielGreene.jpg" alt="Daniel Greene" width="180" height="216" class="alignright size-full wp-image-28621" />
If you’d like to work in education research and design to make a difference, how should you go about it? We recently asked Dan Greene for his thoughts. Dan is a member of our community and graduate researcher at Stanford specialising in online education.


If you'd like to work in education research and design to make a difference, how should you go about it? We recently asked Dan Greene for his thoughts. Dan is a member of our community and graduate researcher at Stanford specialising in online education. Note: the opinions below are Dan's own. What do you work on? I do randomized controlled trials in online courses. You can find out more about my lab's work at ww. perts. net. I love my work - it's really fascinating, I think it's relatively impactful, and I think I can translate it to even more impactful areas after I finish my PhD. But it took me a while to find my niche. What are good PhD topics? A PhD is training in research. You should think of it as building a skill set of discovering knowledge. You'll inevitably want to broaden at first, and look at lots of different things, but keep in mind that you get the most value from it by building specific, tangible, demonstrable skills and expertise in specific things. Education is a very very broad "field", and I think it's useful to distinguish between research topics, data collection techniques, analysis techniques, and intervention techniques. These can be combined to create new and exciting research flavors! For example, my flavor is "academic motivation + surveys and online course data + randomized controlled trials and machine learning + social psychological interventions. " These are the things you want to choose early and become expert in. Here...

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### How to network

- Published: 2015-03-05
- Modified: 2023-11-28
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/03/how-to-network/
- Topics: How to get a job

It’s no secret that networking can be <a href="https://80000hours.org/2013/05/how-important-is-networking-for-career-success">one of the keys to career success</a>. It's useful in helping you to find out about jobs <em>and</em> to land them. But what’s the best way to go about building a successful network?

<strong>The best advice we've come across so far on how to network is Keith Farrazzi's <em>Never Eat Alone</em>.</strong> It’s not as evidence-based and rigorous as we’d like (and his style can be annoying!), but the core of his recommendations makes sense.


It's no secret that networking can be one of the keys to career success. It's useful in helping you to find out about jobs and to land them. But what's the best way to go about building a successful network? The best advice we've come across so far on how to network is Keith Farrazzi's Never Eat Alone. It's not as evidence-based and rigorous as we'd like (and his style can be annoying! ), but the core of his recommendations makes sense. His key recommendation is essentially to adopt a "giving mindset" when meeting people. This means making sure that your first instinct is to help others without calculating the benefits you'll get in return. There's a growing body of evidence that having a giving mindset will make you more successful, so long as you avoid burnout and being exploited, as documented by Prof. Adam Grant in Give and Take (our second top recommendation if you want to learn more about networking). And the idea is pretty much common sense. If you're a sincere giver, other people will want to help you out in the future, you'll have a good reputation and you'll build genuine connections with other people. Then when it comes to making an ask in the future, your connections will be happy to help. Much of the rest of the book focuses on practical tips to allow you to build and maintain weak ties: loosely, relationships with people you don't often hang out with, but who...

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### Researcher position available at Animal Charity Evaluators

> Animal Charity Evaluators has a researcher position available. They are looking for applicants with a passion for animal welfare and research.

- Published: 2015-02-26
- Modified: 2015-03-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/02/researcher-position-available-at-animal-charity-evaluators/
- Topics: Animal Charity Evaluators

<a href="http://www.animalcharityevaluators.org/">Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE)</a> uses research, evidence, and reason to find the most effective opportunities to improve the live of animals. ACE was founded by 80,000 Hours staff working in Oxford, and has since become an independent organization based in California. In 2014 alone, ACE influenced over $141,000 in giving to their recommended charities.

<h4>What is the position?</h4>

From the <a href="http://www.animalcharityevaluators.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/ACEResearcherjobdescription_2014.pdf">position description</a>:

<blockquote>
   will involve developing and managing research department strategies and activities, including designing, managing and executing research projects, data analysis, and program evaluation.
</blockquote>

A sample project:

<blockquote>
  <strong>Intervention evaluations</strong>. You will research the effectiveness of a common tactic in animal advocacy, including by conducting interviews with advocates who regularly use the tactic. You will then write up your findings for use within ACE and for publication on our website. Example evaluation: <a href="http://www.animalcharityevaluators.org/research/interventions/corporate-outreach/">corporate outreach</a>.
</blockquote>

<h4>More info</h4>

Full <a href="http://www.animalcharityevaluators.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/ACEResearcherjobdescription_2014.pdf">job description</a> and <a href="http://www.animalcharityevaluators.org/researcher-position-application/">application</a>.


Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) uses research, evidence, and reason to find the most effective opportunities to improve the live of animals. ACE was founded by 80,000 Hours staff working in Oxford, and has since become an independent organization based in California. In 2014 alone, ACE influenced over $141,000 in giving to their recommended charities. What is the position? From the position description: will involve developing and managing research department strategies and activities, including designing, managing and executing research projects, data analysis, and program evaluation. A sample project: Intervention evaluations. You will research the effectiveness of a common tactic in animal advocacy, including by conducting interviews with advocates who regularly use the tactic. You will then write up your findings for use within ACE and for publication on our website. Example evaluation: corporate outreach. More info Full job description and application.

---

### The Chronicle of Higher Education on who gets 'elite' jobs

> Recruiters for elite jobs (law firms, investment banks, consultancies) pay more attention to what school you attended than anything else.

- Published: 2015-02-24
- Modified: 2021-11-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/02/chronical-on-elite-jobs/
- Topics: Consulting, Investment Banking

I just came across a study of what top-tier investment banks, law firms, and management consulting firms look for when recruiting. The author of the study interviewed over 100 recruiters at these firms to find out what criteria they used.

The Chronicle of Higher Education summed up the results:

<blockquote> If you want to get a job at the very best law firm, investment bank, or consultancy:

1. Go to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or (maybe) Stanford. If you’re a business student, attending the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania will work, too, but don’t show up with a diploma from Dartmouth or MIT. No one cares about those places.
2. Don’t work your rear off for a 4.0. Better to graduate with 3.7 and a bunch of really awesome extracurriculars. And by “really awesome” I mean literally climbing Everest or winning an Olympic medal. Playing intramurals doesn’t cut it.

</blockquote>

Here’s a chart showing the key signals that recruiters used to screen candidates.

<img src="//eighty-thousand-hours-wp-production.s3.amazonaws.com/2015/02/Recruiter-signaling-teal.png" alt="How to get elite jobs" width="652" height="530" class="size-full wp-image-28671" /> Graphic re-created from original figure in Rivera (2011)


I just came across a study of what top-tier investment banks, law firms, and management consulting firms look for when recruiting. The author of the study interviewed over 100 recruiters at these firms to find out what criteria they used. The Chronicle of Higher Education summed up the results: If you want to get a job at the very best law firm, investment bank, or consultancy: 1. Go to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or (maybe) Stanford. If you’re a business student, attending the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania will work, too, but don’t show up with a diploma from Dartmouth or MIT. No one cares about those places. 2. Don’t work your rear off for a 4. 0. Better to graduate with 3. 7 and a bunch of really awesome extracurriculars. And by “really awesome” I mean literally climbing Everest or winning an Olympic medal. Playing intramurals doesn’t cut it. Here’s a chart showing the key signals that recruiters used to screen candidates. Graphic re-created from original figure in Rivera (2011) This isn't to say that coming from a prestigious school is required to get these jobs - there are many cases of people who get them without - just that it's going to be much harder. Another finding was that most candidates were screened out very rapidly: valuators tended to do so very rapidly, typically bypassing cover letters (only about fifteen percent reported even looking at them) and transcripts and reported spending...

---

### Should I help now or later?

> When committing to make a difference, it can be hard to decide if you should help now or later. We outline a method to choose between different options.

- Published: 2015-02-18
- Modified: 2015-04-23
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/02/should-i-help-now-or-later/
- Topics: Foundations, Now vs. Later

If you’re committed to making the biggest difference possible with your career, you may well find that there is a tension between <em>doing good now</em> and laying the groundwork for <em>doing good later</em>.

For example:

<ul>
<li>Next year, you have two choices. You could work for an effective charity, making an immediate difference to its beneficiaries. Or you could go to graduate school and build up your <a href="/career-guide/framework/career-capital/">career capital</a>, (hopefully) allowing you to have a larger impact later.</li>
</ul>

Alternatively:

<ul>
<li>You have a substantial sum of money. You could give it today, or you could invest it, allow it to grow, and then give the larger amount later.</li>
</ul>

How can you go about deciding between these options? Here we present a summary of our findings - the full research has been published on the <a href="http://globalprioritiesproject.org/2015/02/give-now-or-later/">Global Priorities Project page</a>.

<h2>The main factors</h2>

Which option is highest-impact varies from case to case. In general, the earlier you are in your career, the less stable your view of the best cause and the more well-established the cause, the more the balance shifts from <em>doing good now</em> towards <em>doing good later</em>.

Here's a summary:

<img src="//eighty-thousand-hours-wp-production.s3.amazonaws.com/2015/02/Now-vs-Later-flowchart4.png" alt="Now vs Later flowchart" width="652" height="815" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-28851" />

We'll further explain each factor below.


This is an update to our previous research. In a collaboration with Owen from the Global Priorities Project, we substantially revised the model behind it, and added two extra key considerations: (i) whether your view of which causes are highest-impact is stable and (ii) how fast your top causes are growing. These factors determine whether to tilt towards helping now or later when you're mid to late career. The updated career guide page is here. Introduction If you’re committed to making a difference with your career, you may well find that there is a tension between doing good now and laying the groundwork for doing good later. For example: Next year, you have two choices. You could work for an effective charity, making an immediate difference to its beneficiaries. Or you could go to graduate school and build up your career capital, (hopefully) allowing you to have a larger impact later. Alternatively: You have a substantial sum of money. You could give it today, or you could invest it, allow it to grow, and then give the larger amount later. How can you go about deciding between these options? Here we present a summary of our findings. The full research has been published on the Global Priorities Project page. The main factors Which option is highest-impact varies from case to case. In general, the earlier you are in your career, the less stable your view of the best cause and the more well-established the cause, the more the balance shifts...

---

### We change more than we expect

> How much will your personality, values and preferences change over the next decade? Probably more than you think, so keep your options open.

- Published: 2015-02-12
- Modified: 2023-08-02
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/02/we-change-more-than-we-expect-so-keep-your-options-open/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy, Reasoning well

How much will your personality, values and preferences change over the next decade? Probably more than you think, at least according to a recent paper, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150113155248/http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~dtg/Quoidbach%20et%20al%202013.pdf">“The End of History Illusion”</a> by a team of psychologists at Harvard and the University of Virginia.

In a number of separate experiments, the authors asked a total of over 19,000 people between 18 and 68 to measure their current personality, values and preferences. Half of them were also asked to complete the assessment as they believed they would have done ten years earlier, while the other half were asked to predict what they would say in ten years’ time.


How much will your personality, values and preferences change over the next decade? Probably more than you think, at least according to a recent paper, "The End of History Illusion" by a team of psychologists at Harvard and the University of Virginia. In a number of separate experiments, the authors asked a total of over 19,000 people between 18 and 68 to measure their current personality, values and preferences. Half of them were also asked to complete the assessment as they believed they would have done ten years earlier, while the other half were asked to predict what they would say in ten years' time. Next the authors looked at the data on how people believed they had changed in the past decade (past change data) and the data on how people believed they would change in the next decade (future change data). They compared the future change data of 18 year olds in the study with the past change data of 28 year olds, the future change data of 19 year olds with the past change data of 29 year olds, and so on. If people were accurate in their predictions of how much they will change, you would expect the data sets to match. In fact, the experiments consistently showed that people underestimated how much they would change. The results show that people change throughout their lives (although the rate of change slows as people get older), a result consistent with other studies. More interestingly,...

---

### How to start a career in technology (even if you studied art)

> We recently hosted a panel on careers in technology, featuring four people who did arts degrees but ended up working in tech and loving their jobs.

- Published: 2015-02-06
- Modified: 2015-02-06
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/02/how-to-start-a-career-in-technology/
- Topics: Careers, Found a tech startup

80,000 Hours: Oxford recently hosted a panel on tech careers, co-hosted with <a href="http://codelaborate.org">Codelaborate</a>, featuring four people who did arts degrees but ended up working in tech and loving their jobs.

The panel included:

<ul>
<li>Matt Clifford - studied Ancient History at Cambridge before doing a degree at MIT, worked in strategy consulting but quit to start Entrepreneur First</li>
<li>Jackson Gabbard - studied English at a small college in the US but was one of the first engineers at Facebook London</li>
<li>Nabeel Qureshi - studied PPE at Oxford, worked in consultancy but now works at startup GoCardless</li>
<li>Steven Shingler - studied double bass at the Royal College of Music in London, but now works at Google as an engineer.</li>
</ul>


80,000 Hours: Oxford recently hosted a panel on careers in technology, co-hosted with Codelaborate, featuring four people who did arts degrees but ended up working in tech and loving their jobs. We think tech is one of the most promising sectors, so are interested in how to start a career in technology, even if you come from an arts background. Here’s some rough notes I made on the panel (note that they may not accurately reflect the views of the panel and haven’t been checked by them). The panel included: Matt Clifford - studied Ancient History at Cambridge before doing a degree at MIT, worked in strategy consulting but quit to start Entrepreneur First Jackson Gabbard - studied English at a small college in the US but was one of the first engineers at Facebook London Nabeel Qureshi - studied PPE at Oxford, worked in consultancy but now works at startup GoCardless Steven Shingler - studied double bass at the Royal College of Music in London, but now works at Google as an engineer. How did they end up in tech, and what clues might there be for other arts graduates who want to go into the sector? All had, at some point, taught themselves computer programming. The two software engineers stumbled across it by accident (one wanted to design a website for a friend’s band and another wanted to set up a printer network to print promotional materials), but quickly found themselves obsessed, working long into the evening trying...

---

### Which careers are most likely to be automated?

> A recent paper suggests that up to 47% of American jobs are at risk of being automated within the next couple of decades.

- Published: 2015-02-04
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/02/which-careers-will-be-automated/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Career advice &amp; strategy

New and improved technologies will make jobs redundant, even as they open up new opportunities. This has always been the case, but with recent advances in Machine Learning and Mobile Robotics, changes in the labor market could be particularly extreme in the years to come. In fact, a recent paper suggests that up to 47% of American jobs could be vulnerable to automation within the next couple of decades.

That paper is <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150109185039/http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf">“The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs To Computerisation?”</a> by Carl Frey and Michael Osborne of the <a href="http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/">Future of Humanity Institute</a> (which is affiliated with 80,000 Hours). In the paper, widely discussed in outlets such as The Economist and The Financial Times, Frey and Osborne look at the likely impact of recent advances in order to determine which jobs are likely to be automated.


New and improved technologies will make jobs redundant, even as they open up new opportunities. This has always been the case, but with recent advances in Machine Learning and Mobile Robotics, changes in the labor market could be particularly extreme in the years to come. In fact, a recent paper suggests that up to 47% of American jobs could be vulnerable to automation within the next couple of decades. That paper is "The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs To Computerisation? " by Carl Frey and Michael Osborne of the Future of Humanity Institute (which is affiliated with 80,000 Hours). In the paper, widely discussed in outlets such as The Economist and The Financial Times, Frey and Osborne look at the likely impact of recent advances in order to determine which jobs are likely to be automated. Their results will be of interest to anyone looking to choose a career: no-one wants to end up working in a dying profession. Equally, anyone already working as a driver, legal clerk or salesperson might want to think about working on their transferable skills... Update March 2021: Also see this more up-to-date paper by Michael Webb, "The Impact of AI on the Labour Market", summary by Brookings. It argues that AI will most affect high-skilled jobs, though not those in the top 1% by income. Recent progress in automation ... computerisation is no longer confined to routine manufacturing tasks. The autonomous driverless cars, developed by Google, provide one example of how manual tasks...

---

### The social impact of different professions

- Published: 2015-01-23
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/01/the-social-impact-of-different-professions/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy, Effective Altruism, Fields, Reasoning well

Economists and Harvard and Chicago recently published a paper that contains a number of estimates of the social value produced by different professions per dollar of salary. The estimates aren’t the core aim of the paper, but are none-the-less fascinating.

The first set of estimates are by one of the authors of the paper, Lockwood, and aims to stick to views that would be typical based on the the economics literature:

<table class="table-striped">
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Profession</th>
<th>Lockwood’s estimates (additional social $ value produced per $ of salary at the margin)</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tr>
<td>Academia/research</td>
<td>2</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Advertising/marketing/sales</td>
<td>-0.3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Agriculture</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Arts/Entertainment</td>
<td>0</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Business operations</td>
<td>0.1</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Engineering/technical</td>
<td>0.4</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Entrepreneurship</td>
<td>2</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Financial Services</td>
<td>-0.5</td>
</tr>
</table>

What do these figures mean? Read on for more...


Economists and Harvard and Chicago recently published a paper that contains a number of estimates of the social value produced by different professions per dollar of salary. The estimates aren't the core aim of the paper, but are nonetheless fascinating. The first set of estimates are by one of the authors of the paper, Lockwood, and aims to stick to views that would be typical based on the the economics literature: Profession Lockwood's estimates (additional social value produced per $ of salary at the margin) Academia/research 2 Advertising/marketing/sales -0. 3 Agriculture 0 Arts/Entertainment 0 Business operations 0. 1 Engineering/technical 0. 4 Entrepreneurship 2 Financial Services -0. 5 Law -0. 5 Management -0. 2 Medicine 0. 1 Public service/military 0. 4 Real Estate -0. 1 Teaching 4 Looking at the first figure, a value of 2 for academia means that for every $1 of salary an academic earns, a further $2 of value is created for the rest of society. One way to understand this figure is that the rest of society should be willing to pay a further $2 for the services delivered by the academic, meaning the academic only captures 33% of the value they create for themselves. On the other hand, in financial services for every $1 of salary, $0. 50 is lost by the rest of society i. e. it's extracted as rents. For arts/entertainment, each person captures all the value they create, and there's no broader spillovers. What are these estimates based on? The paper says: These views arise from taking very seriously, and perhaps to...

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### A meta-analysis may not mean much

- Published: 2015-01-08
- Modified: 2015-01-08
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/01/a-meta-analysis-may-not-mean-much/
- Topics: Uncategorised

Scott Alexander recently posted an interesting and provocative article: <a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/12/beware-the-man-of-one-study/">"Beware the man of one study"</a> (and see the follow up post <a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/13/debunked-and-well-refuted/">here</a>).

In the post, he points out that it's not uncommon to find two meta-analyses with opposite results on the same question.

Indeed, especially when it comes to a politically divided issue, both sides can sometimes produce apparently overwhelming evidence in support of their case.


Scott Alexander recently posted an interesting and provocative article: "Beware the man of one study" (and see the follow up post here). In the post, he points out that it's not uncommon to find two meta-analyses with opposite results on the same question. Indeed, especially when it comes to a politically divided issue, both sides can sometimes produce apparently overwhelming evidence in support of their case. He uses the example of whether minimum wages decrease employment. He points out that the political right, if selective about which studies they pick, could correctly claim: Economic theory has always shown that minimum wage increases decrease employment, but the Left has never been willing to accept this basic fact. In 1992, they trumpeted a single study by Card and Krueger that purported to show no negative effects from a minimum wage increase. This study was immediately debunked and found to be based on statistical malpractice and “massaging the numbers”. Since then, dozens of studies have come out confirming what we knew all along – that a high minimum wage is economic suicide. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses (Neumark 2006, Boockman 2010) consistently show that an overwhelming majority of the research agrees on this fact – as do 73% of economists. That’s why five hundred top economists recently signed a letter urging policy makers not to buy into discredited liberal minimum wage theories. Instead of listening to starry-eyed liberal woo, listen to the empirical evidence and an overwhelming majority of economists and oppose a raise...

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### Opportunity to work at JPAL as a Research Associate - just hours left to apply!

- Published: 2015-01-07
- Modified: 2015-01-07
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2015/01/opportunity-to-work-at-jpal-as-a-research-associate-just-hours-left-to-apply/
- Topics: Global Health, J-PAL

The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) is the world leader in conducting evidence-based research in developing countries. Their mission is to reduce poverty by ensuring that policy is informed by scientific evidence.

They are currently running a winter recruitment drive (96 total positions) which ends on at 6am EST January 8th. Applications submitted during the drive will be reviewed and short-listed candidates will be contacted. During the rest of the year, applications are reviewed on a rolling basis.

<h2>What is the position?</h2>

Research Associate (RA) positions last 1-2 years, and come in two types. Field RAs (38 positions available) are based around the world, managing field implementation of specific research projects. University-based RAs (8 positions) are primarily based in North America, focusing on data analysis of research projects.

<h2>What are the benefits of the position?</h2>

<ul>
<li>Work directly on J-PAL research programs, which are <a href="http://www.givewell.org/international/technical/criteria/program-evaluation">used by Givewell</a> and other organizations to determine the most effective global poverty interventions (a <a href="/career-guide/framework/cause-selection/">top cause</a>).</li>
<li>Cultivate high-quality research skills. Other organizations <a href="http://www.povertyactionlab.org/course/ME-Management">pay J-PAL to teach them</a> these program evaluation techniques. </li>
<li>Work in a developing country, which can be <a href="/2014/07/how-to-influence-policy-an-interview-with-owen-barder-of-the-center-for-global-development/">very useful</a> if you want to work in international development.</li>
<li>Build a network and career capital for evidence-based development work. Many NGOs now have full time positions for Monitoring and Evaluation. Some RAs go on to top PhD programs or start their own impact evaluation NGOs. </li>
<li>It's paid!</li>
</ul>

Overall, if you've already got a graduate degree, this looks like a good way to start a career in evidence-based international development. However, we have not performed an in-depth investigation of the pros and cons of this job - this assessment is based on our background knowledge and what we've read about the positions online.


The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) is the world leader in conducting evidence-based research in developing countries. Their mission is to reduce poverty by ensuring that policy is informed by scientific evidence. They are currently running a winter recruitment drive (96 total positions) which ends on at 6am EST January 8th. Applications submitted during the drive will be reviewed and short-listed candidates will be contacted. During the rest of the year, applications are reviewed on a rolling basis. What is the position? Research Associate (RA) positions last 1-2 years, and come in two types. Field RAs (38 positions available) are based around the world, managing field implementation of specific research projects. University-based RAs (8 positions) are primarily based in North America, focusing on data analysis of research projects. What are the benefits of the position? Work directly on J-PAL research programs, which are used by Givewell and other organizations to determine the most effective global poverty interventions (a top cause). Cultivate high-quality research skills. Other organizations pay J-PAL to teach them these program evaluation techniques. Work in a developing country, which can be very useful if you want to work in international development. Build a network and career capital for evidence-based development work. Many NGOs now have full time positions for Monitoring and Evaluation. Some RAs go on to top PhD programs or start their own impact evaluation NGOs. It's paid! Overall, if you've already got a graduate degree, this looks like a good way to...

---

### Earning to give is systemic change

- Published: 2014-12-30
- Modified: 2014-12-30
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/12/earning-to-give-is-systemic-change/
- Topics: EtG pros and cons

One of the most common criticisms of earning to give (e.g. see <a href="http://www.varsity.co.uk/comment/8000">this article</a> released yesterday), and advocating for charitable donations generally, is that it just makes thing better at the margin, and doesn’t address the “systemic”, “structural” “root cause” issues that really matter.

One response to this we’ve given before is: yes that’s true, but donating is still a good thing to do.

Another response we’ve given before is that if systemic change is the most important cause, donate to organisations working on systemic change. This works so long as you’re not in a job that does a lot to prevent systemic change (e.g. conservative politician, professional strikebreaker) and you don’t think the act of philanthropy itself prevents systemic change (even if donating to systemic change organisations). If you think this all sounds completely implausible, consider the example of Engles who worked as a factory manager in order to fund Marx’s research.

A response we haven’t often given before, however, is just to argue that no, promoting earning to give <em>is</em> a form of important systemic change: imagine how different the world would be if almost everyone regularly donated 10% or more of their income to whichever causes they thought had the biggest impact.


One of the most common criticisms of earning to give (e. g. see this article released yesterday), and advocating for charitable donations generally, is that it just makes thing better at the margin, and doesn’t address the “systemic”, “structural” “root cause” issues that really matter. One response to this we’ve given before is: yes that’s true, but donating is still a good thing to do. Another response we’ve given before is that if systemic change is the most important cause, donate to organisations working on systemic change. This works so long as you’re not in a job that does a lot to prevent systemic change (e. g. conservative politician, professional strikebreaker) and you don’t think the act of philanthropy itself prevents systemic change (even if donating to systemic change organisations). If you think this all sounds completely implausible, consider the example of Engles who worked as a factory manager in order to fund Marx’s research. A response we haven’t often given before, however, is just to argue that no, promoting earning to give is a form of important systemic change: imagine how different the world would be if almost everyone regularly donated 10% or more of their income to whichever causes they thought had the biggest impact. It wouldn't fix everything, but it would make a lot possible. In a recent post, Scott Alexander points out that if everyone gave 10% of their income it would be $7 trillion each year! Jeffrey Sachs has estimated it would take about $130bn...

---

### Why apply to Teach First?: An interview with the UK's largest graduate recruiter

- Published: 2014-12-18
- Modified: 2023-09-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/12/we-interview-the-uks-largest-graduate-recruiter-teach-first/
- Topics: Education, Top-recommended careers

<img src="//eighty-thousand-hours-wp-production.s3.amazonaws.com/2014/12/Teach-First-300x50.png" alt="Teach First" width="300" height="50" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-26151" />

Teach First is a two year program that places talented graduates in schools in challenging circumstances as teachers after a rapidly accelerated six week training program. It aims to offer rapid personal development while also contributing to an important social cause. It's similar to Teach for America in the US.

Founded in 2002, it's now the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20141218135719/http://www.teachfirst.org.uk/news/teach-first-once-again-named-country%E2%80%99s-biggest-graduate-recruiter">UK's largest graduate recruiter, hiring over 1,500 graduates in 2014</a>, so we're curious to learn more.

We were approached by the Teach First recruiter at Oxford, Tom Cole, and we offered to do an interview as a first step towards learning more. Teach First's popularity is equally strong in Oxford as the rest of the country: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20141218141301/http://www.careers.ox.ac.uk/options-and-occupations/sectors-and-occupations/teaching-in-schools/">secondary school teaching one of Oxford's most common graduate destinations</a>, with <a href="http://public.tableausoftware.com/views/DLHE_stu/SectorsandRoles?:showVizHome=no">about 10% of the class becoming teachers</a>, and a significant fraction of these graduates enter Teach First.

Overall, we don't yet have firm views on the option; but my initial impression is that it's a strong, if challenging, option for learning, building <a href="https://80000hours.org/career-guide/framework/career-capital/">career capital</a> and keeping your options open, which makes it an option worth considering early career if you have good personal fit, though it's probably possible to have more immediate impact earning to give.

In the interview, we focus on the career capital benefits, which we've been told are often overlooked by people considering the programme.

The interview was conducted via email, but we met in person with Tom Cole to discuss the content.

The interview begins below:


Teach First is a two year program that places talented graduates in schools in challenging circumstances as teachers after a rapidly accelerated six week training program. It aims to offer rapid personal development while also contributing to an important social cause. It's similar to Teach for America in the US. Founded in 2002, it's now the UK's largest graduate recruiter, hiring over 1,500 graduates in 2014, so we're curious to learn more. We were approached by the Teach First recruiter at Oxford, Tom Cole, and we offered to do an interview as a first step towards learning more. Teach First's popularity is equally strong in Oxford as the rest of the country: secondary school teaching one of Oxford's most common graduate destinations, with about 10% of the class becoming teachers, and a significant fraction of these graduates enter Teach First. Overall, we don't yet have firm views on the option; but my initial impression is that it's a strong, if challenging, option for learning, building career capital and keeping your options open. This makes it an option worth considering early in your career if you have good personal fit. We haven't yet investigated the potential for immediate impact of Teach First. In the interview, we focus on the career capital benefits, which we've been told are often overlooked by people considering the programme. The interview was conducted via email, but we met in person with Tom Cole to discuss the content. A round of edits was made to the post...

---

### The camel doesn't have two humps - update to software engineering profile

- Published: 2014-12-13
- Modified: 2014-12-14
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/12/the-camel-doesnt-have-two-humps-update-to-software-engineering-profile/
- Topics: Software Engineering

In our current software engineering profile, we say:

<blockquote>
  Programming ability seems to roughly divide into two groups: those who find it relatively easy and those who don’t. If in the past you’ve done well at mathematics and science and can think abstractly, then it’s likely you can learn to program well enough to get an entry-level job within about six months.
</blockquote>

In evidence of the first claim, one piece of evidence we cited was <a href="http://wiki.t-o-f.info/uploads/EDM4600/The%20camel%20has%20two%20humps.pdf">a paper</a> called "The Camel Has Two Humps" by Dehnadi and Bornat.

However, we've just discovered that Bornat has <a href="http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/staffpages/r_bornat/papers/camel_hump_retraction.pdf">publicly redacted</a> this paper. He says:

<blockquote>
  It’s not enough to summarise the scientific result, because I wrote and web-circulated “The camel has two humps” in 2006. That document was very misleading and, in the way of web documents, it continues to mislead to this day. I need to make an explicit retraction of what it claimed. Dehnadi didn’t discover a programming aptitude test. He didn’t find a way of dividing programming sheep from non-programming goats. We hadn’t shown that nature trumps nurture. Just a phenomenon and a prediction.
  
  Though it’s embarrassing, I feel it’s necessary to explain how and why I came to write “The camel has two humps” and its part-retraction in (Bornat et al., 2008). It’s in part a mental health story. In autumn 2005 I became clinically depressed. My physician put me on the then-standard treatment for depression, an SSRI. But she wasn’t aware that for some people an SSRI doesn’t gently treat depression, it puts them on the ceiling. I took the SSRI for three months, by which time I was grandiose, extremely self-righteous and very combative – myself turned up to one hundred and eleven. I did a number of very silly things whilst on the SSRI and some more in the immediate aftermath, amongst them writing “The camel has two humps”.
</blockquote>

Based on this, we've removed the paper from the profile, and removed the claim about the distribution dividing into two clumps.

We intend to do a more thorough review of the predictors of success in this field when we release our full profile of software engineering in the new year.

Did we make a mistake in this case? The profile was only at the "considered" stage, so not the result of in-depth research. Even so, when most skills and abilities are normally or log-normally distributed, we should have been cautious about the existence of a bimodal distribution without relatively strong evidence.


In our current software engineering profile, we say: Programming ability seems to roughly divide into two groups: those who find it relatively easy and those who don’t. If in the past you’ve done well at mathematics and science and can think abstractly, then it’s likely you can learn to program well enough to get an entry-level job within about six months. In evidence of the first claim, one piece of evidence we cited was a paper called "The Camel Has Two Humps" by Dehnadi and Bornat. However, we've just discovered that Bornat has publicly retracted this paper. He says: It’s not enough to summarise the scientific result, because I wrote and web-circulated “The camel has two humps” in 2006. That document was very misleading and, in the way of web documents, it continues to mislead to this day. I need to make an explicit retraction of what it claimed. Dehnadi didn’t discover a programming aptitude test. He didn’t find a way of dividing programming sheep from non-programming goats. We hadn’t shown that nature trumps nurture. Just a phenomenon and a prediction. Though it’s embarrassing, I feel it’s necessary to explain how and why I came to write “The camel has two humps” and its part-retraction in (Bornat et al. , 2008). It’s in part a mental health story. In autumn 2005 I became clinically depressed. My physician put me on the then-standard treatment for depression, an SSRI. But she wasn’t aware that for some people an SSRI doesn’t gently treat depression,...

---

### Stop worrying so much about the long-term

- Published: 2014-12-12
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/12/stop-worrying-so-much-about-the-long-term/
- Topics: Career capital, Career planning, Decision making, Mental health, Unconventional advice

<img src="//eighty-thousand-hours-wp-production.s3.amazonaws.com/2014/12/thinker.jpg" alt="thinker" width="640" height="424" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-25511" />

Today I’ve been reviewing our most recent round of coaching, and something struck me about the applications. Many of them were written by people who were clearly desperate to plan out the next decade of their career, or even their entire working life. As a result, they tended to feel anxious and even overwhelmed by the options available and the weight of the decisions in front of them.

Might this be you? Some giveaways are phrases like “how can I find the <em>right career</em> for me?” or “I’m trying to figure out what to do with my life”.

To people who feel this way, I have this advice: <em>stop worrying so much about the long-term.</em>

Don’t get me wrong, <em>of course</em> your career decisions are important. 80,000 Hours is built around the idea that you can make an incredible difference through your career choices, if you choose carefully.

However, I don’t think that making a detailed career plan is a particularly good way to ensure that your career goes well in the long-term. A better idea, especially at the start of your career, is to make sure you get the next step right: focus on getting into a better position, and <em>then</em> worry about what comes next when more decisions arise.

This may sound counter-intuitive. So why do I recommend it? Four reasons:


Today I've been reviewing our most recent round of coaching, and something struck me about the applications. Many of them were written by people who were clearly desperate to plan out the next decade of their career, or even their entire working life. As a result, they tended to feel anxious and even overwhelmed by the options available and the weight of the decisions in front of them. Might this be you? Some giveaways are phrases like "how can I find the right career for me? " or "I'm trying to figure out what to do with my life". To people who feel this way, I have this advice: stop worrying so much about the long-term. Don't get me wrong, of course your career decisions are important. 80,000 Hours is built around the idea that you can make an incredible difference through your career choices, if you choose carefully. However, I don't think that making a detailed career plan is a particularly good way to ensure that your career goes well in the long-term. A better idea, especially at the start of your career, is to make sure you get the next step right: focus on getting into a better position, and then worry about what comes next when more decisions arise. This may sound counter-intuitive. So why do I recommend it? Four reasons: 1. You have limited knowledge If you're at the start of your career, then you probably don't know much about the career options available, and how to...

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### Learn to code in 16 weeks for free in the UK at Founders and Coders

> Want to learn to code for in 16 weeks in the UK or free? A review of Founders and Coders.

- Published: 2014-12-10
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/12/learn-to-code-in-16-weeks-for-free-in-the-uk-at-founders-and-coders/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy, Computer science, Found a tech startup, Software Engineering

<h2>Introduction</h2>

<img src="//eighty-thousand-hours-wp-production.s3.amazonaws.com/2014/12/Ben-Clifford-300x300.jpg" alt="Ben Clifford" width="300" height="300" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-24841" />

Are you interested in doing something like <a href="https://80000hours.org/2014/04/interview-with-buck-shlegeris-from-app-academy/">App Academy</a> to <a href="https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/software-engineering/">learn to program</a>, but in the UK? <a href="http://www.makersacademy.com/">Makers Academy</a> is often thought to be the best option, and we've had good reports from one of our members. But it costs £8,000. What about doing something similar <em>for free</em>?

In this interview, Ben Clifford - another member who <a href="https://80000hours.org/about/impact/studies-of-career-change/">changed his career due to 80,000 Hours</a> - tells us about a free alternative called Founders and Coders. Ben recently went through the course, and is currently working at a startup in London.

If interested, you can <a href="http://foundersandcoders.org/apply.html">apply here</a>. the deadline for the next round is on Friday.

<h3>Summary of main points:</h3>

<ul>
    <li>Founders and Coders is a free coding program based in London.</li>
    <li>The course aims to make people full stack javascript developers in 16 weeks.</li>
    <li>The biggest benefits of doing a coding course are providing structure and tackling motivation problems.</li>
    <li>The weakest point of Founders and Coders is links to employers but Ben thinks this would not stop determined students can get jobs.</li>
    <li>The most important thing for getting a place is commitment to becoming a software developer. Being motivated to do good in your career also improves your chances.</li>
    <li>Applications for January close on Friday 12th December. You can attend taster days by supporting their Indiegogo campaign.</li>
</ul>


Introduction Are you interested in doing something like App Academy to learn to program, but in the UK? Makers Academy is often thought to be the best option, and we've had good reports from one of our members. But it costs £8,000. What about doing something similar for free? In this interview, Ben Clifford - another member who changed his career due to 80,000 Hours - tells us about a free alternative called Founders and Coders. Ben recently went through the course, and is currently working at a startup in London. If interested, you can apply here. The deadline for the next round is on Friday. Summary of main points: Founders and Coders is a free coding program based in London. The course aims to make people full stack javascript developers in 16 weeks. The biggest benefits of doing a coding course are providing structure and tackling motivation problems. The weakest point of Founders and Coders is links to employers but Ben thinks this would not stop determined students from getting jobs. The most important thing for getting a place is commitment to becoming a software developer. Being motivated to do good in your career also improves your chances. Applications for January close on Friday 12th December. You can attend taster days by supporting their Indiegogo campaign. Ben's Background Why did I do it? I got very interested in solving problems through tech entreprenuership as a way to have impact. I started experimenting with ideas in a very low tech...

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### Giving What We Can is seeking a Director of Research

- Published: 2014-12-04
- Modified: 2020-08-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/12/giving-what-we-can-is-seeking-a-director-of-research/
- Topics: Uncategorised

Giving What We Can is our sister organisation, and we are cross posting this job opportunity from their blog: In just five years, Giving What We Can has grown to over 660 members in 25 countries worldwide. The community has pledged over $330m towards ending poverty. We are looking for additional hires to build on this success. Apply to be our Director of Research Note: applications have now closed. The deadline for submitting applications is now Midnight GMT on Friday 12th December 2014. As Director of Research, you would lead our efforts to find the charities most effective at alleviating extreme poverty and advise the Giving What We Can community in their donation decisions. Specifically, you would be responsible for: Determining which charities we should recommend – based both the effectiveness of the interventions the charities carry out, and how well those organisations implement them. Understanding the broader landscape of top charitable interventions and organisations, in order to advise our members when deciding where to donate Presenting the research in compelling ways in order to encourage people to donate to the most effective charities, both via our website and presentations. We are a small team, so you'll also have the opportunity to be involved in recruitment, fundraising, publishing our findings in the media, and whatever else most interests you. Why work at Giving What We Can Be at the heart of an inspiring community of people who care about others and really put their passion into practice: We have members...

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### Interested in working in international development? Consider 2Seeds.

- Published: 2014-12-04
- Modified: 2023-09-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/12/interested-in-working-in-international-development-consider-2seeds/
- Topics: Uncategorised

Many people have told us that if you want to work in international development, it's very useful to spend time working in a developing country (e.g. see our <a href="https://80000hours.org/2014/07/how-to-influence-policy-an-interview-with-owen-barder-of-the-center-for-global-development/">interview with Owen Barder</a>), and living abroad is probably useful for <a href="/career-guide/framework/exploration-value/">exploration value</a> too. It's also very useful to get project management experience early on in this space, because it opens up jobs in non-profits and foundations. But management positions in the developing world are rare early in your career.

This made me interested to hear about 2Seeds, which gives graduates the opportunity to volunteer as a project manager in rural Tanazania for a year.

I met the co-founder of 2Seeds, Sam Bonsey, at a conference, and then followed up by doing the following interview with their Outreach Manager, Abby Love. Based on what I've seen, it looks well worth considering as an early career step, especially if you're interested in working within international development.

Read on to see the full interview, which was conducted by email.


Many people have told us that if you want to work in international development, it's very useful to spend time working in a developing country (e. g. see our interview with Owen Barder), and living abroad is probably useful for exploration value too. It's also very useful to get project management experience early on in this space, because it opens up jobs in non-profits and foundations. But management positions in the developing world are rare early in your career. This made me interested to hear about 2Seeds, which gives graduates the opportunity to volunteer as a project manager in rural Tanazania for a year. I met the co-founder of 2Seeds, Sam Bonsey, at a conference, and then followed up by doing the following interview with their Outreach Manager, Abby Love. Based on what I've seen, it looks well worth considering as an early career step, especially if you're interested in working within international development. Read on to see the full interview, which was conducted by email. What is 2Seeds Network, and why does it exist? 2Seeds Network is a nonprofit that incubates community-based projects to turn income-generating activities into thriving businesses in Tanzania. Each year, we recruit and train 16-24 individuals to partner with Tanzanian communities to lead these projects, which utilize activities such as poultry-raising and food production and sales to generate income and build business acumen. What is the Project Coordinator position? 2Seeds recruits and trains resilient, passionate individuals to live in rural Tanzania for one year as volunteer...

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### Interview with a project manager at the Copenhagen Consensus

- Published: 2014-12-03
- Modified: 2024-11-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/12/interview-with-a-project-manager-at-the-copenhagen-consensus/
- Topics: Global priorities research

Ben recently interviewed Brad Wong about his career and current job at 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.

We spoke to Brad to learn more about whether working at the CCC could be a good opportunity for our members, following up on our <a href="/2013/07/looking-for-a-seriously-high-impact-job-using-your-managerial-skills/">previous research</a>.

The CCC is hiring <a href="http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/project-job-setting-priorities-bangladesh">two more project managers to work on a Copenhagen Consensus project for development in Bangladesh</a>, in a role similar to Brad’s. These jobs can either be based in Dhaka, Bangladesh or Budapest, Hungary or in the Centre for Effective Altruism’s office’s in Oxford (shared with us!).

The interview was conducted via phone call. Below we summarise the key messages of the conversation, followed by some excerpts, which have been edited and reorganised for clarity.

In summary, Brad told us:

<ul>
<li>Brad manages a project to provide cost-benefit analysis of the UN’s next development goals.</li>
<li>Before this job, Brad completed a PhD, worked as a consultant at Booz &amp; Company, and did strategic consulting at an Indian nonprofit, Technoserve. All three were good preparation for his current role, which requires an understanding of academic research and development, combined with the ability to manage a project and get things done.</li>
<li>Brad really enjoys his work at the CCC. Day-to-day, the work ranges from very exciting (networking with UN ambassadors) to quotidian (writing contracts, organising meetings, proofreading).</li>
<li>He’s excited about the project’s potential impact - their analysis is being used at the highest levels within the UN and there are already more than 100 media articles about the project from major outlets, such as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.</li>
<li>Brad would like to continue working at the CCC, though long-term would like to work at a major foundation or consult for foundations.</li>
<li>80,000 Hours did not directly affect his decision to work for CCC, but exposure to Givewell and 80,000 Hours significantly changed his attitude towards impact in his career.</li>
</ul>


Ben recently interviewed Brad Wong about his career and current job at 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. We spoke to Brad to learn more about whether working at the CCC could be a good opportunity for our members, following up on our previous research. In summary, Brad told us: Brad manages a project to provide cost-benefit analysis of the UN's next development goals. Before this job, Brad completed a PhD, worked as a consultant at Booz & Company, and did strategic consulting at an Indian nonprofit, Technoserve. All three were good preparation for his current role, which requires an understanding of academic research and development, combined with the ability to manage a project and get things done. Brad really enjoys his work at the CCC. Day-to-day, the work ranges from very exciting (networking with UN ambassadors) to quotidian (writing contracts, organising meetings, proofreading). He's excited about the project's potential impact - their analysis is being used at the highest levels within the UN and there are already more than 100 media articles about the project from major outlets, such as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Brad would like to continue working at the CCC, though long-term would like to work at a major foundation or consult for foundations. 80,000 Hours did not directly affect his decision to work for CCC, but exposure to...

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### 80,000 Hours is seeking a Head of Research

- Published: 2014-11-27
- Modified: 2020-08-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/11/80000-hours-is-seeking-a-head-of-research/
- Topics: Uncategorised

As Head of Research, you will become part of our founding team to lead our research efforts into how to select the most high-impact careers. Our research is what drives the advice we provide via our website and career coaching.

Specifically, you become responsible for:

<ul>
    <li>Deciding what questions to investigate and personally coming up with answers to these questions, or overseeing the delegation of this research to others.</li>
    <li>Helping to translate these findings into practical products that help people make better decisions - books, web applications, workshops and others.</li>
    <li>Fitting the research into the overall strategy for the organisation.</li>
</ul>

We are a small team, so you'll also have the opportunity to be involved in recruitment, fundraising, publishing our findings in the media and whatever else most interests you.

<img src="//eighty-thousand-hours-wp-production.s3.amazonaws.com/2014/11/10155004_619539941461081_1904617897_n.jpg" alt="10155004_619539941461081_1904617897_n" width="960" height="599" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-22261" />


As Head of Research, you will become part of our founding team to lead our research efforts into how to select the most high-impact careers. Our research is what drives the advice we provide via our website and career coaching. Specifically, you become responsible for: Deciding what questions to investigate and personally coming up with answers to these questions, or overseeing the delegation of this research to others. Helping to translate these findings into practical products that help people make better decisions - books, web applications, workshops and others. Fitting the research into the overall strategy for the organisation. We are a small team, so you'll also have the opportunity to be involved in recruitment, fundraising, publishing our findings in the media and whatever else most interests you. Apply to be our Head of Research Note: applications have now closed. Applications close Midnight GMT, Friday 12th December. Why apply? This role combines great potential for impact with great potential for growth and learning. We believe 80,000 Hours has the potential to transform careers advice, and you would be playing a central role in our strategy. As one of the key team members of a rapidly growing small organisation, you'll have a huge amount of responsibility, autonomy and room to grow. If you work for 80,000 Hours, you’ll be part of a focused team of intelligent, enthusiastic, driven colleagues who want to change the world, located in our offices within the beautiful University of Oxford, just an hour from London ... .

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### The Centre for Effective Altruism is seeking a Chief Operating Officer

- Published: 2014-11-26
- Modified: 2020-08-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/11/the-centre-for-effective-altruism-is-seeking-a-chief-operating-officer/
- Topics: Uncategorised

We are recruiting a Chief Operating Officer to lead our central division, managing a team that supports the recruitment, finance, logistics, HR and fundraising of all our projects.  This role is a unique opportunity to shape a rapidly-growing charity into an incubator that can quickly scale up the best ideas emerging from the nascent effective altruism movement. We see this as one of the most challenging roles in the organisation, requiring a high level of competency across most skill areas.  The role is located in Oxford, and you would work in our offices which are housed within the University. The Centre for Effective Altruism is an incubator of projects we believe have potential to create significant positive change in the world at low cost. Our organisation includes two established projects, Giving What We Can and 80,000 Hours, as well as two newer projects we are incubating, the Global Priorities Project and Effective Altruism Outreach. We have also spun two projects out of the Centre for Effective Altruism - Animal Charity Evaluators and The Life You Can Save - which are both now run independently in the US. In this role you would be involved in the operational aspects of all of CEA’s projects. You will meet and provide invaluable help to a large share of the people and projects in the effective altruist movement today. You will learn about all aspects of CEA's work, including our expansion into other countries. As a result, it will provide you with the skills and contacts you would need to lead on future projects. The position would place...

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### Serial social entrepreneur, Michael Norton OBE, speaks in Oxford

- Published: 2014-11-20
- Modified: 2014-11-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/11/serial-social-entrepreneur-michael-norton-obe-speaks-in-oxford/
- Topics: Advocacy

The serial social entrepreneur, Michael Norton, recently spoke at 80,000 Hours: Oxford.

Michael started his career as a scientist, merchant banker and publisher before becoming a social activist. Since then, he has helped to found over 40 charities and social enterprises, including UnLtd, which has raised an endowment of over £100 million to support thousands of social enterprises. He spoke to us about his career and what he’s learned about making a difference.

What follows are some notes I made based on his presentation. All are paraphrased, and I can’t guarantee they accurately reflect Michael’s views.

<img src="//eighty-thousand-hours-wp-production.s3.amazonaws.com/2014/11/norton-obe.jpg">


The serial social entrepreneur, Michael Norton, recently spoke at 80,000 Hours: Oxford. Michael started his career as a scientist, merchant banker and publisher before becoming a social activist. Since then, he has helped to found over 40 charities and social enterprises, including UnLtd, which has raised an endowment of over £100 million to support thousands of social enterprises. He spoke to us about his career and what he’s learned about making a difference. What follows are some notes I made based on his presentation. All are paraphrased, and I can’t guarantee they accurately reflect Michael’s views. Presentation notes Anyone can be a social entrepreneur or activist and make a difference It can either be through your job or through ‘evening entrepreneurship’. Small positive day-to-day acts of inspiration can mobilise others. Technology gives ordinary people the ability to reach huge numbers of people. Consider the example of 9 year old girl, Martha Payne, who uploaded photos of her school dinners every day. Her blog ended up with 10 million views, and helped to trigger legislation to improve school meals. The biggest problem in the world is apathy Many social problems have solutions, but they’re not being put into practice. How can overcome apathy? Encourage people to take little steps. Lots of little steps add up, and they encourage people to take bigger steps. Get involved in communities of people making a difference. We need more leaders. There’s lots of people out there who want to make a difference, and want an...

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### Why and how to keep your options open

> Keeping options open is important for everyone, it's especially important if you want to make a difference...

- Published: 2014-11-11
- Modified: 2014-12-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/11/why-and-how-to-keep-your-options-open/
- Topics: Uncategorised

Keeping options open is important for everyone, it's <em>especially</em> important if you want to make a difference, because the most effective career opportunities are likely to change in the future. Indeed, we think it's usually more important to keep your options open to make an immediate impact.

Many people think that 'keeping your options open' means being non-committal and avoiding tough decisions. We disagree. The best to keep your options open is to commit to building flexible abilities and resources, such as transferable skills, money and a public platform.

For more, see our <a href="https://80000hours.org/career-guide/big-picture/keeping-options-open/">new page on the topic</a>.

<img src="//eighty-thousand-hours-wp-production.s3.amazonaws.com/2014/10/Flexible-path-graph-v2-nunito.png"/>


Keeping options open is important for everyone, it's especially important if you want to make a difference, because the most effective career opportunities are likely to change in the future. Indeed, we think it's usually more important to keep your options open to make an immediate impact. Many people think that 'keeping your options open' means being non-committal and avoiding tough decisions. We disagree. The best way to keep your options open is to commit to building flexible abilities and resources, such as transferable skills, money and a public platform. For more, see our new page on the topic.

---

### Mid-year review September 2014

- Published: 2014-11-11
- Modified: 2024-12-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/11/mid-year-review-september-2014/
- Topics: Updates

This document is an update on the priorities we set in our <a href="https://80000hours.org/2014/05/team-plan-may-2014/">May 2014 team plan</a>, as part of our <a href="https://80000hours.org/2014/05/summary-of-the-annual-review-may-2014/">annual 2013 review</a>, for the period June 2014 - September 2014.

<h2>Summary</h2>

<ul>
<li>We’ve made good progress on the priorities we set in our review. In general, we’ve exceeded our goals and are on-track to make the rest by the end of the year.</p></li>
<li>Some of our key achievements include: (i) published our expanded research pages, including 30,000 words of new static pages, (ii) completed our fundraising targets, and (iii) hired Peter Hartree as our part-time web developer, allowing us to exceed our targets on web development.</p></li>
<li><p>The main problem we face is that we’ve failed to hire someone to lead on research, which has contributed to a shortage of staff capacity in this area.</p></li>
<li><p>Over the rest of the year, we intend to focus on improving our online content and the research behind it, by (i) doing another round of work on the key web pages (ii) doing a round of coaching (iii) publishing a round of articles from our research backlog.</p></li>
<li><p>After February 2015, we’ll do our annual review, a hiring round, and our next round of fundraising.</p></li>
</ul>

<hr />

<p>In the rest of this document, we review in more depth (i) our big picture strategy and priorities (ii) how we’ve performed relative to the priorities we set in our last team plan (iii) the challenges we’re facing and (iv) our priorities for the next six months.


This document is an update on the priorities we set in our May 2014 team plan, as part of our annual 2013 review, for the period June 2014 - September 2014. Summary We've made good progress on the priorities we set in our review. In general, we've exceeded our goals and are on-track to make the rest by the end of the year. Some of our key achievements include: (i) published our expanded research pages, including 30,000 words of new static pages, (ii) completed our fundraising targets, and (iii) hired Peter Hartree as our part-time web developer, allowing us to exceed our targets on web development. The main problem we face is that we've failed to hire someone to lead on research, which has contributed to a shortage of staff capacity in this area. Over the rest of the year, we intend to focus on improving our online content and the research behind it, by (i) doing another round of work on the key web pages (ii) doing a round of coaching (iii) publishing a round of articles from our research backlog. After February 2015, we'll do our annual review, a hiring round, and our next round of fundraising. In the rest of this document, we review in more depth (i) our big picture strategy and priorities (ii) how we've performed relative to the priorities we set in our last team plan (iii) the challenges we're facing...

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### Should you wait to make a difference?

> Suppose you could either work at a charity next year or go to graduate school. If you work at the charity, you’ll be making a difference right away, speeding up progress. If you go to graduate school, you’ll be investing in yourself and able to have a larger impact later. Which is better?

- Published: 2014-10-26
- Modified: 2018-07-23
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/10/should-you-wait-to-make-a-difference/
- Topics: Now vs. Later

<h2>The issue</h2>

One big picture consideration in career choice is the question of how important it is to make a difference now versus later. Here’s the issue: suppose you could either work at a charity next year or go to graduate school. If you work at the charity, you’ll be making a difference right away, speeding up progress. If you go to graduate school, you’ll be investing in yourself and able to have a larger impact later. Which is better?

If you think it’s better to make a difference as soon as possible, the more you’ll value your immediate opportunities for impact. In <a href="/career-guide/framework/">our framework</a>, you’ll put more emphasis on <a href="/career-guide/framework/role-impact/">path impact potential</a>. If you think it’s better to invest and give later, the more you’ll value activities that build your skills, connections and credentials (<a href="/career-guide/framework/career-capital">career capital</a>), and the more you’ll value learning about the world so you can make better decisions in the future (<a href="/career-guide/framework/career-capital">exploration value</a>).

There’s a similar issue with charitable giving. If you have some money, you can either give today, or you can invest your money, which will grow over time, and give a larger amount later. Under what circumstances should you invest rather than give now?

<h2>Summary</h2>

Overall, we favour investing in your human capital and wealth early, so that you make a greater difference later in your career. Why?

<ol>
<li>You’ll be able to find better opportunities to make a difference in the future, because you’ll get wiser and be able to use better research in which causes and careers are most effective.</li>
<li>Early-to-mid career, most people can make investments that significantly increase their career capital, such as learning new skills, doing a graduate degree and building a professional network. The returns from these investments more than justify the cost of waiting.</li>
</ol>

Nevertheless, there are a few other reasons to start making a difference now: it will teach you about the world; it will help you find collaborators; it’s motivating; and it will help you build altruistic habits.

So, overall, we suggest that early in your career you mainly focus on building career capital and learning more, though still put some weight on your immediate impact. If choosing between two jobs, this could mean choosing the one that best builds your career capital, using immediate impact as a tiebreaker. As you get older, put more and more weight on your immediate impact.

Read on to see a full discussion of the considerations and our reasoning.


The issue One big picture consideration in career choice is the question of how important it is to make a difference now versus later. Here’s the issue: suppose you could either work at a charity next year or go to graduate school. If you work at the charity, you’ll be making a difference right away, speeding up progress. If you go to graduate school, you’ll be investing in yourself and able to have a larger impact later. Which is better? If you think it’s better to make a difference as soon as possible, the more you’ll value your immediate opportunities for impact. In our framework, you’ll put more emphasis on role impact potential. If you think it’s better to invest and give later, the more you’ll value activities that build your skills, connections and credentials (career capital), and the more you’ll value learning about the world so you can make better decisions in the future (exploration value). There’s a similar issue with charitable giving. If you have some money, you can either give today, or you can invest your money, which will grow over time, and give a larger amount later. Under what circumstances should you invest rather than give now? Summary Overall, we favour investing in your human capital and wealth early, so that you make a greater difference later in your career. Why? You’ll be able to find better opportunities to make a difference in the future, because you’ll get wiser and be able to use better research...

---

### Update: 7 career strategies for making a difference

> New research on the seven top career strategies for making a difference.

- Published: 2014-10-22
- Modified: 2015-08-09
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/10/update-7-career-strategies-for-making-a-difference/
- Topics: Uncategorised

We recently released a page on <a href="research/top-careers/strategies/">“top career strategies”</a>, featuring two strategies for building your long-run potential, and five for immediate impact:

<ol>
<li><a href="/career-guide/top-careers/strategies/the-experimenter/">The experimenter</a>: Finding a career that’s the right fit for you is important, but it’s also difficult to do just by thinking about it. It can therefore be a good strategy to try out a number of different areas in order to learn more about your own interests and skills.</li>
<li><a href="/career-guide/top-careers/strategies/self-developer/">The self-developer</a>: When you’ve narrowed down which area you want to enter, focus on investing in yourself to build your career capital.</li>
<li><a href="/career-guide/top-careers/strategies/effective-work/">The effective worker</a>: There are many non-profit and for-profit organisations that have a large impact, which are short of specific types of human capital. If you’re a good fit for a high-impact organization, it’s an option worth considering. By high-impact organisations we mean those that are well-run and work on an <a href="/career-guide/framework/cause-selection">effective cause</a>.</li>
<li><a href="/articles/entrepreneurship/">The entrepreneur</a>: If you’ve got potential as an entrepreneur, attempt to found new effective non-profit organisations or innovative for-profits that benefit their customers and create positive spill-over effects.</li>
<li><a href="/career-guide/top-careers/strategies/earning-to-give/">The philanthropist</a>: Some people have skills that are better suited to earning money than the other strategies. These people can take a higher-earning career and donate the money to effective organisations. We call this strategy ‘earning to give’.</li>
<li><a href="/career-guide/top-careers/strategies/career-guide/">The researcher</a>: Some people are especially good at and interested in research – attempting to create new knowledge. If this is you, and have you have the opportunity to work in a field that seems particularly <a href="/career-guide/framework/cause-selection">important, tractable and neglected</a>, then this could be a way to have a large impact.</li>
<li><a href="/articles/advocacy/">The advocate</a>: If you can take a job that gives you a public platform, good network and credibility, you can use it to promote and unite people behind important ideas.</li>
</ol>


We recently released a page on “top career strategies”, featuring two career strategies for building your long-run potential, and five for immediate impact: The experimenter: Finding a career that’s the right fit for you is important, but it’s also difficult to do just by thinking about it. It can therefore be a good strategy to try out a number of different areas in order to learn more about your own interests and skills. The self-developer: When you’ve narrowed down which area you want to enter, focus on investing in yourself to build your career capital. The effective worker: There are many non-profit and for-profit organisations that have a large impact, which are short of specific types of human capital. If you’re a good fit for a high-impact organization, it’s an option worth considering. By high-impact organisations we mean those that are well-run and work on an effective cause. The entrepreneur: If you’ve got potential as an entrepreneur, attempt to found new effective non-profit organisations or innovative for-profits that benefit their customers and create positive spill-over effects. The philanthropist: Some people have skills that are better suited to earning money than the other strategies. These people can take a higher-earning career and donate the money to effective organisations. We call this strategy ‘earning to give’. The researcher: Some people are especially good at and interested in research – attempting to create new knowledge. If this is you, and you have the opportunity to work in a field that seems particularly important,...

---

### Want to do something about the risks of artificial intelligence?

> The field of research into the risks of artificial intelligence is taking off. If you're wondering how you can contribute, we'd like to hear from you.

- Published: 2014-10-17
- Modified: 2020-08-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/10/want-to-do-something-about-the-risks-of-artificial-intelligence/
- Topics: Existential risk

Nick Bostrom's recent book, <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Superintelligence-Dangers-Strategies-Nick-Bostrom/dp/0199678111">"Superintelligence"</a>, has been a great success, gaining favorable reviews in the <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/021d3484-fd1d-11e3-8ca9-00144feab7de.html#axzz3GJhwcNc0">Financial Times</a> and the <a href="http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21611037-potential-impacts-intelligent-machines-human-life-clever-cogs">Economist</a>, as well as <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/495759307346952192">support from Elon Musk</a>, the founder of Telsa and SpaceX.

The field of research into the risks of artificial intelligence is also taking off, with the recent founding of Cambridge University's <a href="http://cser.org/">Centre for the Study of Existential Risk</a> and the <a href="http://www.futureoflife.org/">Future of Life Institute</a> (supported by Morgan Freeman!); continued strong growth at <a href="http://intelligence.org/">MIRI</a>; and GiveWell's <a href="http://blog.givewell.org/2014/06/26/potential-global-catastrophic-risk-focus-areas/">recently declared interest</a> in the area.

If you've read the book, and are interested in how you can contribute to this cause, we'd like to hear from you. There's pressing needs developing in the field for researchers, project managers, and funding. We can help you work out where you can best contribute, and introduce you to the right people.

If you're interested, please email ben at 80000hours.org, or apply for our <a href="https://80000hours.org/advising">coaching</a>.


Nick Bostrom's recent book, "Superintelligence", has been a great success, gaining favorable reviews in the Financial Times and the Economist, as well as support from Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX. The field of research into the risks of artificial intelligence is also taking off, with the recent founding of Cambridge University's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and the Future of Life Institute (supported by Morgan Freeman! ); continued strong growth at MIRI; and GiveWell's recently declared interest in the area. If you've read the book, and are interested in how you can contribute to this cause, we'd like to hear from you. There's pressing needs developing in the field for researchers, project managers, and funding. We can help you work out where you can best contribute, and introduce you to the right people. If you're interested, please email ben at 80000hours. org, or apply for our career advising.

---

### What I learned quitting my job to found a tech startup

> I’ve been earning to give as a software developer for the past several years, and it started to become clear that I could make more money in a startups.

- Published: 2014-10-16
- Modified: 2024-12-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/10/what-i-learned-quitting-my-job-to-found-a-tech-startup/
- Topics: Being ambitious, Found a tech startup, Risk, Software Engineering

<center><a href='//eighty-thousand-hours-wp-production.s3.amazonaws.com/2014/10/headshot-med.png'><img alt="Ben West" class="image medium" src="//eighty-thousand-hours-wp-production.s3.amazonaws.com/2014/10/headshot-med.png"/></a></center>

I’ve been earning to give as a software developer for the past several years, and it started to become clear that I could make more money in a different job. But I was torn between a finance career which put my math skills to use and founding a company where I might achieve the vocational equivalent of winning the lottery.

I eventually decided to pursue entrepreneurship because I thought it would better build <a href="https://80000hours.org/career-guide/framework/career-capital/">career capital</a>, i.e. it would prepare me for a wider variety of future careers. After four months of running a company that idea still doesn’t seem completely idiotic, but it doesn’t seem completely true either.

I’ve encountered several people who are in similar positions, so I’d like to give an overview of my motivations (particularly the ones which haven’t been discussed here before), how I went about my career change, and of course how I <em>should’ve</em> gone about my career change. Optimizing for one narrow career path is a <a href="https://80000hours.org/career-guide/framework/">bad idea</a>, so I hope this post is useful to everyone, not just potential entrepreneurs.


I've been earning to give as a software developer for the past several years, and it started to become clear that I could make more money in a different job. But I was torn between a finance career which put my math skills to use and founding a company where I might achieve the vocational equivalent of winning the lottery. I eventually decided to pursue entrepreneurship because I thought it would better build career capital, i. e. it would prepare me for a wider variety of future careers. After four months of running a company that idea still doesn't seem completely idiotic, but it doesn't seem completely true either. I've encountered several people who are in similar positions, so I'd like to give an overview of my motivations (particularly the ones which haven't been discussed here before), how I went about my career change, and of course how I should've gone about my career change. Optimizing for one narrow career path is a bad idea, so I hope this post is useful to everyone, not just potential entrepreneurs. Motivations and The Founder's Dilemma The founder's dilemma contrasts the two basic motivations of entrepreneurs: to make a lot of money and to be in a position of power. Noam Wasserman calls these outcomes "Rich" and "King". The "Rich" goals have been elaborated on before, but I would like to give a brief summary of some reasons why King outcomes are interesting for EAs. First off, it might be unclear why "Rich versus...

---

### Update on Peter's career story

- Published: 2014-10-14
- Modified: 2014-10-14
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/10/update-on-peters-career-story/
- Topics: Found a tech startup, Software Engineering

<a href='//eighty-thousand-hours-wp-production.s3.amazonaws.com/2014/10/DSC_0007-001.jpg'><img alt="Peter Hurford" class="image medium" src="//eighty-thousand-hours-wp-production.s3.amazonaws.com/2014/10/DSC_0007-001.jpg"/></a>

Peter wrote about his <a href="https://80000hours.org/2014/01/case-study-choosing-between-working-at-effective-altruist-organisations-earning-to-give-and-graduate-school/">career choice story</a> on the blog back in January. After graduating, he started his software engineer internship at a startup in July. He recently wrote this update on how he's doing.


Peter wrote about his career choice story on the blog back in January. After graduating, he started his software engineer internship at a startup in July. He recently wrote this update on how he's doing. Learning to program In the past three months, I have successfully completed my internship, been hired as a permanent Software Engineer, and then transferred to become a Data Scientist. In doing so, I learned a lot more about computer programming and a lot more about data science. I think my job has been the most valuable for the immense amount of learning. With my day job and another ~9 hours a week of additional programming training, I think it's not an exaggeration to suggest that my programming knowledge has more than doubled, even though I only went from 700hrs of programming work to ~1100hrs of programming work. Having mentorship is pretty useful. I strengthened my knowledge of Ruby on Rails and R, and added knowledge in Coffeescript, Angular, Knockout, Mongo, Express, Node. js, VimScript, and Shell script. Also, my day job has afforded me the ability to donate more than $3K to date, and save even more than that to donate later. Entrepreneurship As an off-shoot to learning how to program, I've started working on a few "passive income" entrepreneurship projects -- the kinds of projects that I hope will bring in some additional money, but not require too much maintenance. I think doing projects like these is good for (a) building programming skills, (b) building...

---

### Tips on careers in journalism from NPR correspondent David Folkenflik

- Published: 2014-10-08
- Modified: 2014-10-08
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/10/tips-on-careers-in-journalism-from-npr-correspondent-david-folkenflik/
- Topics: Advocacy, Journalist

<a href='//eighty-thousand-hours-wp-production.s3.amazonaws.com/2014/10/David-Folkenflik-ITGR-600x400.jpg'><img alt="David Folkenflik" class="image large" src="//eighty-thousand-hours-wp-production.s3.amazonaws.com/2014/10/David-Folkenflik-ITGR-600x400.jpg"/></a>

David has been NPR’s media correspondent since 2004, and before that spent over a decade at the Baltimore Sun. He has won <a href="http://www.npr.org/people/4459112/david-folkenflik">numerous awards</a> for journalism, and is the author of <a href="http://murdochsworld.com/">Murdoch’s World</a>: The Last of the Old Media Empires.

I had the chance to meet him at the <a href="http://www.nexusyouthsummit.org/">4th annual Nexus Global Youth Summit</a>, where we chatted about careers in journalism for people who want to make a difference. Here’s the notes I made on the key takeaways, which I ran past David before publishing for edits (and are entirely his own views).

<ul>
<li>If you want to get a job in journalism, apply to any news organization that interests you, including all the major media organisations. Set some priorities - pay, location, size of organization, type of work, etc and select among  them based on your top several priorities once you've got offers. “I applied to over 70 organisations. I got two offers, only one of which paid more than $10,000, so I went with that!”</li>
<li>Previously the route into the industry was to get a job at a local news station or paper. But the local news industry has shrunk significantly in recent years, so it’s a lot harder to advance from these positions today.</li>
<li>Build a personal library of content on Tumblr or some platform where it’s relatively easy to build a site. “There needs to be something out there you can link to.”</li>
<li>If you’re still in college, what should you do next? Start writing and reporting on the side to test yourself out, and to start building your portfolio.</li>
<li>How competitive is journalism? “You need to really want it; that’s the major filter.” It’s not a career you should  drift into, but if you’re motivated, you’ve got a decent chance.</li>
<li>Although the industry is changing rapidly, it's not high risk if you're young and don't have a mortgage or other family obligations. And if you do, it can still be rewarding. </li>
<li>Journalism is a good path if you want to effect social change, but that change may be defined quite differently than it would be at a philanthropy or advocacy organization. Providing good information and analysis is a public good in itself. You’ve also got a public platform to promote neglected concerns. And there’s been a renaissance of new news outlets that openly embrace advocacy and point of view journalism.</li>
</ul>


David has been NPR’s media correspondent since 2004, and before that spent over a decade at the Baltimore Sun. He has won numerous awards for journalism, and is the author of Murdoch’s World: The Last of the Old Media Empires. I had the chance to meet him at the 4th annual Nexus Global Youth Summit, where we chatted about careers in journalism for people who want to make a difference. Here’s the notes I made on the key takeaways, which I ran past David before publishing for edits (and are entirely his own views). If you want to get a job in journalism, apply to any news organization that interests you, including all the major media organisations. Set some priorities - pay, location, size of organization, type of work, etc and select among them based on your top several priorities once you've got offers. “I applied to over 70 organisations. I got two offers, only one of which paid more than $10,000, so I went with that! ” Previously the route into the industry was to get a job at a local news station or paper. But the local news industry has shrunk significantly in recent years, so it’s a lot harder to advance from these positions today. Build a personal library of content on Tumblr or some platform where it’s relatively easy to build a site. “There needs to be something out there you can link to. ” If you’re still in college, what should you do next? Start writing and...

---

### Career story: Ben Kuhn: My job hunt after graduating

- Published: 2014-10-06
- Modified: 2017-10-10
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/10/career-story-ben-kuhn-my-job-hunt-after-graduating/
- Topics: Uncategorised

In this guest post, 80,000 Hour's member Ben Kuhn describes how he looked for a job after graduating from Harvard with a maths major. Ben's especially reflective, so it's fascinating to hear how he went about choosing between options in software, startups, finance and research with the aim of making the biggest difference.

<a href='//eighty-thousand-hours-wp-production.s3.amazonaws.com/2014/10/BenK_small.jpg'><img alt="Ben Kuhn" class="image large" src="//eighty-thousand-hours-wp-production.s3.amazonaws.com/2014/10/BenK_small.jpg"/></a>

<h2>Background</h2>

For my first few years of college I prioritized getting experience in a bunch of different potential fields--I tried working at Fog Creek, Jane Street, and GiveWell, and cofounding a startup. By the end of that I came to a couple conclusions about what I wanted to do.

In terms of altruistic career choice considerations, I decided I should probably focus on doing the things I could be most awesome at, rather than trying to naively maximize earnings or maximize direct good done--basically, because I'm fairly uncertain about whether having lots of money will be helpful, and I'm fairly uncertain about what does the most direct good, but being awesome at things is a robustly good outcome that can be parlayed into many different advantages later.

Historically, technology- and software-related things seemed to have some of the greatest potential for me to be awesome at them, and also the widest breadth of opportunities to improve the world with those abilities later, so they seemed like the most promising options to pursue further. But I had already done one software internship, and while it was a fun experience, I didn't want to do anything very similar--I guessed that I'd hit diminishing returns for standard software-engineering internships.

I was concurrently in the process of realizing that studying at Harvard for a fourth year didn't seem especially high-value, and that I could graduate in three years if I wanted to thanks to my Advanced Placement credits. So I realized that I needed to put a lot of effort into my summer job search to make sure I found something that wasn't a repeat of my previous internship, and that I would be happy turning into a full-time job if I decided I didn't want to go back to Harvard.


In this guest post, 80,000 Hour's member Ben Kuhn describes how he looked for a job after graduating from Harvard with a maths major. Ben's especially reflective, so it's fascinating to hear how he went about choosing between options in software, startups, finance and research with the aim of making the biggest difference. Background For my first few years of college I prioritized getting experience in a bunch of different potential fields--I tried working at Fog Creek, Jane Street, and GiveWell, and cofounding a startup. By the end of that I came to a couple conclusions about what I wanted to do. In terms of altruistic career choice considerations, I decided I should probably focus on doing the things I could be most awesome at, rather than trying to naively maximize earnings or maximize direct good done--basically, because I'm fairly uncertain about whether having lots of money will be helpful, and I'm fairly uncertain about what does the most direct good, but being awesome at things is a robustly good outcome that can be parlayed into many different advantages later. Historically, technology- and software-related things seemed to have some of the greatest potential for me to be awesome at them, and also the widest breadth of opportunities to improve the world with those abilities later, so they seemed like the most promising options to pursue further. But I had already done one software internship, and while it was a fun experience, I didn't want to do anything very similar--I guessed...

---

### Have you checked out the Effective Altruism Forum yet?

- Published: 2014-10-05
- Modified: 2014-10-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/10/have-you-checked-out-the-effective-altruism-forum-yet/
- Topics: Uncategorised

A few weeks ago, a <a href="http://effective-altruism.com/top/">new online forum</a> to discuss effective altruism was released.

So far, the quality of the discussion has been great. If you're interested in what we discuss on 80,000 Hours, you should definitely check it out. It may also be a good place to field career-related questions - we're on there often.


A few weeks ago, a new online forum to discuss effective altruism was released. So far, the quality of the discussion has been great. If you're interested in the content on 80,000 Hours, you should definitely check it out. It may also be a good place to field career-related questions - we're on there often and there's lots of other people who might be able to help out. Some more background: It's based on the Less Wrong codebase, so has all the benefits of up/down voting, karma and comment threading, which makes it far superior to Facebook and encourages high-quality discussion. The threads are also all saved and searchable, whereas Facebook discussion gets lost. The idea is to provide a central place for discussion within the 'effective altruism' community. There's lots of relevant organisations and people, but so far discussion has been spread across many different blogs and Facebook threads. On the sidebar of the forum, you can also see an RSS feed for blogs relevant to effective altruism, including our own. The forum was launched due to volunteer work by Ryan Carey (a former intern at 80,000 Hours), Mihai Badic, and Trike Apps.

---

### Interview: Holden Karnofsky on cause selection

> We interviewed Holden to discuss which causes are most important to work on with your career if you want to make a difference.

- Published: 2014-10-03
- Modified: 2015-08-18
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/10/interview-holden-karnofsky-on-cause-selection/
- Topics: Uncategorised

<a href='//eighty-thousand-hours-wp-production.s3.amazonaws.com/2014/09/holden-2.jpg'><img alt="Holden Karnofsky" class="image large" src="//eighty-thousand-hours-wp-production.s3.amazonaws.com/2014/09/holden-2.jpg"/></a>

In August 2014, we interviewed Holden Karnofsky, the co-founder of GiveWell, to discuss how the results of the <a href="http://www.openphilanthropy.org/">Open Philanthropy</a> (formerly GiveWell Labs) might extend to career choice. In particular, we regard Open Philanthropy as the best available single source of information about which causes are most high priority (for more, see our <a href="/career-guide/cause-selection">cause page</a>, and we want to explore how much the results transfer from philanthropists to people picking careers. See our <a href="https://80000hours.org/2013/04/interview-with-holden-karnofsky-co-founder-of-givewell/">previous interview with Holden</a>.

The interview was carried out in person in GiveWell’s offices and recorded. Below, we list some of the key points and excerpts from the interview edited for clarity, which were reviewed by Holden before publishing.

<h2>Key points made by Holden</h2>

<ul>
<li>If a cause is on Open Philanthropy’s list, that’s an extra reason to seek a job in that area.</li>
<li>However, if a cause isn’t on the list, it may still be promising, especially if you have good personal fit with the area. Personal fit may often overwhelm considerations about the general effectiveness of a cause.</li>
<li>There can be other differences between the causes that are most promising for philanthropists and those that are most promising for job seekers. For instance, since OPP’s causes are often constrained by a lack of money, it may be difficult to get a job within them.</li>
<li>Some ideas for causes OPP isn’t investigating, but at first glance still look promising for job seekers include: environment and climate change, scientific research, for-profit work (especially in innovative areas), and foreign relations.</li>
<li>OPP aren't highly likely to drastically change their list of causes (especially within global catastrophic risks and political advocacy) for at least two to three years.</li>
<li>If you want to make a difference in the for-profit world, avoid activities that make money through (i) zero-sum games (ii) addiction (iii) a marketing-first approach. If you’ve cleared those filters, then ask (i) is this scalable? (ii) does it make people’s lives better in a significant way? (iii) are you good at this activity?</li>
</ul>


In August 2014, we interviewed Holden Karnofsky, the co-founder of GiveWell, to discuss how the results of the Open Philanthropy (formerly GiveWell Labs) might extend to career choice. In particular, we regard Open Philanthropy as the best available single source of information about which causes are most high priority (for more, see our cause page, and we want to explore how much the results transfer from philanthropists to people picking careers. See our previous interview with Holden. The interview was carried out in person in GiveWell’s offices and recorded. Below, we list some of the key points and excerpts from the interview edited for clarity, which were reviewed by Holden before publishing. Key points made by Holden If a cause is on Open Philanthropy’s list, that’s an extra reason to seek a job in that area. However, if a cause isn’t on the list, it may still be promising, especially if you have good personal fit with the area. Personal fit may often overwhelm considerations about the general effectiveness of a cause. There can be other differences between the causes that are most promising for philanthropists and those that are most promising for job seekers. For instance, since OPP’s causes are often constrained by a lack of money, it may be difficult to get a job within them. Some ideas for causes OPP isn’t investigating, but at first glance still look promising for job seekers include: environment and climate change, scientific research, for-profit work (especially in innovative areas), and foreign...

---

### Interview: Holden Karnofsky on the importance of personal fit

- Published: 2014-10-01
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/10/interview-holden-karnofsky-on-the-importance-of-personal-fit/
- Topics: Personal fit

In January 2014, I interviewed Holden Karnofsky, the co-founder of GiveWell, to further discuss his views on the importance of personal fit in career choice, and how they might differ from our own. See our <a href="https://80000hours.org/2013/04/interview-with-holden-karnofsky-co-founder-of-givewell/">previous interview with Holden</a>.

The interview was carried out on Skype and recorded. Below, we list some of the key points and excerpts from the interview. These have been edited for clarity, and were reviewed by Holden before publishing.

<h2>Summary of Holden’s key points</h2>

<ul>
<li>Your degree of “fit” with a role depends on your chances of ultimately excelling in the role if you work at hard at it, arising from the match between yourself and the requirements of the role.</li>
<li>Holden believes that if you want to make a difference, seeking out roles with which you have a high degree of fit should be a top priority, especially early in your career. This is because:</li>
<li>Fit is easier to judge than many other factors, such as how much immediate impact you have, which means it’s easier to improve your degree of fit over time.</li>
<li>It’s harder to change your career ‘role’ than your cause later in your career. For instance, if you become a great salesperson, it’s relatively easy to transition into an organisation that works on a different cause, but much harder to become great at some other skill. This means that early in your career it’s more important to figure out what types of roles suit you than what cause support early in your career.</li>
<li>There’s huge, robust benefits from being good at your job including (i) better career capital - “it gives you a better learning experience, better personal development, better overall status, better overall opportunities” - (ii) higher impact within your field. </li>
<li>Excelling at what you do is one of the most important rules of thumb for having more impact, partly because a lot of the world's impact comes from extreme cases, so your chances of being an extreme case may dominate your expected impact. In particular, extreme impact often arises from innovation - spotting ideas others haven’t - and this is more likely when you're at the top of your field.</li>
<li>Some other criteria that are important early in your career are: (i) the general status of the option (ii) the pay (iii) how much you’ll learn about yourself and your other options from taking this option.</li>
</ul>

If you’re interested in finding out more about Holden’s views on career choice for people interested in effective altruism, we recommend seeing the transcript of his <a href="http://www.givewell.org/altruistic-career-choice">conference call on career choice</a>.


In January 2014, I interviewed Holden Karnofsky, the co-founder of GiveWell, to further discuss his views on the importance of personal fit in career choice, and how they might differ from our own. See our previous interview with Holden. The interview was carried out on Skype and recorded. Below, we list some of the key points and excerpts from the interview. These have been edited for clarity, and were reviewed by Holden before publishing. Summary of Holden’s key points Your degree of “fit” with a role depends on your chances of ultimately excelling in the role if you work hard at it, arising from the match between yourself and the requirements of the role. Holden believes that if you want to make a difference, seeking out roles with which you have a high degree of fit should be a top priority, especially early in your career. This is because: Fit is easier to judge than many other factors, such as how much immediate impact you have, which means it’s easier to improve your degree of fit over time. It’s harder to change your career ‘role’ than your cause later in your career. For instance, if you become a great salesperson, it’s relatively easy to transition into an organisation that works on a different cause, but much harder to become great at some other skill. This means that early in your career it’s more important to figure out what types of roles suit you than what cause to support early in...

---

### We would like to interview you

- Published: 2014-10-01
- Modified: 2014-11-28
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/10/wed-like-to-interview-you/
- Topics: Uncategorised

If you've got experience with a career of interest to our readers, we'd like to feature an interview with your on our blog. Similarly, if you're interviewing someone as part of your career research, we'd like to feature your notes. For instance, see this interview with <a href="https://80000hours.org/2014/04/interview-with-buck-shlegeris-from-app-academy/">Buck from App Academy</a> - one of our most popular ever pieces of content - and see many more <a href="https://80000hours.org/blog/?type=interviews">here</a>.

<strong>Why are we looking for interviews?</strong>

We think our readers have lots of useful knowledge to share about their careers, and we've found interviews to be one of the quickest, most transparent ways to do it.

<strong>How would we like to do the interview?</strong>

If you're interested, choose 5-10 questions, draft answers to them, and send them to ben@80000hours.org. I'll ask some follow up questions, then we'll publish the final result on the blog.

If you're interviewing someone else, make sure to get their permission to post the notes.

<strong>Example questions</strong>

Some good general purpose questions are:

<ul>
<li>What did you do before this job?</li>
<li>Why did you take this job?</li>
<li>What does the job involve?</li>
<li>What are the main pros and cons of this job for someone looking to make a difference?</li>
<li>What are the best sources of further information on this area?</li>
</ul>

You can see a full list of ideas for questions we often use <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tmVLrNO11hxELuUq_mb0hgeyaXSUjt-j10ZMfsd81mw/edit?usp=sharing">here</a>.


If you've got experience with a career of interest to our readers, we'd like to feature an interview with your on our blog. Similarly, if you're interviewing someone as part of your career research, we'd like to feature your notes. Here's two examples: Nick's thoughts on working at GiveWell and our interviews with programmers. You can see all our interviews here. Why are we looking for interviews? We think our readers have a huge amount of useful knowledge to share about their careers, and we've found interviews to be one of the quickest, most transparent ways to learn it and share it. How would we like to do the interview? If you're interested, choose 5-10 questions, draft answers to them, and send them to ben@80000hours. org. I'll ask some follow up questions, then we'll publish the final result on the blog. If you're interviewing someone else, make sure to get their permission to post the notes. Example questions Some good general purpose questions are: What did you do before this job? Why did you take this job? What does the job involve? What are the main pros and cons of this job for someone looking to make a difference? What are the best sources of further information on this area? You can see a full list of ideas for questions we often use here.

---

### Tell us about your career

- Published: 2014-09-30
- Modified: 2014-10-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/09/tell-us-about-your-career/
- Topics: Uncategorised

If you’ve made a career decision recently, we’d like to feature your story on the blog. Here’s some examples: <a href="https://80000hours.org/2014/01/case-study-choosing-between-working-at-effective-altruist-organisations-earning-to-give-and-graduate-school/">Peter</a>, <a href="https://80000hours.org/2013/10/why-i-m-doing-a-phd/">Jess</a>, <a href="https://80000hours.org/2013/06/maximizing-your-donations-via-a-job/">Alexei</a>.

If you’re interested, please email ben@80000hours.org.


If you’ve made a career decision recently, or are still thinking about one, we’d like to feature your story on the blog. Here’s some examples: Peter, Jess, Alexei. If you’re interested, please email ben@80000hours. org. Why are we looking? We find these case studies really useful in our research - they help us to identify the key considerations, most common sticking points and most promising solutions. We suspect there's a lot of wisdom out there in our community of readers, and would like to help share it. Our readers find them useful. The three examples above were very popular. Concrete examples help to communicate our approach and bring it to life. Writing up your career decision helps you make better choices. First, writing out your reasoning forces you to think deeply about the decision. Second, putting your ideas out there helps you to get feedback and support. Jess and Peter found it really useful to write about their career decisions. What are we looking for? A written-out study of a specific decision e. g. “what should I study at university? ”, “which of these three jobs should I take? ”, “what’s the next step I should take if I want to start a startup? ”. The decision can either be in the past, or still in progress. Your long-term potential to make a difference is one of the main priorities in the decision, and you're a regular reader of our blog. Otherwise, there’s no restrictions! A template Feel free to use whatever structure you like...

---

### Should you move to Thailand?

> By moving to Thailand, you can cut your cost of living by two to six times, and probably have a higher standard of living than you would have in the US or UK.

- Published: 2014-09-26
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/09/should-you-move-to-thailand/
- Topics: Community &amp; coordination, Exploration, Unconventional advice

<a href='//eighty-thousand-hours-wp-production.s3.amazonaws.com/2014/09/chiang-mai-coffee-shop-spartantraveler.jpg'><img alt="Chiang Mai Coffee Shop" class="image medium" src="//eighty-thousand-hours-wp-production.s3.amazonaws.com/2014/09/chiang-mai-coffee-shop-spartantraveler.jpg" /></a>
<em>Chiang Mai Coffee Shop. Credit: <a href="http://www.spartantraveler.com">Spartantraveler.com</a></em>

By moving to Thailand, you can cut your cost of living by two to six times, and probably have a higher standard of living than you would have in a big city in the US or UK. NomadList <a href="https://nomadlist.io/chiang-mai-thailand">currently estimates</a> that you can live in Chiang Mai for only £400 per month, and flights from London can be had for £500 return. There's several other cities in Thailand, Vietnam and Eastern Europe, which offer a cost of living under £900 per month.

In the case of Chiang Mai, this includes:

<ul>
<li>A nice, serviced apartment on short-let.</li>
<li>Fast internet.</li>
<li>Plenty of good cafes and co-working spaces.</li>
<li>Warm weather all year.</li>
<li>No commute.</li>
<li>Big community of international remote workers.</li>
<li>Eating out every meal.</li>
<li>No visa required for 3 months.</li>
<li>Set up within a day.</li>
</ul>


Chiang Mai Coffee Shop. Credit: Spartantraveler. com By moving to Thailand, you can cut your cost of living by two to six times, and probably have a higher standard of living than you would have in a big city in the US or UK. NomadList currently estimates that you can live in Chiang Mai for only £400 per month, and flights from London can be had for £500 return. There's several other cities in Thailand, Vietnam and Eastern Europe, which offer a cost of living under £900 per month. In the case of Chiang Mai, this includes: A nice, serviced apartment on short-let. Fast internet. Plenty of good cafes and co-working spaces. Warm weather all year. No commute. Big community of international remote workers. Eating out every meal. No visa required for 3 months. Set up within a day. See two reviews of Chiang Mai for remote work here and here. This standard of living would probably require £2,000 - 3,000 per month in London or San Francisco (NomadList estimates it's towards the upper end). For a guide to other cities, see this great ranking by NomadList. When is this helpful? If you want to do unpaid work for a while - for instance to test a new project, volunteer, write a thesis - in Thailand you'll be able to live for two to six times as long on your savings: a couple of months salary could tide you over for an entire year (though you'll need to go in and...

---

### Update: In which career can you make the most difference?

> In which career can you make the most difference? We've updated our top careers list.

- Published: 2014-09-24
- Modified: 2014-09-24
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/09/update-in-which-career-can-you-make-the-most-difference/
- Topics: Finance

In the recent <a href="/2014/09/lots-of-new-content-released-to-the-site/">content release</a>, we added a new <a href="/research/top-careers/">top careers page</a>.

It’s based on the popular blog post we released in February - <a href="/2014/02/in-which-career-can-you-make-the-most-difference/">“in which career can you make the most difference?</a> - but with several changes...


In the recent content release, we added a new top careers page. It’s based on the popular blog post we released in February - “in which career can you make the most difference? - but with several changes. How has the content changed? Replaced the ranking. Previously, we put all the careers we considered in rank order. We knew the precise order wouldn’t be robust, which we flagged, but thought it would be more engaging to present the information that way. After more reflection, we decided in favor of clarity. Now we present the list of all the careers we’ve considered (clearly stating how deeply we’ve researched each career), and break them into four groups: Promising: careers that seem to offer an especially good opportunity for people aiming to make a difference. Promising but uncertain: careers that seem like they might make it into the promising class but are not yet thoroughly researched. Very promising but risky and extremely competitive: for paths like politics and tech entrepreneurship which look really high-impact but should not be entered lightly Everything else: careers that didn’t seem unusually good, though they may still be great options for someone with good personal fit, or if you can identify an especially good opportunity within the path. Added an “ease of competition” score. Previously, we tried to take account of different levels of competitiveness by scoring the careers relative to “someone who can plausibly get this career”, which is an unclear and changing baseline. We decided it...

---

### Update: Don't follow your passion

> Why we think follow your passion is bad advice, but how it contains a some truth – it’s worth searching for a career that’s a good personal fit.

- Published: 2014-09-22
- Modified: 2015-04-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/09/update-dont-follow-your-passion/
- Topics: Job satisfaction, Unconventional advice

Some have claimed "follow your passion" is the definitive career advice of our time.

The idea behind the slogan "follow your passion" is that the best way to choose a career is to:

<ol>
<li>Identify your passions through self-reflection.</li>
<li>Identify careers that involve those passions.</li>
<li>Try to get one of those careers.</li>
</ol>

The reason this advice works is because:

<ol>
<li>Matching your career with your passions in this way is the best way to be truly satisfied with your work.</li>
<li>If you're satisfied with your work, you'll be good at what you do.</li>
<li>Being good at what you do is the best way to make the world a better place.</li>
</ol>

We mainly disagree with the first and last claims: matching your career with your passions is not a particularly good way to find satisfying work, and being good at what you do is only one factor that matters for having a social impact.


We've updated our previous work, on why you shouldn't "follow your passion" and added it as new page to the website. The full text is below. Some of the key changes include: We've added a positive account of what you should do if you want to find work you're passionate about. We've explained the good idea behind "follow your passion" - it's worth seeking work that's a good personal fit. We've improved our work on the predictors of job satisfaction, making the case more solid (I'll explain the changes in an upcoming post). The problem with following your passion. Some have claimed "follow your passion" is the definitive career advice of our time. 1 The idea behind the slogan "follow your passion" is that the best way to choose a career is to: Identify your passions through self-reflection. Identify careers that involve those passions. Try to get one of those careers. The reason this advice works is because: Matching your career with your passions in this way is the best way to be truly satisfied with your work. If you're satisfied with your work, you'll be good at what you do. Being good at what you do is the best way to make the world a better place. We mainly disagree with the first and last claims: matching your career with your passions is not a particularly good way to find satisfying work, and being good at what you do is only one factor that matters for having a...

---

### What does good research look like?

> A list of the principles that guide our research.

- Published: 2014-09-18
- Modified: 2014-09-26
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/09/what-does-good-research-look-like/
- Topics: Uncategorised

We want to be transparent about how we go about our research into career choice, so in the latest site update, we added a page listing the principles we use to guide our research. The full page is <a href="/about-us/credibility/research-principles/">here</a>. I've copied the text below.

What principles do you think we've missed? Which parts don't you agree with?


We want to be transparent about how we go about our research into career choice, so in the latest site update, we added a page listing the principles we use to guide our research. The full page is here. I've copied the text below. What principles do you think we've missed? Which parts don't you agree with? What evidence do we consider? Use of scientific literature We place relatively high weight on what scientific literature says about a question, when applicable. If there is relevant scientific literature, we start our inquiry by doing a literature search. Expert common sense When we first encounter a question, our initial aim is normally to work out: (i) who are the relevant experts? (ii) what would they say about this question? We call what they would say ‘expert common sense’, and we think it often forms a good starting position (more). We try not to deviate from expert common sense unless we have an account of why it’s wrong. Quantification Which careers make the most difference can be unintuitive, since it’s difficult to grasp the scale and scope of different problems, which often differ by orders of magnitude. This makes it important to attempt to quantify and model key factors when possible. The process of quantification is also often valuable for learning more about an issue, and making your reasoning transparent to others. However, we recognise that for most questions we care about, quantified models contain huge (often unknown) uncertainties, and therefore, should not...

---

### Update: How to choose a career

> One of our key new pages is ‘how to choose’ - a step-by-step process for making your next career decision, based on the process we use in coaching and workshops.

- Published: 2014-09-15
- Modified: 2021-01-07
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/09/update-how-to-choose-a-career/
- Topics: Uncategorised

One of our key new pages is ‘how to choose’ - a <a href="/career-guide/how-to-choose">step-by-step process for making your next career decision</a>. It explains how to tie all of our information together to make a rational next decision, and is based on the process we use in coaching and workshops.

In summary...


**New:** We've just launched our in-depth career planning process. It's our most comprehensive overview of all our advice on (/career-planning/), and includes a step-by-step (/career-planning/#template) you can use to plan your career. (It's designed to replace the process below, which we left for posterity. ) One of our key new pages is ‘how to choose’ - a step-by-step process for making your next career decision. It explains how to tie all of our information together to make a rational next decision, and is based on the process we use in coaching and workshops. In summary, recommend writing out answers to the following questions: Next decision(s): What’s the next one or two key decisions you need to make? Initial list of options for next steps: What options are you choosing between at your next decision(s)? Your vision: What roles and causes are you interested in pursuing medium-term? Check our strategies and cause selection page for ideas. Your criteria: What factors are important for your next decision? Check our framework for ideas. Additional options: What other options can you think of? Check our top rated careers for ideas. Discarded options: Which options can you quickly discard? Aim to get down to a list of the best three to five. More analysis needed? : If you've got plenty of time, pursue all the options (e. g. apply to everything). If you need to choose one, carry on. Ranked options: Based on what you know now, how would you rank your remaining options from...

---

### Lots of new content released to the site

- Published: 2014-09-14
- Modified: 2014-09-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/09/lots-of-new-content-released-to-the-site/
- Topics: Unconventional advice

We’ve recently expanded our research page into a series of ten, supported by sixteen career profiles. In total, we’ve released around 30,000 words of new content.

We provide an overview of everything on the <a href="/research/getting-started/">getting started page</a>.

The three most important pages are:

<ol>
<li><a href="/research/top-careers/"><strong>Top careers</strong></a>: Lists the most promising careers from among the <a href="/research/top-careers/career-profiles/">careers we’ve investigated</a> so far.</li>
<li><a href="/research/how-to-choose"><strong>How to choose</strong></a>: A step-by-step process to make your next career decision.</li>
<li><a href="/career-guide/framework"><strong>Our framework</strong></a>: A checklist of criteria to use to compare your individual options in terms of how much difference you can make.</li>
</ol>

Some other important pages include:

<ul>
<li><a href="/research/top-careers/strategies/"><strong>Top strategies</strong></a>: A list of strategies you can take to make a difference (skill build, experiment with your options, do research, earning to give, advocacy, work at effective organisations, entrepreneurship).</li>
<li><a href="/career-guide/framework/cause-selection/"><strong>Cause selection</strong></a>: A framework for comparing causes, and our list of top causes.</li>
<li><a href="/articles/personal-fit/"><strong>Personal fit</strong></a>: A step-by-step process for finding a career that fits, and our views on ‘do what you’re passionate about’.</li>
<li><a href="/career-guide/framework/job-satisfaction/"><strong>Job satisfaction</strong></a>: How to assess jobs in terms of how satisfying you’re likely to find them.</li>
</ul>

Many of our views on these topics have changed since we last wrote about them. I’ll be going through some of the changes on the blog over the next couple of weeks.


We’ve recently expanded our research page into a series of ten, supported by sixteen career profiles. In total, we’ve released around 30,000 words of new content. We provide an overview of everything on the getting started page. After that, the three most important pages are: Top careers: Lists the most promising careers from among the careers we’ve investigated so far. How to choose: A step-by-step process to make your next career decision. Our framework: A checklist of criteria to use to compare your individual options in terms of how much difference you can make. Some other important pages include: Top strategies: A list of strategies you can take to make a difference (skill build, experiment with your options, do research, earning to give, advocacy, work at effective organisations, entrepreneurship). Cause selection: A framework for comparing causes, and our list of top causes. Personal fit: A step-by-step process for finding a career that fits, and our views on ‘do what you’re passionate about’. Job satisfaction: How to assess jobs in terms of how satisfying you’re likely to find them. Many of our views on these topics have changed since we last wrote about them. I’ll be going through some of the changes on the blog over the next couple of weeks. On the getting started page, we also tried to sum up (i) how we’re different and (ii) our key findings so far. We summed up our key findings with a list of common mistakes we think people make: Considering an...

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### Cause overview: cause prioritisation

- Published: 2014-09-05
- Modified: 2014-09-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/09/cause-prioritization-summary/
- Topics: Global priorities research

<a href='//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/329/original/KatjaGrace_25_July_14.jpg?1406564609'><img alt="Katjagrace_25_july_14" class="image medium" src="//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/329/medium/KatjaGrace_25_July_14.jpg?1406564609" /></a>

<h2>Introduction</h2>

I recently conducted a &lsquo;shallow investigation&rsquo; (see <a href="http://www.givewell.org/labs/causes">GiveWell</a>) into cause prioritization, with the help of <a href="http://www.nickbeckstead.com/">Nick Beckstead</a>. It covers the importance of cause prioritization; who is doing it, funding it, or using it; and opportunities to contribute. We had conversations with eight relevant people. The full document is <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/yzpq81arki89gd9/Cause%20Prioritization%20Shallow%20Overview.docx">here</a> and the collection of related interview notes and such is <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/sh/f3zb23ztowqmw6i/AAAUX9ybAe-p2K942b_OWPWna">here</a>. This blog post is a summary of my impressions, given the findings of the investigation.

<hr />

Cause prioritization research seems likely enough to be high value to warrant further investigation. It appears that roughly billions of dollars per year might be influenced by it in just the near future, that current efforts cost a few million dollars per year and are often influential, and that there are many plausible ways to contribute. It also seems like things are likely to get better in the future, as more work is done.


Introduction I recently conducted a ‘shallow investigation’ (see GiveWell) into cause prioritization, with the help of Nick Beckstead. It covers the importance of cause prioritization; who is doing it, funding it, or using it; and opportunities to contribute. We had conversations with eight relevant people (see the three most useful here, here and here). The full document is here and the collection of related interview notes and such is here. This blog post is a summary of my impressions, given the findings of the investigation. Cause prioritization research seems likely enough to be high value to warrant further investigation. It appears that roughly billions of dollars per year might be influenced by it in just the near future, that current efforts cost a few million dollars per year and are often influential, and that there are many plausible ways to contribute. It also seems like things are likely to get better in the future, as more work is done. Funding which might be substantially influenced by cause prioritization research is probably worth at least several billion dollars per year. Prioritization research is likely more relevant to new funders than established ones, but we can get an idea of the scale of new cost-effectiveness sensitive philanthropists by looking at existing ones. This study found nine private funders (or groups of them) who appear to care about cost-effectiveness, and did not look that hard. The Gates Foundation spends around $3. 4bn annually, The Hewlett Foundation spent $304M in 2012, and Good Ventures around...

---

### Conversation with Paul Penley of Excellence in Giving

- Published: 2014-09-03
- Modified: 2021-11-18
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/09/conversation-with-paul-penley-of-excellence-in-giving/
- Topics: Global priorities research, Philanthropic Advising

<a href='//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/327/original/paul_penley.JPG?1406563850'><img alt="Paul_penley" class="image medium" src="//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/327/medium/paul_penley.JPG?1406563850" /></a>

<h2>Participants</h2>

<ul>
<li>Paul Penley: Director of Research, Excellence in Giving</li>
<li>Katja Grace: Research Assistant, Machine Intelligence Research Institute</li>
<li>Nick Beckstead: Research Fellow, Future of Humanity Institute; Board of Trustees, Center for Effective Altruism</li>
</ul>

<h2>Notes</h2>

This is a summary of Paul Penley&rsquo;s points in a conversation on April 3, 2014, written by Katja with substantial help from the other participants.


Participants Paul Penley: Director of Research, Excellence in Giving Katja Grace: Research Assistant, Machine Intelligence Research Institute Nick Beckstead: Research Fellow, Future of Humanity Institute; Board of Trustees, Center for Effective Altruism Notes This is a summary of Paul Penley’s points in a conversation on April 3, 2014, written by Katja with substantial help from the other participants. What kind of philanthropic advising work does Excellence in Giving do? Excellence in Giving is a philanthropic advisory firm with around seven staff members. Around 20 families retain them to act in the place of foundation staff, and other foundations consult with them on specific issues. Excellence in Giving provides an experienced staff who can share what they have learned serving clients for the past 12 years with new family foundations. They don't manage money, but they do track giving, structure grants, research grant effectiveness, produce grant impact reports and plan experiences for clients to see and celebrate their giving’s impact. The research department at Excellence in Giving evaluates nonprofit organizations, performs community solutions assessments and sets up outcomes measurement processes for grantees to ensure its clients support strategic, well-managed charities making a difference. Evaluations at the organization level are discussed online here. Such organizational evaluations have taken place at after school programs in Iowa, colleges in Oxford, children’s charities in Uganda and Kenya, and charitable trusts in north India. Assessments of community needs and solutions tend to focus on a geographic location (e. g. Chicago), a population to be served (e. g. inner-city...

---

### Conversation with Paul Christiano on Cause Prioritization Research

- Published: 2014-08-20
- Modified: 2014-09-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/08/conversation-with-paul-christiano-on-cause-prioritization-research/
- Topics: Global priorities research, World problems

<a href='//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/330/original/christiano.jpg?1406564808'><img alt="Christiano" class="image medium" src="//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/330/medium/christiano.jpg?1406564808" /></a>

<h2>Participants</h2>

<ul>
<li>Paul Christiano: Computer science PhD student at UC Berkeley </li>
<li>Katja Grace: Research Assistant, Machine Intelligence Research Institute</li>
</ul>

<h2>Summary</h2>

This is a verbatim email conversation from the 26th of March 2014. Paul is a proponent of cause prioritization research. Here he explains his support of prioritization research, and makes some suggestions about how to do it.

Note: Paul is Katja&rsquo;s boyfriend, so consider reading his inclusion as a relevant expert with a grain of salt.


Participants Paul Christiano: Computer science PhD student at UC Berkeley Katja Grace: Research Assistant, Machine Intelligence Research Institute Summary This is a verbatim email conversation from the 26th of March 2014. Paul is a proponent of cause prioritization research. Here he explains his support of prioritization research, and makes some suggestions about how to do it. Note: Paul is Katja’s boyfriend, so consider reading his inclusion as a relevant expert with a grain of salt. Katja: How promising do you think cause prioritization is generally? Why? Paul: Defined very broadly---all research that helps us choose what general areas we should be looking into for the best philanthropic impact---I think it is a very strong contender for best thing to be doing at the moment. This judgment is based on optimism about how much money could potentially be directed by the kind of case for impact which we could conceivably construct, but also the belief that there is a good chance that over the very long-term we can hope that the philanthropic community will be radically better-informed and more impactful (think many times) than it currently it is. If that's the case, then it seems likely that a primary output of modern philanthropy is moving towards that point. This is not so much a story about quickly finding insights that let you find a particular opportunity that is twice as effective, and more a story of accumulating a body of expertise and information that has a very large payoff over the...

---

### Conversation with Owen Cotton-Barratt of the Global Priorities Project

- Published: 2014-08-12
- Modified: 2024-12-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/08/conversation-with-owen-cotton-barratt-of-the-global-priorities-project/
- Topics: Global priorities research

<a href='//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/326/original/owen-cotton-barret1-370x370.jpg?1406368749'><img alt="Owen-cotton-barret1-370x370" class="image medium" src="//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/326/medium/owen-cotton-barret1-370x370.jpg?1406368749" /></a>

<h2>Notes</h2>

This is a summary made by Katja of points made by Owen during a conversation on March 24 2014.

<h2>What the Global Priorities Project (GPP) does</h2>

The <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160210144057/https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/research/research-areas/global-priorities-project/">Global Priorities Project</a> is new, and intends to experiment for a while with different types of projects and then work on those that appear highest value in the longer term. Their work will likely address questions about how to prioritize, improve arguments around different options, and will produce recommendations. It will probably be mostly research, but also include for instance some policy lobbying. They will likely do some work with concrete policy-relevant consequences and also some work on general high level arguments that apply to many things. Most features of the project are open to modification after early experimentation.
There will be principally two audiences: policy makers and philanthropists, the latter including effective altruists and foundations. GPP has some access to moderately senior government and civil service policy people and are experimenting with the difficulty of pushing for high impact policies.

<h2>Research areas</h2>

Research topics will be driven by a combination of importance and comparative advantage. GPP is likely to focus on prioritizing broad areas rather than narrower interventions, though these things are closely linked. It is good to keep an eye on object level questions to ensure that you are thinking about things the right way.
Owen is interested in developing frameworks for comparing things. This can produce value both in their own evaluations and through introducing metrics that others want to use, and so making proposals more comparable in general.


Participants Owen Cotton-Barratt: Lead Researcher, Global Priorities Project Katja Grace: Research Assistant, Machine Intelligence Research Institute Notes This is a summary made by Katja of points made by Owen during a conversation on March 24 2014. What the Global Priorities Project (GPP) does The Global Priorities Project is new, and intends to experiment for a while with different types of projects and then work on those that appear highest value in the longer term. Their work will likely address questions about how to prioritize, improve arguments around different options, and will produce recommendations. It will probably be mostly research, but also include for instance some policy lobbying. They will likely do some work with concrete policy-relevant consequences and also some work on general high level arguments that apply to many things. Most features of the project are open to modification after early experimentation. There will be principally two audiences: policy makers and philanthropists, the latter including effective altruists and foundations. GPP has some access to moderately senior government and civil service policy people and are experimenting with the difficulty of pushing for high impact policies. Research areas Research topics will be driven by a combination of importance and comparative advantage. GPP is likely to focus on prioritizing broad areas rather than narrower interventions, though these things are closely linked. It is good to keep an eye on object level questions to ensure that you are thinking about things the right way. Owen is interested in developing frameworks for comparing things... .

---

### Foundation influence interview with Kerry Vaughan

- Published: 2014-07-31
- Modified: 2024-11-21
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/07/foundation-influence-interview-with-kerry-vaughan/
- Topics: Advocacy, Foundation Program Management

<a href='//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/331/original/Kerry_Vaughan_pic.jpg?1406564964'><img alt="Kerry_vaughan_pic" class="image medium" src="//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/331/medium/Kerry_Vaughan_pic.jpg?1406564964" /></a>

<h2>Introduction</h2>

Kerry Vaughan was a member of the <a href="http://arnoldfoundation.org/">Laura and John Arnold Foundation (LJAF)</a> - a major strategic foundation with over $1.5B in assets - for 3 years and served as the manager of the technology and innovation group. Kerry is also a PhD candidate in philosophy with a specialization in ethics. We spoke with Kerry as part of some compensated research he was doing for 80,000 Hours about the impact one can have working at a foundation.

<h2>Summary</h2>

<ol>
<li>The typical annual budget per employee at major foundations is $2 million. Each program officer oversees a budget of about $10 million.</li>
<li>The typical program officer is intelligent and well-educated, and many have graduate degrees.</li>
<li>The board of the foundation typically picks the cause areas and must approve each project. It seems difficult for program officers to influence which causes are supported. However, program officers can influence which projects are funded by selecting which non-profits get presented.</li>
</ol>


Introduction Kerry Vaughan was a member of the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (LJAF) - a major strategic foundation with over $1. 5B in assets - for 3 years and served as the manager of the technology and innovation group. Kerry is also a PhD candidate in philosophy with a specialization in ethics. We spoke with Kerry as part of some compensated research he was doing for 80K about the impact one can have working at a foundation. Summary The typical annual budget per employee at major foundations is $2 million. Each program officer oversees a budget of about $10 million. The typical program officer is intelligent and well-educated, and many have graduate degrees. The board of the foundation typically picks the cause areas and must approve each project. It seems difficult for program officers to influence which causes are supported. However, program officers can influence which projects are funded by selecting which non-profits get presented. What is the typical budget per employee in foundations? It depends on the foundation. LJAF is a very young foundation, so its donations per employee should likely increase over time. Larger established foundations tend to have larger donations per employee. In 20121 LJAF donated $32M with 12 full time staff for an average donation per employee of $2. 6M. This is in line with the amount donated per employee at the largest US-based foundations which averages around $2. 5M per employee for the largest 5 foundations. 2 For smaller foundations, the donations per employee is around $1M. In...

---

### How to influence policy? An interview with Owen Barder of the Center for Global Development

- Published: 2014-07-28
- Modified: 2014-09-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/07/how-to-influence-policy-an-interview-with-owen-barder-of-the-center-for-global-development/
- Topics: Politics

<a href='//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/325/original/OwenBarder_0.jpg?1406366824'><img alt="Owenbarder_0" class="image medium" src="//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/325/medium/OwenBarder_0.jpg?1406366824" /></a>

<h2>Introduction</h2>

We recently interviewed Owen Barder to find out about making a difference through careers in policy.

The interview was conducted in person. Below we summarize the key messages of the conversation, followed by some key excerpts which have been edited and reorganized for clarity.

In summary, Owen told us:

<ul>
<li><p>How influence over policies works in the UK political system. In his experience the partnership between ministers, back-bench MPs and civil servants is one in which they all have an important role to play and they all depend on each other to achieve success. In addition, there is a complex ecosystem of outsiders that influence policies, which requires a combination of proper research, smart political ideas, effective communication and political leadership to influence policy change.</p></li>
<li><p>That the most important types of international policies can be divided into three groups: zero-sum policies in which there is a short-run trade-off between the interests of rich countries and poor countries (eg aid transfers); win-win policies which would benefit rich countries and poor countries (eg trade liberalisation); and fostering global public goods (eg R&amp;D and global institutions).</p></li>
<li><p>Students interested in any career field dealing with the developing world should strongly consider traveling to and living in the developing world for some period of time. For those particularly interested in getting involved in politics, becoming a special advisor is one clear pathway, but transitions to the civil service or politics later in life are possible.</p></li>
</ul>


Introduction We recently interviewed Owen Barder to find out about making a difference through careers in policy. The interview was conducted in person. Below we summarize the key messages of the conversation, followed by some key excerpts which have been edited and reorganized for clarity. In summary, Owen told us: How influence over policies works in the UK political system. In his experience the partnership between ministers, back-bench MPs and civil servants is one in which they all have an important role to play and they all depend on each other to achieve success. In addition, there is a complex ecosystem of outsiders that influence policies, which requires a combination of proper research, smart political ideas, effective communication and political leadership to influence policy change. That the most important types of international policies can be divided into three groups: zero-sum policies in which there is a short-run trade-off between the interests of rich countries and poor countries (eg aid transfers); win-win policies which would benefit rich countries and poor countries (eg trade liberalisation); and fostering global public goods (e. g. R&D and global institutions). Students interested in any career field dealing with the developing world should strongly consider traveling to and living in the developing world for some period of time. For those particularly interested in getting involved in politics, becoming a special advisor is one clear pathway, but transitions to the civil service or politics later in life are possible. The interview Owen Barder is a development economist. Owen is...

---

### Careers in journalism - an interview with Larissa MacFarquhar

- Published: 2014-07-25
- Modified: 2024-11-26
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/07/careers-in-journalism-an-interview-with-larissa-macfarquhar/
- Topics: Journalism, Journalist

<a href='//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/324/original/larrisa5.jpg?1406280714'><img alt="Larrisa5" class="image medium" src="//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/324/medium/larrisa5.jpg?1406280714" /></a>

At the recent <a href="http://www.gooddoneright.com">Good Done Right conference</a>, I had the opportunity to speak with Larissa MacFarquhar about careers in journalism.

Larissa is a journalist at the New Yorker, and next year will release <a href="http://www.bostonreview.net/books-ideas-mccoy-family-center-ethics-society-stanford-university/lives-moral-saints">Strangers Drowning</a>, which explores the lives of those who dedicate themselves to helping others, and features a chapter on effective altruism.

The following is a couple of notes on my key takeaways from our conversation, which were run past Larissa before publishing.


At the recent Good Done Right conference, I had the opportunity to speak with Larissa MacFarquhar about careers in journalism. Larissa is a journalist at the New Yorker, and next year will release Strangers Drowning, which explores the lives of those who dedicate themselves to helping others, and features a chapter on effective altruism. The following is a couple of notes on my key takeaways from our conversation, which were run past Larissa before publishing. The structure of the career The industry is undergoing a transformation and it’s unclear what the career path will look like in the future. So, it’s difficult to give advice about how best to enter the industry. Previously, you would often do an unpaid internship, and then try to get a paid job. It was seen as better to enter directly than to do a Masters in journalism. Today, it’s much easier to get published, but it’s harder to get a paid position. People sometimes try to build a body of unpaid work, perhaps on a blog, while seeking a paid position. So many people work for free these days that the situation seems unsustainable. New models will need to be created, but it’s unclear what these will be. Potential for impact in journalism The media are influential and it seems useful for effective altruist minded people to enter the industry. Personal fit Journalists have to work faster than academics, so people who like to analyze a problem carefully over a long time (as do...

---

### Good Done Right: audio recordings now online

- Published: 2014-07-20
- Modified: 2014-09-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/07/good-done-right-audio-recordings-now-online/
- Topics: Uncategorised

This July saw the first academic conference on effective altruism. The three-day event took place at All Souls College, one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford. The conference featured a <a href="http://www.gooddoneright.com/#!programme/c1dj9">diverse range of speakers</a> addressing issues related to effective altruism in a shared setting, including the CEO of JPAL, Derek Parfit, Nick Bostrom, Larissa MacFarquhar of the New Yorker, and many of our donors and supporters. It was a fantastic opportunity to share insights and ideas from some of the best minds working on these issues.

I&rsquo;m very pleased to announce that <a href="https://soundcloud.com/gooddoneright/sets/good-done-right-2014">audio recordings from most of the talks are now available on the conference website</a>, alongside speakers&rsquo; slides (where applicable). I&rsquo;m very grateful to all of the participants for their fantastic presentations, and to All Souls College and the Centre for Effective Altruism for supporting the conference.


This July saw the first academic conference on effective altruism. The three-day event took place at All Souls College, one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford. The conference featured a diverse range of speakers addressing issues related to effective altruism in a shared setting, including the CEO of JPAL, Derek Parfit, Nick Bostrom, Larissa MacFarquhar of the New Yorker, and many of our donors and supporters. It was a fantastic opportunity to share insights and ideas from some of the best minds working on these issues. I’m very pleased to announce that audio recordings from most of the talks are now available on the conference website, alongside speakers’ slides (where applicable). I’m very grateful to all of the participants for their fantastic presentations, and to All Souls College and the Centre for Effective Altruism for supporting the conference.

---

### What does economics tell us about replaceability?

- Published: 2014-07-17
- Modified: 2024-12-17
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/07/what-does-economics-tell-us-about-replaceability/
- Topics: Replaceability

<h2>Introduction</h2>

&lsquo;Replaceability&rsquo; has become a core concept in discussions of career choice among Effective Altruists (EAs) - put simply, people should not simply consider the &lsquo;direct impact&rsquo; from doing a job, but instead the difference in outcomes resulting from taking that job, relative to not taking it. <a href="/2012/11/what-s-your-true-impact/">Ben Todd</a> and <a href="/2012/03/the-replaceability-effect-working-in-unethical-industries-part-1/">Seb Farquhar</a> have both written blogs introducing this concept, and the importance of counterfactual reasoning in general (read these first if you&rsquo;re not familiar with replaceability!); <a href="http://rationalaltruist.com/2013/01/22/replaceability/">Paul Christiano</a> and <a href="http://www.benkuhn.net/no-replace">Ben Kuhn</a> (among others) have written blogs further exploring the concept, and its various representations and applications. Some Effective Altruists (EAs) have noted that representations of replaceability have varied in their sophistication, and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/effective.altruists/permalink/652449811478046/?comment_id=652964838093210&amp;offset=0&amp;total_comments=24">Will MacAskill</a> summarises this nicely as the &lsquo;simple view&rsquo;, &lsquo;simplistic replaceability&rsquo; and &lsquo;correct replaceability&rsquo;.

&lsquo;Correct replaceability&rsquo; is particularly nuanced and complicated, and comprises taking into account the full set of counterfactual outcomes not only in your (potential) job, but in any other jobs affected by the employment decision, through knock-on and labour market effects. Given this, and that &lsquo;replaceability&rsquo; varies significantly across different industries and jobs, Will MacAskill and Ben Todd asked me to think about what Economics has to tell us about the concept. For clarity, rather than think about the ethical considerations of &lsquo;replaceability&rsquo; as a whole, they asked me to answer a sub-question, namely: <em>&ldquo;according to mainstream economics, if I add myself to the labour pool for job type X (being a doctor, or an aid worker, or a banker), then how many more type X jobs come into being (on average)?&rdquo;</em>. Although these issues have been discussed before, this blog post is a first attempt at providing a thorough analysis of this question.

<h2>Summary</h2>

<ul>
<li>I set out the classical, Econ 101 supply and demand model and discuss the assumptions it makes. I argue that this is a useful framework for considering our question, then show how the answer depends crucially on the elasticities of labour supply and demand. Unfortunately, empirical economic research cannot tell us much about these elasticities for individual industries.</p></li>
<li><p>There is no &lsquo;one-size-fits-all&rsquo; answer to our question - it will vary considerably across different industries and we must try to understand how each industry functions in order to make an informed estimate. 
I believe that the supply and demand framework, or some variant of it, is useful for analysing our question for most jobs and industries, particularly those that are not highly specialised.</p></li>
<li><p>I discuss how (and whether) this framework should be applied in a few industries, most of which are seen as viable EA career paths. This framework can lead us to some (tentative) conclusions:

<ul>
<li>Entrance into industries with a quantity restriction (e.g. through a limited number of occupational licences) is likely to have (close to) zero impact on the number of jobs in that industry. This may apply to medical school and licensed professional industries (e.g. becoming a barrister in the UK).</li>
<li>Entrance into (narrowly defined) industries which require relatively transferable skills is likely to result in less than 0.5 additional jobs in this industry, as (potential) workers can easily substitute into other industries (labour supply is elastic). This may apply to banking and consultancy. </li>
<li>Entrance into industries in which (potential) workers have a strong preference to work is likely to result in more additional jobs (perhaps between 0.5 and 1), as workers will not substitute into other industries at such a high rate (labour supply is inelastic). This may apply to jobs in the charity sector. </li>
<li>In highly specialised industries/jobs, applying this framework may not be appropriate, as the hiring process will not resemble a competitive market. This may apply, for example, to taking a job with Givewell, who likely follow a process more akin to &lsquo;threshold hiring&rsquo;.In this case, it seems likely that taking this job may increase the number of overall jobs by close to 1.</li>
</ul></li>
<li><p>This post only discusses one aspect of replaceability, and does not consider other issues related to the (direct) impact of a job, effects on the quality of employees, or long term effects of a job, such as creating social value.</p></li>
</ul>


Introduction ‘Replaceability’ has become a core concept in discussions of career choice among Effective Altruists (EAs) - put simply, people should not simply consider the ‘direct impact’ from doing a job, but instead the difference in outcomes resulting from taking that job, relative to not taking it. Ben Todd and Seb Farquhar have both written blogs introducing this concept, and the importance of counterfactual reasoning in general (read these first if you’re not familiar with replaceability! ); Paul Christiano and Ben Kuhn (among others) have written blogs further exploring the concept, and its various representations and applications. Some Effective Altruists (EAs) have noted that representations of replaceability have varied in their sophistication, and Will MacAskill summarises this nicely as the ‘simple view’, ‘simplistic replaceability’ and ‘correct replaceability’. ‘Correct replaceability’ is particularly nuanced and complicated, and comprises taking into account the full set of counterfactual outcomes not only in your (potential) job, but in any other jobs affected by the employment decision, through knock-on and labour market effects. Given this, and that ‘replaceability’ varies significantly across different industries and jobs, Will MacAskill and Ben Todd asked me to think about what Economics has to tell us about the concept. For clarity, rather than think about the ethical considerations of ‘replaceability’ as a whole, they asked me to answer a sub-question, namely: “according to mainstream economics, if I add myself to the labour pool for job type X (being a doctor, or an aid worker, or a banker), then how many more type...

---

### Interview with Caroline Fiennes about opportunities in effective philanthropy

- Published: 2014-07-15
- Modified: 2024-11-13
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/07/interview-with-caroline-fiennes-about-opportunities-in-effective-philanthropy/
- Topics: Building effective altruism, Global priorities research

<h2>Introduction</h2>

We recently interviewed Caroline Fiennes to find out about her ideas on opportunities to make a difference promoting effective philanthropy, and more about her organisation, Giving Evidence. The aim was to both inform our strategy as an organisation, and find opportunities for people who are interested in leading a career in this area.

The interview was conducted via phone call. Below we summarise the key messages of the conversation, followed by some key excerpts, which have been edited and reorganised for clarity.

In summary, Caroline told us:

<ul>
<li>Billions of pounds are donated to charity in the UK each year, but there&rsquo;s little evidence which can inform donors&rsquo; decisions about where to donate. Hence, this money probably doesn&rsquo;t have as much impact as it could.</li>
<li>One intervention would be to set up something like <a href="http://www.charitynavigator.org/">Charity Navigator</a> for the UK, ideally rating charities both on organisation quality (as Charity Navigator does) <em>and</em> on the strength of the evidence behind the interventions they implement. There are many people interested in taking this project forward, but it&rsquo;s difficult to raise money for it.</li>
<li>Another intervention is creating a platform to publicly collect and share the monitoring and evaluation data that charities already produce. Over a billion pounds is spent on monitoring and evaluation each year, but it seems that only about two percent of the studies get shared. Giving Evidence <a href="http://giving-evidence.com/2014/06/11/info-infrastructure/">recently raised funding</a> to explore how to create a system for sharing evidence in the UK criminal justice sector.</li>
</ul>


Introduction We recently interviewed Caroline Fiennes to find out about her ideas on opportunities to make a difference promoting effective philanthropy, and more about her organisation, Giving Evidence. The aim was to both inform our strategy as an organisation, and find opportunities for people who are interested in leading a career in this area. The interview was conducted via phone call. Below we summarise the key messages of the conversation, followed by some key excerpts, which have been edited and reorganised for clarity. In summary, Caroline told us: Billions of pounds are donated to charity in the UK each year, but there’s little evidence which can inform donors’ decisions about where to donate. Hence, this money probably doesn’t have as much impact as it could. One intervention would be to set up something like Charity Navigator for the UK, ideally rating charities both on organisation quality (as Charity Navigator does) and on the strength of the evidence behind the interventions they implement. There are many people interested in taking this project forward, but it’s difficult to raise money for it. Another intervention is creating a platform to publicly collect and share the monitoring and evaluation data that charities already produce. Over a billion pounds is spent on monitoring and evaluation each year, but it seems that only about two percent of the studies get shared. Giving Evidence recently raised funding to explore how to create a system for sharing evidence in the UK criminal justice sector. The interview Caroline Fiennes...

---

### The payoff and probability of obtaining venture capital

- Published: 2014-06-25
- Modified: 2024-12-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/06/the-payoff-and-probability-of-obtaining-venture-capital/
- Topics: Economics, Found a tech startup

Venture capital has facilitated the growth of many companies including Apple, Google and Facebook. But is venture capital a key to success for most startups? In this post, we answer three component questions:

<ol>
<li>What are the likely outcomes for companies backed by venture capital?</p></li>
<li><p>What fraction of companies attract venture capital?

a) How many startups and venture capital deals are there?

b) What proportion of applicants to venture capitalists say they accept?</p></li>
<li><p>How much work is it to apply for venture capital?</p></li>
</ol>

<p>We found that:

<ul>
<li><p>According to the data of Professors Hall and Woodward, the average venture capital-backed founder exits with $5.8 million of equity.</p></li>
<li><p>Roughly 1% of companies that aspire to obtain venture capital obtain it.</p></li>
<li><p>Finding out whether you will receive venture capital can take months to years of work.</p></li>
</ul>


Venture capital has facilitated the growth of many companies including Apple, Google and Facebook. But do most startups succeed after they obtain venture capital? In this post, we answer three component questions: What are the likely outcomes for companies backed by venture capital? What fraction of companies attract venture capital? How much work is it to apply for venture capital? We found that: According to the data of Professors Hall and Woodward, the average venture capital-backed founder exits with $5. 8 million of equity. Roughly 1% of companies that aspire to obtain venture capital obtain it. Finding out whether you will receive venture capital can take months to years of work. What are the likely outcomes for companies backed by venture capital? For companies backed by venture capital, failure and acquisition are more common than IPO. In 2008, Professors Hall and Woodward presented data on companies that received venture capital in the preceding two decades. In their set of 22,004 companies:1 9% reached IPO. At IPO, the average founder had an equity stake of $40 million. 2 26% were acquired. 34% died or were taken to have ceased operations due to going unfunded for over five years. Their founders have earned only their salaries. 31% had unknown outcomes. Most of these are probably still operating. So far, their founders have only earned their salaries, although a few may go on to achieve a big exit. Figure 1: Venture capital-backed startup outcomes. The dataset is comprised of 22,004 companies that received venture capital...

---

### Which university has better entrepreneurs?

- Published: 2014-06-24
- Modified: 2022-02-28
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/06/which-university-has-better-entrepreneurs/
- Topics: Income

<img src="http://i.imgur.com/wb0QZgB.jpg" alt="" />

Some of the most successful companies in recent years have been founded by students of America&rsquo;s most prestigious universities. The founders of Google and Facebook, from Stanford and Harvard respectively, are prime examples. So which universities have the most successful entrepreneurs? To answer this question, we&rsquo;ve assessed how many students from each top US university have obtained investment in their startup, how many are worth over $30 million, and how many are worth over $1 billion. This builds upon Jonah Sinick's <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/jwh/why_are_harvards_alumni_so_wealthy/">work</a> on the wealth of Harvard alumni.


Some of the most successful companies in recent years have been founded by students of America’s most prestigious universities. The founders of Google and Facebook, from Stanford and Harvard respectively, are prime examples. So which universities have the most successful entrepreneurs? To answer this question, we’ve assessed how many students from each top US university have obtained investment in their startup, how many are worth over $30 million, and how many are worth over $1 billion. This builds upon Jonah Sinick's work on the wealth of Harvard alumni. Which university secures more funding? According to a CB Insights study of deals from 2007-11, Stanford alumni secured 203 venture capital or angel investments, totaling $4. 1 billion, more than any other university studied (Figure 1). Harvard came second with 112 deals, totaling $3. 8 billion. 1 If you exclude Facebook, then Harvard alumni secured $1. 8 billion, less than half of Stanford’s total. UC Berkeley, NYU, UPenn and MIT all earned less than $1. 4 billion. Figure 1: VC and Angel Deals by University. From University Entrepreneurship Report by CB Insights. If we divide the number of deals by the total number of living alumni from each university, we see that Stanford students have been by far the most likely to obtain external funding, followed by MIT. Figure 2: VC/Angel Deals Per Million Alumni. Using data from University Entrepreneurship Report by CB Insights. Using data on total living alumnus populations from Harvard, UPenn, Stanford, UC Berkeley, NYU and MIT websites. Which university has most ultra-wealthy individuals? ...

---

### How to quantify research quality?

- Published: 2014-06-23
- Modified: 2022-11-17
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/06/how-to-quantify-research-quality/
- Topics: Uncategorised

<h2>Introduction</h2>

You may have recently noticed a number appearing under our blog posts, in a little green square. That&rsquo;s an attempt to better track the quality of our research, which is, as far we know, the first system of its kind.

This post explains why we added it, how it works, who does the ratings, and its benefits so far.

<a href='//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/309/original/image_0.png?1401472156'><img alt="Image_0" class="image medium" src="//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/309/medium/image_0.png?1401472156" /></a>


Introduction You may have recently noticed a number appearing under our blog posts, in a little green square. That’s an attempt to better track the quality of our research, which is, as far we know, the first system of its kind. This post explains why we added it, how it works, who does the ratings, and its benefits so far. Figure: Where can you see the score? Why score our blog posts? Our key organisational aim this year is to deepen our knowledge of how to maximise the social impact of career choices through research. But how can we know if our research is good or bad? It’s easy to track the popularity of online content, and we already attempt to track the extent to which our research changes behaviour, but it’s possible for bad research to be both popular and and persuasive. How can we gain more confidence in the quality of our research? One answer is having a research evaluation. In a research evaluation, an evaluator (ideally external and unbiased) qualitatively assesses a list of criteria that constitute good research. For instance, they could consider: "In coming to these conclusions, did they use methods that are likely to be reliable? " and “are these conclusions important, new information for users? ” Finding out whether authoritative, credible people agree with the conclusions is also useful evidence. These are the kind of evaluations GiveWell has used (although they no-longer actively seek external evaluations because they were getting detailed feedback from users...

---

### What is the average net worth of Stanford entrepreneurs?

- Published: 2014-06-18
- Modified: 2018-07-23
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/06/what-is-the-average-net-worth-of-stanford-entrepreneurs/
- Topics: Uncategorised

In this post we estimate the mean net worth of Stanford alumni who made their wealth primarily through founding startups.

Our estimate is that the mean net-worth of a Stanford alumnus who founded a corporation <strong>$10.8 million</strong> as of 2013.

The reason we are interested in making this estimate is because it fits in with a larger <a href="/2013/09/should-more-altruists-consider-entrepreneurship/">research project to into entrepreneurship</a>, and within that project, into the wealth that can be gained by becoming an entrepreneur.

In this post, we estimate the <em>total net worth</em> of Stanford alumni who have founded corporations then we estimate the <em>total number</em> of Stanford alumni who have founded corporations. We then arrive at our estimate by dividing the total net worth of Stanford alumni founders by the total number of Stanford alumni founders. We close with some caveats and qualifications to our estimate.


In this post we estimate the mean net worth of Stanford alumni who made their wealth primarily through founding startups. Our estimate is that the mean net worth of a Stanford alumnus who founded a corporation is $10. 8 million as of 2013. The reason we are interested in making this estimate is because it fits in with a larger research project to into entrepreneurship, and within that project, into estimating the wealth that can be gained by becoming an entrepreneur. In this post, we estimate: The total net worth of Stanford alumnus billionaires who have founded corporations The total net worth of Stanford alumni who have founded corporations The total number of Stanford alumni who have founded corporations The mean net worth of a Stanford alumnus who has founded a corporation We arrive at this estimate by dividing the total net worth of Stanford alumnus founders by the number of Stanford alumnus founders. We close with some caveats and qualifications to our estimate. Note: Initially, we estimated the wealth of Stanford founders using only the wealth of billionaires. We have since revised our estimate to include the wealth of non-billionaires Total net worth of living Stanford alumnus billionaires who founded corporations Our estimate: $98 billion How we worked this out: We added up the net worth of living Stanford alumni who made their wealth from entrepreneurship by looking at the Forbes list of richest people in America and Wikipedia’s list of notable Stanford Alumni. You can see the spreadsheet of...

---

### Increasing your earnings as a doctor

- Published: 2014-06-17
- Modified: 2024-11-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/06/increasing-your-earnings-as-a-doctor/
- Topics: Doctor, Income, Medicine

Making a difference to patient&rsquo;s lives is a gratifying part of medical work. However, an <a href="/2012/08/how-many-lives-does-a-doctor-save/">investigation</a> by Dr Gregory Lewis suggests that doctors may be able to make a greater improvement to people&rsquo;s lives through their donations than through their practice. In part, this is because the potentially large impact of charitable donations. For instance, research by GiveWell has shown that it&rsquo;s likely to be possible to save a life for less than $10,000. This raises the question 'how can doctors increase their earnings?'.

In this post, we explore whether doctors can improve their earnings by:

<ol>
<li>Moving to a different country.</li>
<li>Choosing a highly-paid specialty.</li>
<li>Pursuing locum (contract) shifts.</li>
</ol>


Making a difference to patient’s lives is a gratifying part of medical work. However, an investigation by Dr Gregory Lewis suggests that doctors may be able to make a greater improvement to people’s lives through their donations than through their practice. In part, this is because the potentially large impact of charitable donations. For instance, research by GiveWell has shown that it’s likely to be possible to save a life for less than $10,000. 1 This raises the question 'if you're a doctor, how can you increase your earnings? '. For more on whether to become a doctor and how to make a difference as a doctor, see our full medicine career profile. In this post, we explore whether doctors can improve their earnings by: Moving to a different country. Choosing a highly-paid specialty. Pursuing locum (contract) shifts. Our findings are as follows. Migrating There are big variations in earnings, but also substantial costs associated with moving, including delayed career progression. It’s difficult to say when the costs are justified. It most likely to be worth it for: UK hospitals consultants willing to move to the US or Australia, since average income is 20-100% higher. Australian GPs willing to move to the US or UK. Doctors in some european nations willing to move to Scandinavia or the UK. We’re still unsure whether it’s worth it even in these cases. We’d be interested in carrying out more research if one of our readers is seriously considering migrating. Choosing speciality In the US and...

---

### Advisory board report June 2014

- Published: 2014-06-15
- Modified: 2020-08-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/06/advisory-board-report-june-2014/
- Topics: Updates

As part of our <a href="/2014/05/summary-of-the-annual-review-may-2014/">annual review</a>, we held an advisory board meeting. Our advisory board consists of: James Norris, Alex Flint and Jeff Kaufman. The members are chosen as supporters of our mission and effective altruism, who are not otherwise involved in running the organisation. We encourage them to act as impartial critics of our approach. One is a major donor to 80,000 Hours, two are highly active in building the effective altruism community and two have entrepreneurial experience.

After the meeting, James Norris issued the following statement on behalf of the board:

<blockquote>
  The advisory board met on May 9, 2014 to review the performance of 80,000 Hours over the past year. Alex Flint, Jeff Kaufman, James Norris, and Ben Todd were present. The members are in agreement that 80,000 Hours is executing well on its strategic plan and making strong progress overall.
  
  Fundraising and website metrics are both encouraging. William MacAskill&rsquo;s commissioned book on effective altruism appears to be a big win for 80,000 Hours and the community at large. However, some members cautioned it might not ultimately yield as large of a benefit as anticipated.
  
  One ongoing concern is staffing. Salaries are slightly uncompetitive and senior leadership may be overly critical to 80,000 Hours&rsquo; success. Some members also voiced concern around maintaining a healthy public image in light of growing media attention.
  
  Overall, 80,000 Hours appears to be intelligently and thoughtfully run by a very capable team. The advisory board is confident 80,000 Hours will continue to execute well in the foreseeable future.
</blockquote>

See the previous report <a href="/2013/09/trustee-and-advisory-board-report/">here</a>.


As part of our annual review, we held an advisory board meeting. Our advisory board consists of: James Norris, Alex Flint and Jeff Kaufman. The members are chosen as supporters of our mission and effective altruism, who are not otherwise involved in running the organisation. We encourage them to act as impartial critics of our approach. One is a major donor to 80,000 Hours, two are highly active in building the effective altruism community and two have entrepreneurial experience. After the meeting, James Norris issued the following statement on behalf of the board: The advisory board met on May 9, 2014 to review the performance of 80,000 Hours over the past year. Alex Flint, Jeff Kaufman, James Norris, and Ben Todd were present. The members are in agreement that 80,000 Hours is executing well on its strategic plan and making strong progress overall. Fundraising and website metrics are both encouraging. William MacAskill’s commissioned book on effective altruism appears to be a big win for 80,000 Hours and the community at large. However, some members cautioned it might not ultimately yield as large of a benefit as anticipated. One ongoing concern is staffing. Salaries are slightly uncompetitive and senior leadership may be overly critical to 80,000 Hours’ success. Some members also voiced concern around maintaining a healthy public image in light of growing media attention. Overall, 80,000 Hours appears to be intelligently and thoughtfully run by a very...

---

### Case series - why and how to learn programming

- Published: 2014-06-10
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/06/case-series-why-and-how-to-learn-programming/
- Topics: Computer science, Computer Science PhD, Income, Machine learning, Software Engineering

Software engineering is a lucrative career with an unusually low barrier to entry. Due to its appeal, some people in our community have switched into programming via many different routes. To help guide other individuals who are considering making this transition, we&rsquo;ve gathered the five people in our community&rsquo;s experiences learning to code and getting employed as a programmer.

<ul>
<li><p>Some programmers say that they enjoy their work because of the puzzles and problems involved in programming. They also say that they enjoy being drawn into a flow state.</p></li>
<li><p>One undesirable characteristic of software engineering is its white male monoculture.</p></li>
<li><p>Other common peeves are the need to understand large existing codebases and engaging in the boring aspects of fixing broken software.</p></li>
<li><p>People learn to program in a variety of ways including App Academy, computer science degrees, and teaching themselves while doing another job.</p></li>
<li><p>It&rsquo;s easier to get hired if you&rsquo;ve done an internship. Applying widely also helps. One App Academy graduate applied to 30-40 companies, out of which he got 5 phone screenings / code challenges, 2 in person interviews, and one offer.</p></li>
</ul>


Summary: Software engineering is a lucrative career with an unusually low barrier to entry. Due to its appeal, some people in our community have switched into programming via many different routes. To help guide other individuals who are considering making this transition, we’ve gathered the five people in our community’s experiences learning to code and getting employed as a programmer. Some programmers say that they enjoy their work because of the puzzles and problems involved in programming. They also say that they enjoy being drawn into a flow state. One undesirable characteristic of software engineering is its white male monoculture. Other common peeves are the need to understand large existing codebases and engaging in the boring aspects of fixing broken software. People learn to program in a variety of ways including App Academy, computer science degrees, and teaching themselves while doing another job. It’s easier to get hired if you’ve done an internship. Applying widely also helps. One App Academy graduate applied to 30-40 companies, out of which he got 5 phone screenings / code challenges, 2 in person interviews, and one offer. Ethan Ethan left graduate school in linguistics and trained at App Academy as a way to earn to give. Why did you decide to learn to program? I decided to learn to program so I could get a high-paying job and donate my earnings to MIRI. I was in graduate school for Linguistics before I learned to program, and I wanted to have a larger impact on...

---

### How much do Y Combinator founders earn?

- Published: 2014-05-27
- Modified: 2022-12-14
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/05/how-much-do-y-combinator-founders-earn/
- Topics: Being ambitious, Found a tech startup, Income

<a href='//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/Paul_Graham_talking_about_Prototype_Day_at_Y_Combinator_Summer_2009.jpg'><img alt="Paul Graham" class="image medium" src="//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/Paul_Graham_talking_about_Prototype_Day_at_Y_Combinator_Summer_2009.jpg" /></a>

<h2>Introduction</h2>

We're interested in estimating how much tech entrepreneurs earn, since it's one of our top recommended <a href="/2014/02/in-which-career-can-you-make-the-most-difference/">careers</a>, and this is in part because it seems particularly high earning (enabling <a href="/earning-to-give">high donations</a>, and potentially indicating the creation of a lot economic value). As part of this, we wanted to find out: <em>if you can get into Y Combinator, how much will you earn?</em> We're particularly interested in Y Combinator because it's the best known seed accelerator, and the data is available. In summary, here's what we found:

<ul>
<li>The total value of Y Combinator companies is $26 billion, of which the founders own $8 billion.</li>
<li>Most of the returns have gone to a tiny minority of super-successes. The founders of AirBnB, Dropbox and Stripe are worth about US$7 billion, about 80% of all founders' equity, although they account for 0.5% of the companies.</li>
<li>Outside of the most successful companies, it was still possible to earn significant returns. 12% of companies from the first five years of Y Combinator are now worth US$40 million or more, and a further 10% have sold for US$5-40 million. The remainder probably earned little more than their (low) salaries.</li>
<li><strong>On average, founders from the first five years of Y Combinator are now worth US$18 million after 5-9 years, giving past average earnings of US$2.5 million per year</strong></li>
<li>When it invests in its companies, Y Combinator values them at US$1.7 million, of which each founding team owns $1.6 million. This implies that founders must earn (in cash or equity) substantially more than $100,000 per year on average.</li>
<li>We expect the average earnings going forward to be less than $2.5 million per founder per year because of competitors to Y Combinator and regression to the mean.</li>
<li>Y Combinator accept 2.5% of applications.</li>
<li>Your personal expected earnings from applying to Y Combinator depend on your chance of being accepted and your chance of creating the next AirBnB or Dropbox.</li>
</ul>


Image source Introduction and summary We're interested in estimating how much tech entrepreneurs earn, since it's one of our top recommended careers, partly because of its earnings. Big earners can create a lot of economic value and can sometimes become big donors. We wanted to find out: if you get into Y Combinator, how much will you earn? We're interested in Y Combinator because it's the best known seed accelerator, and the data is available. Here's what we found: The total value of Y Combinator companies is $26 billion, of which the founders own $8 billion. Most of the returns have gone to a tiny minority of super-successes. The founders of AirBnB, Dropbox and Stripe are worth about US$7 billion, about 80% of all founders' equity, although they account for 0. 5% of the companies. Outside of the most successful companies, it was still possible to earn significant returns. 12% of companies from the first five years of Y Combinator are now worth US$40 million or more, and a further 10% have sold for US$5-40 million. The remainder probably earned little more than their (low) salaries. On average, founders from the first five years of Y Combinator are now worth US$18 million after 5-9 years, meaning that their average net worth has increased by US$2. 5 million per year When it invests in its companies, Y Combinator values them at US$1. 7 million, of which each founding team owns $1. 6 million. This means that for average team sizes, each founder owns $700,000 of...

---

### Summary of the annual review May 2014

- Published: 2014-05-16
- Modified: 2022-04-06
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/05/summary-of-the-annual-review-may-2014/
- Topics: Updates

<a href='//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/305/original/tinted_images_and_options-02.jpg?1400275070'><img alt="Tinted_images_and_options-02" class="image medium" src="//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/305/medium/tinted_images_and_options-02.jpg?1400275070" /></a>

<h2>Introduction</h2>

In this document, we present some concluding comments about our annual review and provide a guide to the rest of the documents. The summary of our previous review is <a href="/2013/09/summary-of-our-six-month-evaluation/">here</a>.

<h2>Overview comments</h2>

With the end of this annual review, 80,000 Hours has reached an important milestone. Over the last year we performed a major impact evaluation. We found that as of December 2013 we&rsquo;ve caused 107 &lsquo;significant plan changes&rsquo; - a metric we developed to track our impact. You can see some examples <a href="/2014/05/plan-change-analysis-and-cost-effectiveness/#appendix---studies-of-career-change">here</a>. given this, we think we&rsquo;ve achieved initial proof of concept that our prototype online content, coaching and community can change careers. we presented an overview of the evaluation <a href="/2014/05/how-well-are-our-programs-performing/">here</a> and an in-depth analysis of the plan changes <a href="/2014/05/plan-change-analysis-and-cost-effectiveness/#appendix---studies-of-career-change">here</a>. we think this proof of concept is sufficiently compelling to move our focus on to improving the quality of our programs.

On this basis, <a href="/2014/05/our-strategic-review-may-2014/">we&rsquo;ve focused our strategy</a>. To complete our &lsquo;discovery phase&rsquo;, <a href="/blog/338-team-plan-april-2014">for th</a><a href="/blog/338-team-plan-april-2014">e rest of 2014</a> we&rsquo;ll deepen our knowledge of social impact careers through research. We&rsquo;ll also improve our online content. We&rsquo;ll do this through successive rounds of coaching people and writing answers to their most pressing questions. We&rsquo;ll summarise our findings on a series of six research pages, which we&rsquo;ll submit for external evaluation.

In 2015, we intend to move into our &lsquo;execution phase&rsquo;, in which we&rsquo;ll aim to take the model we&rsquo;ve discovered to its full potential. We envisage initially focusing on further improving the quality of our programs, in particular by writing a careers guide. We aim to finish this in time for the press campaign surrounding the launch of Will MacAskill&rsquo;s book on effective altruism in August 2015. Securing this book deal with Gotham Books (Penguin US) and Guardian-Faber was another major success of 2013. As part of CEA&rsquo;s <a href="http://www.effective-altruism.com/effective-altruism-outreach-plans/">effective altruism outreach project</a>, it may become a major source of new users.

After that, we may move our focus to outreach to ensure our programs connect with our entire target market. Or we may develop further programs, such as training a social impact career coach for every top university.

Ultimately, we want to become the best source of advice in the world for the most talented, young graduates who want to make a positive impact, enabling them to best use their 80,000 hours to solve the world&rsquo;s most pressing problems.

While our key goals in the discovery phase are clarifying our strategy and testing our programs, we think our impact evaluation showed we&rsquo;re <a href="/2014/05/plan-change-analysis-and-cost-effectiveness/">justif</a><a href="/2014/05/plan-change-analysis-and-cost-effectiveness/">ying our costs</a> through the value of the plan changes our users have adopted. Since we think the value of the plan changes we have caused is only a <a href="/2014/05/what-impact-has-80-000-hours-had/">small portion </a><a href="/2014/05/what-impact-has-80-000-hours-had/">of our total impact</a>, this implies we&rsquo;ve used resources highly effectively.

Besides proof of concept and focusing our strategy, we had <a href="/2014/05/review-of-progress-july-2013-to-april-2014/">other important achievements</a>, including good progress building the team, <a href="/2014/05/80-000-hours-finance-report/">fundraising</a> and <a href="/2014/05/how-well-are-our-programs-performing/">continued growth</a> in reach and impact.

Overall, we&rsquo;re very excited about the next year.


Introduction In this document, we present some concluding comments about our annual review and provide a guide to the rest of the documents. The summary of our previous review is here. Overview comments With the end of this annual review, 80,000 Hours has reached an important milestone. Over the last year we performed a major impact evaluation. We found that as of December 2013 we’ve caused 107 ‘significant plan changes’ - a metric we developed to track our impact. You can see some examples here. Given this, we think we’ve achieved initial proof of concept that our prototype online content, coaching and community can change careers. We presented an overview of the evaluation here and an in-depth analysis of the plan changes here. We think this proof of concept is sufficiently compelling to move our focus on to improving the quality of our programs. On this basis, we’ve focused our strategy. To complete our ‘discovery phase’, for the rest of 2014 we’ll deepen our knowledge of social impact careers through research. We’ll also improve our online content. We’ll do this through successive rounds of coaching people and writing answers to their most pressing questions. We’ll summarise our findings on a series of six research pages, which we’ll submit for external evaluation. In 2015, we intend to move into our ‘execution phase’, in which we’ll aim to take the model we’ve discovered to its full potential. We envisage...

---

### Team plan May 2014

- Published: 2014-05-16
- Modified: 2020-08-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/05/team-plan-may-2014/
- Topics: Updates

In this document, which is part of our annual review, we outline our priorities over the rest of 2014. We also list the organisational metrics we intend to track and some of the challenges we anticipate facing.

To see how this plan fits into our overall strategy, see the <a href="/2014/05/our-strategic-review-may-2014/">strategic review</a>. To see what we did over the last year, see our review of progress.

In summary, over the rest of 2014 we intend to focus on deepening our knowledge of social impact careers and improving the prototype of our online content. We&rsquo;ll do this by expanding our research pages into a series of six separate pages, then completing several rounds of coaching and writing up research, with the aim of coaching at least 40 people, writing five reports on their most pressing questions, and writing five career profiles on the most asked about careers. At the end of the year, we&rsquo;ll update the research pages based on what we&rsquo;ve found, and perform a research evaluation to measure our progress.

In addition, it&rsquo;s highly important to build the capacity of our research team. Our main goal in this area is to find an outstanding candidate who can start working at 80,000 Hours as a staff member within the next 18 months, specialising in research.

Other priorities include maintaining six months of reserves and building team capacity, through training the team and hiring new staff.


Introduction and summary In this document, which is part of our annual review, we outline our priorities over the rest of 2014. We also list the organisational metrics we intend to track and some of the challenges we anticipate facing. To see how this plan fits into our overall strategy, see the strategic review. To see what we did over the last year, see our review of progress. In summary, over the rest of 2014 we intend to focus on deepening our knowledge of social impact careers and improving the prototype of our online content. We’ll do this by expanding our research pages into a series of six separate pages, then completing several rounds of coaching and writing up research, with the aim of coaching at least 40 people, writing five reports on their most pressing questions, and writing five career profiles on the most asked about careers. At the end of the year, we’ll update the research pages based on what we’ve found, and perform a research evaluation to measure our progress. In addition, it’s highly important to build the capacity of our research team. Our main goal in this area is to find an outstanding candidate who can start working at 80,000 Hours as a staff member within the next 18 months, specialising in research. Other priorities include maintaining six months of reserves and building team capacity, through training the team and hiring new staff... .

---

### Review of progress July 2013 to April 2014

- Published: 2014-05-16
- Modified: 2024-12-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/05/review-of-progress-july-2013-to-april-2014/
- Topics: Updates

<h2>Introduction and summary</h2>

The purpose of this document is to review what 80,000 Hours has achieved from July 2013 to February 2014 since our <a href="/2013/08/our-progress/">last review of progress</a>. We also review how we performed relative to our targets, and our mistakes over the period. This document is part of our annual review.

In summary:

<ul>
<li>We went through three stages during the period: website redesign, testing our content, and finally conducting our impact evaluation and strategic review. Other significant priorities included writing a book proposal on effective altruism, fundraising and staff recruitment.</li>
<li>Our main achievements were establishing proof of concept that our programs (research and online content, supported by coaching) can change career plans, and creating a clearer strategy.</li>
<li>While doing this, we continued to faciliate significant plan changes, which we think justify our costs.</li>
<li>Other achievements included: Will landed a major book deal to write about effective altruism, we continued to build the team and CEA, we increased our financial security by reaching our target of 12 months&rsquo; cash reserves, we implemented more professional branding, we had a meeting at the UK Prime Minister&rsquo;s office on careers advice policy, we helped to foster the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150219111333/https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/research/global-priorities-project">Global Priorities Project</a>, we published over 40 research blog posts, the Cambridge student group had a strong first year, and we increased our organisational transparency.</li>
<li>We made progress on all of our key priorities and completed most of what we set out to achieve in our last review, but ended up several months behind schedule for a variety of reasons.</li>
<li>Our main mistake over the period was not keeping the team sufficiently focused on fundamental strategic progress. We think we&rsquo;ve already corrected this mistake.</li>
</ul>

You can find more detail on our key metrics in our <a href="/2014/05/how-well-are-our-programs-performing/">review of program performance</a>.


Introduction and summary The purpose of this document is to review what 80,000 Hours has achieved from July 2013 to February 2014 since our last review of progress. We also review how we performed relative to our targets, and our mistakes over the period. This document is part of our annual review. In summary: We went through three stages during the period: website redesign, testing our content, and finally conducting our impact evaluation and strategic review. Other significant priorities included writing a book proposal on effective altruism, fundraising and staff recruitment. Our main achievements were establishing proof of concept that our programs (research and online content, supported by coaching) can change career plans, and creating a clearer strategy. While doing this, we continued to faciliate significant plan changes, which we think justify our costs. Other achievements included: Will landed a major book deal to write about effective altruism, we continued to build the team and CEA, we increased our financial security by reaching our target of 12 months’ cash reserves, we implemented more professional branding, we had a meeting at the UK Prime Minister’s office on careers advice policy, we helped to foster the Global Priorities Project, we published over 40 research blog posts, the Cambridge student group had a strong first year, and we increased our organisational transparency. We made progress on all of our key priorities and completed most of what we set out to...

---

### 80,000 Hours finance report

- Published: 2014-05-16
- Modified: 2024-12-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/05/80-000-hours-finance-report/
- Topics: Updates

<h2>Summary</h2>

(N.B figures are rounded)

<em>Current financial situation</em>

<strong>As of April 2014, 80,000 Hours had £148,000 in reserves.</strong> This would represent 16 months of reserves at current rates of spending or <strong>12.5 months of reserves if we follow our target budget, which would have us spend £130,000 over 2014.</strong> This £130,000 would be primarily spent on staff salaries (£68,000), intern support expenses and accommodation (£24,000) and office rent (£10,000).

<em>Historical spending</em>

<strong>In <em>2013</em>, 80,000 Hours spent £124,000, or around £10,000 per month</strong>. <strong>From <em>January through March 2014</em> 80,000 Hours spent £28,000,</strong> or around £9,000 per month, slightly under the £31,000 budgeted. Since its founding in 2012 until April 2014 80,000 Hours has spent £176,000.

<em>Historical income</em>

<strong>In <em>2013</em> 80,000 Hours received £175,000 in donations</strong>, of which £150,000 were specifically restricted to 80,000 Hours by donors and the remainder was given without restriction to our parent organisation, the Centre for Effective Altruism. <strong>From <em>January through March 2014</em> 80,000 Hours has received a further £92,000</strong>, of which £73,000 was restricted to 80,000 Hours by donors. Since its founding in 2012 until April 2014 80,000 Hours has received a total of £301,000.

<em>Fundraising targets</em>

We are currently looking to raise an additional £40,000. This would cover our remaining shortfall for 2014, and give us the option to hire an additional staff member to focus on research and coaching. Making this goal would mean we could end fundraising for the rest of 2014, and fully focus on developing our programs.


Summary (N. B. figures are rounded. ) Current financial situation As of April 2014, 80,000 Hours had £148,000 in reserves. This would represent 16 months of reserves at current rates of spending or 12. 5 months of reserves if we follow our target budget, which would have us spend £130,000 over 2014. This £130,000 would be primarily spent on staff salaries (£68,000), intern support expenses and accommodation (£24,000) and office rent (£10,000). Historical spending In 2013, 80,000 Hours spent £124,000, or around £10,000 per month. From January through March 2014 80,000 Hours spent £28,000, or around £9,000 per month, slightly under the £31,000 budgeted. Since its founding in 2012 until April 2014 80,000 Hours has spent £176,000. Historical income In 2013 80,000 Hours received £175,000 in donations, of which £150,000 were specifically restricted to 80,000 Hours by donors and the remainder was given without restriction to our parent organisation, the Centre for Effective Altruism. From January through March 2014 80,000 Hours has received a further £92,000, of which £73,000 was restricted to 80,000 Hours by donors. Since its founding in 2012 until April 2014 80,000 Hours has received a total of £301,000. Fundraising targets We are currently looking to raise an additional £40,000. This would cover our remaining shortfall for 2014, and give us the option to hire an additional staff member to focus on research and coaching. Making this goal would mean we could end fundraising for the rest...

---

### Our strategic review May 2014

- Published: 2014-05-16
- Modified: 2024-12-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/05/our-strategic-review-may-2014/
- Topics: Updates

<h2>Introduction - where have we come from?</h2>

Less than two years ago, we were simply a group of student volunteers aiming to have the biggest possible impact. We thought we had some powerful ideas, which had caused <a href="/2014/02/some-stories-of-career-change-due-to-80-000-hours/">some people</a> to completely change their careers. But we didn&rsquo;t know how to turn our ideas into a high impact organisation. We were doing a mixture of campaigning, community building, research and one-on-one coaching, and were unsure where to focus.

Since then, we have focused our <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/18i2krmxsjdt21dr7nmzz-sjpvulf8qpobbqehqyp-dm/edit#">model</a>, tested several prototype programs (online content and coaching) and gained an initial <a href="/2014/05/how-well-are-our-programs-performing/">proof of concept</a> by showing these can change careers. we also think we&rsquo;ve had enough impact by changing career plans to <a href="/2014/05/plan-change-analysis-and-cost-effectiveness/">justify our costs</a> and have overall been a <a href="/2014/05/what-impact-has-80-000-hours-had/">high impact use of resources</a>.

In light of these milestones, this document explains how our strategy has changed over time and where it stands now. It is part of our annual review.

<h3>Summary</h3>

<strong>We intend for the next year to be the final year of our &lsquo;discovery phase&rsquo;</strong>. The aim of the discovery phase is to identify the most high potential business model. (By &lsquo;business model&rsquo; we mean the combination of programs, promotion, team structure and financing strategies we use to have a social impact).

<strong>Our key focus will be on improving the quality of our prototype programs</strong>, in order to test some of the most important remaining uncertainties in our model.

Within this, we have two aims. First <strong>we&rsquo;ll focus on research</strong> to deepen our knowledge of how to choose the most high impact careers. We think further research is likely to be valuable, both because this body of knowledge is neglected but highly important, and because we think high quality research is crucial to the appeal and impact of our programs. High quality research is the most important way for us to become more credible (therefore able to persuade more people), it&rsquo;s the key factor that sets us apart from our competition in attracting users, and it&rsquo;ll ensure we highlight careers that are genuinely better than those our users would have taken otherwise (a key uncertainty in our impact evaluation). At the same time, we&rsquo;re unsure how rapidly we&rsquo;ll be able to make progress on research. Focusing on research for the rest of 2014, tracking our progress and submitting ourselves to an external research evaluation will reduce our uncertainty about the value of further research.

Second, <strong>we&rsquo;ll focus on improving our online content</strong>. We&rsquo;ll expand our research page into a series of five, covering (i) the key criteria we suggest for comparing between careers, (ii) ranked lists of promising careers and causes (iii) supporting career profiles (iv) advice on how to find a career that fits and (v) a step-by-step planning process. We&rsquo;ll also add pages to guide users to the best of our old content.

We&rsquo;re focusing on online content because we think our online content has more potential for impact than coaching. In our <a href="/2014/05/plan-change-analysis-and-cost-effectiveness/">plan change analysis</a>, we found over 30 of the 107 significant plan changes were attributable to online content alone. This would make the online content similarly important to the coaching in terms of changing careers. Given that online content is also far more scalable than coaching, it makes sense to prioritise it to test the hypothesis that it&rsquo;s a better program. Moreover, developing the online content involves the least additional work over just doing research, and we think our current offering could be significantly improved relatively easily through better summaries of our existing content.

<strong>We&rsquo;ll continue with our one-on-one coaching as part of our research process</strong>. We&rsquo;ll deepen our knowledge of social impact careers by doing rounds of coaching talented, altruistic, young people, then writing up answers to their most pressing questions for the blog. We&rsquo;ll also write career profiles covering the careers our coachees most want to know more about.

In 2015, we plan to start our &lsquo;execution phase&rsquo;, in which we aim to realise our model&rsquo;s full potential for impact. We intend to initially focus on making our online content easier to use, most likely by developing it into an online careers guide, while continuing with research. The aim is to have the careers guide in place before <a href="http://www.effective-altruism.com/effective-altruism-outreach-plans/">the promotional campaign accompanying the launch of Will MacAskill&rsquo;s book</a> on effective altruism in August 2015. After that, we may increase our outreach work to connect with our entire target market.

In the longer term, we&rsquo;ll aim to develop further programs to deepen engagement with our users, such as expanding the coaching service. Our aim is to become the best source of advice in the world for the most talented, altruistic young graduates, enabling them to best use their 80,000 hours to solve the world&rsquo;s most pressing problems.


Introduction - where have we come from? Less than two years ago, we were simply a group of student volunteers aiming to have the biggest possible impact. We thought we had some powerful ideas, which had caused some people to completely change their careers. But we didn’t know how to turn our ideas into a high impact organisation. We were doing a mixture of campaigning, community building, research and one-on-one coaching, and were unsure where to focus. Since then, we have focused our model, tested several prototype programs (online content and coaching) and gained an initial proof of concept by showing these can change careers. we also think we’ve had enough impact by changing career plans to justify our costs and have overall been a high impact use of resources. In light of these milestones, this document explains how our strategy has changed over time and where it stands now. It is part of our annual review. Summary We intend for the next year to be the final year of our ‘discovery phase’. The aim of the discovery phase is to identify the most high potential business model. (By ‘business model’ we mean the combination of programs, promotion, team structure and financing strategies we use to have a social impact). Our key focus will be on improving the quality of our prototype programs, in order to test some of the most important remaining uncertainties in our model... .

---

### Plan change analysis and cost effectiveness

- Published: 2014-05-15
- Modified: 2024-12-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/05/plan-change-analysis-and-cost-effectiveness/
- Topics: Uncategorised

<a href='//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/303/original/DSC04945.JPG?1400228615'><img alt="Dsc04945" class="image medium" src="//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/303/medium/DSC04945.JPG?1400228615" /></a>

<h2>Introduction</h2>

This document is part of our annual review. In section one, it aims to resolve some key uncertainties within our <a href="/2014/05/how-well-are-our-programs-performing/">review of program performance</a>:

<ol>
<li>How many significant plan changes has 80,000 Hours caused?  </li>
<li>What were these changes?  </li>
</ol>

In section two, we move on to consider:

<ol>
<li>What costs has 80,000 Hours incurred in causing these changes?  </li>
<li>Does the value of the significant plan changes justify total historical costs?  </li>
</ol>

In the <a href="#appendix---studies-of-career-change">appendix</a>, we also include 27 studies of career changes.


Introduction This document is part of our annual review. In section one, it aims to resolve some key uncertainties within our review of program performance: How many significant plan changes has 80,000 Hours caused? What were these changes? In section two, we move on to consider: What costs has 80,000 Hours incurred in causing these changes? Does the value of the significant plan changes justify total historical costs? In the appendix, we also include 27 studies of career changes. Summary The following is a four page summary of what we found. More detail is provided in the main body of the document. How many significant plan changes has 80,000 Hours caused? As of December 2013, we’ve collected 107 cases of significant plan changes, which we define as a 20% shift in plans plausibly attributable to 80,000 Hours. The full definition is below. Over 60 were found through our impact survey. The remainder were found through our coaching evaluation, previous evaluation work and from prior knowledge. We estimate that 14 occurred in 2011, 34 in 2012 and 59 in 2013. The changes resulted from a mixture of online research, coaching, community engagement and events, although it’s difficult to untangle these influences, so we are unsure which was most important. Nevertheless, there is evidence that both the online content and coaching can change careers in isolation. Overall, we think this is good evidence that 80,000 Hours is having a significant effect on the career plans of its users. Nevertheless, there is potential...

---

### How well are our programs performing?

- Published: 2014-05-15
- Modified: 2024-12-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/05/how-well-are-our-programs-performing/
- Topics: Updates

<h2>Introduction and summary</h2>

In this document, which is part of our annual review, we overview the performance of our programs and their costs from founding to the end of 2013. Our programs consist of online research, coaching, community building and events. In this document, we examine how successful they have been in gaining audience, engaging and informing that audience, and ultimately in changing their career plans for the better.

The key question we want to answer is: do we have proof of concept that our programs can repeatedly change the careers of our target audience for the better?

Our key findings are:

<ul>
<li>We&rsquo;ve been successful in reaching people and engaging them with little investment in outreach.  </li>
<li>Out of several thousand engaged users, 107 have made significant career plan changes, and a significant proportion of these have followed through with their plan changes. </li>
<li>Overall, we think we have proof of concept that our programs can repeatedly change careers for the better.  </li>
<li>In total, 80,000 Hours has received about £147,000 of donations and has taken 13 years of labour from the team. </li>
</ul>

Our main uncertainties are:

<ul>
<li>How valuable is a plan change, taking into account what the person would have done otherwise? We have performed further analysis of this question in our analysis of plan changes. We plan to further investigate this question by performing a research evaluation and continuing to track our users over time. Some important sub-questions include: </li>
<li>How high value are &lsquo;conventional careers&rsquo; compared to &lsquo;effective altruist&rsquo; style careers?</li>
<li>What&rsquo;s the chance of one or two people in the group having extreme impact, such as founding a highly influential organisation, donating tens of millions of pounds to charity, or being elected to office?</li>
<li>Are these plan changes due to 80,000 Hours or another group in effective altruism? We also investigate this issue in our analysis of plan changes. In the future, we may be able to carry out a randomised controlled trial of some of our programs to learn more.</li>
<li>How useful are the benefits of our programs compared to the information and support our users could have found elsewhere?  </li>
<li>Will our users stay engaged for a couple of years, or many decades into the future? </li>
<li>How confident can we be that future work will lead to more plan changes?</li>
<li>How much personal value do our users gain from our programs? Would they pay for coaching?</li>
<li>How is impact allocated between our different programs? Would the plan changes attributed to coaching have been caused anyway due to our research and community?</li>
</ul>


Introduction and summary In this document, which is part of our annual review, we overview the performance of our programs and their costs from founding to the end of 2013. Our programs consist of online research, coaching, community building and events. In this document, we examine how successful they have been in gaining audience, engaging and informing that audience, and ultimately in changing their career plans for the better. The key question we want to answer is: do we have proof of concept that our programs can repeatedly change the careers of our target audience for the better? Our key findings are: We’ve been successful in reaching people and engaging them with little investment in outreach. Out of several thousand engaged users, 107 have made significant career plan changes, and a significant proportion of these have followed through with their plan changes. Overall, we think we have proof of concept that our programs can repeatedly change careers for the better. In total, 80,000 Hours has received about £147,000 of donations and has taken 13 years of labour from the team. Our main uncertainties are: How valuable is a plan change, taking into account what the person would have done otherwise? We have performed further analysis of this question in our analysis of plan changes. We plan to further investigate this question by performing a research evaluation and continuing to track our users over time. Some important sub-questions...

---

### What impact has 80,000 Hours had?

- Published: 2014-05-15
- Modified: 2024-12-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/05/what-impact-has-80-000-hours-had/
- Topics: Updates

<a href='//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/304/original/80000_hours.jpg?1400229143'><img alt="80000_hours" class="image medium" src="//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/304/medium/80000_hours.jpg?1400229143" /></a>

<h2>Introduction</h2>

What impact has 80,000 Hours had since we started in 2011? This document is not meant as an impact assessment; rather, its aim is to lay out the ways in which we&rsquo;ve plausibly had an impact, and summarise what we currently know about them.

Our impact can be compared to our <a href="/2014/05/how-well-are-our-programs-performing/">historical costs</a>. By the end of 2013, we had spent £147,000 and used about thirteen years of labour from the team, which we estimate had an opportunity cost of about £233,000 in forgone donations.


Introduction What impact has 80,000 Hours had since we started in 2011? This document is not meant as an impact assessment; rather, its aim is to lay out the ways in which we’ve plausibly had an impact, and summarise what we currently know about them. Our impact can be compared to our historical costs. By the end of 2013, we had spent £147,000 and used about thirteen years of labour from the team, which we estimate had an opportunity cost of about £233,000 in forgone donations. Historical plan change impact The main way our programs aim to have an impact is through through enabling our users to have more impact with their careers, so has been the focus of our evaluation efforts. During our development phase, our goal has been to justify our costs on the basis of causing ‘significant plan changes’ - our key impact metric in this area. As explained in our analysis of plan changes, we think we’ve caused 107 significant plan changes. We think it’s likely that the value of these significant plan is enough to justify our costs, because: The 35% who are pursuing earning to give expect to donate at least an additional £700,000 to high impact charities within the next three years, have already donated £70,000, and expect to donate significantly more beyond the next three years. The group of 107 contains highly able people, who now prioritise making a...

---

### What we can learn about career choice from the Terman study

- Published: 2014-05-08
- Modified: 2014-09-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/05/what-we-can-learn-about-career-choice-from-the-terman-study/
- Topics: Ability, Job satisfaction

<a href='//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/294/original/terman2.jpg?1398725117'><img alt="Terman2" class="image medium" src="//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/294/medium/terman2.jpg?1398725117" /></a>

The Terman study is the longest running longitudinal studies ever to be carried out in psychology. The study included 1,528 of the most intelligent children born between 1900 and 1925. It started in 1921, and the participants have been followed up every four to five years ever since. Data was collected on their personality, habits, life-choices, health and much more. This allows researchers to track the results of different life choices over decades.

Two of the leading researchers working on the Terman study recently released a book: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Longevity-Project-Discoveries-Eight-Decade/dp/B00AZ8AX6S"><em>The Longevity Project</em></a>, which aims to uncover the factors that lead to the participants having long and healthy lives.

The book has a fascinating chapter on career choice (though I&rsquo;d recommend the whole thing).

Here&rsquo;s a summary of the key conclusions:

<em>The factors leading to career success</em>

<ul>
<li><strong>Intelligence predicts success, but it&rsquo;s no guarantee.</strong> All of the participants in the Terman study were very bright, but a quarter ended up in less prestigious occupations, like clerical workers and craftsmen. Only one fifth ended up &lsquo;highly successful&rsquo; - prominent doctors or lawyers, accomplished in the arts, or leading scientists. One fifth ended up &lsquo;unsuccessful&rsquo; within their professions.</li>
<li><strong>The more successful, the longer they lived.</strong> The most successful men lived on average five years longer than the least. In fact, Terman&rsquo;s rating of success at age 30 predicted life-span decades later.</li>
<li><strong>This effect was not explained by greater wealth, avoiding smoking and drinking, a happier marriage, more education, or conscientiousness (although conscientiousness did explain part of the effect).</strong></li>
<li>A stable career with a clear progression of rising responsibilities also predicted longevity, compared to a &lsquo;drifting&rsquo; career through many different professions. </li>
<li>Continuing to work into old age was a significant predictor of longevity.</li>
<li>Overall, <strong>the findings do not suggest that avoiding stress and responsibility is a good strategy for having a healthy life.</strong> Rather, they suggest that the becoming the type of person who perseveres to achieve ambitious goals leads to both success and health.</li>
<li>This links to a broader theme in positive psychology - in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Flourish-Visionary-Understanding-Happiness-Well-being/dp/1439190763/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1397941364&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=flourish"><em>Flourish</em></a>, Seligman proposes that achievement is one of the five key components of a flourishing life.</li>
</ul>


The Terman study is the longest running longitudinal studies ever to be carried out in psychology. The study included 1,528 of the most intelligent children born between 1900 and 1925. It started in 1921, and the participants have been followed up every four to five years ever since. Data was collected on their personality, habits, life-choices, health and much more. This allows researchers to track the results of different life choices over decades. Two of the leading researchers working on the Terman study recently released a book: The Longevity Project, which aims to uncover the factors that lead to the participants having long and healthy lives. The book has a fascinating chapter on career choice (though I’d recommend the whole thing). Here’s a summary of the key conclusions: The factors leading to career success Intelligence predicts success, but it’s no guarantee. All of the participants in the Terman study were very bright, but a quarter ended up in less prestigious occupations, like clerical workers and craftsmen. Only one fifth ended up ‘highly successful’ - prominent doctors or lawyers, accomplished in the arts, or leading scientists. One fifth ended up ‘unsuccessful’ within their professions. The more successful, the longer they lived. The most successful men lived on average five years longer than the least. In fact, Terman’s rating of success at age 30 predicted life-span decades later. This effect was not explained by greater wealth, avoiding smoking and drinking, a happier marriage, more education, or conscientiousness (although conscientiousness did explain part...

---

### Biographies of Top Entrepreneurs

- Published: 2014-05-06
- Modified: 2018-07-23
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/05/biographies-of-top-entrepreneurs/
- Topics: Found a tech startup

Lots of the people we coach want to know how to become a successful technological entrepreneur. One approach to this difficult question is to assess which unusual traits are common among the most successful tech entrepreneurs. In this post, we review the biographies of the ten richest tech entrepreneurs. Here is what we found:

<ul>
<li>All attended American Universities, though only half graduated (3 to start companies but 2 dropped out before they started their companies), and none have postgraduate qualifications.</p></li>
<li><p>8 of the 10 entrepreneur&rsquo;s Wikipedia page had stories or achievements demonstrating exceptional tech skills or interest in technology. (Azim Premji (Wipro) and Lawrence Ellison (Oracle)) are the only two whose Wikipedia pages do not demonstrate exceptional talent/interest in tech.</p></li>
<li><p>Fewer demonstrated early interest in business - Jeff Bezos and Michael Dell being the only exceptions</p></li>
<li><p>Only three took a job after finishing university and before starting a company.

<ul>
<li><p>Jeff Bezos, worked in multiple computer science-related jobs</p></li>
<li><p>Larry Ellison, worked for a data company while developing his product</p></li>
<li><p>Paul Allen, worked in programming before starting Microsoft</p></li>
</ul></li>
</ul>


Lots of the people we coach want to know how to start a successful technology company. One approach to this difficult question is to assess which unusual traits are common among the most successful tech entrepreneurs. In this post, we review the biographies of the ten richest tech entrepreneurs. Here is what we found: All attended American Universities, though only half graduated (3 to start companies but 2 dropped out before they started their companies), and none have postgraduate qualifications. 8 of the 10 entrepreneur’s Wikipedia page had stories or achievements demonstrating exceptional tech skills or interest in technology. (Azim Premji (Wipro) and Lawrence Ellison (Oracle)) are the only two whose Wikipedia pages do not demonstrate exceptional talent/interest in tech. Fewer demonstrated early interest in business - Jeff Bezos and Michael Dell being the only exceptions. Only three took a job after finishing university and before starting a company. Jeff Bezos, worked in multiple computer science-related jobs. Larry Ellison, worked for a data company while developing his product. Paul Allen, worked in programming before starting Microsoft. 6 people were involved with a company with more than one founder, and 4 were the sole owner of the company. There are a few cautions with this kind of research: First, it may be that most of the determinants of success in technological entrepreneurship are specific to the technology e. g. Yahoo’s founders David Filo and Jerry Yang were among the first million users of the internet and so in 1994, their Guide to...

---

### Shared values predict startup success? An interview with Saberr

- Published: 2014-05-01
- Modified: 2023-09-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/05/shared-values-predict-startup-success-an-interview-with-saberr/
- Topics: Personal fit

<a href='//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/295/original/saberr.jpg?1398725409'><img alt="Saberr" class="image medium" src="//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/295/medium/saberr.jpg?1398725409" /></a>

<h2>Introduction</h2>

As part of our ongoing research we have been looking at the best ways to go into entrepreneurship. When we <a href="/2013/10/interview-with-matt-clifford/">talked to Matt Clifford</a>, of Entrepreneur First about the question, he suggested talking to Saberr. Saberr are a small startup focussed on the question of predicting the success of teams in business settings, and they have already had some impressive successes.

We spoke to Alistair Shepherd by phone, one of the two original founders of Saberr, about their perspective on forming a successful entrepreneurial team. The following is a selection of highlights from the call, edited and reorganised for clarity.

<h2>Key points</h2>

According to research by Noam Wasserman most startups fail because of their team, suggesting team composition is important for entrepreneurial success.
While standard personality tests have <a href="/2013/04/how-important-is-fitting-in-at-work/">not been shown</a> to be very successful at predicting success in careers, Saberr have achieved some impressive, if small scale, predictive success using a model based on value alignment and behavioural diversity.


Introduction As part of our ongoing research we have been looking at the best ways to go into entrepreneurship. When we talked to Matt Clifford, of Entrepreneur First about the question, he suggested talking to Saberr. Saberr are a small startup focused on the question of predicting the success of teams in business settings, and they have already had some impressive successes. We spoke to Alistair Shepherd by phone, one of the two original founders of Saberr, about their perspective on forming a successful entrepreneurial team. The following is a selection of highlights from the call, edited and reorganised for clarity. Key points According to research by Noam Wasserman most startups fail because of their team, suggesting team composition is important for entrepreneurial success. While standard personality tests have not been shown to be very successful at predicting success in careers, Saberr have achieved some impressive, if small scale, predictive success using a model based on value alignment and behavioural diversity. The interview What does Saberr do? We help organisations optimise their workforce by designing internal teams, or by recruiting candidates who are actually more likely to fit well with the rest of the team. In Jim Collins’ book “Good to Great” one of the principles is that companies whose workforce is aligned on values is 6 times more productive than their competition. A rather startling statistic but it’s not new or revolutionary. The question is how do you find employees who are aligned on their values or how do...

---

### App Academy interview with Buck Shlegeris

> Buck Shlergeris is a teaching assistant at App Academy. We interviewed him on how to enter, what you do on the course and what the benefits are.

- Published: 2014-04-28
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/04/interview-with-buck-shlegeris-from-app-academy/
- Topics: Computer science, Earning to Give, Income, Software Engineering

Buck Shlegeris is a teaching assistant at <a href="http://www.appacademy.io/">App Academy</a> in San Francisco. Buck plans to use his earnings in programming to give to charities that improve the future. We discussed whether 80,000 Hours members can start a career in programming by doing a coding bootcamp. Below are some edited notes from our conversation.

<strong>Summary of main points:</strong>

<ul>
<li><p>People can enter training at App Academy from an unrelated background such as philosophy or other humanities with a few weeks of preparation.</p></li>
<li><p>The application includes some programming challenges and takes takes 10-20 hours to complete.</p></li>
<li><p>The course requires 60+ hours of work per week for 12 weeks.</p></li>
<li><p>90% of App Academy students make it to graduation. By asking for help if you are failing to progress, you can probably further reduce the chance of dropping out.</p></li>
<li><p>Over 95% of App Academy graduates seeking employment as programmers attain it.</p></li>
<li><p>The average income of graduates is $100k in San Francisco&rsquo;s Bay Area, with 90% securing an income from $80-120k. In New York City, the average income is $84k.</p></li>
</ul>


Introduction Buck Shlegeris is a teaching assistant at App Academy in San Francisco, who is earning to give. We discussed whether it is feasible for 80,000 Hours members to switch into a career in programming using a coding bootcamp like App Academy. We spoke to Buck because we knew him and he's involved in the effective altruism community. Here are our notes from that conversation. Summary of main points: People can enter training at App Academy from an unrelated background such as philosophy or other humanities with a few weeks of preparation. The application includes some programming challenges and takes around an hour. However, it takes around 10-20 hours to learn enough programming to reach the interview stage. The course requires 60+ hours of work per week for 12 weeks. 90% of App Academy students make it to graduation. By asking for help if you are failing to progress, you can probably further reduce the chance of dropping out. Over 95% of App Academy graduates seeking employment as programmers attain it. The average income of graduates is $100k in San Francisco’s Bay Area, with 90% securing an income from $80-120k. In New York City, the average income is $84k. The cost of attending App Academy is 18% deducted from your first year’s salary. For many individuals, App Academy can quickly and cheaply train students for likely lucrative employment. However, we note that getting a working visa in the USA usually requires a 4 year degree or 12 years of relevant...

---

### The Undercover Economist speaks to 80,000 Hours

- Published: 2014-04-22
- Modified: 2021-11-18
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/04/the-undercover-economist-speaks-to-80-000-hours/
- Topics: Biomedical Research, Founder of new projects

<a href='//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/290/original/tim2.jpg?1396388577'><img alt="Tim2" class="image medium" src="//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/290/medium/tim2.jpg?1396388577" /></a>

Tim Harford recently spoke to us at Oxford. He&rsquo;s a journalist for the <em>Financial Times</em> and the best-selling author of the <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Undercover-Economist-Tim-Harford/dp/0349119856">Undercover Economist</a>, which we&rsquo;d recommend as a popular introduction to Economics. He also wrote <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Adapt-Success-Always-Starts-Failure/dp/0349121516">Adapt</a>, which argues that trial and error is the best strategy for solving important global problems. The arguments he makes fit with some of the arguments we have made for <a href="/2013/07/your-career-is-like-a-startup/">trial and error being a good way to plan your career</a>.

Tim gave a talk on innovation, similar to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEoqRJ86X9g">this</a>. The talk introduced a distinction between two types of innovation, and asks, which one is more important?

<ol>
<li><p><strong>Marginal improvements</strong> - incremental improvements to existing systems.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Revolutionary improvements</strong> - transformations of existing systems to create new ones.</p></li>
</ol>


Tim Harford recently spoke to us at Oxford. He’s a journalist for the Financial Times and the best-selling author of the Undercover Economist, which we’d recommend as a popular introduction to Economics. He also wrote Adapt, which argues that trial and error is the best strategy for solving important global problems. The arguments he makes fit with some of the arguments we have made for trial and error being a good way to plan your career. Tim gave a talk on innovation, similar to this. The talk introduced a distinction between two types of innovation, and asks, which one is more important? Marginal improvements - incremental improvements to existing systems. Revolutionary improvements - transformations of existing systems to create new ones. For instance, developing the Fosbury Flop was a revolutionary improvement for the high jump. Testing out different diet regimes for athletes or different ways of running up to the bar would yield marginal improvements. If you’re aiming to maximise your impact, which type of innovation should you aim to do? Tim introduced some reasons that revolutionary improvements can be neglected: The value is more difficult to capture - Revolutionary improvements tend to be the types of innovations that quickly get widely copied, and so it’s difficult for the inventor to capture the benefits of the innovation for themselves. This reduces the economic incentives for individuals or organisations to invest in this kind of innovation. Revolutionary improvements are often long-shots, which makes them risky and low-status to work on -...

---

### The Copenhagen Consensus speaks to 80,000 Hours about global prioritisation

- Published: 2014-04-17
- Modified: 2024-11-26
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/04/the-copenhagen-consensus-speaks-to-80-000-hours-about-global-prioritisation/
- Topics: Global priorities research

In October, Bjorn Lomborg from the <a href="http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/">Copenhagen Consensus Centre</a> led a global priorities setting session at 80,000 Hours: Oxford in the Oxford Union. The video of the event has been uploaded by the Union.

In the session, Lomborg guides the audience through the pros and cons of different uses of development aid, and asks them to put them in order of priority from the perspective of maximising the welfare of the global poor. Throughout the session, live votes are taken from the audience via wifi.



More on the Copenhagen Consensus...


In October, Bjorn Lomborg from the Copenhagen Consensus Centre led a global priorities setting session at 80,000 Hours: Oxford in the Oxford Union. The video of the event has been uploaded by the Union. In the session, Lomborg guides the audience through the pros and cons of different uses of development aid, and asks the audience to put them in order of priority from the perspective of maximising the welfare of the global poor. Throughout the session, live votes are taken from the audience via wifi. About the Copenhangen Consensus The CCC is one of the only groups in the world which does and promotes global priority setting, and they've been major pioneers in this area. Every four years, they ask leading economists to make and discuss cost-benefit analyses of high potential solutions to pressing global problems in a series of challenge papers. A panel (often involving several Nobel Laureates) places the solutions in order of priority. You can see the past challenge papers comparing the solutions to different global problems here. Although we don't agree with all aspects of the methodology, we often find these a useful first place to turn when considering a new cause, especially to get a rough sense of how economists see the area. This is the final list of investments from 2012. The book Global Crises, Global Solutions is a great summary of their work.

---

### How much do people pursuing earning to give actually give?

- Published: 2014-04-09
- Modified: 2022-11-17
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/04/how-much-do-people-pursuing-earning-to-give-actually-give/
- Topics: Earning to Give

<h2>Introduction</h2>

The purpose of this document is to estimate:
1. How much do people pursuing earning to give donate, and how much can we expect them to in the immediate future?
2. How much more giving has 80,000 Hours caused?

The second part fits into our upcoming impact evaluation.

<h2>Summary</h2>

<h3>How much do people pursuing earning to give donate?</h3>

<ul>
<li>We estimate there&rsquo;s at least 100 people pursuing earning to give in the effective altruism community, based on survey data from the effective altruist organisations.</li>
<li>From our own surveys, we&rsquo;ve found 39 people pursuing earning to give whose career plans have been changed by 80,000 Hours.</li>
<li>A random sample of ten of these 39 reported total donations to high impact and meta-charities over the last three years of £210k. </li>
<li>The top three donors we know among the group of 39 gave £230k over the last three years.</li>
<li>The members of the random sample of ten estimate they will donate £1.6m over the next three years to high impact charities and meta-charities. The top five donors we know expect to donate £2.1m over the next three years. If a significant number continue earning to give, donations will be substantially higher after 2016 due to rapid expected earnings growth.</li>
<li>The majority of the donations are expected to be to effective altruist organisations, followed by GiveWell recommended charities.</li>
<li>The estimates are complicated by: (i) the difficulty forecasting salary (ii) the chance of mass drop outs from earning to give (iii) biases in reporting (iv) dependence upon a couple of individuals, who account for a large fraction of the donations.</li>
<li>Overall, our best guess estimate is that the group of 39 has donated £230k - £400k over the past three years, and will donate about £2m over the next three years (with an 80% confidence interval of £500k - £4m).</li>
<li>The entire earning to give community of around 100 is likely to be donating about twice as much.</li>
</ul>

<h3>How much more giving has 80,000 Hours caused?</h3>

<ul>
<li>We asked the random sample of ten from among the group of 39 to estimate how much of their expected giving to effective charities is due to 80,000 Hours. On average, they estimated 30%.</li>
<li>We searched the group of 39 for the donors who attributed the most donations over the next three years to 80,000 Hours&rsquo; influence. Collectively, the top five attribute £565k. More detail on each individual is in the <a href="/2014/04/how-much-do-people-pursuing-earning-to-give-actually-give/#appendixindividual-studies-of-career-change">Appendix</a>.</li>
<li>These estimates are complicated by all the issues that complicate the overall estimates of donations, plus additional biases and the difficulty of separating our influence from the rest of the effective altruism community.</li>
<li>Based on the survey data and these considerations, our overall estimate is that 80,000 Hours has caused £50k of donations over the past three years. We expect to cause £500k of donations over the next three years, and substantially more after that, although our estimates are highly uncertain. The increase over the next three years is because more of the community will soon start work, and others are expected to see rapid salary growth during their first years of employment.</li>
</ul>


Introduction The purpose of this document is to estimate: How much do people pursuing earning to give donate, and how much can we expect them to in the immediate future? How much more giving has 80,000 Hours caused? The second part fits into our upcoming impact evaluation. Summary How much do people pursuing earning to give donate? We estimate there’s at least 100 people pursuing earning to give in the effective altruism community, based on survey data from the effective altruist organisations. From our own surveys, we’ve found 39 people pursuing earning to give whose career plans have been changed by 80,000 Hours. A random sample of ten of these 39 reported total donations to high impact and meta-charities over the last three years of £210k. The top three donors we know among the group of 39 gave £230k over the last three years. The members of the random sample of ten estimate they will donate £1. 6m over the next three years to high impact charities and meta-charities. The top five donors we know expect to donate £2. 1m over the next three years. If a significant number continue earning to give, donations will be substantially higher after 2016 due to rapid expected earnings growth. The majority of the donations are expected to be to effective altruist organisations, followed by GiveWell recommended charities. The estimates are complicated by: (i) the difficulty forecasting salary (ii) the chance of mass drop outs from earning to give (iii) biases in reporting (iv) dependence upon...

---

### 80,000 Hours visits Number 10

- Published: 2014-04-02
- Modified: 2014-09-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/04/80-000-hours-visits-number-10/
- Topics: Unconventional advice

<a href='//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/286/original/blog_10.jpg?1396386410'><img alt="Blog_10" class="image medium" src="//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/286/medium/blog_10.jpg?1396386410" /></a>

In December, Will and I had the opportunity to visit Number 10 Downing St. to meet with policy advisors to discuss government policy on careers advice.

After the meeting, we wrote up a <a href="https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8OdBVMpAjJHZnZHVzN1OEJhdGM/edit">white paper on how we think nationwide careers advice can be improved</a>

Below, you can find the executive summary.


In December, Will and I had the opportunity to visit Number 10 Downing St. to meet with policy advisors to discuss government policy on careers advice. After the meeting, we wrote up a policy paper on how we think nationwide careers advice can be improved. Below, you can find the executive summary. Improving careers advice: executive summary We are impressed with the Government’s efforts to invest in careers advice. The National Careers Service (NCS) is a success in terms of its rapid development, huge reach and high user satisfaction ratings. However, we think more can be done to improve the quality of careers advice in the UK. Careers advice has more potential to enable people to find meaningful work and contribute to a flourishing society. In this report, we outline some of the ways we think careers advice could be improved, which we believe also apply to the NCS. In summary: A large amount of high-quality information is available to job seekers, but it’s overwhelming and difficult to digest. This could be improved by providing simpler, high-level, strategic information and advice both online and in-person. For instance, advice could highlight skills that are particularly in-demand, inform people about the importance of keeping their options open, and group opportunities into ‘career paths’ rather than hundreds of disconnected job profiles. The social and economic contribution of a wide range of different careers could be highlighted, helping more people to find more meaningful work and make a larger contribution to society. If presented...

---

### Review of progress on the website

- Published: 2014-03-11
- Modified: 2024-11-13
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/03/review-of-progress-on-the-website/
- Topics: Updates

This document outlines the website updates from the period of August
2013 to January 2014. It's part of our annual review, the rest of which will be released on the blog over the next month.

The most significant change was a site redesign,
followed by several new features such as a hierarchical categories
system, a research rating system, and newly designed pages.

Throughout this period we've decided on having a more focussed
brand and website in the future.  In the next year, technical development
will primarily support website maintenance and organizational research.

<a href='//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/275/original/image08.png?1394133470'><img alt="Image08" class="image large" src="//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/275/large/image08.png?1394133470" /></a>


Summary This document outlines the website updates from the period of August 2013 to January 2014. It's part of our annual review, the rest of which will be released on the blog over the next month. The most significant change was a site redesign, followed by several new features such as a hierarchical categories system, a research rating system, and newly designed pages. Throughout this period we've decided on having a more focussed brand and website in the future. In the next year, technical development will primarily support website maintenance and organizational research. Website Redesign In early 2013, the 80,000 Hours team decided to redesign the brand and website. These were to be launched simultaneously for consistency. The team chose an initial completion date of approximately October 1st 2013, close to the start of the academic year in the UK. The redesign was comprehensive, resulting in changes to the 80,000 Hours color scheme, logo, branding, and website. It was carried through and most of the intended changes were completed. Important documents Several redesign analysis documents were written by the 80,000 Hours team, and other design documents were created by an external design team. Most of the analysis documents and select design documents are below. Analysis Documents Slideshow: Technical Debt with the 80,000 Hours Codebase August 2013 Website Snapshot Analysis by Ozzie Gooen Design Documents Logotype and Identity Logo Variations Business Card Templates Initial Templates Using New...

---

### 80,000 Hours impact survey evaluation

- Published: 2014-03-10
- Modified: 2021-11-18
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/03/80-000-hours-impact-survey-evaluation/
- Topics: Uncategorised

To understand our impact and learn how to improve as an organisation, we recently ran an open survey of our users.

We released the survey on 7th January through social media, our blog, newsletter emails and some individual emails. The following post analyses the 206 responses we had received by the 7th February.

<h2>Summary</h2>

<ul>
<li>The survey identified sixty three people who said engaging with 80,000 Hours significantly changed their career plans. These people could specify the changes and how they came about. We know from other sources of a further forty people who changed plans, bringing our total to over one hundred.</li>
<li>About a third of the changes resulted only from reading online content. This is the first systematic evidence that our online content can change plans without one-on-one contact with the team.</li>
<li>One-on-one coaching, discussion with people in the community and attending events were all significant in changing plans.</li>
<li>We also collected evidence of impact beyond plan changes. We found for every three plan changes, there was a ratio of 1.5 people introduced to effective altruism for first time who now identify as supporters, and two people who changed their attitudes towards careers.</li>
<li>Giving What We Can, Less Wrong, word of mouth and Peter Singer&rsquo;s TED talk also bring people to the effective altruism community.</li>
<li>Important sources of promotion for 80,000 Hours seem to be word of mouth, Less Wrong, our Oxford and Cambridge events, online search, social media and Peter Singer&rsquo;s TED talk.</li>
<li>The rate at which we caused people to change plans roughly doubled when we became a full-time rather than voluntary organisation. This rate has been roughly steady since.</li>
<li>After seeing what kind of help people want, we decided to increase the priority put on bringing back some simple member networking tools.</li>
<li>We identified several themes in the feedback, detailed later in the post.</li>
<li>We received thirty very positive testimonials, which we take as a strong show of support.</li>
<li>We collected data on the careers and causes that supporters of 80,000 Hours commonly pursue, detailed later in the post.</li>
</ul>


To fill out our current impact survey please click here. Introduction To understand our impact and learn how to improve as an organisation, we recently ran an open survey of our users. We released the survey on 7th January through social media, our blog, newsletter emails and some individual emails. The following post analyses the 206 responses we had received by the 7th February. Summary The survey identified sixty three people who said engaging with 80,000 Hours significantly changed their career plans. These people could specify the changes and how they came about. We know from other sources of a further forty people who changed plans, bringing our total to over one hundred. About a third of the changes resulted only from reading online content. This is the first systematic evidence that our online content can change plans without one-on-one contact with the team. One-on-one coaching, discussion with people in the community and attending events were all significant in changing plans. We also collected evidence of impact beyond plan changes. We found for every three plan changes, there was a ratio of 1. 5 people introduced to effective altruism for first time who now identify as supporters, and two people who changed their attitudes towards careers. Giving What We Can, Less Wrong, word of mouth and Peter Singer’s TED talk also bring people to the effective altruism community. Important sources of promotion for 80,000 Hours seem to be word of mouth, Less Wrong, our Oxford and Cambridge events, online search, social...

---

### Coaching Applications Analysis

- Published: 2014-03-05
- Modified: 2022-01-18
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/03/coaching-applications-analysis/
- Topics: Uncategorised

Who has been applying to <a href="/speak-with-us/?int_campaign=2014-03-coaching-applications-analysis/">coaching</a> from 80,000 Hours?  In this post, we analyze our coaching applications to understand what kinds of people are requesting coaching.

<h2>Summary</h2>

<h3>Data sources and quantity</h3>

We analyzed responses from our <a href="/speak-with-us/?int_campaign=2014-03-coaching-applications-analysis/">Social Impact Coaching applications</a>.  These consisted of multiple choice questions, text-response paragraphs, and CVs or resumes.  This analysis looked at all 91 Social Impact Coaching responses from Oct 15th 2013 to Jan 22 2014.

<h3>Key questions</h3>

<strong>What were the key demographic characteristics of the audience?</strong>

<ul>
<li>Only 30% were from the UK. 38% were from the US, with others spread
around the globe, especially Australia and Canada.  </li>
<li>73% were in their twenties, and 20% were over 30.  </li>
<li>We estimated that approximately 40% of applicants were not students.  </li>
</ul>

<strong>Where do most coaching applicants come from?</strong>

<ul>
<li>The most important source was personal referrals at 28% of applicants.  </li>
<li>Next, came the student groups in Oxford and Cambridge, which yielded 24% of applicants.  </li>
<li>Google search was a surprisingly common source at 16% of applicants.  </li>
<li>Two other important sources were the CFAR/LW community and Peter Singer&rsquo;s TED talk.</li>
</ul>

<strong>How high achieving is the audience?</strong><br />
Our impression of the audience was that they were extremely &lsquo;high achieving&rsquo; from the standpoint of intelligence and general prestige.  It seems like we have a surprisingly high number of top young academics, entrepreneurs and charity workers applying.

This could have been biased because it has become known that 80,000 Hours coaching applications are highly competitive.  Therefore it may be that many applicants who didn't feel impressive did not apply.

<strong>How knowledgeable about effective altruism is our audience?</strong><br />
Approximately 1/4th of the applicants seemed to be very familiar with effective altruism, 1/4th somewhat familiar, and the other 1/2 seemed unfamiliar (see the 'Knowledge of effective altruism' rating below for more details). About 45% said that they support one of the causes common in the effective altruism community.

<strong>How altruistic is the audience?</strong><br />
They appear to be highly altruistic on average, with 30% pledging at least 10% of their income to charity and over half saying that positive impact is the main or only relevant factor in choosing their career. We might expect this to be biased upwards because it was obvious from the application which answers we&rsquo;d prefer.   From examining CVs qualitatively, we classified about ? of the audience as &lsquo;highly altruistic&rsquo;.

<strong>Is there a subsection of the audience who might be willing to pay for
coaching?</strong><br />
We&rsquo;re interesting in the possibility of making part of the coaching self-funding. Our best guess was that the people who will be most willing to pay for coaching are people from tech and finance backgrounds aged 25-35. We found that about 20% of the requests fell in this category, which was higher than our expectations.

<strong>How has our audience changed over time?</strong><br />
There was a 0.17 correlation between audience ID (the order in which they joined) and the achievement score.  Therefore it seems like the applications are becoming slightly higher in average achievement, which is a positive sign.  However, it&rsquo;s hard to draw firm conclusions because the period of time was very short (October 15th 2013 to Jan 15th 2014).

<strong>What were the most common types of question?</strong><br />
The vast majority of questions were about choosing careers.  Approximately 30% of questions seemed directly focussed on optimizing social impact as opposed to improving the career from a personal perspective.  Taking other parts of the applications into account, it seemed that most applicants primarily care about social impact.  After reviewing these questions we came up with an <a href="##main-questions-methodology">alternative method</a> of categorizing questions.

<h3>Additional findings</h3>

Doing this analysis required us to personally read each application and skim each resume.  These were highly revealing.

<ol>
<li><p>Entrepreneurs, global &lsquo;shapers&rsquo;, international lawyers, genius geeks, and lots of otherwise different groups all share uncertainty but desire to do good in the world.  Our audience base seemed diverse indeed.</p></li>
<li><p>Some applicants discussed frustrating experiences at the forefront of careers in several &lsquo;ethical&rsquo; industries.  For instance, several applicants experienced frustration at the difficulties of getting positions at international nonprofits (and some of these people spoke several languages and did diverse work on many different continents).  These could represent very useful opportunities to learn from this community, perhaps in direct interviews.</p></li>
<li><p>Many of these applicants could probably benefit greatly from meeting each other.  They are, on the whole, extremely intelligent and talented, but often confused.  Many are looking for future startup or nonprofit co-founders.  We&rsquo;re not sure what organization or who should facilitate connections in the community, but this seems like a really valuable service.</p></li>
<li><p>80,000 Hours&rsquo; coaching service attracts a large community that is not familiar with effective altruism.  Much of this seems to be what is call the &lsquo;Globalists&rsquo; above.  This group seems to have very different goals and needs from the &lsquo;Rationalists&rsquo;.  It may make sense for 80,000 Hours to either focus on one of these groups, or at least experiment more with the &lsquo;Globalist&rsquo; group.</p></li>
<li><p>We noticed that a significant number of the applicants wanted to do one of the following:<br />
a. Consult international NGOs on effectiveness<br />
b. Create new social ventures to help the world, (often not particularly effective altruism inspired)<br />
c. Technology related to decision making, policy making, or global poverty<br />
This leads us to believe that impressive new organizations doing (a) or (c) may be able to find many excellent employees.  It may be useful to create an incubator or social groups to encourage (b).</p></li>
</ol>


Overview Who has been applying to coaching from 80,000 Hours? In this post, we analyze our coaching applications to understand what kinds of people are requesting coaching. Table of Contents Summary Data sources and quantity We analyzed responses from our Social Impact Coaching applications. These consisted of multiple choice questions, text-response paragraphs, and CVs or resumes. This analysis looked at all 91 Social Impact Coaching responses from Oct 15th 2013 to Jan 22 2014. Key questions What were the key demographic characteristics of the audience? Only 30% were from the UK. 38% were from the US, with others spread around the globe, especially Australia and Canada. 73% were in their twenties, and 20% were over 30. We estimated that approximately 40% of applicants were not students. Where do most coaching applicants come from? The most important source was personal referrals at 28% of applicants. Next, came the student groups in Oxford and Cambridge, which yielded 24% of applicants. Google search was a surprisingly common source at 16% of applicants. Two other important sources were the CFAR/LW community and Peter Singer’s TED talk. How high achieving is the audience? Our impression of the audience was that they were extremely ‘high achieving’ from the standpoint of intelligence and general prestige. It seems like we have a surprisingly high number of top young academics, entrepreneurs and charity workers applying. This could have been biased because it has become known that 80,000 Hours coaching applications are highly competitive. Therefore it may be that...

---

### Interview with Matt Gibb

- Published: 2014-02-25
- Modified: 2015-04-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/02/interview-with-matt-gibb/
- Topics: Earning to Give, Found a tech startup

<h2>Introduction</h2>

Matt Gibb has been involved with 80,000 Hours since its inception. Early on, he was influenced by the idea of earning to give and has been pursuing this for the last few years through entrepreneurship. When we spoke to him he was focussed on a company <a href="https://www.facebook.com/dropkickr">dropkic.kr</a> at the startup incubator <a href="http://betaspring.com/">Betaspring</a>. With dropkic.kr, Matt has tied himself and his co-founders to the mast by adding a legally binding agreement to the company charter to donate ? of any proceeds they from selling their stake to GiveWell or Giving What We Can recommended charities.

<blockquote>
  Charitable Contributions. <strong>Each Founder hereby agrees that</strong>, upon the earlier to occur of a Sale of the Company or a Transfer of all Company Securities held by such Founder (such time, the &ldquo;Charitable Contribution Trigger&rdquo;), <strong>such Founder shall contribute not less than one-third (1/3) of such Founder&rsquo;s Aggregate Proceeds</strong> (measured as of, and after giving effect to any amounts received by such Founder as a result of, such Sale of the Company or Transfer) (such amount, the &ldquo;Charitable Contribution Amount&rdquo;), <strong>to one or more global health-related charities as may be recognized by <a href="http://givingwhatwecan.org/">givingwhatwecan.org</a> and <a href="http://givewell.org/">givewell.org</a> or any similar or successor research organization</strong>; provided, however, that each Founder shall be entitled to deduct from such Charitable Contribution Amount, on a dollar-for-dollar basis, the amount of any and all global health-related charitable donations made by such Founder from and after the date hereof and prior to such Charitable Contribution Trigger. (emphasis added)
</blockquote>

He has some experience as a successful entrepreneur, having co founded <a href="http://promopush.com/login/">Promo Push Ltd</a>. in 2010 an electronic dance music promotion company, now servicing 250,000 customers including Sony Music and a subsidiary of Universal music. We talked to him about his experience in tech entrepreneurship and his views on getting into it for those just starting out. What follows is a edited and reworked version of the interview.

<h2>Summary of Matt&rsquo;s points</h2>

<ul>
<li>The best way to learn what you need in order to make a successful startup is by trying, so the best path into entrepreneurship is to aim to start as soon as possible.</li>
<li>For those interested in entrepreneurship web startups are a good option because they are the cheapest to start, but the startup costs of new businesses in physical products is dropping rapidly.</li>
<li>When starting out as an entrepreneur it is much more important to focus on execution than the idea, because it is unlikely the idea you end up with will be the same one you started with.</li>
<li>The demand for technical skills in backend or frontend development outsrips supply in the startup world, so they are very valuable skills to learn if you want to become an entrepreneur.</li>
</ul>


Introduction Matt Gibb has been involved with 80,000 Hours since its inception. Early on, he was influenced by the idea of earning to give and has been pursuing this for the last few years through entrepreneurship. When we spoke to him he was focussed on a company dropkic. kr at the startup incubator Betaspring. With dropkic. kr, Matt has tied himself and his co-founders to the mast by adding a legally binding agreement to the company charter to donate ? of any proceeds they from selling their stake to GiveWell or Giving What We Can recommended charities. Charitable Contributions. Each Founder hereby agrees that, upon the earlier to occur of a Sale of the Company or a Transfer of all Company Securities held by such Founder (such time, the “Charitable Contribution Trigger”), such Founder shall contribute not less than one-third (1/3) of such Founder’s Aggregate Proceeds (measured as of, and after giving effect to any amounts received by such Founder as a result of, such Sale of the Company or Transfer) (such amount, the “Charitable Contribution Amount”), to one or more global health-related charities as may be recognized by givingwhatwecan. org and givewell. org or any similar or successor research organization; provided, however, that each Founder shall be entitled to deduct from such Charitable Contribution Amount, on a dollar-for-dollar basis, the amount of any and all global health-related charitable donations made by such Founder from and after the date hereof and prior to such Charitable Contribution Trigger. (emphasis added) He has some experience as...

---

### Case study: should I finish my degree?

- Published: 2014-02-21
- Modified: 2014-09-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/02/case-study-should-i-finish-my-degree/
- Topics: Income

<h2>Introduction</h2>

Martin is taking a year out from an applied science degree at a Russell group university to work in industry. He came to us very undecided about his path after graduation and wondering whether he should finish his degree at all.

The following is our notes on what was discussed and the results that followed.

<h2>Lessons learned</h2>

<ul>
<li>We discovered there is fairly strong academic evidence for <a href="/2014/01/the-value-of-a-degree/">high financial returns from doing a degree</a>.</li>
<li>Career capital, earnings potential and keeping your options open have been highly relevant factors for assessing entry level jobs for most students who have come to us so far, who don&rsquo;t already have several strong options on the table.</li>
<li>We want to prepare an overview of the options in finance, since lots of people have asked us about this.</li>
</ul>


Introduction Martin is taking a year out from an applied science degree at a Russell group university to work in industry. He came to us very undecided about his path after graduation and wondering whether he should finish his degree at all. The following is our notes on what was discussed and the results that followed. Lessons learned We discovered there is fairly strong academic evidence for high financial returns from doing a degree. Career capital, earnings potential and keeping your options open have been highly relevant factors for assessing entry level jobs for most students who have come to us so far, who don’t already have several strong options on the table. We want to prepare an overview of the options in finance, since lots of people have asked us about this. The research First meeting In our first meeting, we went over Martin’s current options after graduation, including: corporate jobs in marketing/sales/product development/management, (science) entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship, research into his degree subject, accountancy, law, consulting and finance. We discussed how each of these might have an impact either directly or through earning to give. Martin had experience in marketing and wanted to rule it out as not a fit. He also ruled out law and accountancy. We determined some key criteria: How useful is the career capital? In particular how good is it for going into social entrepreneurship or high earning roles? How much does it keep your options open? How satisfying is it? In particular, does it...

---

### Case study: earning to give compared to medical research

- Published: 2014-02-19
- Modified: 2014-09-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/02/case-study-earning-to-give-compared-to-medical-research/
- Topics: Biomedical Research, Doctor, Earning to Give, Finance, Medical Researcher

<h2>Introduction</h2>

Ramit came to us with a simple question: should I try to train as a medic with the aim of doing biomedical research, or should I seek a high earning job in finance and pursue Earning to Give?

He&rsquo;s currently doing both - working as a quantitative financial analyst giving away more than a third of his salary (he was an early stage funder of Give Directly) and taking pre-med courses part time, as well as other projects!

Ramit&rsquo;s initial thought was that the biomedical research path would be better. Read on to find out how he came to change his mind, and came up with a new set of next steps.


Introduction Ramit came to us with a simple question: should I try to train as a medic with the aim of doing biomedical research, or should I seek a high earning job in finance and pursue Earning to Give? He’s currently doing both - working as a quantitative financial analyst giving away more than a third of his salary (he was an early stage funder of Give Directly) and taking pre-med courses part time, as well as other projects! Ramit’s initial thought was that the biomedical research path would be better. Read on to find out how he came to change his mind, and came up with a new set of next steps. The research In our first meeting, we discussed Ramit’s background, the decisions facing him and his thoughts on their pros and cons. Ramit’s guess was that he could make a considerably larger contribution as a medical researcher, in part because that might allow him to work on potentially very high return projects like vaccine development. We also discussed some big picture questions, like how concern for the far future might be relevant to picking causes. After this discussion, we decided to do a full comparison of earning to give and biomedical research. Here’s the report we produced. We also started a shallow investigation of biomedical research careers. You can see two of the four interviews we’ve performed for that here and here. We ended up coming down in favor of earning to give, especially if Ramit supports...

---

### Should you do a degree?

- Published: 2014-02-18
- Modified: 2022-12-13
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/02/should-you-do-a-degree/
- Topics: Advice for undergraduates

<a href='//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/285/original/graduates.jpg?1395424789'><img alt="Graduates" class="image large" src="//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/285/large/graduates.jpg?1395424789" /></a>

As university fees have continued to increase, there has been debate in the press over whether doing a degree is still worth it: the Telegraph asks <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/universityeducation/student-life/10036720/University-was-it-worth-it-The-9000-question.html">&rdquo;University: was it worth it?&rdquo;</a> and a Daily Mail headline reads: <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2229587/Value-university-education-falls-Graduates-degree-earn-22-decade.html">&ldquo;Degree earning power falls 22% in a decade - and top graduates are working in pubs&rdquo;</a>. The same debate is raging in the US, and has received excellent in-depth analysis by <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/08/26/introducing-the-tuition-is-too-damn-high/">Dylan Matthews of the Washington Post.</a>

The question of whether or not to do a university degree has arisen in our careers coaching. In a recent case study, we were asked by our coachee whether they should finish their degree. We&rsquo;ve previously been asked by a member whether they should start a degree, and we&rsquo;ve discussed career decisions with <a href="/2013/09/case-study-designing-a-new-organisation-that-might-be-more-effective-than-givewell-s-top-recommendation/">Joey and Xio</a>, who decided to put their degree on hold in order to start Effective Fundraising. So, we decided to write up our thoughts.

This article is aimed at the UK, though we think many of the ideas apply in other countries.

In summary:

<ul>
<li>If you have the option of doing a degree, it&rsquo;s normally best to take it. There are several good reasons to think it&rsquo;s one of the best ways to boost your career capital.</li>
<li>We&rsquo;re open to the idea that there can be better paths, but our guess is that they&rsquo;re relatively rare, because they would need to offer unusually high social returns or be unusually good for building career capital.</li>
<li>If you&rsquo;re not going to do a degree, some alternatives that we guess might be particularly promising include learning a high-earning trade, learning to program, working at a small company, and founding a new project.</li>
</ul>


Introduction As university fees have continued to increase, there has been debate in the press over whether doing a degree is still worth it: the Telegraph asks "University: was it worth it? " and a Daily Mail headline reads: “Degree earning power falls 22% in a decade - and top graduates are working in pubs”. The same debate is raging in the US, and has received excellent in-depth analysis by Dylan Matthews of the Washington Post. The question of whether or not to do a university degree has arisen in our careers coaching. In a recent case study, we were asked by our coachee whether they should finish their degree. We’ve previously been asked by a member whether they should start a degree, and we’ve discussed career decisions with Joey and Xio, who decided to put their degree on hold in order to start Effective Fundraising. So, we decided to write up our thoughts. This article is aimed at the UK, though we think many of the ideas apply in other countries. In summary: If you have the option of doing a degree, it’s normally best to take it. There are several good reasons to think it’s one of the best ways to boost your career capital. We’re open to the idea that there can be better paths, but our guess is that they’re relatively rare, because they would need to offer unusually high social returns or be unusually good for building career capital. If you’re not going to do a...

---

### Internship opportunities at 80,000 Hours

- Published: 2014-02-14
- Modified: 2020-08-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/02/internship-opportunities-at-80-000-hours/
- Topics: Uncategorised

We are looking for interns to join our Graduate Volunteer Scheme, which involves a period of 6-10 months of work in our Oxford-based office (although we are also interested in students who want to intern with us over the summer, and sometimes consider 2-3 month placements). We have roles in research, outreach, operations, fundraising, tech and design. Taking up a Graduate Volunteer position is a great way to gain experience for your future career, as well as meet a diverse range of interesting and highly motivated people, and do a lot of good.

As a Graduate Volunteer, there are lots of different areas to work on, and there's plenty of flexibility to adjust the role so it plays to your strengths and development aims. We make it our responsibility to ensure your time here allows you to grow as much as possible, as well as just being lots of fun! Many interns say the experience was a significant boost to their career, and we introduced several to the people who set them up with their current jobs. You can see why past interns have found the Graduate Volunteer Scheme a great experience at the bottom of this post.

The scheme has proved very popular with our current interns, with a stimulating and dedicated atmosphere in the office and a lively and welcoming community outside office hours. Perhaps the strongest evidence of this is that many have extended their stays repeatedly. Once you have applied, we are happy to connect you with a current intern to discuss what it's like to work with us. Read more about <a href="/recruitment##why-work-for-80000-hours">why working at 80,000 Hours is an excellent experience</a>.

We're looking for hardworking individuals with a strong desire for personal development who are deeply interested in making the world a better place in an effective way. <a href="/recruitment##what-are-we-looking-for">Find out more.</a>

We can often provide accommodation in a house with other volunteers and staff, free lunch, and expenses of up to £8 a day based on financial need, especially for longer-term interns. As you would play an important role for a significant period, we would make sure you weren't left out of pocket.


Note: This blog post was written in 2014. 80,000 Hours no longer offers internships, and the Centre for Effective Altruism now offers very few. We are looking for interns to join our Graduate Volunteer Scheme, which involves a period of 6-10 months of work in our Oxford-based office (although we are also interested in students who want to intern with us over the summer, and sometimes consider 2-3 month placements). We have roles in research, outreach, operations, fundraising, tech and design. Taking up a Graduate Volunteer position is a great way to gain experience for your future career, as well as meet a diverse range of interesting and highly motivated people, and do a lot of good. As a Graduate Volunteer, there are lots of different areas to work on, and there's plenty of flexibility to adjust the role so it plays to your strengths and development aims. We make it our responsibility to ensure your time here allows you to grow as much as possible, as well as just being lots of fun! Many interns say the experience was a significant boost to their career, and we introduced several to the people who set them up with their current jobs. You can see why past interns have found the Graduate Volunteer Scheme a great experience at the bottom of this post. The scheme has proved very popular with our current interns, with a stimulating and dedicated atmosphere in the office and a lively and welcoming community outside office hours... .

---

### An estimate of the expected influence of becoming a politician

- Published: 2014-02-12
- Modified: 2018-03-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/02/an-estimate-of-the-expected-influence-of-becoming-a-politician/
- Topics: Party Politics

<a href='//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/262/original/Politics.jpg?1391363140'><img alt="Politics" class="image medium" src="//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/262/medium/Politics.jpg?1391363140" /></a>

<h2>Introduction</h2>

How much influence could you have by becoming a politician? Common sense says that politicians have a lot of influence, and it&rsquo;s a serious contender as a high impact path for someone who&rsquo;s altruistically motivated. But aren't the chances of success incredibly low? Our guess was that even though the chances are low, the potential impact is still very high. So, when we were asked about UK politics in a recent case study, we decided to make a more detailed estimate of the expected influence to feed into an overall analysis of politics as a career path.

We found that chances of success are low, but for some students they&rsquo;re not low enough to offset the very large potential influence. The UK government budget is £720 billion, and even a small chance at influencing a budget that large could be highly significant (and the impact of politicians extends well beyond budgets).

We've extended our analysis of <a href="/2012/02/how-hard-is-it-to-become-prime-minister-of-the-united-kingdom/">the chances of an Oxford PPE graduate succeeding as a politician</a>, to make a rough estimate that <strong>such a student can expect to be able to direct £7.5 - 75 million to the causes they support</strong> from their chances of making it into elected office. For a student similar to an Oxford PPE graduate, this suggests the path is competitive with the most high potential <a href="/earning-to-give">earning to give</a> careers - such as those in finance - in terms of financial influence, which when combined with politicians&rsquo; law-making powers and advocacy opportunities could put politics clearly ahead.

Aren't politicians highly constrained by existing policy, what other politicians want, the desires of the electorate and other factors? Yes, but these factors have already been included in the estimate. Read on to see the full process.

<h2>Summary of the estimate</h2>

Our preliminary estimate is that an Oxford PPE graduate who aims to become a politician in the UK, could expect to influence <strong>£150 million</strong> of government spending, arising from their chances of making it into office. A number of factors decrease the impact of that money; giving a quality-adjusted estimate of <strong>£7.5 - 75 million</strong>, falling towards the lower end if you&rsquo;re primarily interested in very specific interventions (e.g. supporting a certain organisation) rather than broader ones (e.g. promoting evidence-based policy). This is the amount of government spending the graduate might be able to direct towards the causes they support.

For students without the typical attributes of Oxford PPE students, chances are significantly reduced. For instance, repeating the calculation but considering students from Oxford and Cambridge as a whole suggests expected influence on the order of £1 - 10 million. More generally, the expected influence is highly sensitive to the individual&rsquo;s degree of fit with politics i.e. it could be substantially higher for someone with strong success in student politics at Oxford, and near zero for many others.

Our proposed estimate is extremely coarse. We rely on a crude economic model of influence within government, assume that this influence in aggregate accounts for all public spending, and try to estimate the share of influence possessed by a number of relevant groups. We believe this model is much stronger than it appears casually, and do provide some justification for some of the simplifying assumptions at the end of the document. We also explain some important caveats, such as our uncertainty over the prominence of MPs and ministers, and focussing mainly on Oxford PPE. Nevertheless, it is certainly an extremely crude model. The error on this estimate is at least an order of magnitude or so, and if there are significant issues with the methodology they may actually be even larger.

To compensate for this we have made conservative estimates throughout, and still arrived at a remarkably high number. Since the conclusion of this calculation is also supported by the common sense position that going into politics is high potential for students with the right characteristics, we conclude that the expected influence of entering this path is indeed very large.


Introduction How much influence could you have by becoming a politician? Common sense says that politicians have a lot of influence, and it’s a serious contender as a high impact path for someone who’s altruistically motivated. But aren't the chances of success incredibly low? Our guess was that even though the chances are low, the potential impact is still very high. So, when we were asked about UK politics in a recent case study, we decided to make a more detailed estimate of the expected influence to feed into an overall analysis of politics as a career path. We found that chances of success are low, but for some students they’re not low enough to offset the very large potential influence. The UK government budget is £720 billion, and even a small chance at influencing a budget that large could be highly significant (and the impact of politicians extends well beyond budgets). We've extended our analysis of the chances of an Oxford PPE graduate succeeding as a politician, to make a rough estimate that such a student can expect to be able to direct £7. 5 - 75 million to the causes they support from their chances of making it into elected office. For a student similar to an Oxford PPE graduate, this suggests the path is competitive with the most high potential earning to give careers - such as those in finance - in terms of financial influence, which when combined with politicians’ law-making powers and advocacy opportunities could put...

---

### Assessing the social value produced by founding Google

- Published: 2014-02-11
- Modified: 2014-09-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/02/assessing-the-social-value-produced-by-founding-google/
- Topics: Found a tech startup

<a href='//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/259/original/sergey-brin-larry-page-google-founders.jpg?1388142910'><img alt="Sergey-brin-larry-page-google-founders" class="image medium" src="//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/259/medium/sergey-brin-larry-page-google-founders.jpg?1388142910" /></a>

80,000 Hours has outlined <a href="/2013/09/should-more-altruists-consider-entrepreneurship/">some reasons</a> tech entrepreneurship could be a particularly promising career path. One relevant factor is that the technology sector is a candidate for a sector of the economy that produces significantly more social value than its total earnings. Some reasons for this are:

<ul>
<li><p>Anecdotally, people report that they benefit substantially more from certain technologies than they pay for them. For example, Google provides services to Google users at the very low cost of unobtrusive advertisements, and Google users benefit substantially relative to this cost.</p></li>
<li><p>Technological innovation has been a large driver of economic growth, and economic growth helps people who haven&rsquo;t been born yet, who don&rsquo;t pay for past technological innovation.</p></li>
</ul>


80,000 Hours has outlined some reasons tech entrepreneurship could be a particularly promising career path. One relevant factor is that the technology sector is a candidate for a sector of the economy that produces significantly more social value than its total earnings. Some reasons for this are: Anecdotally, people report that they benefit substantially more from certain technologies than they pay for them. For example, Google provides services to Google users at the very low cost of unobtrusive advertisements, and Google users benefit substantially relative to this cost. Technological innovation has been a large driver of economic growth, and economic growth helps people who haven’t been born yet, who don’t pay for past technological innovation. As the beginnings of an attempt to estimate the social value of tech entrepreneurship relative to other high impact careers, in June 2013 I made a very rough attempt to estimate the value that Sergey Brin and Larry Page generated by starting Google. I attempted to estimate the value based on a subjective judgment of how much people would have been willing to pay to use Google historically, and a subjective judgment of how soon a counterfactual replacement to Google would have emerged had Google not existed. Upon reflection, I think that my analysis is sufficiently crude so that it shouldn’t be given nontrivial weight. This is not unexpected — in writing the post I was soliciting feedback on my thinking rather than aiming to make a cogent argument. I benefited from feedback from Carl...

---

### The Centre for Effective Altruism is looking for a Director of Development

- Published: 2014-02-06
- Modified: 2020-08-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/02/the-centre-for-effective-altruism-is-looking-for-a-director-of-development/
- Topics: Uncategorised

We are looking for a Director of Development to join our team in Oxford! The right candidate would play a vital role growing and sustaining the donor base that enables 80,000 Hours and our sister charity Giving What We Can to serve their charitable missions. You can read more about the role below. If you&rsquo;re interested in this opportunity please apply <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Z2V9juGx0UmydzLGK3zJvelbuQEnso0UdbhYLh5AAQA/viewform">here</a> by 28th February (and if you know anyone else who might be interested, we encourage you to pass this opportunity on to them).

Note that this is just one of many job and internship opportunities that are available with our parent charity, the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) - for a full list, see <a href="http://home.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/careers">here</a>. See also our description of <a href="http://home.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/careers/why-work-with-us">why CEA is an excellent place to work</a>.


We are looking for a Director of Development to join our team in Oxford! The right candidate would play a vital role growing and sustaining the donor base that enables 80,000 Hours and our sister charity Giving What We Can to serve their charitable missions. You can read more about the role below. If you’re interested in this opportunity please apply here by 28th February 2014 (and if you know anyone else who might be interested, we encourage you to pass this opportunity on to them). Note: Applications are now closed. Note that this is just one of many job and internship opportunities that are available with our parent charity, the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) - for a full list, see here. See also our description of why CEA is an excellent place to work. Details of the role CEA is a young and rapidly growing charity which has grown to a £300,000 annual budget over 18 months. We are located in central Oxford and affiliated with Oxford University. As described above, in this role you’ll be fundraising for both 80,000 Hours and the other innovative organisation that is part of CEA - Giving What We Can. CEA has a track record of incubating new charitable projects and is continuing to expand into new areas. In order to meet its growth targets CEA has set the ambitious goal of raising an extra £150,000 over the next year. Currently CEA is funded primarily by ‘high net worth’ individuals, but also...

---

### In which career can you make the most difference?

- Published: 2014-02-05
- Modified: 2024-12-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/02/in-which-career-can-you-make-the-most-difference/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy, Careers, Civil Service, Doctor, Economics PhD, Effective Altruism, Fields, Found a tech startup, Foundation Program Management, Lawyer, Medical Researcher, Party Politics, Party Politics, Software Engineering

<a href='//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/265/original/the-fork-in-the-road_0.jpg?1391620489'><img alt="The-fork-in-the-road_0" class="image large" src="//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/265/large/the-fork-in-the-road_0.jpg?1391620489" /></a>

<h2>Introduction</h2>

Previously, we introduced a way to <a href="/2013/07/how-to-assess-the-impact-of-a-career/">assess career opportunities</a> in terms of their potential for positive impact, but which careers actually do best on these criteria? In this post, we&rsquo;ll apply an adapted version of this framework to some career paths that seem particularly promising for recent graduates. Using what we&rsquo;ve learned over the past two years of research and coaching over 100 people, we&rsquo;ll provide a ranked list of options.

<h2>Summary</h2>

<ul>
<li>If you&rsquo;re looking <strong>to build career capital, consider entrepreneurship, consulting or an economics PhD.</strong></li>
<li>If you&rsquo;re looking <strong>to pursue <a href="/earning-to-give">earning to give</a>, consider high-end finance, tech entrepreneurship, law, consulting and medicine</strong>. These careers are all high-earning in part due to being highly demanding. Our impression is that <strong>software engineering, being an actuary and dentistry are somewhat less demanding but also highly paid.</strong></li>
<li>If you&rsquo;d like <strong>to make an impact more directly, consider party politics, founding effective nonprofits, working inside international organisations, government or foundations to improve them, and doing valuable academic research.</strong></li>
<li>If you&rsquo;d like <strong>to advocate for effective causes, consider party politics, journalism, and working in international organisations, policy-oriented civil service or foundations.</strong></li>
<li><strong>Some career paths that look promising overall are: tech entrepreneurship, consulting, party politics, founding effective nonprofits and working in international organisations.</strong></li>
<li>Some paths we think are promising but are largely neglected by our members and would like to learn more about are: party politics, working in international organisations, being a program manager at a foundation, journalism, policy-oriented civil service and marketing.</li>
</ul>


Introduction Previously, we introduced a way to assess career opportunities in terms of their potential for positive social impact, but which careers actually do best on these criteria? In this post, we’ll apply an adapted version of this framework to some career paths that seem particularly promising for recent graduates. Using what we’ve learned over the past two years of research and from coaching over 100 people, we’ll provide a ranked list of options. Summary If you’re looking to build career capital, consider entrepreneurship, consulting or an economics PhD. If you’re looking to pursue earning to give, consider high-end finance, tech entrepreneurship, law, consulting and medicine. These careers are all high-earning in part due to being highly demanding. Our impression is that software engineering, being an actuary and dentistry are somewhat less demanding but also highly paid. If you’d like to make an impact more directly, consider party politics, founding effective nonprofits, working inside international organisations, government or foundations to improve them, and doing valuable academic research. If you’d like to advocate for effective causes, consider party politics, journalism, and working in international organisations, policy-oriented civil service or foundations. Some career paths that look promising overall are: tech entrepreneurship, consulting, party politics, founding effective nonprofits and working in international organisations. Some paths we think are promising but are largely neglected by our members and would like to learn more about are: party politics, working in international organisations, being a program manager at a foundation, journalism, policy-oriented civil service and...

---

### Some stories of career change due to 80,000 Hours

- Published: 2014-02-04
- Modified: 2022-11-17
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/02/some-stories-of-career-change-due-to-80-000-hours/
- Topics: Uncategorised

What kinds of career changes has 80,000 Hours caused? The following is a collection of 15 examples we prepared as part of a grant application in October 2013.

The examples were written by us, but each was sent to the relevant person by email, who was encouraged to point out inaccuracies or exaggerations of our influence. <strong>The exact wording for each example has been approved by the career changer</strong>. ? have been anonymised. In addition, we prepared 4 more similar examples, but don&rsquo;t have permission to share those publicly.

We aimed to select the more impressive examples that we were most familiar with, so the selection is biased towards people we know personally and from the first two years of our existence (Feb 2011 - Feb 2013). We&rsquo;re exploring the career changes we have caused among our readers and coachees more broadly through our <a href="/2014/01/has-80-000-hours-helped-you/">impact survey</a> and upcoming coaching evaluations. Nevertheless, <strong>we think this collection of examples is a good proof of concept.</strong> They show that talking to people about our ideas in the context of a community can lead to significant changes of career plan, more thoughtfulness and stronger intentions to make a difference.

They also help estimate a lower bound on our impact. Just considering those who switched to pursuing earning to give, we&rsquo;ve already tracked donations of ~$150,000 to GiveWell recommended charities or effective altruist organisations.

The amount donated over the next couple of years seems clearly set to rise. 
* The people already donating can expect substantial salary increases as they move into their second and third years in employment.
* Richard and Adam have only just entered employment.
* Sam Bankman-Fried has accepted a job at a proprietary trading firm, and is on track to donate as much as Tim.
* Matt&rsquo;s startup is in an incubator, and he has legally bound himself to donate 33% of his exit value.

Given this, we&rsquo;re confident that more than $1mn will be donated by this group in the next 3 years.

We think there is also substantial value among those not pursuing earning to give:

<ul>
<li>One is a Marshall scholar, and starting a promising academic career.</li>
<li>One went to work at GiveWell.</li>
<li>One has founded a network to promote effective altruism in healthcare.</li>
</ul>

In addition, we played a substantial role in the creation of <a href="http://www.animalcharityevaluators.org/">Animal Charity Evaluators</a>, which performs research into the most effective ways to promote animal welfare and now has an annual budget of $80,000. ACE developed out of Effective Animal Activism, which was founded by an intern at 80,000 Hours during their internship. 80,000 Hours contributed to the initial concept for the charity and provided it with technical support, as well as assistance fundraising and hiring full-time staff. Moreover, EAA was legally part of 80,000 Hours for 6 months, before being spun-off and independently registered.

The full stories are below.


Introduction What kinds of career changes has 80,000 Hours caused? The following is a collection of 15 examples we prepared as part of a grant application in October 2013. The examples were written by us, but each was sent to the relevant person by email, who was encouraged to point out inaccuracies or exaggerations of our influence. The exact wording for each example has been approved by the career changer. 4 have been anonymised. In addition, we prepared 4 more similar examples, but don’t have permission to share those publicly. We aimed to select the more impressive examples that we were most familiar with, so the selection is biased towards people we know personally and from the first two years of our existence (Feb 2011 - Feb 2013). We’re exploring the career changes we have caused among our readers and coachees more broadly through our impact survey and upcoming coaching evaluations. Nevertheless, we think this collection of examples is a good proof of concept. They show that talking to people about our ideas in the context of a community can lead to significant changes of career plan, more thoughtfulness and stronger intentions to make a difference. They also help estimate a lower bound on our impact. Just considering those who switched to pursuing earning to give, we’ve already tracked donations of ~$150,000 to GiveWell recommended charities or effective altruist organisations. The amount donated over the next couple of years seems clearly set to rise. The people already donating can expect...

---

### 5 ways to make a big difference in any career

- Published: 2014-02-03
- Modified: 2024-11-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/02/5-ways-to-make-a-big-difference-in-any-career/
- Topics: Earning to Give, Fundraising, Giving What We Can, Volunteering

<a href='//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/263/original/Soup_Kitchen.jpg?1391363651'><img alt="Soup_kitchen" class="image medium" src="//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/263/medium/Soup_Kitchen.jpg?1391363651" /></a>

At 80,000 Hours, we&rsquo;re focused on finding the very best opportunities for you to do good with your career. We&rsquo;re worried that sometimes this continuous focus can be demoralising.  After all, it&rsquo;s hard to find the best opportunities. Moreover, we&rsquo;re worried that sometimes our members lose sight of the fact that <em>you can make a big difference in any career.</em>

We don&rsquo;t mean <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/19/make-a-difference-jim-ziolkowski-walk-in-their-shoes_n_3922625.html">spending your birthday volunteering at a soup kitchen</a>, <a href="http://www.generationon.org/global/65-ways-make-difference">giving seniors the &lsquo;gift&rsquo; of your art</a>, or <a href="http://www.wikihow.com/Help-Change-the-World">buying a charity wristband</a>. We mean you can transform the lives of hundreds of other people, in any career.

So, we decided to write this note explaining how...


Introduction At 80,000 Hours, we’re focused on finding the very best opportunities for you to do good with your career. We’re worried that sometimes this continuous focus can be demoralising. After all, it’s hard to find the best opportunities. Moreover, we’re worried that sometimes our members lose sight of the fact that you can make a big difference in any career. We don’t mean spending your birthday volunteering at a soup kitchen, giving seniors the ‘gift’ of your art, or buying a charity wristband. We mean you can transform the lives of hundreds of other people, in any career. So, we decided to write this note explaining how. 1) Donate cost-effectively If you donate 10% of your income to effective charities, you’ll significantly help hundreds of people less fortunate than yourself, and perhaps save tens of lives. That’s probably more lives than doctors save, which is pretty incredible. Thanks to charity evaluators like GiveWell, finding the best giving opportunities takes little time. And don’t worry about missing the money. The balance of evidence suggests there’s a good chance you’ll end up happier. But if you’re concerned about this, why not try out giving with Giving What We Can? 2) Fundraise for great charities It seems fairly easy to raise hundreds of pounds from your colleagues and friends for effective charities through sponsorship, doing fundraising drives or organising events. The average participant in Live Below the Line 2013 raised £200. 1 The average returns to fundraising in general are 4:1, so if...

---

### 80,000 Hours is hiring: careers analyst job available

- Published: 2014-01-31
- Modified: 2020-08-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/01/80-000-hours-is-hiring-careers-analyst-job-available/
- Topics: Uncategorised

<a href='//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/261/original/OxfordImage.jpg?1391354256'><img alt="Oxfordimage" class="image large" src="//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/261/large/OxfordImage.jpg?1391354256" /></a>

As we continue to expand our team in Oxford, we are looking for someone to join 80,000 Hours full time as a Careers Analyst. Details of all the positions we&rsquo;re offering can as always be found on our <a href="/recruitment">recruitment page</a>.

This is your chance to help us fulfill our mission of helping thousands of the most talented and dedicated people work on solving the world&rsquo;s most pressing problems. That&rsquo;s a big project, and we&rsquo;re growing fast, so we&rsquo;re looking for bright and ambitious people to join us. If this sounds like something you&rsquo;d like to be part of, then apply to work for us!

You can read more about the position below. For more on why working at 80,000 Hours is an incredible opportunity, see <a href="/recruitment##why-work-for-80000-hours">Why work for 80,000 Hours?</a>

<h3>Details of the role</h3>

As an 80,000 Hours Careers Analyst, you will play a key part in growing the organisation as we expand over the coming years. We are looking for someone to become part of our founding team, in order to:

<ul>
<li><p>Give one-on-one coaching to amazing people who want to change the world, as part of our case studies.</p></li>
<li><p>Do research into ?nding the most promising career opportunities in the world.</p></li>
<li><p>Promote our research in the international media, online and through other outreach.</p></li>
<li><p>Monitor our impact.</p></li>
</ul>


As we continue to expand our team in Oxford, we are looking for someone to join 80,000 Hours full time as a Careers Analyst. Details of all the positions we’re offering can as always be found on our recruitment page. This is your chance to help us fulfill our mission of helping thousands of the most talented and dedicated people work on solving the world’s most pressing problems. That’s 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! You can read more about the position below. For more on why working at 80,000 Hours is an incredible opportunity, see Why work for 80,000 Hours? Details of the role As an 80,000 Hours Careers Analyst, you will play a key part in growing the organisation as we expand over the coming years. We are looking for someone to become part of our founding team, in order to: Give one-on-one coaching to amazing people who want to change the world, as part of our case studies. Do research into ? nding the most promising career opportunities in the world. Promote our research in the international media, online and through other outreach. Monitor our impact. The role is highly flexible, and we’ll tailor it to your skills, interests and development aims. If you work for 80,000 Hours, you’ll be part of a focused team of intelligent, enthusiastic, driven...

---

### Case study: can I earn more in software or finance?

- Published: 2014-01-30
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/01/case-study-can-i-earn-more-in-software-or-finance/
- Topics: Computer science, Finance, Income, Software Engineering

<a href='//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/246/original/software.jpg?1384777215'><img alt="Software" class="image medium" src="//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/246/medium/software.jpg?1384777215" /></a>

Jessica is a software engineer at Google, who donates much of her income to GiveWell recommendations and 80,000 Hours. She plans to continue pursuing earning to give, and came to us wondering whether she might be able earn more using her skills; in particular by switching into finance or moving to Silicon Valley.

<h2>Summary of lessons learned</h2>

We found:

<ul>
<li>An engineer at Google can expect to earn about $150-$200 p.a. after 3 years of experience, which will then grow at 2-6% p.a. afterwards.</li>
<li>Google engineers are among the most highly paid engineers in big companies.</li>
<li>Google engineers do not appear to earn more in Silicon Valley compared to major East Coast cities, although software engineers on average earn more in the Valley.</li>
<li>She may be able to earn more by switching into finance, but we need to do more research.</li>
</ul>


Introduction Jessica is a software engineer at Google, who donates much of her income to GiveWell recommendations and 80,000 Hours. She plans to continue pursuing earning to give, and came to us wondering whether she might be able earn more using her skills; in particular by switching into finance or moving to Silicon Valley. Summary of lessons learned We found: An engineer at Google can expect to earn about $150-$200 p. a. after 3 years of experience, which will then grow at 2-6% p. a. afterwards. Google engineers are among the most highly paid engineers in big companies. Google engineers do not appear to earn more in Silicon Valley compared to major East Coast cities, although software engineers on average earn more in the Valley. She may be able to earn more by switching into finance, but we need to do more research. Our research Jessica wanted to know whether she could earn more with her software engineering skills, so that she could see how much more she could donate if she switched jobs. We discussed her key uncertainties, and agreed to work on these questions: What are my earnings prospects if I continue as an engineer at Google? Could I earn more by moving to Google HQ in California? Could I earn more by joining a start-up in Silicon Valley? Could I earn more by becoming a programmer in finance? Our findings are here. Why these questions? (2)-(4) were some of Jessica’s key uncertainties that we thought we could make progress...

---

### Interview with leading HIV vaccine researcher - Prof. Sir Andrew McMichael

- Published: 2014-01-28
- Modified: 2018-07-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/01/interview-with-leading-hiv-vaccine-researcher-prof-sir-andrew-mcmichael/
- Topics: Academic Research, Biomedical Research, Existential risk

<h2>Introduction</h2>

<img src="https://80000hours.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Nelson_McMichael.jpg" alt="Andrew McMichael" width="200" height="263" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-41907" />

Continuing our investigation into medical research careers, we interviewed Prof. Andrew McMichael. Andrew is Director of the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine in Oxford, and focuses especially on two areas of special interest to us: HIV and flu vaccines.

<h2>Key points made</h2>

<ul>
<li><strong>Andrew would recommend starting in medicine for the increased security</strong>, better earnings, broader perspective and greater set of opportunities at the end. The main cost is that it takes about 5 years longer.</li>
<li>In the medicine career track, you qualify as a doctor in 5-6 years, then you work as a junior doctor for 3-5 years, while starting a PhD. During this time, you start to move towards a promising speciality, where you build your career.</li>
<li>In the biology career track, get a good undergraduate degree, then do a PhD. It&rsquo;s very important to join a top lab and publish early in your career. Then you can start to move towards an interesting area.</li>
<li>After you finish your PhD is a good time to reassess. <strong>It&rsquo;s a competitive career</strong>, and if you&rsquo;re not headed towards the top, be prepared to do something else. Public health is a common backup option, which can make a significant contribution. If you&rsquo;ve studied medicine, you can do that. <strong>People sometimes get stranded mid-career, and that can be tough.</strong></li>
<li><strong>An outstanding post-doc applicant has a great reference from their PhD supervisor, is good at statistics/maths/programming, and has published in a top journal.</strong></li>
<li>If you qualify in medicine in the UK, you can earn as much as ordinary doctors while doing your research, though you&rsquo;ll miss out on private practice. In the US, you&rsquo;ll earn less.</li>
<li>Some exciting areas right now include stem cell research, neuroscience, psychiatry and the HIV vaccine.</li>
<li><strong>To increase your impact, work on good quality basic science, but keep an eye out for applications.</strong></li>
<li><strong>Programming, mathematics and statistics are all valuable skills</strong>. Other skills shortages develop from the introduction of new technologies.</li>
<li><strong>Good researchers can normally get funded</strong>, and Andrew would probably prefer a good researcher to a half million pound grant, though he wasn&rsquo;t sure.</li>
<li>He doesn&rsquo;t think that bad methodology or publication bias is a significant problem in basic science, though it might be in clinical trials.</li>
</ul>


Introduction Continuing our investigation into medical research careers, we interviewed Prof. Andrew McMichael. Andrew is Director of the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine in Oxford, and focuses especially on two areas of special interest to us: HIV and flu vaccines. Our aim in this interview was to gain the perspective of someone who had entered medical research as a medic, whereas our previous interviewee, John Todd, entered as a biologist, and to gain the perspective of a senior researcher focused on infectious diseases rather than genetics. We also wanted to test some hypotheses from our two previous interviews (here and here). Andrew was introduced to us by John Todd. The interview was conducted in person and recorded. The following is an abbreviated selection of key quotes, reorganised for clarity. Key points made Andrew would recommend starting in medicine for the increased security, better earnings, broader perspective and greater set of opportunities at the end. The main cost is that it takes about 5 years longer. In the medicine career track, you qualify as a doctor in 5-6 years, then you work as a junior doctor for 3-5 years, while starting a PhD. During this time, you start to move towards a promising speciality, where you build your career. In the biology career track, get a good undergraduate degree, then do a PhD. It’s very important to join a top lab and publish early in your career. Then you can start to move towards an interesting area. After you finish your...

---

### Has 80,000 Hours helped you?

- Published: 2014-01-27
- Modified: 2014-09-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/01/has-80-000-hours-helped-you/
- Topics: Uncategorised

We want to find out.

We&rsquo;re doing a survey to understand how we may have helped readers like yourself. <strong>This will help us measure our impact.</strong> We take this really seriously, because we want to know how effective we are, and how our service can be improved.

If you've found our content useful, please give us five minutes of your time in support.

If you haven't found our content useful, we also really want to hear from you. This is your chance to tell us what we should do different.

Take our survey before midnight January 31st, and we'll enter you in a draw to win $100 as an Amazon Gift Card or donation to a charity of your choice.

<a href="/survey/form"><strong>Take our survey</strong></a>

The full results will be published on the blog.


We want to find out. We’re doing a survey to understand how we may have helped readers like yourself. This will help us measure our impact. We take this really seriously, because we want to know how effective we are, and how our service can be improved. If you've found our content useful, please give us five minutes of your time in support. If you haven't found our content useful, we also really want to hear from you. This is your chance to tell us what we should do different. Take our survey before midnight January 31st, and we'll enter you in a draw to win $100 as an Amazon Gift Card or donation to a charity of your choice. Take our survey The full results will be published on the blog.

---

### 80,000 Hours is hiring! Lead Developer and tech/design interns needed

- Published: 2014-01-24
- Modified: 2020-08-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/01/80-000-hours-is-hiring-lead-developer-and-tech-design-interns-needed/
- Topics: Uncategorised

As we continue to expand our team in Oxford, we are seeking three new team members to join us some time between March and September this year:

<ol>
<li>A Lead Developer to develop our website as a paid employee</p></li>
<li><p>A tech intern to work on a range of web projects as a member of our <a href="/recruitment##graduate-volunteers-and-internships">Graduate Volunteer Scheme</a></p></li>
<li><p>A design intern to illustrate our ideas as a member of our <a href="/recruitment##graduate-volunteers-and-internships">Graduate Volunteer Scheme</a></p></li>
</ol>

<p><a href='//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/202/original/WholeTeam1.jpg?1374519929'><img alt="Wholeteam1" class="image large" src="//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/202/large/WholeTeam1.jpg?1374519929" /></a>


As we continue to expand our team in Oxford, we are seeking three new team members to join us some time between March and September this year: A Lead Developer to develop our website as a paid employee A tech intern to work on a range of web projects as a member of our Graduate Volunteer Scheme A design intern to illustrate our ideas as a member of our Graduate Volunteer Scheme Help us change the world! We want to change the world by revolutionising something incredibly important: the way people spend their careers. Our mission is to help thousands of the most talented and dedicated people work on solving the world’s most pressing problems. 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! Convinced already? Read about the positions available below. For more on why working at 80,000 Hours is an incredible opportunity, see Why work for 80,000 Hours? Role descriptions Lead Developer We’re looking for someone to join the founding team as a paid staff member, to lead our web development efforts. In this role, you would play a key part in a very important stage of our growing organisation, helping to: Use Ruby on Rails to build our website as an engaging online platform for people to learn about our research. Help develop new products, such as a career...

---

### Reasoning about influence in politics

- Published: 2014-01-23
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/01/reasoning-about-influence-in-politics/
- Topics: Foundation Program Management, Party Politics, Party Politics

Understanding a politician&rsquo;s influence at first appears to be hopelessly tangled. A politicians&rsquo; influence is very tenuously related to the vote they can cast in parliament, and is mediated by a complicated process involving respect for precedent, social consensus, explicit and implicit negotiation, explicit and implicit appeals to popular opinion, and so on. Fortunately, on closer inspection many of these challenges can be ameliorated.

In the following research notes, we introduce an argument that the naive answer is about right: <strong>if there are 100 politicians with one vote each, then each politician has about 1% of the total impact of the politicians</strong>.

The result is highly useful in making estimates of the influence you might expect to have by becoming a politician, or indeed in any situation when a group of people negotiate over an outcome e.g a company board setting strategy, or a committee of grant makers allocating funding.

Note that the following are only preliminary research notes that were made while doing a case study, and not the results of in-depth analysis, so we&rsquo;re cautious about the conclusion. Nevertheless, we&rsquo;re keen to share the ideas and seek feedback.


Introduction Understanding a politician’s influence at first appears to be hopelessly tangled. A politicians’ influence is very tenuously related to the vote they can cast in parliament, and is mediated by a complicated process involving respect for precedent, social consensus, explicit and implicit negotiation, explicit and implicit appeals to popular opinion, and so on. Fortunately, on closer inspection many of these challenges can be ameliorated. In the following research notes, we introduce an argument that the naive answer is about right: if there are 100 politicians with one vote each, then each politician has about 1% of the total impact of the politicians. The result is highly useful in making estimates of the influence you might expect to have by becoming a politician, or indeed in any situation when a group of people negotiate over an outcome e. g a company board setting strategy, or a committee of grant makers allocating funding. Note that the following are only preliminary research notes that were made while doing a case study, and not the results of in-depth analysis, so we’re cautious about the conclusion. Nevertheless, we’re keen to share the ideas and seek feedback. The argument Consider a state in which each new government is able to pass a new set of laws, but these laws are only able to deviate very slightly from established precedent. At first, it may appear that this change significantly reduces the influence of each government, because their choices are constrained to lie within a relatively narrow range... .

---

### Which cause is most effective?

- Published: 2014-01-21
- Modified: 2024-03-08
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/01/which-cause-is-most-effective-300/
- Topics: Biomedical Research, Building effective altruism, Existential risk, Factory Farming, Geoengineering, Global Health, Global priorities research, Harmful restrictions on migration, Institutional decision making, Most pressing problems, Problem prioritisation, Unconventional advice, World problems

In previous posts, we explained <a href="/2013/12/why-pick-a-cause/">what causes are</a> and <a href="/2013/12/a-framework-for-strategically-selecting-a-cause/">presented a method for assessing them</a> in terms of expected effectiveness.

In this post, we apply this method to identify a list of causes that we think represent some particularly promising opportunities for having a social impact in your career (though there are many others we don't cover!).

We&rsquo;d like to emphasise that these are just informed guesses over which there&rsquo;s disagreement. We don&rsquo;t expect the results to be highly robust. However, you have to choose <em>something</em> to work on, so we think it&rsquo;ll be useful to share our guesses to give you ideas and so we can get feedback on our reasoning - we&rsquo;ve certainly had lots of requests to do so. In the future, we&rsquo;d like more people to independently apply the methodology to a wider range of causes and do more research into the biggest uncertainties.

The following is intended to be a list of some of the most effective causes in general to work on, based on broad human values. Which cause is most effective for an individual to work on also depends on what resources they have (money, skills, experience), their comparative advantages and how motivated they are. This list is just intended as a starting point, which needs to be combined with individual considerations. An individual&rsquo;s list may differ due also to differences in values. After we present the list, we go over some of the key assumptions we made and how these assumptions affect the rankings.

We intend to update the list significantly over time as more research is done into these issues. Fortunately, more and more cause prioritisation research is being done, so we&rsquo;re optimistic our answers will become more solid over the next couple of years. This also means we think it&rsquo;s highly important to stay flexible, build <a href="/2013/07/how-to-assess-the-impact-of-a-career/">career capital</a>, and keep your <a href="/2013/07/how-important-is-keeping-your-options-open/">options open</a>.

In the rest of this post we:
1. <a href="/2014/01/which-cause-is-most-effective-300/##the-list">Provide a summary list of high priority causes</a>
2. <a href="/2014/01/which-cause-is-most-effective-300/##why-these-causes">Explain what each cause is and overview our reasons for including it</a>
3. <a href="/2014/01/which-cause-is-most-effective-300/##what-are-the-most-important-judgement-calls-we-made-in-constructing-this-list">Explain how key judgement calls alter the ranking</a>
4. <a href="/2014/01/which-cause-is-most-effective-300/##our-research-process">Overview how we came up with the list and how we&rsquo;ll take it forward</a>
5. <a href="/2014/01/which-cause-is-most-effective-300/##other-questions">Answer other common questions</a>


Introduction In previous posts, we explained what causes are and presented a method for assessing them in terms of expected effectiveness. In this post, we apply this method to identify a list of causes that we think represent some particularly promising opportunities for having a social impact in your career (though there are many others we don't cover! ). We’d like to emphasise that these are just informed guesses, over which there’s disagreement. We don’t expect the results to be highly robust. However, you have to choose something to work on, so we think it’ll be useful to share our guesses to give you ideas and so we can get feedback on our reasoning - we’ve certainly had lots of requests to do so. In the future, we’d like more people to independently apply the methodology to a wider range of causes and do more research into the biggest uncertainties. The following is intended to be a list of some of the most effective causes in general to work on, based on broad human values. Which cause is most effective for an individual to work on also depends on what resources they have (money, skills, experience), their comparative advantages and how motivated they are. This list is just intended as a starting point, which needs to be combined with individual considerations. An individual’s list may differ due also to differences in values. After we present the list, we go over some of the key assumptions we made and how these assumptions...

---

### The Value of a Degree

- Published: 2014-01-15
- Modified: 2024-12-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/01/the-value-of-a-degree/
- Topics: Career capital

<h2>Introduction</h2>

Many of our readers are students, and some have come to us wondering whether they should start a university degree or complete one they have already started. One thing to consider in making this decision is what effect getting a degree will have on your lifetime earnings. So in this post we summarise our reading of some of the empirical literature on this question, mostly focused on the UK.

<h2>Summary</h2>

<ul>
<li><p>There appears to be a consensus in the empirical literature that getting a degree provides a large financial return on the costs in increased lifetime earnings (generally better than an investment with a 10% return and maybe closer to 15%).</p></li>
<li><p>The most common way of studying the question of economic returns is to use correlations in data containing information on education, earnings and other variables (performing &ldquo;ordinary least square regression&rdquo; on it).</p></li>
<li><p>The obvious worry with this method is that the same abilities that help earn a higher income might cause people to go to university rather than the other way around. This is called <em>ability bias</em>. The standard view in the literature, however, is that this issue only has as minor effect on estimates of the return to education.</p></li>
<li><p>The literature here supports the common sense position that an undergraduate degree is generally a good investment in your career.</p></li>
</ul>


Update Dec 2020: A more up-to-date resource is Bryan Caplan's book The Case Against Education, especially Chapter 5, which contains a walk-through of how individuals can estimate the private returns of college based on the literature. He is relatively sceptical about the value of education but still agrees that the private returns (e. g. in terms of higher earnings or social connections) are often large (at least for the right student) and that it's often worth going, even just from a purely financial perspective (even accounting for ability bias and so on). See more discussion of the book. Introduction Many of our readers are students, and some have come to us wondering whether they should start a university degree or complete one they have already started. One thing to consider in making this decision is what effect getting a degree will have on your lifetime earnings. So in this post we summarise our reading of some of the empirical literature on this question, mostly focused on the UK. Summary There appears to be a consensus in the empirical literature that getting a degree provides a large financial return on the costs in increased lifetime earnings (generally better than an investment with a 10% return and maybe closer to 15%). The most common way of studying the question of economic returns is to use correlations in data containing information on education, earnings and other variables (performing “ordinary least square regression” on it). The obvious worry with this method is that the same...

---

### Neglectedness and impact

- Published: 2014-01-14
- Modified: 2023-08-28
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/01/neglectedness-and-impact/
- Topics: Uncategorised

<h2>Summary</h2>

Let&rsquo;s suppose there&rsquo;s a cause that you care about much more than society at large. In your eyes, that cause is neglected. All else equal, you should have more positive impact by working on a neglected cause, because other people won&rsquo;t already be taking the best opportunities within it. But how much more positive impact can you expect?

The following is a set of research notes we made while performing a case study, which we&rsquo;re making available for feedback on our thinking. It argues for a simple result: <strong>If you care about an output K times more than society at large, then (all else equal) you should expect investing in gaining that output to be K times more effective than making other investments.</strong>

For instance, most people don&rsquo;t put a high weight on avoiding animal suffering. Let&rsquo;s suppose you do. In fact, you estimate that you care about it roughly 10 times more than the average person (i.e. you would be satisfied investing 10 times the amount of resources to avoid the same amount of animal suffering compared to the average person). Then, you should expect that investing to end animal suffering is, all else equal, roughly 10 times more effective than making other investments.

This seems like it might be a highly relevant consideration in picking causes. If the argument is correct then, all else equal, we should expect more neglected causes to be more effective. Our current position is that the arguement below shows that we should weight neglectedness to some extent in picking causes, but we&rsquo;re not yet sure how highly we should weight it because we&rsquo;re not sure: (i) how important neglectedness, as modelled in this way, is compared to other considerations we could investigate (ii) how tractable it is to investigate.

The research note also explores how important this consideration is to members of 80,000 Hours, the effect of adding further considerations, and how the result might be applied in practice.


Summary Let’s suppose there’s a cause that you care about much more than society at large. In your eyes, that cause is neglected. All else equal, you should have more positive impact by working on a neglected cause, because other people won’t already be taking the best opportunities within it. But how much more positive impact can you expect? The following is a set of research notes we made while performing a case study, which we’re making available for feedback on our thinking. It argues for a simple result: If you care about an output K times more than society at large, then (all else equal) you should expect investing in gaining that output to be K times more effective than making other investments. For instance, most people don’t put a high weight on avoiding animal suffering. Let’s suppose you do. In fact, you estimate that you care about it roughly 10 times more than the average person (i. e. you would be satisfied investing 10 times the amount of resources to avoid the same amount of animal suffering compared to the average person). Then, you should expect that investing to end animal suffering is, all else equal, roughly 10 times more effective than making other investments. This seems like it might be a highly relevant consideration in picking causes. If the argument is correct then, all else equal, we should expect more neglected causes to be more effective. Our current position is that the arguement below shows that we should...

---

### Case study: choosing between working at effective altruist organisations, earning to give, and graduate school

- Published: 2014-01-09
- Modified: 2024-11-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/01/case-study-choosing-between-working-at-effective-altruist-organisations-earning-to-give-and-graduate-school/
- Topics: Building effective altruism, Earning to Give, Software Engineering

<h2>Introduction</h2>

Back in May 2013, I realized I would be graduating in a year and wondered a lot about what I should pick for my first career.  The questions I had at the time were:

1.) Should I aim to work in an effective altruist organisation, go to graduate school, or should I earn to give?

2.) Where should I look for employment if I want to earn to give -- law, market research, or programming?

I spent a little time considering other options (finance and consulting careers), but the bulk of my time was spent comparing EA org employment, grad school, and the three earning to give careers.

<h2>Lessons learned</h2>

<ul>
<li><p>Direct work in EA is promising, but there are limited employment opportunities and a generally strong base of talent to draw from that makes replaceability an issue.</p></li>
<li><p>Graduate school also seems promising, but programs with high direct impact seem limited in employment opportunities.</p></li>
<li><p>It&rsquo;s important to consider factors about the career other than salary when doing earning to give.  Law was my best earning to give opportunity at first glance, given that it had the highest salary of the options I was willing to consider.  But when I looked more deeply at non-salary factors, it became my worst option.</p></li>
<li><p>Market research and computer programming are my most promising paths and I should consider both further.  They allow good salary potential while offering many other benefits.</p></li>
<li><p>Publishing my ongoing thought process was valuable in ways I couldn&rsquo;t even imagine at the time, creating the opportunity to meet people I couldn&rsquo;t have met otherwise.</p></li>
<li><p>Spending time directly in Oxford was also incredibly valuable in meeting with people that could help me think through my decision process.</p></li>
<li><p>An analytically-minded person can train in programming quickly enough to seriously consider programming as a career path.  While I started with intermediate computer programming knowledge in irrelevant computer languages, it took me about 150 hours of training over 20 weeks to know enough to interview competently.  I don&rsquo;t know if this is a unique case, though.</p></li>
</ul>


See an update on how Peter's getting on here Introduction Back in May 2013, I realized I would be graduating in a year and wondered a lot about what I should pick for my first career. The questions I had at the time were: Should I aim to work in an effective altruist organisation, go to graduate school, or should I earn to give? Where should I look for employment if I want to earn to give -- law, market research, or programming? I spent a little time considering other options (finance and consulting careers), but the bulk of my time was spent comparing EA org employment, grad school, and the three earning to give careers. Lessons learned Direct work in EA is promising, but there are limited employment opportunities and a generally strong base of talent to draw from that makes replaceability an issue. Graduate school also seems promising, but programs with high direct impact seem limited in employment opportunities. It’s important to consider factors about the career other than salary when doing earning to give. Law was my best earning to give opportunity at first glance, given that it had the highest salary of the options I was willing to consider. But when I looked more deeply at non-salary factors, it became my worst option. Market research and computer programming are my most promising paths and I should consider both further. They allow good salary potential while offering many other benefits. Publishing my ongoing thought process was valuable...

---

### Research into the earnings of software engineers

- Published: 2014-01-06
- Modified: 2014-09-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2014/01/research-into-the-earnings-of-software-engineers/
- Topics: Income, Software Engineering

<a href='//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/246/original/software.jpg?1384777215'><img alt="Software" class="image medium" src="//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/246/medium/software.jpg?1384777215" /></a>

<h2>Introduction</h2>

We recently did a case study for an individual who has worked at Google for several years in an East Coast city, earning between US$140k and US$180k, and donating a large fraction to GiveWell recommended charities and 80,000 Hours. They asked us the following questions about their expected earnings in software engineering:

<ol>
<li>What are my prospective earnings if I continue as an engineer at Google?</li>
<li>Could I earn more by moving to Google HQ in California?</li>
<li>Could I earn more by joining a start-up in Silicon Valley?</li>
<li>Could I earn more by becoming a programmer in finance?</li>
</ol>

We interviewed five people about these questions (see full details at the end of this post) and did a simple analysis on <a href="http://www.glassdoor.com">Glassdoor</a>. In this post we present notes on our findings.

<h2>Summary of findings</h2>

In summary, we found:

<ol>
<li>They can expect their salary to increase 2-6% per year if they stay at Google.</li>
<li>They probably can&rsquo;t earn more by moving to Google HQ in the Bay Area, though we encouraged them to ask more people about this.</li>
<li>They can probably expect to earn more by joining a start-up. But we're still investigating this issue so aren't confident.</li>
<li>We&rsquo;re unsure whether they can earn more by entering finance, though there is potential for significant salary increases so we recommended they speak to a head-hunter, and eventually apply to several companies.</li>
</ol>


Introduction We recently did a case study for an individual who has worked at Google for several years in an East Coast city, earning between US$140k and US$180k, and donating a large fraction to GiveWell recommended charities and 80,000 Hours. They asked us the following questions about their expected earnings in software engineering: What are my prospective earnings if I continue as an engineer at Google? Could I earn more by moving to Google HQ in California? Could I earn more by joining a start-up in Silicon Valley? Could I earn more by becoming a programmer in finance? We interviewed five people about these questions (see full details at the end of this post) and did a simple analysis on Glassdoor. In this post we present notes on our findings. Summary of findings In summary, we found: They can expect their salary to increase 2-6% per year if they stay at Google. They probably can’t earn more by moving to Google HQ in the Bay Area, though we encouraged them to ask more people about this. They can probably expect to earn more by joining a start-up. But we're still investigating this issue so aren't confident. We’re unsure whether they can earn more by entering finance, though there is potential for significant salary increases so we recommended they speak to a head-hunter, and eventually apply to several companies. Full analysis Prospective earnings in Google We asked two other Google engineers, who both thought our candidate’s earnings would increase by 2-6%...

---

### A framework for strategically selecting a cause

- Published: 2013-12-19
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/12/a-framework-for-strategically-selecting-a-cause/
- Topics: Problem prioritisation, Reasoning well, World problems

<h2>Introduction and summary</h2>

We could have all the influence in the world, but if we focus on the wrong opportunity, we&rsquo;re not going to have much impact.

How can we make sure we work on good opportunities in our careers? At 80,000 Hours, we <a href="/2013/12/why-pick-a-cause/">think it&rsquo;s really useful for most people to work on picking a cause to support in their career</a>. By <a href="/2013/12/why-pick-a-cause/">cause</a>, we mean a set of opportunities for making a difference such that the people working on them tend to share common knowledge, skills and core values.

But how can we compare causes in terms of potential for impact? In this post, we present our answer, which we think differs considerably from how people normally go about choosing a cause, which focuses mainly on <a href="/2012/08/don-t-do-what-you-re-passionate-about-part-1/">personal passion</a>. Your degree of passion is important, but it's just one factor among several others, which we'll describe in this post.

Our answer to how you can compare causes in terms of the impact you can have with your human or financial capital, is in the form of a framework you can apply. <strong>Note that what follows is just our current best answer - it&rsquo;s likely to change, and involves many judgement calls that some people may not agree with.</strong>

In a later post, we&rsquo;ll apply this framework to a selection of causes we think are particularly promising.

In summary, we think you should look for the best overall combination of the following three factors, the names of which we took from GiveWell Labs:

<ol>
<li><strong>Important: If we make more progress on this cause, the world will be made a better place.</strong> By &lsquo;world made a better place&rsquo; we mean that lots of people will be made better off in important ways. Causes can also be important indirectly, because progress on them lets us make progress on other important causes or provides valuable information about which causes are best.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Tractable: There are definite interventions to make progress within this cause, with strong evidence behind them</strong> For instance, there are definite opportunities for progress, backed by widely accepted theory, randomised control trials or a track record of success.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Uncrowded: If we add more resources to the cause, we can expect more promising interventions to be carried out.</strong> Uncrowded causes are often undervalued or neglected by society. There may be a shortage of important actors within the cause.</p></li>
</ol>

<p>We think you can assess causes by:
* Assessing these factors and their subfactors by asking experts and gathering other relevant data (e.g. data about how many people are affected by a problem, how many people are working on the cause).
* Drawing on cost-effectiveness and benefit-cost analyses prepared by the <a href="http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com">Copenhagen Consensus</a>, <a href="http://www.povertyactionlab.org/">JPAL</a> and other academic research.
* Using the results of <a href="http://www.givewell.org/givewell-labs">GiveWell Labs</a>, which aims to assess causes from the perspective of a donor (with the caveat that the best areas to lead your career within are likely to be different from the best areas to donate to).

In the rest of this post:
* <a href="/2013/12/a-framework-for-strategically-selecting-a-cause/##further-explanation-of-the-factors">We explain why we picked these factors and further explain what we mean by them</a>
* <a href="/2013/12/a-framework-for-strategically-selecting-a-cause/##summary-checklist">We give a summary checklist of criteria you can use to compare causes</a>
* <a href="/2013/12/a-framework-for-strategically-selecting-a-cause/##how-can-you-apply-this-framework-to-compare-two-causes">We suggest how it might be practically applied</a>
* <a href="/2013/12/a-framework-for-strategically-selecting-a-cause/##why-this-framework">We sketch how we came up with it</a>


Introduction and summary We could have all the influence in the world, but if we focus on the wrong opportunity, we’re not going to have much impact. How can we make sure we work on good opportunities in our careers? At 80,000 Hours, we think it’s really useful for most people to work on picking a cause to support in their career. By cause, we mean a set of opportunities for making a difference such that the people working on them tend to share common knowledge, skills and core values. But how can we compare causes in terms of potential for impact? In this post, we present our answer, which we think differs considerably from how people normally go about choosing a cause, which focuses mainly on personal passion. Your degree of passion is important, but it's just one factor among several others, which we'll describe in this post. Our answer to how you can compare causes in terms of the impact you can have with your human or financial capital, is in the form of a framework you can apply. Note that what follows is just our current best answer - it’s likely to change, and involves many judgement calls that some people may not agree with. In a later post, we’ll apply this framework to a selection of causes we think are particularly promising. In summary, we think you should look for the best overall combination of the following three factors, the names of which we took from...

---

### An interview on which skills most boost your employability

- Published: 2013-12-17
- Modified: 2023-09-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/12/an-interview-on-which-skills-most-boost-your-employability/
- Topics: Earning to Give

<a href='//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/250/original/satvik8.jpg?1386704793'><img alt="Satvik8" class="image medium" src="//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/250/medium/satvik8.jpg?1386704793" /></a>

We recommend reading the following interview by Peter Hurford (an 80,000 Hours coachee, and volunteer at CEA) with Satvik Beri. Peter performed the interview as part of research into his career decision. We post it here because Satvik has invested a lot of thought into how to maximise his earnings in order to do earning to give, and we think he adds some new considerations to the discussion.


We recommend reading the following interview by Peter Hurford (an 80,000 Hours coachee, and volunteer at CEA) with Satvik Beri. Peter performed the interview as part of research into his career decision. We post it here because Satvik has invested a lot of thought into how to maximise his earnings in order to do earning to give, and we think he adds some new considerations to the discussion. Go here to read the interview. We also recommend checking out some of Satvik’s other interviews and posts: A conversation with Ben Kuhn - another 80,000 Hours coachee Satvik wrote in his blog an essay entitled “Counterintuitive Career Advice for 20-Somethings” where he outlined more general advice. He also has more advice in this comment on LessWrong. In order to probe these views more deeply, we asked a couple of further questions by email. Here are the full questions and responses: You mention combining skills as a useful way to boost your expected income (e. g. being the best market researcher who can also program), based on your experience. Why do you think this opportunity exists? i. e. if this is a simple way to boost your income, why don't more people do it and earn more? Most people tend to get comfortable with one skill and have an easy time practicing that, but a hard time practicing skills outside their domain. For example, most programmers know that they could build better software by spending more time understanding their users, but find it much...

---

### A comparison of medical research and earning to give

- Published: 2013-12-13
- Modified: 2014-09-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/12/a-comparison-of-medical-research-and-earning-to-give/
- Topics: Academic Research, Biomedical Research, Doctor, Earning to Give

<h2>Introduction and Summary</h2>

We recently did a case study with Ramit (see the full case study write up <a href="/2014/02/case-study-earning-to-give-compared-to-medical-research/">here</a>). He was wondering whether to start a medicine degree, with the aim of going into research, or to continue in finance doing earning to give, where he already has a job as a quant researcher earning in the range of $150,000 per year.

We did an in-depth comparison of the expected impact of the two paths to help him decide. The rest of this post contains our case study research notes on the comparison.

If forced to guess now, we lean in favor of earning to give, though we think it&rsquo;s very high priority to gain more information. Ramit is going to try to better assess his degree of fit with medical research, perhaps by working as a researcher during the summer, and learn more about his earnings prospects in finance by making applications and speaking to a headhunter. We&rsquo;ll review our decision when we find out more.

In the rest of the post, we explain our reasoning:

<ol>
<li>We outline our general approach  </li>
<li>We define a number of factors to compare the two options  </li>
<li>We evaluate the two paths based on the factors  </li>
<li>We make our overall conclusions  </li>
</ol>

Note that there were several potentially important issues we didn&rsquo;t address, including job satisfaction and which path is best for career capital in careers besides finance and research.


Introduction and Summary We recently did a case study with Ramit (see the full case study write up here). He was wondering whether to start a medicine degree, with the aim of going into research, or to continue in finance doing earning to give, where he already has a job as a quant researcher earning in the range of $150,000 per year. We did an in-depth comparison of the expected impact of the two paths to help him decide. The rest of this post contains our case study research notes on the comparison. If forced to guess now, we lean in favor of earning to give, though we think it’s very high priority to gain more information. Ramit is going to try to better assess his degree of fit with medical research, perhaps by working as a researcher during the summer, and learn more about his earnings prospects in finance by making applications and speaking to a headhunter. We’ll review our decision when we find out more. In the rest of the post, we explain our reasoning: We outline our general approach We define a number of factors to compare the two options We evaluate the two paths based on the factors We make our overall conclusions Note that there were several potentially important issues we didn’t address, including job satisfaction and which path is best for career capital in careers besides finance and research. Our research Our initial guess at the answer We state this guess so that you...

---

### Why pick a cause?

- Published: 2013-12-10
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/12/why-pick-a-cause/
- Topics: Effective Altruism, Problem prioritisation, Reasoning well

<h2>Introduction</h2>

We normally find our coachees benefit from <a href="/2013/08/introduction-to-our-career-model/">picking a cause as part of their career planning</a>, like global health or mitigating climate change, which they can use to <a href="/2013/07/how-to-assess-the-impact-of-a-career/">compare their career options</a>. Why?

In this post, we outline four reasons to pick a cause. In our one-on-one coaching, the idea of picking a cause has been something that many people hadn't heard of, or thought about, and hearing about it has led to some significant career changes.

Note that when we say &ldquo;pick a cause&rdquo; we mean <a href="/2013/07/your-career-is-like-a-startup/">make an educated best guess</a> (or perhaps pick 2 or 3 causes you find it difficult to choose between). We don&rsquo;t mean pick a cause and stick to it for ever. Nothing in career choice is certain, so don&rsquo;t get hung up on uncertainty. Make a best guess and be prepared to revise it.

In the rest of the post, we overview our reasons for picking a cause:

<ol>
<li>Picking a cause is one of the best things you can do to increase your impact.</li>
<li>We think picking a cause provides you with a useful level of direction in planning your next steps, which is neither too narrow nor too broad.</li>
<li>Picking a cause seems to be a useful way to narrow down careers based on personal factors and deeply held value judgements.</li>
<li>Having a cause can be motivating.</li>
</ol>

We&rsquo;ll also give a couple of other lines of evidence.


Introduction We normally find our coachees benefit from picking a cause as part of their career planning, like global health or mitigating climate change, which they can use to compare their career options. Why? In this post, we outline four reasons to pick a cause. In our one-on-one coaching, the idea of picking a cause has been something that many people hadn't heard of, or thought about, and hearing about it has led to some significant career changes. Note that when we say “pick a cause” we mean make an educated best guess (or perhaps pick 2 or 3 causes you find it difficult to choose between). We don’t mean pick a cause and stick to it for ever. Nothing in career choice is certain, so don’t get hung up on uncertainty. Make a best guess and be prepared to revise it. In the rest of the post, we overview our reasons for picking a cause: Picking a cause is one of the best things you can do to increase your impact. We think picking a cause provides you with a useful level of direction in planning your next steps, which is neither too narrow nor too broad. Picking a cause seems to be a useful way to narrow down careers based on personal factors and deeply held value judgements. Having a cause can be motivating. We’ll also give a couple of other lines of evidence. What is a cause? GiveWell makes the following definition of ‘cause’ in the context...

---

### More evidence on the competitiveness of charity jobs

- Published: 2013-12-04
- Modified: 2021-11-17
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/12/more-evidence-on-the-competitiveness-of-charity-jobs/
- Topics: Organisation-building at effective nonprofits

<h2>Introduction</h2>

Here&rsquo;s a <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/f63bed82-98bd-11dd-ace3-000077b07658.html">short report</a>, &ldquo;Charities: Passion and skills in aid of a good cause,&rdquo; on changes in the nonprofit sector&rsquo;s employment landscape. The report provides evidence of increased competition over jobs, which is attributed to strong interest among recent graduates, greater professionalization across the sector, higher salaries, and an increase in the number of business people switching into nonprofit positions.

The report was published in 2008 by the Financial Times, but our sense is that the trends described have likely continued. The report features excerpts from an interview with a recruiter specialising in nonprofit careers.


Introduction Here’s a short report, “Charities: Passion and skills in aid of a good cause,” on changes in the nonprofit sector’s employment landscape. The report provides evidence of increased competition over jobs, which is attributed to strong interest among recent graduates, greater professionalization across the sector, higher salaries, and an increase in the number of business people switching into nonprofit positions. The report was published in 2008 by the Financial Times, but our sense is that the trends described have likely continued. The report features excerpts from an interview with a recruiter specialising in nonprofit careers. Summary Key points from the report include: The charitable sector continues to become more professionalized and focused on efficiency, which coincides with increased competition over jobs. Charities increasingly rely on well-trained staff members over passionate volunteers. The report highlights four factors that appear to drive an increase in competitiveness over jobs: The nonprofit sector enjoys strong interest from recent graduates. Hundreds of applicants may apply for a single position. Professionalization has raised the bar on the skills and experience expected of new hires. Salaries have increased to attract individuals with greater levels of skills and experience. At more senior levels, increasing numbers of business people are applying for nonprofit jobs. Charities have a bigger pool from which to recruit senior staff. Many job applicants hold graduate degrees, often from prestigious universities. Graduates often need to start at the bottom and work their way up. This can be difficult for idealistic students who want to...

---

### Economics PhD the only one worth getting?

- Published: 2013-12-02
- Modified: 2024-11-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/12/economics-phd-the-only-one-worth-getting/
- Topics: Economics PhD

<h2>Introduction</h2>

Here&rsquo;s a <a href="http://qz.com/82743/a-phd-in-economics-is-the-only-one-worth-getting/">case for doing an Economics PhD</a> by Noah Smith, professor of finance at Stony Brook University. We think it&rsquo;s an interesting argument, though there's much more we need to investigate to work out whether this is an especially promising path for 80,000 Hours members. Regardless, we think that many of our readers will find this article and several of the embedded links useful.

If you're persuaded, Smith also coauthored a guide on how to <a href="http://qz.com/116081/the-complete-guide-to-getting-into-an-economics-phd-program/">get into an Economics PhD program</a>.


Introduction Here’s a case for doing an Economics PhD by Noah Smith, professor of finance at Stony Brook University. We think it’s an interesting argument, though there's much more we need to investigate to work out whether this is an especially promising path for 80,000 Hours members. Regardless, we think that many of our readers will find this article and several of the embedded links useful. If you're persuaded, Smith also coauthored a guide on how to get into an Economics PhD program. Summary The article’s main points are: Despite common arguments against doing “a PhD” (e. g. , years of long hours with little pay, glut of PhDs on the job market, decline of tenure-track positions), PhDs are not created equal. Arguments against doing a PhD are much less applicable to economics PhDs than PhDs in other fields. Economics PhDs stand out across four categories: near-guaranteed employment in a well-paid position, even for graduates of mid tier programs; autonomy to work on one’s own projects during graduate school; intellectual fulfillment; and a low failure rate given that the non-trivial percentage of students who fail their prelims still receive a master’s degree. Drawbacks to doing an economics PhD include a low standard of living during graduate school, the stresses that come with a high degree of autonomy, and the field’s conservative culture. Other good PhDs seem to be “marketing, applied math and statistics, finance, computer science, accounting, and management. ” An economics PhD remains the best. People considering an economics PhD should start...

---

### Summary of our thoughts on how to pick a degree

- Published: 2013-11-27
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/11/summary-of-our-thoughts-on-how-to-pick-a-degree/
- Topics: Advice for undergraduates, Career capital, Career planning, Now vs. Later

<h2>Introduction</h2>

I recently came across <a href="http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/j2t/i_am_switching_to_biomedical_engineering_and_am/">this post</a>, which prompted me to summarise our current thoughts on how to pick an undergraduate degree.

I&rsquo;d like to caveat that most of the following is just a judgement call, based on listening to what thoughtful, successful people have said about the topic (e.g. see <a href="/2013/11/careers-advice-from-top-tech-entrepreneur-marc-andreessen/">here</a>, <a href="http://www.everydayutilitarian.com/essays/my-conversation-with-satvik-beri/">here</a>), my experiences of coaching, and thinking through the issues. Where there is further research on the claims, I&rsquo;ve linked to it. Otherwise, assume it's just my judgement call. Note that I don't think I'm going to say anything that's particularly controversial or against common sense.

<h2>In summary - what&rsquo;s best?</h2>

It&rsquo;s highly important to go to a prestigious university, do something you&rsquo;re good at (which probably means picking something enjoyable and motivating) and use free time to meet people and learn useful skills.

With this constraint in mind, and if you broadly want to keep your options open, try to do the most impressive subject you can, ideally one which gives you skills in applied maths, statistics or programming. Top subjects would be things like: Maths (especially if combined with applied courses), Physics, CompSci, Engineering, Economics and Pre-Med. If you&rsquo;ll hate these subjects or find them really hard, however, it&rsquo;s probably best not to do them!

Note that there&rsquo;s a tension between academic success and gaining connections, work experience and other skills. If you&rsquo;re interested in a research career, then go for academic success. Otherwise, concentrate on getting &lsquo;good enough&rsquo; grades (a 2.1 in the UK or a GPA around 3.4 in the US), and use the rest of your time to meet interesting people, get useful skills and do something impressive. That&rsquo;s because our impression is that most employers <a href="/2013/01/how-to-choose-a-degree-for-earning-to-give-and-research/">value these traits more than good grades</a>.


Introduction I recently came across this post, which prompted me to summarise our current thoughts on how to pick an undergraduate degree, particularly aimed at the UK and US university systems. This isn't as carefully backed up with evidence as I would like, but instead mainly aims to explain our key bottom lines as they currently stand. Follow the links to our further posts for more detailed references. I’d like to caveat that most of the following is just a judgement call, based on listening to what thoughtful, successful people have said about the topic (e. g. see here, here for two examples), my experiences of coaching, and thinking through the issues. Where there is further research on the claims, I’ve linked to it. Otherwise, assume it's just my judgement call. Note that I don't think I'm going to say anything that's particularly controversial or against common sense. What’s important in degree choice? Because you’re at the start of your career, and are preparing yourself for jobs in 4+ years time, I think you should prioritise keeping your options open very highly. So, I think the most important aim is to build flexible career capital - skills, connections and credentials that will help you find opportunities in the future. Learning a subject matter is less important. 80% of jobs in the UK don’t require a specific degree. You’ll learn more about what’s best to do. The exception is when you've already decided you want to enter a particular field, especially in...

---

### An attempt to create a new AMF

- Published: 2013-11-25
- Modified: 2014-09-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/11/an-attempt-to-create-a-new-amf/
- Topics: Founder of new projects, Global priorities research

There are several health interventions that have been found in academic papers to have a cost-effectiveness that&rsquo;s similar or better than distributing insecticide treated bed-nets, but which lack a high quality charity to implement them. For someone with the right entrepreneurial skills, it could be extremely effective to create such a charity.

One example of a promising intervention is using mass media to promote positive health behaviours. <a href="http://developmentmedia.net/">Development Media International</a> is attempting to become a highly effective, transparent, scalable charity that implements this intervention.

Clara Marquardt, a member of <a href="http://www.givingwhatwecan.org/">Giving What We Can</a>, recently interviewed Will Snell, a member of 80,000 Hours and the Director of Public Engagement &amp; Development at DMI.

Before scaling up, DMI decided to gather more evidence about the effectiveness of using mass media to promote health, since the existing evidence is patchy. In the interview, <strong>Will explains how DMI overcame numerous challenges to design, fund and carry out a $12mn randomised control trial into the effectiveness of their program</strong>. He also explains the story and mission of DMI, giving an insight into the advantages and challenges of running an impact-focused charity.


There are several health interventions that have been found in academic papers to have a cost-effectiveness that’s similar or better than distributing insecticide treated bed-nets, but which lack a high quality charity to implement them. For someone with the right entrepreneurial skills, it could be extremely effective to create such a charity. One example of a promising intervention is using mass media to promote positive health behaviours. Development Media International is attempting to become a highly effective, transparent, scalable charity that implements this intervention. Clara Marquardt, a member of Giving What We Can, recently interviewed Will Snell, a member of 80,000 Hours and the Director of Public Engagement & Development at DMI. Before scaling up, DMI decided to gather more evidence about the effectiveness of using mass media to promote health, since the existing evidence is patchy. In the interview, Will explains how DMI overcame numerous challenges to design, fund and carry out a $12mn randomised control trial into the effectiveness of their program. He also explains the story and mission of DMI, giving an insight into the advantages and challenges of running an impact-focused charity. Clara: Could you give us a brief overview of DMI's objectives and approach? Will: I would describe DMI as an organisation that uses radio and television to improve health outcomes, especially maternal and child health outcomes, in developing countries by changing behaviours. We are bringing together two different disciplines. One is the creative and logistical expertise in managing large-scale multi-issue media campaigns focused on...

---

### Careers advice from top tech entrepreneur Marc Andreessen

- Published: 2013-11-21
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/11/careers-advice-from-top-tech-entrepreneur-marc-andreessen/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy, Found a tech startup

We just came across a series of four careers advice posts by Marc Andreessen (hat tip, Satvik Beri).

We&rsquo;re always on the look out for thoughtful careers advice from very successful individuals aimed at people looking to make a big impact - we think it&rsquo;s one of the best sources of careers advice, and we think these posts qualify. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen">Andressen</a> co-authored Mosaic (the first web browser), founded Netscape, and then led a successful career in venture capital.

The advice is particularly orientated towards people who want to enter the technology industry, which we think is a <a href="/2013/09/should-more-altruists-consider-entrepreneurship/">particularly promising path</a> to social impact.


We just came across a series of four careers advice posts by Marc Andreessen (hat tip, Satvik Beri). We’re always on the look out for thoughtful careers advice from very successful individuals aimed at people looking to make a big impact - we think it’s one of the best sources of careers advice, and we think these posts qualify. Andressen co-authored Mosaic (the first web browser), founded Netscape, and then led a successful career in venture capital. The advice is particularly orientated towards people who want to enter the technology industry, which we think is a particularly promising path to social impact. The posts are here: Part 0: Introduction Part 1: Opportunity Part 2: Skills and Education Part 3: Where to go Key points made and our comments 1) Do not plan your career because the world is too unpredictable. Rather, focus on developing skills and pursuing the best opportunities open to you. We agree there are problems with making detailed career plans and that the future is highly unpredictable. Our solution to planning is to focus on high quality evaluation of your opportunities over the next few years, and to otherwise be guided by a broad long-term vision. We may favor slightly more long-term direction than Andreessen, because we think some causes are more promising than others (though he also agrees that some industries are predictably better than others). We wholeheartedly agree that it’s very important to develop a useful package of skills that will serve you well in...

---

### Interview with malaria vaccine researcher Katie Ewer

- Published: 2013-11-20
- Modified: 2023-09-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/11/interview-with-malaria-vaccine-researcher-katie-ewer/
- Topics: Biomedical Research

<h2>Introduction</h2>

A recent case study candidate asked us whether he should enter vaccine research. As part of our research for that study, we contacted the <a href="http://www.jenner.ac.uk/">Jenner Institute</a>, an international centre based in Oxford that develops vaccines for infectious diseases . Our aim was to interview one of the scientists to better understand how careers in this sector tend to go, and to get their thoughts on a variety of important questions (especially those concerning vaccines) for our case study candidate to cross-check against other interviews we have done with medical researchers.

Katie Ewer, a cellular immunologist based at the Institute, agreed to talk to us. We sent her a list of questions by email (see the appendix), and discussed them on Skype. Below, we present a summary of her responses and key quotes from the Skype call.

<h2>Key updates for us</h2>

<ul>
<li>Katie was less keen on starting your career by studying medicine than our <a href="/2013/11/interview-with-a-cambridge-professor-of-medical-genetics-on-research-careers/">previous interview</a>, because she didn&rsquo;t think the benefits are worth the lost time, which made us less certain about this question.</li>
<li>We updated slightly in favor of the idea that most of the benefits of doing vaccine research on a specific disease are flow through effects i.e. advances in one vaccine have many benefits for other vaccines, reducing pandemic risk, and medical research more generally. This suggests that ability at research is relatively more important than the priority of the research question than we previously thought.</li>
<li>Katie suggested without prompting that research into neglected tropical diseases might be particularly neglected, which fits with previous research done by Giving What We Can into the <a href="http://www.sabin.org/">Sabin Vaccine Institute</a>.</li>
<li>Katie, as with everyone else we&rsquo;ve spoken to, said that strong motivation by the subject is very important, because the work is tough and the pay is low.</li>
<li>Katie thought that the vast majority of people would be better off supporting research through earning to give than by becoming researchers, though talented people should do research, which fits with our view.</li>
<li>A useful way to test out a medical research career is to take a research assistant job over the summer.</li>
<li>We found that careers in medical research might be more flexible than we had first thought.</li>
</ul>


Introduction A recent case study candidate asked us whether he should enter vaccine research. As part of our research for that study, we contacted the Jenner Institute, an international centre based in Oxford that develops vaccines for infectious diseases . Our aim was to interview one of the scientists to better understand how careers in this sector tend to go, and to get their thoughts on a variety of important questions (especially those concerning vaccines) for our case study candidate to cross-check against other interviews we have done with medical researchers. Katie Ewer, a cellular immunologist based at the Institute, agreed to talk to us. We sent her a list of questions by email (see the appendix), and discussed them on Skype. Below, we present a summary of her responses and key quotes from the Skype call. Key updates for us Katie was less keen on starting your career by studying medicine than our previous interview, because she didn’t think the benefits are worth the lost time, which made us less certain about this question. We updated slightly in favor of the idea that most of the benefits of doing vaccine research on a specific disease are flow through effects i. e. advances in one vaccine have many benefits for other vaccines, reducing pandemic risk, and medical research more generally. This suggests that ability at research is relatively more important than the priority of the research question than we previously thought. Katie suggested without prompting that research into neglected tropical diseases...

---

### Career Opportunities for Economics PhDs

- Published: 2013-11-18
- Modified: 2024-12-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/11/career-opportunities-for-economics-phds/
- Topics: Economics, Economics PhD, How to get a job

<h2>Introduction</h2>

This post presents some research notes we made while investigating the value of economics PhDs. We were motivated to do this research because we have some reasons to think that an economics PhD is a particularly good way to build career capital and keep one&rsquo;s options open. We have coached several individuals who are considering applying to economics PhD programs. We lacked information about a) how useful an economics PhD is for high impact careers outside of academia and b) how important attending a top ranked program is for different career options. With more information, we can be more confident in determining whether an economics PhD or an alternative is the best option in individual cases.

<h2>Summary</h2>

Key findings from our research are:

<ul>
<li><p>A majority (about 60%) of economics PhDs place into academic positions immediately following graduate school. About one-in-six place into government, and a similar percentage place into the private sector. Very few place into nonprofits or think tanks.</p></li>
<li><p>Program tier does not appear to affect what sector one places into, but placement types can vary widely between individual programs.</p></li>
<li><p>Within academia, professorships in top departments are largely held by graduates of top tier programs. For example, twenty-six percent of faculty at the top 15 departments earned their PhDs at Harvard or MIT.</p></li>
<li><p>One-in-three professors at LSE and Oxford, top ranked departments outside of the US, went to a 1st tier program in the US.</p></li>
<li><p>Prestigious awards within economics tend to go to individuals who graduated from top-ranked programs.</p></li>
</ul>


Introduction This post presents some research notes we made while investigating the value of economics PhDs. We were motivated to do this research because we have some reasons to think that an economics PhD is a particularly good way to build career capital and keep one’s options open. We have coached several individuals who are considering applying to economics PhD programs. We lacked information about a) how useful an economics PhD is for high impact careers outside of academia and b) how important attending a top ranked program is for different career options. With more information, we can be more confident in determining whether an economics PhD or an alternative is the best option in individual cases. Summary Key findings from our research are: A majority (about 60%) of economics PhDs place into academic positions immediately following graduate school. About one-in-six place into government, and a similar percentage place into the private sector. Very few place into nonprofits or think tanks. Program tier does not appear to affect what sector one places into, but placement types can vary widely between individual programs. Within academia, professorships in top departments are largely held by graduates of top tier programs. For example, twenty-six percent of faculty at the top 15 departments earned their PhDs at Harvard or MIT. One-in-three professors at LSE and Oxford, top ranked departments outside of the US, went to a 1st tier program in the US. Prestigious awards within economics tend to go to individuals who graduated from top-ranked...

---

### Interview with a Cambridge Professor of Medical Genetics on research careers

- Published: 2013-11-14
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/11/interview-with-a-cambridge-professor-of-medical-genetics-on-research-careers/
- Topics: Biomedical Research, Effective Altruism, Medicine, Reasoning well

<h2>Introduction</h2>

I recently interviewed John Todd, a Professor of Medical Genetics at Cambridge, as part of a series of interviews we&rsquo;re carrying out for a case study. The aim of the series is to find out what key people in the field think about:

<ol>
<li>What opportunities are best in the medical research field?</li>
<li>What&rsquo;s the balance between talent constraints and funding constraints?</li>
<li>Who&rsquo;s a good fit for medical research?</li>
<li>Would our case study candidate be a good fit?</li>
<li>How to go about this kind of career</li>
</ol>

<h2>Summary</h2>

The main points made in this interview were:

<ol>
<li>John would prefer a good person in his lab to an extra £0.5mn in annual funding. Generally, there are enough grants, so finding good people is a bigger constraint than money.</li>
<li>People with both medical knowledge with statistical and programming skills are highly sought after.</li>
<li>Within medical research, it&rsquo;s not straightforward to try to &ldquo;pick&rdquo; an area to work on and it changes quickly, though there are some broad strategies to use (e.g. pick diseases neglected by pharma, take a longer term perspective, avoid bandwagons)</li>
<li>If you want to fund medical research, it would be difficult to beat going with the Wellcome Trust or Gates Foundation. Likewise, if you want to find the best areas to work on, these foundations are a good start.</li>
<li>Getting an MD, then doing a PhD as a registrar is a good way in. If you have programming and statistics, you don&rsquo;t need the PhD.</li>
<li>He prefers Academia to Pharma.</li>
</ol>


Introduction I recently interviewed John Todd, a Professor of Medical Genetics at Cambridge, as part of a series of interviews we’re carrying out for a case study. The aim of the series is to find out what key people in the field think about: What opportunities are best in the medical research field? What’s the balance between talent constraints and funding constraints? Who’s a good fit for medical research? Would our case study candidate be a good fit? How to go about this kind of career Summary The main points made in this interview were: John would prefer a good person in his lab to an extra £0. 5mn in annual funding. Generally, there are enough grants, so finding good people is a bigger constraint than money. People with both medical knowledge and with statistical or programming skills are highly sought after. Within medical research, it’s not straightforward to try to “pick” an area to work on and it changes quickly, though there are some broad strategies to use (e. g. pick diseases neglected by pharma, take a longer term perspective, avoid bandwagons) If you want to fund medical research, it would be difficult to beat going with the Wellcome Trust or Gates Foundation. Likewise, if you want to find the best areas to work on, these foundations are a good start. Getting an MD, then doing a PhD as a registrar is a good way in. If you have programming and statistics, you don’t need the PhD. He prefers Academia to...

---

### Case study: Working in the financial sector to promote a flourishing long-term future

- Published: 2013-11-13
- Modified: 2022-01-18
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/11/case-study-working-in-the-financial-sector-to-promote-a-flourishing-long-term-future/
- Topics: Finance, Global priorities research

<h2>Introduction</h2>

This post is a write up of an in-depth <a href="/speak-with-us/overview">case study</a>, exploring one person&rsquo;s decision about where to work in the financial sector, from the perspective of helping the long-run future.

<h2>Key recommendations made</h2>

<ul>
<li>If you particularly care about <a href="/2013/08/how-important-are-future-generations/">long-run impacts</a>, <a href="/2013/10/influencing-the-far-future/">these are</a> some of the interventions that have been pursued.</li>
<li>We rate cause prioritisation research and advocacy as high priority (to be explained in an upcoming post)</li>
<li>If you&rsquo;re pursuing prioritisation research within finance and don&rsquo;t want to pursue earning to give, then we recommend generally aiming to build career capital, building a community of people who support prioritisation, and promoting areas of social finance that seek to assess the social value of different projects. Though note that this is a judgement call.</li>
</ul>

<h2>What we learned</h2>

<ul>
<li>We prepared <a href="/2013/10/influencing-the-far-future/">this list</a> of ways that people are trying to improve the far future.</li>
<li>The direct impact of doing &lsquo;impact investing&rsquo; (attempting to invest in socially beneficial companies) doesn&rsquo;t seem high relative to donations to cost-effective charities, but the industry might be improvable, could produce useful research and could move more resources into altruistic causes (as we&rsquo;ll explain in an upcoming report).</li>
<li>Impact investing seems like a reasonable area for someone looking to build career capital and promote prioritisation, though we don't have much confidence in this.</li>
</ul>


Introduction This post is a write up of an in-depth case study, exploring one person’s decision about where to work in the financial sector, from the perspective of helping the long-run future. Key recommendations made If you particularly care about long-run impacts, these are some of the interventions that have been pursued. We rate cause prioritisation research and advocacy as high priority (to be explained in an upcoming post) If you’re pursuing prioritisation research within finance and don’t want to pursue earning to give, then we recommend generally aiming to build career capital, building a community of people who support prioritisation, and promoting areas of social finance that seek to assess the social value of different projects. Though note that this is a judgement call. What we learned We prepared this list of ways that people are trying to improve the far future. The direct impact of doing ‘impact investing’ (attempting to invest in socially beneficial companies) doesn’t seem high relative to donations to cost-effective charities, but the industry might be improvable, could produce useful research and could move more resources into altruistic causes (as we’ll explain in an upcoming report). Impact investing seems like a reasonable area for someone looking to build career capital and promote prioritisation, though we don't have much confidence in this. Summary of the study Plans before starting Roles: Work in socially responsible investment - 50% probability Return to quantitative risk management and do earning to give - 30% probability Consult social enterprise - 10%...

---

### Live Q&A in Oxford with Dame Stephanie Shirley

- Published: 2013-11-11
- Modified: 2014-09-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/11/live-q-a-in-oxford-with-dame-stephanie-shirley/
- Topics: Earning to Give, Found a tech startup

<h2>Introduction</h2>

We recently held a public Q&amp;A with Dame &ldquo;Steve&rdquo; Shirley at our Oxford student group.

In the talk, Dame Stephanie filled us in on her fascinating life, which includes pioneering work in tech entrepreneurship (during which time she took on the name &ldquo;Steve&rdquo; in order to secure meetings in the male dominated industry, and built a company of 300 female programmers), followed by a philanthropic career in which she has founded 5 non-profits, became the first UK Ambassador of Philanthropy, and donated £67mn (primarily towards fighting Autism but also interdisciplinary research into the social consequences of the internet at the Oxford Internet Institute). She plans to donate 95% of her wealth.

We held the talk in order to hear about the career ideas of someone extremely successful in areas that are particularly interesting to us (tech entrepreneurship and philanthropy).

This blog post highlights three questions and responses that are of particular interest to our members.


Introduction We recently held a public Q&A with Dame “Steve” Shirley at our Oxford student group. In the talk, Dame Stephanie filled us in on her fascinating life, which includes pioneering work in tech entrepreneurship (during which time she took on the name “Steve” in order to secure meetings in the male dominated industry, and built a company of 300 female programmers), followed by a philanthropic career in which she has founded 5 non-profits, became the first UK Ambassador of Philanthropy, and donated £67mn (primarily towards fighting Autism but also interdisciplinary research into the social consequences of the internet at the Oxford Internet Institute). She plans to donate 95% of her wealth. We held the talk in order to hear about the career ideas of someone extremely successful in areas that are particularly interesting to us (tech entrepreneurship and philanthropy). If you want to hear more about Dame Steve’s story, there are lots of videos on YouTube. We also recommend her book of memoirs Let it Go. In the rest of the blog, I’ll highlight three questions and responses that are of particular interest to our members. Here are the questions and notes on her responses: 1. What do you look for in a funding opportunity? Four key factors: Pioneering - implementing a new, innovative approach Strategic - clearly defined aims and business-like approach to achieving these aims Measurement - ways to measure impact and success Personal comparative advantage - is relevant to her areas of expertise, which allows her...

---

### What should you do with a very large amount of money?

- Published: 2013-11-06
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/11/what-should-you-do-with-a-very-large-amount-of-money/
- Topics: Biomedical Research, Building effective altruism, Donating effectively, Earning to Give, Effective Altruism, Existential risk, Global priorities research, Harmful restrictions on migration, Institutional decision making, Unconventional advice

A philanthropist who will remain anonymous recently asked Nick Beckstead, a trustee of 80,000 Hours, what he would do with a very large amount of money.

Nick, with support from Carl Shulman (a research advisor to 80,000 Hours), wrote a detailed answer: <a href="http://www.effective-altruism.com/a-long-run-perspective-on-strategic-cause-selection-and-philanthropy/">A long-run perspective on strategic cause selection and philanthropy</a>.

If you&rsquo;re looking to spend or influence large budgets with the aim of improving the world (or happen to be extremely wealthy!) we recommend taking a look. It also contains brief arguments in favor of five causes.


A philanthropist who will remain anonymous recently asked Nick Beckstead, a trustee of 80,000 Hours, what he would do with a very large amount of money. Nick, with support from Carl Shulman (a research advisor to 80,000 Hours), wrote a detailed answer: A long-run perspective on strategic cause selection and philanthropy. If you’re looking to spend or influence large budgets with the aim of improving the world (or happen to be extremely wealthy! ) we recommend taking a look, since it broadly explains our views, we think their judgement is worth taking seriously, and they make good arguments. It also contains brief arguments in favor of five causes, which we think are worth considering as starting points.

---

### Thoughts on my experience working at GiveWell

- Published: 2013-11-04
- Modified: 2024-07-23
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/11/thoughts-on-my-experience-working-at-givewell/
- Topics: Donating effectively, GiveWell, Global priorities research, Research in relevant areas

<h2>Introduction</h2>

In this post, I offer some thoughts on my experience working at GiveWell. I&rsquo;ve had a number of different people ask me about this, and I think many people interested in effective altruism are curious about working there. So I thought I would explain my views in detail so that others who are thinking about working there have more information.

<h2>Summary</h2>

In summary:

<ol>
<li><p>I worked at GiveWell for two months in 2012, during which time I mainly did literature reviews and constructed cost-effectiveness models for a few different interventions (breast-feeding promotion, vaccination for neonatal tetanus, vaccination for meningitis, and vaccination for measles).</p></li>
<li><p>While there, I primarily learned about how to do a literature search, how to evaluate research (especially causal attribution in economics), and how to construct cost-effectiveness models. I also learned a lot about how to run an effective organization in general, which may have been the most valuable part of the experience.</p></li>
<li><p>For people who may be a good fit and have the opportunity to work at GiveWell, I recommend trying it without hesitation. I believe that working at GiveWell is an outstanding opportunity for personal development and having an impact. I also found it a very enjoyable place to work.</p></li>
<li><p>I didn&rsquo;t end up working at GiveWell because the work they wanted me to do didn&rsquo;t line up well with the work that I wanted to do, working there offered me less autonomy than my best alternative (working at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford), and I believed that working at the Future of Humanity Institute would offer me more job security and options in the future.</p></li>
</ol>


Introduction In this post, I offer some thoughts on my experience working at GiveWell. I’ve had a number of different people ask me about this, and I think many people interested in effective altruism are curious about working there. So I thought I would explain my views in detail so that others who are thinking about working there have more information. Summary In summary: I worked at GiveWell for two months in 2012, during which time I mainly did literature reviews and constructed cost-effectiveness models for a few different interventions (breast-feeding promotion, vaccination for neonatal tetanus, vaccination for meningitis, and vaccination for measles). While there, I primarily learned about how to do a literature search, how to evaluate research (especially causal attribution in economics), and how to construct cost-effectiveness models. I also learned a lot about how to run an effective organization in general, which may have been the most valuable part of the experience. For people who may be a good fit and have the opportunity to work at GiveWell, I recommend trying it without hesitation. I believe that working at GiveWell is an outstanding opportunity for personal development and having an impact. I also found it a very enjoyable place to work. I didn’t end up working at GiveWell because the work they wanted me to do didn’t line up well with the work that I wanted to do, working there offered me less autonomy than my best alternative (working at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford),...

---

### Why consider becoming a trader?

- Published: 2013-10-30
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/10/why-consider-becoming-a-trader/
- Topics: Asset Management, Computer science, Earning to Give, Economics, How to get a job, Statistics

<h2>Introduction</h2>

The following is an article by 80,000 Hours member, Joe Mela, about (i) why he thinks trading can be better than other finance jobs (ii) what the work&rsquo;s like (iii) who might especially suit it. Joe has over 5 years experience in trading, and was keen to share his perspective with other 80,000 Hours members on why this might be an especially promising career path.

<h2>Summary</h2>

In summary, Joe thinks:

If you have excellent quantitative skills, have yet to start your career, and are thinking of earning to give, you should consider going into a <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7672274.stm">hedge fund or proprietary trading firm to trade stocks</a> or other assets. You can reach a seven figure bonus within five years by working on interesting problems. You'll work with really smart, focused people and have transferable skills if you choose to leave.


Introduction The following is an article by 80,000 Hours member, Joe, about (i) why he thinks trading can be better than other finance jobs (ii) what the work’s like (iii) who might especially suit it. Joe has over 5 years experience in trading, and was keen to share his perspective with other 80,000 Hours members on why this might be an especially promising career path. Summary In summary, Joe thinks: If you have excellent quantitative skills, have yet to start your career, and are thinking of earning to give, you should consider going into a hedge fund or proprietary trading firm to trade stocks or other assets. You can reach a seven figure bonus within five years by working on interesting problems. You'll work with really smart, focused people and have transferable skills if you choose to leave. My background I’ve worked in the industry since I finished college. Most recently I was at a leading electronic market-making firm for four years. Most market makers don’t try to take views on the market; instead they try to buy from people who want to sell, and sell to people who want to buy. They place their buy orders (“bids”) slightly below their sell orders (“offers”). Historically, orders were placed by humans, but more recently computers have been placing orders. This is much more efficient, and the spread between the bid and offer has decreased over time. That’s great for investors. There are other forms of trading, e. g. some firms calculate assets’...

---

### Linearity - a useful assumption in evaluating careers and causes

- Published: 2013-10-28
- Modified: 2019-09-13
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/10/linearity-a-useful-assumption-in-evaluating-careers-and-causes/
- Topics: Uncategorised

<h2>Introduction</h2>

When analysing the good done by different paths, <strong>we&rsquo;ve often found it useful to assume that the value of your resources are linear</strong> - i.e. donating $2mn is roughly twice as good as $1mn, persuading two people to support a cause is roughly twice as good as persuading one person, and so on. For more in-depth examples, see our upcoming analysis of the value of becoming a politician or <a href="http://rationalaltruist.com/2013/05/02/economics-of-small-changes/">this analysis of the ethics of consumption</a>.

This assumption, however, faces a number of objections. In this post, Paul Christiano, a Research Associate at 80,000 Hours, <strong>responds to these objections to linearity, arguing that it&rsquo;s normally a reasonable approximation to make.</strong>

<h2>What do I mean by &ldquo;linearity&rdquo;?</h2>

More precisely, the assumption is:

<em>The value of a resource is very likely to be linear when considering changes that are a small fraction of the current supply of that resource; is very likely to be diminishing through most of the range; and is likely to be increasing only as you come to control the  majority of that resource, and even then only in some cases.</em>

In the abstract it's not a very objectionable sounding claim, but below I go over a few common objections in particular cases.

Note that "current supply" means resources that would be used in the pursuit of similar goals. When it seems like the current supply is negligibly small, I think we are probably drawing the boundaries wrong: don&rsquo;t consider money being spent on a very narrow cause, consider money being sensibly spent on improving the world, etc. In the most extreme case, where the relevant supply of resources really is tiny, then this number will still be driven up by incidentally relevant behavior by people with completely different goals.

Of course I don't think this is an ironclad law, but in practice I rarely believe objections people make against local linearity. That said, there is lots of room for me to revise my views here.

First, I should say that linearity seems to be the right prior presumption. If we do something twice, a priori we should suppose that the second time we do it will have the same (expected) effect as the first time we do it. So I see my role here (at least with respect to linearity) as defending the prior presumption from various objections that might be raised.


Introduction When analysing the good done by different paths, we’ve often found it useful to assume that the value of your resources are linear - i. e. donating $2mn is roughly twice as good as $1mn, persuading two people to support a cause is roughly twice as good as persuading one person, and so on. For more in-depth examples, see our upcoming analysis of the value of becoming a politician or this analysis of the ethics of consumption. This assumption, however, faces a number of objections. In this post, Paul Christiano, a Research Associate at 80,000 Hours, responds to these objections to linearity, arguing that it’s normally a reasonable approximation to make. What do I mean by “linearity”? More precisely, the assumption is: The value of a resource is very likely to be linear when considering changes that are a small fraction of the current supply of that resource; is very likely to be diminishing through most of the range; and is likely to be increasing only as you come to control the majority of that resource, and even then only in some cases. In the abstract it's not a very objectionable sounding claim, but below I go over a few common objections in particular cases. Note that "current supply" means resources that would be used in the pursuit of similar goals. When it seems like the current supply is negligibly small, I think we are probably drawing the boundaries wrong: don’t consider money being spent on a very narrow cause,...

---

### Interview with the World Health Organisation

- Published: 2013-10-25
- Modified: 2014-09-02
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/10/interview-with-the-world-health-organisation/
- Topics: Foundation Program Management

Jeremy Lauer is a researcher at <a href="http://www.who.int/choice/en/">WHO-CHOICE</a>, a project of the World Health Organization to encourage cost-effectiveness via both research and communication with policy-makers  Rob Wiblin and I sat down to interview Jeremy and learn about WHO-CHOICE, a potentially promising career path for 80,000 Hours members interested in promoting cost-effectiveness research - one of our high priority causes to investigate.

<h2>Summary</h2>

Jeremy&rsquo;s main points were:

<ul>
<li><p>WHO-CHOICE is about giving countries the tools needed to establish priorities in the health sector and make good, high-impact-for-money policy.</p></li>
<li><p>The landscape of global public health is starting to shift to a time where, more and more, &ldquo;best buys&rdquo; and &ldquo;magic-bullet solutions&rdquo; such as vaccines are fully funded.  This is exciting because it means people are getting important treatments, but it is also daunting because the next generation of interventions will involve more complex technical work and clearer communication with the public.</p></li>
<li><p>If you have a strong economics background, are quantitatively minded, and also have interests in epidemiology, biostatistics, or computer programming, a career at WHO-CHOICE or a similar organization could be rewarding and impactful.</p></li>
</ul>


Jeremy Lauer is a researcher at WHO-CHOICE, a project of the World Health Organization to encourage cost-effectiveness via both research and communication with policy-makers Rob Wiblin and I sat down to interview Jeremy and learn about WHO-CHOICE, a potentially promising career path for 80,000 Hours members interested in promoting cost-effectiveness research - one of our high priority causes to investigate. Summary Jeremy’s main points were: WHO-CHOICE is about giving countries the tools needed to establish priorities in the health sector and make good, high-impact-for-money policy. The landscape of global public health is starting to shift to a time where, more and more, “best buys” and “magic-bullet solutions” such as vaccines are fully funded. This is exciting because it means people are getting important treatments, but it is also daunting because the next generation of interventions will involve more complex technical work and clearer communication with the public. If you have a strong economics background, are quantitatively minded, and also have interests in epidemiology, biostatistics, or computer programming, a career at WHO-CHOICE or a similar organization could be rewarding and impactful. Excerpts from the interview: What is WHO-CHOICE? WHO-CHOICE is a program in the World Health Organization that helps countries decide priorities and figure out what they should be doing based on considerations of impact and cost-effectiveness. While other tools might be available to them to tell them how to do things, WHO-CHOICE is unique in this focus on establishing priorities. What’s your methodology for determining cost-effectiveness? Well, first I’d like...

---

### Why I'm doing a PhD

- Published: 2013-10-22
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/10/why-i-m-doing-a-phd/
- Topics: Academic Research, Graduate school, Institutional decision making, Reasoning well, User stories

I&rsquo;ve just started a PhD in Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School. People who have thought hard about how to make a difference seem to disagree about the value of PhDs. Having thought about this quite thoroughly for my own situation, I&rsquo;ve decided to write up my decision process. Hopefully some of the considerations that were relevant for me will be generally applicable and useful to others making similar decisions.

<h2>Summary</h2>

Essentially, I&rsquo;m doing a PhD because:

<ul>
<li><p>I want to use my career to do as much good as I can. However, I&rsquo;m quite uncertain about which causes are most important and what I should do with my career long term. This means I want to spend the next few years learning and building "career capital" to keep my options open for whatever is highest impact later.</p></li>
<li><p>I believe that the PhD I&rsquo;m doing is the best way for me to do this right now because:</p></li>
<li><p>It gives me the opportunity to build skills across a variety of disciplines/areas, whilst expanding my network and also giving me credentials that will help me later</p></li>
<li><p>At the same time, the research itself could be valuable - I&rsquo;ve got a lot of flexibility with what I focus on, within an area that has the potential to be very important and useful (improving rationality/decision making)</p></li>
<li><p>I&rsquo;m fairly confident I&rsquo;ll be able to work on other high impact projects during the next few years alongside my PhD - volunteering for 80,000 Hours being just one example</p></li>
</ul>


I’ve just started a PhD in Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School. People who have thought hard about how to make a difference seem to disagree about the value of PhDs. Having thought about this quite thoroughly for my own situation, I’ve decided to write up my decision process. Hopefully some of the considerations that were relevant for me will be generally applicable and useful to others making similar decisions. Post outline Summary My background How I structured this decision Some thoughts on values and causes Long term career aims Dimensions on which to compare my options Career capital CV Networks Skills Immediate impact Other considerations Skill and Interest Information value Remaining uncertainties and questions Some general takeaways Summary Essentially, I’m doing a PhD because: I want to use my career to do as much good as I can. However, I’m quite uncertain about which causes are most important and what I should do with my career long term. This means I want to spend the next few years learning and building "career capital" to keep my options open for whatever is highest impact later. I believe that the PhD I’m doing is the best way for me to do this right now because: It gives me the opportunity to build skills across a variety of disciplines/areas, whilst expanding my network and also giving me credentials that will help me later At the same time, the research itself could be valuable - I’ve got a lot of flexibility with what...

---

### More on What Really Matters for Finding a Job You Love

- Published: 2013-10-16
- Modified: 2014-09-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/10/more-on-what-really-matters-for-finding-a-job-you-love/
- Topics: Job satisfaction

We think being satisfied in the work you do is really crucial if you want to make a difference: you won&rsquo;t be motivated otherwise. This is why we&rsquo;ve spent time over the past year trying to <a href="/2012/12/our-research-on-how-to-find-a-job-you-love/">summarise the evidence-based research on job satisfaction</a>, to help you find a job you&rsquo;ll love and make a difference in. In doing this, we found something a bit surprising: the common view that you should find a career that is a <a href="/2013/04/how-important-is-fitting-in-at-work/">good fit</a> for your <a href="/2013/08/does-your-personality-matter-in-picking-a-career/">personality type</a> doesn&rsquo;t have much support in the job satisfaction literature. The evidence seems to point towards <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_satisfaction##Job_characteristics_model">the characteristics of the job itself</a> (things like having variety, a sense of contribution, and clearly defined tasks) being more important than your personality fit.

Of course, we don&rsquo;t think that this is the end of it - that all that matters when it comes to job satisfaction are five simple factors. So we&rsquo;ve spent a bit more time delving into the job satisfaction literature to get a better sense of what personal or social factors might be most important alongside this. One finding that seems to be fairly well supported is that, whilst &ldquo;personality fit&rdquo; might not matter that much, feeling <em>socially supported</em> at work on the other hand, does.

<em>In summary:</em>

<ul>
<li><p>Feeling like you are socially supported at work - that you are able to get help and advice from your supervisors and coworkers - correlates with increased satisfaction at work</p></li>
<li><p>This is pretty intuitive, and seems to be both due to the direct benefits of social interactions, and the fact that support from coworkers also means we&rsquo;re less likely to suffer from stress</p></li>
<li><p>This suggests it may be worth explicitly focusing on finding a working environment where you feel supported e.g. having a manager who you can go to with problems, perhaps above things like &ldquo;personality fit&rdquo; or &ldquo;being the right type of person.&rdquo; It also means that organisations (like 80,000 Hours!) should make creating this environment high priority</p></li>
</ul>


We think being satisfied in the work you do is really crucial if you want to make a difference: you won’t be motivated otherwise. This is why we’ve spent time over the past year trying to summarise the evidence-based research on job satisfaction, to help you find a job you’ll love and make a difference in. In doing this, we found something a bit surprising: the common view that you should find a career that is a good fit for your personality type doesn’t have much support in the job satisfaction literature. The evidence seems to point towards the characteristics of the job itself (things like having variety, a sense of contribution, and clearly defined tasks) being more important than your personality fit. Of course, we don’t think that this is the end of it - that all that matters when it comes to job satisfaction are five simple factors. So we’ve spent a bit more time delving into the job satisfaction literature to get a better sense of what personal or social factors might be most important alongside this. One finding that seems to be fairly well supported is that, whilst “personality fit” might not matter that much, feeling socially supported at work on the other hand, does. In summary: Feeling like you are socially supported at work - that you are able to get help and advice from your supervisors and coworkers - correlates with increased satisfaction at work This is pretty intuitive, and seems to be both...

---

### Interview with the founder of Giving Games

- Published: 2013-10-11
- Modified: 2014-09-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/10/interview-with-the-founder-of-giving-games/
- Topics: Building effective altruism, Founder of new projects

Like both Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld, Jon Behar left a lucrative job at a hedge fund to create a startup called <a href="http://www.apaththatsclear.com/">"A Path That&rsquo;s Clear"</a>.  Here, he runs &ldquo;Giving Games&rdquo; which engage people around the world in discussions about effective giving.

Rob Wiblin and I sat down to interview Jon Behar and learn more about his career choices and what it&rsquo;s like to leave your job to pursue dreams of running effective altruist projects. Jon's main points were:

<ul>
<li><p>It can be worthwhile to take some time off to think about things if you no longer are enjoying your job.</p></li>
<li><p>Working on something that you think is important can make you more motivated and more productive.</p></li>
<li><p>When starting an effective altruist project, it could be important to consider how you could partner with an existing organization rather than proliferate the large amount of EA orgs that exist.</p></li>
<li><p>The best way to get into a career in any field is to find people who are already in that field and ask them for advice, even if you don&rsquo;t know them. You&rsquo;ll be surprised by the number of people who agree to speak with you.</p></li>
</ul>


Like both Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld of GiveWell, Jon Behar left a lucrative job at a hedge fund to create a startup called "A Path That’s Clear". Here, he runs “Giving Games” which engage people around the world in discussions about effective giving. Rob Wiblin and I sat down to interview Jon Behar and learn more about his career choices and what it’s like to leave your job to pursue dreams of running effective altruist projects. Jon's main points were: It can be worthwhile to take some time off to think about things if you no longer are enjoying your job. Working on something that you think is important can make you more motivated and more productive. When starting an effective altruist project, it could be important to consider how you could partner with an existing organization rather than proliferate the large amount of EA orgs that exist. The best way to get into a career in any field is to find people who are already in that field and ask them for advice, even if you don’t know them. You’ll be surprised by the number of people who agree to speak with you. How did you get involved with "A Path That's Clear"? What lead you to decide to put a lot of time into it? I got interested in effective giving through GiveWell. I used to work at a hedge fund with GiveWell’s co-founders and that’s how I learned about the organization and got interested in effective...

---

### Interview with Matt Clifford

- Published: 2013-10-09
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/10/interview-with-matt-clifford/
- Topics: Being ambitious, Computer science, Found a tech startup, Risk, Software Engineering

<a href='//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/229/original/matt_website_original_(959x1024)_(749x800)_(500x500).jpg?1381340269'><img alt="Matt_website_original_(959x1024)_(749x800)_(500x500)" class="image medium" src="//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/229/medium/matt_website_original_(959x1024)_(749x800)_(500x500).jpg?1381340269" /></a>

In 2011 Matt Clifford and Alice Bentick, left their consulting jobs in McKinsey to found their own  non-profit, <a href="http://www.entrepreneurfirst.org.uk/">Entrepreneur First</a>. Their idea is to take about 30 talented and ambitious graduates each year and help them form teams and start companies, in order to promote entrepreneurship as a career path. They have already achieved some impressive results with their first cohort group of 32 graduates founding 11 companies which collectively achieved a market valuation of £22 milion In their first funding round.

As part of our research on the best routes into entrepreneurship we talked to Matt Clifford about this questions.

<h2>Summary</h2>

Key points Matt made in the interview:

<ul>
<li><p>A high level of technical skills seems to be the most important single attainment of someone interested in becoming a tech entrepreneur.</p></li>
<li><p>Startups inevitably involve failures and things going wrong, so determination is an important trait for entrepreneurs.</p></li>
<li><p>If you are interested in starting a startup consider developing domain expertise in a sector other than tech that is ripe for disruption.</p></li>
<li><p>It remains hard to find good data on indicators of success in entrepreneurship, current research is more qualitative and indicative.</p></li>
</ul>


In 2011 Matt Clifford and Alice Bentick left their consulting jobs in McKinsey to found their own nonprofit, Entrepreneur First. Their idea is to take about 30 talented and ambitious graduates each year and help them form teams and start companies, in order to promote entrepreneurship as a career path. They have already achieved some impressive results with their first cohort group of 32 graduates founding 11 companies which collectively achieved a market valuation of £22 million in their first funding round. As part of our research on the best routes into entrepreneurship we talked to Matt Clifford about his thoughts on the question. Summary Key points Matt made in the interview: A high level of technical skills seems to be the most important single attainment of someone interested in becoming a tech entrepreneur. Startups inevitably involve failures and things going wrong, so determination is an important trait for entrepreneurs. If you are interested in starting a startup then you should consider developing domain expertise in a sector other than tech that is ripe for disruption. You probably shouldn't do an MBA before before going into startups unless you would do one anyway. While many people leave consulting jobs to start startups, they do not provide ideal preparation for most startups. It remains hard to find good data on indicators of success in entrepreneurship, current research is more qualitative and indicative. Excerpts from the interview: 1) On your website you say you are looking for graduates with skills, track record,...

---

### Influencing the Far Future

- Published: 2013-10-07
- Modified: 2021-01-08
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/10/influencing-the-far-future/
- Topics: Existential risk

<img src="//eighty-thousand-hours-wp-production.s3.amazonaws.com/2013/08/future_generations.jpg" alt="future_generations" width="540" height="540" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-19851" />

<h2>Introduction</h2>

In an earlier post we reviewed the arguments in favor of the idea that we should primarily assess causes in terms of whether they <a href="/2013/08/how-important-are-future-generations/">help build a society that&rsquo;s likely to survive and flourish in the very long-term</a>. We think this is a plausible position, but it raises the question: what activities in fact <em>do</em> help improve the world over the very long term, and of those, which are best? We&rsquo;ve been asked this question several times in recent case studies.

First, we propose a very broad categorisation of how our actions today might affect the long-run future.

Second, as a first step to prioritising different methods, we compiled a list of approaches to improve the long-run future that are currently popular among the community of people who explicitly believe the long-run future is important.

The list was compiled from our knowledge of the community. Please let us know if you think there are other important types of approach that have been neglected. Further, note that this post is not meant as an endorsement of any particular approach; just an acknowledgement that it has significant support.

Third, we comment on how existing mainstream philanthropy may or may not influence the far future.


Introduction In an earlier post we reviewed the arguments in favor of the idea that we should primarily assess causes in terms of whether they help build a society that’s likely to survive and flourish in the very long-term. We think this is a plausible position, but it raises the question: what activities in fact do help improve the world over the very long term, and of those, which are best? We’ve been asked this question several times in recent case studies. First, we propose a very broad categorisation of how our actions today might affect the long-run future. Second, as a first step to prioritising different methods, we compiled a list of approaches to improve the long-run future that are currently popular among the community of people who explicitly believe the long-run future is highly important. The list was compiled from our knowledge of the community, which principally includes the people associated with CEA, MIRI, FHI, GCRI and related organisations. Please let us know if you think there are other important types of approach that have been neglected. Further, note that this post is not meant as an endorsement of any particular approach; just an acknowledgement that it has significant support. Third, we comment on how existing mainstream philanthropy may or may not influence the far future. (1) What kinds of changes can last? If we are concerned with influencing the very far future, we might first wonder: what kind of actions could possibly have an effect extending for...

---

### The value of economics PhDs: A conversation with Robin Hanson

- Published: 2013-10-04
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/10/the-value-of-economics-phds-a-conversation-with-robin-hanson/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy, Economics, Economics PhD, Graduate school

<a href='//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/228/original/robinhanson1.jpg?1380927881'><img alt="Robinhanson1" class="image large" src="//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/228/large/robinhanson1.jpg?1380927881" /></a>

<h2>Summary</h2>

<strong>Purpose of the call:</strong> We organized this call to learn more about the value of getting a PhD in economics to help advise people considering that path.

<strong>Why this person:</strong> We sought Robin&rsquo;s thoughts because he is a like-minded economics professor with whom we already had a relationship.

We discussed what career options are available to people who get PhDs in economics, who is a good fit for a PhD in economics, and how to maximize one&rsquo;s impact in economics. We did not discuss highly data-oriented questions, such as PhD acceptance rates, tenure rates, and portions of economics PhDs working in different areas.

An economics PhD is

<ol>
<li>generally necessary for becoming an economics professor</p></li>
<li><p>can be a promising route (among some other potentially promising routes) to finding work in think tanks, government agencies, international organizations such as the World Bank,</p></li>
<li><p>can be helpful for getting a job in consulting.</p></li>
</ol>

<p>Good indicators of fit for an economics PhD include aptitude for math, interest in economics, being open-minded about research topics, being able to work on challenging tasks with little direction from others, and being willing to put in a lot of hours. A firm grasp of basic economics concepts and theory, developed through years of practice, is very valuable for understanding how the social world works, which is helpful for evaluating causes and interventions.


Participants Robin Hanson—Associate Professor, Department of Economics, George Mason University; Research Associate, Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University Nick Beckstead—Research Fellow, Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University; Board of Trustees, Centre for Effective Altruism Jess Whittlestone—Director of Communications, 80,000 Hours Summary Purpose of the call: We organized this call to learn more about the value of getting a PhD in economics to help advise people considering that path, which we think is a potentially promising route in academia. Why this person: We sought Robin’s thoughts because he is a like-minded economics professor with whom we already had a relationship. We discussed what career options are available to people who get PhDs in economics, who is a good fit for a PhD in economics, and how to maximize one’s impact in economics. We did not discuss highly data-oriented questions, such as PhD acceptance rates, tenure rates, and portions of economics PhDs working in different areas. An economics PhD is generally necessary for becoming an economics professor can be a promising route (among some other potentially promising routes) to finding work in think tanks, government agencies, international organizations such as the World Bank, can be helpful for getting a job in consulting. Good indicators of fit for an economics PhD include aptitude for math, interest in economics, being open-minded about research topics, being able to work on challenging tasks with little direction from others, and being willing to put in a lot of hours. A firm grasp of basic economics...

---

### Should more altruists consider entrepreneurship?

- Published: 2013-09-30
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/09/should-more-altruists-consider-entrepreneurship/
- Topics: Being ambitious, Found a tech startup, Founder of new projects, Risk, Unconventional advice

<a href='//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/226/original/800px-Berlin_Hackathon_2012-46.jpg?1380562828'><img alt="800px-berlin_hackathon_2012-46" class="image large" src="//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/226/large/800px-Berlin_Hackathon_2012-46.jpg?1380562828" /></a>

One thing you might consider, if you&rsquo;re aiming to do the most good with your career, is going into entrepreneurship. In this post I&rsquo;ll summarise our reasons for thinking for-profit entrepreneurship is a promising career path for altruists, and outline our plans for research which will form the later parts of this blog series.

In summary:

<ul>
<li>For-profit entrepreneurship is potentially one of the highest earning careers, making it an attractive option for earning to give</li>
<li>It seems more promising than other high-earning careers for doing good directly, because you have the option to sell products that help the world, and contribute to innovation in the economy </li>
<li>Furthermore, we think that startups may be one of the best ways to build career capital early on in your career</li>
</ul>


Many thanks to Spencer Greenberg, whose talk “When Startups Help the World” given at the recent Effective Altruism Summit inspired many of the ideas in this post, and motivated much of the upcoming research on entrepreneurship. One thing you might consider, if you’re aiming to do the most good with your career, is going into entrepreneurship. In this post I’ll summarise our reasons for thinking for-profit entrepreneurship1 is a promising career path for altruists, and outline our plans for research which will form the later parts of this blog series. In summary: For-profit entrepreneurship is potentially one of the highest earning careers, making it an attractive option for earning to give It seems more promising than other high-earning careers for doing good directly, because you have the option to sell products that help the world, and contribute to innovation in the economy Furthermore, we think that startups may be one of the best ways to build career capital early on in your career I’ll now talk about each of these points in a little more detail. High expected earnings We’ve made the point previously on the 80k blog that, if your aim is to maximise your earnings to maximise your charitable donations, you might want to consider entrepreneurship. A 2007 study by Hall and Woodward 2 of thousands of American startups finds the average founding team’s earnings by time of exit are a massive $9 million. This gives us further reason to think entrepreneurship is promising as a high earning...

---

### We're looking for donations

- Published: 2013-09-15
- Modified: 2022-03-22
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/09/we-re-looking-for-donations/
- Topics: Uncategorised

Do we provide useful research or coaching? Support our service: we&rsquo;re looking for donations to develop 80,000 Hours.

We set up 80,000 Hours because we believe it is our best opportunity to make the most difference in the world. There&rsquo;s an enormous opportunity to help thousands or even millions of people to find the opportunities that enable them to make the most difference.

We&rsquo;re looking for donations to help develop our content over the next two years, test to see if it works, and, if it works, prepare to take it to scale. During that time, we also anticipate carrying out hundreds of in-depth consulting sessions with the most high potential, altruistic young people in the world, spinning off high impact projects and raising millions for charity.


The figures in this post were accurate as of September 2013. Please contact development@80000hours. org for our latest information. We’re looking for donations to develop 80,000 Hours. We set up 80,000 Hours because we believe it is our best opportunity to make the most difference in the world. There’s an enormous opportunity to help thousands or even millions of people to find the opportunities that enable them to make the most difference. We’re looking for £360,000 to develop our content over the next two years, test to see if it works, and, if it works, prepare to take it to scale. During that time, we also anticipate carrying out hundreds of in-depth consulting sessions with the most high potential, altruistic young people in the world, spinning off high impact projects and raising millions for charity. If you would like to talk to someone about donating, please contact development AT 80000hours. org. You can see more details on what we have done and our plans on our evaluation pages. What can your donations buy? Over 80% of our budget is for our staff. So extra donations mainly allow us to maintain and grow the team. We think our team represents exceptional value. It’s made up of highly able, dedicated people, who care a great deal about the impact they have in the world, and so work for less than they could make even at other non-profits. Here are some examples of the kinds of ways we can spend money on the margin An...

---

### Case Study: Designing a new organisation that might be more effective than GiveWell's top recommendation

- Published: 2013-09-12
- Modified: 2024-12-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/09/case-study-designing-a-new-organisation-that-might-be-more-effective-than-givewell-s-top-recommendation/
- Topics: Founder of new projects, Fundraising

Several months ago, we <a href="/2013/03/how-to-create-the-world-s-most-effective-charity/">wrote about</a> an easy way to create a charity that&rsquo;s more effective than <a href="http://www.givewell.org">GiveWell&rsquo;s</a> top recommendations. It&rsquo;s a simple idea: create an organisation that does nothing except  fundraise for GiveWell&rsquo;s top recommendations. It <a href="/2012/10/why-don-t-charities-spend-more-on-fundraising/">seems relatively easy</a> to raise more than $1 for every $1 invested in fundraising, so it seems relatively easy to act as a multiplier on donations to other charities, and thus create an organisation with a cost-effectiveness ratio that&rsquo;s higher than the charities themselves.

We were thrilled, therefore, to find that two 80k members, Joey and Xio, are planning to start an organisation that does exactly this. It&rsquo;s called Effective Fundraising. Their plan is to start by writing grants for <a href="http://www.againstmalaria.com/">Against Malaria Foundation</a> (AMF) and <a href="http://www.thehumaneleague.com/">The Humane League</a> for six months. If it goes well, they could hire more people. Longer term, they could expand into others kinds of fundraising. They chose grant writing because (i) surveys of average fundraising ratios found that grant writing earns an average return of around $8 for every $1 invested, which is higher than most other forms of fundraising (ii) the money can be raised within 6-18 months, unlike &lsquo;chugging&rsquo; (asking for donations on the street) or door-to-door which takes several years to pay off.

We think:

<ol>
<li>Working on Effective Fundraising looks like a very strong option for building career capital.</li>
<li>They could consider running more experiments before committing to grant-writing for 6 months.</li>
<li>They may be having less impact than they could because they may not be supporting the most high priority causes.</li>
<li>They should strongly consider hiring someone else to work for Effective Fundraising as a grant writer.</li>
</ol>


Introduction Several months ago, we wrote about an apparently easy way to create a charity that’s more effective than GiveWell’s top recommendations. It’s a simple idea: create an organisation that does nothing except fundraise for GiveWell’s top recommendations. It seems relatively easy to raise more than $1 for every $1 invested in fundraising, so it seems relatively easy to act as a multiplier on donations to other charities, and thus create an organisation with a cost-effectiveness ratio that’s higher than the charities themselves. The idea has merit from other angles too, for instance, there’s reason to expect that charities don’t fundraise as much as would be optimal, and it’s a valuable service to them to take fundraising off their books. It’s also promising because the success of fundraising is relatively easy to quantify compared to many other meta-charity activities (like doing research or advocacy). This means that you can learn quickly whether you’re succeeding, which means you can improve quickly. We were thrilled, therefore, to find that two 80k members, Joey and Xio, are planning to start an organisation that does exactly this. It’s called Effective Fundraising. Their plan is to start by writing grants for Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) and The Humane League for six months. If it goes well, they could hire more people. Longer term, they could expand into others kinds of fundraising. They chose grant writing because (i) surveys of average fundraising ratios found that grant writing earns an average return of around $8 for every...

---

### Making a difference through social entrepreneurship: an interview with Tom Rippin

- Published: 2013-09-05
- Modified: 2014-09-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/09/making-a-difference-through-social-entrepreneurship-an-interview-with-tom-rippin/
- Topics: Founder of new projects

I spoke with <a href="http://onpurpose.uk.com/portfolio-item/tom-rippin/">Tom Rippin</a>, founder and CEO of <a href="http://onpurpose.uk.com/on-purpose-explained/our-purpose-2/">On Purpose</a>, a leadership programme aimed at <em>"attracting and developing talent to address the greatest issues faced by society and the environment."</em> We talked about:

<ul>
<li>Tom&rsquo;s own career path and what led him to founding On Purpose</p></li>
<li><p>Why he thinks that social enterprise has the potential to have an enormous positive impact on the world</p></li>
<li><p>What constraints the social enterprise movement faces at the moment</p></li>
<li><p>How On Purpose is working to address these issues, and how they plan to assess their own impact</p></li>
</ul>

<p><a href='//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/223/original/176720914_640.jpg?1378460404'><img alt="176720914_640" class="image large" src="//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eightythousand/posts/images/223/large/176720914_640.jpg?1378460404" /></a>


I spoke with Tom Rippin, founder and CEO of On Purpose, a leadership programme aimed at "attracting and developing talent to address the greatest issues faced by society and the environment. " We talked about: Tom’s own career path and what led him to founding On Purpose Why he thinks that social enterprise has the potential to have an enormous positive impact on the world What constraints the social enterprise movement faces at the moment How On Purpose is working to address these issues, and how they plan to assess their own impact Key takeaways: Solid professional skills can be very useful for accelerating a career in other sectors, especially social enterprise. This supports the view we’ve expressed previously that working in the private sector early on in your career might be a great way to build career capital to have more impact later. The social enterprise space might be less constrained by people who have ideas and want to start businesses, and more by people who actually have the skills to run and scale these businesses. So developing these skills early on could be very valuable. Tell us a bit about your career background and the path that led you to set up On Purpose I started my career in academic research but soon discovered that wasn’t for me after all, and decided I wanted to get into international development. I spoke to various people who recommended I acquire some private sector skills first, so I joined management consultants McKinsey...

---

### Summary of our six month evaluation

- Published: 2013-09-05
- Modified: 2020-08-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/09/summary-of-our-six-month-evaluation/
- Topics: Updates

<em>This is the final post (of a series of six) on our six month evaluation</em>

This report overviews our entire six month evaluation. Our Six Month Review is divided into 9 sections. Click on the links to see the full reports.

You can see a commentary on this review by the trustees and external advisory board of 80,000 Hours <a href="/blog/252-trustee-and-advisory-board-re">here</a>.

<ul>
<li><p><a href="/2013/08/our-progress/">(1) Our Progress</a></p></li>
<li><p><a href="/2013/08/metrics-report/">(2) Metrics Report</a></p></li>
<li><p><a href="/2013/08/evaluation-of-80-000-hours-as-project/">(3) Evaluation of 80,000 Hours as Project</a></p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8OdBVMpAjJHQWJEZC1QeFhIYnc/edit">(4) Trustee Performance Evaluation of 80,000 Hours</a></p></li>
<li><p><a href="/2013/09/team-plan/">(5) Our Plans for the Next Six Months</a></p></li>
<li><p><a href="/2013/09/finance-report/">(6) Finance Report</a></p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OFOtzhrTHfw7CkDjDEQ7l4JQrw02hZrESauGV10xCgs/edit">(7) Our Latest Business Strategy</a></p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-Jhoc5Aa_5WU09CcU1Sb254NlU/edit?usp=sharing">(8) Our Latest Summary Business Plan</a></p></li>
<li><p><a href="/meet_the_team">(9) Our Team</a></p></li>
</ul>


This is the final post (of a series of six) on our six month evaluation This report overviews our entire six month evaluation. Our Six Month Review is divided into 9 sections. Click on the links to see the full reports. You can see a commentary on this review by the trustees and external advisory board of 80,000 Hours here. (1) Our Progress Highlights our main achievements and mistakes in the period. Our key priority was further developing our business model and content plans, and we’re pleased with our success in this area. We made two rounds of improvements, culminating with adopting the ‘case study model’ - we outline our key ideas then do further research by doing in-depth consultations on the career decisions of high potential people. 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 almost 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 and content. 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 or just ways things could have gone better. The worst mistake...

---

### Trustee and Advisory Board Report

- Published: 2013-09-03
- Modified: 2014-09-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/09/trustee-and-advisory-board-report/
- Topics: Uncategorised

<em>Our trustees and advisory board have reviewed our six month evaluation. This report presents a summary report from each group, outlining their main concerns with and comments on the overall progress of the organisation.</em>

Our trustees are Toby Ord, Nick Beckstead and William MacAskill (who is also our President).

Will issued the following statement:


Our trustees and advisory board have reviewed our six month evaluation. This report presents a summary report from each group, outlining their main concerns with comments on the overall progress of the organisation. Trustee Review Our trustees are Toby Ord, Nick Beckstead and William MacAskill (who is also our President). Will issued the following statement: Overall, I think that 80,000 Hours has performed very well over the last 6 months. Some aspects that I found particularly impressive are: The leadership of the organisation. There is a clear mission focus and unified culture within the organisation. This results in recruitment of staff and interns of exceptionally high quality. The agility of the organisation. I really get the sense that the 80,000 Hours team is focused on learning (a) what activities in general will have the biggest impact; and (b) what activities there is a particular niche for and that they can be particularly successful at. The team then modifies its plans, and even its nature as an organisation, on the basis of what they have learned. This focus on learning and improving bodes well for the future. The development of the case-study model. This model has the potential to answer my main concerns (below), and so I'm excited about finding out the effect it will have. The substantial increase in members and web traffic, which were considerably beyond expectations. My principal concerns are as follows: I would like to see some well-documented examples of significant career changes that are clearly attributable...

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### Team Plan

- Published: 2013-09-02
- Modified: 2014-09-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/09/team-plan/
- Topics: Uncategorised

<em>This is the fifth post (of a series of six) on our six month evaluation</em>

This report outlines our key priorities for the next six months.

<h2>Summary and Discussion</h2>

<ul>
<li><p>We continue to see the top priority as further investment i.e. developing our business model, content and the organisation&rsquo;s robustness.</p></li>
<li><p>The flagship goal in this area is carrying out 30 case studies, which will form the centre of our content and evaluation efforts.</p></li>
<li><p>Also important is: (i) more impact evaluation in general (ii) fundraising enough to keep up with our expanding budget (iii) increasing our talent pool through training and outreach (iv) increase the appeal of our content to successful young professionals through rebranding (v) having high quality research on our key ideas to support the case studies on our blog.</p></li>
<li><p>Outreach is less high priority, except insofar as we do enough to ensure a strong stream of candidates for case studies and internships, and build up credibility (e.g. receiving press coverage and impressive affiliations).</p></li>
<li><p>We&rsquo;re also not yet focused on scaling up delivery, because we think it will be overall faster to spend more time developing our content at this stage.</p></li>
</ul>


This is the fifth post (of a series of six) on our six month evaluation This report outlines our key priorities for the next six months. Summary and Discussion We continue to see the top priority as further investment i. e. developing our business model, content and the organisation’s robustness. The flagship goal in this area is carrying out 30 case studies, which will form the centre of our content and evaluation efforts. Also important is: (i) more impact evaluation in general (ii) fundraising enough to keep up with our expanding budget (iii) increasing our talent pool through training and outreach (iv) increase the appeal of our content to successful young professionals through rebranding (v) having high quality research on our key ideas to support the case studies on our blog. Outreach is less high priority, except insofar as we do enough to ensure a strong stream of candidates for case studies and internships, and build up credibility (e. g. receiving press coverage and impressive affiliations). We’re also not yet focused on scaling up delivery, because we think it will be overall faster to spend more time developing our content at this stage. Our Priorities Case Studies Carry out and evaluate the impact of 30 high-quality case studies with people who have high potential to make a difference. Evaluation Improve our data collection and storage, in particular, setting up a central CRM database. Aim to be in a position to carry out and analyse an impact survey of members before the end...

---

### Finance Report

- Published: 2013-09-01
- Modified: 2024-12-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/09/finance-report/
- Topics: Updates

<em>This is the fourth post (of a series of six) on our six month evaluation</em>

This report outlines our key financial metrics.

<h2>Summary</h2>

<br/>
<strong>80,000 Hours is seeking to raise £360,000 over the next year to cover operating expenses for July 2013 – June 2015.</strong> This would cover all of 80,000 Hours&rsquo; expenses for this year and give 80,000 Hours 12 months of cash reserves, which would be very valuable for improved organizational planning and stability. Raising £245,000 by June 2014 would give us 6 months of cash reserves.

This will enable us to carry out our plans to develop and promote our content about which careers make the most difference, as outlined in <a href="/2013/09/team-plan/">our team plan</a>.

<strong>80,000 Hours&rsquo; current financial situation</strong>: As of 20 August 2013, 80,000 Hours has about £30,000 of cash on hand, which is about 2 months of reserves. 80,000 hours&rsquo; estimated budget for July 2013 – June 2014 is £160,000. 80,000 Hours&rsquo; estimated budget for July 2014 - June 2015 is £230,000. In the last year, 80,000 Hours raised £100,000, so we would like funds raised this year to increase by £260,000.


This is the fourth post (of a series of six) on our six month evaluation This report outlines our key financial metrics. Summary 80,000 Hours is seeking to raise £360,000 over the next year to cover operating expenses for July 2013 – June 2015. This would cover all of 80,000 Hours’ expenses for this year and give 80,000 Hours 12 months of cash reserves, which would be very valuable for improved organizational planning and stability. Raising £245,000 by June 2014 would give us 6 months of cash reserves. This will enable us to carry out our plans to develop and promote our content about which careers make the most difference, as outlined in our team plan. 80,000 Hours’ current financial situation: As of 20 August 2013, 80,000 Hours has about £30,000 of cash on hand, which is about 2 months of reserves. 80,000 Hours’ estimated budget for July 2013 – June 2014 is £160,000. 80,000 Hours’ estimated budget for July 2014 - June 2015 is £230,000. In the last year, 80,000 Hours raised £100,000, so we would like funds raised this year to increase by £260,000. Historical spending Over our previous budgeting period (July 2012 - June 2013) we spent £79,000. Overall, we spent slightly more than the £73,000 originally budgeted for. We went under budget in most areas, but spent significantly more on intern expenses than projected because we identified several very high quality interns. Spending...

---

### Evaluation of 80,000 Hours as Project

- Published: 2013-08-31
- Modified: 2020-08-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/08/evaluation-of-80-000-hours-as-project/
- Topics: Updates

<em>This is the third post (of a series of six) on our six month evaluation</em>

In this report, we answer a set of critical questions for 80,000 Hours stakeholders. These questions are inspired by <a href="http://www.givewell.org/about/self-evaluation">GiveWell&rsquo;s self-evaluation process</a>, 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 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. Summary We believe it’s likely but highly uncertain that our current business model and content is cost-effective relative to GiveWell’s top recommendations, and we continue to rapidly improve our business model. We continue to learn about how to function effectively as an organisation (as evident in Our Progress). One significant challenge ahead is learning how to effectively run a larger, three tier organisation. We continue to rely heavily on our key staff, though we’re making progress towards reducing this reliance. We’re not financially weak, but there is significant room to become more secure. Our team is highly able and reports high levels of satisfaction, and we’re attracting very talented applicants, especially to our internships. Nevertheless, we are being somewhat slowed down by not being able to find enough talented staff. How well is our current business model working? This is evaluated in Nick Beckstead’s separate performance evaluation of 80,000 Hours. I think the main conclusions are: We’re successful in our aims to engage people in our programs. My best guess is that we’re yielding a good return on...

---

### Metrics Report

- Published: 2013-08-28
- Modified: 2020-08-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/08/metrics-report/
- Topics: Updates

<em>This is the second post (of a series of six) on our six month evaluation</em>

This post outlines the key outreach and community metrics that we track week-to-week.


Metrics Report 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. Web Traffic The chart below shows the number of unique visitors to our website each month (i. e. each visitor is only counted once). In the 6-month period from December 2012 to May 2013, we received 47,144 unique visitors. In the previous 6 months, we received 32,031 unique visitors. This represents a 47% increase. Sources of Web Traffic The table below shows our sources of web traffic in the most recent 6 months and in the previous 6 months, as well as the difference between these periods. SourceDec 2012 - May 2013Jun 2012 - Nov 2012Increase% Increase Referral30,179 (39%)26,8883,29112% Search27,889 (37%)11,43416,455140% Direct18,002 (24%)10,0527,95079% Major Referral Domains Below are the top 5 referral domains in the last 6 months and the previous 6 months. Top Referral Domains Dec 2012 - May 2013VisitorsTop Referral Domains Jun 2012 - Nov 2012Visitors facebook. com14,188reddit. com9,081 reddit. com3,083facebook. com9,456 qz. com1,615lesswrong. com1,297 blog. ted. com705overcomingbias. com935 lesswrong. com698t. co618 Geographical Location 37. 61% of visits came from the United States. 29. 28% came from the United Kingdom. Top Blog Posts Our 5 most popular blog posts for the period were: * "Our Research on How to Find a Job You Love" (2,815 views) * “A Formula for the Perfect Job” (2,621 views) * “Two Question You Won’t Want to Ask Yourself but Should” (2,255 views) *...

---

### Our Progress

- Published: 2013-08-27
- Modified: 2020-08-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/08/our-progress/
- Topics: Updates

<em>This is the first post (of a series of six) on our six month evaluation</em>

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 <a href="http://www.givewell.org/about/self-evaluation">GiveWell</a>.

In this report, we outline how we see our main achievements and mistakes over the last six months.

<h2>Summary</h2>

<ul>
<li><p>Our key priority was further developing our business model and content strategy, and we&rsquo;re pleased with our success in this area. We made two rounds of improvements, culminating with adopting the <a href="/2013/07/we-re-changing-our-career-coaching/">case study model</a>.</p></li>
<li><p>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.</p></li>
<li><p>While prioritising developing our business model and organisation building, we&rsquo;ve also performed strongly in outreach. Increasing web traffic by 47% and recruiting about 400 new members was well ahead of expectations.</p></li>
<li><p>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.</p></li>
<li><p>Overall, I think we&rsquo;re in a strong position to carry out our plans over the next six months.</p></li>
</ul>


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. Summary 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. Our web traffic increased by 47% and we recruited about 400 new members, which 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...

---

### How important are future generations?

- Published: 2013-08-19
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/08/how-important-are-future-generations/
- Topics: Effective Altruism, Existential risk, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Moral patients, Moral philosophy, Unconventional advice

At 80,000 Hours, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2XNfeIASoA">we think it&rsquo;s really important to find</a> the <a href="/causes">causes</a> 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. <a href="https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&amp;pid=sites&amp;srcid=ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnxuYmVja3N0ZWFkfGd4OjM4ZDVlYjY4ZTkzMzFlZjE">Important new research</a> by a trustee of <a href="http://centreforeffectivealtruism.org/">CEA</a> (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.

<img src="//eighty-thousand-hours-wp-production.s3.amazonaws.com/2013/08/future_generations.jpg" alt="future_generations" width="540" height="540" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-19851" />


Summary 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 civilization is likely to be the most important consideration in working out the importance of a cause. Briefly: Barring a disaster, the Earth will remain habitable for about a billion years, and many millions of future generations could come after us. Most of humanity’s potential lies in the future. There are actions we might take today that could have a significant impact on these future generations. For instance, if we cause a nuclear war that ends civilization, then this future will never happen at all. So, from the perspective of making a difference, the expected impact of our actions today on the far future might be the most important thing about them. In the rest of this post, we summarise the argument and its consequences, concluding: The argument seems plausible, so it’s plausible that the expected impact of different causes on future civilization is the most important thing about them. We know little about the effects of different causes on the long term future Thus, if the argument is plausible, it’s very unclear which cause is most effective Since prioritization research that considers the far future is also extremely...

---

### Our first career workshop

- Published: 2013-08-16
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/08/our-first-career-workshop/
- Topics: Uncategorised

Last month, 80,000 Hours ran its <strong>first ever career workshop</strong>! 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.


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. The workshop took place in mid-July in the Welsh countryside, at the Centre for Effective Altruism’s (CEA) weekend away. Over 60 current and former volunteers and staff of CEA came to take part in workshops, receive training and attend talks on various topics in effective altruism. All day on Saturday, 80,000 Hours ran the career workshop. We had sixteen keen people work with us on making a concrete improvement to their next career decision. 1 What we covered Our aim was to get people to create a personal career plan, to improve their plan over the course of the day and to go away with concrete actions which to take after the weekend was over. The workshop consisted of a series of presentations and discussions, as well as breaks for writing down of thoughts and ideas. In the presentations, we went over our latest thoughts on how to choose a career in which you can have the biggest possible impact. This included a section on how to choose which problem to work towards solving with your career (which we call your cause). We presented a framework for choosing between different causes and our current best-guess ranking of which causes are most important. Stay tuned to the blog to hear about this in more detail. We...

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### Does your personality matter in picking a career?

- Published: 2013-08-12
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/08/does-your-personality-matter-in-picking-a-career/
- Topics: Ability, Job satisfaction, Personal fit, Unconventional advice

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&rsquo;ve concluded that they&rsquo;re not very useful in choosing your career. This is because they haven&rsquo;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.


Introduction In order to work out best practice within career advising, we looked into personality testing. Several people we've asked for advice have recommended that we consider using it. Having investigated the leading personality tests, however, we’ve concluded 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. Key takeaways: given our findings, what do we recommend? Personality tests have not yet shown to be directly useful in picking which careers will fit you, so don’t put much weight on them Be more sceptical about claims about which career might suit you based on personality To judge your chances of success, put more weight on IQ, grit and experience. When looking for job satisfaction, put more weight on the nature of the work and the quality of the social support in the workplace you’re considering Do plenty of trial and error. There’s a lot we can’t yet predict and don’t know. If you’re wondering whether a job will suit you, the best way to find out is to try it. Our findings on personality testing The most widely used personality test in the world is the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). There are plenty of reasons to doubt that this test is a good measure of personality. More importantly, there has been very little testing (and nothing within the academic community) of...

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### Why the Myers Briggs test is not useful in picking a career

- Published: 2013-08-12
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/08/why-the-myers-briggs-test-is-not-useful-in-picking-a-career/
- Topics: Ability, Job satisfaction, Personal fit, Unconventional advice

While investigating how to give good careers advice, we asked ourselves whether the Myers Briggs test, the world&rsquo;s most widely used personality test, might be useful. We&rsquo;ve concluded that it probably isn&rsquo;t.

<img src="https://80000hours.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/animals-myersbriggs-chart.jpg" alt="Myers Briggs types" width="960" height="747" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-41908" />


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. We wrote about why here. More recently, we came across an excellent article on the Washington Post about the test. The article makes several important points: Myers-Briggs is controlled by a family company. The franchise is worth $20 million per year. It was created by one woman, Isabel Myers, who was inspired by Jungian psychotherapy, rather than empirical work. It’s almost completely rejected by the academic psychology community. No major journal has published research on the indicator. This is largely due to point (2). The academic community instead uses the Big 5 test. The Big 5 doesn’t get promoted because it’s open source. There isn’t a company promoting it. It also doesn’t get promoted because it can tell you unpleasant things about your personality, whereas Myers Briggs is always positive. The academic community are often unwilling to criticise Myers Briggs, because (i) they are paid by Myers Briggs, or (ii) they want to work with and consult people using psychology in business, and have little to gain from criticising their current main approach. These are all things that make us very wary about using Myers Briggs. It seems much better to use the Big 5 instead, which psychologists have developed as an empirically grounded and more complete measure of personality. When we raise these points, the most common...

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### Introduction to our career model

- Published: 2013-08-07
- Modified: 2021-01-07
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/08/introduction-to-our-career-model/
- Topics: Uncategorised

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.


We think that the term “career choice” is misleading. It implies that your career hinges on one single decision: what you should do with the rest of your life. It’s no wonder that choosing a career can seem daunting! In reality, you needn’t choose one career path and stick with it blindly for the rest of your life. Career choice is less a single decision, and more a sequence of smaller decisions. You make a best guess of what to do next, try things out, test and learn, and then reassess. Thinking of each individual decision like this takes a huge amount of pressure off: you don’t need to choose perfectly first time. Drawing on similarities between an individual planning their career and a startup business, we’ve realised the importance of focusing on learning and adapting to change early on in your career. We’ve come to the conclusion that rigid career plans probably aren’t that helpful, and could even be harmful - but you do still need some means of direction and motivation for the future. One promising solution to all this 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 the model is designed to be tested and adapted as you learn. In this post I'll outline the career model we use at 80,000 Hours, explain how we've come to this model, and then go into the various parts of...

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### We're looking for a Director of Fundraising and a Finance Manager!

- Published: 2013-08-06
- Modified: 2020-08-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/08/we-re-looking-for-a-director-of-fundraising-and-a-finance-manager/
- Topics: Uncategorised

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.


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. For more information on why you should work for us, see our recent blog post or the recruitment page. To apply, fill out this form. Note: applications have now closed. The deadline for all positions is Friday 16th August 2013 at 5pm GMT. For the jobs listed below, the starting salary will be between £15,000 and £30,000 a year, depending on skills and experience. All roles are based at our office in Oxford, in a building shared with academics from the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and the Future of Humanity Institute. We do not currently offer remote positions. If you are an American citizen, the application will be more competitive as it's difficult to get a visa, but we’re still very interested in hearing from you. We look for the following traits in candidates for all positions: Be self-motivated, hard-working, and independent Can deal with pressure and unfamiliar problems Have a strong desire for personal development Able to quickly master complex, abstract ideas, and solve problems Able to communicate clearly and persuasively in writing and in person Comfortable working in a team and quick to get on with new people Able to lead a team and...

---

### Show me the harm

- Published: 2013-07-31
- Modified: 2024-11-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/07/show-me-the-harm/
- Topics: EtG pros and cons, Finance, Investment Banking

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 <a href="http://www.benkuhn.net/etg-objections">this idea</a> raised many times during the recent <a href="/2013/06/80-000-hours-in-the-washington-post-our-responses-to-the-coverage/">press coverage</a> of <a href="/earning-to-give">Earning to Give</a>. Our response is that although the objection may be true for <a href="http://blog.givewell.org/2009/12/14/charity-isnt-about-helping/">typical examples of philanthropy</a>, when donors are <a href="http://www.givewell.org/">giving effectively</a> 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.


Does Earning to Give do more harm than good? Summary 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. The Direct Harm Introduction Left leaning advocates sometimes claim that Bill Gates did more harm through the Windows monopoly than good through his charity work. On the other hand, some on the right claim that he did more good with Windows than with charity. Both views are implausible. I’ll focus on the first claim, that the Windows monopoly did more harm than the Gates Foundation managed to do good, since this is the more common type of objection we find raised about Earning to Give. The vaccination programs of the Gates Foundation alone are estimated to have saved around 6 million lives to date, and this number is expected to rise significantly in the future. Windows has had 800 million users to date. This means that in order for Gates to have caused more harm through Windows, using...

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### How to assess the impact of a career

- Published: 2013-07-25
- Modified: 2022-08-27
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/07/how-to-assess-the-impact-of-a-career/
- Topics: Uncategorised

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&rsquo;ve developed an initial simple framework for assessing the value of different careers.


Our sole purpose is to help you work out in which career you can make the most difference. At first sight, it’s hard to know where to begin. Or what this even means. Indeed, many people don’t think it’s even possible to work this out! We don’t agree. If you don’t try to weigh up your options, you’ll end up doing far less for the world than you could otherwise be doing. And you could achieve so much. How, then, do we go about helping you decide in which career can you make the most difference? It’s not an easy question, but it is a fascinating one that has a great deal of importance to the world. What factors are the most important? 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 expect this framework will develop significantly and become more precise over time as we come to gain a better grasp over which factors matter. It just represents our best guess at which key factors are most important, organised in a way that we’ve found relatively easy to understand and evaluate separately. In summary, we find it useful to judge careers on two key factors: Immediate Impact Building career capital We break immediate impact down further into: the size of your contribution multiplied by the effectiveness of the cause you work...

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### Your career is like a startup

- Published: 2013-07-25
- Modified: 2024-11-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/07/your-career-is-like-a-startup/
- Topics: Unconventional advice

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?


Many people I’ve encountered seem to think about their career something like the following: “I can’t seem to find the “right” career for me. I don’t have anything I’m passionate about, and I don’t feel like I have any skills that particularly set me out from the crowd. I don’t want to be doing what I’m doing now for the rest of my life, but until I find something that fits my skills and interests, it'll do. ” There’s an assumption here that I think is implicit in a lot of talk about career choice: that it’s ultimately just a matter of sifting through all the possibilities and picking the best option given certain constraints. The problem with this is that it assumes you, your skills, your strengths, are fixed, and finding the “right” career is simply a matter of finding the best way to apply them. It also relies to some extent on being able to predict how your career will unfold over time. But if you want to have a successful career, you need to be constantly looking to improve and thinking about what skills are most worth investing in developing. If you want to make a difference, you need to be able to adapt to changes in the world around you. Your career is like a startup We think that we can draw many useful insights about career planning from thinking about how startups operate successfully. We started looking into how people typically plan their careers, and noticed...

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### 80,000 Hours is hiring!

- Published: 2013-07-19
- Modified: 2020-08-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/07/80-000-hours-is-hiring/
- Topics: Uncategorised

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&rsquo;re growing fast, so we&rsquo;re looking for bright and ambitious people to join us. If this sounds like something you&rsquo;d like to be part of, then apply to work for us!


Help us change the world! 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! Convinced already? Skip straight to the role descriptions and application form. Note: Applications are now closed. Our sister organisation, Giving What We Can, is also recruiting! The deadline for applications is Friday 16th August. We will accept applications for internships and graduate volunteers on an ongoing basis, but if you’d like us to review your application within the next two months, it needs to be received by this deadline. If you have any questions at any stage of the process, please contact recruitment@centreforeffectivealtruism. org Why work for 80,000 Hours? Quick disclaimer: I’ve been working for 80,000 Hours since last October. The below is a summary of all the reasons I’ve found working here awesome, and why I think others would too. First and foremost, “making the world a better place” is our bottom line and central aim. If you work for 80,000 Hours, you can directly help hundreds of other people have more impact with their careers. We work on this project because we think it’s the best way for us...

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### Looking for a seriously high-impact job using your managerial skills?

- Published: 2013-07-15
- Modified: 2021-11-18
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/07/looking-for-a-seriously-high-impact-job-using-your-managerial-skills/
- Topics: Global priorities research, Research management

We recently interviewed Roland Mathiasson, vice president of the <a href="http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com">Copenhagen Consensus Center</a> (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&rsquo;s leader, <a href="http://www.lomborg.com">Dr. Bjorn Lomborg</a>, was named one of the world&rsquo;s 100 most influential people by Time magazine and has been repeatedly named one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers by <em>Foreign Policy</em>. We initiated the interview after being contacted by Roland about a job opportunity with CCC...


Introduction 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. Summary of the job opportunity CCC is looking to hire a Project Manager to focus on organizing the promotion of their research following the setting of the new Millenium Development Goals (MDG). We expect this role is high impact career opportunity, albeit with fairly high uncertainty, because: We think prioritisation is likely to be a highly effective cause (see our upcoming research) The CCC is one of the only organisations carrying out and promoting prioritisation, and although we don't fully agree with their research, we think they play a valuable role, as well as offering significant potential to have even more impact The particular project you would focus on, promoting CCC’s research after the new MDG goals, is promising. Giving What We Can thinks that it may represent a promising, if speculative, funding opportunity. There seems to be substantial scope for an effective person to have outsized impact compared to the next best candidate In addition, the career offers strong good potential to...

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### The Future of Humanity Institute is hiring a high-impact project manager

- Published: 2013-07-08
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/07/the-future-of-humanity-institute-is-hiring-a-high-impact-project-manager/
- Topics: Future of Humanity Institute, Research management

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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s success going forward.

It&rsquo;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 <a href="http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/vacancy-academic-project-manager-at-the-future-of-humanity-institute/">here</a>


The Future of Humanity Institute The Future of Humanity Institute (Oxford) is a world-leading research centre looking at big-picture questions for human civilization. With the tools of mathematics, philosophy, and science, we explore the risks and opportunities that will arise from technological change, weigh ethical dilemmas, and evaluate global priorities. Our goal is to clarify the choices that will shape humanity’s long-term future. Who we need 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 can you make a big difference in this role? I’ve written in the past about the impact a talented person can have in academic project management. Your work will increase the success and impact of research done by each one of a...

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### How important is keeping your options open?

- Published: 2013-07-05
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/07/how-important-is-keeping-your-options-open/
- Topics: Unconventional advice

Why do so many elite graduates go into finance and consulting? At Princeton, for example, <a href="http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/21/out-of-harvard-and-into-finance/">more than 30% enter finance alone.</a>

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 <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-16/harvard-liberal-arts-failure-is-wall-street-gain-commentary-by-ezra-klein.html">the explanations proposed by commentators</a> 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;t enjoy your first one.


Summary Keeping your options open is more important for effective altruists than in conventional career choice. Keeping your options open seems at least as important as the immediate impact of your job for most effective altruists. For some effective altruists, it’s likely to be several times more important than immediate impact. This means it’s highly important to adopt flexible career strategies. For instance, we think it’s important to focus on developing broadly useful capacities (career capital) that generally improve your ability to have impact in the future. It’s also a reason in favor of Earning to Give, since donations are extremely flexible. Introduction 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... .

---

### We're changing our career coaching

- Published: 2013-07-03
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/07/we-re-changing-our-career-coaching/
- Topics: Uncategorised

We&rsquo;re changing how we do our career coaching. For at least the next couple of months, we&rsquo;re only going to be coaching one or two people each week, but we&rsquo;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.


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? Over the last year, we’ve learned a lot about how to improve decisions about career choice. In the summer, we focused on evaluating the career advice that is already out there. Around the new year, we focused on working out the kinds of problems people who want to make a difference confront in choosing their careers. To identify these problems, we spoke to about 40 people one-on-one and asked them to tell us what they found most difficult about choosing a career. We also surveyed students in Oxford and turned to lots of people we respect for their advice. Doing this research, we developed an understanding of the kinds of problems we could address in career choice that aren’t being well addressed elsewhere. Broadly, effective altruist minded people would like a bunch of concrete, evidence-based ideas for high impact careers and causes, and then they’d like some personalised guidance on how to narrow these down, with a particular focus on impact. So, we came up with a plan to produce reviews of a variety of potentially high impact careers and an individualised planning process delivered...

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### Effective Animal Activism, a spin-off of 80,000 Hours, has hired a full-time Executive Director

- Published: 2013-07-01
- Modified: 2021-11-18
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/07/effective-animal-activism-a-spin-off-of-80-000-hours-has-hired-a-full-time-executive-director/
- Topics: Uncategorised

Effective Animal Activism (EAA) will now become entirely independent from 80,000 Hours, and has a separate board of trustees consisting of <a href="/members/brian-tomasik">Brian Tomasik</a>, <a href="/members/eitan-fischer">Eitan Fischer</a> and <a href="/members/robert-wiblin">Rob Wiblin</a>.

In the rest of this post, I let Jon explain the new mission and direction of the organisation.


I'm very excited to see our that spin-off Effective Animal Activism, which only launched last summer, has already been able to hire a full-time Executive Director, Jon Bockman. Jon has six years of experience in the nonprofit sector, with a special focus on animal causes. 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. **The following was written by Jon Bockman and was originally featured on the EAA blog ** We’re in the midst of an exciting era for effective animal altruists. Animal advocacy groups are getting serious about increasing effectiveness. Every month brings exciting projects, and the volume of new studies and research projects is expanding faster than ever before. EAA has taken important organizational and strategic steps to powerfully execute our mission in this new era. I am writing to share these exciting updates with you: We’ve hired an Executive Director and Director of Communications, recruited skilled interns and advisors, and embarked on a focused path. We now employ a well-defined mission: identify and promote the most effective organizations. We have developed a clear course of action: conduct and evaluate research, and provide recommendations to the public. To ensure maximum efficiency and maintain a high level of professionalism, we will be splitting our website into two distinct areas. Our main site will feature charity...

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### Maximizing your donations via a job

- Published: 2013-06-24
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/06/maximizing-your-donations-via-a-job/
- Topics: Earning to Give, Software Engineering

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.


In November of 2012 I set a goal for myself: find the most x-risk reducing role I can fill. At first I thought it would be by working directly with MIRI, but after a while it became clear that I could contribute more by simply donating. So my goal became: find the highest paying job, so I can donate lots of money to CFAR and MIRI. A little bit of background on me. Started programming in 2000. Graduated in 2009 with Bachelor's in computer science. Worked for about a year and a half at a game company. Then did my own game startup for about a year. Then moved to the Bay Area and joined a game startup here, which was acquired 10 months later. Worked a bit at the new company and then left. So, just under four years of professional programming experience, but primarily in the game industry. Almost no leadership / managerial experience, aside from the startup I did where I hired freelancers. Below is my experience of finding a software engineering job in the Silicon Valley. If you are not an engineer or not in the Silicon Valley, I think you'll still find a lot of useful information here. Pre-game Before sending out my resume, I spent about a month preparing. I read Intro to Algorithms, which was very good overall, but not a huge help in preparing for interviews. 1 I read Cracking the Coding Interview, which was extremely helpful. (If you read only one book...

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### Want to make a real difference in development? AidGrade is hiring!

- Published: 2013-06-21
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/06/want-to-make-a-real-difference-in-development-aidgrade-is-hiring/
- Topics: Uncategorised

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.


Want to really add value and innovate in international development? AidGrade, a fantastic new organisation with precisely this aim, is currently hiring. For more information about AidGrade, see their website and my recent interview with their founder, Eva Vivalt. 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 offers. Why work with AidGrade? What's different about AidGrade? First, we have a high quantitative standard. Here you will find a very high level of maturity about research that you would not often find outside of academia. We focus on being right. Second, as we are a small organization, you would immediately have a lot of responsibility. This is your organization to build. You really have an immense opportunity here if you have the enthusiasm and skill to seize it. Third, we're kind of awesome. What we're creating here is new, unique and useful, and the people who have coalesced around this goal are truly wonderful people. There are some other places like that in the world, but not many. What are we looking for? There are two kinds of people we are looking for. First, we are looking for people to assist with our meta-analyses and quantitative work. These people should ideally have experience with impact evaluations and quantitative methods and be able to get stuck in quickly. These can be shorter-term positions, though those who can work for longer...

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### How to add value in international development: an interview with Eva Vivalt

- Published: 2013-06-19
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/06/how-to-add-value-in-international-development-an-interview-with-eva-vivalt/
- Topics: Global priorities research

I recently interviewed <a href="http://www.evavivalt.com/">Eva Vivalt</a>, who works for the World Bank and is the founder of AidGrade, a new organisation that evaluates and recommends different development programs on the basis of effectiveness. AidGrade&rsquo;s mission is &ldquo;to improve the effectiveness of development efforts by understanding and encouraging what works using rigorous, actionable and engaging evidence.&rdquo; You can find out more about AidGrade on their website <a href="http://www.aidgrade.org">here</a>.


I recently interviewed Eva Vivalt, who works for the World Bank and is the founder of AidGrade, a new organisation that evaluates and recommends different development programs on the basis of effectiveness. AidGrade’s mission is “to improve the effectiveness of development efforts by understanding and encouraging what works using rigorous, actionable and engaging evidence. ” You can find out more about AidGrade on their website. We talked a little about her career background and what AidGrade is doing, as well as what career advice she might have for people with similar aims in poverty reduction and international development. Tell us a bit about your background and how you got to your current position. I was interested in the idea of “helping as much as I could” from a very early stage. I did my undergraduate degree in philosophy, but realised partway through that this probably wasn’t the best way for me to figure out how to help the world. Not that philosophy isn’t a great way to do this for some people, but personally I thought I could better get this through studying international development. So I did a Masters program in Development Studies at Oxford, which was fantastic. The course is a real mix of different disciplines, which ensures you don’t think too narrowly early on. I realised I particularly liked the way economists were thinking about issues and the way they arrived at conclusions. I felt like I thought in a similar way, and so this seemed like a...

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### Where can I earn the most?

- Published: 2013-06-12
- Modified: 2024-12-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/06/where-can-i-earn-the-most/
- Topics: Income

Since one way that you can have a big impact with your career is through earning to give, we want to investigate which careers hold the best earnings prospects.

Our most recent research looked at the typical career paths and salaries for five different careers: Accounting, Consulting, Investment Banking, Law and Medicine. We found that investment bankers have the highest earning potential and in the UK: they can expect to earn between £8m and £40m over the course of their career.


This post is outdated. See our new article instead. Since one way you can have a big impact with your career is through earning to give, we have an on-going project to work out how much you can expect to earn in different career paths. Our most recent research looked at the typical career paths and salaries for five different careers: Accounting Consulting Investment Banking Law Medicine. We found that investment bankers have the highest earning potential. In the UK, an investment banker can expect to earn between £8 million and £40 million over the course of their career. You can make more refined estimates for your individual situation by considering a number of personal factors, such as where you live and your ability relative to your peers. In some upcoming posts, we’ll look at some ways to maximise your earnings within specific careers. We’ll cover entry requirements, the best places to work, and which exit opportunities are the most promising. We will also look at some of the major differences that we’ve found between earnings in the UK and the USA. In this post, we present a summary of our findings. So, how much will I earn? Within each of these broad sectors, we chose one specific career - deal making investment bankers, solicitors, management consultants, public accountants and NHS doctors (including both consultants and GPs) - and estimated how much you could earn if you make it all the way to the top of each particular field. The...

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### Why Earning to Give is often not the best option

- Published: 2013-06-10
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/06/why-earning-to-give-is-often-not-the-best-option/
- Topics: Donating effectively, Earning to Give, Effective Altruism, EtG pros and cons

A common misconception is that 80,000 Hours thinks <a href="/earning-to-give">Earning to Give</a> is typically the way to have the most impact with your career. We've never said that in any of our materials. All we have said, for instance in <a href="http://www.academia.edu/3619295/Replaceability_career_choice_and_making_a_difference">the paper we published on Earning to Give</a>, is that there is strong reason to think that Earning to Give is better than taking a typical nonprofit job.

When it comes to how to make the most difference with your career, we think there's huge room for debate. Whether it's best for someone to pursue Earning to Give normally depends on difficult to estimate empirical considerations unique to the situation, like some of those mentioned <a href="/2012/09/how-good-are-the-best/">here</a>, whether your cause is more talent-constrained or funding-constrained, what other people are doing, and issues like what else you could do with an Earning to Give job (often high earning jobs give you a useful platform to advance high impact causes independent of the money you donate yourself). When people have come to us in the past interested in pursuing Earning to Give, we've advised some to do it, and others not to do it. See our recent <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oihS0Cx8Lcs">intro video</a> for some examples.

This is why we welcome a recent article by ex-Givewell employee Jonah Sinick on why Earning to Give might not be optimal...


A common misconception is that 80,000 Hours thinks Earning to Give is typically the way to have the most impact. We've never said that in any of our materials. All we have said, for instance in the paper we published on Earning to Give, is that there is strong reason to think that Earning to Give is better than taking a typical nonprofit job. When it comes to how to make the most difference with your career, we think there's huge room for debate. Whether it's best for someone to pursue Earning to Give normally depends on difficult to estimate empirical considerations unique to the situation, like some of those mentioned here, whether your cause is more talent-constrained or funding-constrained, what other people are doing, and issues like what else you could do with an Earning to Give job. Often high earning jobs give you a useful platform to advance high impact causes independent of the money you donate yourself. When people have come to us in the past interested in pursuing Earning to Give, we've advised some to do it, and others not to do it. See our recent intro video for some examples. This is why we welcome a recent article by ex-Givewell employee Jonah Sinick on why Earning to Give might not be optimal. You can see the full article here, with an extensive discussion attached. What follows are the key arguments. We look forward to getting clearer on the tough question of which people should do...

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### 80,000 Hours in the Washington Post! - Our responses to the coverage

- Published: 2013-06-07
- Modified: 2022-05-31
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/06/80-000-hours-in-the-washington-post-our-responses-to-the-coverage/
- Topics: Uncategorised

The concept of <a href="/earning-to-give">Earning to Give</a> was featured in the Washington Post last week. See the article <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/31/join-wall-street-save-the-world/">here</a>.

In combination with Peter Singer&rsquo;s TED talk on <a href="http://effective-altruism.com/node/4">effective altruism</a>, which mentions 80,000 Hours, we&rsquo;ve been receiving very heavy and sustained web traffic - over 10,000 visitors in just two weeks.

The Washington Post article generated a number of high profile responses, including an opinion piece in the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/04/opinion/brooks-the-way-to-produce-a-person.html?ref=davidbrooks&amp;_r=0">New York Times</a>, a piece in the <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/agenda/349841/rise-singerians-reihan-salam">National Review</a>, and a mention on <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2334682/Young-professionals-joining-Wall-Street-save-world.html">Daily Mail Online</a> - the world&rsquo;s most read online newspaper. (Unfortunately they call us 8,000 Hours!)

There was much praise for the idea of Earning to Give and Effective Altruism, as well as the dedication of the people mentioned. Many of the criticisms, including those reflected more generally in the comments, are criticisms or misunderstandings we have addressed many times in the past, for instance in our <a href="/about/faq##faq-what-is-earning-to-give">FAQ about Earning to Give</a>, in this series of <a href="/2012/03/the-replaceability-effect-working-in-unethical-industries-part-1/">three</a> <a href="/2012/07/collective-action-working-in-unethical-industries-part-2/">blog</a> <a href="/2012/07/universalisability-immoral-industries-part-3/">posts</a>, and in Will&rsquo;s <a href="http://www.academia.edu/1557895/Replaceability_Career_Choice_and_Making_a_Difference">original paper</a>.


The concept of Earning to Give was featured in the Washington Post last week. The article profiles several people, including some 80,000 Hours members, pursuing Earning to Give, and explains the rationale behind the idea. In combination with Peter Singer’s TED talk on effective altruism, which mentions 80,000 Hours, we’ve been receiving very heavy and sustained web traffic - over 10,000 visitors in just two weeks. The Washington Post article generated a number of high profile responses, including an opinion piece in the New York Times, a piece in the National Review, and a mention on Daily Mail Online - the world’s most read online newspaper. (Unfortunately they call us 8,000 Hours! ) There was much praise for the idea of Earning to Give and Effective Altruism, as well as the dedication of the people mentioned. Many of the criticisms, including those reflected more generally in the comments, are criticisms or misunderstandings we have addressed many times in the past, for instance in our FAQ about Earning to Give, in this series of three blog posts, and in Will’s original paper. One of the most widespread misunderstandings has been that 80,000 Hours believes Earning to Give is typically the optimal career path; whereas we actually believe that it’s only optimal for a fraction of people, and whether a particular person should Earn to Give is a complex empirical question, which depends on the cause you support and many other factors. In the rest of this post, I’ll comment on the two...

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### 80,000 Hours Mentioned in TED

- Published: 2013-06-06
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/06/80-000-hours-mentioned-in-ted/
- Topics: Uncategorised

Peter Singer gave a TED talk on "The Why and How of Effective Altruism," which you can watch <a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/peter_singer_the_why_and_how_of_effective_altruism.html">here</a>, which mentions 80,000 Hours.

It's been interesting to look at people's reactions both on the TED website, and on YouTube...


Peter Singer gave a TED talk on "The Why and How of Effective Altruism," which you can watch here, which mentions 80,000 Hours. It's been interesting to look at people's reactions both on the TED website, and on YouTube. The comments have been better than I expected, and a lot of people have been very enthusiastic, which has been great. The main criticisms seem to be: 1. Charity starts at home 2. Doing some amount of good is what matters, not trying to maximize 3. It's unfair only to focus on the most cost-effective programs, when there are other causes you could focus on 4. There's too much focus on the symptoms (which charitable donations do) rather than the root causes of global problems 5. Worries about some people (e. g. Gates) doing harm through the way they made their money 6. It's impossible to compare effectiveness across charities because the outcomes are so different 7. You have no reason to be altruistic (and if you're doing it because it makes you feel good, then that's just another form of egoism) Of course I think that the criticisms are mistaken, but it's good to be aware of where the idea of effective altruism is unintuitive or controversial. There were also a lot of comments about the pretty inappropriate Rolex advert that follows the talk! You may also enjoy: What should I read if I'm new? What is effective altruism? How to do one year of work in four hours

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### How to create a Donor-Advised Fund

- Published: 2013-06-03
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/06/how-to-create-a-donor-advised-fund/
- Topics: Donating effectively, EtG advice

What can you do if you're pursuing <a href="/earning-to-give">Earning to Give</a> but aren't currently sure what organisation to donate to? You can set up a donor advised fund which has all the psychological and tax benefits that go along with donating, while still holding off on your decision as to which charity is best. In this post <a href="/members/ben-west">Ben West</a> tells you how.


What can you do if you're pursuing Earning to Give but aren't currently sure what organisation to donate to? You can set up a donor advised fund which has all the psychological and tax benefits that go along with donating, while still holding off on your decision as to which charity is best. In this post Ben West tells you how. How to Create a Donor-Advised Fund There are a lot of charities. So many, in fact, that some would-be altruists are struck with the alliterative analysis paralysis and end up not donating at all. A tax vehicle known as a "Donor-advised fund" (DAF) allows you to get the best of both worlds - you can donate to charity, with all the psychological and tax benefits that go along with that decision, while still holding off on your decision as to which charity is best. You can create your own DAF in about 15 minutes online. (Be sure to give it an awesome name like "The Jane Doe Fund for Paperclip Maximization" because how many chances do you have to name an organization after yourself? ) Once created, you can contribute money when you feel like it and deduct those contributions from your taxes. Your contributions will sit in an account accruing interest until you decide to write a grant to a specific charity. There are interesting questions about when to put money in a DAF vs. donate directly, but if you are uncertain about the most effective charity, especially if...

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### Can you measure the good you'll do

- Published: 2013-05-27
- Modified: 2022-05-28
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/05/can-you-measure-the-good-you-ll-do/
- Topics: Unconventional advice

The idea that it&rsquo;s impossible to measure which career lets you make the most difference is silly.

If it were true, then packing meat for a living would be, for all we know, as good for the world as running Oxfam or being a great President.

Why, then, do we so often meet the idea that &lsquo;you can&rsquo;t measure the good done by a career&rsquo;? - an idea that quashes debate about what&rsquo;s best to do, and thus leads millions of ambitious young people to do less for the world than they could.

Here&rsquo;s the mistakes I think are being made.


The idea that it’s impossible to measure which career lets you make the most difference is silly. If it were true, then packing meat for a living would be, for all we know, as good for the world as running Oxfam or being a great President. Why, then, do we so often meet the idea that ‘you can’t measure the good done by a career’? - an idea that quashes debate about what’s best to do, and thus leads millions of ambitious young people to do less for the world than they could. Here’s the mistakes I think are being made. 1. Thinking measurement needs to be perfectly precise Thinking back to school science classes, it’s easy to think ‘measuring’ means ‘precisely quantifying. ’ A classic example is using a pair of scales to weigh something, and having a ‘precise’ number as the result. In choosing between careers, we don’t get precise numbers, so the good you do is not measurable. But this isn’t a good way to think about measurement. No measurement is perfectly precise. Weighing with scales actually only gives you a range of probable values for the true weight, because the scales are not 100% accurate. In reality, there’s always some uncertainty. Our choice is only ever how much uncertainty is OK given our purposes. If there’s always some uncertainty left, then we can see that in practice what it is to measure some quantity is to reduce uncertainty about its magnitude. That’s all that’s actually possible. But...

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### The worst ethical careers advice in the world

- Published: 2013-05-25
- Modified: 2021-11-18
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/05/the-worst-ethical-careers-advice-in-the-world/
- Topics: Unconventional advice

What are you going to do with your life?

If you&rsquo;re like most young people, you care about making a difference. But who&rsquo;s there to help you with that? So much of the career advice out there today is unhelpful cliches. Here&rsquo;s some of the most common career advice we&rsquo;ve found over the last six months that you shouldn&rsquo;t follow.


What are you going to do with your life? If you’re like most young people, you care about making a difference. But who’s there to help you with that? So much of the career advice out there today is unhelpful cliches. Here’s some of the most common career advice we’ve found over the last six months that you shouldn’t follow. Do what you’re passionate about Perhaps the most common advice of all. It’s espoused by hundreds of advice gurus and public figures, perhaps most famously Steve Jobs, who told the Stanford class of ‘05 ”you’ve got to find what you love”, in a video that has gone on to have over 16 million views. But when Jobs was young, his passions were history, dance and eastern mysticism. Is that what he should have done? He first got into computers as a way to earn cash on the side. This advice gets things backwards, since passion develops out of applying yourself to something worthwhile. It’s not helpful to think that your passion is out there, waiting to be discovered. You create your passion. We’ve already offered a comprehensive take-down here. Do what you’re good at Better, but consider, I’m amazingly good at meat packing. Is that what I should do? This advice is incomplete at best. And similar to ‘do what you’re passionate about’, it gets things backwards. Getting good at something is the result of thousands of hours of practice. So, your choice of career is more a choice of...

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### What should I read if I'm new?

- Published: 2013-05-23
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/05/what-should-i-read-if-i-m-new/
- Topics: Uncategorised

Are you new to 80,000 Hours, and wondering where to start?

We've put together this summary of our most popular blog posts from over the past year to make it much easier to get a quick overview of our key content and ideas. Even if you've been around the site for a while, you might might find something here you've missed or forgotten about!


Are you new to 80,000 Hours, and wondering where to start? Here's a quick summary of our most popular blog posts from over the past year to make it much easier to get a quick overview of our key content and ideas. Even if you've been around the site for a while, you might might find something here you've missed or forgotten about! Our core ideas What is effective altruism? And what does it really mean to be an effective altruist? What does it really mean to make a difference? How the common sense view often gets it wrong Why do we need an evidence-based approach? It’s not always obvious what works, and the impact of different career paths can vary massively. It’s hard to tell which careers make the most difference, but estimation and quantification are the best tools we have. Types of high impact career Could you make more difference in the corporate sector than working for a charity? How to create the world’s most effective charity How hard is it to become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom? The power of effective activism How to do important research A career in charity evaluation? Salary or startup? How do-gooders can gain more from risky careers High impact science Career planning Should you plan your career? Our research on how to find a job you’ll love Making better career decisions: common biases and how to overcome them, and two questions you won’t want to ask yourself but should. The...

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### The best career advice you never heard in a graduation speech

- Published: 2013-05-20
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/05/the-best-career-advice-you-ll-never-hear-in-a-graduation-speech/
- Topics: Unconventional advice

&ldquo;Follow your passion&rdquo; is the stupidest career advice I&rsquo;ve ever heard. Why? Because my passion in life is for singing bad karaoke. My friend Dodgy Dave&rsquo;s passion is for dealing crack cocaine. Some of my friends have many passions. Most of my friends have none.

&ldquo;Do what you&rsquo;re good at&rdquo; is better, but still stupid. It gets things the wrong way around. For almost all activities, being &ldquo;good at&rdquo; something is the result of <a href="http://www.uvm.edu/~pdodds/files/papers/others/everything/ericsson2007a.pdf">thousands of hours of practice and learning</a> (pdf). In choosing a career, you&rsquo;re almost always making the decision about what to become good at, not the other way around.

How, then, should you find a job you&rsquo;ll love?


“Follow your passion” is the stupidest career advice I’ve ever heard. Why? Because my passion in life is for singing bad karaoke. My friend Dodgy Dave’s passion is for dealing crack cocaine. Some of my friends have many passions. Most of my friends have none. “Do what you’re good at” is better, but still stupid. It gets things the wrong way around. For almost all activities, being “good at” something is the result of thousands of hours of practice and learning (pdf). In choosing a career, you’re almost always making the decision about what to become good at, not the other way around. How, then, should you find a job you’ll love? Here’s my slogan: ”Do something valuable. ” Let the problems in the world dictate what you do, rather than forcing a preconceived checklist labeled “success,” to be your motivation. Do something that genuinely helps others and makes the world a better place in a major way. That’s the way to have a happy, fulfilled life. When I tell people this, half think it’s crazy and half think it’s trivial. I think it’s neither. So here’s a three-part explanation. First, here’s the intuition. Think about yourself at 85, sitting on your rocking chair, looking back on your life. You, Version 1, think: “I made a ton of cash, own three beach houses and a yacht. But what was the point of it all? ” Compare with You, Version 2: “I made a lot of money. I also dewormed the entire childhood...

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### Biases: how they affect your career decisions, and what to do about them

- Published: 2013-05-17
- Modified: 2024-11-22
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/05/biases-how-they-affect-your-career-decisions-and-what-to-do-about-them/
- Topics: Individual reasoning &amp; cognition, Reasoning well, Unconventional advice

A large and growing body of research suggests our reasoning is far from perfectly "rational." This means that an important part of designing a process for choosing a high impact career has been looking into the extent to which these biases tend to affect peoples&rsquo; career decisions, and what can be done about them.

It turns out that we likely don&rsquo;t know as much as we think we do, and our judgements can often be mistaken in ways that affect our career decisions negatively. Just being aware of this also doesn&rsquo;t help much. Rather we need to be more sceptical of our decisions than we might be inclined to be, and take a more systematic and evidence-based approach to career choice.


At 80,000 Hours, we help people work out the best ways to do good with their careers. To do this we need to do two things (at the very least! ). First is providing information you can’t get elsewhere about the difference you can make in different career paths. Second is developing a “choosing process”: a way to rationally use this information to make good career decisions. It’s easy to neglect this second part, to think that mere information is enough. But even with all the relevant factual information available, if your judgement is clouded by biases, you won’t make good decisions. A large and growing body of research 1, 2, 3 suggests that our reasoning processes are far from perfectly “rational. ” Over the past few decades, studies have pointed to a number of cognitive biases that affect our decision making in general, and there’s no reason to believe this doesn’t include career decisions. This means that an important part of designing a process for choosing a high impact career has been looking into the extent to which these biases tend to affect peoples’ career decisions, and what can be done about them. It turns out that we likely don’t know as much as we think we do, and our judgements can often be mistaken in ways that affect our career decisions negatively. Just being aware of this also doesn’t help much. Rather we need to be more sceptical of our decisions than we might be inclined to be, and take...

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### How to double your donations with no extra effort

- Published: 2013-05-15
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/05/how-to-double-your-donations-with-no-extra-effort/
- Topics: EtG advice

80,000 hours is all about making a difference in an effective way and one of the most effective things you can do is donate to a cost effective charity. There has been some talk of <a href="/2012/03/why-doesn-t-everyone-use-matching-donations/">matching donations</a> and how it might not always increase how much money is ultimately donated. But there is a type of matching that can be very powerful.

Some companies offer large matching contributions and sometimes offer more than a dollar per every dollar donated. Some companies also offer <a href="http://www.doublethedonation.com/VolunteerGrants.html">grant money</a> for volunteer hours or matching donations for participating in walks/runs/events for charity, and also match gifts made by retirees and/or spouses. If you're pursuing an Earning to Give career, then a good matching scheme could be even more important than what industry you enter. In many cases it's probably easier to find an employer who matches than to earn a much bigger salary.


80,000 Hours is all about making a difference in an effective way and one of the most effective things you can do is donate to a cost effective charity. There has been some talk of matching donations and how it might not always increase how much money is ultimately donated. But there is a type of matching that can be very powerful. Some companies offer large matching contributions and sometimes offer more than a dollar per every dollar donated. Some companies also offer grant money for volunteer hours or matching donations for participating in walks/runs/events for charity, and also match gifts made by retirees and/or spouses. If you're pursuing an Earning to Give career, then a good matching scheme could be even more important than what industry you enter. In many cases it's probably easier to find an employer who matches than to earn a much bigger salary. How can you find out which companies do matching? Luckily there is a large and extensive list of hundreds of companies for both the US and the UK (in fact 65% of Fortune 500 companies offer matching gift programs). Additionally, many companies not on this list can be searched or will offer matching donations if asked. What are the best matching schemes out there? Some of the best matching schemes include large companies such as: Microsoft matches $12,000 General Electric matches $50,000 Johnson and Johnson match up to $10,000 at a 1:2 ratio Craigslist matches up to 10% of your salary at...

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### Estimation - Part II: How much will you earn?

- Published: 2013-05-13
- Modified: 2024-12-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/05/estimation-part-ii-how-much-will-you-earn/
- Topics: Earning to Give

<em>How much could I earn during my life as a lawyer? How many people could this campaign reach? How long will it take to complete this research?</em> Answers to questions like these would be extremely useful when planning your career, if only we knew what the answers were.

We can make estimates for questions like these by breaking them down into more manageable sub-questions and answering these instead. This post will take you through the best process for combining these estimates so that we can answer the bigger questions and then compare different options for important decisions.


What can we use estimates for? How much could I earn during my life as a lawyer? How many people could this campaign reach? How long will it take to complete this research? There are lots of figures that would be extremely useful to planning your career, but that are highly uncertain. Rather than making a direct estimate, it’s better to break these questions down into a number of sub-questions. For these sub-questions we can use the four techniques (the equivalent bet, the absurdity test, avoiding anchoring and listing pros and cons) learnt in Part 1 of this post to make calibrated Confidence Intervals (CIs). We can then combine these individual estimates to answer our original question, and once we have done this for a number of different options we can compare them to make decisions about our future career. In the following post we will therefore be looking at: * How we can combine individual estimates to answer complex career questions * How to compare different career options. * How we can improve our estimates Combining estimates In order to look at how to combine estimates we will consider the question posed above; ‘What are my expected lifetime earnings if I choose a legal career? ’ After a bit of thought we decide that in order to create a simple linear model for this calculation we need to know how much is the initial salary at the graduate level, final salary at the executive level and how long it will...

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### Estimation - Part I: How to do it?

- Published: 2013-05-10
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/05/estimation-part-i-how-to-do-it/
- Topics: Uncategorised

Trying to answer questions about the impact of a career is difficult, and trying to decide between different career options is even harder. If I asked you <em>&lsquo;How many people will benefit from research into anti-malarial vaccination?&rsquo;</em> or <em>&lsquo;How many malaria nets would a £1000 donation to the Against Malaria Foundation get?&rsquo;</em>, your first answer will probably be that you don&rsquo;t know. After this you will probably try to google the answer, but in most cases the information that you need is either not easily accessible or it would cost you a lot of time and money to find it. Finally you might guess or estimate an answer.

But are some guesses or estimates better than others? In this post we will look at processes you can go through to make an estimate and how to make sure that your estimate is as good as it can be.


Why you need to make estimates Trying to answer questions about the impact of a career is difficult, and trying to decide between different career options is even harder. If I asked you ‘How many people will benefit from research into anti-malarial vaccination? ’ or ‘How many malaria nets would a £1000 donation to the Against Malaria Foundation get? ’, your first answer will probably be that you don’t know. After this you will probably try to Google the answer, but in most cases the information that you need is either not easily accessible or it would cost you a lot of time and money to find it. Once you realise this, you need to make a choice; do you give up or do you estimate the answer? If you consider a question or a decision important enough to search for data, chances are that giving up is not an option. In this post we are going to look at how to make an estimate of a quantity you’re uncertain about. In order to do this we will cover the following things: * Making your estimate * Is your estimate a good one? * Are you overconfident? * Calibration: overcoming your overconfidence * Case Study: When did Einstein win his Nobel Prize? * How to use estimations After going over the above, you will be able to make useful estimates for quantities that relate to your career. A second post will then examine the more complex task of how to compare and...

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### Looking for a seriously high impact job using your analytical skills?

- Published: 2013-05-08
- Modified: 2023-09-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/05/looking-for-a-seriously-high-impact-job-using-your-analytical-skills/
- Topics: Building effective altruism, GiveWell, Global priorities research

Recently we <a href="/2013/04/interview-with-holden-karnofsky-co-founder-of-givewell/">interviewed Holden Karnofsky</a>, co-founder of the independent, nonprofit charity evaluator <a href="http://www.givewell.org/">GiveWell</a>. We recommend GiveWell as a leading source of information on where to have the largest impact with your charitable donations.

Our conversation suggested that GiveWell might be one of the highest impact career opportunities in the world. There's reason to think that GiveWell has the potential to be an extremely impactful organisation, but they are short of some key types of staff. If you fit their criteria, then this is a position really worth considering. Read on for excerpts from our conversation on (i) what GiveWell does and why it's important (ii) what kind of people will do well there (iii) how you can get a job there.


Recently we interviewed Holden Karnofsky, co-founder of the independent, nonprofit charity evaluator GiveWell. We recommend GiveWell as a leading source of information on where to have the largest impact with your charitable donations. Our conversation suggested that GiveWell might be one of the highest impact career opportunities in the world. There's reason to think that GiveWell has the potential to be an extremely impactful organisation, but they are short of some key types of staff. If you fit their criteria, then this is a position really worth considering. Read on for excerpts from our conversation to find out (i) what GiveWell does and why it's important (ii) what kind of people will do well there and (iii) how you can get a job there. Summary of who GiveWell is looking for ‘The kind of person who should work at GiveWell is probably super excited and enthusiastic about working at GiveWell, is intelligent, talented, is particularly good at synthesising research efficiently (cutting through issues quickly, thinking critically about things and taking apart studies, these are things that should feel natural), is an intense direct person who is comfortable in an intense direct environment where there’s a lot of discussion, debate, going back and forth, and someone who’s very self-directed, who can come up with their own plan that is efficient and productive. I think that for someone who would be a good fit for GiveWell, this kind of profile would sound extremely exciting to them and they would apply. ’ Why is...

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### How important is networking for career success?

- Published: 2013-05-06
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/05/how-important-is-networking-for-career-success/
- Topics: Exploration, How to get a job, Leverage

“After two decades of successfully applying the power of relationships in my own life and career, I’ve come to believe that connecting is one of the most important business - and life - skill sets you’ll ever learn. Why? Because, flat out, people do business with people they know and like. Careers - in every imaginable field - work the same way. ” -- Keith Ferrazzi, Author of Never Eat Alone Many business books and careers advice websites claim that networking is essential for career success. It’s something that many job-hunters think they should be doing, but is it actually helpful? The evidence suggests yes. There have been several studies that show more workers find out about new jobs through their personal network than any other method. For example, a study of workers in the Quebec provincial government found that 42. 7% of the 2553 people in the study had found the job through personal contacts despite the government’s efforts to formalise the application process. An unpublished study of 1780 people in the Philadelphia area found that 56% of those who weren’t self employed got their current job with significant help from another person. A longitudinal study that questioned people on their networking behaviours and then recorded their salary over three years found that networking was related to salary growth. There is also some evidence that you’re more likely to find a job through your acquaintances than through close friends. Also, often as you become more...

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### Intelligence matters more than you think for career success

- Published: 2013-05-01
- Modified: 2022-12-14
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/05/intelligence-matters-more-than-you-think-for-career-success/
- Topics: Ability, Unconventional advice

When you&rsquo;re trying to have an impact, it's useful to know how successful you'll be in different careers so you can pick the right one. But how can you do this? There are a few predictors of success that have been studied by psychologists, but the results aren&rsquo;t widely known. The scientific consensus is that the best way to predict someone&rsquo;s career success is to assess their general mental ability (GMA), which is similar to what most people mean by &ldquo;intelligence&rdquo;. You might find this surprising, so I&rsquo;m going to summarise the evidence backing it up. Then I&rsquo;ll talk about:

<ul>
<li>Why GMA is so important in work - mainly because people with higher GMA learn faster.</li>
<li>Which other factors affect success - job complexity, personality, and experience.</li>
<li>What this all means for your career - choose jobs that fit your GMA and find the best ways to increase your chances of success.</li>
</ul>


When you’re trying to have an impact, it's useful to know how successful you'll be in different careers so you can pick the right one. But how can you do this? There are a few predictors of success that have been studied by psychologists, but the results aren’t widely known. The scientific consensus is that the best way to predict someone’s career success is to assess their general mental ability (GMA), which is similar to what most people mean by “intelligence”. You might find this surprising, so I’m going to summarise the evidence backing it up. Then I’ll talk about: Why GMA is so important in work - mainly because people with higher GMA learn faster. Which other factors affect success - job complexity, personality, and experience. What this all means for your career - choose jobs that fit your GMA and find the best ways to increase your chances of success. What is general mental ability (GMA)? In 1904, psychologist and statistician Charles Spearman noticed that children tend to get similar marks in unrelated school subjects and he thought that there might be an underlying factor affecting their performance. He developed the statistical method of factor analysis to find how many underlying factors there were. Since then, many psychologists psychologists have used factor analysis to conclude that there is a single underlying general (or g) factor that explains people’s performance on different cognitive tests, although there is some disagreement about this. No single test measures general mental...

---

### Interview with Holden Karnofsky, co-founder of GiveWell

- Published: 2013-04-29
- Modified: 2021-11-18
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/04/interview-with-holden-karnofsky-co-founder-of-givewell/
- Topics: Building effective altruism, GiveWell, Global priorities research

Holden Karnofsky is the co-founder and co-executive director of <a href="http://www.givewell.org/">GiveWell</a>, an independent, nonprofit charity evaluator. We recommend Givewell as a leading source of information on where to have the largest impact with your charitable donations.

In 2012 GiveWell moved over <a href="http://blog.givewell.org/2013/03/12/givewell-annual-review-for-2012-details-on-givewells-money-moved-and-web-traffic/">$9.5 million</a> to its top charities and the amount of money moved by GiveWell has so far been roughly doubling each year. GiveWell also recently formed a <a href="http://blog.givewell.org/2012/06/28/givewell-and-good-ventures/">partnership</a> with <a href="http://www.goodventures.org/">GoodVentures</a>, a new multi-billion dollar foundation which aims to do as much good as possible. This has already had huge impact, for example at the end of 2012, Good Ventures awarded <a href="https://www.facebook.com/notes/good-ventures/giving-season-grants-to-givewells-top-charities/542998472395716">$2 million in grants</a> to GiveWell&rsquo;s top recommended charities.


Holden Karnofsky is the co-founder and co-executive director of GiveWell, an independent, nonprofit charity evaluator. We recommend GiveWell as a leading source of information on where to have the largest impact with your charitable donations. In 2012 GiveWell moved over $9. 5 million to its top charities and the amount of money moved by GiveWell has so far been roughly doubling each year. GiveWell also recently formed a partnership with GoodVentures, a new multi-billion dollar foundation which aims to do as much good as possible. This has already had huge impact. For example, at the end of 2012 Good Ventures awarded $2 million in grants to GiveWell’s top recommended charities. Key career points: Initially choosing jobs that you are good at, helps to be able to have impact and influence later in your career. More broadly, paying attention to abilities and fit when choosing a career is important for estimating the impact of your career. The direct impact of your job is important because the creation of wealth and improvement of productivity generally benefit the world as a whole in the long-term. Academia is a career you have to decide about relatively early on in your life. As an entrepreneur, passion and belief in your project is very important for eventual success. What were the biggest decisions you made in your career, and how did they lead you to your current role? It wasn’t a very deliberative process; when I got out of college I just wanted a job and the...

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### How much is 50p worth to you?

- Published: 2013-04-26
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/04/how-much-is-50p-worth-to-you/
- Topics: Earning to Give

Suppose we meet on the street one day and I tell you that, through no fault of my own, I&rsquo;m having to live on just a pound a day for food and drink. Would you give me just 50p, knowing this could greatly improve my day without really affecting your own at all? I&rsquo;m pretty sure you would.

Between the 29th April and the 3rd May, I and a number of others from 80,000 Hours and Giving What We Can will be "living below the line" - spending no more than a pound a day on food and drink. Admittedly we're doing this out of choice, but those who live below the poverty line in reality do so by force of circumstance, and suffer a great deal more. So if you'd buy me something to eat, or give me 50p if I was doing this through no fault of my own, please instead make a donation to one of the charities we're doing this to raise money for


Why I'm "living below the line" Suppose we meet on the street one day and I tell you that, through no fault of my own, I’m having to live on just a pound a day for food and drink (I’d been robbed, say, or lost everything in a house fire). Would you buy me a sandwich, or invite me round for lunch? Would you give me just 50p, knowing this could greatly improve my day without really affecting your own at all? I’m pretty sure you would. I’m also pretty sure you’d feel good about it: rather than detracting from your day, this act of generosity would probably improve it. When we’re explicitly faced with inequality, giving is surprisingly easy. It just makes sense: if you can help someone else at no or little cost to yourself, why wouldn’t you? By giving me 50p when I’m living on a pound a day, you allow me to buy that bit more food, make my meal that little bit more interesting, or have that extra cup of tea (personally, I’d probably opt for the latter. ) Undoubtedly, I’ll appreciate that 50p much more than you would have. What’s harder to appreciate is that there are opportunities to do this kind of thing all the time – we’re just not confronted with them as directly. But if you look a little further, you’ll find there are ways you can make a huge difference to someone else’s life with incredibly little effort. Instead of giving...

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### How important is fitting in at work?

- Published: 2013-04-24
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/04/how-important-is-fitting-in-at-work/
- Topics: Ability, Job satisfaction, Personal fit, Unconventional advice

For most people, having a career which is a good &ldquo;fit&rdquo; for their personality and interests is extremely high priority. Unsurprisingly, the notion of &ldquo;person-environment fit&rdquo; is fundamental to most careers advice. The general idea is that a) people have different personalities and interests, b) different types of people are suited to different working environments and c) finding the right working environment for your personality and interests is crucial to finding a job you&rsquo;ll enjoy and be successful in.

However, despite several decades of research attempts, psychologists have failed to demonstrate that fit with the workplace has any substantial effect on job satisfaction or job performance. This suggests the normal approach of (i) working out your interests and personality and then (ii) finding a job to match them might be wrong - it doesn&rsquo;t seem to help you find a job you enjoy or are good at!

This is surprising: it seems intuitively obvious that your fit with your work environment is important. It might be that the effect is too complex to be picked up in the existing studies, and that improved survey design would uncover a stronger connection. <strong>But we should also consider whether being a good fit with your work is less important than we first think.</strong>


Update May 2020 This article was written in 2013, and doesn't fully reflect our views today. We still think the basic message that Holland-type match only correlates weakly with job performance is correct, and since many career tests are based on this method, we still don't put much stock in their results. However, some newer studies have found more positive results than those we cover. For instance, a 2012 meta-analysis found correlations of 0. 2-0. 3 for some measures of interest-match based on Holland types. In particular, newer studies looked something more like the degree of match across your top 3 types, which turned out to be more predictive than more simple ways of matching. Nye, Christopher D. , et al. "Vocational interests and performance: A quantitative summary of over 60 years of research. " Perspectives on Psychological Science 7. 4 (2012): 384-403. On the other hand, a 2005 replication of the original meta-analysis we use, found a correlation of 0. 16. Tsabari, Orit, Aharon Tziner, and Elchanan I. Meir. "Updated meta-analysis on the relationship between congruence and satisfaction. " Journal of Career Assessment 13. 2 (2005): 216-232 If we were rewriting this article, we would also be more positive about the idea of interest-match in general. Because interest-match is hard to measure, and people already self-select by interests, there may well be stronger effects than those that academics have managed to uncover to date, though this failure does at least suggest that these effects are not obviously large. It remains the case there is stronger evidence for...

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### Is US gun control an important issue?

- Published: 2013-04-22
- Modified: 2014-09-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/04/is-us-gun-control-an-important-issue/
- Topics: Gun Control

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?


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? A natural measure of the importance of the problem is the number of years of healthy life lost due to gun violence. At the moment there are a bit over 8,000 murders with firearms each year in the US, some two thirds of the total. If we guess that the typical age of death from gun violence is 30, then the average survivor would have enjoyed another 50 years or so of healthy life. Firearm homicides would than lead to the loss of 400,000 years of healthy life each year. We would then have to add health problems among survivors of gun violence. To confirm that these figures are sensible I looked up the World Health Organisation’s Global Burden of Disease, which suggest ‘intentional violence’ as a whole cost the US and Canada about 1,100,000 years of healthy life each year. Two thirds of this would be 650,000 years, a figure which amounts to about 0. 8% of the total burden of disease and injury in the US. Another even larger problem than murder – at least as far as...

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### Tiny steps towards an incrementally better world

- Published: 2013-04-19
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/04/tiny-steps-towards-an-incrementally-better-world/
- Topics: Uncategorised

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...


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: *When making decisions people usually try to do the thing which is best for them. We can call this the ‘private optimum’. * However, a choice that is best for them is not always the best decision for society as a whole - what we can call the ‘social optimum’. * Around the ‘private optimum’, small changes in either direction don’t make a big difference to the person involved. For instance, imagine that you are having a meal and deciding how much to eat. At the point where you are consuming ‘just the right amount’, the benefit of eating more is perfectly balanced by its cost. In economic language you are ‘indifferent’ between eating a little more and a little less. By contrast, if you are desperately hungry, or painfully stuffed with food, the benefits and costs of eating are far apart. In one case you really want to eat more, in the other case you really want to eat less; when you are so far away from where you ideally want to be, each extra mouthful matters much more. * As a result, the bigger the difference between the private and social optimums, the more valuable it is to take given step towards the social optimum (see the Figure below). 1 Therefore, in cases where the private and social optimums are far apart, people who...

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### Is most research a waste?

- Published: 2013-04-17
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/04/is-most-research-a-waste/
- Topics: Academic Research, Biomedical Research

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.


At 80,000 Hours we have been looking into which research questions are most important or prone to neglect. As part of that, I was recently lucky enough to have dinner with Iain Chalmers, one of the founders of the Cochrane Collaborations. He let me know about this helpful summary of reasons to think most clinical research is predictably wasteful: “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. Within speci? c health problems there is little research on the extent to which questions addressed by researchers match questions of relevance to patients and clinicians. In an analysis of 334 studies, only nine compared researchers’ priorities with those of patients or clinicians. The ? ndings of these studies have revealed some dramatic mismatches. For example, the research priorities of patients with osteoarthritis of the knee and the clinicians looking after them favoured more rigorous evaluation of physiotherapy and surgery, and assessment of educational and coping strategies. Only 9% of patients wanted more research on drugs, yet over 80% of...

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### How to prioritise - Meta skills part 4

- Published: 2013-04-12
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/04/how-to-prioritise-meta-skills-part-iv/
- Topics: Uncategorised

Some activities have many more times more impact than others. For example, if you&rsquo;re learning a new skill you&rsquo;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 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law">by far the most useful, often gainig you ~80% coverage</a>. 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.


Choose the best thing to work on - effective prioritisation When you prioritise, you make sure that you’re doing the most important work possible. This means both choosing tasks that are important and focussing on the most important parts of tasks that you’re doing. Choosing the most important tasks 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 gaining 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. Finding big differences in the effectiveness within tasks of the same kind is so common that the rule of thumb has been given a name: the 80/20 principle. It states that roughly 80 percent of your impact will come from 20% of the things you do. This suggests that in general, time spent working out which tasks from a set are most effective will be well rewarded, enabling you to achieve several times as much as you would have otherwise. Focussing on the most important parts of tasks Prioritisation also applies when doing tasks as well as when choosing them. Often you don’t need to produce a perfect piece of work...

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### Dramatically increase your productivity by using a task management system - Meta-skills Part 3

- Published: 2013-04-10
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/04/dramatically-increase-your-productivity-by-using-a-task-management-system-meta-skills-part-3/
- Topics: Individual reasoning &amp; cognition

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 <a href="http://www.wikisummaries.org/Getting_Things_Done:_The_Art_of_Stress-Free_Productivity">here</a>.


Use a task management system 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 system is called Getting Things Done and you can read a summary of it here. How does it work and what are the benefits? Capture Whenever you get new tasks you make sure to put them in your system. The main benefit here is that you get all your tasks out of your head. This means you feel more relaxed and can concentrate more easily, knowing that you haven’t missed anything. Capturing all your tasks also makes you less likely to miss something important. Review and prioritisation In your regular reviews (especially daily and weekly reviews) you’ll prioritise your work. This is a potentially huge benefit if your prioritisation helps you choose tasks with far more impact than other tasks. Motivation through goal-setting Good goal setting is highly effective at increasing motivation and a good task management system fulfils some of the criteria suggested by goal setting researchers: It encourages you to set specific goals As you tick things of you feel as if you’re making progress your broader goals. It makes you more confident about completing your broader goals because you break them down into specific tasks. Is it worth it? I find the daily review takes about 10 minutes and the weekly review takes about 1 hour, so...

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### How to finally do what you've been putting off - Meta skills part 2

- Published: 2013-04-08
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/04/how-to-finally-do-what-you-ve-been-putting-off/
- Topics: Individual reasoning &amp; cognition, Mental health

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&rsquo;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!)


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! ) Some tips: Make your pass/fail criteria clear - you don’t want any possibility to wriggle out of your commitment. Make commitments with friends so that you have a real person to report to. Be careful with commitment devices for creative tasks - test out different ways to incentivise yourself. There are a few of online ways of setting commitment devices. When combined with a friend monitoring you, these can be very powerful: Beeminder - if you need to be able to track quantities (like your weight) or adjust your goals regularly. Also good if you like pretty graphs. StikK - if you have a simple goal you want to commit to. But I find that just setting up a shared google spreadsheet where I log my successes/failures works best. What are the benefits? Commitment devices are the ultimate anti-procrastination tool - they make you more likely to follow through with any valuable action that you’d otherwise tend to put off. Another benefit is that commitment devices force you to set specific goals...

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### Increase your productivity to boost your impact - Meta skills part 1

- Published: 2013-04-05
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/04/increase-your-productivity-to-boost-your-impact/
- Topics: Uncategorised

To have impact you need to choose the right career. But that&rsquo;s not all. If you can build your knowledge and productivity faster than everyone else in your career then you&rsquo;ll rise from average in your field to the top and have much more impact. So how can you do this?


“Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest. Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works 10% more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. ”      -- Richard Hamming, You and Your Research 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 field then you’ll rise to the top and have much more impact. So how can you do this? Obviously you need to build skills, but which skills should you build first? Conventional careers advice suggests that you should work out which skills you need for your chosen career and then learn them. But it’s far better to start by building skills that make you more able to build other skills. So productivity and learning techniques are where you should start. That way you get compounding benefits for everything else you do (including more skill building), even if you end up changing your career plans. So which productivity techniques are the best? It’s easy to spend ages reading productivity advice on the internet - I did that for years with little improvement. But most of the stuff you find isn’t evidence based and rarely gives you clear...

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### Opportunity to intern with 80,000 Hours

- Published: 2013-04-03
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/04/opportunity-to-intern-with-80-000-hours-178/
- Topics: Uncategorised

If you&rsquo;re here, you probably have some idea of what 80,000 Hours is about. We&rsquo;re trying to become the world&rsquo;s best source of advice on how to make as big a positive impact as possible. That&rsquo;s a big project, and we&rsquo;re growing fast. To support this growth we now need someone to help manage our finances and fundraising, so if you&rsquo;d like to join the team this is your chance!

<a href="http://bit.ly/15EGoWr">Apply now</a> or read on for more details...


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! The position we’re recruiting for is Finance and Fundraising Manager. In this role, you would work closely with the director of our Operations division, which supports the different organisations within the Centre for Effective Altruism, including 80,000 Hours and Giving What We Can. If you work for us you’ll be part of a focused team of intelligent, enthusiastic, driven colleagues. Everyone involved in CEA is passionate about their work, making the office an inspiring place to be. The current Finance and Fundraising intern has helped to write budgets, set up a new charity in the US, and create financial procedures and book-keeping systems almost from scratch. In doing so, he’s made a major difference to the success of 80,000 Hours and the Centre for Effective Altruism family that it belongs to. If you follow him, you would do so too. We’re looking for someone who can start soon, and ideally commit to at least six months, though we’re flexible about time commitment. To find out more about this opportunity, please see our recruitment page. If you’re interested in the position,...

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### How to improve your memory - Meta skills part 5

- Published: 2013-04-02
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/04/how-to-improve-your-memory/
- Topics: Unconventional advice

Learn more effectively using a spaced repetition system

If you can accelerate your learning then you&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;t know, you can make a new flashcard in seconds.


The faster you can master new knowledge, the better you’ll be able to do your job and have more impact. But what’s the best way of learning? The most promising method is spaced repetition - flashcards done well. Learn more effectively using a spaced repetition system Imagine that one day you learned that the capital of Ethiopia was Addis Ababa. If you were tested the next day, you’d have a high chance of remembering this. If instead you were tested the next week, you’d have a lower chance of remembering it. This is common sense, and can be represented by a curve that shows your forgetting over time. If you review the item some days later, you then get a new, more gradual forgetting curve: You will forget slower this time, because this is your second review. This means that if you want to learn efficiently, you should learn something, then review it at intervals later, but that the intervals should get wider and wider: As well as this optimal pattern of review, psychologists have shown1 that active recall (i. e. practice testing) is better than passive recall - i. e. it is better to review by asking “What is the capital of Ethiopia” and forcing yourself to answer than to review by simply reading “The capital of Ethiopia is Addis Ababa”. Spaced repetition software uses these principles. You make question-and-answer flashcards and when you’ve answered a question the software works out the best time to test you again. So all the...

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### Six Month Review of 80,000 Hours June - Nov 2012

- Published: 2013-04-01
- Modified: 2020-08-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/04/six-month-review-of-80-000-hours-june-nov-2012/
- Topics: Updates

In December we conducted the first review of our progress as a full-time organisation. In a spirit of transparency, we&rsquo;re posting the results on our site.

The review consisted of:

<ol>
<li><p>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.</p></li>
<li><p>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.</p></li>
<li><p>It was also brought to the three members of our Advisory Committee. These are three supporters of 80,000 Hours who aren&rsquo;t involved in our day-to-day operation who provide an outside view on our strategy.</p></li>
</ol>


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. What were my main conclusions as Executive Director? Main Achievements We managed the transition from being a volunteer organisation, to having a team of five staff and interns who are executing our business plan and report very high levels of satisfaction. We clarified our concept to one focused on providing career advice, and re-wrote our website and materials. This contributed to a doubling of key engagement rates (e. g. number of people attending our events and % of website visitors becoming members). We tested basic content on our philosophy and high impact paths on the website and in Oxford outreach. This included about 20,000 words of web content, 60 blog posts and...

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### Should you plan your career?

- Published: 2013-03-13
- Modified: 2024-12-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/03/should-you-plan-your-career/
- Topics: Uncategorised

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&rsquo;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&rsquo;t it naive to plan for the future when you have no real idea what the job market will look like, what the world&rsquo;s biggest needs might be, and what you might want personally


**New:** We've just launched our in-depth career planning process. It's our most comprehensive overview of all our advice on (/career-planning/), and includes a step-by-step (/career-planning/#template) you can use to plan your career. (It's designed to replace the process below, which we left for posterity. ) Should you try to plan your career? To what extent should you set yourself career goals in advance? On the one hand, plans and 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? Although there’s little research explicitly looking at the effects of career planning, there’s a lot of literature on the effects of planning and goal setting on business and employee performance, which seems pretty relevant. So we decided to explore the research a bit further and see what it might suggest about the best way to approach thinking about your career. In summary: On first glance, the research appears contradictory: there’s evidence that goal setting provides motivation and increases effort and persistence. Yet elsewhere it’s been suggested that goals can be damaging to performance by narrowing focus, promoting risk taking, and even encouraging unethical behaviour. A...

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### Internship opportunity in promoting charity cost-effectiveness

- Published: 2013-03-11
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/03/internship-opportunity-in-promoting-charity-cost-effectiveness/
- Topics: Uncategorised

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, <a href="http://www.givingwhatwecan.org">Giving What We Can</a>, 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 <a href="http://www.givingwhatwecan.org/getting-involved/work-with-us/september-internship">here</a>


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 You may also enjoy Volunteering for Us! Effective Altruist Projects in the Community

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### When to "go with your gut" in career choice

- Published: 2013-03-08
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/03/when-to-go-with-your-gut-in-career-choice/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy, Decision making

People often talk about how you should just &ldquo;go with your gut&rdquo; 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.


“Going with your gut” part 4 People often talk about how you should just “go with your gut” when choosing a career. But how useful is this advice, really? In some earlier posts, I talked about ways in which our intuitions can be misleading. I suggested that in fact, a simple formula might often do a better job. But I also acknowledged that there are specific circumstances in which gut judgements can come in pretty handy, namely when: The environment in which we’re making decisions is sufficiently predictable We have enough experience making similar decisions in similar environments We’ve had good feedback on past decisions What does all this mean for career choice? I’ll go into more detail on these points below, but the key takeaways are: In general, we should be wary of our intuitions about careers, especially when it comes to the big questions like “Which career is right for me? ” and “Which career can I have the biggest impact in? ” However, this doesn’t mean intuitions have no part to play in career choice. There might be some more specific decisions relevant to career choice that fit the above criteria, where our gut judgements are more likely to be trustworthy. Judgements in areas where we have a lot of experience ourselves, or where we can learn from the experience of others, for example, are more likely to be accurate. It’s worth double-checking our intuitions career choice. There are two steps to this: Ask whether your judgement is likely...

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### How to create the world's most effective charity

- Published: 2013-03-04
- Modified: 2024-11-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/03/how-to-create-the-world-s-most-effective-charity/
- Topics: Founder of new projects, Fundraising

GiveWell&rsquo;s charity recommendations – currently <a href="http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/AMF">Against Malaria Foundation</a>, <a href="http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/give-directly">GiveDirectly</a> and the <a href="http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/schistosomiasis-control-initiative">Schistosomiasis Control Initiative</a>– 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?


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? Probably not. As a general rule, a dollar spent on fundraising seems to raise at least several dollars. It’s a pretty simple and fast multiplier that obviously beats putting your money in the stock market. An independent organisation raising money for GiveWell’s top charities should do even better than a typical fundraiser, thanks to: the strength of evidence, which is especially compelling to big donors the independent recommendation, which looks particularly credible and removes the perception of any ulterior motive a willingness to maximise (for example by targeting the wealthy, and focussing on regular or legacy donors) an intrinsic motivation to do good the freedom to choose which of the three organisations they promote, depending on who they are talking to. Putting your money into fundraising, rather than just giving it directly, does impose additional costs on the donors you inspire, and may crowd out gifts to other charities. However, the logic of giving to GiveWell’s top rated charities is that they make (much) better...

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### How much do taxes matter if you're giving to charity?

- Published: 2013-03-01
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/03/how-much-do-taxes-matter-if-you-re-giving-to-charity/
- Topics: EtG advice

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.


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. In many western countries, charitable donations are in some way tax-exempt. In the UK the charity can claim back the normal rate of tax you paid on your donation, and you can claim back the higher rate tax you paid. In the US, you can use your charitable donations to reduce your tax liability in a similar way. So your charitable donations come out of your pre-tax income, rather than post-tax income. If you're not going to be made to pay tax on your substantial donations, you've made yourself tax-exempt to a considerable degree. You might think that the tax environment doesn't make much difference to your ability to Earn to Give. But this isn’t actually the case, for several reasons. Firstly, you do still need to earn some money for yourself, and you'll pay tax on that. The lower the tax rates, the more you can spend on and invest in yourself - or, the lower the proportion of your pre-tax income you need to keep for yourself, so the more you can donate. Secondly, it's quite possible that the best charity to support won't turn out to be a registered charity at all. What if you find a scrappy little start-up that's...

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### How to find out earnings for different jobs

- Published: 2013-02-25
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/02/how-to-find-out-earnings-for-different-jobs/
- Topics: Income

When you&rsquo;re thinking about earning money to donate it to charity, you need compare different jobs on how much you&rsquo;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&rsquo;m going to guide you through one of the best sources of earnings information - salary.com - and show you how to use it


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. Over the next couple of months, we’d like to show you: Where to get the data to make your own estimates. The best general sources we know right now are here. A couple of methods for making your own estimates, plus common pitfalls. Tables of expected earnings by profession, broken down by skill level. Detailed estimates for some of the most interesting and tricky cases, like jobs in finance. Currently, you can only find tables of median earnings by profession. Unfortunately, median earnings don’t translate into your expected earnings. This is partly because income distributions tend to be skewed - the top half of the population has a wider range of salaries (including some very high salaries) than the bottom half. The other reason is that you probably have some information about how good you’ll be - so ideally you want to know what the salaries are for different levels of the profession and what your chances are of getting promoted. And there are further problems with this data - this post outlines some of them. These problems become all the more pressing with jobs that have a wide spread in outcomes and high drop-out rates, like those in finance. So can we do any better? ...

---

### The single number that best predicts professor tenure: a case study in quantitative career planning

- Published: 2013-02-21
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/02/the-single-number-that-best-predicts-professor-tenure-a-case-study-in-quantitative-career-planning/
- Topics: Uncategorised

<em>Cal Newport is the best-selling author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1455509124">So Good They Can't Ignore You</a>, 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 <a href="http://www.amazon.com/How-Win-College-Surprising-Countrys/dp/0767917871/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1361515147&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=how+to+win+at+college">How to Win at College</a>. 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 <a href="http://calnewport.com/blog/">blog</a>.</em>


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. An Interesting Experiment How do people succeed in academia? I have notebooks filled with theories about this question, but I’ve increasingly come to realize that insights of this type — built on gut instinct, not data — are close to worthless. Most knowledge work fields are complex. Breaking into their upper levels requires a deliberate effort and precision that is poorly matched to the blunt, feel-good plans we devise in bouts of blog-inspired reflection. This was on my mind when, earlier this week, I went seeking empirical insight into the above prompt, and ended up designing a simple experiment: I started by identifying well-known professors in my particular niche of theoretical computer science. For each such professor, I studied their former graduate students. I was looking for pairs of students who earned their PhD around the same time and went on to research positions, but then experienced markedly different levels of success in the field. Once I had identified such a pair, I studied the first four years...

---

### Bringing it all together: high impact research management

- Published: 2013-02-18
- Modified: 2024-12-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/02/bringing-it-all-together-high-impact-research-management/
- Topics: Research management

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&rsquo;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.


The direct and obvious route isn’t always the one that has the most impact. The jobs that get the most credit and recognition aren’t necessarily the ones that make the most difference. The smartest people might not be those who make the greatest contribution. These statements are true generally, but one area in which they might be less immediately obvious is in academic research. 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 the 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. We also tend to think of these people as fairly interchangeable; that it doesn’t make much difference who fills these roles, as long as the work gets done. But someone who is motivated and interested in research can potentially make a huge difference in these roles, as they can add a huge amount of value as compared with someone who is not. So this could potentially be an avenue for some incredibly high impact work. High Impact Management In an earlier post, we talked about the idea of the high impact PA: how helping an already very effective researcher to be more productive by taking everyday tasks off their hands could arguably bring about more important research than you going...

---

### Two questions you won't want to ask yourself but should

- Published: 2013-02-14
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/02/two-questions-you-won-t-want-to-ask-yourself-but-should/
- Topics: Decision making, Individual reasoning &amp; cognition, Reasoning well

Most of us spend a lot of time visualising scenarios we&rsquo;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&rsquo;t want to know. But this is <em>exactly why we should do it.</em>


What are some reasons I might be wrong? What would I do if it turned out I was wrong? 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. In this article on Overcoming Bias, Nick Bostrom writes: “Let's say you have been promoting some view (on some complex or fraught topic – e. g. politics, religion; or any "cause" or "-ism") for some time. When somebody criticizes this view, you spring to its defense. You find that you can easily refute most objections, and this increases your confidence. The view might originally have represented your best understanding of the topic. Subsequently you have gained more evidence, experience, and insight; yet the original view is never seriously reconsidered. You tell yourself that you remain objective and open-minded, but in fact your brain has stopped looking and listening for alternatives. ” Applying this idea to career choice: suppose you’ve always assumed you’ll be a doctor. You’ve long believed that this is the best way for you to use your skills to do good in the world, and have found you can...

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### Advice on going into a research career: An interview with Richard Thaler

- Published: 2013-02-12
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/02/advice-on-going-into-a-research-career-an-interview-with-richard-thaler/
- Topics: Uncategorised

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.


I've recently been following a great new blog doing interviews with "research heroes" in the field of judgement and decision-making (JDM) called InDecision. Some of these interviews seem like they could be very useful and interesting to anyone wanting to make a difference in a research career, and the blog's editors, Elina Halonen (University of Turku, Finland) and Neda Kerimi (University of Uppsala, Sweden), have kindly agreed to let us repost some of them here on the 80,000 Hours blog. First up: Richard Thaler, most famously the co-author of global best-seller Nudge: a book about how we can improve the decisions people make by presenting choices differently. He is currently Ralph and Dorothy Keller Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioural Science and Economics at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business. His extensive research focuses broadly on using behavioural economics to tackle many of society's major problems. I wish someone had told me at the beginning of my career: how to go about combining economics and psychology. There was no road map. Mostly trial and error with lots of errors. I most admire academically… My greatest inspiration came from Kahneman and Tversky, my mentors who became my friends and collaborators. Danny is still a source of inspiration, going full speed at 78. They were a fantastic team because of their complementary skills, but they were both perfectionists in their different ways. I owe my career to them directly, but in some ways so does the entire field. The best research...

---

### Common mistakes in careers advice: when should you trust sayings?

- Published: 2013-02-10
- Modified: 2022-02-28
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/02/common-mistakes-in-careers-advice-when-should-you-trust-sayings/
- Topics: Uncategorised

&ldquo;Look after the pennies, and the pounds will look after themselves.&rdquo;

Often in careers advice, as in life generally, you will be handed some proverb. But sometimes these sayings aren&rsquo;t true, how can you know when to trust them? <strong>A common mistake in career choice is to blindly accept common ideas like this without good reason.</strong>

You can&rsquo;t always rely on hard studies being available, you have to rely on your intuitions a lot of the time. One way of using your intuition better that I&rsquo;ve found effective is to follow this plan:

<ul>
<li>Reverse the principle and see if the opposite idea makes sense</li>
<li>Tell two stories, one to explain the principle, one to explain the reverse.</li>
<li>Use these stories to find out when to trust the principle.</li>
</ul>


“Look after the pennies, and the pounds will look after themselves. ” Often in careers advice, as in life generally, you will be handed some proverb. But sometimes these sayings aren’t true, how can you know when to trust them? A common mistake in career choice is to blindly accept common ideas like this without good reason. You can’t always rely on hard studies being available, you have to rely on your intuitions a lot of the time. One way of using your intuition better that I’ve found effective is to follow this plan: Reverse the principle and see if the opposite idea makes sense Tell two stories, one to explain the principle, one to explain the reverse. Use these stories to find out when to trust the principle. But first, is there a real problem here to solve? Why isn’t normal intuition enough? Your intuitions can convince you that ideas are believable even when they are false, or even contradicted by other beliefs. It’s important to know how (un)trustworthy your intuitions are. A typical person’s instincts about social situations are excellent. A typical person’s instincts about nuclear physics are terrible. For an autistic nuclear scientist the reverse might be true. In general, without a lot of experience involving regular feedback intuitions tend not to be reliable. But, even when you have good feedback, there is a special bias involved in common expressions that needs to be dealt with consciously. The most common way our intuitions assess new ideas is by...

---

### The best resources for planning your career

- Published: 2013-02-06
- Modified: 2024-11-26
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/02/the-best-resources-for-planning-your-career/
- Topics: Career planning, Uncategorised

When you&rsquo;re choosing between career options you need detailed information on different aspects of your career so you can evaluate potential impact, work out what skills are needed, and see whether you&rsquo;d like to pursue that career. Unfortunately much of the information you need doesn&rsquo;t exist. For instance, you can easily find minimum entry requirements for different roles, but there&rsquo;s isn&rsquo;t much on how to judge your <a href="/2012/12/how-to-judge-your-chances-of-success/">chances of being successful</a> once you&rsquo;ve got the job. Some important information does exist, such as evidence-based ways to <a href="/2012/12/our-research-on-how-to-find-a-job-you-love/">judge whether you&rsquo;ll enjoy</a> a particular job, but it isn&rsquo;t covered by conventional careers advice. And it&rsquo;s difficult to find any information at all about more entrepreneurial paths.

On the other hand, the existing resources are great for certain types of information. Governments collect detailed information on types of roles, what they involve, what skills and qualifications are required, basic salary data and industry trends. There are also some private providers of career information and advice, including advice on how to get into certain types of jobs.

We&rsquo;re going to prepare career profiles on specific careers that will help you work out whether to pursue that option . But in the meantime, here&rsquo;s our first thoughts on the best resources that are already out there.


**New:** We've just launched our in-depth career planning process. It's the most comprehensive and up-to-date overview of all our advice on (/career-planning/), and includes a step-by-step (/career-planning/#template) you can use to plan your career. It's more up-to-date and comprehensive than the article below, though the below article has more description of other resources. When you’re choosing between career options you need detailed information on different aspects of your career so you can evaluate potential impact, work out what skills are needed, and see whether you’d like to pursue that career. Unfortunately much of the information you need doesn’t exist. For instance, you can easily find minimum entry requirements for different roles, but there’s isn’t much on how to judge your chances of being successful once you’ve got the job. We know some important useful things about finding a job that suits you, such as evidence-based ways to judge whether you’ll enjoy a particular job, but it isn’t covered by conventional careers advice. And it’s difficult to find any information at all about more entrepreneurial paths. On the other hand, the existing resources are great for certain types of information. Governments collect detailed information on types of roles, what they involve, what skills and qualifications are required, basic salary data and industry trends. There are also some private providers of career information and advice, including advice on how to get into certain types of jobs. We’re going to prepare career profiles on specific careers that will help you...

---

### Vegetarian Research

- Published: 2013-02-03
- Modified: 2021-12-16
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/02/vegetarian-research-the-value-and-the-need/
- Topics: Factory Farming, Research in relevant areas

For-profit companies (including the meat, egg, and dairy industries) spend countless
dollars each year on market research to figure out the best ways to persuade
the public to consume their products. Vegetarian advocacy organizations have
until recently spent virtually nothing to determine the best ways to persuade the
public, despite the fact that their entire success as a movement depends on getting
individual members of the public to change their dietary behavior. Until things
began to change this past year, there had been virtually no research on the impact of
various programs (i.e., no formal comparing of veg advocacy programs against one
another to determine which are most cost-effective), and also no component testing
of specific aspects of a program (for example, does video A or video B persuade
more people to go vegetarian?).


Nick Cooney is the Founder and Director of The Humane League – Effective Animal Activism's top recommended charity - and the Compassionate Communities Manager at Farm Sanctuary. He's also the author of Change of Heart, which is about how we can use an understanding of psychology to make social advocacy more effective (we recommend it! ). As a member of 80,000 Hours, we asked him to share his thoughts on how to use an 80,000 Hours approach to approach causes more effectively. Note that Nick's views do not represent those of Farm Sanctuary The Problem For-profit companies (including the meat, egg, and dairy industries) spend countless dollars each year on market research to figure out the best ways to persuade the public to consume their products. Vegetarian advocacy organizations have until recently spent virtually nothing to determine the best ways to persuade the public, despite the fact that their entire success as a movement depends on getting individual members of the public to change their dietary behavior. Until things began to change this past year, there had been virtually no research on the impact of various programs (i. e. , no formal comparing of veg advocacy programs against one another to determine which are most cost-effective), and also no component testing of specific aspects of a program (for example, does video A or video B persuade more people to go vegetarian? ). Additionally, while there is a body of useful academic research on vegetarians, it remains cloistered in unread journals where it is of...

---

### Encourage discussion, not defensiveness

- Published: 2013-01-31
- Modified: 2024-11-29
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/01/encourage-discussion-not-defensiveness/
- Topics: Uncategorised

Rather than encouraging constructive discussion, presenting new ideas - especially about moral issues - can often spark confrontation. Why is it so hard to communicate new or controversial ideas? How can you improve the way you frame your case to encourage discussion, not defensiveness?


Getting more people behind a cause you care about can be a great way to really multiply your impact. To do this you need to be able to communicate your ideas in a way that allows people to engage with them fully. But this isn’t always easy. Rather than encouraging constructive discussion, presenting new ideas - especially about moral issues - can often spark confrontation. I know a number of people have found this when talking about the fact they give x% of their income to charity. As soon as the idea is mentioned, rather than really listening, people often respond defensively; giving reasons why they don’t do the same or why your suggestion is totally unreasonable. “I can’t afford to save money/pay my mortgage and donate too”, “You must be getting financial support from elsewhere if you’re donating that much! ”, and similar responses seem common. As soon as these kind of defensive reactions slip in, all hopes of getting your point across are pretty much shattered. Why is it so hard to communicate new or controversial ideas without provoking confrontation? How can you improve the way you frame your case to encourage discussion, not defensiveness? What causes this defensive reaction? The first thing to note is that we mostly have a strong desire, arguably a need, to believe that we are good, moral people. 1 This means that if you present someone with a piece of information which seems to contradict that belief, they’re not going to like it very...

---

### Career Advice for High-Impact Activism

- Published: 2013-01-29
- Modified: 2023-09-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/01/career-advice-for-high-impact-activism/
- Topics: Volunteering

Nick Cooney is the Founder and Director of The Humane League –
(http://www.effectiveanimalactivism.org/Top-
charities) top recommended charity - and the Compassionate Communitites
Manager at Farm Sanctuary. He&rsquo;s also the author of (http://
www.veganoutreach.org/advocacy/cooneyontitles.html), which is about how we
can use an understanding of psychology to make social advocacy more effective
(we recommend it!). As a member of 80,000 Hours, we asked him to share his thoughts on how to create
impact with your career.


Nick Cooney is the Founder and Director of The Humane League – Effective Animal Activism’s top recommended charity - and the Compassionate Communitites Manager at Farm Sanctuary. He’s also the author of Change of Heart, which is about how we can use an understanding of psychology to make social advocacy more effective (we recommend it! ). As a member of 80,000 Hours, we asked him to share his thoughts on how to create impact with your career. Please note that this does not represent the views of Farm Sanctuary. So you want to do the most good you can in life. Great! Adopting a thoughtful view where you try to do the most good you can in everything (what job to have, where to donate, how to use the limited resources you have, how to live your life) is probably the most important step you can take. Since you’re visiting this website, I imagine it’s a step you’ve already taken. But what comes next? What career path offers the opportunity to do the most good in the world? While I would definitely not claim to be an expert on the subject, here are the best thoughts that I can share with you. The Issue Naturally, one of the most important questions is what issue to focus on. Your view on this may change in time; mine certainly did. During most of college, the majority of my work was focused on social justice and environmental activism. Eventually, however, I realized that it...

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### How to choose a degree - putting it all together

- Published: 2013-01-27
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/01/how-to-choose-a-degree-putting-it-all-together/
- Topics: Uncategorised

It&rsquo;s time. This is where you pull together <a href="/2013/01/how-to-choose-a-degree-for-earning-to-give-and-research/">all</a> the <a href="/2013/01/how-to-choose-a-degree-what-do-employers-want/">information</a> you have <a href="/2013/01/10-steps-to-choosing-your-degree/">assembled</a> to work out what you will be most likely to succeed at and which degrees will set you up to do good.


It’s time. This is where you pull together all the information you have assembled to work out what you will be most likely to succeed at and which degrees will set you up to do good. Working out exactly how to bring together all of the different bits of information is hard and there is no formula for it. Talking through this with someone you trust to make good decisions is often useful. Look especially for people who gave you advice before that turned out to be good. But remember that they might be biased. If they disagree with you about something ask yourself why. Do they have information you don’t have? Maybe they have valuable life experience you’re missing, don’t neglect that. Or they might just care about different things because they are a different person. As always, respect the opinions of others and try to understand why they believe what they do. Then try to see what your beliefs are once you’ve taken account of the reasons they had. But even though there’s no formula, I’m going to suggest a way to use a scoring system to structure your thoughts. The results of this scoring system won’t always be better than your gut instinct. But using a system helps you make sure you don’t miss some of your evidence and makes it more likely that you treat your evidence consistently. It’s time for a new table. For each degree course you’re still considering, you’ll want a score to...

---

### 10 steps to choosing your degree

- Published: 2013-01-23
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/01/10-steps-to-choosing-your-degree/
- Topics: Advice for undergraduates

I talked earlier about how <a href="/2013/01/how-to-choose-a-degree-what-do-employers-want/">at university you should probably pick more mathematical &lsquo;hard&rsquo; subjects over more artsy ones and focus on getting a good degree class</a>. This is pretty similar to conventional advice on choosing a degree. But I found a lack of practical step-by-step guides to picking the right degree for you. This guide gives you a structured way to gather all the relevant information and to make a decision on your degree. Without a structured process it&rsquo;s easy to narrow down your options too fast, to ignore important evidence, and to apply your evidence inconsistently.


I talked earlier about how at university you should probably pick more mathematical ‘hard’ subjects over more artsy ones and focus on getting a good degree class. This is pretty similar to conventional advice on choosing a degree. But I found a lack of practical step-by-step guides to picking the right degree for you. This guide gives you a structured way to gather all the relevant information and to make a decision on your degree. Without a structured process it’s easy to narrow down your options too fast, to ignore important evidence, and to apply your evidence inconsistently. The steps you take depend on how sure you already are about what you want to do. I’ve broken down a sensible set of steps that you might use in the UK. You should feel in control of your choice. With the power of the internet and email you can find the best information and advice once you know where to look and shake off your shyness. This decision is important for you and you shouldn’t hesitate in imposing on people in order to get the information you need. It will also teach you some skills that are useful for many activities that are important for making a difference. 1- Take a prospectus from a major university you might apply to. Large universities offer broadly similar sets of courses, so you don’t really have to do this separately for each university. At this point don’t worry too much about which university to...

---

### How to choose a degree - what do employers want?

- Published: 2013-01-20
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/01/how-to-choose-a-degree-what-do-employers-want/
- Topics: Advice for undergraduates

In my <a href="/2013/01/how-to-choose-a-degree-for-earning-to-give-and-research/">last post</a> I looked at the role of degree choice for professional and academic careers. Now let&rsquo;s branch out and look at the more general role of degree choice. This matters for people interested in <a href="/advocacy">Advocacy</a>, <a href="/innovation">Innovation</a>, <a href="/improving">Improving</a> as well as <a href="/earning-to-give">Earning to Give</a> in non-professional careers. At this stage in our research, it seems that degrees in more quantitative subjects improve your employment prospects and your flexibility, which is important for making a difference. The next most important thing is to pick a degree you expect to do well in. But, again, we&rsquo;ll be refining that view as we explore more of the evidence.


In my last post I looked at the role of degree choice for professional and academic careers. Now let’s branch out and look at the more general role of degree choice. This matters for people interested in Advocacy, Innovation, Improving as well as Earning to Give in non-professional careers. At this stage in our research, it seems that degrees in more quantitative subjects improve your employment prospects and your flexibility, which is important for making a difference. The next most important thing is to pick a degree you expect to do well in. But, again, we’ll be refining that view as we explore more of the evidence. Employers like Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths Once again, degree choice is not going to close off most of your options. In the UK, 80% of employers don’t have specific subject requirements for their graduate roles, according to CBI/Pearson Education and Skills Survey 2012. But the subject you choose does make a difference to them. 72% say that they are on the lookout for graduates from certain subjects (compared with 46% who say degree class is one of the most important criteria). Fully 50% of employers say that they are looking for graduates from Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) degrees. 17% want students with Business degrees. Only 2% want linguists, 2% social scientists, and 1% arts students. That suggests that quantitative STEM subjects give you far more career flexibility and hiring prospects than other courses. But it is worth remembering that this...

---

### How to choose a degree for Earning to Give and Research

- Published: 2013-01-18
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/01/how-to-choose-a-degree-for-earning-to-give-and-research/
- Topics: Advice for undergraduates, Earning to Give, Research in relevant areas

One of the most important early career decisions many people face is what to study at university. This is the first of a series of posts on degree choice intended for people who mean to go to university. Degree choice plays an important role in your ability to make a difference later in life. People probably don&rsquo;t put enough effort into systematically thinking about degree choice. In this post I&rsquo;ll look at the importance of degree choice for professional careers and academic careers. In the <a href="/2013/01/how-to-choose-a-degree-what-do-employers-want/">next post</a> I look at the importance for general career choice.


One of the most important early career decisions many people face is what to study at university. This is the first of a series of posts on degree choice intended for people who mean to go to university. Degree choice plays an important role in your ability to make a difference later in life. People probably don’t put enough effort into systematically thinking about degree choice. In this post I’ll look at the importance of degree choice for professional careers and academic careers. In the next post I look at the importance for general career choice. Our overview of the question so far suggests that, unless you hope to enter certain professional careers, you should bias your choice in favour of more mathematical/technical subjects and pick a degree you can expect to do well in. That opinion is based on an overview of recent graduate employment and employer surveys, interviews, personal experiences, and other cited sources. We’ll be updating that recommendation as we explore more of the evidence. There are lots of different systems of university education. In the UK, the system we have the most experience with, students pick a three or four year degree at roughly 17. In the US, students pick courses, building to a selection of majors some years later. Other countries have other systems. Thinking through your degree carefully matters more if you’re following a UK model, where you can’t easily experiment. But regardless of the model, the tendency is to put less thought into...

---

### How to make a difference in research: An interview with Nick Bostrom

- Published: 2013-01-16
- Modified: 2024-11-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/01/how-to-make-a-difference-in-research-an-interview-with-nick-bostrom/
- Topics: Academic Research, Career advice &amp; strategy, Future of Humanity Institute, Research in relevant areas

Rob Wiblin and I interviewed Nick Bostrom, founding Director of the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford, about his career and ways to do high impact research.


Rob Wiblin and I interviewed Nick Bostrom, founding Director of the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford, about his career and ways to do high impact research. What we found out: Meta-research seems really important. There could be some very high leverage opportunities in looking at the bigger picture and trying to figure out which questions are the most important, as there's still a lot of uncertainty here. Just by caring about the impact of your research, you're already making a difference. Many people seem not to care about doing important research, or at least don't think about it. If you want to advocate high impact research, it's probably best to target young researchers. It's generally very hard to get established academics to change their views, but people entering the academic field might be easier to influence. You can also make a big difference by trying to pull funding into more important areas. It may be easier to do this as an academic than by trying to get onto a funding body, as it's hard to fully influence what funding gets spent on from the top level down. There's still a lot of uncertainty about what the most important questions are, so be careful. Working to reduce these uncertainties by focusing on meta-level questions, or questions that are fairly robust in the face of uncertainty, could be good ways to deal with this. Tell us a bit about how you ended up where you are now For as long as...

---

### 3 ways to broaden your career horizons

- Published: 2013-01-14
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/01/3-ways-to-broaden-your-career-horizons/
- Topics: Decision making, Exploration

One huge barrier to making good career decisions is thinking too narrowly. There are just too many options, and too many different ways to compare them, to possibly hold all of this in our minds at once. But this means we could end up missing valuable options or important considerations. Why do we do this, and how can you broaden your options?


Benjamin Franklin, 1772, on dealing with difficult decisions: “When these difficult cases occur, they are difficult, chiefly because while we have them under consideration, all the reasons pro and con are not present to mind at the same time; but sometimes one set present themselves, and at other times another, the ? rst being out of sight. Hence the various purposes or inclinations that alternatively prevail, and the uncertainty that perplexes us. ” One huge barrier to making good career decisions (and good decisions in general! ) is thinking too narrowly. As Benjamin Franklin points out, often when making difficult decisions there is far too much relevant information for us to hold in our mind all at once. There are too many options, and too many different ways to compare them, to possibly consider this all at the same time. Not only this, it seems we often think we’ve got a broader view than we have. Not only do we have vastly incomplete knowledge for the decision we’re trying to make, but we’re under the illusion that it’s complete, and so don’t even try to expand it. This is pretty worrying, and it means we could end up missing really great opportunities to make a difference. There are three key ways in which “narrow framing” can affect career decisions: Considering too narrow a set of alternatives: Before making any career decision, you need to know what your options are. However, it seems that people often consider too narrow a set of options to...

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### Save time through smart buying

- Published: 2013-01-11
- Modified: 2024-08-07
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/01/save-time-through-smart-buying/
- Topics: Unconventional advice

When people say that time is money, they mostly mean that you can earn money with your time. But it works both ways.  In a previous post I discussed <a href="/2012/12/spending-money-to-save-time-virtual-assistance/">how we can spend money on a virtual assistant to save time</a>.  Here I will discuss some ways that you can spend money on goods or services to save you time.


When people say that time is money, they mostly mean that you can earn money with your time. But it works both ways. Here I will discuss some ways that you can spend money on goods or services to save you time. Food I have found a few cheap places to eat in my neighbourhood but my favourite is our college hall. The student cafeteria is an ideal location to eat as food is generally cheaper than elsewhere, and cooking costs are usually subsidised or paid entirely by the college. I try and arrange all of my meetings during meal times as a form of multi-tasking, and my college cafeteria is my favourite location. You’ll want to factor in travel times to and from your local eatery when doing this calculation, but for me it is well worth doing. Shopping When I go do a weekly shop it takes me about an hour all-told. I am about to trial using a shopping delivery service such as tesco. com to do the shopping for me. There is an initial setup cost associated with selecting which types of items I like, for example which type of muesli I buy, and saving them in the system. But once I have done this, I can save time each week by taking a photo of my shopping list and sending it to my virtual assistant to order online for me. I have not tried this yet, but I’ll let you know how it goes. Going digital...

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### Trading, donating and charter cities: An interview with Ben Gilbert

- Published: 2013-01-08
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/01/trading-donating-and-charter-cities-an-interview-with-ben-gilbert/
- Topics: Asset Management, Charter cities, Earning to Give

Ben Gilbert&rsquo;s an 80,000 Hours member who previously worked as a trader in the City, but now focuses his attention on the effective giving community and the development of charter cities. We met in Oxford to discuss his career, jobs in trading and his plans for making a difference in the future.


Ben Gilbert’s an 80,000 Hours member who previously worked as a trader in the City, but now focuses his attention on the effective giving community and the development of charter cities. We met in Oxford to discuss his career, jobs in trading and his plans for making a difference in the future. Your first job was as a trader in the city, tell us a bit about why you ended up doing that I was a year in to a PhD about Shakespeare but decided I'd had enough of academic discussions that seemed to me rather unreal. Trading seemed to me as real as could be, having to make judgements where everyone would know very quickly if I was right or wrong, plus I thought it might be like playing poker which I enjoyed. What did it involve? I ended up trading interest rates on emerging markets. I don't have an economics background and so most of what I did involved trying to decide which way everyone else in the market was pushing things – psychology of crowds - and also about identifying assets which were out of line with one another, in order to buy one, sell the other, and expect to profit when they moved back into line. What that meant day-to-day was sitting in front of two or three computer screens all day, watching and listening out for prices that seemed out of line with where they should be, following which way markets were moving and feeling...

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### Should you go into research? - part 2

- Published: 2013-01-05
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/01/should-you-go-into-research-part-2/
- Topics: Ability, Academic Research

Why do the best researchers get almost all the attention? One factor is the Matthew effect, in which &ldquo;the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.&rdquo; In this context, the Matthew effect means that the most accomplished researchers get increasing amounts of credit and attention.

<img src="https://80000hours.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/mattheweffect1.png" alt="" width="800" height="671" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-42350" />


Research Careers and the Matthew Effect In part 1, I noted that citations in research are distributed by a power law: that is, the best few researchers get almost all the attention. Why is this? One factor is the Matthew effect, in which “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. ”1, 2 *For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken even that which he hath. —Matthew 25:29* In this context, the Matthew effect is that the most accomplished researchers get increasing amounts of credit and attention. 3 One recent study confirmed the Matthew effect in the careers of 400,000 scientists and 20,000 athletes. The authors suggested that the Matthew effect was a feature of “universal statistical laws” of competitive career progress: they predict that early success plays a crucial role in later success, and progress is much easier when you’re already ahead. 4 They suggest that this trend is common to all competitive careers. The Matthew effect may be a crucial consideration for assessing the probability that you rise to the top of your field. Because “the rich get richer,” early achievements and signs of success increase the likelihood that you’ll be even more successful later. For example, the figure below shows how the power-law exponent for a scientist’s article receiving a given number of citations decreases as s/he has more prior articles with more citations. 5 The h-index in the figure above is the number of...

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### Are you cheating career choice?

- Published: 2013-01-02
- Modified: 2024-11-28
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2013/01/are-you-cheating-career-choice/
- Topics: Unconventional advice

Often when faced with a really difficult question, people &ldquo;cheat&rdquo; by opting to answer an easier but related one, without realising they&rsquo;re doing it. Sometimes this is a helpful tactic, but it can be a huge source of error. Could you be doing this with your career decisions?

People often end up cheating and answering an easier question because the real question is so complex that they don&rsquo;t even know how to go about answering it. What we&rsquo;re aiming to do is provide you with the tools and guidance you need to answer the questions &ldquo;Which career is right for me?&rdquo; and &ldquo;How can I make a difference in my career?&rdquo;, so that you don&rsquo;t need to cheat.


Often when faced with a really difficult question, people “cheat” by opting to answer an easier but related one, without realising they’re doing it. For example, if someone asks you “How happy are you with your life right now? ” you might find you actually end up giving the answer to an easier (but related) question such as “How happy do I feel at the moment? ” or “How happy am I with my love life right now? ”1 Sometimes this is a helpful tactic, but it can be a huge source of error. Could you be doing this with your career decisions? Is it helping you, or holding you back? Answering an easier question This tactic of “answering an easier question” is formally known as the attribute substitution heuristic. It was proposed by Daniel Kahneman and Shane Frederick in 2002 as underpinning a number of the mental shortcuts we use, that can lead to biases. 2 Studies have shown that this tactic of “answering an easier question” is used by people when answering difficult questions in a variety of different situations: including how likely a person is to do a certain job,3 which of two cities is larger,4 and what volume of a cube a sphere will occupy if dropped into it5. Common cheats in career choice. What are some common “cheat” questions people use in their career decisions? 1) Which careers are most popular? It’s easy to just follow the crowd when you’re not sure what to do. Often when a lot...

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### The power of effective activism

- Published: 2012-12-23
- Modified: 2024-11-22
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/12/the-power-of-effective-activism/
- Topics: Advocacy

The power of persuasion for making a difference is often underappreciated. If you can convince just one other person to care about a cause as much as you, then you&rsquo;ve easily doubled your impact. But people&rsquo;s efforts at influencing others often aren&rsquo;t as efficient as they could be. By stepping outside your circle of personal contacts and choosing a strategic approach, your time and influence can go ten or even a hundred times further.


The power of persuasion for making a difference is often underappreciated. If you can convince just one other person to care about a cause as much as you, then you’ve easily doubled your impact. But peoples' efforts at influencing others often aren’t as efficient as they could be. Just as people tend to give to the charity that resonates with them most personally, they often spend years trying to convince friends or family of a cause they care about. What many people don’t realise is that by stepping outside your circle of personal contacts and choosing a strategic approach, your time and influence can go ten or even a hundred times further. Triple your impact in an hour Over the past 10 years, Joe Espinosa has likely convinced somewhere between 4,000 and 13,000 people to turn vegetarian. 1 The estimates of animal advocacy organisations suggest that one person turning vegetarian saves around 100 animals from factory farming per year, mostly poultry. (In fact, this may turn out to be a very conservative estimate. ) Given this, we can estimate Joe’s impact as saving at least 4,000 * 100 = 400,000 animals from factory farming each year. Supposing each person he convinces remains vegetarian for on average 5 years, the number of animals saved from a life in a factory farm is closer to 2 million. And this doesn’t factor in the ripple effect: that many of the people convinced will likely influence others themselves. Safe to say, the guy’s overall impact in...

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### Our research on how to find a job you love

- Published: 2012-12-18
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/12/our-research-on-how-to-find-a-job-you-love/
- Topics: Ability, Job satisfaction, Mental health, Personal fit

<em>Note: this post has been superseded by our <a href="https://80000hours.org/career-guide/framework/job-satisfaction/">job satisfaction page</a> and <a href="/career-guide/job-satisfaction/job-satisfaction-research/">supporting research page</a>.</em>

Many people aren&rsquo;t as satisfied as they could be with their careers. This is a big problem: not only is the person less happy, they also end up making less difference in society. The even bigger problem is that people don&rsquo;t seem to know what to do about this - how to find a job that they&rsquo;ll find satisfying. There&rsquo;s a lot of psychology research on happiness that could be really useful, but people don&rsquo;t seem to be aware of it or at least aren&rsquo;t applying it. So we decided to start collecting together the research that seems most useful to job satisfaction, and explaining how it applies to your career decisions.


Note: this post has been superseded by our job satisfaction page and supporting research page. Many people aren’t as satisfied as they could be with their careers. This is a big problem: not only is the person less happy, they also end up making less difference in society. The even bigger problem is that people don’t seem to know what to do about this - how to find a job that they’ll find satisfying. There’s a lot of psychology research on happiness that could be really useful, but people don’t seem to be aware of it or at least aren’t applying it. So we decided to start collecting together the research that seems most useful to job satisfaction, and explain how it applies to your career decisions. A summary of our findings so far “Do what you’re passionate about” may not be very useful, and may actually be counterproductive. We’re often not that great at predicting how happy something will make us, or how long that happiness will last. Some simple methods might improve these predictions: using a simple formula, or looking at what the average person enjoys. Often aiming for happiness too directly doesn’t work. Better instead to aim for happiness indirectly: research suggests we should look for mental challenge, the single best predictor of job satisfaction - though other factors, especially how well a career fits with the rest of your life, are also arguably very important. Finding a career you love and making a difference may conflict...

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### How to judge your chances of success

- Published: 2012-12-16
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/12/how-to-judge-your-chances-of-success/
- Topics: Ability, Career advice &amp; strategy, Decision making, Reasoning well

You want to make a difference. This means being as successful as possible in whatever high-impact path you pursue. In recent posts, I raised a worry that we might overestimate our chances of success. But at the same time we don't want to underestimate them: something we do have reason to think we're better than average at something.


You want to make a difference. This means being as successful as possible in whatever high-impact path you choose to pursue. In some recent posts I raised a worry that we might overestimate our chances of success, due to a tendency to think of ourselves as better than average, and to pay too little attention to information about the average person. This could lead you to pick careers that turn out not to suit. However, some people have made the point that we also don’t want to go too far the other way and underestimate ourselves. Sometimes we do have reason to think we’re better than average at something, and we shouldn’t ignore this. Underestimating our chances of success might stop us from pursuing potentially high impact paths. 1 What if you think you really are better than average? After all, whilst no-one is above average at everything, almost everyone will be above average at something. In this post I’ll talk through some of the best ways we’ve found for working out your chances of success in a career. In summary, the process is: Work out which factors (personality traits, skills and abilities) are most relevant to success in the field you’re considering Find ways to objectively measure yourself on these factors Given this information, narrow down your reference class to those similar to you Get your “base rate” from this class Think about what’s relevant You might have really solid evidence that you’re slimmer than the average person, but this...

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### 3 Ways to Advance Science

- Published: 2012-12-15
- Modified: 2018-07-23
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/12/3-ways-to-advance-science/
- Topics: Academic Research

There are three ways to contribute to scientific progress. The direct way is to conduct a good scientific study and publish the results. The indirect way is to help others make a direct contribution. Journal editors, university administrators and philanthropists who fund research contribute to scientific progress in this second way. A third approach is to marry the first two and make a scientific advance that itself expedites scientific advances. The full significance of this third way is commonly overlooked.

<a href="http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/1867897faj0vpjpg/original.jpg"><img alt="Formula" class="image large" src="//img.gawkerassets.com/img/1867897faj0vpjpg/original.jpg" /></a>


There are three ways to contribute to scientific progress.  The direct way is to conduct a good scientific study and publish the results.  The indirect way is to help others make a direct contribution.  Journal editors, university administrators and philanthropists who fund research contribute to scientific progress in this second way.  A third approach is to marry the first two and make a scientific advance that itself expedites scientific advances. The full significance of this third way is commonly overlooked. It is, of course, widely appreciated that certain academic contributions lay the theoretical or empirical foundations for further work.  One reason why a great scientist such as Einstein is celebrated is that his discoveries have enabled thousands of other scientists to tackle problems that they could not have solved without relativity theory. Yet even this deep and beautiful theory is, in one sense, very narrow.  While relativity is of great help in cosmology and some other parts of physics, it is of little use to a geneticist, a palaeontologist, or a neuroscientist.  General relativity theory is therefore a significant but not a vast contribution to the scientific enterprise as a whole. Some findings have wider applicability.  The scientific method itself — the idea of creating hypotheses and subjecting them to stringent empirical tests — is one such.  Many of the basic results in statistics also have very wide applicability.  And some scientific instruments, such as the thermometer, the microscope, and the computer, have proved enormously useful over a wide range of domains.  Institutional innovations — such as the peer? reviewed journal —...

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### Christmas gifts, goats and cash-transfer charities

- Published: 2012-12-12
- Modified: 2023-12-13
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/12/christmas-gifts-goats-and-cash-transfer-charities/
- Topics: Earning to Give

It&rsquo;s getting closer to Christmas, and we&rsquo;re running out of time to get presents for friends and family. It can be hard to work out what presents people will actually enjoy. An increasingly popular option is to <a href="http://www.givingwhatwecan.org/oxford/cards.php">make a donation on behalf of someone else as a present.</a> What's the best way to do that? Does it involve goats? You might be interested in <a href="http://www.givingwhatwecan.org/oxford/cards.php">Giving What We Can's gift cards that let you donate to the world's most effective charities</a> .


It’s getting closer to Christmas, and we’re running out of time to get presents for friends and family. It can be hard to work out what presents people will actually enjoy. An increasingly popular option is to make a donation on behalf of someone else as a present. You might be interested in Giving What We Can's gift cards that let you donate to the world's most effective charities: the deadline for sending them is tomorrow! When it comes to presents, it seems like a thoughtful gift is better than a gift certificate, and a gift certificate is better than a thoughtless gift. It’s a lot like that for charity gifts too. Your best options are likely to be donations towards the most effective charities. Next in line are going to be well-run cash transfer charities. And in last place will be the unasked-for gift of a goat. Why “give a goat”? What was originally a fairly uninspired set of options for charity gifts has since turned into a wide range of charitable choices for the holidays. Oxfam alone lets you select gifts from 58 different projects. But the old stand-by is sending farm animals to developing countries. This seems unlikely to be motivated by effectiveness. I googled “Give a _____ for christmas” for a bunch of farm animals and wrote down the estimated number of search results. Goat: 22,200 Cow: 1,630 Chicken: 130 Pig: 49 Sheep: 4 (an) Ox: 0 Now, it’s possible that goats are just much much...

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### Want to be successful? Know your odds.

- Published: 2012-12-02
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/12/want-to-be-successful-know-your-odds/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy, Decision making, Reasoning well

If you want to make a difference in your career, you need to think not just about which jobs have the most impact, but which jobs you&rsquo;ve got the best chances of success in. This latter point can be easily neglected. It&rsquo;s all very well working for an incredibly high impact cause, but if you do a rubbish job you won&rsquo;t make much difference. Judging your chances of success is hard. Knowing the odds: the average person's chances of success, is a good place to start.

<a href="http://cdn.worldcupblog.org/www.worldcupblog.org/files/2010/07/success-and-failure-sign.jpg"><img alt="Formula" class="image large" src="//cdn.worldcupblog.org/www.worldcupblog.org/files/2010/07/success-and-failure-sign.jpg" /></a>


If you want to make a difference in your career, you need to think not just about which jobs have the most impact, but in which jobs you’ve got the best chances of success. This point is easy to neglect. It’s all very well working for an incredibly high impact cause, but if you do a rubbish job you won’t make much difference (at worst you might actually do harm). Judging your chances of success is hard. You probably don’t want to think of yourself as “merely average”. But looking at the average person’s chances is the best place to start if you want to get a realistic picture of how likely you are to succeed. The representativeness heuristic If you’ve ever travelled on the same train or bus route at the same time every morning, you’ll have found you end up seeing the same people every day. When I commuted to work in London from my home in Cambridge over the summer I found myself making up stories about these people to pass the time: imagining what jobs they did and what their lives were like. 1 This could get pretty dull, as most of the people in my carriage were middle-aged men; smartly dressed and carrying briefcases, tapping on their smart phones. Bankers, businessmen: boring. There was one man in particular, though, whose story was different. At first glance, he looked like the rest of them. What sparked my interest was that he read: and not from a Kindle,...

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### How to choose a research topic: An interview with Anders Sandberg

- Published: 2012-12-01
- Modified: 2014-09-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/12/how-to-choose-a-research-topic-an-interview-with-anders-sandberg/
- Topics: Academic Research

Ben and I spoke with Anders Sandberg, a James Martin research fellow at the <a href="http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk">Future of Humanity Institute</a>, about his career and how to make a difference through research. Here are some of the highlights!

<a href="http://www.materialbeliefs.com/collaboration/images/anders-s.jpg"><img alt="Formula" class="image large" src="//www.materialbeliefs.com/collaboration/images/anders-s.jpg" /></a>


Ben and I spoke with Anders Sandberg, a James Martin research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute, about his career, how to make a difference through research and how to choose a research topic. We’re going to be writing in more detail about some of this in the near future, but here are some highlights from our conversation: General advice for students interested in doing high impact research: spending a lot of time thinking it through can make a big difference, and sometimes small or unglamorous innovations can have the most impact. Some heuristics for finding high impact research areas: look for under-researched fields, find problems that affect a lot of people, try adding a new twist to a big problem, being a generalist Things to be careful of: some problems seem huge and important but might be ill-posed and so hard or even impossible to solve. “Solving consciousness” or “curing cancer” are good examples of this. More specific ideas of what research questions might be promising: certain areas of neuroscience focused on improving human well-being, communication and cooperation, anything that makes it easier to acquire or multiply human capital. Why scientists aren’t working on these things and general barriers are to doing high impact research: inheriting the research agenda of your professor seems a big problem, as well as aversion to risk and uncertainty. A quick biography Anders’ research focuses mostly on cognitive enhancement and future technologies, with particular interest in cognitive biases, technology-enabled collective intelligence, neuroethics and...

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### Do you think you're better than average?

- Published: 2012-11-27
- Modified: 2024-11-21
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/11/do-you-think-you-re-better-than-average/
- Topics: Reasoning well

Most people think they're better than the average person: that they're smarter, more likeable, more attractive. This tendency to think of ourselves as better than average is a well-established bias. But if we need to do this to feel better about ourselves, who cares? The problem is that we'll also overestimate our chances of being successful. And if you want to work out where to make the most difference, you need to have a realistic idea of where your chances of success are best.

<center><a href='http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-AW6gs3TG-vA/TxYGDpwGUjI/AAAAAAAACEQ/gY7S140Ezdo/s400/mediocre.jpg'><img alt="Formula" class="image large" src="//1.bp.blogspot.com/-AW6gs3TG-vA/TxYGDpwGUjI/AAAAAAAACEQ/gY7S140Ezdo/s400/mediocre.jpg" /></a></center>


Most people think they’re better than the average person: that they’re smarter, more likeable, more attractive. 1 Maybe you don’t think this is you. Maybe most people think they’re better than average, but you’re not as big-headed as most people. Maybe you’re more modest than the average person. Or maybe your modesty is just another trait you’re overestimating. The Dunning-Kruger effect This tendency to think of ourselves as “above average” is a well-established bias. It’s commonly referred to under several names: illusory superiority, the better-than-average effect, or, my personal favourite, the Lake Wobegon effect - after Garrison Keillor's fictional town where “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average. " A closely related bias is the Dunning-Kruger effect, where incompetent or unskilled people fail to recognise their own incompetency (of course, I’m sure you’re not incompetent or unskilled, so this one doesn’t apply to you... ) In a study conducted by psychologists Hoorens and Buunk, high school students were asked to estimate how true a number of personality traits were of themselves, and of the average student. Results showed that students rated themselves significantly higher than average on positive traits (such as honesty, persistence and originality) and lower than average on negative ones (such as hostility, vanity and reasonableness. )2 There are a ton more studies3 which demonstrate this tendency to rate oneself as above average: ninety percent of drivers think they are better than the average driver4, and most students think they are...

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### Is microcredit mostly hype?

- Published: 2012-11-25
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/11/is-microcredit-mostly-hype/
- Topics: Uncategorised

Microcredit has become one of the most popular ideas in charity. 2005 was named the <a href="http://www.yearofmicrocredit.org/">Year of Microcredit</a>.The microcredit charity <a href="http://www.kiva.org">Kiva</a> has over 800,000 lenders, the highest possible rating from Charity Navigator, and was <a href="http://www.kiva.org/updates/kiva/2010/11/19/kiva-chosen-as-one-of-oprahs-favorite.html">endorsed by Oprah</a>... The <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2006/press.html">2006 Nobel Committee</a> boldly claimed that microcredit &ldquo;must play a major part&rdquo; in ending global poverty.

Recently, however, criticism of microfinance has <a href="http://www.oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/?p=5161">been growing</a>. And that&rsquo;s a good thing, because <strong>it&rsquo;s far from proven that microfinance, on average, has any positive effects at all.</strong>


In 2002, Lize, a widow with 5 children, was unable to work for three months due to illness. When she recovered, many of her fishing nets were ruined. Lize decided to apply for a loan with Hluvuku-Adsema Fundo de Credito Male Yeru... Since then she has been granted four loans, the first one in January 2003 for a total of around US$260... With these basic financial services, Lize's commercial activities recovered allowing her to support her extended family of sixteen members and start building a new concrete house. In addition, her company has generated four permanent job posts, seven temporary ones, and supports the business of self-employed women that buy her fish to sell in Catembe and Maputo. This story is typical of those used to promote microcredit: the practice of providing small loans to the global poor who don’t have access to existing lending services. Microcredit is a type of microfinance, which includes a variety other financial services provided on a small scale. Microcredit is an intuitively appealing idea, especially for market-oriented people: the global poor can lift themselves sustainably out of poverty, all they need is some capital to start a business! And it seems to have become one of the most popular ideas in charity. 2005 was named the Year of Microcredit. The microcredit charity Kiva has over 800,000 lenders, the highest possible rating from Charity Navigator, and was endorsed by Oprah... The 2006 Nobel Committee boldly claimed that microcredit “must play a major part” in ending global poverty... .

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### Triumphs of intuition

- Published: 2012-11-21
- Modified: 2020-07-31
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/11/triumphs-of-intuition/
- Topics: Uncategorised

Paramedics appear to make good, fast decisions based on "gut feeling": knowing what to do without knowing how you know. Along a similar vein, chess grandmasters are able to identify and decide on the best moves incredibly rapidly, moves which mediocre players may not even spot at all.

But this ability to make astoundingly accurate judgements in the blink of an eye isn't limited to experts. We all do it every day: when we judge what some else wants from their facial expressions, or catch a ball without doing any complex physics calculation. How are these triumphs of intuition possible?

<a href='http://gigaom2.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/shutterstock_73070908.jpg'><img alt="Formula" class="image large" src="//gigaom2.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/shutterstock_73070908.jpg" /></a>


“Going with your gut” - part 3 Paramedics have to make life or death decisions in the blink of an eye every day. Novices tend to follow simple rules in these situations, which work well up to a point. But with experience paramedics begin to make better, faster decisions, without any conscious awareness of the rules they are following. These decisions appear to be based on “gut feeling”: knowing what to do without knowing how you know. Along a similar vein, chess grandmasters are able to identify and decide on the best moves incredibly rapidly, moves which mediocre players may not even spot at all. But this ability to make astoundingly accurate judgements in the blink of an eye isn’t limited to experts. We all do it every day: when we judge what someone else is feeling from their facial expressions, or catch a ball without doing any complex physics calculation. How are these triumphs of intuition possible? The environments in which chess players and paramedics make their decisions are very different, but share two key similarities. First, they are both fairly regular: there are identifiable cues and patterns of actions leading to outcomes. From certain moves or patterns of moves in chess you can predict fairly reliably what the response will be. For most casualties there are known methods of treatment. Second, both provide fairly good and fast feedback. A chess player will find out pretty quickly whether his move was a good one or not;...

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### Why don't people help others more? - part 2

- Published: 2012-11-18
- Modified: 2024-11-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/11/why-don-t-people-help-others-more-part-2/
- Topics: Decision making, Economics, Effective Altruism, Psychology, Unconventional advice

In part 1, I talked about some ways in which we might motivate people to be more altruistic. Providing a personal connection with the victim and appealing to a someone&rsquo;s emotional responses seem to help. So too can instilling a sense of responsibility to help others, and an understanding that doing so is not futile.

All these observations are incredibly valuable. But I think there&rsquo;s more to understanding why people don&rsquo;t help others more, despite the fact they may believe in doing so in principle. A huge factor here is <em>the behaviour of others</em>. Most people appear to have a strong tendency not to want to help more than the other people around them.

<a href="http://naturalrhythms.org/2.0/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/woman_man_moneyiStock_000003224362XSmall.jpg"><img alt="Formula" class="image large" src="//naturalrhythms.org/2.0/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/woman_man_moneyiStock_000003224362XSmall.jpg" /></a>


In part 1, I talked about some ways in which we might motivate people to be more altruistic. Providing a personal connection with the victim and appealing to a someone’s emotional responses seem to help. So too can instilling a sense of responsibility to help others, and an understanding that doing so is not futile. All these observations are incrdibly valuable. But I think there’s more to understanding why people don’t help others more, despite the fact they may believe in doing so in principle. A huge factor here is the behaviour of others. Most people appear to have a strong tendency not to want to help more than the other people around them. What's Fair In Help? If you were asked to share this money with a stranger, how much would you give them? It's clear that people value fairness, even to their own detriment. In a game called "the Ultimatum Game", one participant is given a sum of money by the researcher, say $10, and told they can split this money with an anonymous second player in any proportion they choose -- give them $10, give them $7, give them $5, give them nothing, everything is fair game. The catch is, however, the second player, after hearing of the split anonymously, gets to vote to accept it or reject it. Should the split be accepted, both players walk away with the agreed amount. But should the split be rejected, both players walk away with nothing. A Fair...

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### Why don't people help others more? - part 1

- Published: 2012-11-16
- Modified: 2024-12-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/11/why-don-t-people-help-others-more-part-1/
- Topics: Unconventional advice

As Peter Singer writes in his book <em>The Life You Can Save</em>, "he world would be a much simpler place if one could bring about social change merely by making a logically consistent moral argument." Many people might agree that a social change movement is noble, yet don't want to do anything about it. Why not? Why don't people help others more?

<a href='http://utrechttoastmasters.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/rokia1.png?w=500'><img alt="Formula" class="image medium" src="//utrechttoastmasters.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/rokia1.png?w=500" /></a>


As Peter Singer writes in his book The Life You Can Save: "the world would be a much simpler place if one could bring about social change merely by making a logically consistent moral argument". Many people might agree that a social change movement is noble yet not want to do anything to promote it, or want to give more money to a charity yet refrain from doing so. Additional moralizing doesn't seem to do the trick... . So what does? For a start on the answer, like many things, I turn to psychology. Specifically, the psychology Peter Singer catalogues in his book. A Single, Identifiable Victim "This is seven-year old Rokia. Rokia is desperately poor and her life will be changed for the better by your gift. " One of the most well-known motivations behind helping others is a personal connection, which triggers empathy. When psychologists researching generosity paid participants to join a psychological experiment and then later gave these participants the opportunity to donate to a global poverty fighting organization Save the Children, two different kinds of information were given. One random group of participants were told "Food shortages in Malawi are affecting more than three million children" and some additional information about how the need for donations was very strong, and these donations could help stop the food shortages. Another random group of participants were instead shown the photo of Rokia, a seven-year-old Malawian girl who is desperately poor. The participants were told that "her life will be changed...

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### A formula for the perfect job?

- Published: 2012-11-15
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/11/a-formula-for-the-perfect-job/
- Topics: Career capital, Career planning, Decision making, Exploration, How to get a job, Personal fit

Career choice is complex. Could a simple decision rule help us? This idea seems worth paying serious attention to, as there's a large body of research suggesting rules can improve decision making in other areas.


“Going with your gut” - part 2 Career choice is complex. There are a lot of uncertainties. This means we can't necessarily just trust our intuitions on what job to choose. What can we do instead? One suggestion might be to use some kind of decision rule to help us. A large body of research suggests that rules can improve decision making in other areas, so this idea is worth paying attention to. However, it’s unclear how reliable these studies are, or how similar the cases in question are to career choice. Before we can draw any strong conclusions about the use of rules in career choice, therefore, we need to either test this directly, or do a more detailed survey of the literature (or both. ) Decision rules in interviews Earlier I talked about the problems with interviews. They encourage decisions based on global impressions, which can be overly influenced by factors such as likeability and attractiveness. But we probably don’t want to stop interviewing people altogether. Interviews are an efficient and flexible way of assessing candidates. If used more effectively, they can be a valuable part of the recruitment process. Research into different interviewing methods suggests that we can improve the accuracy of interviews. The biggest and most consistent gains come from the use of structured interviews. 1,2 The main idea is to design questions before the interview to test for certain characteristics, develop a way of scoring the answers, and treat all candidates identically. Why are structured interviews so...

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### 80,000 Hours is Recruiting!

- Published: 2012-11-14
- Modified: 2022-02-28
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/11/80-000-hours-is-recruiting/
- Topics: Uncategorised

<img alt='join us' align="left" height='200' src='/assets/icons/volunteer.svg' width='200' /> 
We're trying to build the world's best career advice organisation that helps you make a difference. That's a big project, and we're growing fast. If you'd like to help us out, now's your chance.


If you're here, you probably have some idea of what 80,000 Hours is about. We're trying to build the world's best career advice organisation that helps you make a difference. That's a big project, and we're growing fast. If you'd like to help us out, now's your chance. 80,000 Hours, and our sister organisations, are recruiting. The first stage of the recruitment process is specially designed to be really quick- you'll fill in a little bit of basic information and then answer one question in 200 words or less. Everyone we've tested the question on thought it was pretty fun - although it does take a bit of serious thinking. We're looking for a Head of Career Research and Advice as well as a Head of Fundraising and External Relations. To find out more, click here. Giving What We Can is looking for a Head of Communications. Effective Animal Activism is looking for an Executive Director. The Life You Can Save is looking for a Director of Outreach. For more information on these other roles click here. If you have any questions, email recruitment@centreforeffectivealtruism. org

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### Interview with Brian Tomasik

- Published: 2012-11-10
- Modified: 2024-11-29
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/11/interview-with-brian-tomasik/
- Topics: Building effective altruism

<a href="/members/brian-tomasik">Brian Tomasik</a> is a member of 80,000 Hours who has spent many years thinking and writing essays about how to most effectively reduce suffering in the world. Research Director Robert Wiblin sat down with Brian (metaphorically) to learn about his intellectual journey and at times unusual conclusions.


Brian Tomasik is a member of 80,000 Hours who has spent many years thinking and writing essays about how to most effectively reduce suffering in the world. Research Director Robert Wiblin sat down with Brian (metaphorically) to learn about his intellectual journey and at times unusual conclusions. What were the initial influences that led you to care about doing as much good for the world as possible? I grew up in a family that cared about social issues. However, I wasn't terribly interested in them myself until late 2000, when I saw a speech by Ralph Nader at a local college. Nader's speech wasn't just about politics narrowly defined, but also about the extraordinary amounts of suffering (or, in his words, "injustice") in our world and the amazing ability that young people have to make a difference -- especially educated young people living in the most powerful country on the planet. Inspired by Nader's example, I became a really good student, and I led many social-activism clubs and projects at my high school. Later, in spring 2005, I heard the word ‘utilitarian’ and didn't quite know what it meant, so I looked it up. I was delighted to discover that there was a name for the philosophy of cost-benefit analysis applied to happiness and suffering that I had been following for the last few years. I soon found utilitarian. net and read Peter Singer's work on animals. Previously I had believed that non-human animals couldn't consciously suffer, but Singer persuaded me...

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### The Best News You'll Hear All Year

- Published: 2012-11-08
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/11/the-best-news-you-ll-hear-all-year/
- Topics: Uncategorised

The folks at <a href="http://www.charitynavigator.org">Charity Navigator</a> get a lot of heat from people who care about charity evaluation. Their approach, up till now, has been mostly of the lamentable <a href="/2011/11/it-is-effectiveness-not-overhead-that-matters/">fundraising is evil</a> variety. Things are about to change.


The folks at Charity Navigator get a lot of heat from people who care about charity evaluation. Their approach, up till now, has been mostly of the lamentable fundraising is evil variety. Despite the fact that the comparison they’ve been making between organisations was only loosely correlated to the effectiveness of the organisation (1), they’ve become one of the most influential forces in charity comparison. According to them, they get almost 3. 3mn unique visitors every year. You can’t beat a good idea Things are about to change. Charity Navigator is taking an aggressive step in the direction of results based charity evaluation. They’re building their capacity, with help from the Hewlett Foundation, to evaluate the results of all the charities they collect information on. Even better, once the results rating is live they plan to make it the most significant factor in their evaluations. It’s going to be tough They’ve got a pretty innovative approach. While GiveWell focuses resources on the most promising leads, Charity Navigator seems to want to cover all the charities it looks at. That is potentially wasteful, but maybe they’re betting that their comprehensiveness will give them some extra credibility as well as reach. They’re planning to base part of their impact assessment on the quantity of feedback the charities get from their beneficiaries. Part will come from teams of trained volunteer charity evaluators, crowd-sourced from universities across the US. And part will come from the professionals - they’re going to incorporate GiveWell and Philanthropedia rankings... .

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### What's your true impact?

- Published: 2012-11-06
- Modified: 2024-11-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/11/what-s-your-true-impact/
- Topics: Unconventional advice

We often confuse our  true impact with what we do directly. Instead of focusing on what you do directly, ask yourself <em>what would have happened if I hadn&rsquo;t been there?</em> The real <em>difference</em> we make is the difference between what happened because of us, and and what would have happened otherwise. Thinking about change like that opens up lots of new ways to make the world a better place.


We often confuse our true impact with what we do directly. Instead of focusing on what you do directly, ask yourself what would have happened if I hadn’t been there? The real difference we make is the difference between what happened because of us, and and what would have happened otherwise. Thinking about impact explicitly like that opens up lots of new ways to make the world a better place. Let’s explore some examples:   1) Fundraising A charity runs a huge campaign raising money for medicine to prevent deaths due to HIV/AIDs, and raise millions of pounds. What was their direct impact? Directly, the fundraisers caused a large number of donations to their cause. This money is used to save many lives in the developing world. What would have happened if they hadn’t run the campaign? Some of the donors would have given less money to charity over the rest of the year. But other donors have only changed their donations. If the campaign hadn’t been run, these donors would have given some of the money to different charities instead. What was their true impact? If these other charities needed the money more, then the campaign might have even been harmful. At any rate, the fundraising didn’t do as much good as it first looks. To do more good as a fundraiser, you have to increase the total amount given to charity, and be wary of pulling funds away from other important causes.   2) The high impact secretary...

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### Find the gate

- Published: 2012-11-04
- Modified: 2021-11-18
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/11/find-the-gate/
- Topics: Uncategorised

There&rsquo;s an easy way to tell a smart dog from a stupid dog. There&rsquo;s a fence in front of you, and behind it is a delicious juicy bone. You&rsquo;re starting to salivate just thinking about how amazing it will feel between your teeth. Now you have a choice. If you&rsquo;re a stupid dog, you&rsquo;ll run at the fence, stand in front of the bone and start to bark. If you&rsquo;re a smart dog, you&rsquo;ll look along the fence, find the gate, run happily through it and devour your prize.

Humans also have a hard time finding the gate. It&rsquo;s easy to get preoccupied with the bone. It can look so inviting that you don&rsquo;t take the time to look around, take things in, and choose the best path. Sometimes that path is indirect. It often means getting other people involved. But by spending the time, you can have far more impact...


There’s an easy way to tell a smart dog from a stupid dog. There’s a fence in front of you, and behind it is a delicious juicy bone. You’re starting to salivate just thinking about how amazing it will feel between your teeth. Now you have a choice. If you’re a stupid dog, you’ll run at the fence, stand in front of the bone and start to bark. If you’re a smart dog, you’ll look along the fence, find the gate, run happily through it and devour your prize. Humans also have a hard time finding the gate. It’s easy to get preoccupied with the bone. It can look so inviting that you don’t take the time to look around, take things in, and choose the best path. Often the best path to making a difference is indirect. It often means getting other people involved. Spend an hour persuading other people to donate to an important cause as a fundraiser and you can easily more than you could have given directly (around £40 on average). Have you got a great idea for a social enterprise? Chances are, you can find someone else to do it, and probably do it better than you. Rather than work directly for your favourite charity or research lab, if you become a high-earner, you could pay for them to take several extra staff (or one person with much better qualifications than you). Instead of hoping you’ll be the best, find the person who is the...

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### Should we stop interviewing people?

- Published: 2012-11-01
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/11/should-we-stop-interviewing-people/
- Topics: Individual reasoning &amp; cognition, Reasoning well, Unconventional advice

Most employers rely heavily on interviews in recruiting. However, research suggests that the interview process is far from perfect. This is pretty worrying when we think about how much difference hiring the best candidate for an important job can make. It might sound crazy, but maybe we should stop interviewing people...


Our discussion of the reliability of interviews and years of experience has been superseded by the analysis in our career guide article on personal fit, which suggests interviews are more reliable and years of experience less reliable. "Going with your gut" - part 1 Would you hire this guy? Most employers rely heavily on interviews in recruiting. However, there's evidence that the method of choosing candidates based on general impressions from an interview is barely more accurate than a coin toss. 1 Evaluations of interviews conducted in the Israeli Defence Forces to assign soldiers to various branches, for example, suggested that the procedure was almost completely useless at predicting the future success of recruits. 2 Multiple studies indicate that the interview process is far from perfect : that interview performance is a poor predictor of job performance 3, and that it’s often overvalued relative to other assessment methods (such as aptitude tests and references) 4. This is pretty worrying when we think about how much difference hiring the best candidate for an important job can make. It might sound crazy, but maybe we should stop interviewing people... Why can interviewing lead to bad hiring decisions? Judging which candidate has the best chance of success in a job is far from easy. We have to consider a huge number of different factors and then combine them together in the right way. This is difficult even in theory, let alone in practice! This means interviewers tend to rely on shortcuts to make their...

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### Sunk Costs in Careers

- Published: 2012-10-31
- Modified: 2024-11-21
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/10/sunk-costs-in-careers/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy, Decision making, Individual reasoning &amp; cognition, Reasoning well

In my last post <a href="/2012/10/good-generals-let-their-soldiers-die-in-vain/">we looked at sunk costs</a>. We saw that having paid for something distorts how you think about it later on.

This is a very common experience in career decisions. You might be in a degree course you don&rsquo;t want to be on, or climbing the ladder in a company you aren&rsquo;t sure about, or find out that the dream job you&rsquo;ve spent years working for isn&rsquo;t as good as expected. It is only by forgetting these sunk costs that you can make the right career decisions and have as much impact as you can.

But if you find yourself in this situation what can you do?


In my last post we looked at sunk costs. We saw that having paid for something distorts how you think about it later on. This is a very common experience in career decisions. You might be in a degree course you don’t want to be on, or climbing the ladder in a company you aren’t sure about, or find out that the dream job you’ve spent years working for isn’t as good as expected. It is only by forgetting these sunk costs that you can make the right career decisions and have as much impact as you can. If you find yourself in this situation what can you do? Rejecting sunk costs Mark Lee was working to become a high-impact philosopher, he already had a batchelor’s degree and was working towards a PhD. Then he learned about earning to give. On paper Mark was faced with an tricky decision: what would do more good, doing philosophy, or training as a lawyer and doing earning to give? It's a tricky decision, but it's at least possible to think through the different ways those careers will do good, and to estimate how much good they are likely to do. In practice that decision was much harder. Those years of work getting his degree were a huge cost. To abandon that work (letting that work be in vain) would be painful for most people, which would make it hard to reliably make the right decision. If you’ve already worked to get something, you’ll...

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### How to be a high impact volunteer

- Published: 2012-10-28
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/10/how-to-be-a-high-impact-volunteer/
- Topics: Effective Altruism, Volunteering

Lots of volunteering is definitely not actually about helping people. It usually doesn&rsquo;t hurt, but neither does going for a walk. If what you really want is to volunteer your time to make the world a better place, what should you do?


Lots of volunteering is definitely not actually about helping people. It usually doesn’t hurt, but neither does going for a walk. If what you really want is to volunteer your time to make the world a better place, what should you do? It’s not all what it seems You may think I’m being cynical when I say most volunteering is usually not that helpful. But many charities agree with me. FORGE, a charity that looks after refugees, shifted its focus away from volunteers to a model that should have been able to help people more effectively. It turns out, that was a bad move for them – because their volunteers were also their chief fundraisers. Their income plummeted. Many charities have similar experiences – volunteers are an important investment, but they don’t directly contribute to the charity’s good works. It’s not even usually true that a volunteer is free for a charity. There are substantial costs to managing and engaging volunteers. That’s usually worth it for a charity, because they’re counting on you to donate later. But it’s not a great start. That’s not even taking into account the peculiar practice of getting lots of people to put huge amounts of time and effort into baking cakes and/or buying things in order to then auction them off (often below cost) in order to donate the proceeds to charity. Let’s do it right What I’ve just described sounds awful, but of course it isn’t. Even if that’s all there was on...

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### Net Impact Survey: Hopeful News for Ethical Careers

- Published: 2012-10-25
- Modified: 2014-09-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/10/net-impact-survey-hopeful-news-for-ethical-careers/
- Topics: Uncategorised

Net Impact, a US charity, has released a report on attitudes towards ethical careers. The report contains hopeful news for the high-impact career market, but the findings must be treated with caution. The report suggests that current students are more inclined to go into ethical careers, and that they will be happier if they do. Having an impact with their job is very important to current students. 31% of students describe making an impact as essential, compared to only 15% of older generations. This is higher than the percentage of students who say wealth (13%) or prestige (19%) are essential.

<img src="//netimpact.org/netimpact-logo.png" alt="Net Impact" />


Net Impact, a US charity, has released a report on attitudes towards ethical careers. The report contains hopeful news for the high-impact career market, but the findings must be treated with caution. The report suggests that current students are more inclined to go into ethical careers, and that they will be happier if they do. Having an impact with their job is very important to current students. 31% of students describe making an impact as essential, compared to only 15% of older generations. This is higher than the percentage of students who say wealth (13%) or prestige (19%) are essential. 45% say they would trade 15% of their salary to make more impact. The advice for those trying to recruit to ethical careers is twofold: First, be personal. More people are motivated to “work in a company with their values” (58%) than more impersonal goals like tackling inequality (20%). Second, wealth may not be the key thing, but financial security is. Flexible work, job security, and enough money to pay off student debts are essential. These results must be tempered with caution however. Net Impact (and the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University) conducted the survey, but their analysis is less rigorous than could be hoped. There has been little attempt to assess the statistical significance of the results. It must be noted that all these conclusions are based on self-reports, so false reporting will be significant. This report is not strong evidence on its own, but should...

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### Good generals let their soldiers die in vain

- Published: 2012-10-23
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/10/good-generals-let-their-soldiers-die-in-vain/
- Topics: History, Reasoning well

In November 1914 Winston Churchill proposed a campaign to turn the tide of war on the Eastern Front. The plan was to fight a land war up the Gallipoli peninsula, secure safe passage for warships up the Dardanelles, and give the Russians access to the Mediterranean.

The land war was a total failure. After landing in April 1915 the Allied troops lost momentum quickly. By August Ottoman forces had tied them into static trench warfare. The Allies couldn&rsquo;t make any more progress, they had achieved nothing and 220,000 soldiers had died. It was at this point that the allied troops were ordered to evacuate.

Some soldiers said they hoped their dead comrades wouldn&rsquo;t notice them leaving. The 220,00 soldiers died &ldquo;in vain&rdquo;. And yet it was a great decision by Lieutenant-General Sir Charles Monro to let them die in vain. <em>Better that than lose even more men pointlessly.</em>

<center><a title="By Boldair at fr.wikipedia , from Wikimedia Commons" href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AIllustration_par_Carrey_pour_le_journal_Le_Miroir_en_1915.jpg"><img width="256" alt="Illustration par Carrey pour le journal Le Miroir en 1915" src="//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/77/Illustration_par_Carrey_pour_le_journal_Le_Miroir_en_1915.jpg/256px-Illustration_par_Carrey_pour_le_journal_Le_Miroir_en_1915.jpg"/></a></center>


In November 1914 Winston Churchill proposed a campaign to turn the tide of war on the Eastern Front. The plan was to fight a land war up the Gallipoli peninsula, secure safe passage for warships up the Dardanelles, and give the Russians access to the Mediterranean. The land war was a total failure. After landing in April 1915 the Allied troops lost momentum quickly. By August Ottoman forces had tied them into static trench warfare. The Allies couldn’t make any more progress, they had achieved nothing and 220,000 soldiers had died. It was at this point that the allied troops were ordered to evacuate. Some soldiers said they hoped their dead comrades wouldn’t notice them leaving. The 220,00 soldiers died “in vain”. And yet it was a great decision by Lieutenant-General Sir Charles Monro to let them die in vain. Better that than lose even more men pointlessly. Why is it so clear to everyone than soldiers dying in vain is more tragic than soldiers dying otherwise? Why is it so hard to accept that Monro made the right decision? The sunk cost bias The “sunk cost bias” is the tendency to keep doing something that doesn’t make sense anymore, just because of how much you’ve already paid for it. When that cost is as enormous as people’s deaths this bias is overpowering. It would be the obvious thing to do to refuse to fight an unwinnable battle. But we feel that it’s a mistake, or even immoral, to turn...

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### Why most charity fundraisers cause harm

- Published: 2012-10-21
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/10/why-most-charity-fundraisers-cause-harm/
- Topics: Fundraising, Unconventional advice

Most fundraisers don&rsquo;t raise extra money for charity. Rather, they shift money from one charity to another. This means that many fundraisers could actually be making people worse off...


Doing harm when you think you’re doing good - part 2 If you become a fundraisers, you won't raise extra money for charity. Rather, you'll shift money from one charity to another. Suppose Oxfam spends an extra £1 on fundraising. We’d expect this to raise them at least £41. So, it looks like they’ve generated an extra £3 for charity. Great! But what would have happened if they hadn’t spent that £1? If this was an easy opportunity to raise money, then another charity would take it instead. Charities as a whole are raising about as much money as they can from the public. This is what we’d expect. Charities are aiming to do as much for their cause as possible, so if there were easy money to raise, they’d take it. And intuitively, people have a relatively stable ‘charity budget’ . They avoid future giving once they’ve ‘done their part. ’ This means that Oxfam wasn’t actually generating new money for charity by doing more fundraising, rather, it was shifting it from somewhere else. So the extra fundraiser wasn’t doing any good2. But it gets worse. If you graph how cost-effective charities are, you’d expect to find a curve a bit like the one on my very basic graphic below3: The key point is that the median is significantly less than the mean. In other words, the effectiveness of the majority of charities is less than the effectiveness of the average charity. That sounds a bit odd, but it’s just...

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### Introducing THINK

- Published: 2012-10-19
- Modified: 2018-04-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/10/introducing-think/
- Topics: Uncategorised

Not long ago, there were zero organizations focused on effective altruism. Over the last few years, we&rsquo;ve seen an explosion of interest in the topic. More and more of us are finding each other to ask not only &ldquo;How can I help?&rdquo; but &ldquo;How can I help better?&rdquo;

There&rsquo;s a new organization asking these questions:. The High Impact NetworK, THINK&rsquo;s goal is to introduce people to ideas and skills that will help them do good more effectively.


Not long ago, there were zero organizations focused on effective altruism. Over the last few years, we’ve seen an explosion of interest in the topic. More and more of us are finding each other to ask not only “How can I help? ” but “How can I help better? ” There’s a new organization asking these questions: The High Impact NetworK, THINK’s goal is to introduce people to ideas and skills that will help them do good more effectively. This fall, THINK meetups will be starting at universities and in cities around the world. THINK is developing a curriculum of presentations and activities that can be picked up and used by anyone who wants to lead such a group. The modules cover areas of interest to effective altruists: charity assessment, paths to impact, making science better and more. (You can take a look at the sample modules currently on the website. ) The modules are designed to teach newcomers about the basics of effective altruism, but also to offer self-improvement tools that can help participants reach their chosen goals. Of course, 80,000 Hours and THINK share many of the same goals. In the coming months, THINK meetups will provide venues for speakers and written material from 80,000 Hours. Its modules will refer interested people to 80,000 Hours for more information on high-impact careers. The key difference between the organisations is that THINK focuses on helping people all over the world to set up group meet-ups, while 80,000 Hours focuses on online content, careers...

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### Open Source Technology: A Career in Engineering

- Published: 2012-10-18
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/10/open-source-technology-a-career-in-engineering/
- Topics: Academic Research

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...


Skype conversation and email interview between 80,000 Hours (Benjamin Todd) and Joshua Pearce (Professor at Michigan Tech and Member of 80,000 Hours) I contacted Joshua to talk about how he had used his academic career to do high impact research. In summary: We talked about which research questions might be important in engineering We identified an area that might be promising (which we'll be looking into more): Open Source Appropriate Technology – providing free information about technology that anyone can build that solves problems in the developing world We discussed some of the barriers to doing this research: there’s very little funding and a shortage of grad students willing to work in an area with uncertain job prospects We discussed the barriers to doing high impact research within academia in general: there’s very little funding, there’s many non-research demands on your time, there’s a need to work on conventional questions to further your career We talked about some strategies for dealing with these barriers: sources of funding, how you can do un-funded work alongside your other projects, gaining status (and tenure) in a mainstream field then using it to promote other work, finding a mentor who’s already been there Tell us a little about what you do and why you're interested in 80,000 Hours? I am a professor at Michigan Tech where I run our Open Sustainability Technology Research Group. My research focuses on open and applied sustainability, which is the application of science and innovation to ensure a better...

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### How much is a volunteer worth?

- Published: 2012-10-17
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/10/how-much-is-a-volunteer-worth/
- Topics: Volunteering

The problem with volunteer labour is that it&rsquo;s free, so a charity has an incentive to recruit volunteers as long as they contribute <em>some</em> value to the charity. In the case of Feed My Starving Children, volunteer labour isn&rsquo;t just free; it&rsquo;s a source of revenue. Feed My Starving Children don&rsquo;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.


An organisation called Feed My Starving Children once held a volunteer event at my college. Feed My Starving Children relies on volunteers in the US to package meals that are sent to nearly 70 countries. This strategy—use labour from a high-wage country to pack food that is then shipped to far-flung regions of the world, at great cost and without improving regional agriculture—seems suboptimal. But the organisation, with a budget of $25. 1 million and 92 new staff members hired in the most recent year, seems to be doing well. This example illustrates one problem with volunteer labour: since volunteers are unpaid, charities have an incentive to recruit them as long as they contribute some value to the charity. In the case of Feed My Starving Children, not only are volunteers unpaid; they're a source of revenue. Feed My Starving Children don’t recruit volunteers in the US for their adept food-handling skills or their convenient location: they recruit them to attract donations, which volunteers are encouraged to make. Clearly, the effectiveness of a charity is a primary consideration in determining whether you should volunteer for it. But once you’ve found a highly effective charity that’s recruiting volunteers, how do you know whether the work you’re being asked to do is a good use of your time? One way to get a handle on this problem is to ask the charity whether they would prefer that you complete a certain assignment or that you make a donation. When you find out the...

---

### The most important unsolved problems in ethics

- Published: 2012-10-14
- Modified: 2024-02-23
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/10/the-most-important-unsolved-problems-in-ethics/
- Topics: Moral philosophy, Most pressing problems, Philosophy

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&rsquo;s problems, then you were doing respectable mathematics.

There is no such list within moral philosophy.  That&rsquo;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&rsquo;ve written on for coursework previously, or pick something that&rsquo;s &lsquo;hot&rsquo; at the time.  I don&rsquo;t know for sure, but I imagine the same is true of many other academic disciplines.


(Or, How to be a high impact philosopher, part III) 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. What would the equivalent list look like for moral philosophy? Of course, it’s difficult to define ‘important’, but let’s say here that they are the potentially soluble problems that, if solved and taken seriously, would make the greatest difference to the way the world is currently run. I’ve briefly discussed this idea with Nick Beckstead, and also Carl Shulman and Nick Bostrom, and here’s a select list of what we came up with. For more explanation of why, see my previous two posts on high impact philosophy, here and here. The Practical List What’s the optimal career choice? Earning to give, advocacy, research and innovation, or something more common-sensically virtuous? What’s the optimal donation area? Development charities? Animal welfare charities? Extinction risk mitigation charities? ...

---

### How to do one year of work in four hours

- Published: 2012-10-11
- Modified: 2020-12-14
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/10/how-to-do-one-year-of-work-in-four-hours/
- Topics: Unconventional advice

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.


The best-selling 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. Suppose your mission in life is to fight HIV/AIDS. Consider two charities. The first prevents deaths due to AIDS by handing out antiretroviral therapy to people infected with the virus. The second prevents deaths due to AIDS by educating people about the need for contraception through television shows. Which one should you work for? Both are producing massive benefits for others, but the second measure is cheap and preventative, so intuitively it looks like it might work better. To find out, let’s look at the latest cost-effectiveness research. According to the Disease Control Priorities Second Report, $500 used on antiretroviral therapy allows one person to live an extra year of healthy life. This is a great deal, working out at only 6c per hour. The same resources used on mass media education, however, allows about 500 people to live an extra year of healthy life. If both charities are roughly the same size, and you can make the same kind of contribution at each, then it seems like you can do about 500 times as much to fight AIDS at the mass media charity. For instance, suppose you make...

---

### Why don't charities spend more on fundraising?

- Published: 2012-10-09
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/10/why-don-t-charities-spend-more-on-fundraising/
- Topics: Fundraising

People often think it&rsquo;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&rsquo;s great! They&rsquo;ve just multiplied the impact of your donation. It turns out that charities are being pretty rational after all.


People often think it’s bad for their charity of choice to spend money fundraising. Up there with percentage spent on administration, people want the portion of the budget spent fundraising to be low (1). 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. An even greater mystery has been why charities don’t spend even more on fundraising. The returns from fundraising seem to be huge. For each £1 spent on fundraising, studies have shown that charities typically raise £4-10 (2). That’s an incredible 300-900% return. Why wouldn’t they do as much of this as possible? One theory is that the social norm against heavy fundraising prevents them from doing as much as they would like. This may be part of the reason. It looks like the sector, and in particular the most effective charities, might under-fundraise. But it also seems that charities are taking most of the easy fundraising opportunities already out there, and so are behaving more effectively than it first looks. Although the average returns to fundraising are high, it looks like the returns from additional fundraising are much lower. We can show this with a very rough calculation: In 2006, charities in the UK raised an estimated £27bn from fundraising (3). They spent about £5. 7bn on fundraising (4) In 2010, charities raised £31bn (5). They spent £7. 8bn on fundraising (6). (inflation-adjusted) So, over...

---

### When should I quantify? - Quantification - Part 4

- Published: 2012-10-08
- Modified: 2018-07-23
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/10/when-should-i-quantify-quantification-part-4/
- Topics: Uncategorised

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.

<center><a title="By Tjeerd Wiersma from Amsterdam, The Netherlands (Flickr) , via Wikimedia Commons" href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AMosquito_Netting.jpg"><img width="512" alt="Mosquito Netting" src="//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/73/Mosquito_Netting.jpg/512px-Mosquito_Netting.jpg"/></a></center>


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 want to have as much impact as possible. Because more people living happy joyful lives is better than fewer. Image source The last 3 posts have been about quantifying our impact on the world and analysing our effect with numerical methods. But general theories don’t help people with malaria. Their specific applications do. This post is a checklist to run through to decide if you should use quantitative methods on your goal. I will run through the example of malaria treatment, but the checklist is general. Step 1: What is the goal? Before you begin any project it is important to be very clear about what you are trying to do and why. This way you don’t end up like the fool in every story about a genie, who gets exactly what he wishes for but not what he wants. If you want to get rid of malaria remember that you want this because malaria is a terrible disease that kills people. If you ever find yourself with some course of action that could eradicate malaria but at the cost of many...

---

### How to do important research

- Published: 2012-10-04
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/10/how-to-do-important-research/
- Topics: Academic Research, Applying an unusual skill to a needed niche, Graduate school, Research in relevant areas

Many academics want to do important research that makes the world a better place. Unfortunately, there&rsquo;s virtually no guidance out there.

We&rsquo;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 <strong>explore how to find research questions that need your talent.</strong>


Our project to find research that makes the world a better place Like many new academics, you want to do important research; research that makes the world a better place. The problem is there’s virtually no guidance out there. All you can do is ask experts in specific fields, while there’s no-one providing an overview of which areas might be best. We want to change this. We’re building a resource of strategies and ideas for finding high impact research questions, as well as practical information about how to get involved with them. If you would like to get involved, contact us! In this post, we take a first step and explore how to find research questions that need your talent. Introduction A high impact research question has three characteristics: It’s important: If we make progress, then the world will become a better place. It needs talent: If more people work on it, then more progress will be made. And in particular... It needs your talent: If you work on it, then more progress will be made A good research question needs to be both important and in need of more researchers. Building a perpetual motion machine is extremely important - if we could do it, then we’d solve our energy problems - but we have good reason to think it’s impossible, so it’s not worth working on. Similarly, a problem can be important but already hold the attention of many extremely talented researchers, meaning your extra efforts won’t go very...

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### Let's stop building schools

- Published: 2012-10-03
- Modified: 2022-12-14
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/10/let-s-stop-building-schools/
- Topics: Accidental harm, Donating effectively, Problem prioritisation

I recently came accross Taylor Conroy, who&rsquo;s using an innovative fundraising technique to let ordinary people to raise $8,500 to build a school with just <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aC02SmuOxYI">an evening&rsquo;s work</a>. The method has since been expanded to include <a href="http://www.thechangeheroes.com/sign-up/##.UGSEz03A_Sg">water pumps and libraries</a>. The fundraising is amazing, but I can&rsquo;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 <em>obviously</em> be a good thing. They can send you pictures of it after it&rsquo;s built. But is this really where we should be directing our efforts?


I recently came across Taylor Conroy, who’s using a new fundraising technique to let ordinary people raise $8,500 to build a school with just an evening’s work. The method has 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. According to Change Heros: "Each of these projects are incredibly needed and will change the world for the better. " School building seems like one of the most popular projects in charity. There’s a whole range of organisations that let you do it. Change Heros uses Free to Children, but there’s also Asante, Build a School, Build Africa, and not to mention all those gap year volunteer programs that let you travel to Africa to help out with the construction. But is this really where we should be directing our efforts? Here's an alternative case. 1) The most obvious benefit of building schools is to increase attendance, but it’s unclear they even do that Studies in Africa found that providing better quality, closer schools could increase average attendance by about 2 years, but were plagued by problems in the methodology 1. The best study on the topic showed that a major program of school construction in Indonesia led to 0. 12-0. 19 extra years in school per school per...

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### Quantification as a Lamppost in the Dark - Quantification - Part 3

- Published: 2012-10-02
- Modified: 2018-07-23
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/10/quantification-as-a-lamppost-in-the-dark-quantification-part-3/
- Topics: Uncategorised

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. &ldquo;What are you looking for?&rdquo; asks the policeman. &ldquo;My keys,&rdquo; the man replies, pointing down the road a little way, &ldquo;I dropped them over there.&rdquo; The policeman is baffled, &ldquo;Then why are you looking for them here?&rdquo;. &ldquo;Because there&rsquo;s no light over there.&rdquo;

The joke is old but it gets to the heart of the debate over quantification. Is it best to look for keys under lampposts?

<center><a title="By ClementSeveillac (Own work) , via Wikimedia Commons" href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AGecko_in_lamp_by_night.jpeg"><img width="512" alt="Gecko in lamp by night" src="//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a6/Gecko_in_lamp_by_night.jpeg/512px-Gecko_in_lamp_by_night.jpeg"/></a></center>


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? Quantification lets us use a whole host of numerical tools to understand problems and develop solutions to them. But as I discussed last time there are dangers in using such tools on the wrong kinds of goals. In this way quantification is like the lamppost. It lets you see far more clearly what is going on, but only in some limited areas. So what kinds of things tell us how good an idea it is to look under lampposts? (Or what kinds of problems should we use quantitative methods on). How many near misses there are. I’ll discuss this below. How bright the light is. i. e. how much information does this tool give you. Where you think you dropped the keys. i. e. if you suspect that the thing you are looking for cannot be analysed by these methods then don’t use them. Last time we dealt with the biases and limitations around quantitative methods. With...

---

### How many lives does a doctor save? - Part 3 - Replacement

- Published: 2012-09-30
- Modified: 2022-12-14
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/09/how-many-lives-does-a-doctor-save-part-3-replacement-84/
- Topics: Doctor, Medicine, Reasoning well

If I become a doctor, I won&rsquo;t increase the total number of doctors by one. The NHS has a limited budget, so it can&rsquo;t just hire every qualified person who applies; medical schools have limited places by law, and there are more applicants who are &lsquo;good enough&rsquo; than there are places. If I become a doctor, then I&rsquo;ve just displaced <em>someone else</em> who would have taken the job.


In the last post we showed that by becoming a doctor, assuming doctors are equally skilled, I would save 600-920 QALYs, with my best guess at 760 QALYs. That’s roughly equivalent to saving 25 lives. But even this is too generous. 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. If we also assume that doctors are equally skilled, then by becoming a doctor you’d have zero impact. You’d simply displace someone equally good. Fortunately, it’s not as bad as this. First, doctors are clearly not equally skilled (as we’ll look at later). But more importantly, by becoming a doctor, you do, in one sense, increase the number of doctors. Supply-Demand Effect If I become willing to work as a doctor, then I increase the supply of doctors. If more people are willing to be doctors, then the NHS can slightly decrease the wages for doctors (1). If the wages are slightly lower, the budget can be used to hire slightly more doctors. How this all balances out is studied by economists. If the labour market for doctors is in equilibrium, then increasing the supply of doctors by one doctor, will...

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### How to be a high impact philosopher, part II

- Published: 2012-09-27
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/09/how-to-be-a-high-impact-philosopher-part-ii/
- Topics: Academic Research, Philosophy

There&rsquo;s a second method for high impact philosophy.  Let&rsquo;s call it the bottom-up method.
Begin by asking &lsquo;which are the biggest decisions that one typically makes in life?&rsquo;


In a previous post, I discussed how, as a philosopher, one should decide on a research area. I suggested that one method was to work out what are potentially the biggest problems the world faces, work out what the crucial normative consideration are, and then work on those areas. Call that the top-down method: starting with the problem, and working backwards to the actions one should take. There’s a second method for high impact philosophy, however. Let’s call it the bottom-up method. Begin by asking ‘which are the biggest decisions that one typically makes in life? ’ Then ask: ‘What are the crucial normative considerations that might affect how I should make those decisions? ’ Then figure out which of these crucial considerations is most likely to produce an action-relevant outcome given your marginal research time. Then work on that topic! As in my previous post, I’ll go through each step in turn. 1) What are the biggest decisions one typically makes in life? By ‘biggest decisions’ I mean the decisions that potentially have the greatest positive or negative moral impact. In general, these will be those decisions that involve the greatest amount of resources – where having greater ‘resources’ is just the power to make things happen. So what are the biggest decisions one typically makes in life? The list would certainly include the following: i. How should I spend my money? Why? Over a lifetime, a high school graduate can expect to earn $1. 2million. With a bachelor’s degree, that figure...

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### Quantum Quest: Pruning Procrastination

- Published: 2012-09-23
- Modified: 2024-11-21
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/09/quantum-quest-pruning-procrastination/
- Topics: Uncategorised

In a series of posts, I will offer a perspective on the &ldquo;quantum quest&rdquo; - 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 &ldquo;quantum&rdquo;.


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”. Productivity and Effectiveness 80,000 Hours has focused on how you can change the world through your career. This post is a lead-in to a series of posts aiming to complement the deliberation on career choice with thoughts about how to be more productive and effective in the paths we end up pursuing (which can be applied more generally to other areas of your life). If you have altruistic goals, then boosting your effectiveness helps you make more difference, sometimes a lot more. We may spend about 80,000 hours in a typical career, while the time available in a longer-than-typical life (for now) is probably on the order of 800,000 hours – which of course includes plenty of time for sleep! Goals, Plans, Methods How do productivity and effectiveness fit into the big picture? There are three broad stages in purposeful action – starting with goals, make a plan, then execute actions with methods. Increased productivity does not obviate the need to identify goals to focus on, as it will never be possible to have the time or resources to do everything you want to do. You have to decide what you really want, which is tricky to say the least... .

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### Quantification - Part 2 - The Dangers

- Published: 2012-09-19
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/09/quantification-part-2-the-dangers/
- Topics: Uncategorised

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?


(Part 1 is here) 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? Rationality does not tell us what to value. But once we have decided what our ultimate goals are it can tell us what paths to those goals will be most effective. The problem is that often the goal we have in mind is rather fuzzy and intuitive. The methods of analysis used to decide on a course of action do not always work as expected, which can produce unwanted results. We can break goals down by how easily they are converted into quantitative terms: Inherently quantitative goals: These are those that are explicitly in the form 'maximise numerical quantity X'. Examples might be 'get more money', or 'get as many people as possible to join my organisation. ' Optionally quantifiable goals: These are goals that can be measured approximately/with difficulty/with some loss of completeness. For instance “improve health” can be replaced by the numerical goal 'increase years of healthy life, or more precisely QALYs', but this will sometimes not completely match how we intuitively regard health. Non-quantifiable goals:...

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### Does money make you happy?

- Published: 2012-09-18
- Modified: 2024-11-26
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/09/does-money-make-you-happy/
- Topics: Job satisfaction

If we&rsquo;re to believe the Internet, <a href="http://quotationsbook.com/quote/27092/">various apologists</a> <a href="http://snigdhakrishna.com/money-happiness">for materialism</a> <a href="http://quotationsbook.com/quote/27092/">have</a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/show/106119">quipped</a> <a href="http://www.girlnextdoorfashion.net/2010/08/whoever-said-that-money-doesnt-buy.html">that</a> whoever said money can&rsquo;t buy happiness didn&rsquo;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&rsquo;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..?


This post has been superseded by our new post on this topic. 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? We first need to clarify what is meant by ‘well-being’. I'm going to focus on emotional well-being, the balance of positive and negative emotions that a person is experiencing at any given time. (This is to be contrasted with life evaluation, which is how people evaluate their lives when asked to reflect on them. ) Though I’m going to focus on a single research paper, much what I say applies to other correlational studies of income and well-being. ) In a 2010 paper, Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton analyzed survey data from 450,000 Americans and found that emotional well-being - a composite of positive affect, stress, and feeling blue - was related to income. Much of the media coverage focused on the fact that income and emotional well-being were correlated only up to £50,000 a year. For example, the Telegraph's article claimed that emotional well-being ‘only rose steadily with annual income up to level—$75,000, or just below £50,000. ’ This is right but misleading. Most people would interpret ‘rise...

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### How many lives does a doctor save? - Part 2 - Diminishing marginal returns

- Published: 2012-09-16
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/09/how-many-lives-does-a-doctor-save-part-2-diminishing-marginal-returns/
- Topics: Doctor, Medicine, Reasoning well

In the first post, I worked out an upper bound for the <em>average direct health impact</em> 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&rsquo;t, however, show how much difference you make by <em>becoming</em> a doctor. There&rsquo;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?


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. Working this out requires a number of adjustments. The first is that we need to work out the impact of additional doctors, instead of the average doctor. There’s already about 200,000 doctors in the UK. By becoming a doctor, let’s suppose I increase the number of doctors to 200,001. And let’s assume that all doctors in the UK are equally skilled (we’ll relax this assumption in the next post). The extra doctor won’t produce a benefit of 2600 QALYs. That’s because doctors perform a huge variety of tasks. Some of these do more for the UK’s health than others. The NHS (to some extent) prioritises its distribution of resources so that the most effective tasks get done first. This is part of the remit of the National Institute of Clinical Excellence. So, if there’s one extra doctor, the tasks they do will be less effective than those that are already being done. So we’d expect an additional doctor to have less impact than the 200,000 people who are already doctors. This is called diminishing marginal returns. How can we take the figure for the average impact of a doctor and work out the impact of...

---

### Quantification - Part 1 - An Introduction

- Published: 2012-09-12
- Modified: 2021-03-26
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/09/quantification-part-1-an-introduction/
- Topics: Decision making

Who was the most important person in the 20th century? JFK? Einstein? Bill Gates? On the one hand it&rsquo;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...


Who was the most important person in the 20th century? Gavrilo Princip? Norman Borlaug? JFK? Einstein? Mao? Ken Lay? Margaret Thatcher? Nick Leeson? Bill Gates? Maurice Hilleman? 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. I may argue that Maurice Hilleman is the most important because he is responsible for vaccines that saved more lives than anyone else. You may respond that JFK’s “we choose to go to the moon” speech is one of the defining symbols of our era. One argument is about a quantitative difference, one is a qualitative difference. The aim of 80,000 Hours is to help people to choose careers where they can do the most good for their chosen cause. How we go about finding out what the best career is also says a lot about how we think about the things that matter. Do you want to be a great statesman with power and prestige, or do you want to be a researcher finding out ways to cure terrible diseases? And more importantly, what is the reasoning process that you use to answer that question? How would you find out who was the best sprinter ever? Simple, go to the record books, find who ran 100m the fastest. How would you find out who is the richest person ever? Again, find out who had the most money. In these cases you can...

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### Do you really know what job will make you happy?

- Published: 2012-09-10
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/09/do-you-really-know-what-job-will-make-you-happy/
- Topics: Job satisfaction, Mental health, Personal fit, Unconventional advice

Why are so many people dissatisfied with their jobs? A big part of the problem is that we&rsquo;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...


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. We think, for example, that winning the lottery will make us much happier in the long run - but it probably won’t. (1) This has some serious ramifications for career choice. In an earlier post, I concluded that there’s a much closer connection between careers which make us happy and careers that make a difference than we might think. One side of this relationship is that we’re more likely to make a difference in a career we enjoy. This means that even for the effective altruist, factoring in our own happiness at least to some extent when making career decisions is important. However, what this doesn’t mean is that we should simply follow our intuition (or our passions) about what makes us happy, and then factor this in to our decisions. We have a tendency to overestimate both the positive impact of a “good” event (such as winning the lottery), and the negative impact of something “bad” happening (such as breaking a leg. ) One study showed that accident victims often turn out to be happier a year after their accident than they expect to be. (1) Another asked professors to predict the long-term impact that either receiving or failing to receive tenure would have on their happiness: and lo and behold, in both cases the emotional impact...

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### Is there such thing as a 'bad' charity?

- Published: 2012-09-05
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/09/is-there-such-thing-as-a-bad-charity/
- Topics: Donating effectively

When we talk about giving to charities there&rsquo;s a dirty secret we try really hard not to mention. Some charities are &ldquo;bad&rdquo;.


When we talk about giving to charities there’s a dirty secret we try really hard not to mention. Some charities are “bad”. When people look at charities, all of which are doing decent things, they don’t want to point out that some do a lot more good than others. It’s understandable. They’re all well-intentioned, good projects. People care about them. You don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. But the truth is that, in the world we live in, we can’t afford not to be picky about our giving. If all charities were as good as each other, then giving to less effective charities wouldn’t be a big deal. But there are huge differences. A safe and effective cataract operation can completely cure someone of blindness in the developing world for about $20. The same person can be provided with a seeing eye dog for $50,000. There are charities doing each. Let’s not make any mistakes about this. Both charities are definitely helping people. But one is helping a lot more people with the same resources. There’s something awkward here. It feels like we’re putting a price on helping people. We’d like to just help charities help people in need without having to think about scarce resources. It feels embarrassing to say to one charity “I’m sorry, I think my money can help more people somewhere else. ” It seems much nicer to give a bit to all the good causes. That’s a very costly attitude to have. We live in a...

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### How good are the best?

- Published: 2012-09-01
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/09/how-good-are-the-best/
- Topics: Ability, Career advice &amp; strategy, Reasoning well

Imagine you&rsquo;re offered the top job at <a href="http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/schisto">SCI</a> – one of the <a href="http://givewell.org/charities/top-charities">world&rsquo;s most cost-effective charities</a> – should you take it?


In complex jobs, the best 10% of workers produce 8 times as much as the bottom 10%. Imagine you’re offered the top job at SCI one of the world’s most cost-effective charities should you take it? SCI’s historical annual budget has been just under $10m (1). With $10m, SCI is able to provide 20 million children with medicine that prevents neglected tropical diseases each year (2). We’d expect this to lead to 250,000 years of extra healthy life per year (3), as well as to yield long-term education and economic benefits to the millions of people in the affected area (4). A 10% improvement to SCI’s efficiency means treating an extra 2 million children and creating an extra 25,000 years of healthy life per year. That’s roughly equivalent to saving 800 lives per year (5). So, a small improvement to SCI’s efficiency is a big deal. The same would go for someone who could fundraise an extra 10% for SCI. Whether you could increase SCI’s impact by 10% is a tough question, and given the organisation’s extreme efficiency, we have reason to be sceptical. But one issue that bears on the question is the following: how much do different employees typically differ in output? There have been many studies looking at this very question, across a wide range of jobs, which are summarised in a meta-study by Hunter, Schmidt and Judiesch (6). Output is measured in a variety of ways. For salespeople, it’s the dollar value of what they sell... .

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### Should we sacrifice doing what we love to make a difference? part 2

- Published: 2012-08-29
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/08/should-we-sacrifice-doing-what-we-love-to-make-a-difference-part-2/
- Topics: Job satisfaction

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&rsquo;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&rsquo;ll enjoy.


In my last post, I argued that the conflict between being an effective altruist and having a career one enjoys is less than it first seems, for making a difference can lead to a very satisfying career. We might be tempted to conclude from this that a career’s potential to make a difference should be the primary factor we consider in career choice, and hope that job satisfaction follows on this basis. (1) Sadly I don’t think it’s so straightforward. As I will show, we’re 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. Consider a career that has the potential to be very high-impact if done well: some kinds of scientific research, for example. Suppose however that such a career is undertaken by someone who has little or no interest in the research involved. As I mentioned in part 1, I was hesitant to pursue research in a field I was passionate about because I felt that it was likely to be relatively low-impact. Trying to strike a balance between what I perceived enjoying and what would make the most difference, I considered other routes of research that might potentially be higher impact: such as neuroscience. But since I couldn’t imagine being passionate about research that involved spending my time doing experiments in a lab (2), I found it hard to see myself producing ground-breaking research in this field. It seems like a lack...

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### How much malaria is biodiversity worth?

- Published: 2012-08-25
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/08/how-much-malaria-is-biodiversity-worth/
- Topics: Uncategorised

Every day, almost everything we do is about prioritisation. Given how important prioritisation is, and how much people seem to care about doing it right, it&rsquo;s startling that relatively little research is done into how best to prioritise the most important issues facing society.

What do you think the most important challenges facing humanity are...?


Every day, almost everything we do is about prioritisation. When I pick BLT or egg-mayo, I’m prioritising. When a small business owner decides whether to hire a new worker or install a new machine, they’re prioritising. When we decide to increase the cost of energy in order to reduce future climate change, we’re prioritising. In fact, one of the most dramatic conflicts of the twentieth century was over how best to prioritise. Capitalists advocated a spread-out strategy, where individual choices combine to guide the priorities of entire societies. Socialists believed that a central organisation is needed to set priorities for societies. Given how important prioritisation is, and how much people seem to care about doing it right, it’s startling that relatively little research is done into how best to prioritise the most important issues facing society. People do research on, say, the best ways to distribute humanitarian aid. But it wasn’t until 2004 that anyone thought to compare the best opportunities in humanitarian aid with the best opportunities in climate change adaptation technology or in reducing international trade barriers. There are powerful reasons for avoiding the problem. It’s hard to know where to start. We’d have to, for example, find some way to compare reductions in human rights abuses with reductions in child deaths. It seems unlikely we’ll ever find a rigorous way to do that. It’s steeped in value judgements. No matter which way you go, you’ll have to make some ideologically loaded decisions. How much do you value...

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### Should we sacrifice doing what we love to make a difference? part 1

- Published: 2012-08-23
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/08/should-we-sacrifice-doing-what-we-love-to-make-a-difference-part-1/
- Topics: Job satisfaction, Mental health, Personal fit, Unconventional advice

We all want to find a career which makes us happy: but for many there seems to be a conflict between doing what one loves, and making a difference. My initial interest in 80,000 Hours was sparked by a desire to resolve a conflict between wanting to make a difference in my career, and wanting to pursue philosophy research (which I considered fairly low impact.)(1) I recognised that I could potentially make more difference by applying my numerical skills to a high-earning career and donating to greater causes - but the thing is, I just don&rsquo;t want to do this. And shouldn&rsquo;t this count for something, even for the aspiring effective altruist? Should we have to give up doing what we love in order to make a difference?


In an earlier post, Ben argued that “do what you’re passionate about” isn’t a good rule or even a good heuristic to follow when choosing a career. In particular, doing what you’re passionate about might prevent you from making the most difference - if what you’re passionate about is contract killings, for example. The example doesn’t even need to be this extreme: what if what you really love has relatively low impact on others, like meatpacking? It seems like your time could be put to more altruistic use, even if you’re not doing something actively harmful. The problem is that we all still want to find a career which makes us happy: but for many there seems to be a conflict between doing what one loves, and making a difference. My initial interest in 80,000 Hours was sparked by a desire to resolve a conflict between wanting to make a difference in my career, and wanting to pursue philosophy research (which I considered fairly low impact. )(1) I recognised that I could potentially make more difference by applying my numerical skills to a high-earning career and donating to greater causes - but the thing is, I just don’t want to do this. And shouldn’t this count for something, even for the aspiring effective altruist? Should we have to give up doing what we love in order to make a difference? I’d like to suggest that this conflict, although it exists, may be much less than it first appears - for there’s...

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### How many lives does a doctor save?

> An in-depth answer to 'how many lives do doctors save', and why becoming a doctor doesn't make as much difference as you might think.

- Published: 2012-08-19
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/08/how-many-lives-does-a-doctor-save/
- Topics: Doctor, Effective Altruism, Medicine, Reasoning well, Unconventional advice

It seemed a pretty good career move for a 17-year old wanting to make a difference. Like thousands of others, I applied to read medicine. This is what I wrote on my personal statement: "I want to study medicine because of a desire I have to help others, and so the chance of spending a  career doing something worthwhile I can&rsquo;t resist. Of course, Doctors don&rsquo;t have a monopoly on altruism, but I believe the attributes I have lend themselves best to medicine, as opposed to all the other work I could do instead." Was I right? Is medicine a good career choice for someone wanting to 'make a difference'?


This is part 1 in a 3 post series. See also part 2 on diminishing marginal returns and part 3 on replaceability. We now have a full career profile on medicine, which contains a more up-to-date and in-depth version of this research. Doctors have a pretty solid reputation as do-gooders. There are regular news stories about how advances in medical science promise to help more people than ever before. Many of us have had the experience of being ill, seeing our doctor, and being made better. So it seemed a pretty good career move for a 17-year old wanting to make a difference. Like thousands of others, I applied to read medicine. This is what I wrote on my personal statement: I want to study medicine because of a desire I have to help others, and so the chance of spending a career doing something worthwhile I can’t resist. Of course, Doctors don’t have a monopoly on altruism, but I believe the attributes I have lend themselves best to medicine, as opposed to all the other work I could do instead. Was I right? Is medicine a good career choice for someone wanting to 'make a difference'? Over the next few posts we are going to try and answer this question, and try to estimate the impact one can expect to make becoming a doctor in the UK (which will be pretty similar to the impact made anywhere else in the developed world). This post will look at the average...

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### Project Launch: Effective Animal Activism

- Published: 2012-08-17
- Modified: 2014-09-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/08/project-launch-effective-animal-activism/
- Topics: Factory Farming

Among the goals of 80,000 hours is to provide resources to our community on the issues that matter most to us. As a result, we took the initiative to launch a new web-page dedicated to Effective Animal Activism: <a href="http://effectiveanimalactivism.org/">http://effectiveanimalactivism.org/</a>, as a part of 80,000 hours, for our members to research, share, and act upon the most effective forms of giving our time or money to help animals.


Last month we asked you, 80,000 hours members and readers: what questions do you have about making a difference? Over half of the responders on the thread noted a glaring lacuna in information available within the Effective Altruism movement – an evaluation of the best ways to do good within the cause of non-human animals. Among the goals of 80,000 hours is to provide resources to our community on the issues that matter most to us. As a result, we took the initiative to launch a new web-page dedicated to Effective Animal Activism: http://effectiveanimalactivism. org/, as a part of 80,000 hours, for our members to research, share, and act upon the most effective forms of giving our time or money to help animals. All 80,000 hours members have pledged to use the time or resources we give effectively to help others. In pursuit of this goal, members are involved in a variety of causes, such as raising money for malaria nets – a highly effective, evidence-based way to fight global poverty. Some of our members are interested in exploring other options for doing a lot of good. The animal cause is one such area, mostly because of the magnitudes involved. A staggering 60 billion non-human land animals (1) are killed every year for food alone. A large proportion of those animals are factory farmed, living in extreme suffering. Luckily, it turns out there are some very effective ways to reduce this suffering: for example, promoting reduction in animal-product consumption is a...

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### How to find a job you'll love

- Published: 2012-08-16
- Modified: 2024-11-26
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/08/how-to-find-a-job-you-ll-love/
- Topics: How to get a job, Job satisfaction, Mental health, Personal fit

If you want to be satisfied at work, what characteristics should you look for? Prestige, money, something you&rsquo;re <a href="/2012/08/don-t-do-what-you-re-passionate-about-part-1/">passionate about</a>, a corner office? <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Career-Ahead-Complete-Handbook/dp/0956111807">Books</a> on careers guidance often start by asking you to consider your values and desired lifestyle, and then to find a job that matches them. But why expect this approach to work? Research has shown that the only consistently present characteristic of  satisfying jobs is that the work itself is mentally challenging (1)(2). This suggests that finding challenging work should be the starting point for a satisfying career.


If you want to be satisfied at work, what should you look for? Prestige, money, something you’re passionate about, a corner office? Books on careers guidance often start by asking you to consider your values and desired lifestyle, and then to find a job that matches them. But why expect this approach to work? Research has shown that the only thing that's consistently present in satisfying jobs is that the work itself is engaging (1)(2), suggesting that finding engaging work should be the starting point for a satisfying career. What makes for mental challenging work is broken down into five qualities (4): Independence –how much are you able to individually decide how to go about the work? Sense of Completion– how much does the job involve completing a whole piece of work, so that your contribution to the end product is easily visible, rather than a small part of a much larger product? Variety – how much does the job require you to perform a range of different activities, using different skills and talents? Feedback from the job – how much does the work itself provide clues about how well you are doing? Contribution – how much does your work affect the wellbeing of other people? A large meta-analysis of survey results (2) showed that each correlates with job satisfaction (mean r=0. 41), as well as with motivation, productivity and commitment to your employer. Job complexity and the degree of information processing required are similarly strong predictors, but the evidence is...

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### Social interventions gone wrong

- Published: 2012-08-15
- Modified: 2024-11-21
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/08/social-interventions-gone-wrong/
- Topics: Economics, Effective Altruism, Reasoning well, Unconventional advice

Lots of social interventions end up doing more harm than good. Many more make no difference at, and they're just a waste of resources. At times, we&rsquo;ve probably argued with friends about which interventions we&rsquo;d like to see, and which we wouldn&rsquo;t. But are we any good at judging what&rsquo;s likely to work?

Try and guess which of these eight programs made a difference, which had no effect, and which made things worse...


Note: This is an old blog post that has been superseded by our Social Interventions Quiz. Lots of social interventions end up doing more harm than good. Many more make no difference at all, and are just a waste of resources. At times, we’ve probably argued with friends about which interventions we’d like to see, and which we wouldn’t. But are we any good at judging what’s likely to work? Try and guess which of these eight programs made a difference, which had no effect, and which made things worse. At least some had a positive effect. Round ##1: Scared Straight Program description: “In the 1970s, inmates serving life sentences at a New Jersey (USA) prison began a program to ‘scare’ or deter at risk or delinquent children from a future life of crime. The program, known as ‘Scared Straight’, featured as its main component an aggressive presentation by inmates to juveniles visiting the prison facility. The presentation depicted life in adult prisons, and often included exaggerated stories of rape and murder … The program received considerable and favorable media attention and was soon replicated in over 30 jurisdictions nationwide … Although the harsh and sometimes vulgar presentation in the earlier New Jersey version is the most famous, inmate presentations are now sometimes designed to be more educational than confrontational but with a similar crime prevention goal. Some of these programs featured interactive discussions between the inmates and juveniles, also referred to as ‘rap sessions. ’(2) Did the program decrease the...

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### What is going on at 80,000 Hours?

- Published: 2012-08-12
- Modified: 2020-08-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/08/what-is-going-on-at-80-000-hours/
- Topics: Updates

This is an exciting time for 80,000 Hours. One month ago we took on our first full-time staff members. Over this summer there will be six of us working full-time on 80,000 Hours...


This is an exciting time for 80,000 Hours. One month ago we took on our first full-time staff members. Over this summer there will be six of us working full-time on 80,000 Hours: Will MacAskill – President – working on content writing and research, external relations and strategy Benjamin Todd – Managing Director – helping the rest of the team and writing content Richard Batty – intern – working on developing the 80,000 Hours website and community, our careers advice service and assisting members Jake Nebel – intern – researching and writing about the crucial considerations in picking research careers Ilan Fischer – intern – working on researching animal welfare as a cause and helping people to find careers that reduce animal suffering Bastian Stern – intern – working with Ben and Will conducting and writing up research, currently on the methodological questions of cost-effective giving We also have the support of several great part-time volunteers and staff shared with Giving What We Can, in particular the vital operations team! This means we have far more manpower than ever before. The most visible sign will be more blog activity – we’ll have three posts per week, so check back regularly! We’ll use the blog for the first airing of ideas that will ultimately turn into website content. Much, much more is going on behind the scenes. First, there’s a great deal of operations to set up and...

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### Should you go into research? - part 1

- Published: 2012-08-10
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/08/should-you-go-into-research-part-1/
- Topics: Academic Research

Should you go into a research career? Here&rsquo;s one striking fact about academic research that bears on this question: in most fields, the best few researchers get almost all the attention...


Should you go into a research career? Here’s one striking fact about academic research that bears on this question: in most fields, the best few researchers get almost all the attention. Most scientific articles get little to no attention (Van Dalen and Klamer 2005). One study found that 47 percent of articles catalogued by the Institute for Scientific Information have never been cited, and more than 80 percent have been cited less than 10 times (Redner 1998). Articles in the median social science journal, on average, get only 0. 5 citations within two years of publication (Klamer and Dalen 2002). The mean number of citations per article in mathematics, physics, and environmental science journals is probably less than 1 (Mansilla et al. 2007). By contrast, the top 0. 1% of papers in the Institute for Scientific Information have been cited over 1000 times (Redner 1998). Citations per paper are basically distributed by a power law, which means that only a few papers dominate. This trend seems to hold across fields, even when the average number of citations per article varies widely (Radicchi, Fortunato, and Castellano 2008), and a similar distribution holds across individual researchers, not just articles (Petersen et al. 2011a). What does this skewed distribution imply for the prospects of academic research as a high-impact career? You might think it means that becoming a researcher is a sure way not to have a significant impact. But what matters is the expected outcome of becoming a researcher. That the best researchers get...

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### Don't 'do what you're passionate about' - part 2

- Published: 2012-08-04
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/08/don-t-do-what-you-re-passionate-about-part-2/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy, Job satisfaction, Unconventional advice

In the <a href="/discussion/do-what-you-re-passionate-about-part-1">last post</a>, I showed that we can&rsquo;t blindly follow the widely-quoted careers guidance &ldquo;do what you&rsquo;re passionate about.&rdquo; A more reasonable idea is that &ldquo;do what you&rsquo;re passionate about&rdquo; is a heuristic for career choice – but even this doesn't seem like good advice...


In the last post, I showed that we can’t blindly follow the widely-quoted careers guidance 'do what you’re passionate about. ' Being passionate about a career doesn’t mean you should do it. Not being passionate about a career doesn’t rule it out. This was because there are other important components of career choice – such as making a difference, and your talents – which can outweigh your passions. This may seem obvious. A more reasonable claim is that 'do what you’re passionate about' is a heuristic for career choice – it’s not always true, but is nevertheless a useful rule of thumb. In particular, it might be a useful heuristic insofar as your career is about finding personal happiness. Even this, however, seems false. Here are the reasons 'do what you’re passionate about' is not a good heuristic for career choice. We’re bad at predicting what leads to happiness. Equating being passionate with what makes us most happy means it’s a difficult target to aim for. A host of biases seriously affect our ability to predict how happy or sad a state of us affairs will make us. This means, even if our only goal were happiness, following the rule 'do what you’re passionate about could lead us the wrong way. What makes us happy can change. Part of the reason we’re bad at predicting what leads to happiness is because we underestimate our ability to adapt to circumstances. Even after major life changes, people’s reported sense of well-being tends to...

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### Don't 'do what you're passionate about' - part 1

- Published: 2012-08-03
- Modified: 2018-08-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/08/don-t-do-what-you-re-passionate-about-part-1/
- Topics: Job satisfaction

Common advice in choosing a career is &ldquo;do what you&rsquo;re passionate about.&rdquo; An article on <a href="http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifestyle/how-to-find-your-passion.html">lifehack</a> begins: &ldquo;If you could do one thing to transform your life, I would highly recommend it be to find something you&rsquo;re passionate about, and do it for a living.&rdquo; The first paragraph of the major careers advice book <em>Career Ahead</em> ends &ldquo;You owe it to yourself to do work that you love. This book will show you how.&rdquo; But what happens if your passion is for beautifully executed contract killings?


I knelt down, grasping the cool, steel barrel, and slowly screwed it into the gun. One year of planning was coming to climax. I performed the final checks…there would be no witnesses. As I lined the target’s head up in my sights, I released a sigh of satisfaction. I had found my passion. This was what I was born to do. I pulled the trigger. Common advice in choosing a career is “do what you’re passionate about. ” An article on lifehack begins: “If you could do one thing to transform your life, I would highly recommend it be to find something you’re passionate about, and do it for a living. ” The first paragraph of the major careers advice book Career Ahead ends “You owe it to yourself to do work that you love. This book will show you how. ” But what happens if your passion is for beautifully executed contract killings? “Do what you’re passionate about” and “do what you love” are not a good rules to follow in career choice. You can be passionate about something – being a hitman – that there are good reasons not to do. In the case of being a hitman, it’s because the career causes harm. Similar cases could arise if the career radically under-uses your potential, rather than being actually harmful. And what about if you’re passionate about a career, but also terrible at what it involves? Suppose you adore playing basketball, but you’ll never be selected by a team because you’re...

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### Universalisability - Immoral Industries Part 3

- Published: 2012-07-31
- Modified: 2014-12-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/07/universalisability-immoral-industries-part-3/
- Topics: EtG pros and cons

When I tell people that they might want to consider professional philanthropy as a career choice, they react in a lot of different ways. Some people raise an eyebrow. &ldquo;Seb,&rdquo; they say as if explaining something very obvious, &ldquo;if everybody quit their jobs and took a high earning career to give money to charities, then there wouldn&rsquo;t be anybody to give the money to!&rdquo;


When I tell people that they might want to consider professional philanthropy as a career choice, they react in a lot of different ways. Some people raise an eyebrow. “Seb,” they say as if explaining something very obvious, “if everybody quit their jobs and took a high earning career to give money to charities, then there wouldn’t be anybody to give the money to! ” To put the problem a bit more sympathetically, “80,000 Hours is trying to convince people to do Earning to Give. So if you succeeded, by getting everyone to do it, the world would be worse off. ” But this misses the point entirely. First, so we’re all clear, 80,000 Hours doesn’t necessarily recommend Earning to Give as the best career path. It all depends on who you are and what your strengths are. Even many effective altruists (EAs) who are suited to a high earning career can do better elsewhere. 80,000 Hours is just trying to put Earning to Give on the map of possible ethical career options. But, more importantly, we only recommend that anyone does Earning to give because we look at the way the world is and we reckon it makes a positive difference. If the world became different, and lots of people naturally decided to do Earning to Give, we’d recommend something else. 80,000 Hours is about getting people to think seriously about the difference their career choices make. That means you have to react to evidence. There is no risk that a...

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### Collective Action: working in unethical industries part 2

- Published: 2012-07-29
- Modified: 2014-12-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/07/collective-action-working-in-unethical-industries-part-2/
- Topics: EtG pros and cons

In my <a href="/2012/03/the-replaceability-effect-working-in-unethical-industries-part-1/">last article</a> I looked at how it sometimes the best option is to take a high-earning job, even in an industry one thinks is harmful, in order to donate more to charity. There were a lot of caveats. The job has to earn more than you could have made otherwise to make up for the marginal harm you do by taking it. But, for a competitive job market in a mainstream job, that marginal harm is often much smaller than the total harm caused by the job.


In my last article I looked at how it sometimes the best option is to take a high-earning job, even in an industry one thinks is harmful, in order to donate more to charity. There were a lot of caveats. The job has to earn more than you could have made otherwise to make up for the marginal harm you do by taking it. But for a competitive job market in a mainstream job, that marginal harm is often much smaller than the total harm caused by the job. At this point, one might raise a second objection – this is a classic collective action problem in which the ‘best option’ for an individual is much worse than the result of longer term co-ordination. The Prisoner's Dilemma and The Tragedy of the Commons are classic examples. Here’s how that might go. Let’s consider the pool of young effective altruist (EA) graduates entering the job market and considering professional philanthropy. Suppose that their highest earning job opportunity is in some industry which they all agree is harmful. Each young graduate apparently believes: If I enter the harmful industry, the harm I cause (due to the reasoning about replaceability in the previous post) will be much smaller (1) than the good I can do through my philanthropy The industry is harmful, so it would be better if all of us didn’t work in the industry Since each young graduate believes (1), they all choose to take the job in the harmful industry...

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### The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator: A popular but flawed way of understanding your personality

- Published: 2012-07-24
- Modified: 2024-09-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/07/the-myers-briggs-type-indicator-a-popular-but-flawed-way-of-understanding-your-personality/
- Topics: Ability, Job satisfaction, Personal fit, Unconventional advice

It&rsquo;s difficult to work out which jobs will suit you. To help with this problem, a variety of personality tests have been developed. It&rsquo;s hoped these tests provide understanding of your personality in a way that can be used to predict what sorts of job might suit.

One of the most widely used tests is the Myers-Briggs type indicator (MBTI). According to Malcolm Gladwell, 2.5 million Americans every year take the test and 89 out of the fortune 100 companies use it.

But it turns out there are plenty of reasons to be sceptical about its use in choosing careers...


It’s difficult to work out which jobs will suit you. To help with this problem, a variety of personality tests have been developed. It’s hoped these tests provide understanding of your personality in a way that can be used to predict what sorts of job might suit. One of the most widely used tests is the Myers-Briggs type indicator (MBTI). According to Malcolm Gladwell, 2. 5 million Americans every year take the test and 89 out of the Fortune 100 companies use it. (1) But it turns out there are plenty of reasons to be sceptical about its use in choosing careers. Does the MBTI actually give you a meaningful type? The MBTI is normally used as a typology. It uses four measures of personality and for each measure people are classified into one of two types. The results of these are then combined to summarise the overall personality type. Since there are four measures, there are 16 possible overall personality types. The assumption that we can be classified into types like this turns out to be false. The distribution is not bimodal If this approach was right, we'd expect the distribution of scores on the Myers-Briggs measures to be bimodal – most people should be in either one or the other. The distribution is not like this - most people score between the two extremes. (3) For example, most extraverts and introverts are fairly close together on the Extravert-Introvert scale with only a few people at either extreme. Because of...

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### The wider consequences of giving away money

- Published: 2012-07-22
- Modified: 2014-12-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/07/the-wider-consequences-of-giving-away-money/
- Topics: Donating effectively

Like most of the people here, I'm asking myself what I could do that would have a positive impact on others – about what would have the most positive impact on others. One important part of this is making decisions about what to do with money. This matters for anyone with more money than they feel they need for themselves and those close to them; and it matters especially for people who plan to do good by earning a lot and giving a lot away. I think it's fair to say that, so far, this site has generally answered this question by focusing on the good that can be done by giving to well-functioning charities. There is a lot to be said for this. The questions, though, seem wider to me. I'll try to explain here why I think so...


Like most of the people here, I'm asking myself what I could do that would have a positive impact on others – about what would have the most positive impact on others. One important part of this is making decisions about what to do with money. This matters for anyone with more money than they feel they need for themselves and those close to them; and it matters especially for people who plan to do good by earning a lot and giving a lot away. I think it's fair to say that, so far, this site has generally answered this question by focusing on the good that can be done by giving to well-functioning charities. There is a lot to be said for this. The questions, though, seem wider to me. I'll try to explain here why I think so. One principle of this site is that it is important to think of the consequences of one's acts, including acts of giving, rather than just the act itself. Thinking about these consequences should not stop at the fact that some individuals' lives have been changed by your giving. There are questions about the effects of the gift, and its immediate results, on complex social and economic systems. There are also questions about what the consequences would have been of the other things you could have done with the money. All of this is, of course, terribly complex. You cannot come close to the sort of confidence that you can have...

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### Why Do People Love Charity Workers? pt 2

- Published: 2012-07-21
- Modified: 2014-09-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/07/why-do-people-love-charity-workers-pt-2/
- Topics: Uncategorised

In the last post, I argued that self-sacrifice is not, on its own, relevant to the moral value of an act. But if that&rsquo;s the case, then why (again) do people love charity workers just because their work involves greater self-sacrifice?


In the last post, I argued that self-sacrifice is not, on its own, relevant to the moral value of an act. But if that’s the case, then why (again) do people love charity workers just because their work involves greater self-sacrifice? I would suggest that this mistake is a symptom of a broader conceptual confusion between two questions: Q1: What ought we to do? Q2: What kinds of motives would a good person have? Q1 is about acts and what’s morally right. Q2 asks about agents and their character. Depending on your moral views, the answers to these questions may diverge. Self-sacrifice doesn't seem directly relevant to Q1. But the willingness to carry some great burden might be a good motive: If everyone had that kind of character, then the world would probably be a better place. So, it may be relevant to Q2. You might still find something fishy about the idea that the self-sacrifice of a charity worker doesn't make charity work ethically preferable. If so, I think your thought might really be that **charity work is praiseworthy ** because it reflects good character or motives. But that wouldn't imply that you ought to do charity work even when funding it instead would be more effective. Let me explain. Praise and blame are ways of reacting to each other's behavior, and they don't correspond perfectly to right acts and wrong acts. People who act wrongly are not always blameworthy, since they may have a good excuse. Young children...

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### What questions do you have about making a difference?

- Published: 2012-07-19
- Modified: 2014-09-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/07/what-questions-do-you-have-about-making-a-difference/
- Topics: Uncategorised

How can you best use your time to make a difference? 80,000 Hours now has several people working full time on research, and they would like your questions!


How can you best use your time to make a difference? What do you want to know about how to do good? 80,000 Hours now has several people working full time on research, and they would like your questions! We’re happy to consider any questions about how to effectively make a difference, in whatever sphere of your life – volunteering, career or philanthropy. These questions could be at the conceptual or ethical level, or they could concern nitty-gritty practicalities. We’re particularly interested in questions that are not already well addressed by other groups. The most popular questions will receive the attention of our research team, and their findings will feature in our new careers guide. Either post your questions below, or send them to careers@80000hours. org

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### Why do people love charity workers? pt 1

- Published: 2012-07-16
- Modified: 2024-11-26
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/07/why-do-people-love-charity-workers-pt-1/
- Topics: Uncategorised

Many <a href="http://www.ethicaljobs.com.au/files/How_to_Find_an_Ethical_Job.pdf">careers</a> <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20110218023158/http://www.idealist.org/info/Careers/SectorKnowledge/Nonprofit">guides</a> <a href="http://www.totaljobs.com/careers-advice/inside-careers/why-work-for-a-charity">and</a> <a href="http://www.princeton.edu/career/about_us/online-resources/by-industry/non-profit/">agencies</a> suggest that ethically minded folks go into the nonprofit sector. And some use the phrase <a href="http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Ethical_Careers_Guide.html?id=Ugy0AAAACAAJ">&ldquo;ethical careers&rdquo;</a> as a near-synonym for <a href="http://www.graduationpledge.org/newsite/wp-content/uploads/GPA_career_greater_good_proof_brochure.pdf">charity work</a>. Of course, some charity workers do a lot of good. But there seem to be many <a href="http://player.vimeo.com/video/32787159">career</a> <a href="/high-impact-careers">options</a> that do at least as much good as charity workers. Why, then, do people <a href="http://www.whydev.org/52-reasons-why-you-should-date-an-aid-worker/">love charity workers</a>..?


Many careers guides and agencies suggest that ethically minded folks go into the nonprofit sector. And some use the phrase 'ethical careers' as a near-synonym for charity work. Of course, some charity workers do a lot of good. But there seem to be many career options that do at least as much good as charity workers. Why, then, do people love charity workers? In this post, I discuss one possible explanation for the conventional wisdom about ethical careers: I suspect that many people implicitly view the extent of self-sacrifice required by our choices as a proxy for the moral value of our choices. Some of my altruistically minded friends are initially puzzled by the idea that (say) secretarial work can be more choice-worthy than charity work because the former can help important people do vastly more good. While they don't make this idea explicit, I think their tendency is to assume that jobs demanding greater self-sacrifice must be morally better. People may be disposed to hold this kind of view, in part, because our positive reactions to friend-favoring altruism might not be sensitive to effectiveness, and because doing the right thing often involves sacrificing one's own interests. But morality and self-sacrifice do not always coincide. In the context of career choice, morality and self-sacrifice come apart. Aid workers have an extremely demanding job, with low salaries, cruel realities, and (in extreme cases) high rates of mental problems. But many individual aid workers typically don't make much of a difference, since...

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### Biases in career choice: Don't be misled by the category 'high impact career' when deciding between careers

- Published: 2012-07-11
- Modified: 2014-09-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/07/biases-in-career-choice-don-t-be-misled-by-the-category-high-impact-career-when-deciding-between-careers/
- Topics: Uncategorised

I've noticed a bias in my thinking about career options that I'd like to help you avoid: I often group several careers together into a &lsquo;high impact&rsquo; category even when the careers are very different in their potential to make an impact...


I've noticed a bias in my thinking about career options that I'd like to help you avoid: I often group several careers together into a ‘high impact’ category even when the careers are very different in their potential to make an impact. For instance, I’ve been considering different professional philanthropy careers. I've noticed that I tend to think of professional philanthropy through being employed as a programmer and through going into finance as similarly high impact, even though bankers can earn several times the salary of programmers and thus donate more to charity. Similar thinking may occur in conventional ethical careers advice. Jobs working in a charity tend to be thought of as ‘ethical’, even though some charities have many times the impact of others. Similarly, some jobs within a charity are much less replaceable than others and so have a higher impact. Why do we think in this way? 1. The flaw in my thinking seems to be an example of the cognitive bias scope neglect, which is a result of the human tendency to think in categories. In a psychology experiment, three groups of people were asked how much they'd be willing to pay for nets to save 2000, 20,000 or 200,000 birds from drowning in uncovered oil pools. Their answers were surprisingly similar: $80, $78, and $88 respectively. (1) The proposed explanation is that when the people in the experiment were weighing up how much they were willing to give to save the birds, they imagined a prototype...

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### The high impact PA: how anyone can bring about ground-breaking research

- Published: 2012-07-09
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/07/the-high-impact-pa-how-anyone-can-bring-about-ground-breaking-research/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy, High impact executive assistant, Research management, Unconventional advice

Suppose you could identify a really important research topic - one that could yield huge benefits to millions of people … something like ending ageing, developing a cheap, clean supply of energy, or discovering a cheap vaccine for HIV/AIDs. Suppose you think that carrying out this research is one of the most important things for humanity to do.

At this point, it&rsquo;s easy to think &lsquo;how can I get involved with this field..?&rsquo;


Suppose you could identify a really important research topic - one that could yield huge benefits to millions of people … something like ending ageing, developing a cheap, clean supply of energy, or discovering a cheap vaccine for HIV/AIDs. Suppose you think that carrying out this research is one of the most important things for humanity to do. At this point, it’s easy to think ‘how can I get involved with this field? ’ If you can get the right qualifications, you could aim to become a researcher in this field, with visions of being the person who makes the crucial breakthrough. But now ask yourself: ‘is the important thing that I do this research, or is the important thing that someone does it? ’ If what you really care about is helping others - making a difference - and not personal glory, then it’s the latter rather than the former that’s important. This shift in perspective opens up some unusual ethical career options. Rather than attempt to personally become a researcher in that field, instead attempt to find the very best researcher already working on the issue. If you can do that, then it’s in your power to bring about more of the very best research in the world. Consider: if you can save that researcher one hour spent on activities besides research, then that researcher can spend one more hour researching. So, by saving that researcher time, you can convert your time into their time. Suddenly, one of your hours...

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### Following in Schindler's footsteps

- Published: 2012-06-29
- Modified: 2014-12-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/06/following-in-schindler-s-footsteps/
- Topics: EtG pros and cons

Can it be ethical to take a job working for an immoral corporation if one does so with the aim of making the world a better place?

Suppose, for example, that you could work for an arms company, supplying munitions to soldiers fighting an unjust war, in order that you could earn enough money to save thousands of lives? You know that, if you don&rsquo;t take that job, someone else more ruthless than you will take it, hurting more people than you would.

Is that sufficient? Intuitively, it seems that it just can&rsquo;t be ethical to do this. But a historical case suggests otherwise...


Can it be ethical to take a job working for an immoral corporation if one does so with the aim of making the world a better place? Suppose, for example, that you could work for an arms company, supplying munitions to soldiers fighting an unjust war, in order that you could earn enough money to save thousands of lives? You know that, if you don’t take that job, someone else more ruthless than you will take it, hurting more people than you would. Is that sufficient? Intuitively, it seems that it just can’t be ethical to do this. But a historical case suggests otherwise. The example I’m thinking of is that of Oskar Schindler, who was immortalized through the novel Schindler’s Ark and the film Schindler’s List. Schindler ran munitions factories for the Nazis, producing mess kits and, later, ammunition for Nazi soldiers. He did this so that he could earn enough money to literally buy the lives of 1200 Jews. A key aspect of the story is that he deliberately ran his factories less efficiently than whoever would have been in his place. Though accounts of Schindler have questioned his character - he was an opportunist and a womanizer - his decision to run the Nazi factories in order to save his workers has been universally admired. (1) In particular, we think that Schindler should have acted as he did even if he had had the option to escape, avoiding having to work for the Nazis, but saving a much...

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### On triage

- Published: 2012-06-20
- Modified: 2014-09-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/06/on-triage/
- Topics: Unconventional advice

Effective altruism focuses on efficiency. Any action that fails to effect the maximum possible reduction in suffering is considered suboptimal. But isn't this standard for use of one's time and money too harsh? As long as one is making some sort of positive impact on the world, isn't that enough? Can't one live ethically without devoting all of one's energy and attention to helping others?

I believe that the answers ought to be &lsquo;no&rsquo;...


Effective altruism focuses on efficiency. Any action that fails to effect the maximum possible benefit is considered suboptimal. But isn't this standard for use of one's time and money too harsh? As long as one is making some sort of positive impact on the world, isn't that enough? Can't one live ethically without devoting all of one's energy and attention to helping others? Here's a relevant scenario: Imagine a military doctor who comes across a battlefield laden with hundreds of injured soldiers in severe pain. The doctor calls for assistance, but the additional medical units will not arrive for thirty minutes. However, the doctor happens to have with him a bag of pain medicine that he can use to palliate the suffering around him. Would it be acceptable for him to treat five of the soldiers and then stop to read a comic book, arguing that he has produced some positive change in aggregated welfare and he needn't spend all of his effort helping others? Similarly, would we countenance his decision to spend most of his limited supply of pain killer on the mildly injured patients nearest to him, even though many of those a bit farther away are in absolute agony? I believe that the answers ought to be ‘no’. Rather, triage - giving greatest medical attention to those who can be helped most in the least amount of time - represents the ethical imperative under these circumstances. Yet how are other situations any different? In choosing how to...

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### Fundraising for charity - A career for effective altruists?

- Published: 2012-05-31
- Modified: 2018-02-13
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/05/fundraising-for-charity-a-career-for-effective-altruists/
- Topics: Founder of new projects, Fundraising

Fundraising sometimes has a bad reputation, but there are a lot of reasons to think that being a fundraiser, or perhaps more likely, managing fundraisers may be a very effective career...


By Ruairi Donnelly Fundraising sometimes has a bad reputation, but there are a lot of reasons to think that being a fundraiser, or perhaps more likely, managing fundraisers may be a very effective career. The Institute of Fundraising and the Centre for Interfirm Comparison publish a yearly report called ‘FundRatios’, with statistics on returns on investment, growth and other fundraising statistics. In their 2010 report they found that for every £1 invested in fundraising charities receive £4. 03 in donations. But some forms of fundraising are much more effective; for every £1 invested in asking people to leave the charity a legacy in their will (‘legacy fundraising’) about £25 will be donated to the charity, and some years the figure is much higher. The exuberant fundraiser on the street who tries to get people to sign up to a monthly direct debit may actually be making a large amount of money for their charity. The average donor they sign up stays with their charity for about 5 years and donates around £8 a month, if their donations qualify for gift aid this can add about an extra 25% too. Street fundraisers usually average a few ‘sign ups’ per day, maybe between 2 and 4, and the 2010 FundRatios report finds that it costs charities £87 to get one new “committed giver”. So one street fundraiser who signs up 2 donors who each give £8 a month for 5 years is effectively making about £786 for their charity in one day! Managing...

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### The flat margin effect

- Published: 2012-05-13
- Modified: 2014-09-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/05/the-flat-margin-effect/
- Topics: Uncategorised

Here&rsquo;s a claim to supplement the <a href="/2012/03/the-replaceability-effect-working-in-unethical-industries-part-1/">replacement effect (RE)</a>:

<em>The flat margin effect</em>: If you take a job that seems to have a strong (positive or negative) impact on the economy, the actual difference it makes to social welfare will be minimal.

So who is this relevant to? And why should you believe it?


Here’s a claim to supplement the replacement effect: The flat margin effect (FME): If you take a job that seems to have a strong (positive or negative) impact on the economy, the actual difference it makes to social welfare will be minimal. So who is this relevant to? And why should you believe it? On the first question, it’s relevant to any effective altruist thinking of taking a job in something like finance, which they’re concerned will contribute to an industry that harms the wider economy. Perhaps you don’t agree with the replacement effect, or perhaps you think it doesn’t apply in your case for some reason (maybe you’re going to be such an effective banker that you’ll actually make a big difference to the industry’s success). It might also apply to people considering startups whose product would contribute to the economy (for example business-to-business services), who are wondering how much the positive value from doing so weighs against a higher income than they might get from following another path. Unlike the replacement effect, it doesn’t apply - or at least not as much - to jobs where you directly improve people’s welfare (such as becoming a doctor). It will still be relevant to any economic effects these jobs might have beyond the direct good (or bad) they do. As for why you should believe it, let me explain with an example. The New Economics Foundation estimates that bankers remove £7 from the UK economy for every pound they earn. (1)...

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### How to be a high impact philosopher

- Published: 2012-05-08
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/05/how-to-be-a-high-impact-philosopher/
- Topics: Academic Research, Philosophy, Philosophy academia

Philosophy is often impractical. That&rsquo;s an understatement. It might therefore be surprising to think of a career as a philosopher as a potentially high impact ethical career - the sort of career that enables one to do a huge amount of good in the world. But I don&rsquo;t think that philosophy&rsquo;s impracticality is in the nature of the subject-matter. In fact, I think that research within certain areas of philosophy is among some of the most important and practical research that one can do. This shouldn&rsquo;t be surprising when one considers that philosophy is the only subject that addresses directly the fundamental practical question: what ought I to do?


Philosophy is often impractical. That’s an understatement. It might therefore be surprising to think of a career as a philosopher as a potentially high impact ethical career - the sort of career that enables one to do a huge amount of good in the world. But I don’t think that philosophy’s impracticality is in the nature of the subject-matter. In fact, I think that research within certain areas of philosophy is among some of the most important and practical research that one can do. This shouldn’t be surprising when one considers that philosophy is the only subject that addresses directly the fundamental practical question: what ought I to do? In this post I’ll focus in on normative ethics, practical ethics, and decision theory. Within these areas, I’m going to give a recipe for choosing research topics, if one wants to maximise the practical importance of one’s work as a philosopher. Here it goes: Begin by asking 'which issues might conceivably be the most important moral issue that we currently face? ' Then ask ‘what are the crucial normative considerations for determining which of these issues really is the most important? ' Then figure out which of these crucial considerations is most likely to produce an action-relevant outcome given your marginal research time? Then work on that topic! That was the outline. It’s by no means a perfect methodology, and there are many ways in which it could be expanded upon. Its main point is to give one the gist, and hopefully to...

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### Donation methods: credit vs cheque

- Published: 2012-05-02
- Modified: 2014-12-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/05/donation-methods-credit-vs-cheque/
- Topics: EtG advice

How much you give and the effectiveness of the organisations that you give to together determine the impact of your donations. The seemingly trivial decision of whether to pay by cheque or credit card may affect both these factors, so it&rsquo;s worth considering which payment method will help you do the most good...


How much you give and the effectiveness of the organisations that you give to together determine the impact of your donations. The seemingly trivial decision of whether to pay by cheque or credit card may affect both these factors, so it’s worth considering which payment method will help you do the most good. Consider the fees that are charged on credit-card transactions. The largest of these is the interchange fee, which in the US is typically 1 to 3 percent. American interchange fees, however, are anomalously high: in the UK the average fee is just 0. 79% (see the chart in this article for other countries’ rates). Depending on how much you give and where you live, you could end up paying hundreds of dollars to the bank that issued your credit card. Several organisations, including the Schistosomaiasis Control Initiative and Vegan Outreach, have arrangements that allow them to avoid paying these fees. If the organisation that you’re donating to can avoid fees, the convenience of credit-card donations may make them the best choice. This is especially true if you receive incentives for credit-card purchases, such as cashback or airline miles. Credit-card fees are relatively small, though, and they probably aren’t the most important determinant of how you should pay for your donations. Psychological effects are likely to have a larger impact on your giving. One relevant psychological factor is the tendency to spend more money when paying for things by credit card than by cheque. This additional spending is part...

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### The haste consideration

- Published: 2012-04-16
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/04/the-haste-consideration/
- Topics: Building effective altruism, Effective Altruism, Reasoning well, Unconventional advice

Here&rsquo;s a crucial issue for altruists.

<em>The Haste Consideration</em>: Resources for improving the world are vastly more valuable if you have those resources sooner.

I&rsquo;ll first explain one way to see that the haste consideration is true, and then I&rsquo;ll talk about one important implication of this consideration.


Here’s a crucial consideration for altruists. The haste consideration: resources for improving the world are vastly more valuable if you have those resources sooner. I’ll first explain one way to see that the haste consideration is true, and then I’ll talk about one important implication of this consideration. People who dedicate a large part of their life to strategically doing as much good as possible - i. e. effective altruists - are able to accomplish vastly more good than most people will. Unfortunately, not many people are effective altruists. One way to try to improve the world would be to try to convince more people to be effective altruists. If you spent all of your efforts doing this, how long do you think it would take to convince one person who is at least as effective as you are at improving the world? For most people, if they’re strategic about it, I think they could do it in less than 2 years. Now imagine two worlds: (1) You don’t do anything altruistic for the next 2 years and then you spend the rest of your life after that improving the world as much as you can. (2) You spend the next 2 years influencing people to become effective altruists and convince one person who is at least as effective as you are at improving the world. (And assume that this person wouldn’t have done anything altruistic otherwise. ) You do nothing altruistic after the next 2 years, but the person you convinced...

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### Living to 1000: an interview with Aubrey de Grey

- Published: 2012-04-12
- Modified: 2024-12-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/04/living-to-1000-an-interview-with-aubrey-de-grey/
- Topics: Ending Ageing

In his recent <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDJ_IjMwT20&amp;context=C40174a6ADvjVQa1PpcFOEBMV6ytjvTudCo5CPyIuBqysnQTTFpls=">talk</a>, Aubrey de Grey argued that the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SENS_Foundation">SENS foundation</a>&rsquo;s life extension research should be the most important project for any effective altruist. I collared him for an interview afterwards...


In his recent talk, Aubrey de Grey argued that the SENS foundation’s life extension research should be the most important project for any effective altruist. I recommend listening to the talk before reading the interview below, but it’s not essential. Similarly, more information on SENS’s anti-ageing research is available for them that want it. On with the questions, then - as in the interview with Luke Muehlhauser I’ve separated them into a section for people interested in working in gerontology and a section for people interest in supporting it in other ways. Questions for potential supporters ZR: It seems like you gain interest from the same sorts of people who might be interested in SIAI, especially given that you’re an adviser to the group. But the mercenary question remains - given finite resources, which organisation should we prioritise? Here’s the key argument Luke Muehlhauser gave for SIAI: In the next two centuries we will have a multitude of chances to destroy ourselves with powerful new technologies. AI looks like it may be one of the first existential threats to be created. But unlike the others, doing AI right can actually prevent the other existential risks from happening. There is no more important thing humanity can do. Do you think friendly AI will not be as good at fixing the world’s problems as longer-lived humans, do you just rate the latter as much more likely to happen soon, or is there some other reason you’d advocate the SENS Foundation over them? ...

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### Where are the women?

- Published: 2012-04-07
- Modified: 2014-09-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/04/where-are-the-women/
- Topics: Uncategorised

Women <a href="http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2010/10/24/charitable-giving-by-income-and-sex/">donate more</a> than men. They are more likely to give, and they give more money. So why is the smart giving/effective philanthropy/whatever-you-want-to-call-it movement so skewed male?

...


Women donate more than men. They are more likely to give, and they give more money. So why is the smart giving/effective philanthropy/whatever-you-want-to-call-it movement so skewed male? About a quarter of the members of Giving What We Can and 80,000 Hours are women. At any kind of discussion on efficient giving, I'm usually either the only woman or one of two women there. This doesn't bother me in itself, but it means we're missing people who could have a lot to give to the conversation. I don't believe women are more selfish than men or that they want to help people less than men do. So where are they? Some of my guesses: A lot of this movement came out of university philosophy departments. At least in the US, only 1/3 of philosophy PhD students are female - that's more skewed than math or almost any of the sciences. Apparently not that many women want to sign up for five years of having their ideas ripped apart. There's a good bit of finance and math involved in finding the best charities. I have very little math background, and while I think posts like this are very important, I can't get through them. A lot of women also didn't do much with math or economics. Until recently, there was never anything I wanted to understand that required me to know much about math or money, and I was disheartened to realize I was going to have to learn some. Lately, there's...

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### Heuristics for a good life

- Published: 2012-03-29
- Modified: 2014-09-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/03/heuristics-for-a-good-life/
- Topics: Uncategorised

I wondered what careers or the like help other people the most. Tyler reposted my question, <a href="http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/06/what-career-helps-other-people-the-most.html">adding</a>:

<em>(Let&rsquo;s) rule out &lsquo;become a billionaire and give away all your money&rsquo; and &lsquo;cure cancer&rsquo; by postulating that said person ends up at the 90th percentile of achievement in the specified field but no higher.</em>

Unfortunately calculating the net costs and benefits of all the things one could do with oneself is notoriously impossible. So how about some heuristics for discerning what types of jobs tend to be more socially beneficial?


I wondered what careers or the like help other people the most. Tyler reposted my question, adding: (Let’s) rule out ‘become a billionaire and give away all your money’ and ‘cure cancer’ by postulating that said person ends up at the 90th percentile of achievement in the specified field but no higher. Unfortunately calculating the net costs and benefits of all the things one could do with oneself is notoriously impossible. So how about some heuristics for discerning what types of jobs tend to be more socially beneficial? Here are some considerations, please extend and criticize: Low displacement: if someone had to be hired, you only added the difference between your ability and the second best candidate’s (plus the second best candidate’s efforts to another job at random). The same goes for what you produce. Even if creating beautiful music doesn’t knock another musician out of business, people listen to your new song instead of older songs, which are not seemingly any worse. Big gains to a marginal person being better: careers that fail the above can still rate highly if this is so. This is a hard route because if candidate quality matters more there will generally be stronger selection so you will more average compared to the other candidates. Your best bet here might be in something important to you which usually attracts people with poor abilities. Goal discretion: one way a displacing person can make a relatively big difference is to have a better purpose than the...

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### The replaceability effect: working in unethical industries part 1

- Published: 2012-03-26
- Modified: 2014-12-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/03/the-replaceability-effect-working-in-unethical-industries-part-1/
- Topics: EtG pros and cons, Unconventional advice

High earning careers are often perceived as unethical careers. It&rsquo;s not just that people think earning lots of money is bad, it&rsquo;s also that a lot of the careers that make you really rich involve things that also seem immoral... This article will look at something called the replaceability effect. It&rsquo;s the idea that, often, if you don&rsquo;t take a job, someone else will take it. For some types of jobs, this is a very safe assumption, and it makes the harm you do by taking a job in an unethical industry much smaller than you might first guess.


High earning careers are often perceived as unethical careers. It’s not just that people think earning lots of money is bad, it’s also that a lot of the careers that make you really rich involve things that also seem immoral. The example of our times is investment banking. It’s hard to be precise about why investment banking is bad, and I’m pretty sure that most people who think bankers do harm don’t really have much of an idea of what bankers do. But it seems plausible that irresponsible risk-taking in some parts of the banking system has had a really negative effect on millions of lives. Let’s suppose, for sake of argument, that banking is pretty bad. That raises the question: is it bad to become a banker? Banking isn’t just a relevant example because it’s topical. It’s also one of the highest earning salaried careers available today. If I’m picking a career with the intention of giving away a large portion of what I earn, can I pick a job that causes harm because I think the money I give away will do more good? One interesting thing you can do is to work out the total harm of the investment banking industry and compare it against the good you can do with your donations directly. But that’s only a small part of the issue. This article will look at something called the replaceability effect. It’s the idea that, often, if you don’t take a job, someone else will...

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### Why doesn't everyone use match funding?

- Published: 2012-03-21
- Modified: 2018-07-23
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/03/why-doesn-t-everyone-use-matching-donations/
- Topics: Earning to Give

For the last two years whenever I have felt charitable, rather than directly give away the money - to <a href="http://villagereach.org/">Village Reach</a> incidentally - I have offered to match donations made by my Facebook friends 1:1. Initially I could only raise a few hundred dollars in matching donations, but most recently I attracted almost $2000 with little effort. I always kept the maximum amount I was willing to match above what I expected would be forthcoming, so that matchers were apparently inducing me to donate more. Is all this a good thing to do?


For the last two years whenever I have felt charitable, rather than directly give away the money - to Village Reach incidentally - I have offered to match donations made by my Facebook friends 1:1. Initially I could only raise a few hundred dollars in matching donations, but most recently I attracted almost $2000 with little effort. I always kept the maximum amount I was willing to match above what I expected would be forthcoming, so that matchers were apparently inducing me to donate more. Is all this a good thing to do? The obvious answer is yes. By matching donations I am inducing others to donate more than they otherwise would. As long as I can find enough people to match that I don’t donate much less than I otherwise would, I’m increasing the additional effect of my donation. This is probably right. That said, it’s likely that many of those other folk were planning to give some money away anyway and reduced their other donations in order to match mine. For this reason I don’t believe that I was really causing two dollars to be donated for each dollar that I gave. The additional impact was probably quite a bit less. An outside possibility is that donation matching not only doesn’t induce extra donations but rather ‘crowds them out’. This would be the effect if the people who matched my donation reduced their other donations by more than one dollar for each dollar they matched for me. Why...

---

### Review of Dead Aid

- Published: 2012-03-20
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/03/review-of-dead-aid/
- Topics: Accidental harm, Donating effectively, Government &amp; policy, Uncategorised

Dambisa Moyo's best-selling 2009 book <em>Dead Aid</em> caused a considerable stir upon its release; written by a young African woman, it stood out in a field dominated by ageing, white academics. It stands, along William Easterly's <em>The Elusive Quest for Growth</em> and <em>The White Man's Burden</em>, as the central work of foreign aid scepticism...


Dambisa Moyo's best-selling 2009 book Dead Aid caused a considerable stir upon its release; written by a young African woman, it stood out in a field dominated by ageing, white academics. It stands, along William Easterly's The Elusive Quest for Growth and The White Man's Burden, as the central work of foreign aid scepticism. Moyo's basic argument is that foreign aid is actually counter-productive precisely because we are so willing to give it: because leaders are virtually guaranteed to receive foreign aid, they do not attempt to use it to benefit their populations. Aid functions as a ‘moral hazard’ for recipient governments, incentivising corruption and civil war - for whoever reaches power will have access to an unending fount of foreign funding. Moyo proposes that we remove the distorting force that is foreign aid, and allow governments to find other sources of finance - most notably by opening their countries to foreign capital markets. While Dead Aid is interesting insofar as it challenges certain development clichés and received wisdom, it has several major flaws. Concentrating solely on government aid One factor which makes Dead Aid less relevant than it could be to an organisation like 80,000 Hours is that it concentrates solely on ‘official aid’ (from international organisations and the governments of international organisations to recipient governments); it does not take into account private international philanthropy or humanitarian relief, or the work of most NGOs. As such, it simply has nothing to contribute on what most people can do as...

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### What is an effective altruist?

- Published: 2012-03-05
- Modified: 2015-01-23
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/03/what-is-an-effective-altruist/
- Topics: Uncategorised

80,000 Hours is built around the idea of effective altruism. What does <em>that</em> mean?


80,000 Hours is built around the idea of effective altruism. What does that mean? At its most basic, effective altruism is based on two simpler concepts: effectiveness and altruism. So far so good. Altruism means wanting to help other people. It means thinking that other people’s welfare matters. Effectiveness is a more fiddly idea. It’s about doing something well. Say I’m in the business of making match-sticks. It’s all well and good to take a whole tree and whittle away at it until all that remains is a match-stick. You’ve done what you set out to do, but you could have done much more with your time. That idea doesn’t just apply to making things. It applies to your friendships too. Suppose a friend comes to me looking for support. For me, it’s very tempting to try to analyse and solve their problem. But that’s often actually not a particularly helpful thing to do. Here, being a good friend means taking the time to think about what will help the most, and doing it. An effective altruist doesn’t just do what feels most helpful. They pause a moment and think about what will work best, and then they do it. This site has lots of examples of the sorts of conclusions you might reach. The important point is that an effective altruist will often reach conclusions that someone who is just an altruist might never reach. Suppose, for example, Jim is a massive programming geek. He loves writing software and...

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### The Road Less Travelled: Replaceability and Neglected Causes

- Published: 2012-02-28
- Modified: 2014-09-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/02/the-road-less-travelled-replaceability-and-neglected-causes/
- Topics: Uncategorised

The <a href="/2012/01/just-what-is-making-a-difference-counterfactuals-and-career-choice/">replaceability issue</a> often means that pursuing conventional ethical careers isn&rsquo;t the way to have the most impact.

Instead, it&rsquo;s better to focus activities in which you have a special edge, or on <em>neglected</em> activities - those which wouldn&rsquo;t get done if it wasn&rsquo;t for you.


The replaceability issue often means that pursuing conventional ethical careers isn’t the way to have the most impact. Instead, it’s better to focus activities in which you have a special edge, or on neglected activities - those which wouldn’t get done if it wasn’t for you. Seeking out neglected activities is a common theme across all high impact careers. Just as seeking out a job that wouldn’t have be done otherwise is a good way to make your career high impact, so is researching a neglected field or funding a neglected intervention. It’s no coincidence that some of the most cost-effective interventions to combat global poverty are treatments for the so-called neglected tropical diseases. These diseases went under the radar because they rarely affect westerners and tend to be non-lethal. It was precisely because of this neglect that such a huge opportunity existed – big pharma was handing out the easily administered treatments for free, they merely needed to be distributed at a cost of only 50p per year per person. Thankfully, due to the campaigning efforts of the Gates Foundation and others, there’s now a major move to eliminate them. Setting out wanting to make a difference, the first things that go through our mind are the most well known ways to make the world a better place, and the most well known causes to get involved in. But it’s precisely because they are well known that your impact is likely to be higher doing something else. There are...

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### Lots of website updates on 80,000 Hours

- Published: 2012-02-27
- Modified: 2020-08-05
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/02/lots-of-website-updates-on-80-000-hours/
- Topics: Updates

The last month has been a big one for the 80,000 Hours website. Thanks to our comms and web team for working so hard on it!

Here's a whirlwind tour of the recent changes...


The last month has been a big one for the 80,000 Hours website. Thanks to our comms and web team for working so hard on it! Here's a whirlwind tour of the recent changes: We've changed our membership declaration - check out the membership pages to see what it means to join 80,000 Hours, and why you should. What is effective altruism and why is our careers advice different from conventional ethical careers advice? We've recruited lots of new members, surpassing 75 in total. Check them out here. In addition to our research published on the blog, we've written a getting started guide for you career and an introduction to the 5 main types of high impact activities. If you're interested in what you see, why not volunteer or get in touch with us?

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### 26th of September: Petrov Day

- Published: 2012-02-27
- Modified: 2014-09-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/02/26th-of-september-petrov-day/
- Topics: Existential risk

Here&rsquo;s another candidate for Most Important Person Ever, albeit one whose footsteps will be harder - hopefully impossible - to retread.


Here’s another candidate for Most Important Person Ever, albeit one whose footsteps will be harder - hopefully impossible - to retread. In the words of Eliezer Yudkowsky (edited slightly to make sense of today not being September 26): September 26th is Petrov Day, celebrated to honor the deed of Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov on September 26th, 1983. Wherever you are on that day, whatever you're doing, take a minute to not destroy the world. The story begins on September 1st, 1983, when Soviet jet interceptors shot down a Korean Air Lines civilian airliner after the aircraft crossed into Soviet airspace and then, for reasons still unknown, failed to respond to radio hails. 269 passengers and crew died, including US Congressman Lawrence McDonald. Ronald Reagan called it ‘barbarism’, ‘inhuman brutality’, ‘a crime against humanity that must never be forgotten’. Note that this was already a very, very poor time for US/USSR relations. Andropov, the ailing Soviet leader, was half-convinced the US was planning a first strike. The KGB sent a flash message to its operatives warning them to prepare for possible nuclear war. On September 26th, 1983, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov was the officer on duty when the warning system reported a US missile launch. Petrov kept calm, suspecting a computer error. Then the system reported another US missile launch. And another, and another, and another. What had actually happened, investigators later determined, was sunlight on high-altitude clouds aligning with the satellite view on a US missile base. In the command...

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### 5 ways to be misled by salary rankings

- Published: 2012-02-25
- Modified: 2024-12-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/02/5-ways-to-be-misled-by-salary-rankings/
- Topics: Income

Suppose that you plan, like many members of <a href="http://www.givingwhatwecan.org/">Giving What We Can</a> or the <a href="http://givingpledge.org/">Giving Pledge</a>, to give a significant portion of your income to highly effective causes, and as one factor in your career decision you want want to assess how much you will be able to donate in various fields.

National wage and employment surveys, such as the UK <a href="http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/ashe/annual-survey-of-hours-and-earnings/ashe-results-2011/ashe-statistical-bulletin-2011.html">Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings</a> or the US Occupational Employment Statistics <a href="http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm">database</a> provide good places to start. However, typical salary is an imperfect measure of career earnings. This post discusses five ways in which the national surveys can mislead at first glance, particularly for the most financially rewarding areas, in hopes of providing some protection to the casual explorer and explaining how in-depth analysis can help.


Suppose that you plan, like many members of Giving What We Can or the Giving Pledge, to give a significant portion of your income to highly effective causes, and as one factor in your career decision you want want to assess how much you will be able to donate in various fields. National wage and employment surveys, such as the UK Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings or the US Occupational Employment Statistics database provide good places to start. However, typical salary is an imperfect measure of career earnings. This post discusses five ways in which the national surveys can mislead at first glance, particularly for the most financially rewarding areas, in hopes of providing some protection to the casual explorer and explaining how in-depth analysis can help. High-wage fields in the United Kingdom For the moment, most of the membership of 80,000 hours is based in the UK, so I will use the 2011 ASHE statistics to set the stage. One can download the data here, view a table ranking UK occupations by median income in ASHE here, or just consider these high-income occupations (the top 4, followed by a selection of others near the top): ProfessionMedian salary (£)Directors and chief executives of major organizations112,157Corporate managers and senior officials77,679Aircraft pilots and flight engineers71,555Medical professionals69,952Brokers (finance and insurance);54,924Financial managers and chartered secretaries53,944Health professionals48,775Solicitors and lawyers, judges and coroners44,552Electronics engineer43,772Mechanical engineer39,142Corporate managers38,091Software professionals36,634Architect36,375Pharmacists/pharmacologists36,211Management accountants35,851 The presence of management and leadership roles is unsurprising: these are senior positions by definition. Other occupations...

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### In praise of Viktor Zhdanov

- Published: 2012-02-23
- Modified: 2014-09-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/02/in-praise-of-viktor-zhdanov/
- Topics: Uncategorised

Until 2010, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Zhdanov">Viktor Zhdanov</a>, didn't even have a Wikipedia page. No big deal, you say, unless you realize Viktor Zhdanov was the single most important person of the last millennium. A bold claim, and one which I will attempt to substantiate. No angel, he was involved in the Soviet Union's biological warfare program, but the good he has done is incalculable.


Until 2010, Viktor Zhdanov, didn't even have a Wikipedia page. No big deal, you say, unless you realize Viktor Zhdanov was the single most important person of the last millennium. A bold claim, and one which I will attempt to substantiate. No angel, he was involved in the Soviet Union's biological warfare program, but the good he has done is incalculable. I've been looking into who was responsible for the greatest good over the last millennium and how that achievement has been recognized. There can be little debate that the eradication of smallpox stands out as humanity’s greatest achievement of the last millennium. In the twentieth century alone, smallpox is estimated to have killed 300m-500m, not to mention causing a countless amount of human disfigurement. And that is just for the twentieth century, and with the effects of smallpox's eradication factored in. If smallpox had not been eradicated, the twentieth century death toll would have been far higher. Wars pale by comparison, World War II for instance, by far the largest war, is estimated at most to have resulted in 78m deaths. So who is responsible for this outstanding achievement? Society and the conventional literature places the credit and the numerous awards and rewards with D. A. Henderson. This conventional analysis is wrong, or at least too simplistic. D. A. Henderson was in charge of the WHO smallpox eradication program, but he was acting as an agent. It was a job. A job that at least initially he didn't even want, but...

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### Software engineering: Britain vs Silicon Valley

- Published: 2012-02-21
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/02/software-engineering-britain-vs-silicon-valley/
- Topics: Income, Software Engineering

Several British members of 80,000 hours, both students and people considering switching careers, have asked about entering the field of software development. The field has a reputation as high-paying, and in Silicon Valley, the heart of the global software industry, average salaries are now <a href="http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2399247,00.asp">reported</a> over $104,000 (£66,000) with generous bonuses. This image is bolstered by the spectacular success of tech startup founders like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, communicated by news media and movies like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Network">The Social Network</a>. Moving from salaried to startup status and back is easier than in many industries, a fact which should be of special interest to <a href="/2012/01/salary-or-startup-how-do-gooders-can-gain-more-from-risky-careers/">altruists</a> with <a href="/2012/02/entrepreneurship-a-game-of-poker-not-roulette/">strong skills</a>, as discussed in the two linked 80,000 hours blog posts. The media report fierce competition for engineers between companies like Facebook and Google.

Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom there have been recent news stories with titles such as <a href="http://thenextweb.com/uk/2010/07/02/the-least-employable-graduates-in-the-uk-computer-science-graduates/">&ldquo;Computer Science graduates are the least employable in the UK&rdquo;</a>. What is the real story here? How attractive is the software industry for those who want to make money and use it to do <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundation">good</a>? In some ways, the British statistics are misleading, but they also reflect a real difference: software engineers in the US, and especially Silicon Valley, really are better compensated. This post will lay out the supporting data, and discuss ways people outside the United States can make their way to Silicon Valley.


Several British members of 80,000 hours, both students and people considering switching careers, have asked about entering the field of software development. The field has a reputation as high-paying, and in Silicon Valley, the heart of the global software industry, average salaries are now reported over $104,000 (£66,000) with generous bonuses. This image is bolstered by the spectacular success of tech startup founders like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, communicated by news media and movies like The Social Network. Moving from salaried to startup status and back is easier than in many industries, a fact which should be of special interest to altruists with strong skills, as discussed in the two linked 80,000 hours blog posts. The media report fierce competition for engineers between companies like Facebook and Google. Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom there have been recent news stories with titles such as “Computer Science graduates are the least employable in the UK”. What is the real story here? How attractive is the software industry for those who want to make money and use it to do good? In some ways, the British statistics are misleading, but they also reflect a real difference: software engineers in the US, and especially Silicon Valley, really are better compensated. This post will lay out the supporting data, and discuss ways people outside the United States can make their way to Silicon Valley. Software salaries, on both sides of the Atlantic In the United Kingdom the Office of National Statistics conducts an Annual...

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### Entrepreneurship: a game of poker, not roulette

- Published: 2012-02-19
- Modified: 2024-11-22
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/02/entrepreneurship-a-game-of-poker-not-roulette/
- Topics: Being ambitious, Found a tech startup, Founder of new projects, Risk

Follow-up to: <a href="/2012/01/salary-or-startup-how-do-gooders-can-gain-more-from-risky-careers/">Salary or startup? How do-gooders can gain more from risky careers</a>

In a previous <a href="/2012/01/salary-or-startup-how-do-gooders-can-gain-more-from-risky-careers/">post</a>, I discussed how high-risk, high-reward careers can be a better deal for those who want to do good: if you strike it rich, buying a tenth car will add very little to your personal quality of life, but vaccinating a tenth child will help that child about as much as the first one.  This matters in practice: most venture-backed startups fail, but the average (mean) financial gain to founders is measured in millions.

However, it would be a mistake to think of the returns to entrepreneurship as predictably stemming from just showing up and taking a spin at the wheel of startup roulette.  Instead, entrepreneurship is more like poker: a game where even the best players cannot predictably win over a single night, but measurable differences predict that some will earn much more than others on average.  By paying attention to predictors of entrepreneurial success (whether good news or bad), you can better tell whether you have a winning hand or should walk away for a different game.  And even if the known predictors don&rsquo;t bear on your own situation, knowing about these predictors can dispel the &ldquo;lottery illusion&rdquo;, and can let you know that success is not magic, and that it is worth investing in skill, hard work, strategy, and an understanding of the game.

Let&rsquo;s take a look at some of those predictors...


Follow-up to: Salary or startup? How do-gooders can gain more from risky careers In a previous post, I discussed how high-risk, high-reward careers can be a better deal for those who want to do good: if you strike it rich, buying a tenth car will add very little to your personal quality of life, but vaccinating a tenth child will help that child about as much as the first one. This matters in practice: most venture-backed startups fail, but the average (mean) financial gain to founders is measured in millions. However, it would be a mistake to think of the returns to entrepreneurship as predictably stemming from just showing up and taking a spin at the wheel of startup roulette. Instead, entrepreneurship is more like poker: a game where even the best players cannot predictably win over a single night, but measurable differences predict that some will earn much more than others on average. By paying attention to predictors of entrepreneurial success (whether good news or bad), you can better tell whether you have a winning hand or should walk away for a different game. And even if the known predictors don’t bear on your own situation, knowing about these predictors can dispel the “lottery illusion”, and can let you know that success is not magic, and that it is worth investing in skill, hard work, strategy, and an understanding of the game. Let’s take a look at some of those predictors... Does your invention make business sense? In Canada,...

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### How hard is it to become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom?

> How to become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom? We analyse what kinds of people make it, and what your chances of making it might be.

- Published: 2012-02-17
- Modified: 2024-11-21
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/02/how-hard-is-it-to-become-prime-minister-of-the-united-kingdom/
- Topics: Government &amp; policy, Party Politics

How much good should one expect to do in a political career aimed at Parliament or Prime Ministership in the United Kingdom? A number of members of 80,000 hours suspect that they have above-average suitability for politics, but want to compare the field against <a href="/2011/11/high-impact-science/">research</a> or <a href="/2012/01/salary-or-startup-how-do-gooders-can-gain-more-from-risky-careers/">entrepreneurship</a>. To do that we need to think about the power of elected officials to sway policy in office, the value of different policies, and the probability that a political career will reach various levels of success. This post will take a stab at the last question, using data from Parliament and the educational system.

With a strong academic background, interest in politics, and social skill those chances may be surprisingly good, as much as 1 in 3 for becoming an MP, and 1 in 300 for PM. Let's take a first pass at our <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem">Fermi calculation</a> and see how.


How much good should one expect to do in a political career aimed at Parliament or Prime Ministership in the United Kingdom? A number of members of 80,000 hours suspect that they have above-average suitability for politics, but want to compare the field against research or entrepreneurship. To do that we need to think about the power of elected officials to sway policy in office, the value of different policies, and the probability that a political career will reach various levels of success. This post will take a stab at the last question, using data from Parliament and the educational system. With a strong academic background, interest in politics, and social skill those chances may be surprisingly good, as much as 1 in 3 for becoming an MP, and 1 in 300 for PM. Let's take a first pass at our Fermi calculation and see how. People per Parliamentarian As of mid-2010, there were an estimated 62,260,000 people in the United Kingdom, and 650 MPs in the House of Commons. As of this BBC article there were 23 members of the Cabinet, including the Prime Minister. Thus if we knew nothing further about a randomly selected person in the United Kingdom, we would assign a chance of about 1 in 96 thousand that she was an MP, 1 in 2. 7 million for Cabinet, and 1 in 62 million for PM. However, the average time in office of an MP is much less than the typical British life expectancy, so that...

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### Professional philanthropy vs professional influencing

- Published: 2012-02-13
- Modified: 2024-11-21
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/02/professional-philanthropy-vs-professional-influencing/
- Topics: Uncategorised

Some facts about charity are so useful that they just have to be shared. Here&rsquo;s one from the website of Giving What We Can:

<blockquote>
  &lsquo;It is not even a matter of some charities being 10 or 100 times as effective: even restricted to the field of health programs in developing countries, research shows that some are up to 10,000 times as effective as others.&rsquo; 
  By reading this, most of us will have gained some motivation to give effectively, and this will deliver years of healthy life to those in need of charity.
</blockquote>

Just as we&rsquo;re grateful to Giving What We Can for this help, it&rsquo;s natural to wonder what we can do to nudge others towards cost-effective philanthropy.


Some facts about charity are so useful that they just have to be shared. Here’s one from the website of Giving What We Can: ‘It is not even a matter of some charities being 10 or 100 times as effective: even restricted to the field of health programs in developing countries, research shows that some are up to 10,000 times as effective as others. ’ By reading this, most of us will have gained some motivation to give effectively, and this will deliver years of healthy life to those in need of charity. Just as we’re grateful to Giving What We Can for this help, it’s natural to wonder what we can do to nudge others towards cost-effective philanthropy. First, I will evaluate whether philanthropic influencing can be effective in principle. Then, I’ll describe the classes of philanthropic influencing to get us thinking about what philanthropic influencing means in practice. To discuss cost-effectiveness, we will use a point of comparison. Let’s put ourselves into the shoes of Jane. Jane is a professional donor, someone who earns money and donates it as cost-effectively as possible. If Jane earns a typical American income for forty years and donates 10%, she can expect to save 44,000 years worth of healthy life . One day, however, Jane makes a change. She cuts down her hours at her relatively well-paid job so that she can no longer afford to donate in order to spend more time persuading other people to donate professionally. As a philanthropic...

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### Pledge to fight neglected tropical diseases

- Published: 2012-02-06
- Modified: 2014-09-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/02/pledge-to-fight-neglected-tropical-diseases/
- Topics: Uncategorised

Treating NTDs is one of the most cost-effective ways to improve <a href="http://www.givingwhatwecan.org/resources/recommended-charities.php##sci">people's</a> <a href="http://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities">lives</a>. So if news stories were ordered by its actual effect on human welfare, <a href="http://oneinsevenpeople.co.uk/new-partnership-to-fight-ntds/">this announcement</a> would have adorned the front of all major newspapers.

Sadly not, but it can at least adorn this blog: pharmaceutical titans including GSK and Merck are teaming up with the World Bank and the WHO to try and eliminate some of the worst NTDs. See the full announcement for more info...

(no further text)


Treating NTDs is one of the most cost-effective ways to improve people's lives. So if news stories were ordered by its actual effect on human welfare, this announcement would have adorned the front of all major newspapers. Sadly not, but it can at least adorn this blog: pharmaceutical titans including GSK and Merck are teaming up with the World Bank and the WHO to try and eliminate some of the worst NTDs. See the full announcement for more info...

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### Practical ethics given moral uncertainty

- Published: 2012-01-31
- Modified: 2024-11-26
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/01/practical-ethics-given-moral-uncertainty/
- Topics: Moral philosophy

Practical ethics aims to offer advice to decision-makers embedded in the real world.  In order to make the advice practical, it typically takes empirical uncertainty into account...

But if practical ethics should take empirical uncertainty into account, surely it should take moral uncertainty into account as well.  In many situations, we don&rsquo;t know all the moral facts...


Practical ethics aims to offer advice to decision-makers embedded in the real world. In order to make the advice practical, it typically takes empirical uncertainty into account. For example, we don’t currently know exactly to what extent the earth’s temperature will rise, if we are to continue to emit CO2 at the rate we have been emitting so far. The temperature rise might be small, in which case the consequences would not be dire. Or the temperature rise might be very great, in which case the consequences could be catastrophic. To what extent we ought to mitigate our CO2 emissions depends crucially on this factual question. But it’s of course not true that we are unable to offer any practical advice in absence of knowledge concerning this factual question. It’s just that our advice will concern what one ought to do in light of uncertainty about the facts. But if practical ethics should take empirical uncertainty into account, surely it should take moral uncertainty into account as well. In many situations, we don’t know all the moral facts. I think it is fair to say, for example, that we don’t currently know exactly how to weigh the interests of future generations against the interests of current generations. But this issue is just as relevant to the question of how one ought to act in response to climate change as is the issue of expected temperature rise. If the ethics of climate change offers advice about how best to act given...

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### Just what is making a difference: counterfactuals and career choice

- Published: 2012-01-30
- Modified: 2018-03-20
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/01/just-what-is-making-a-difference-counterfactuals-and-career-choice/
- Topics: Uncategorised

When we think about how to make a difference in our careers, it is natural to think about what we can do directly. We think about the children we could build schools for, the homeless person we could help, what campaigns we might take part in, and so on.

But what we do directly is not the only thing that matters. We also need to think about what <em>would</em> have happened if we hadn&rsquo;t acted – which is called a counterfactual...


This post is out-of-date and no longer reflects our views. Read more. Doing good directly? When we think about how to make a difference in our careers, it is natural to think about what we can do directly. We think about the children we could build schools for, the homeless person we could help, what campaigns we might take part in, and so on. But what we do directly is not the only thing that matters. We also need to think about what would have happened if we hadn’t acted – which is called a counterfactual. Imagine you’re involved in a car accident. When you regain consciousness, you find that your mother is seriously injured. Paramedics have just arrived and are preparing to help her. Suppose you believe that what’s important is what you can do directly. Therefore you shove the paramedics out of the way and start performing first aid on your mother. You’re not an expert, so although you save her life, you cause her permanent spine damage. If you had let the paramedics work, your parent would have fully recovered. The consequence of your action is the difference between what happened as the result of your action and what would have happened otherwise. In this case, the consequence of your action was your mother suffering permanent spinal damage. This is why pushing the paramedics out of the way was wrong. Consequences matter When judging the goodness of an act, what you do directly matters, but so do...

---

### High impact interview 1: Existential risk research at SIAI

- Published: 2012-01-24
- Modified: 2014-09-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/01/high-impact-interview-1-existential-risk-research-at-siai/
- Topics: Existential risk, Machine Intelligence Research Institute

The plan: to conduct a series of interviews with successful workers in various key candidates for high impact careers.

The first person to agree to an interview is <a href="http://lukeprog.com/">Luke Muehlhauser</a> (aka lukeprog of <a href="http://lesswrong.com/">Less Wrong</a>), the executive director of the <a href="http://singinst.org/">Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence</a>, whose mission is to influence the development of greater-than-human intelligence to try and ensure that it&rsquo;s a force for human flourishing rather than <a href="http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2011/02/why_we_should_fear_the_paperclipper.html">extinction</a>.


The plan: to conduct a series of interviews with successful workers in various key candidates for high impact careers. The first person to agree to an interview is Luke Muehlhauser (aka lukeprog of Less Wrong), the executive director of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, whose mission is to influence the development of greater-than-human intelligence to try and ensure that it’s a force for human flourishing rather than extinction. Each interview will have one or two goals. Firstly, to probe the experience of the job itself, to give readers a sense of what sort of life they’d be letting themselves in for if they followed a similar path – I’ve divided these question types under headers. Secondly, where the interviewee’s organisation is a candidate for philanthropic funding, to seek their insiders’ perspective on why donors should consider picking them over the other options. On with the interview: Working in SIAI (and similar X-risk-related careers) ZR: Can you describe a typical working week for you? How many hours would you put in, what proportion of them would be spent on work you find engaging and what on admin/other chores? More importantly, what, physically do you do in what proportion from day to day? Can you give a sense of the highs and lows of the job? LM: My work log says I've worked an average of 61 hours per week since the beginning of September, when I was hired. This period covers a transition from Research Fellow to Executive Director, so...

---

### New donations recommendations

- Published: 2012-01-22
- Modified: 2014-09-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/01/new-donations-recommendations/
- Topics: Uncategorised

Givewell and Giving What We Can have both recently updated their <a href="http://givewell.org/charities/top-charities">charity</a> <a href="http://www.givingwhatwecan.org/resources/recommended-charities.php">recommendations</a>.

As a response I've updated the '<a href="/2011/11/the-best-causes-updated/">Best causes</a>' post, with a few extra thoughts thrown into the mix.

(end of post)


Givewell and Giving What We Can have both recently updated their charity recommendations. As a response I've updated the 'Best causes' post, with a few extra thoughts thrown into the mix.

---

### Is banking harmful?

- Published: 2012-01-22
- Modified: 2014-12-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/01/is-banking-harmful/
- Topics: EtG pros and cons, Investment Banking

The basic argument for professional philanthropy is that, because giving your money away is so powerful, it's well worth the slight harm to the economy of some high earning jobs.

But the NYT recently put up an opinion piece by Nicholas D. Kristof arguing that <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/19/opinion/kristof-is-banking-bad.html?_r=3&amp;ref=global-home">banking isn't (necessarily) harmful</a> at all...


The basic argument for professional philanthropy is that, because giving your money away is so powerful, it's well worth the slight harm to the economy of some high earning jobs. But the NYT recently put up an opinion piece by Nicholas D. Kristof arguing that banking isn't (necessarily) harmful at all: 'I’ve been sympathetic to the Occupy Wall Street movement, but, look, finance is not evil. Banking has contributed immensely to modern civilization. By allocating capital to more efficient uses, banking laid the groundwork for the industrial revolution and the information revolution. 'Likewise, the attacks on private equity seem over the top. Private equity firms like Bain Capital, where Romney worked, aren’t about destroying companies and picking over the carcasses. Rather, the aim is to acquire poorly managed companies, make them more efficient (sometimes by firing people but often by rejiggering the business model) and then resell them at a profit. That’s the merciless, rugged nature of capitalism. ' The basic argument applies whether or not you accept Kristof's view, and it's hardly universal. The New Economics Foundation claims banking is deleterious: 'While collecting salaries of between £500,000 and £10 million, leading City bankers to destroy £7 of social value for every pound in value they generate. '

---

### Policy careers

- Published: 2012-01-18
- Modified: 2014-09-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/01/policy-careers/
- Topics: Government &amp; policy, Organisation-building at effective nonprofits

The 80,000 Hours 'Banker vs. Aid Worker' media campaign has certainly succeeded in causing a stir, but many have been misled about the central message of the organization. We are not based around the single idea that one should pursue a higher-earning career in order to donate the proceeds to charity - much less that bankers are inherently the most ethical career path.

Rather, <i>we wish to reflect seriously and in clear-headed fashion upon the impact our careers can have</i>, and adjust our life plans accordingly. This means looking into the tremendous power our earnings have, but our impact is by no means limited to them...


The 80,000 Hours 'Banker vs. Aid Worker' media campaign has certainly succeeded in causing a stir, but many have been misled about the central message of the organization. We are not based around the single idea that one should pursue a higher-earning career in order to donate the proceeds to charity - much less that bankers are inherently the most ethical career path. Rather, we wish to reflect seriously and in clear-headed fashion upon the impact our careers can have, and adjust our life plans accordingly. This means looking into the tremendous power our earnings have, but our impact is by no means limited to them. For example, you can have a very high impact through campaigning or policy-making. One of the highest-impact ethical people of the twentieth century was a man you have probably never heard of - Viktor Zhdanov, Deputy Minister of Health for the Soviet Union. In 1958, he called for a programme to eradicate smallpox at the World Health Assembly and then lobbied for its acceptance, which came the following year. In 1977, the WHO declared smallpox the first infectious disease ever eradicated by humanity. Another integral figure was Donald Henderson, the head of the smallpox unit at the Center for Disease Control in the US, and the advisor who convinced President Johnson to fund the WHO eradication programme rather than other, less targeted health initiatives. The US became the single biggest donor to the programme, and Henderson himself went on to become its director in...

---

### WikiCharities, for those who haven't seen it

- Published: 2012-01-16
- Modified: 2014-09-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/01/wikicharities-for-those-who-haven-t-seen-it/
- Topics: Uncategorised

Just a quick note:

In case you missed it in Sam's post on <a href="/2012/01/health-vs-education/">Health vs Education</a>, some members of Giving What We Can have put together a <a href="http://wikicharities.org/index.php?title=Main_Page">charities Wiki</a>.

It goes into a bit more detail than the main GWWC website on various charities and the issues associated with them. It's still in its infancy, but like any Wiki is both a resource and an opportunity for interested researchers to help out.

(no further text)


Just a quick note: In case you missed it in Sam's post on Health vs Education, some members of Giving What We Can have put together a charities Wiki. It goes into a bit more detail than the main GWWC website on various charities and the issues associated with them. It's still in its infancy, but like any Wiki is both a resource and an opportunity for interested researchers to help out.

---

### Salary or startup? How do-gooders can gain more from risky careers

- Published: 2012-01-08
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/01/salary-or-startup-how-do-gooders-can-gain-more-from-risky-careers/
- Topics: Being ambitious, Effective Altruism, Found a tech startup, Risk, Software Engineering

Consider Sam, a software engineer at Google. His employer ranks highly in both quality-of-life and salary rankings. Sam is a great coder, and passionate about his work. But Sam is not satisfied: he is sorely tempted to take his savings and launch his own company. There are costs in taking the plunge: entrepreneurship would mean working harder, and investing time and money into a venture that might easily fail with nothing to show for it.  On the other hand, success would mean bringing his vision to life, and potentially a financial payoff far beyond what he could hope for as a salaried employee.

Considering just these factors, Sam isn&rsquo;t sure which way to go, like many other talented technologists. But if one of Sam&rsquo;s goals is making a big impact on the lives of others, that can tip the balance towards entrepreneurship. Here&rsquo;s how...


Consider Sam, a software engineer at Google. His employer ranks highly in both quality-of-life and salary rankings. Sam is a great coder, and passionate about his work. But Sam is not satisfied: he is sorely tempted to take his savings and launch his own company. There are costs in taking the plunge: entrepreneurship would mean working harder, and investing time and money into a venture that might easily fail with nothing to show for it. On the other hand, success would mean bringing his vision to life, and potentially a financial payoff far beyond what he could hope for as a salaried employee. Considering just these factors, Sam isn’t sure which way to go, like many other talented technologists. But if one of Sam’s goals is making a big impact on the lives of others, that can tip the balance towards entrepreneurship. Here’s how. Taking risks and winning big It’s common knowledge that entrepreneurship is risky business: many firms fold, some enjoy moderate success, and a few become enormous successes, making their founders billionaires. A study by Hall and Woodward, which tracked the fates of thousands of American startups after receiving venture capital investment, shows the strength of this skew. For two thirds of startups, the shareholdings of the founders wound up worth less than a million US (2006) dollars. Over 90% of the wealth gained by founders came from the top 10% of firms, those which returned over $10 million, and almost half the wealth came from the top...

---

### Health vs education

- Published: 2012-01-04
- Modified: 2024-11-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2012/01/health-vs-education/
- Topics: Education, Global Health, Medicine, Problem prioritisation

If you want to make a difference with your philanthropic donations it is important to donate to a good charity, rather than buying books for a school that has no teachers and so on. But how do we decide? It is all very well to say that a charity that saves 100 lives is better than a charity that saves 10 lives for the same cost, but not all charities are so easily comparable. Here I will try to compare health and education interventions...


If you want to make a difference with your philanthropic donations it is important to donate to a good charity, rather than buying books for a school that has no teachers and so on. But how do we decide? It is all very well to say that a charity that saves 100 lives is better than a charity that saves 10 lives for the same cost, but not all charities are so easily comparable. Here I will try to compare health and education interventions. The Competitors - And Their Weights First let me present health, coming in with a mighty possible $3. 50 for a year of life at full health. The reigning champ, in that most of the charities I have seen recommended on this website support health interventions. Next we have education, coming in with a mighty $2. 50 for a year of schooling. To clarify, this is the absolute minimum cost that a charity could put in to let a child in a developing country attend primary schooling for another year. So we are roughly comparing the benefit of 1 year of life at full health to 1. 5 years extra primary schooling in a developing country Round 1: Direct Benefits to Individuals Would you lose out on health for a year to gain the happiness brought to you by being better educated, to gain the ability to read and count? Can we put a value on such a thing? Not easily. Let’s consider what data is available. The World...

---

### Delayed Gratification? - Choosing When to Donate

- Published: 2011-12-08
- Modified: 2024-11-26
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2011/12/delayed-gratification-choosing-when-to-donate/
- Topics: Now vs. Later

Most charities spend money at about the rate at which they take it in, while most foundations pay out <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130726110432/http://www.hks.harvard.edu/hauser/PDF_XLS/workingpapers/workingpaper_9.pdf">just five percent</a> of their assets each year, the legal minimum in the US. Which strategy does more good? The answer matters to you as well as to charitable organizations: you can give away your money soon after you earn it, or you can invest it in a <a href="http://nonprofit.about.com/od/fordonors/a/advisedfunds.htm">donor-advised fund</a> and allow it to grow for an indefinite amount of time before giving it away. (Donor-advised funds offer tax savings and require that the money be contributed to charity.) The question of whether to give now or later is complicated, so I&rsquo;ll mention just a few of the considerations involved...


Most charities spend money at about the rate at which they take it in, while most foundations pay out just five percent of their assets each year, the legal minimum in the US. Which strategy does more good? The answer matters to you as well as to charitable organizations: you can give away your money soon after you earn it, or you can invest it in a donor-advised fund and allow it to grow for an indefinite amount of time before giving it away. (Donor-advised funds offer tax savings and require that the money be contributed to charity. ) The question of whether to give now or later is complicated, so I’ll mention just a few of the considerations involved. What rate of return can you expect from investing your money? The S&P 500 index, a broad measure of the US stock market, returned seven percent annually from 1950 to 2009 after inflation. At this rate, an investment of $10,000 would grow to about $300,000 over 50 years. But stock-market returns will probably be lower in the future: Jeremy Siegel, the author of Stocks for the Long Run and the foremost enthusiast for investing in stocks, estimates that returns will be 4. 5–5. 5% in the future. This lower rate of return would cut the expected value of a $10,000 investment after 50 years to $115,000—still a lot more than you started with. Since it’s reasonable to expect investments in stocks to rise in value over the long term, why not delay your...

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### It is Effectiveness, not Overhead that Matters

- Published: 2011-11-24
- Modified: 2022-12-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2011/11/it-is-effectiveness-not-overhead-that-matters/
- Topics: Donating effectively, Effective Altruism, Reasoning well

Would you rather help one person or 200 people, if it took the same effort? If you do what most people
do, you&rsquo;ll be lucky if you help even one.

Let&rsquo;s say you recognize that giving to charities can make a profound impact in others&rsquo; lives and perhaps
you even believe it&rsquo;s morally the right thing to do. Perhaps you once met someone who was blind and
now you are drawn to helping the blind. You&rsquo;ve made the choice of a cause, but there are hundreds of
organizations that help the blind and thus seem deserving of your money.


Would you rather help one person or 200 people, if it took the same effort? If you do what most people do, you’ll be lucky if you help even one. Let’s say you recognize that giving to charities can make a profound impact in others’ lives and perhaps you even believe it’s morally the right thing to do. Perhaps you once met someone who was blind and now you are drawn to helping the blind. You’ve made the choice of a cause, but there are hundreds of organizations that help the blind and thus seem deserving of your money. Some think it inappropriate to compare charities and especially to criticize a decision about which charity to give money to. But it is not just appropriate, it is supremely important. Your decision where to give will determine whether 200 or just one person gets helped. You find a US charity that trains guide dogs for the blind. It’s a commendably austere charity; over 99% of its received donations go directly to its goal: training the dogs. So you make your donation of US$1,000 and are confident your money will be used well. Months later you receive a photo of the dog with its new owner and you feel great, knowing you have helped provide a dog that will help its owner ‘see’ for the next 10 years. No one will say you’ve done a bad thing, and you haven’t. But you could have done something better. You probably would have liked...

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### Today Show

- Published: 2011-11-22
- Modified: 2014-09-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2011/11/today-show/
- Topics: Uncategorised

80,000 Hours founder Will Crouch appeared with Private Eye editor Ian Hislop on BBC Radio 4&rsquo;s The
Today Show. The interview opens with Will explaining the logic behind 80,000 Hours&rsquo; &ldquo;Banker vs. Aid Worker&rdquo;
campaign: namely, that a professional philanthropist, or someone who enters a lucrative career with
the intention of giving much of it away, can fund the work of several aid workers, and as such can do
several times as much good.


80,000 Hours founder Will MacAskill appeared with Private Eye editor Ian Hislop on BBC Radio 4’s The Today Show. You can listen to the programme here. The interview opens with Will explaining the logic behind 80,000 Hours’ “Banker vs. Aid Worker” campaign: namely, that a professional philanthropist, or someone who enters a lucrative career with the intention of giving much of it away, can fund the work of several aid workers, and as such can do several times as much good. But interviewer John Humphrys had some bones to pick. These are some of the salient points he made. On that basis, we don’t need charity workers? Interviewer John Humphrys argued that, by this logic, we should all become bankers and no one should be a charity worker. This is a misunderstanding of 80,000 Hours aims. We’re not the Banking Fan Club of Great Britain: we simply wish to help individuals make the biggest positive impact they can in their careers. As it stands, pursuing a lucrative career and funding several charity workers through it would do multiple times as good as being a charity worker yourself, but the lucrative career is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. And we do assume a more-or-less constant pool of aid workers. Because as Will MacAskill pointed out, persuasive as we may be, we’re not quite that persuasive: the NGO sector is extremely competitive, and there is little risk that 80,000 Hours’s “Banker vs. Aid Worker” debate...

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### William MacAskill of 80,000 Hours featured on the Today Programme

- Published: 2011-11-22
- Modified: 2014-11-06
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2011/11/william-macaskill-of-80-000-hours-featured-on-the-today-programme/
- Topics: Uncategorised

<img alt="Will Crouch" class="shadow float-right" src="/assets/blog/willcrouch.png">
Want to make a difference? Want to make the most different that you can?
Become a banker. An ethical banker.

Not what you expected? Research on professional philanthropy by an Oxford
University ethicist today reveals a new way of looking at ethical careers.
Believe it or not, it is possible to be an ethical banker. William Crouch
today discusses his research at the Uehiro Centre in Oxford University's
Philosophy Faculty with Ian Hislop on the Today Programme at 8:45am.


Want to make a difference? Want to make the most different that you can? Become a banker. An ethical banker. Not what you expected? Research on professional philanthropy by an Oxford University ethicist today reveals a new way of looking at ethical careers. Believe it or not, it is possible to be an ethical banker. William MacAskill today discusses his research at the Uehiro Centre in Oxford University's Philosophy Faculty with Ian Hislop on the Today Programme at 8:45am. MacAskill is launching 80,000 Hours: an organisation which is redefining ethical careers. Incredibly an individual typically spends 80,000 hours on their career: choosing a career which maximises the difference you can make is therefore paramount for those considering an ethical career. Professional philanthropy - deliberately pursuing a lucrative career in order to donate a substantial proportion of earnings to the best causes - may have significantly more impact than careers traditionally considered as ethical. Let us take the example of a banker and a charity worker: firstly consider the financial discrepancy in earnings – the money that a banker donates can pay for several charity workers who would be better qualified to do the job. Secondly, money is fungible and can be moved to better causes as they come along whereas experience as a charity worker is specific and often non-transferable. Thirdly, the charity worker would replace a similar charity worker but the ethical banker would replace a banker who would probably keep all his money to himself. This means the...

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### The best causes - updated

- Published: 2011-11-20
- Modified: 2014-09-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2011/11/the-best-causes-updated/
- Topics: Uncategorised

If you&rsquo;re reading this, I&rsquo;ll assume you&rsquo;re convinced by the philosophy of 80,000 Hours - so you won&rsquo;t find an argument for that philosophy here. This post is just to help you decide where to best give your money right now, based on the combined recommendations of the above organisations allowing for a couple of factors they don&rsquo;t address.

So... plenty of organisations want your money, but a select few really stand out. What&rsquo;s the best option?


Both Giving What We Can and Givewell recently revised their charity recommendations, so I’ve updated this post to account for them. If you’re reading this, I’ll assume you’re convinced by the philosophy of 80,000 Hours - so you won’t find an argument for that philosophy here. This post is just to help you decide where to best give your money right now, based on the combined recommendations of the above organisations allowing for a couple of factors they don’t address. So... plenty of organisations want your money, but a select few really stand out. What’s the best option? Honestly, we don’t know yet. Thanks to GiveWell and Giving What We Can, efficient philanthropy has become much easier in the last couple of years, but they might still find better causes. Their recommendations overlap, but are far from equivalent, partly because of the different values they espouse. However, their work has already been so useful that using it to give now is literally thousands of times better than using the best evaluators was only a few years ago, which focused only on admin costs and ignored what the charities were actually trying to achieve. So below is a list of groups you might consider supporting, in no particular order, why they’re a top candidate, and at the end some considerations to help you decide between them. I’ve kept the summaries brief and linked to more information at the bottom. Against Malaria Foundation AMF provides treated malaria nets to high-risk populations. It’s...

---

### High Impact Science

- Published: 2011-11-15
- Modified: 2024-12-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2011/11/high-impact-science/
- Topics: Academic Research, Biomedical Research

Paul Ehrlich began his 1968 book, The Population Bomb, with this statement:

<blockquote>
  The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to
  death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a
  substantial increase in the world death rate.
</blockquote>

Ehrlich predicted the deaths as a consequence of the challenge of feeding a
rapidly growing world population, pointing to recent devastating famines in
South Asia. But even as those words were written, the fields were being planted
with new, higher-yielding semi-dwarf strains of wheat and rice.


Paul Ehrlich began his 1968 book, The Population Bomb, with this statement: The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate. Ehrlich predicted the deaths as a consequence of the challenge of feeding a rapidly growing world population, pointing to recent devastating famines in South Asia. But even as those words were written, the fields were being planted with new, higher-yielding semi-dwarf strains of wheat and rice. Combined with modern fertilizers and other methods, these strains ushered in the “Green Revolution”: wheat production in India and Pakistan almost doubled between 1965 and 1970, and formerly famine-wracked countries became self-sufficient in food and have not seen such hunger since. The agronomist Norman Borlaug, who developed new and more effective methods of plant breeding, used them to develop the key strain of wheat, and brought about expansion of his methods to other crops and deployment in South Asia, played a pivotal role. Some credit him with saving a billion lives, referring to the number of people fed by the increase agricultural production of the Green Revolution. Indisputably, scientific and technological advances and technological innovation have brought about almost incredible amounts of good. Not whether, but when? However, when we ask how we can effectively do good in our careers, the key question is not how much...

---

### Our Worst Subjects

- Published: 2011-11-14
- Modified: 2014-09-01
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2011/11/our-worst-subjects/
- Topics: Uncategorised

&ldquo;I prefer to give to local organizations.&rdquo; I've heard this a lot.

Imagine a high school student who sits down to study for exams. Her chemistry
book is lying closest to her on the desk, so she decides to study chemistry.
Her father points out that since she has an A in chemistry and a D in geometry,
studying geometry might help her grades more. &ldquo;But that book is all the way
over there in my backpack,&rdquo; the student points out; &ldquo;I prefer to study
locally.&rdquo;


“I prefer to give to local organizations. ” I've heard this a lot. Imagine a high school student who sits down to study for exams. Her chemistry book is lying closest to her on the desk, so she decides to study chemistry. Her father points out that since she has an A in chemistry and a D in geometry, studying geometry might help her grades more. “But that book is all the way over there in my backpack,” the student points out; “I prefer to study locally. ” If you were her parent, you probably wouldn't let her get away with this. All things being equal, she would benefit most from studying the subjects where she is most behind. Even though she hasn't learned all the chemistry there is to know, a few hours of studying geometry will get her farther than spending the same hours on chemistry. Even within rich countries, we don't have straight As on our report card. Homelessness, environment, prisons, health, schools – we're behind where we should be in lots of areas. I've seen many of these first-hand, and I care passionately about them. But these are not our worst subjects. The fact that millions of people every year die of easily preventable diseases, and billions live in grinding poverty – that is a much worse failure. Only it's not happening right here next to us; it's happening far away. The good news is this: the same amount of effort goes a lot farther on our worst...

---

### Estimation is the best we have

- Published: 2011-11-09
- Modified: 2021-03-26
- URL: https://80000hours.org/2011/11/estimation-is-the-best-we-have/
- Topics: Decision making

This argument seems common to many debates:

&lsquo;Proposal P arrogantly assumes that it is possible to measure X, when really
X is hard to measure and perhaps even changes depending on other factors.
Therefore we shouldn&rsquo;t do P&rsquo;.

This could make sense if X wasn&rsquo;t especially integral to the goal. For
instance if the proposal were to measure short distances by triangulation
with nearby objects, a reasonable criticism would be that the angles are hard
to measure, relative to measuring the distance directly. But this argument is
commonly used in situations where optimizing X is the whole point of the
activity, or a large part of it.


This argument seems common to many debates: Proposal P arrogantly assumes that it is possible to measure X, when really X is hard to measure and perhaps even changes depending on other factors. Therefore we shouldn’t do P This could make sense if X wasn’t especially integral to the goal. For instance if the proposal were to measure short distances by triangulation with nearby objects, a reasonable criticism would be that the angles are hard to measure, relative to measuring the distance directly. But this argument is commonly used in situations where optimizing X is the whole point of the activity, or a large part of it. Criticism of cost-benefit approaches to doing good provides a prime example. A common argument is that it’s just not possible to tell if you are increasing net welfare, or by how much. The critic concludes then that a different strategy is better, for instance some sort of intuitive adherence to strict behavioural rules. But if what we fundamentally think matters most is increasing welfare, or at least reducing extreme suffering, then the extreme difficulty of doing the associated mathematics perfectly should not warrant abandoning the goal. One should always be better off putting the reduced effort one is willing to contribute into what accuracy it buys, rather than throwing it away on a strategy that is more random with regard to one’s goal. A CEO would sound ridiculous making this argument to his shareholders: ‘You guys are being ridiculous. It’s just not possible...

---


## Skills

### Engineering skills

> Learn how to get started in an engineering career, and how you can use engineering skills to solve pressing global problems.

- Published: 2023-12-15
- Modified: 2024-09-13
- URL: https://80000hours.org/skills/engineering/
- Topics: Engineering, Skills

In 1958, Nils Bohlin was recruited as an engineer for Volvo. At the time, over 100,000 people were dying in road accidents every year. Bohlin came up with one very simple invention: the modern seat belt. Within a year, Volvo began equipping their cars with seat belts as standard, and — as a result of its importance to safety — opened up the patent so that other manufacturers could do the same. Volvo claims that Bohlin's invention has saved over a million lives. That would make Bohlin one of the highest-impact people in history, alongside David Nalin, the inventor of oral rehydration therapy for diarrhoea. We'd guess Bohlin's impact wasn't quite that large. For one thing, seat belts already existed: in 1951, a Y-shaped three-point seat belt was patented that avoided the risks of internal injuries from simple lap belts. Bohlin's innovation was doing this with just one strap, making it simple and convenient to use. For another thing, it seems likely that someone else would have come up with Bohlin's design eventually. Nevertheless, a simple estimate suggests that Bohlin saved hundreds of lives at the very least — incredible for such a simple piece of engineering. **In a nutshell:** Engineering can be used to speed up the development and use of technological solutions to global problems. There are three main engineering routes: academia, industry, or startups. After spending some time building your skills, you might be able to apply them to help solve pressing...

---

### Experience with an emerging power (especially China)

> Become an expert on an emerging power to improve international coordination on global issues including AI, pandemics, and climate change.

- Published: 2023-10-31
- Modified: 2024-11-25
- URL: https://80000hours.org/skills/emerging-power/
- Topics: Career capital, China-Western coordination, Government &amp; policy, Policy careers, Skills, Specialist in emerging global powers

China will likely play an especially influential role in determining the outcome of many of the biggest challenges of the next century. India also seems very likely to be important over the next few decades, and many other non-western countries — for example, Russia — are also major players on the world stage. A lack of understanding and coordination between all these countries and the West means we might not tackle those challenges as well as we can (and need to). So it's going to be very valuable to have more people gaining real experience with emerging powers, especially China, and then specialising in the intersection of emerging powers and pressing global problems. **In a nutshell:** Many ways of solving the world's (/problem-profiles/) will require international coordination. You could help with this by building specific experience of the culture, language, and policies in China or another emerging power. Once you have that expertise, you could consider working in an AI lab, think tanks, governments, or in research roles. ####Key facts on fit You'll need fantastic cross-cultural communication skills (and probably a knack for learning languages), a keen interest in international relations, strong networking abilities, and excellent judgement to be a good fit. Why is experience with an emerging power (especially China) valuable? China in particular plays a crucial role in many of the major global problems we highlight. For instance: The Chinese government 's spending...

---

### Research skills

> Learn how to do research, and how you can use research skills to do good.

- Published: 2023-09-18
- Modified: 2023-12-28
- URL: https://80000hours.org/skills/research/
- Topics: Academic Research, Biomedical Research, Career capital, Research in relevant areas, Research into global priorities, Scientific research, Skills

Norman Borlaug was an agricultural scientist. Through years of research, he developed new, high-yielding, disease-resistant varieties of wheat. It might not sound like much, but as a result of Borlaug's research, wheat production in India and Pakistan almost doubled between 1965 and 1970, and formerly famine-stricken countries across the world were suddenly able to produce enough food for their entire populations. These developments have been credited with saving up to a billion people from famine, and in 1970, Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Many of the highest-impact people in history, whether well-known or completely obscure, have been researchers. **In a nutshell:** Talented researchers are a key bottleneck facing many of the (/problem-profiles/). That doesn't mean you need to become an academic. While that's one option (and academia is often a good place to start), lots of the most valuable research happens elsewhere. It's often cheap to try out developing research skills while at university, and if it's a good fit for you, research could be your highest impact option. #### Key facts on fit You might be a great fit if you have the potential to become *obsessed* with high-impact questions, have high levels of grit and self-motivation, are open to new ideas, are intelligent, and have a high degree of intellectual curiosity. You'll also need to be a good fit for the particular area you're researching (e. g. you might need quantitative ability)... .

---

### Policy and political skills

> Working in policy can be a rewarding and high-impact way of changing the world for the better. Learn how to get started.

- Published: 2023-09-18
- Modified: 2024-05-10
- URL: https://80000hours.org/skills/political-bureaucratic/
- Topics: Career capital, Congressional staffer, Government &amp; policy, Policy careers, Skills

Suzy Deuster wanted to be a public defender, a career path that could help hundreds receive fair legal representation. But she realised that by shifting her focus to government work, she could improve the justice system for thousands or even millions. Suzy ended up doing just that from her position in the US Executive Office of the President, working on criminal justice reform. This logic doesn't just apply to criminal justice. For almost any global issue you're interested in, roles in powerful institutions like governments often offer unique and high-leverage ways to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. **In a nutshell:** Governments and other powerful institutions are often crucial forces in addressing (/problem-profiles/), so learning to navigate, improve and assist these institutions is a route to having a big impact. Moreover, there are many positions that offer a good network and a high potential for impact relative to how competitive they are. ####Key facts on fit This skill set is fairly broad, which means it can potentially be a good fit for a wide variety of people. For many roles, indications of fit include being fairly social and comfortable in a political environment — but this isn't true for all roles, and if you feel like that's not you it could still be worth trying out something in the area. Why are policy and political skills valuable? We'll argue that: Governments...

---

### Software and tech skills

> Learn to code, then apply your skills to something that really matters. Here's how to get started and how to use your coding skills for good.

- Published: 2023-09-18
- Modified: 2024-01-10
- URL: https://80000hours.org/skills/software-tech/
- Topics: AI safety technical research, Career capital, Computer science, Computer Science PhD, Data science, Machine learning, Skills, Software Engineering

**In a nutshell:** You can start building software and tech skills by trying out learning to code, and then doing some programming projects before applying for jobs. You can apply (as well as continue to develop) your software and tech skills by specialising in a related area, such as technical AI safety research, software engineering, or information security. You can also (/articles/earning-to-give/), and this in-demand skill set has great backup options. ####Key facts on fit There's no single profile for being great at software and tech skills. It's particularly cheap and easy to try out programming (which is a core part of this skill set) via classes online or in school, so we'd suggest doing that. But if you're someone who enjoys thinking systematically, building things, or has good quantitative skills, those are all good signs. Why are software and tech skills valuable? By "software and tech" skills we basically mean what your grandma would call "being good at computers. " When investigating the world's most pressing problems, we've found that in many cases there are software-related bottlenecks. For example, machine learning (ML) engineering is a core skill needed to contribute to AI safety technical research. Experts in information security are crucial to reducing the risks of engineered pandemics, as well as other risks. And software engineers are often needed by nonprofits, whether they're working on reducing poverty or mitigating the risks of climate change. Also,...

---

### Specialist knowledge relevant to a top problem

> Which areas of specialist knowledge are most applicable to solving the world's most pressing problems?

- Published: 2023-09-18
- Modified: 2023-12-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/skills/specialist-knowledge/
- Topics: Biorisk strategy &amp; policy, Career capital, Economics, Expert in AI hardware, Skills

What specialist knowledge is valuable? Many highly specific areas of knowledge seem applicable to solving the world's most pressing problems, especially risks posed by biotechnology and artificial intelligence. In particular we'd highlight: Subfields of biology relevant to pandemic prevention. Working on many of the possible technical solutions to reduce the risk of pandemics will require expertise in parts of biology. We'd particularly highlight synthetic biology, mathematical biology, virology, immunology, pharmacology, and vaccinology. This expertise can also be helpful for pursuing a biorisk-focused policy career. (Read more about careers to prevent catastrophic pandemics. ) AI hardware. Specialised hardware is a crucial input to the development of frontier AI systems. As a result, we expect expertise in AI hardware to become increasingly important to the governance of AI systems. (Read more about becoming an expert in AI hardware). Economics. Understanding economics can be valuable in a huge range of impactful roles when combined with another skill set. For example, economics research is crucial for conducting global priorities research and improving decision making in large institutions. And a knowledge of economics can also support you in building policy and political skills, particularly for policy design and governance research. Other areas we sometimes recommend include history, knowledge of China, and law. Of course, whatever skill set you focus on, you'll likely need to build some specialist knowledge — for example, if you focus on policy and political skills, you'll need to gain specialist knowledge in the area of policy you're working in. Similarly, if...

---

### Organisation-building

> Find out how to help build and boost great organisations through skills like management, operations, legal and financial oversight, entrepreneurship and fundraising.

- Published: 2023-09-18
- Modified: 2024-05-10
- URL: https://80000hours.org/skills/organisation-building/
- Topics: Building effective altruism, Career capital, Consulting, Finance, Found a tech startup, Founder of new projects, Lawyer, Non-technical roles in leading AI labs, Operations at high impact organisations, Organisation-building at effective nonprofits, Skills

When most people think of careers that "do good," the first thing they think of is working at a charity. The thing is, lots of jobs at charities just aren't that impactful. Some charities focus on programmes that don't work, like Scared Straight, which actually caused kids to commit more crimes. Others focus on ways of helping that, while thoughtful and helpful, don't have much leverage, like knitting individual sweaters for penguins affected by oil spills (this actually happened! ) instead of funding large-scale ocean cleanup projects. While this penguin certainly looks all warm and cosy, we'd guess that knitting each sweater one-by-one wouldn't be the best use of an organisation's time. But there are also many organisations out there — both for-profit and nonprofit — focused on pressing problems, implementing effective and scalable solutions, run by great teams, and in need of people. If you can build skills that are useful for helping an organisation like this, it could well be one of the highest-impact things you can do. In particular, organisations often need generalists able to do the bread and butter of building an organisation — hiring people, management, administration, communications, running software systems, crafting strategy, fundraising, and so on. We call these 'organisation-building' skills. They can be high impact because you can increase the scale and effectiveness of the organisation you're working at, while also gaining skills that can be applied to a wide range of global problems in the future (and make you generally employable too)... .

---

### Communicating ideas

> Through communicating important ideas, you could end up inspiring many people to do far more good than you could ever have done by yourself.

- Published: 2023-09-18
- Modified: 2024-11-21
- URL: https://80000hours.org/skills/communication/
- Topics: Advocacy, Career capital, Communication, Journalist, Marketing, Promoting effective altruism, Public intellectual, Skills

Many of the highest-impact people in history have been communicators and advocates of one kind or another. Take Rosa Parks, who in 1955 refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus, sparking a protest which led to a Supreme Court ruling that segregated buses were unconstitutional. Parks was a seamstress in her day job, but in her spare time she was involved with the civil rights movement. When Parks sat down on that bus, she wasn't acting completely spontaneously: just a few months before she'd been attending workshops on effective communication and civil disobedience, and the resulting boycott was carefully planned by Parks and the local NAACP. After she was arrested, they used widely distributed fliers to launch a total boycott of buses in a city with 40,000 African Americans, while simultaneously pushing forward with legal action. This led to major progress for civil rights. There are many ways to communicate ideas. One is social advocacy, like Rosa Parks. Another is more like being an individual public intellectual, who can either specialise in a mass audience (like Carl Sagan), or a particular niche (like Paul Farmer, a medical anthropologist who wrote about global health). Or you can learn skills in marketing and public relations and then work as part of a team or organisation to spread important ideas. **In a nutshell:** Communicating ideas can be a way for a small group of people to have a large effect on a problem. By...

---


## Podcast

### Bonus: Guilt, imposter syndrome & doing good: 16 past guests share their mental health journeys

- Published: 2025-04-11
- Modified: 2025-04-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/mental-health-impactful-careers-compilation/
- Topics: Being ambitious, Mental health, Personal fit, Unconventional advice



---

### Buck Shlegeris on controlling AI that wants to take over – so we can use it anyway

- Published: 2025-04-04
- Modified: 2025-04-04
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/buck-shlegeris-ai-control-scheming/
- Topics: AI safety technical research, Artificial Intelligence, Artificial sentience, Computer science, Machine learning, Redwood Research



---

### Bonus: 15 expert takes on infosec in the age of AI

- Published: 2025-03-28
- Modified: 2025-03-28
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/infosecurity-compilation/
- Topics: AI safety technical research, Computer science, Expert in AI hardware, Information security, Long-term AI policy, Machine learning, Risks from malevolent actors, Software Engineering



---

### Will MacAskill on AI causing a “century in a decade” — and how we're completely unprepared

- Published: 2025-03-11
- Modified: 2025-04-10
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/will-macaskill-century-in-a-decade-navigating-intelligence-explosion/
- Topics: Academic Research, Artificial Intelligence, Artificial sentience, Civilisational resilience, Decision making, Economics, Epistemics, Existential risk, Forecasting, Forecasting research &amp; implementation, Forethought Foundation, Founder of new projects, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Global priorities research, Global public goods, Great power conflict, History, Improving values, Information security, Institutional decision making, Investigate new problems, Long-term AI policy, Longtermist philanthropy, Moral patients, Moral philosophy, Non-technical roles in leading AI labs, Philosophy, Policy careers, Public intellectual, Reasoning well, Research into global priorities, Risks from malevolent actors, Risks of stable totalitarianism, S-risks, Space governance, Think tank research



---

### Emergency pod: Judge plants a legal time bomb under OpenAI (with Rose Chan Loui)

- Published: 2025-03-07
- Modified: 2025-03-07
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/rose-chan-loui-elon-musk-openai-case-update/
- Topics: Lawyer, Long-term AI policy, OpenAI



---

### Allan Dafoe on why technology is unstoppable & how to shape AI development anyway

- Published: 2025-02-14
- Modified: 2025-03-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/allan-dafoe-unstoppable-technology-human-agency-agi/
- Topics: AI safety technical research, Artificial Intelligence, Computer science, DeepMind, Economics, Global public goods, Great power conflict, Historian of large societal trends, History, Institutional decision making, Long-term AI policy



---

### Emergency pod: Elon tries to crash OpenAI's party (with Rose Chan Loui)

- Published: 2025-02-12
- Modified: 2025-03-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/rose-chan-loui-elon-musk-open-ai/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Lawyer, Long-term AI policy, OpenAI



---

### Bonus: AGI disagreements and misconceptions: Rob, Luisa, & past guests hash it out

- Published: 2025-02-10
- Modified: 2025-03-28
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/ai-misconceptions-disagreements/
- Topics: Accidental harm, AI safety technical research, Artificial Intelligence



---

### 2024 highlightapalooza — the best of The 80,000 Hours Podcast this year

- Published: 2024-12-27
- Modified: 2025-01-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/2024-highlights/



---

### Sam Bowman on why housing still isn't fixed and what would actually work

- Published: 2024-12-19
- Modified: 2025-01-06
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/sam-bowman-overcoming-nimbys-housing-policy-proposals/
- Topics: Communication, Decision making, Economic growth, Economics, Economics PhD, Global priorities research, Government &amp; policy, Institutional decision making, Policy careers, Promising interventions, Research into global priorities



---

### Cameron Meyer Shorb on dismantling the myth that we can’t do anything to help wild animals

- Published: 2024-11-29
- Modified: 2025-04-07
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/cameron-meyer-shorb-wild-animal-suffering/
- Topics: Academic Research, Factory Farming, Global priorities research, Investigate new problems, Mental health, Moral patients, Moral uncertainty, Problem prioritisation, Research in relevant areas, Research into global priorities, Wild animal suffering



---

### Rose Chan Loui on OpenAI’s gambit to ditch its nonprofit

- Published: 2024-11-27
- Modified: 2024-12-02
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/rose-chan-loui-openai-breaking-free-nonprofit/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Grantmaker, Institutional decision making, Lawyer, Long-term AI policy, OpenAI, Public intellectual



---

### Elizabeth Cox on the case that TV shows, movies, and novels can improve the world

- Published: 2024-11-21
- Modified: 2025-03-07
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/elizabeth-cox-tv-movies-novels-change-the-world/
- Topics: Applying an unusual skill to a needed niche, Art &amp; Entertainment, Civilisational resilience, Communication, Education, Personal fit, Unconventional advice



---

### Sarah Eustis-Guthrie on why she shut down her charity, and why more founders should follow her lead

- Published: 2024-11-14
- Modified: 2024-11-22
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/sarah-eustis-guthrie-founding-shutting-down-charity/
- Topics: Being ambitious, Charity Entrepreneurship, Community &amp; coordination, Decision making, Founder of new projects, Global Health, Personal fit, Reasoning well, Risk



---

### Bonus: Parenting insights from Rob and 8 past guests

- Published: 2024-11-08
- Modified: 2025-03-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/bonus-parenting-insights-compilation/
- Topics: Career planning, Job satisfaction, Mental health, Now vs. Later, Personal fit, Unconventional advice



---

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

- Published: 2024-11-01
- Modified: 2024-11-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/anil-seth-predictive-brain-explaining-consciousness/
- Topics: Academic Research, Artificial sentience, Biomedical Research, Biomedical Research, Emerging challenges, Psychology, Research in relevant areas, Scientific research



---

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

- Published: 2024-10-23
- Modified: 2024-11-08
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/sebastien-moro-fish-cognition-senses-social-lives/
- Topics: Communication, Factory Farming, Global priorities research, Investigate new problems, Public intellectual, Wild animal suffering



---

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

- Published: 2024-10-16
- Modified: 2024-10-29
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/nate-silver-effective-altruism-sbf-art-of-risk/
- Topics: Accidental harm, Being ambitious, COVID-19, Effective Altruism, Forecasting, Forecasting research &amp; implementation, Global priorities research, Global public goods, Individual reasoning &amp; cognition, Institutional decision making, Politics, Reasoning well, Risk



---

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

- Published: 2024-10-03
- Modified: 2024-10-16
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/peter-godfrey-smith-wild-animal-suffering-complex-life/
- Topics: Academic Research, Applying an unusual skill to a needed niche, Artificial sentience, Communication, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Global priorities research, Moral philosophy, Philosophy, Philosophy academia, Public intellectual, Wild animal suffering



---

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

- Published: 2024-09-19
- Modified: 2024-09-30
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/venki-ramakrishnan-ageing-life-extension/
- Topics: Academic Research, Biomedical Research, Biomedical Research, Ending Ageing



---

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

- Published: 2024-09-13
- Modified: 2024-11-26
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/ken-goldberg-robotics/
- Topics: AI safety technical research, Artificial Intelligence, Computer science, Computer Science PhD, Engineering, Expert in AI hardware, Found a tech startup, Physics, Scientific research



---

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

- Published: 2024-09-04
- Modified: 2024-09-13
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/ezra-karger-forecasting-existential-risks/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Decision making, Existential risk, Forecasting, Forecasting research &amp; implementation, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Individual reasoning &amp; cognition, Institutional decision making, Reasoning well



---

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

- Published: 2024-08-29
- Modified: 2024-11-28
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/nathan-calvin-sb-1047-california-ai-safety-bill/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Center for AI Safety, Congressional staffer, Government &amp; policy, Law, Lawyer, Long-term AI policy, Party Politics, Party Politics, Politics



---

### Meghan Barrett on challenging our assumptions about insects

- Published: 2024-08-26
- Modified: 2025-04-07
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/meghan-barrett-insect-pain-consciousness-sentience/
- Topics: Academic Research, Factory Farming, Global priorities research, Investigate new problems, Research into global priorities, Rethink Priorities, Scientific research, Wild animal suffering



---

### Nick Joseph on whether Anthropic's AI safety policy is up to the task

- Published: 2024-08-22
- Modified: 2024-10-06
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/nick-joseph-anthropic-safety-approach-responsible-scaling/
- Topics: Accidental harm, AI safety technical research, Anthropic, Artificial Intelligence, Computer science, Expert in AI hardware, Information security, Long-term AI policy, Machine learning, Non-technical roles in leading AI labs, Policy careers



---

### Jonathan Birch on the edge cases of sentience and why they matter

- Published: 2024-08-15
- Modified: 2024-08-29
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/jonathan-birch-edge-sentience-uncertainty/
- Topics: Academic Research, Artificial sentience, Biomedical Research, Global priorities research, Institutional decision making, Investigate new problems, Moral patients, Moral philosophy, Moral uncertainty, Philosophy, Philosophy academia, Policy careers, Research in relevant areas, Research into global priorities, Whole brain emulation



---

### Sella Nevo on who's trying to steal frontier AI models, and what they could do with them

- Published: 2024-08-01
- Modified: 2024-08-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/sella-nevo-securing-ai-model-weights/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Computer science, Expert in AI hardware, Government &amp; policy, Information security, Long-term AI policy, Risks from malevolent actors



---

### Vitalik Buterin on defensive acceleration and how to regulate AI when you fear government

- Published: 2024-07-26
- Modified: 2024-08-18
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/vitalik-buterin-techno-optimism/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Atomically precise manufacturing, Biorisk strategy &amp; policy, Communication, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Global public goods, Government &amp; policy, Individual reasoning &amp; cognition, Information security, Risks of stable totalitarianism, Voting reform



---

### Sihao Huang on the risk that US–China AI competition leads to war

- Published: 2024-07-18
- Modified: 2025-01-27
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/sihao-huang-china-ai-capabilities/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence, China-related AI safety &amp; governance, China-Western coordination, Expert in AI hardware, Great power conflict, Information security, Institutional decision making, Long-term AI policy, Risks of stable totalitarianism, Specialist in emerging global powers



---

### Annie Jacobsen on what would happen if North Korea launched a nuclear weapon at the US

- Published: 2024-07-12
- Modified: 2024-07-23
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/annie-jacobsen-nuclear-catastrophe-escalation/
- Topics: Civilisational resilience, Communication, Great power conflict, Journalism, Journalist, Nuclear war, Risks from malevolent actors



---

### Carl Shulman on government and society after AGI (Part 2)

- Published: 2024-07-05
- Modified: 2025-04-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/carl-shulman-society-agi/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Decision making, Epistemics, Forecasting, Forecasting research &amp; implementation, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Global public goods, Improving values, Institutional decision making, Reasoning well, Risks from malevolent actors, Risks of stable totalitarianism, Science policy &amp; infrastructure



---

### Carl Shulman on the economy and national security after AGI (Part 1)

- Published: 2024-06-27
- Modified: 2024-11-28
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/carl-shulman-economy-agi/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Artificial sentience, Civilisational resilience, Economic growth, Economics, Forecasting research &amp; implementation, History, Institutional decision making, Long-term AI policy



---

### Eric Schwitzgebel on whether the US is conscious

- Published: 2024-06-07
- Modified: 2024-06-24
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/eric-schwitzgebel-world-weird-us-consciousness/
- Topics: Academic Research, Philosophy, Philosophy academia, Reasoning well



---

### Rachel Glennerster on how “market shaping” could help solve climate change, pandemics, and other global problems

- Published: 2024-05-29
- Modified: 2024-09-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/rachel-glennerster-market-shaping-incentives/
- Topics: Academic Research, Biorisk strategy &amp; policy, Catastrophic pandemics, Climate change, Data science, Economic growth, Economics, Economics PhD, Effective climate change interventions, Global Health, Global public goods, Government &amp; policy, Institutional decision making, Research in relevant areas, Science policy &amp; infrastructure



---

### Matt Clancy on whether science is good

- Published: 2024-05-23
- Modified: 2024-06-06
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/matt-clancy-whether-science-is-good/
- Topics: Academic Research, Accidental harm, Artificial Intelligence, Biomedical Research, Biomedical Research, Biorisk strategy &amp; policy, Catastrophic pandemics, Economics, Existential risk, Forecasting, Forecasting research &amp; implementation, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Global priorities research, Grantmaker, Great power conflict, Open Philanthropy, Risks from malevolent actors, Science policy &amp; infrastructure, Scientific research



---

### Zach Weinersmith on how researching his book turned him from a space optimist into a "space bastard"

- Published: 2024-05-14
- Modified: 2024-11-29
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/zach-weinersmith-space-settlement/
- Topics: Art &amp; Entertainment, Civilisational resilience, Communication, Economics, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Great power conflict, Physics, Psychology, Public intellectual, Space governance



---

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

- Published: 2024-05-01
- Modified: 2024-05-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/dean-spears-neonatal-mortality-kangaroo-mother-care/
- Topics: Academic Research, Economics, GiveWell, Global Health, Government &amp; policy, Policy careers



---

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

- Published: 2024-04-18
- Modified: 2024-10-22
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/lewis-bollard-factory-farm-advocacy-gains/
- Topics: Advocacy, Factory Farming, Grantmaker, Moral patients, Open Philanthropy, Volunteering, Wild animal suffering



---

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

- Published: 2024-04-11
- Modified: 2024-05-29
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/zvi-mowshowitz-sleeper-agents-ai-updates/
- Topics: Accidental harm, Anthropic, Artificial Intelligence, Career capital, Communication, DeepMind, Existential risk, Government &amp; policy, Individual reasoning &amp; cognition, Institutional decision making, Long-term AI policy, Machine Intelligence Research Institute, OpenAI, Public intellectual, Reasoning well



---

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

- Published: 2024-03-14
- Modified: 2025-03-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/spencer-greenberg-money-happiness-hype-value/
- Topics: Academic Research, Computer science, Data science, Decision making, Economics, Forecasting research &amp; implementation, Found a tech startup, Founder of new projects, Improving values, Individual reasoning &amp; cognition, Machine learning, Psychology, Public intellectual, Reasoning well, Science policy &amp; infrastructure, Statistics, Unconventional advice



---

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

- Published: 2024-03-08
- Modified: 2024-10-22
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/bob-fischer-comparing-animal-welfare-moral-weight/
- Topics: Academic Research, Factory Farming, Global priorities research, Moral patients, Moral philosophy, Moral uncertainty, Philosophy, Philosophy academia, Problem prioritisation, Research into global priorities, Rethink Priorities, Wild animal suffering



---

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

- Published: 2024-03-01
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/laura-deming-ending-ageing/
- Topics: Biomedical Research, Biomedical Research, Ending Ageing, Founder of new projects, Grantmaker



---

### Hugo Mercier on why gullibility and misinformation are overrated

- Published: 2024-02-21
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/hugo-mercier-misinformation-mass-persuasion/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence, False ideas on social media, Individual reasoning &amp; cognition, Institutional decision making, Psychology, Reasoning well, Risks from malevolent actors



---

### Randy Nesse on why evolution left us so vulnerable to depression and anxiety

- Published: 2024-02-12
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/randy-nesse-evolutionary-medicine-psychiatry/
- Topics: Academic Research, Biomedical Research, Medical Researcher, Mental health, Mental health (problem area), Personal fit, Psychology



---

### Emily Oster on what the evidence actually says about pregnancy and parenting

- Published: 2024-02-01
- Modified: 2024-05-15
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/emily-oster-pregnancy-parenting-careers/
- Topics: Academic Research, Being ambitious, Career advice &amp; strategy, Communication, Data science, Economics PhD, Mental health, Now vs. Later, Personal fit, Unconventional advice



---

### Nathan Labenz on recent AI breakthroughs and navigating the growing rift between AI safety and accelerationist camps

- Published: 2024-01-24
- Modified: 2025-03-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/nathan-labenz-ai-breakthroughs-controversies/
- Topics: AI safety technical research, Artificial Intelligence, Communication, Existential risk, False ideas on social media, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Long-term AI policy



---

### Nathan Labenz on the final push for AGI, understanding OpenAI's leadership drama, and red-teaming frontier models

- Published: 2023-12-22
- Modified: 2025-03-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/nathan-labenz-openai-red-team-safety/
- Topics: AI safety technical research, Artificial Intelligence, China-related AI safety &amp; governance, Existential risk, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Institutional decision making, Long-term AI policy, Machine learning, OpenAI



---

### Lucia Coulter on preventing lead poisoning for $1.66 per child

- Published: 2023-12-14
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/lucia-coulter-lead-exposure-elimination-project/
- Topics: Charity Entrepreneurship, Doctor, Founder of new projects, Global Health, Global priorities research, Government &amp; policy, Investigate new problems, Mental health (problem area), Promising interventions, Research into global priorities



---

### Nita Farahany on the neurotechnology already being used to convict criminals and manipulate workers

- Published: 2023-12-07
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/nita-farahany-neurotechnology/
- Topics: Government &amp; policy, Individual reasoning &amp; cognition, Information security, Law, Machine learning, Psychology, Risks from malevolent actors, Risks of stable totalitarianism, Whole brain emulation



---

### Jeff Sebo on digital minds, and how to avoid sleepwalking into a major moral catastrophe

- Published: 2023-11-22
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/jeff-sebo-ethics-digital-minds/
- Topics: Academic Research, Artificial Intelligence, Artificial sentience, Factory Farming, Improving values, Long-term AI policy, Moral patients, Moral philosophy, S-risks, Wild animal suffering



---

### Bryan Caplan on why you should stop reading the news

- Published: 2023-11-17
- Modified: 2025-03-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/bryan-caplan-stop-reading-the-news/
- Topics: Academic Research, Artificial Intelligence, Economics, Journalism, Politics, Public intellectual, Unconventional advice



---

### Alison Young on how top labs have jeopardised public health with repeated biosafety failures

- Published: 2023-11-09
- Modified: 2025-03-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/alison-young-biosafety-lab-leaks/
- Topics: Biorisk strategy &amp; policy, Catastrophic pandemics, COVID-19, Government &amp; policy, Journalism, Journalist



---

### Santosh Harish on how air pollution is responsible for ~12% of global deaths — and how to get that number down

- Published: 2023-11-01
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/santosh-harish-air-pollution/
- Topics: Effective climate change interventions, Global Health, Global priorities research, Global public goods, Government &amp; policy, Grantmaker, Institutional decision making, Open Philanthropy, Philanthropic Advising, Research into global priorities



---

### Paul Niehaus on whether cash transfers cause economic growth, and keeping theft to acceptable levels

- Published: 2023-10-26
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/paul-niehaus-cash-transfers/
- Topics: Economic growth, Economics, Global Health, Promising interventions, Statistics



---

### Ian Morris on whether deep history says we're heading for an intelligence explosion

- Published: 2023-10-23
- Modified: 2025-03-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/ian-morris-deep-history-intelligence-explosion/
- Topics: Academic Research, Artificial Intelligence, Artificial sentience, Forecasting research &amp; implementation, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Historian of large societal trends, History



---

### Seren Kell on the research gaps holding back alternative proteins from mass adoption

- Published: 2023-10-18
- Modified: 2024-10-22
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/seren-kell-alternative-proteins/
- Topics: Effective climate change interventions, Factory Farming, Promising interventions, Scientific research



---

### Tantum Collins on what he’s learned as an AI policy insider at the White House, DeepMind and elsewhere

- Published: 2023-10-12
- Modified: 2025-03-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tantum-collins-ai-policy-insider/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Career advice &amp; strategy, Center for Security and Emerging Technology, China-related AI safety &amp; governance, DeepMind, Existential risk, Government &amp; policy, Long-term AI policy, Party Politics, Party Politics, Policy careers, Politics, Science policy &amp; infrastructure



---

### Anders Sandberg on war in space, whether civilisations age, and the best things possible in our universe

- Published: 2023-10-06
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/anders-sandberg-best-things-possible-in-our-universe/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Existential risk, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Future of Humanity Institute, Moral philosophy, Philosophy, Reasoning well, Space governance, Whole brain emulation



---

### Kevin Esvelt on cults that want to kill everyone, stealth vs wildfire pandemics, and how he felt inventing gene drives

- Published: 2023-10-02
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/kevin-esvelt-stealth-wildfire-pandemics/
- Topics: Biomedical Research, Biorisk strategy &amp; policy, Catastrophic pandemics, COVID-19, Existential risk, Promising interventions, Risks from malevolent actors, Scientific research, Sculpting Evolution Group at the MIT Media Lab



---

### Toby Ord on the perils of maximising the good that you do

- Published: 2023-09-08
- Modified: 2025-03-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/toby-ord-perils-of-maximising-good/
- Topics: About 80,000 Hours, Accidental harm, Artificial Intelligence, Decision making, Earning to Give, Effective Altruism, Epistemics, EtG pros and cons, Moral philosophy, Reasoning well



---

### Mustafa Suleyman on getting Washington and Silicon Valley to tame AI

- Published: 2023-09-01
- Modified: 2025-03-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/mustafa-suleyman-getting-washington-and-silicon-valley-to-tame-ai/
- Topics: AI safety technical research, Artificial Intelligence, DeepMind, Existential risk, Found a tech startup, Government &amp; policy, Long-term AI policy



---

### Michael Webb on whether AI will soon cause job loss, lower incomes, and higher inequality — or the opposite

- Published: 2023-08-23
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/michael-webb-ai-jobs-labour-market/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Career advice &amp; strategy, DeepMind, Economic growth, Economics, Forecasting, Forecasting research &amp; implementation, Government &amp; policy, Historian of large societal trends, Long-term AI policy, Party Politics, Politics



---

### Hannah Ritchie on why it makes sense to be optimistic about the environment

- Published: 2023-08-14
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/hannah-ritchie-environmental-optimism/
- Topics: Academic Research, Climate change, Communication, Data science, Effective climate change interventions, Global Health, Global public goods, Our World in Data, Public intellectual, Research in relevant areas, Research into global priorities, Scientific research, Statistics



---

### Jan Leike on OpenAI's massive push to make superintelligence safe in 4 years or less

- Published: 2023-08-07
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/jan-leike-superalignment/
- Topics: AI safety technical research, Artificial Intelligence, Long-term AI policy, OpenAI



---

### Holden Karnofsky on how AIs might take over even if they’re no smarter than humans, and his 4-part playbook for AI risk

- Published: 2023-07-31
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/holden-karnofsky-how-ai-could-take-over-the-world/
- Topics: AI safety technical research, Anthropic, Artificial Intelligence, Existential risk, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Grantmaker, Long-term AI policy, Machine learning, Moral philosophy, Non-technical roles in leading AI labs, Open Philanthropy



---

### Ezra Klein on existential risk from AI and what DC could do about it

- Published: 2023-07-24
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/ezra-klein-ai-and-dc/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Career capital, Civil Service, Government &amp; policy, Journalism, Journalist, Long-term AI policy, Party Politics, Party Politics, Politics, Public intellectual



---

### Markus Anderljung on how to regulate cutting-edge AI models

- Published: 2023-07-10
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/markus-anderljung-regulating-cutting-edge-ai/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Centre for the Governance of AI, China-related AI safety &amp; governance, Government &amp; policy, Long-term AI policy, Non-technical roles in leading AI labs, Policy careers, Science policy &amp; infrastructure, Think tank research



---

### Lennart Heim on the compute governance era and what has to come after

- Published: 2023-06-22
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/lennart-heim-compute-governance/
- Topics: AI safety technical research, Centre for the Governance of AI, China-Western coordination, Computer science, Computer Science PhD, Expert in AI hardware, Government &amp; policy, Information security, Long-term AI policy, Machine learning, Machine learning PhD, Non-technical roles in leading AI labs



---

### Rohin Shah on DeepMind and trying to fairly hear out both AI doomers and doubters

- Published: 2023-06-09
- Modified: 2025-03-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/rohin-shah-deepmind-doomers-and-doubters/
- Topics: AI safety technical research, Artificial Intelligence, Communication, DeepMind, Long-term AI policy, Machine learning, Non-technical roles in leading AI labs



---

### Elie Hassenfeld on two big-picture critiques of GiveWell's approach, and six lessons from their recent work

- Published: 2023-06-02
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/elie-hassenfeld-givewell-critiques-and-lessons/
- Topics: Data science, Economics, GiveWell, Global Health, Institutional decision making, Moral philosophy, Organisation-building at effective nonprofits, Promising interventions, Statistics



---

### Joe Carlsmith on navigating serious philosophical confusion

- Published: 2023-05-19
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/joe-carlsmith-navigating-serious-philosophical-confusion/
- Topics: Academic Research, Epistemics, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Moral patients, Moral philosophy, Moral uncertainty, Philosophy



---

### Ajeya Cotra on accidentally teaching AI models to deceive us

- Published: 2023-05-12
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/ajeya-cotra-accidentally-teaching-ai-to-deceive-us/
- Topics: AI safety technical research, Artificial Intelligence, Open Philanthropy



---

### Tom Davidson on how quickly AI could transform the world

- Published: 2023-05-05
- Modified: 2024-12-18
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tom-davidson-how-quickly-ai-could-transform-the-world/
- Topics: AI safety technical research, Artificial Intelligence, Economic growth, Economics, Forecasting research &amp; implementation, Long-term AI policy, Open Philanthropy, Research in relevant areas



---

### Tim LeBon on how altruistic perfectionism is self-defeating

- Published: 2023-04-12
- Modified: 2025-03-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tim-lebon-self-defeating-altruistic-perfectionism/
- Topics: Mental health, Psychology



---

### Johannes Ackva on unfashionable climate interventions that work, and fashionable ones that don't

- Published: 2023-04-03
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/johannes-ackva-unfashionable-climate-interventions/
- Topics: Climate change, Effective climate change interventions, Founders Pledge, Geoengineering, Grantmaker



---

### Spencer Greenberg on stopping valueless papers from getting into top journals

- Published: 2023-03-24
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/spencer-greenberg-stopping-valueless-papers/
- Topics: Academic Research, Data science, Economics, Founder of new projects, Politics, Psychology, Science policy &amp; infrastructure, Statistics, Unconventional advice



---

### Robert Long on why large language models like GPT (probably) aren't conscious

- Published: 2023-03-14
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/robert-long-artificial-sentience/
- Topics: Academic Research, AI safety technical research, Artificial Intelligence, Artificial sentience, Center for AI Safety, Existential risk, Long-term AI policy, Philosophy, S-risks, Whole brain emulation



---

### Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasn't inevitable

- Published: 2023-02-11
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/christopher-brown-slavery-abolition/
- Topics: Academic Research, Historian of large societal trends, History, Moral philosophy



---

### Athena Aktipis on why cancer is actually one of the fundamental phenomena in our universe

- Published: 2023-01-25
- Modified: 2025-03-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/athena-aktipis-cancer-cooperation-apocalypse/
- Topics: Academic Research, Biomedical Research, Existential risk



---

### Jeffrey Lewis on the most common misconceptions about nuclear weapons

- Published: 2022-12-29
- Modified: 2025-03-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/jeffrey-lewis-common-misconceptions-about-nuclear-weapons/
- Topics: Academic Research, Existential risk, Government &amp; policy, Nuclear war, Research into global priorities



---

### John McWhorter on key lessons from linguistics, the virtue of creoles, and language extinction

- Published: 2022-12-20
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/john-mcwhorter-language-extinction/
- Topics: Communication, History, Journalism, OpenAI, Unconventional advice



---

### Richard Ngo on large language models, OpenAI, and striving to make the future go well

- Published: 2022-12-13
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/richard-ngo-large-language-models/
- Topics: AI safety technical research, Artificial Intelligence, Long-term AI policy, Non-technical roles in leading AI labs, OpenAI



---

### Bear Braumoeller on the case that war isn't in decline

- Published: 2022-11-08
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/bear-braumoeller-decline-of-war/
- Topics: Academic Research, Data science, Great power conflict, Nuclear war, Research in relevant areas



---

### Alan Hájek on puzzles and paradoxes in probability and expected value

- Published: 2022-10-28
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/alan-hajek-probability-expected-value/
- Topics: Academic Research, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Institutional decision making, Moral philosophy, Research in relevant areas



---

### Sharon Hewitt Rawlette on why pleasure and pain are the only things that intrinsically matter

- Published: 2022-09-30
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/sharon-hewitt-rawlette-hedonistic-utilitarianism/
- Topics: Moral philosophy, Philosophy



---

### Andreas Mogensen on whether effective altruism is just for consequentialists

- Published: 2022-09-08
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/andreas-mogensen-deontology-and-effective-altruism/
- Topics: Academic Research, Effective Altruism, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Global Priorities Institute, Global priorities research, Moral philosophy, Research into global priorities



---

### Will MacAskill on what we owe the future

- Published: 2022-08-15
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/will-macaskill-what-we-owe-the-future/
- Topics: Academic Research, Effective Altruism, Existential risk, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Global priorities research, Moral philosophy, Reasoning well



---

### Samuel Charap on key lessons from five months of war in Ukraine

- Published: 2022-08-08
- Modified: 2025-03-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/samuel-charap-key-lessons-from-five-months-of-war-in-ukraine/
- Topics: Government &amp; policy, Great power conflict, Institutional decision making, Nuclear war, Politics



---

### Ian Morris on what big-picture history teaches us

- Published: 2022-07-22
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/ian-morris-big-picture-history/
- Topics: Academic Research, Great power conflict, Historian of large societal trends, History, Politics



---

### Max Tegmark on how a 'put-up-or-shut-up' resolution led him to work on AI and algorithmic news selection

- Published: 2022-07-01
- Modified: 2025-03-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/max-tegmark-ai-and-algorithmic-news-selection/
- Topics: Advocacy, AI safety technical research, Artificial Intelligence, Communication, Effective Altruism, Existential risk, Institutional decision making, Journalism, Long-term AI policy, Physics



---

### Nova DasSarma on why information security may be critical to the safe development of AI systems

- Published: 2022-06-14
- Modified: 2025-03-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/nova-dassarma-information-security-and-ai-systems/
- Topics: AI safety technical research, Anthropic, Artificial Intelligence, Computer science, Existential risk, Information security, Machine learning, Unconventional advice



---

### Lewis Dartnell on getting humanity to bounce back faster in a post-apocalyptic world

- Published: 2022-06-03
- Modified: 2025-03-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/lewis-dartnell-getting-humanity-to-bounce-back-faster/
- Topics: Academic Research, Catastrophic pandemics, Civilisational resilience, Existential risk, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Nuclear war



---

### Will MacAskill on balancing frugality with ambition, whether you need longtermism, and mental health under pressure

- Published: 2022-05-23
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/will-macaskill-ambition-longtermism-mental-health/
- Topics: Academic Research, Advocacy, Being ambitious, Building effective altruism, Effective Altruism, Existential risk, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Global priorities research, Mental health, Moral philosophy, Reasoning well, Research into global priorities



---

### Dr James Tibenderana on the state of the art in malaria control and elimination

- Published: 2022-05-09
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/james-tibenderana-malaria-control-and-elimination/
- Topics: Academic Research, Doctor, Fundraising, Global Health, Medical Researcher, Medicine, Organisation-building at effective nonprofits, Science policy &amp; infrastructure



---

### Chris Blattman on the five reasons wars happen

- Published: 2022-04-28
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/chris-blattman-five-reasons-wars-happen/
- Topics: Academic Research, Decision making, Government &amp; policy, Great power conflict, History, Party Politics, Politics, Psychology



---

### Bryan Caplan on whether lazy parenting is OK, what really helps workers, and betting on beliefs

- Published: 2022-04-05
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/bryan-caplan-parenting-workers-betting/
- Topics: Economics, Effective Altruism, Harmful restrictions on migration, Institutional decision making, Moral philosophy, Philosophy, Unconventional advice



---

### Joan Rohlfing on how to avoid catastrophic nuclear blunders

- Published: 2022-03-29
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/joan-rohlfing-avoiding-catastrophic-nuclear-blunders/
- Topics: Advocacy, Civilisational resilience, Existential risk, Government &amp; policy, Great power conflict, Nuclear Threat Initiative, Nuclear war, Party Politics, Politics



---

### Karen Levy on fads and misaligned incentives in global development, and scaling deworming to reach hundreds of millions

- Published: 2022-03-21
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/karen-levy-misaligned-incentives-in-global-development/
- Topics: Consulting, Data science, Founder of new projects, Fundraising, GiveWell, Global Health, Institutional decision making, Philanthropic Advising, Politics



---

### Samuel Charap on why Putin invaded Ukraine, the risk of escalation, and how to prevent disaster

- Published: 2022-03-14
- Modified: 2025-03-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/samuel-charap-why-putin-invaded-ukraine/
- Topics: Government &amp; policy, Great power conflict, Institutional decision making, Nuclear war, Politics



---

### Michelle Hutchinson & Habiba Islam on balancing competing priorities and other themes from our 1-on-1 careers advising

- Published: 2022-03-09
- Modified: 2025-03-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/michelle-hutchinson-habiba-islam-themes-from-careers-advising/
- Topics: About 80,000 Hours, Career advice &amp; strategy, Career capital, Careers, Effective Altruism, Exploration, Future generations &amp; longtermism, How to get a job, Personal fit, Problem prioritisation



---

### Matthew Yglesias on avoiding the pundit's fallacy and how much military intervention can be used for good

- Published: 2022-02-16
- Modified: 2025-03-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/matthew-yglesias-pundits-fallacy-military-intervention/
- Topics: Advocacy, Catastrophic pandemics, Communication, Effective Altruism, Existential risk, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Great power conflict, Journalism, Journalist, Moral philosophy, Nuclear war, Party Politics, Politics



---

### Audrey Tang on what we can learn from Taiwan’s experiments with how to do democracy

- Published: 2022-02-02
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/audrey-tang-what-we-can-learn-from-taiwan/
- Topics: Advocacy, Civil Service, Computer science, Computer Science PhD, Global public goods, Government &amp; policy, Party Politics, Party Politics, Politics, Software Engineering, Specialist in emerging global powers, Voting reform



---

### Andrew Yang on our very long-term future, and other topics most politicians won’t touch

- Published: 2021-12-20
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/andrew-yang-very-long-term-future/
- Topics: Advocacy, Economics, Effective Altruism, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Government &amp; policy, Journalism, Party Politics, Party Politics, Politics



---

### Jaime Yassif on safeguarding bioscience to prevent catastrophic lab accidents and bioweapons development

- Published: 2021-12-13
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/jaime-yassif-safeguarding-bioscience/
- Topics: Biorisk strategy &amp; policy, Career advice &amp; strategy, Catastrophic pandemics, COVID-19, Existential risk, Government &amp; policy, Nuclear Threat Initiative, Politics, Research in relevant areas, Risks from malevolent actors, Science policy &amp; infrastructure



---

### David Denkenberger on using paper mills and seaweed to feed everyone in a catastrophe, ft Sahil Shah

- Published: 2021-11-29
- Modified: 2025-03-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/david-denkenberger-sahil-shah-using-paper-mills-and-seaweed-in-catastrophes/
- Topics: Academic Research, Civilisational resilience, Climate change, Data science, Economics, Effective climate change interventions, Engineering, Existential risk, Founder of new projects, Nuclear war, Unconventional advice



---

### Luisa Rodriguez on why global catastrophes seem unlikely to kill us all

- Published: 2021-11-19
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/luisa-rodriguez-why-global-catastrophes-seem-unlikely-to-kill-us-all/
- Topics: Academic Research, Catastrophic pandemics, Civilisational resilience, Climate change, Effective Altruism, Existential risk, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Mental health, Nuclear war, Science policy &amp; infrastructure, Unconventional advice



---

### David Wallace on the many-worlds theory of quantum mechanics and its implications

- Published: 2021-11-12
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/david-wallace-many-worlds-theory-of-quantum-mechanics/
- Topics: Academic Research, Philosophy, Physics, Research in relevant areas



---

### Maha Rehman on working with governments to rapidly deliver masks to millions of people

- Published: 2021-10-22
- Modified: 2025-03-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/maha-rehman-governments-masks-millions/
- Topics: Biomedical Research, Biomedical Research, Biorisk strategy &amp; policy, Catastrophic pandemics, COVID-19, Data science, Global Health, Government &amp; policy, Promising interventions



---

### Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

- Published: 2021-10-18
- Modified: 2025-03-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/varsha-venugopal-vaccinations-children-india/
- Topics: Charity Entrepreneurship, Founder of new projects, Global Health, J-PAL, Organisation-building at effective nonprofits, Promising interventions, Psychology



---

### Carl Shulman on the common-sense case for existential risk work and its practical implications

- Published: 2021-10-05
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/carl-shulman-common-sense-case-existential-risks/
- Topics: Biorisk strategy &amp; policy, Catastrophic pandemics, Climate change, COVID-19, Effective Altruism, Existential risk, Forecasting research &amp; implementation, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Global priorities research, Grantmaker, Moral philosophy, Nuclear war, Open Philanthropy, Philanthropic Advising, Research in relevant areas



---

### Mushtaq Khan on using institutional economics to predict effective government reforms

- Published: 2021-09-10
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/mushtaq-khan-institutional-economics/
- Topics: Academic Research, Economic growth, Economics, Economics PhD, Government &amp; policy, Institutional decision making, Research in relevant areas



---

### Holden Karnofsky on building aptitudes and kicking ass

- Published: 2021-08-26
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/holden-karnofsky-building-aptitudes-kicking-ass/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy, Career capital, COVID-19, Effective Altruism, Founder of new projects, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Grantmaker, Open Philanthropy, Unconventional advice



---

### Holden Karnofsky on the most important century

- Published: 2021-08-19
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/holden-karnofsky-most-important-century/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Effective Altruism, Foundation Program Management, Future generations &amp; longtermism, GiveWell, Grantmaker, Open Philanthropy, Philanthropic Advising, Philosophy, Research in relevant areas



---

### Chris Olah on working at top AI labs without an undergrad degree

- Published: 2021-08-11
- Modified: 2025-03-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/chris-olah-unconventional-career-path/
- Topics: AI safety technical research, Anthropic, Artificial Intelligence, Career capital, Graduate school, How to get a job, OpenAI, Personal fit, PhDs, Promising interventions, Research in relevant areas, Unconventional advice



---

### Chris Olah on what the hell is going on inside neural networks

- Published: 2021-08-04
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/chris-olah-interpretability-research/
- Topics: AI safety technical research, Anthropic, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science PhD, OpenAI, Promising interventions, Research in relevant areas



---

### Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work

- Published: 2021-07-28
- Modified: 2025-03-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/cal-newport-industrial-revolution-for-office-work/
- Topics: Academic Research, Advice for undergraduates, Career capital, Community &amp; coordination, Consulting, Decision making, Doing good in your current job, Found a tech startup, How to get a job, Unconventional advice



---

### Alexander Berger on improving global health and wellbeing in clear and direct ways

- Published: 2021-07-12
- Modified: 2024-12-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/alexander-berger-improving-global-health-wellbeing-clear-direct-ways/
- Topics: Foundation Program Management, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Global Health, Global priorities research, Grantmaker, Moral philosophy, Open Philanthropy



---

### Dr Pardis Sabeti on the Sentinel system for detecting and stopping pandemics

- Published: 2021-06-29
- Modified: 2025-03-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/pardis-sabeti-sentinel/
- Topics: Academic Research, Biorisk strategy &amp; policy, Catastrophic pandemics, COVID-19, Existential risk, Promising interventions



---

### Max Roser on building the world's first great source of COVID-19 data at Our World in Data

- Published: 2021-06-21
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/max-roser-our-world-in-data/
- Topics: Academic Research, Biorisk strategy &amp; policy, Catastrophic pandemics, Communication, COVID-19, Data science, Existential risk, Our World in Data, Research in relevant areas



---

### Tom Moynihan on why prior generations missed some of the biggest priorities of all

- Published: 2021-06-11
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tom-moynihan-prior-generations/
- Topics: Academic Research, Existential risk, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Historian of large societal trends, History, Philosophy



---

### Robert Wright on using cognitive empathy to save the world

- Published: 2021-05-27
- Modified: 2025-03-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/robert-wright-cognitive-empathy/
- Topics: Building effective altruism, Effective Altruism, Existential risk, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Institutional decision making, Psychology, Reasoning well



---

### Having a successful career with depression, anxiety, and imposter syndrome

- Published: 2021-05-19
- Modified: 2024-09-28
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/depression-anxiety-imposter-syndrome/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy, Effective Altruism, Mental health, Open Philanthropy, Personal fit, Unconventional advice



---

### Leah Garcés on turning adversaries into allies to change the chicken industry

- Published: 2021-05-13
- Modified: 2024-10-28
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/leah-garces-chicken-industry/
- Topics: Advocacy, Communication, Factory Farming, Promising interventions



---

### Christian Tarsney on future bias and a possible solution to moral fanaticism

- Published: 2021-05-05
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/christian-tarsney-future-bias-fanaticism/
- Topics: Academic Research, Effective Altruism, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Global priorities research, Moral philosophy, Philosophy, Reasoning well, Research into global priorities



---

### Mike Berkowitz on keeping the U.S. a liberal democratic country

- Published: 2021-04-20
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/mike-berkowitz-preserving-us-democracy/
- Topics: Advocacy, Donating effectively, Government &amp; policy, Journalism, Politics



---

### Nina Schick on disinformation and the rise of synthetic media

- Published: 2021-04-06
- Modified: 2025-03-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/nina-schick-disinformation-synthetic-media/
- Topics: Advocacy, Artificial Intelligence, Communication, False ideas on social media, Journalism, Politics, Risks from malevolent actors



---

### Kelly Wanser on whether to deliberately intervene in the climate

- Published: 2021-03-26
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/kelly-wanser-climate-interventions/
- Topics: Academic Research, Climate change, Effective climate change interventions, Geoengineering, Scientific research



---

### Ezra Klein on aligning journalism, politics, and what matters most

- Published: 2021-03-20
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/ezra-klein-journalism-most-important-topics/
- Topics: Building effective altruism, Catastrophic pandemics, COVID-19, Effective Altruism, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Journalism, Journalist, Politics



---

### Andy Weber on rendering bioweapons obsolete and ending the new nuclear arms race

- Published: 2021-03-12
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/andy-weber-rendering-bioweapons-obsolete/
- Topics: Biorisk strategy &amp; policy, Catastrophic pandemics, Civil Service, COVID-19, Existential risk, Government &amp; policy, Nuclear war, Promising interventions



---

### Brian Christian on the alignment problem

- Published: 2021-03-05
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/brian-christian-the-alignment-problem/
- Topics: AI safety technical research, Artificial Intelligence, Communication, Computer Science PhD, Data science, Journalism, Long-term AI policy, Machine learning, Most pressing problems, Software Engineering, World problems



---

### Lewis Bollard on big wins against factory farming and how they happened

- Published: 2021-02-15
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/lewis-bollard-big-wins-against-factory-farming/
- Topics: Factory Farming, Grantmaker, Open Philanthropy, Promising interventions



---

### Ajeya Cotra on worldview diversification and how big the future could be

- Published: 2021-01-19
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/ajeya-cotra-worldview-diversification/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Donating effectively, Effective Altruism, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Global priorities research, Grantmaker, Moral philosophy, Open Philanthropy, Problem prioritisation, Reasoning well, Research in relevant areas, Research into global priorities



---

### Owen Cotton-Barratt on epistemic systems & layers of defence against potential global catastrophes

- Published: 2020-12-16
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/owen-cotton-barratt-epistemic-systems/
- Topics: Academic Research, Career advice &amp; strategy, Effective Altruism, Epistemics, Existential risk, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Future of Humanity Institute, Global priorities research, Moral philosophy, Research in relevant areas



---

### Tristan Harris on the need to change the incentives of social media companies

- Published: 2020-12-03
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tristan-harris-changing-incentives-social-media/
- Topics: Advocacy, False ideas on social media, Global public goods, Government &amp; policy, Institutional decision making, Moral philosophy, Politics, Psychology



---

### Benjamin Todd on what the effective altruism community most needs (& how to analyse replaceability)

- Published: 2020-11-12
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/ben-todd-on-what-effective-altruism-most-needs/
- Topics: Building effective altruism, Effective Altruism, Most pressing problems, Replaceability, Top-recommended careers



---

### Russ Roberts on whether it's more effective to help strangers, or people you know

- Published: 2020-11-03
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/russ-roberts-effective-altruism-empirical-research-utilitarianism/
- Topics: Academic Research, Building effective altruism, Decision making, Economics, Effective Altruism, Moral philosophy, Reasoning well, Science policy &amp; infrastructure, Scientific research



---

### Hilary Greaves on Pascal's mugging, strong longtermism, and whether existing can be good for us

- Published: 2020-10-21
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/hilary-greaves-comparing-existence-and-non-existence/
- Topics: Academic Research, Effective Altruism, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Global Priorities Institute, Global priorities research, Moral philosophy, Moral uncertainty, Research into global priorities



---

### Benjamin Todd on the core of effective altruism and how to argue for it

- Published: 2020-09-21
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/ben-todd-on-the-core-of-effective-altruism/
- Topics: Advocacy, Building effective altruism, Donating effectively, Earning to Give, Effective Altruism, Global priorities research, Institutional decision making



---

### Benjamin Todd on varieties of longtermism and things 80,000 Hours might be getting wrong

- Published: 2020-09-01
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/ben-todd-on-varieties-of-longtermism/
- Topics: About 80,000 Hours, Building effective altruism, Career capital, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Global priorities research, Moral philosophy, Personal fit, Unconventional advice



---

### Mark Lynas on climate change, societal collapse & nuclear energy

- Published: 2020-08-20
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/mark-lynas-climate-change-nuclear-energy/
- Topics: Advocacy, Climate change, Effective climate change interventions, Existential risk



---

### Shruti Rajagopalan on what India did to stop COVID-19 and how well it worked

- Published: 2020-08-13
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/shruti-rajagopalan-covid19-and-india/
- Topics: Academic Research, Biorisk strategy &amp; policy, Catastrophic pandemics, COVID-19, Economics, Economics PhD, Global Health, Government &amp; policy, Law, Politics



---

### Jennifer Doleac on ways to prevent crime other than police and prisons

- Published: 2020-07-31
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/jennifer-doleac-reforming-police-preventing-crime/
- Topics: Academic Research, Economics, Government &amp; policy, Gun Control, Institutional decision making, Law, Lawyer, Mental health (problem area), Promising interventions, Psychology



---

### James Forman Jr on reducing the cruelty of the US criminal legal system

- Published: 2020-07-27
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/james-forman-jr-cruelty-in-the-us-criminal-legal-system/
- Topics: Academic Research, Advocacy, Government &amp; policy, Gun Control, History, Law, Lawyer



---

### Ben Garfinkel on scrutinising classic AI risk arguments

- Published: 2020-07-09
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/ben-garfinkel-classic-ai-risk-arguments/
- Topics: AI safety technical research, Artificial Intelligence, Effective Altruism, Existential risk, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Future of Humanity Institute, Long-term AI policy, Moral philosophy, Reasoning well



---

### Stuart Russell on the flaws that make today's AI architecture unsafe, and a new approach that could fix them

- Published: 2020-06-22
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/stuart-russell-human-compatible-ai/
- Topics: AI safety technical research, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science PhD, Long-term AI policy



---

### A.J. Jacobs on radical honesty, following the whole Bible, and reframing global problems as puzzles

- Published: 2020-06-01
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/aj-jacobs-on-writing-reframing-problems-as-puzzles/
- Topics: Advocacy, Building effective altruism, Communication, Effective Altruism, Journalism, Journalist, Moral philosophy, Unconventional advice



---

### Danny Hernandez on forecasting and the drivers of AI progress

- Published: 2020-05-22
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/danny-hernandez-forecasting-ai-progress/
- Topics: AI safety technical research, Artificial Intelligence, Decision making, Expert in AI hardware, Forecasting research &amp; implementation, Institutional decision making, Long-term AI policy, OpenAI



---

### Marc Lipsitch on whether we're winning or losing against COVID-19

- Published: 2020-05-18
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/marc-lipsitch-winning-or-losing-against-covid19-and-epidemiology/
- Topics: Academic Research, Biorisk strategy &amp; policy, Catastrophic pandemics, COVID-19, Government &amp; policy, Reasoning well



---

### Tara Kirk Sell on COVID-19 misinformation, who's done well and badly, and what we should reopen first

- Published: 2020-05-08
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tara-kirk-sell-covid-19-misinformation-performance-reopen/
- Topics: Biomedical Research, Biomedical Research, Biorisk strategy &amp; policy, Catastrophic pandemics, Communication, COVID-19, False ideas on social media, Government &amp; policy, Journalism



---

### Michelle Hutchinson on what people most often ask 80,000 Hours

- Published: 2020-04-28
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/michelle-hutchinson-giving-career-advice/
- Topics: About 80,000 Hours, Being ambitious, Career advice &amp; strategy, Career planning, How to get a job, Personal fit, Risk, Top-recommended careers



---

### Dr Greg Lewis on COVID-19 and reducing global catastrophic biological risks

- Published: 2020-04-17
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/greg-lewis-covid-19-global-catastrophic-biological-risks/
- Topics: Academic Research, Biomedical Research, Biorisk strategy &amp; policy, Catastrophic pandemics, COVID-19, Future of Humanity Institute, Medicine



---

### Emergency episode: Rob & Howie on the menace of COVID-19, and what both governments & individuals might be able to do to help

- Published: 2020-03-19
- Modified: 2024-04-14
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/rob-howie-coronavirus-crisis/
- Topics: Biorisk strategy &amp; policy, Catastrophic pandemics, COVID-19



---

### Phil Trammell on how becoming a 'patient philanthropist' might allow you to do far more good

- Published: 2020-03-17
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/phil-trammell-patient-philanthropy/
- Topics: Building effective altruism, Donating effectively, Earning to Give, Effective Altruism, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Moral philosophy, Now vs. Later, Philanthropic Advising, Reasoning well, Unconventional advice



---

### Toby Ord on the precipice and humanity's potential futures

- Published: 2020-03-07
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/toby-ord-the-precipice-existential-risk-future-humanity/
- Topics: Academic Research, Artificial Intelligence, Catastrophic pandemics, Climate change, Existential risk, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Global priorities research, Moral philosophy, Most pressing problems, Nuclear war, Research into global priorities, Scientific research



---

### Benjamin Todd on the key ideas of 80,000 Hours

- Published: 2020-03-03
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/ben-todd-key-ideas-of-80000hours/
- Topics: About 80,000 Hours, Building effective altruism, Careers, Existential risk, Foundations, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Top-recommended careers



---

### Bonus episode: Arden & Rob on demandingness, work-life balance and injustice

- Published: 2020-02-25
- Modified: 2024-12-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/arden-and-rob-on-demandingness/
- Topics: Careers, Effective Altruism, Mental health, Moral philosophy



---

### Dr Cassidy Nelson on the twelve best ways to stop the next pandemic (and limit COVID-19)

> Dr Cassidy Nelson, a medical doctor and research scholar at Oxford University, explains 12 policies her research group says are urgently required.

- Published: 2020-02-14
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/cassidy-nelson-12-ways-to-stop-pandemics/
- Topics: Biomedical Research, Biomedical Research, Biorisk strategy &amp; policy, Catastrophic pandemics, COVID-19, Doctor, Existential risk, Scientific research



---

### Jeff Ding on China, its AI dream, and what we get wrong about both

- Published: 2020-02-06
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/jeffrey-ding-china-ai-dream/
- Topics: AI safety technical research, Artificial Intelligence, China-related AI safety &amp; governance, China-Western coordination, Existential risk, Long-term AI policy



---

### Bonus episode: What we do and don’t know about the 2019-nCoV coronavirus

- Published: 2020-02-03
- Modified: 2024-12-03
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/howie-rob-coronavirus-february-3rd/
- Topics: Biomedical Research, Biorisk strategy &amp; policy, COVID-19, Medicine



---

### Will MacAskill on the moral case against ever leaving the house, whether now is the hinge of history, and the culture of effective altruism

- Published: 2020-01-24
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/will-macaskill-paralysis-and-hinge-of-history/
- Topics: Academic Research, Building effective altruism, Effective Altruism, Existential risk, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Moral philosophy



---

### David Chalmers on the nature and ethics of consciousness

- Published: 2019-12-16
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/david-chalmers-nature-ethics-consciousness/
- Topics: Academic Research, AI safety technical research, Artificial sentience, Existential risk, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Graduate school, Moral patients, Moral philosophy, Philosophy, Philosophy academia, Research into global priorities



---

### Peter Singer on being provocative, EA, how his moral views have changed, & rescuing children drowning in ponds

- Published: 2019-12-05
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/peter-singer-advocacy-and-the-life-you-can-save/
- Topics: Academic Research, Advocacy, Building effective altruism, Career advice &amp; strategy, Effective Altruism, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Moral philosophy, Moral uncertainty



---

### Ambassador Bonnie Jenkins on 8 years of combating WMD terrorism

- Published: 2019-11-19
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/ambassador-bonnie-jenkins-peace-arms-control/
- Topics: Biorisk strategy &amp; policy, Catastrophic pandemics, Existential risk, Government &amp; policy, Great power conflict, Nuclear war, Policy careers



---

### Bruce Schneier on how insecure electronic voting could break the United States — and surveillance without tyranny

- Published: 2019-10-25
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/bruce-schneier-security-secrets-and-surveillance/
- Topics: Academic Research, AI safety technical research, Catastrophic pandemics, Computer science, Computer Science PhD, Existential risk, False ideas on social media, Government &amp; policy, Great power conflict, Information security, Nuclear war, Risks of stable totalitarianism, Unconventional advice, Voting reform



---

### Rob Wiblin on plastic straws, nicotine, doping, & whether changing the long term is really possible

- Published: 2019-09-25
- Modified: 2024-11-21
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/rob-wiblin-on-many-things/
- Topics: About 80,000 Hours, Climate change, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Global Health, Problem prioritisation, Unconventional advice



---

### Vitalik Buterin on effective altruism, better ways to fund public goods, the blockchain's problems so far, and how it could yet change the world

- Published: 2019-09-03
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/vitalik-buterin-new-ways-to-fund-public-goods/
- Topics: Economic growth, Economics, Effective Altruism, Forecasting research &amp; implementation, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Global public goods, Government &amp; policy, Institutional decision making, Organisation-building at effective nonprofits, Voting reform



---

### Paul Christiano on whether we should leave a helpful message for future civilisations — just in case humanity dies out

- Published: 2019-08-05
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/paul-christiano-a-message-for-the-future/
- Topics: AI safety technical research, Artificial Intelligence, Existential risk, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Long-term AI policy, Machine learning, Moral philosophy, S-risks



---

### Helen Toner on the new 30-person research group in DC investigating how emerging technologies could affect national security

- Published: 2019-07-17
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/helen-toner-on-security-and-emerging-technology/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Center for Security and Emerging Technology, China-related AI safety &amp; governance, Government &amp; policy, Long-term AI policy, Machine learning, Politics, Research into global priorities, Risks of stable totalitarianism



---

### Accurately predicting the future is central to absolutely everything. Phil Tetlock has spent 40 years studying how to do it better.

- Published: 2019-06-28
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/philip-tetlock-forecasting-research/
- Topics: Civil Service, Decision making, Existential risk, Forecasting research &amp; implementation, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Government &amp; policy, Institutional decision making, Psychology, Reasoning well



---

### Cass Sunstein on how social change happens, and why it's so often abrupt & unpredictable

> Professor Cass R. Sunstein, legal scholar and best-selling author of Nudge, discusses his recent book How Change Happens on the 80,000 Hours podcast.

- Published: 2019-06-17
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/cass-sunstein-how-change-happens/
- Topics: Advocacy, Building effective altruism, Doing good in your current job, Factory Farming, Journalist, Psychology, Unconventional advice



---

### Pushmeet Kohli on DeepMind's plan to make AI systems robust & reliable, why it's a core issue in AI design, and how to succeed at AI research

- Published: 2019-06-03
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/pushmeet-kohli-deepmind-safety-research/
- Topics: AI safety technical research, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science PhD, Data science, DeepMind, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Long-term AI policy, Machine learning



---

### Tom Kalil on how to have a big impact in government & huge organisations, based on 16 years' experience in the White House

- Published: 2019-04-23
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tom-kalil-government-careers/
- Topics: Career advice &amp; strategy, Civil Service, Existential risk, Government &amp; policy, Long-term AI policy, Science policy &amp; infrastructure



---

### Animals in the wild often suffer a great deal. We ask Persis Eskander what — if anything — should we do about that

- Published: 2019-04-15
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/persis-eskander-wild-animal-welfare/
- Topics: Academic Research, Founder of new projects, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Moral patients, Moral philosophy, Open Philanthropy, Research into global priorities, Unconventional advice, Wild animal suffering



---

### Mark Lutter on trying to end poverty by founding well-governed 'charter' cities, ft Tamara Winter

- Published: 2019-03-31
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/lutter-and-winter-chater-cities-innovative-governance/
- Topics: Charter cities, China-Western coordination, Economic growth, Founder of new projects, Government &amp; policy



---

### Askell, Brundage & Clark on whether policy has a hope of keeping up with AI advances

> OpenAI’s Dactyl can manipulate objects; OpenAI Five can defeat humans at Dota 2. Amazingly, they both sprang from the same general-purpose reinforcement learning algorithm.

- Published: 2019-03-19
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/openai-askell-brundage-clark-latest-in-ai-policy-and-strategy/
- Topics: Accidental harm, AI safety technical research, Artificial Intelligence, Existential risk, Government &amp; policy, Long-term AI policy, OpenAI, Politics



---

### Kelsey Piper on whether journalists have room to write about important things

- Published: 2019-02-27
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/kelsey-piper-important-advocacy-in-journalism/
- Topics: Advocacy, Building effective altruism, Communication, False ideas on social media, Journalism



---

### Glen Weyl on radical institutional reforms that make capitalism & democracy work better, and how to get them

- Published: 2019-02-08
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/glen-weyl-radically-reforming-capitalism-and-democracy/
- Topics: Economics, Effective Altruism, Global public goods, Harmful restrictions on migration, Institutional decision making, Moral philosophy, Politics, Reasoning well, Voting reform



---

### Martin Gurri on the revolt of the public & crisis of authority in the information age

> Politics in rich countries seems to be going nuts. What's the explanation? Rising inequality? The decline of manufacturing jobs? Excessive immigration?

- Published: 2019-01-29
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/martin-gurri-revolt-of-the-public/
- Topics: Civil Service, False ideas on social media, Government &amp; policy, Institutional decision making, Journalism, Party Politics, Politics, Risks of stable totalitarianism



---

### We could feed all eight billion people through a nuclear winter. David Denkenberger is working to make it practical.

- Published: 2018-12-27
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/david-denkenberger-allfed-and-feeding-everyone-no-matter-what/
- Topics: Academic Research, Civilisational resilience, Engineering, Existential risk, Founder of new projects, Nuclear war, S-risks



---

### Rachel Glennerster on a year's worth of education for under a dollar and other 'best buys' in development

- Published: 2018-12-20
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/rachel-glennerster-best-buys-in-international-development/
- Topics: Academic Research, Charter cities, Data science, Economic growth, Economics, Education, Founder of new projects, Global Health, J-PAL, Promising interventions, Reasoning well



---

### Brian Christian on computer science algorithms that tackle fundamental and universal problems — and whether they can help us live better in practice

- Published: 2018-11-22
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/brian-christian-algorithms-to-live-by/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Computer science, Decision making, Economics, Forecasting research &amp; implementation, Individual reasoning &amp; cognition, Institutional decision making, Reasoning well, Unconventional advice



---

### PhD or programming? Fast paths into aligning AI as a machine learning engineer, according to ML engineers Catherine Olsson & Daniel Ziegler

- Published: 2018-11-02
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/olsson-and-ziegler-ml-engineering-and-safety/
- Topics: AI safety technical research, Artificial Intelligence, Career advice &amp; strategy, Careers to build career capital, Computer science, Graduate school, How to get a job, Machine learning, Machine learning PhD, OpenAI, PhDs, Research in relevant areas, Software Engineering



---

### Philosopher Hilary Greaves on moral cluelessness, population ethics, probability within a multiverse, & harnessing the brainpower of academia to tackle the most important research questions

- Published: 2018-10-23
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/hilary-greaves-global-priorities-institute/
- Topics: Academic Research, Building effective altruism, Effective Altruism, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Global Priorities Institute, Global priorities research, Moral patients, Moral philosophy, Moral uncertainty, Philosophy, Philosophy academia, Reasoning well, Research in relevant areas, Research into global priorities



---

### Economist Tyler Cowen says our overwhelming priorities should be maximising economic growth and making civilisation more stable. Is he right?

- Published: 2018-10-17
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tyler-cowen-stubborn-attachments/
- Topics: Academic Research, Economic growth, Economics, Economics PhD, Existential risk, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Moral philosophy, Moral uncertainty, Research into global priorities, Scientific research, Space governance



---

### Paul Christiano on how OpenAI is developing real solutions to the 'AI alignment problem', and his vision of how humanity will progressively hand over decision-making to AI systems

- Published: 2018-10-02
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/paul-christiano-ai-alignment-solutions/
- Topics: AI safety technical research, Artificial Intelligence, Artificial sentience, Machine learning, Moral patients, OpenAI, PhDs



---

### Daniel Ellsberg on the creation of nuclear doomsday machines, the institutional insanity that maintains them, and a practical plan for dismantling them

- Published: 2018-09-24
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/daniel-ellsberg-doomsday-machines/
- Topics: China-Western coordination, Government &amp; policy, Great power conflict, Institutional decision making, Nuclear war



---

### Amanda Askell on tackling the ethics of infinity, being clueless about the effects of our actions, and having moral empathy for intellectual adversaries

- Published: 2018-09-11
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/amanda-askell-moral-empathy/
- Topics: Academic Research, Advice for undergraduates, Effective Altruism, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Moral philosophy, Moral uncertainty, PhDs, Philosophy, Philosophy academia, Research into global priorities



---

### If the US put fewer people in prison, would crime go up? Not at all, according to Open Philanthropy’s renowned researcher David Roodman.

- Published: 2018-08-28
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/david-roodman-becoming-a-world-class-researcher/
- Topics: Academic Research, Data science, Existential risk, Government &amp; policy, Grantmaker, Law, Open Philanthropy, Research in relevant areas, Research into global priorities, Think tank research



---

### How well can we actually predict the future? Katja Grace on why expert opinion isn't a great guide to AI's impact and how to do better

- Published: 2018-08-21
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/katja-grace-forecasting-technology/
- Topics: AI Impacts, AI safety technical research, Artificial Intelligence, Existential risk, Forecasting research &amp; implementation, Founder of new projects, Long-term AI policy, Machine learning



---

### How much should you change your beliefs based on new evidence? Spencer Greenberg on the scientific approach to solving difficult everyday questions

- Published: 2018-08-07
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/spencer-greenberg-bayesian-updating/
- Topics: Data science, Decision making, Forecasting research &amp; implementation, Individual reasoning &amp; cognition, Institutional decision making, Reasoning well



---

### Yew-Kwang Ng on ethics and how to create a much happier world

- Published: 2018-07-26
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/yew-kwang-ng-anticipating-effective-altruism/
- Topics: Academic Research, Building effective altruism, Climate change, Economics, Economics PhD, Existential risk, Factory Farming, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Great power conflict, Risks of stable totalitarianism, Wild animal suffering



---

### Finding the best charity requires estimating the unknowable. Here’s how GiveWell tries to do that, according to researcher James Snowden.

- Published: 2018-07-16
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/james-snowden-givewell-research/
- Topics: Donating effectively, Foundation Program Management, Founder of new projects, GiveWell, Promising interventions, Research into global priorities



---

### Tanya Singh on ending the operations management bottleneck in effective altruism

- Published: 2018-07-11
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tanya-singh-operations-bottleneck/
- Topics: Academic Research, Building effective altruism, Building the effective altruism community, Founder of new projects, Future of Humanity Institute, High impact executive assistant, Operations at high impact organisations



---

### How the audacity to fix things without asking permission can change the world, demonstrated by Tara Mac Aulay

> How broken is the world? How inefficient is a typical organisation? Looking at Tara Mac Aulay’s life, the answer seems to be ‘very’.

- Published: 2018-06-22
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tara-mac-aulay-operations-mindset/
- Topics: Being ambitious, Building effective altruism, Building the effective altruism community, Centre for Effective Altruism, Effective Altruism, Founder of new projects, Operations at high impact organisations, Personal fit



---

### Politics is so much worse because we use an atrocious 18th century voting system. Aaron Hamlin has a viable plan to fix it.

- Published: 2018-05-31
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/aaron-hamlin-voting-reform/
- Topics: Founder of new projects, Government &amp; policy, Institutional decision making, Party Politics, Voting reform



---

### Oxford's Anders Sandberg on solar flares, the annual risk of nuclear war, and what if dictators could live forever?

- Published: 2018-05-29
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/anders-sandberg-extending-life/
- Topics: Academic Research, Ending Ageing, Existential risk, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Future of Humanity Institute, Nuclear war, Research into global priorities



---

### Economist Bryan Caplan thinks education is mostly pointless showing off. We test the strength of his case.

- Published: 2018-05-22
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/bryan-caplan-case-for-and-against-education/
- Topics: Academic Research, Career advice &amp; strategy, Economics, Education, Graduate school, Harmful restrictions on migration, Risks of stable totalitarianism, Unconventional advice



---

### Allan Dafoe on trying to prepare the world for the possibility that AI will destabilise global politics

- Published: 2018-05-18
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/allan-dafoe-politics-of-ai/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Centre for the Governance of AI, Future of Humanity Institute, Institutional decision making, Long-term AI policy, Nuclear war, Research into global priorities, Risks from malevolent actors, Risks of stable totalitarianism



---

### Eva Vivalt's research suggests social science findings don’t generalize. So evidence-based development - what is it good for?

- Published: 2018-05-15
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/eva-vivalt-social-science-generalizability/
- Topics: Academic Research, Data science, Economic growth, Economics, Economics PhD, Global Health, Government &amp; policy, Promising interventions, Reasoning well, Science policy &amp; infrastructure



---

### Where are the aliens? Anders Sandberg on three new resolutions to the Fermi Paradox and how we could easily colonise the whole universe

- Published: 2018-05-08
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/anders-sandberg-fermi-paradox/
- Topics: Academic Research, Existential risk, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Future of Humanity Institute, Reasoning well, Research into global priorities



---

### Owen Cotton-Barratt on why daring scientists should have to get liability insurance

> If an accident is capable of triggering a global pandemic – hundreds of millions of lives might be at risk.

- Published: 2018-04-27
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/owen-cotton-barratt-regulating-risky-research/
- Topics: Academic Research, Accidental harm, Building effective altruism, Building the effective altruism community, Future of Humanity Institute, Research in relevant areas, Unconventional advice



---

### The careers and policies that can prevent global catastrophic biological risks, according to world-leading health security expert Dr Tom Inglesby

- Published: 2018-04-18
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tom-inglesby-health-security/
- Topics: Biomedical Research, Biorisk strategy &amp; policy, Catastrophic pandemics, Existential risk, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, Risks from malevolent actors



---

### How exactly clean meat is created & the advances needed to get it into every supermarket, according to food scientist Marie Gibbons

- Published: 2018-04-10
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/marie-gibbons-clean-meat/
- Topics: Academic Research, Factory Farming, Scientific research, The Good Food Institute



---

### Why we have to lie to ourselves about why we do what we do, according to economist Robin Hanson

- Published: 2018-03-28
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/robin-hanson-on-lying-to-ourselves/
- Topics: Academic Research, Building effective altruism, Communication, Economics, Government &amp; policy, Moral philosophy, Psychology, Unconventional advice



---

### Stefan Schubert on why it’s a bad idea to break the rules, even if it’s for a good cause

- Published: 2018-03-20
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/stefan-schubert-considering-considerateness/
- Topics: Building effective altruism, Building the effective altruism community, Effective Altruism, Epistemics, Party Politics, Problem prioritisation, Reasoning well



---

### Jan Leike on how to become a machine learning alignment researcher

- Published: 2018-03-16
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/jan-leike-ml-alignment/
- Topics: Advice for undergraduates, AI safety technical research, Artificial Intelligence, Computer science, DeepMind, Graduate school, How to get a job, Machine learning, Machine learning PhD, PhDs



---

### Leah Utyasheva on how to massively cut suicide rates in Sri Lanka, and her non-profit's plan to do the same around the world

- Published: 2018-03-07
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/leah-utyasheva-pesticide-suicide-prevention/
- Topics: Founder of new projects, Global Health, Government &amp; policy, Medical Researcher, Mental health (problem area)



---

### The world’s most intellectual foundation is hiring. Holden Karnofsky, founder of GiveWell, on how philanthropy can have maximum impact by taking big risks.

- Published: 2018-02-27
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/holden-karnofsky-open-philanthropy/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Founder of new projects, GiveWell, Global priorities research, Grantmaker, Open Philanthropy, Philanthropic Advising, Problem prioritisation, Promising interventions



---

### Bruce Friedrich makes the case that inventing outstanding meat replacements is the most effective way to help animals

- Published: 2018-02-19
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/bruce-friedrich-good-food-institute/
- Topics: Academic Research, Factory Farming, Scientific research, The Good Food Institute



---

### Samantha Pitts-Kiefer on her job worrying about any way nukes could get used

- Published: 2018-02-14
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/samantha-pk-nuclear-security/
- Topics: Government &amp; policy, Great power conflict, Nuclear Threat Initiative, Nuclear war, Policy careers



---

### Ofir Reich on using data science to end poverty and the spurious action/inaction distinction

- Published: 2018-01-31
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/ofir-reich-data-science/
- Topics: Computer science, Data science, Global Health, Government &amp; policy, Software Engineering



---

### Will MacAskill fears our descendants will probably see us as moral monsters. What should we do about that?

- Published: 2018-01-19
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/will-macaskill-moral-philosophy/
- Topics: Academic Research, Effective Altruism, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Moral philosophy, Moral uncertainty, Philosophy academia, Research into global priorities, Unconventional advice



---

### Michelle Hutchinson hopes to shape the world by shaping the ideas of intellectuals. Will global priorities research succeed?

- Published: 2017-12-22
- Modified: 2024-04-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/michelle-hutchinson-global-priorities/
- Topics: Academic Research, Economics, Effective Altruism, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Global Priorities Institute, Global priorities research, Moral philosophy, Research into global priorities, World problems



---

### Phil Tetlock on predicting catastrophes, why keep your politics secret, and when experts know more than you

- Published: 2017-11-20
- Modified: 2024-04-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/prof-tetlock-predicting-the-future/
- Topics: Academic Research, Existential risk, Forecasting research &amp; implementation, Good Judgement Inc, Great power conflict, Institutional decision making, Politics, Reasoning well



---

### Sharon Nuñez & Jose Valle on going undercover to expose animal cruelty, get rabbit cages banned, and reduce meat consumption

- Published: 2017-11-13
- Modified: 2024-04-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/animal-equality-exposing-cruelty/
- Topics: Advocacy, Factory Farming, Founder of new projects, Wild animal suffering



---

### Claire Walsh on testing which policies work & how to get governments to listen to the results

- Published: 2017-10-31
- Modified: 2024-04-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/claire-walsh-evidence-in-development/
- Topics: Academic Research, Founder of new projects, Global Health, Government &amp; policy, J-PAL, Policy careers, Politics, Promising interventions, Science policy &amp; infrastructure



---

### Beth Cameron fought Ebola for the White House. Now she works to stop something even worse.

- Published: 2017-10-25
- Modified: 2024-11-14
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/beth-cameron-pandemic-preparedness/
- Topics: Biorisk strategy &amp; policy, Catastrophic pandemics, Government &amp; policy, Medical Researcher, Nuclear Threat Initiative



---

### Spencer Greenberg on speeding up social science 10-fold & why plenty of startups cause harm

- Published: 2017-10-17
- Modified: 2024-04-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/spencer-greenberg-social-science/
- Topics: Communication, Data science, Decision making, Founder of new projects, Individual reasoning &amp; cognition, Reasoning well, Research in relevant areas, Science policy &amp; infrastructure



---

### Nick Beckstead on how to spend billions of dollars preventing human extinction

- Published: 2017-10-11
- Modified: 2024-04-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/nick-beckstead-giving-billions/
- Topics: Building effective altruism, Effective Altruism, Existential risk, Factory Farming, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Grantmaker, Open Philanthropy, Philosophy, Research into global priorities



---

### Christine Peterson on the '80s futurist movement and its lessons for today's idealists

- Published: 2017-10-04
- Modified: 2024-04-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/christine-peterson-computer-security/
- Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Atomically precise manufacturing, Building effective altruism, Effective Altruism, Ending Ageing, Existential risk, Founder of new projects, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Information security



---

### Lewis Bollard on ending factory farming as soon as possible

- Published: 2017-09-27
- Modified: 2024-04-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/lewis-bollard-end-factory-farming/
- Topics: Factory Farming, Grantmaker, Open Philanthropy



---

### Julia Galef on making humanity more rational, what EA does wrong, and why Twitter isn’t all bad

- Published: 2017-09-13
- Modified: 2024-04-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/is-it-time-for-a-new-scientific-revolution-julia-galef-on-how-to-make-humans-smarter/
- Topics: Center for Applied Rationality, Communication, Decision making, Economics, Effective Altruism, Forecasting research &amp; implementation, Graduate school, Individual reasoning &amp; cognition, Institutional decision making, Public intellectual, Reasoning well



---

### Toby Ord on why the long-term future of humanity matters more than anything else, and what we should do about it

- Published: 2017-09-06
- Modified: 2024-04-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/why-the-long-run-future-matters-more-than-anything-else-and-what-we-should-do-about-it/
- Topics: Effective Altruism, Existential risk, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Moral philosophy



---

### Alex Gordon-Brown on making millions for charity each year by working in quant finance

- Published: 2017-08-28
- Modified: 2024-04-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/the-life-of-a-quant-trader-how-to-earn-and-donate-millions-within-a-few-years/
- Topics: Computer science, Donating effectively, Earning to give in quant trading, Giving What We Can, Quantitative hedge funds



---

### Howie Lempel on why we aren't worried enough about the next pandemic — and specifically what we can do to stop it.

> What disaster is most likely to kill more than 10 million human beings in the next 20 years? Natural pandemics and new scientifically...

- Published: 2017-08-23
- Modified: 2024-04-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/we-are-not-worried-enough-about-the-next-pandemic/
- Topics: Biorisk strategy &amp; policy, Catastrophic pandemics, Grantmaker, Open Philanthropy



---

### Dario Amodei on OpenAI and how AI will change the world for good and ill

- Published: 2017-07-21
- Modified: 2024-04-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/the-world-needs-ai-researchers-heres-how-to-become-one/
- Topics: AI safety technical research, Artificial Intelligence, Machine learning PhD, OpenAI



---

### David Spiegelhalter on risk, statistics, and improving the public understanding of science

- Published: 2017-06-21
- Modified: 2024-09-19
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/prof-david-spiegelhalter-on-risk-statistics-and-improving-the-public-understanding-of-science/
- Topics: Academic Research, Data science, Decision making, Economics, Global Health, Individual reasoning &amp; cognition, Other pressing problems, Reasoning well, Risk, Science policy &amp; infrastructure, Statistics



---

### Miles Brundage on the world's desperate need for AI strategists and policy experts

- Published: 2017-06-06
- Modified: 2024-04-11
- URL: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/the-world-desperately-needs-ai-strategists-heres-how-to-become-one/
- Topics: Advice for undergraduates, Artificial Intelligence, Computer science, Economics, Future of Humanity Institute, Government &amp; policy, Graduate school, Long-term AI policy, Machine learning, Politics



---


## Podcast (80k After Hours)

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

- Published: 2024-03-21
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/after-hours-podcast/episodes/christian-ruhl-nuclear-catastrophic-risks-philanthropy/
- Topics: Catastrophic pandemics, China-related AI safety &amp; governance, China-Western coordination, Civilisational resilience, Emerging challenges, Existential risk, Founders Pledge, Future generations &amp; longtermism, Grantmaker, Great power conflict, Longtermist philanthropy, Nuclear war, Philanthropic Advising, Risks from malevolent actors, Risks of stable totalitarianism



---

### Benjamin Todd on the history of 80,000 Hours

- Published: 2023-12-01
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/after-hours-podcast/episodes/benjamin-todd-history-80k/
- Topics: 80000 Hours, About 80,000 Hours, Building effective altruism, Building the effective altruism community, Career capital, Community &amp; coordination, Effective Altruism, Promoting effective altruism



---

### Alex Lawsen on avoiding 10 mistakes people make when pursuing a high-impact career

- Published: 2023-09-06
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/after-hours-podcast/episodes/alex-lawsen-10-career-mistakes/
- Topics: 80000 Hours, Career advice &amp; strategy, Careers, Careers to build career capital



---

### Hannah Boettcher on the mental health challenges that come with trying to have a big impact

- Published: 2023-07-19
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/after-hours-podcast/episodes/hannah-boettcher-mental-health-challenges/
- Topics: Effective Altruism, Effective solutions, Existential risk, Mental health (problem area)



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### Luisa and Keiran on free will, and the consequences of never feeling enduring guilt or shame

- Published: 2023-04-22
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/after-hours-podcast/episodes/luisa-keiran-free-will-guilt-shame/
- Topics: Mental health, Unconventional advice



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### Luisa and Robert Long on how to make independent research more fun

- Published: 2023-03-14
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/after-hours-podcast/episodes/luisa-rob-long-independent-research/
- Topics: Academic Research, Graduate school, Job satisfaction, Mental health, Most pressing problems, Nuclear war, PhDs, Sometimes-recommended careers



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### Marcus Davis on founding and leading Rethink Priorities

- Published: 2022-12-12
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/after-hours-podcast/episodes/marcus-davis-rethink-priorities/
- Topics: Academic Research, Building the effective altruism community, Categories of impactful careers, Effective Altruism, Factory Farming, Founder of new projects, Global priorities research, Organisation-building at effective nonprofits, Research in relevant areas, Wild animal suffering



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### Kuhan Jeyapragasan on effective altruism university groups

- Published: 2022-09-21
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/after-hours-podcast/episodes/kuhan-jeyapragasan-effective-altruism-university-groups/
- Topics: Advocacy, Building effective altruism, Doing good in your current job, Effective Altruism



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### Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla on the Shrimp Welfare Project

- Published: 2022-09-05
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/after-hours-podcast/episodes/andres-jimenez-zorrilla-shrimp-welfare-project/
- Topics: Charity Entrepreneurship, Effective Altruism, Factory Farming, Founder of new projects, Other pressing problems, World problems



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### Clay Graubard and Robert de Neufville on forecasting the war in Ukraine

- Published: 2022-05-25
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/after-hours-podcast/episodes/clay-graubard-robert-de-neufville-forecasting-ukraine/
- Topics: Decision making, Forecasting research &amp; implementation, Great power conflict, Institutional decision making, Nuclear war, Top-recommended careers



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### Michelle and Habiba on what they’d tell their younger selves, and the impact of the 1-1 team

- Published: 2022-03-09
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/after-hours-podcast/episodes/michelle-habiba-advice-for-younger-selves/
- Topics: About 80,000 Hours, Advice for undergraduates, Being ambitious, Career advice &amp; strategy, Career capital, Careers, Decision making, Effective Altruism, Exploration, Foundations, How to get a job, Personal fit, Reasoning well



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### Alex Lawsen on his advice for students

- Published: 2022-02-28
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/after-hours-podcast/episodes/alex-lawsen-on-his-advice-for-students/
- Topics: Advice for undergraduates, Career advice &amp; strategy, Exploration, Unconventional advice



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### Rob and Keiran on the philosophy of The 80,000 Hours Podcast

- Published: 2022-02-28
- Modified: 2025-03-12
- URL: https://80000hours.org/after-hours-podcast/episodes/rob-and-keiran-on-the-philosophy-of-the-80000-hours-podcast/
- Topics: About 80,000 Hours, Building effective altruism, Communication, Effective Altruism, Fields, Other topics, Philosophy



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