New releases

Why I’m doing a PhD

Blog post by · Published October 22nd, 2013

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.

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 I focus on, within an area that has the potential to be very important and useful (improving rationality/decision making)

  • I’m fairly confident I’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

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More on What Really Matters for Finding a Job You Love

Blog post by · Published October 16th, 2013

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 due to the direct benefits of social interactions, and the fact that support from coworkers also means we’re less likely to suffer from stress

  • 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 “personality fit” or “being the right type of person.” It also means that organisations (like 80,000 Hours!) should make creating this environment high priority

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Interview with the founder of Giving Games

Blog post by · Published October 11th, 2013

Like both Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld, 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.

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Interview with Matt Clifford

Blog post by · Published October 9th, 2013

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In 2011 Matt Clifford and Alice Bentick, left their consulting jobs in McKinsey to found their own non-profit, 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 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.

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 consider developing domain expertise in a sector other than tech that is ripe for disruption.

  • It remains hard to find good data on indicators of success in entrepreneurship, current research is more qualitative and indicative.

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Influencing the Far Future

Blog post by · Published October 7th, 2013

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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 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.

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The value of economics PhDs: A conversation with Robin Hanson

Blog post by · Published October 4th, 2013

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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.

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

  1. generally necessary for becoming an economics professor

  2. 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,

  3. 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 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.

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Should more altruists consider entrepreneurship?

Blog post by · Published September 30th, 2013

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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 entrepreneurship[^1] 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

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We’re looking for donations

Blog post by · Published September 15th, 2013

Do we provide useful research or coaching? Support our service: 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 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.

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    Case Study: Designing a new organisation that might be more effective than GiveWell’s top recommendation

    Blog post by · Published September 12th, 2013

    Several months ago, we wrote about an 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.

    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 $1 invested, which is higher than most other forms of fundraising (ii) the money can be raised within 6-18 months, unlike ‘chugging’ (asking for donations on the street) or door-to-door which takes several years to pay off.

    We think:

    1. Working on Effective Fundraising looks like a very strong option for building career capital.
    2. They could consider running more experiments before committing to grant-writing for 6 months.
    3. They may be having less impact than they could because they may not be supporting the most high priority causes.
    4. They should strongly consider hiring someone else to work for Effective Fundraising as a grant writer.

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    Making a difference through social entrepreneurship: an interview with Tom Rippin

    Blog post by · Published September 5th, 2013

    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

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    Summary of our six month evaluation

    Blog post by · Published September 5th, 2013

    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.

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    Trustee and Advisory Board Report

    Blog post by · Published September 3rd, 2013

    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.

    Our trustees are Toby Ord, Nick Beckstead and William MacAskill (who is also our President).

    Will issued the following statement:

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      Team Plan

      Blog post by · Published September 2nd, 2013

      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.

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        Finance Report

        Blog post by · Published September 1st, 2013

        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.

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        Our Progress

        Blog post by · Published August 27th, 2013

        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. 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. 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 six months.

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        How important are future generations?

        Blog post by · Published August 19th, 2013

        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 future civilization is likely to be the most important consideration in working out the importance of a cause.

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        Our first career workshop

        Blog post by · Published August 16th, 2013

        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.

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          Does your personality matter in picking a career?

          Blog post by · Published August 12th, 2013

          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’ve concluded that 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.

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