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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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…
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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…
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…
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.
Givewell and Giving What We Can have both recently updated their charity recommendations.
As a response I’ve updated the ‘Best causes‘ post, with a few extra thoughts thrown into the mix.
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The basic argument for professional philanthropy is that, because giving your money away is so powerful, it’s well worth the slight harm to the economy of some high earning jobs.
But the NYT recently put up an opinion piece by Nicholas D. Kristof arguing that banking isn’t (necessarily) harmful at all…
The 80,000 Hours ‘Banker vs. Aid Worker’ media campaign has certainly succeeded in causing a stir, but many have been misled about the central message of the organization. We are not based around the single idea that one should pursue a higher-earning career in order to donate the proceeds to charity – much less that bankers are inherently the most ethical career path.
Rather, we wish to reflect seriously and in clear-headed fashion upon the impact our careers can have, and adjust our life plans accordingly. This means looking into the tremendous power our earnings have, but our impact is by no means limited to them…
Just a quick note:
In case you missed it in Sam’s post on Health vs Education, some members of Giving What We Can have put together a charities Wiki.
It goes into a bit more detail than the main GWWC website on various charities and the issues associated with them. It’s still in its infancy, but like any Wiki is both a resource and an opportunity for interested researchers to help out.
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Consider Sam, a software engineer at Google. His employer ranks highly in both quality-of-life and salary rankings. Sam is a great coder, and passionate about his work. But Sam is not satisfied: he is sorely tempted to take his savings and launch his own company. There are costs in taking the plunge: entrepreneurship would mean working harder, and investing time and money into a venture that might easily fail with nothing to show for it. On the other hand, success would mean bringing his vision to life, and potentially a financial payoff far beyond what he could hope for as a salaried employee.
Considering just these factors, Sam isn’t sure which way to go, like many other talented technologists. But if one of Sam’s goals is making a big impact on the lives of others, that can tip the balance towards entrepreneurship. Here’s how…
If you want to make a difference with your philanthropic donations it is important to donate to a good charity, rather than buying books for a school that has no teachers and so on. But how do we decide? It is all very well to say that a charity that saves 100 lives is better than a charity that saves 10 lives for the same cost, but not all charities are so easily comparable. Here I will try to compare health and education interventions…
Most charities spend money at about the rate at which they take it in, while most foundations pay out just five percent of their assets each year, the legal minimum in the US. Which strategy does more good? The answer matters to you as well as to charitable organizations: you can give away your money soon after you earn it, or you can invest it in a donor-advised fund and allow it to grow for an indefinite amount of time before giving it away. (Donor-advised funds offer tax savings and require that the money be contributed to charity.) The question of whether to give now or later is complicated, so I’ll mention just a few of the considerations involved…
Would you rather help one person or 200 people, if it took the same effort? If you do what most people
do, you’ll be lucky if you help even one.
Let’s say you recognize that giving to charities can make a profound impact in others’ lives and perhaps
you even believe it’s morally the right thing to do. Perhaps you once met someone who was blind and
now you are drawn to helping the blind. You’ve made the choice of a cause, but there are hundreds of
organizations that help the blind and thus seem deserving of your money.
80,000 Hours founder Will Crouch appeared with Private Eye editor Ian Hislop on BBC Radio 4’s The
Today Show. The interview opens with Will explaining the logic behind 80,000 Hours’ “Banker vs. Aid Worker”
campaign: namely, that a professional philanthropist, or someone who enters a lucrative career with
the intention of giving much of it away, can fund the work of several aid workers, and as such can do
several times as much good.
Want to make a difference? Want to make the most different that you can?
Become a banker. An ethical banker.
Not what you expected? Research on professional philanthropy by an Oxford
University ethicist today reveals a new way of looking at ethical careers.
Believe it or not, it is possible to be an ethical banker. William Crouch
today discusses his research at the Uehiro Centre in Oxford University’s
Philosophy Faculty with Ian Hislop on the Today Programme at 8:45am.
If you’re reading this, I’ll assume you’re convinced by the philosophy of 80,000 Hours – so you won’t find an argument for that philosophy here. This post is just to help you decide where to best give your money right now, based on the combined recommendations of the above organisations allowing for a couple of factors they don’t address.
So… plenty of organisations want your money, but a select few really stand out. What’s the best option?