New releases

The Future of Humanity Institute is hiring a high-impact project manager

Blog post by · Published July 8th, 2013

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

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How important is keeping your options open?

Blog post by · Published July 5th, 2013

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recently conducted research that attempted to work out why so many elite graduates enter finance and consulting (unpublished).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. You have little idea what you’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’t enjoy your first one.

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We’re changing our career coaching

Blog post by · Published July 3rd, 2013

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? This post explains how and why our new approach will be more in depth.

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    How to add value in international development: an interview with Eva Vivalt

    Blog post by · Published June 19th, 2013

    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 here.

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    Where can I earn the most?

    Blog post by · Published June 12th, 2013

    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.

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    Why Earning to Give is often not the best option

    Blog post by · Published June 10th, 2013

    A common misconception is that 80,000 Hours thinks Earning to Give 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 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…

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    80,000 Hours in the Washington Post! – Our responses to the coverage

    Blog post by · Published June 7th, 2013

    The concept of Earning to Give was featured in the Washington Post last week. See the article here.

    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.

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      Can you measure the good you’ll do

      Blog post by · Published May 27th, 2013

      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.

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      What should I read if I’m new?

      Blog post by · Published May 23rd, 2013

      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!

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        The best career advice you never heard in a graduation speech

        Blog post by · Published May 20th, 2013

        “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?

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        Biases: how they affect your career decisions, and what to do about them

        Blog post by · Published May 17th, 2013

        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’ 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 a more systematic and evidence-based approach to career choice.

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        How to double your donations with no extra effort

        Blog post by · Published May 15th, 2013

        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.

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        Estimation – Part II: How much will you earn?

        Blog post by · Published May 13th, 2013

        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? 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.

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        Estimation – Part I: How to do it?

        Blog post by · Published May 10th, 2013

        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. 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.

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