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Heuristics for a good life

Blog post by · Published March 29th, 2012

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?

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    The replaceability effect: working in unethical industries part 1

    Blog post by · Published March 26th, 2012

    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… 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 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.

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    Why doesn’t everyone use match funding?

    Blog post by · Published March 21st, 2012

    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?

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    5 ways to be misled by salary rankings

    Blog post by · Published February 25th, 2012

    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.

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    In praise of Viktor Zhdanov

    Blog post by · Published February 23rd, 2012

    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.

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      Software engineering: Britain vs Silicon Valley

      Blog post by · Published February 21st, 2012

      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.

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      Entrepreneurship: a game of poker, not roulette

      Blog post by · Published February 19th, 2012

      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…

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      How hard is it to become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom?

      Blog post by · Published February 17th, 2012

      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.

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      Professional philanthropy vs professional influencing

      Blog post by · Published February 13th, 2012

      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.’ [1]
      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.

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        Pledge to fight neglected tropical diseases

        Blog post by · Published February 6th, 2012

        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…

        (no further text)

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          Practical ethics given moral uncertainty

          Blog post by · Published January 31st, 2012

          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’t know all the moral facts…

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          Just what is making a difference: counterfactuals and career choice

          Blog post by · Published January 30th, 2012

          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…

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            High impact interview 1: Existential risk research at SIAI

            Blog post by · Published January 24th, 2012

            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.

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