New releases

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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    Looking for a seriously high impact job using your analytical skills?

    Blog post by · Published May 8th, 2013

    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 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.

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    How important is networking for career success?

    Blog post by · Published May 6th, 2013

    “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 senior in an organisation,

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    Intelligence matters more than you think for career success

    Blog post by · Published May 1st, 2013

    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.

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    Interview with Holden Karnofsky, co-founder of GiveWell

    Blog post by · Published April 29th, 2013

    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.

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    How much is 50p worth to you?

    Blog post by · Published April 26th, 2013

    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. 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.

    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

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    How important is fitting in at work?

    Blog post by · Published April 24th, 2013

    For most people, having a career which is a good “fit” for their personality and interests is extremely high priority. Unsurprisingly, the notion of “person-environment fit” 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’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’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. But we should also consider whether being a good fit with your work is less important than we first think.

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    Is US gun control an important issue?

    Blog post by · Published April 22nd, 2013

    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?

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    Is most research a waste?

    Blog post by · Published April 17th, 2013

    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.

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    How to prioritise – Meta skills part 4

    Blog post by · Published April 12th, 2013

    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 gainig 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.

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      How to finally do what you’ve been putting off – Meta skills part 2

      Blog post by · Published April 8th, 2013

      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!)

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      Opportunity to intern with 80,000 Hours

      Blog post by · Published April 3rd, 2013

      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!

      Apply now or read on for more details…

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        How to improve your memory – Meta skills part 5

        Blog post by · Published April 2nd, 2013

        Learn more effectively using a spaced repetition system

        If you can accelerate your learning then you’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’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’t know, you can make a new flashcard in seconds.

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        Six Month Review of 80,000 Hours June – Nov 2012

        Blog post by · Published April 1st, 2013

        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:

        1. 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.

        2. 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.

        3. 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.

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