Blog post by Roman Duda · Published July 14th, 2016
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.
Blog post by Robert Wiblin · Published June 2nd, 2016
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 using 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Problem profile by Robert Wiblin · Published April 2016
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, which reduces their ability to get jobs or earn higher wages, likely by a very large amount.
The direct beneficiaries of progress on this problem would mostly be middle-class people in developed countries – not the most needy of groups globally. However, if you believe economic growth, wage increases and technological advancement in developed countries are valuable goals, this is one of the more promising policy changes for raising productivity.
An opportunity to tackle the problem is to start or join a nonprofit or lobbying body to advocate for more housing construction in key urban areas and states. For example, the YIMBY Party and More New York are grassroots lobbying groups that advocate for changes to zoning regulations in San Francisco and New York City respectively. 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.
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.
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.
Problem profile by Robert Wiblin · Published April 2016
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.
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.
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.
Blog post by Robert Wiblin · Published April 4th, 2016
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.
Problem profile by Robert Wiblin · Published April 2016
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.
Only around $100 per capita is spent annually on the healthcare of people living in low-income countries (adjusted for purchasing power). To put this in context: annual health spending in the EU is over $4,500 per capita, in the UK it’s about $5,000 per capita, and in the US it’s nearly $11,000.
As a result, there remain many opportunities to scale up treatments that are known to prevent or cure common health conditions in low-income countries.
Options for working on the problem include serving as a donor to effective projects, working as an economist in intergovernmental organisations (such as the World Bank or World Health Organization), or starting or working in a nonprofit that scales up proven treatments.
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.
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.
Blog post by Robert Wiblin · Published March 30th, 2016
Update: Unfortunately, due to staff limitations we cannot accept any more freelance career reviews.
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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 [email protected] 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.
Blog post by Roman Duda · Published February 26th, 2016
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:
Variable
Good (or neutral)
Bad
Type of stress
Intensity of demands
Challenging but achievable
Mismatched with ability (either too high or too low)
Duration
Short-term
On-going
Context
Control
High control and autonomy
Low control and autonomy
Power
High power
Low power
Social Support
Good social support
Social isolation
How to cope
Mindset
Reframe demands as opportunities, stress as useful
View demands as threats, stress as harmful to health
Blog post by Benjamin Todd · Published February 25th, 2016
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,
Blog post by Benjamin Todd · Published February 24th, 2016
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.
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).
