Transcript

Cold open [00:00:00]

Sarah Eustis-Guthrie: I am the world’s biggest advocate of reevaluation points. I think that everyone should have reevaluation points both personally and organisationally, where you’re going to sit down and you’re going to say, “We have this strategy. Our whole approach rests on these assumptions. A, should we have these assumptions in the first place? And B, how well are we actually doing in achieving this thing? Maybe there’s different approaches to achieving our goal in a better way that’s more effective.”

I think that the genius of reevaluation points is that it both ensures that you have a time when you’re going to be reflecting on your approach, and it also gives you permission to set aside your concerns on a day-to-day basis. So you write down that concern in your reevaluation doc, and then you go back to regular life — and you know that you’re going to have a moment where you come back and say, “Wait a minute, is this actually a good idea?” Because if it turns out that you were doing a suboptimal thing all along, that’s a big problem.

Luisa’s intro [00:01:04]

Luisa Rodriguez: Hey listeners, Luisa here. You were just listening to Sarah Eustis-Guthrie from episode #207 on why she shut down her charity, and why more founders should follow her lead.

When I talked with Sarah last November, loads of what she said really resonated with me.

And we realised we’ve had tonnes of guests over the years who have offered just some real gems about how they got to where they were, advice they think is underrated, and some of their own career ups and downs — but of course, many of these insights are buried in our famously long episodes, so we thought we’d compile them to make it easier for listeners to have a single episode that puts all of this wisdom in one place.

Coming up you’ll hear from:

• Holden Karnofsky on his philosophy of just… kicking ass at whatever you do
• Michael Webb on how to think about career planning given the insanely rapid development of AI
• Chris Olah on finding the most valuable intersections of different skills, and how to send cold emails that actually work
• Leah Garcés on finding common ground with unlikely allies
• Spencer Greenberg on recognising toxic people who could derail your careers and life
• Plus insights from a bunch of other guests we’ve had on over the years

And remember, you can find loads more resources on the 80,000 Hours website, including a step-by-step career planning guide. You may also want to apply for our free one-on-one advising if you’re facing a tough career decision, or if you want to know how to pivot into a more impactful role, or if you just could benefit from some connections in the field. Check all that out at 80000hours.org.

Holden Karnofsky on just kicking ass at whatever [00:02:53]

From episode #110 – Holden Karnofsky on building aptitudes and kicking ass

Rob Wiblin: So in prepping for this interview I went back and looked at some stuff that you’d said and written over the years about career choice. And I suppose the common thread that people have probably picked up on already is the idea that you should just flourish in whatever, or just try to kick ass in whatever, early on.

Holden Karnofsky: That’s right.

Rob Wiblin: And that’s a strategy in itself. I think the tone in favour of that was even sharper, I think, five or 10 years ago. What have you observed that makes you believe that that’s a good approach? Is it primarily based on empirical experience or something else?

Holden Karnofsky: I mean, it’s pretty hard to really have justified empirical beliefs about career choice. Career choice is not even a well-posed question, because we’re like, “What should people do with their career?” It’s like, well, who? And if I start talking to an individual, well, they have so much information that I don’t — about themselves, about their networks, about their feelings…

I think a job is so all consuming that your feelings about it are going to be a major factor. And how it feels to work there every day, I’m not saying it’s the only thing that matters, I’m not saying “do what you love”; I’m just saying, it’s really important. And I don’t have the information about it that I could have if I’m talking to you.

So there’s really no version of the career choice question that is the same kind of question as, what are AI timelines? There’s no version of that question that we can really pinpoint our disagreements down to Bayesian probabilities and just hash it out. It’s just like, we’re either talking in generalisations, or we’re talking to specific people, where they’ve got 80% of the information and we’re trying to do some value add. Or more like they have 99% of the information, and we’re trying to do some value add.

I mean, I don’t know what my views are based on. I look around myself at people who I think are doing great things, and I ask how they got there, and that’s most of it.

So yeah, I absolutely think that when you kick ass… The job market is really unfair, and especially the market for high-impact effective altruist jobs is really unfair. And the people who are incredible at something are so much more in demand than the people who are merely great at it. And the people who are great are so much more in demand than people who are good. And the people who are good are so much more in demand than the people who are OK. And so it’s just a huge, really important source of variation.

So then it’s like, can you know enough about what cause or path you want to be on, that the variance in that, the predictable variance in that, beats the variance in how good you’re going to be? Usually not. Or usually at least they’re quite competitive, and you need to pay a lot of attention to how good you’re going to be, because there’s a lot of different things you could do to help with the most important century, and a lot of them are hard to predict today.

But a robust thing is that whatever you’re doing, you’re doing it so much better if you’re better at it. So, that’s part of it.

Also, people who are good at things, people who kick ass, they get all these other random benefits. So one thing that happens is people who kick ass become connected to other people who kick ass. And that’s really, really valuable. It’s just a really big deal.

You look at these AI companies and they want boards, and they want the people on their boards to be impressive. And a lot of those people are not AI people necessarily, or they weren’t for most of their careers. They kicked ass at something. That’s how they got there.

And you know, a lot of my aptitude-agnostic stuff is about this too: let’s say that you missed, and you picked a skill that turned out it’s never going to get you a direct-work EA job. But you kicked a bunch of ass, and you know a bunch of other people who kick ass. So now you have this opportunity to affect people you know, and get them to do a lot of good. And they are not the people you would know if you hadn’t kicked ass.

It’s very hard to predict what kind of job you’re going to end up in, or what kind of thing is going to work out. People will switch causes during their career all the time.

So I just think a thing that you can do with that early career stage that is more predictive is you can ask, “What aptitude can I build, and become really good at? And that aptitude is going to stick with me throughout my career, no matter what cause I go into, and it’s going to be something that I’m building every year — even if I switch causes, even if I switch worldviews, even if things go differently than I thought, even if this job doesn’t work out: I’m building this aptitude.”

Rob Wiblin: What are a few of the specific aptitudes that you describe as an alternative way of framing what you’re trying to achieve early career?

Holden Karnofsky: There’s a cluster of aptitudes called “organisation running, building, and boosting.” And that includes things like doing management of people and helping organisations set their goals, hit their targets. It can include operations jobs. It can include business operations jobs. It can include, if you stretch it a little bit, communications jobs, a lot of things.

And it’s like, if you come into an organisation and your thing is you’re a project manager who keeps people on track and you’re a good personnel manager, that’s an aptitude you’re building, and that aptitude is going to stay with you. If you’re doing that at a tech company, but you’re really good at it and you get better at it, and then you go later to an AI lab, you’re still going to be good at it. And that’s going to be one of the skills that you bring to the AI lab.

And that’s a case where you were able to build something useful without having immediately a job in the cause you wanted to be working in that then did transfer.

So that’s an example of an aptitude. I talk about various research aptitudes, where you try to digest hard problems. I talk about a communications aptitude, where you try to communicate important ideas to big audiences. I go into a bunch of different things.

Rob Wiblin: So 80,000 Hours over the years has talked quite a lot about career capital, which we define very broadly as anything that puts you in a better position to get a job that has impact in the future. But it obviously includes things like skills, things like the people you know, the credibility you have, even just having money in the bank so that you can potentially change jobs without having to stress too much.

Is this kind of a similar concept to building career capital in your early career, or does it maybe have a different emphasis?

Holden Karnofsky: Well, if you build an aptitude, then you’re building career capital. An aptitude is a kind of career capital. I think the thing that I’m emphasising in the post is that when you’re at this early stage in your career, and you’re looking for a helpful question to ask, you’re looking for a, “Do I want to do A, B, or C?”

And when A, B, and C are different causes, I think that doesn’t always have very clear or reliable implications for what that means for what kind of job you’re working in and how you know if you’re on track. Whereas if A, B, and C are being a project manager, being a researcher, being a communicator, then it’s like, “If I want to do this, then I should take this kind of job. I can almost certainly find some kind of job like that. And then here’s how I’ll know if I’m getting better at it. And then if I switch, then I’ll do that kind of job.”

So, it’s a question you can ask — “Which aptitude, which kind of career capital do I want to build?” You can ask the question, you can take a guess. You can probably try out the guess, and you could probably get information on whether the guess is a good guess, and you could do all that earlier in your career in a reliable way, versus trying to gather information on what cause should I be in. Which can be done differently, but you don’t always necessarily learn a lot about that from your day-to-day work in your job.

Rob Wiblin: Just to complete the list of aptitudes that you mentioned, I think the last few ones were software and engineering aptitude, quite a transferable skill. Then there was information security — like computer security, helping people keep secrets. I guess that one’s beginning to approach a little bit like a job or career. And then there’s academia. So, that’s like a broad class of roles.

Holden Karnofsky: Some of them are broad classes of aptitudes that have a bunch of stuff in common. A lot of the point of the post was to be like, how do I take my guess at what I could be great at? And how do I start learning whether it was a good guess, and start changing my mind about it? Which I think is often a better framework to be learning than some of these other frameworks.

And then I think another aptitude that I just skipped over is political and bureaucratic aptitudes. So if you’re in the government and you’re climbing through the ranks, that’s the thing that you can be good at or bad at. You can learn if you’re good or bad at it. And if you’re good at it, you’re going to be good at it. And if you change your mind about what cause you to work on, you’re still going to have those skills, and they’re going to help you get into whatever cause you wanted.

I also talk about entrepreneurs. I talk about community-building aptitudes, like trying to help people discover important ideas and form a community around them. That’s a thing that you can try out. You can see if you’re good at it. If you’re good at it, you’re going to keep getting better at it, et cetera.

Rob Wiblin: One thing that I particularly liked about the post is it’s focused on guideposts telling if you’re on track in developing a given aptitude. So whether you should stick with it and double down. For example, how does one tell if one is on track in political and bureaucratic aptitudes?

Holden Karnofsky: Yeah, sure. So that’s an example. With some of these other frameworks, which I think are great, but I think you can end up lost on, how am I refining my picture of what I should be doing and where it should be.

So it’s like, “I wanted to work in AI. I managed to get this job in an AI organisation. What do I do now? What am I learning about what kind of job I should be in?” The aptitudes framework is a way of saying, look, if you’re succeeding at the job you’re in, then you are gaining positive information about your fit for that aptitude, not necessarily for that cause. And if you’re failing at the job you’re in, you’re gaining negative information about your fit for that aptitude, not necessarily that cause or that path.

So you gave the example of, “I want to be in government.” And it’s like, well, yeah, if you go into government and you have some peers or some close connections, they can probably, after a year, tell you how you’re doing. They can say, “Hey, you’re doing great. You’re moving up. You’re getting promoted at a good rate. People here think you’re good. This is a good fit for you.” Or they can tell you, “You’re kind of stalling out. And people don’t like this about you and that about you. Or the system doesn’t like this or that about you.” And then you can start thinking to yourself, “Maybe I want to try something else. Maybe government’s not for me.”

So it’s this framework where it’s not too hard to see if you’re succeeding or failing. A lot of people — who aren’t necessarily all the way in your headspace and don’t have all the same weird views you have — can just tell you if you’re succeeding or failing. And you can tell if you’re getting promoted, and it also matters if you’re enjoying yourself and if you’re finding it sustainable. These are all actual predictors of whether this is going to be something that you keep getting better at and end up really good at.

Jeff Sebo on what improv comedy can teach us about doing good in the world [00:12:23]

From episode #173 – Jeff Sebo on digital minds, and how to avoid sleepwalking into a major moral catastrophe

Luisa Rodriguez: If you had to just completely change careers and somehow became totally indifferent to making the world a better place — which I think would be hard for you — what would be the most self-indulgent or most enjoyable career for you to pursue instead?

Jeff Sebo: I love that question. I do love my career, and feel very grateful to be able to do what I do. And I will say that when I was graduating from college, I was considering this as one of three possible careers. The other two were law and TV comedy.

When I was in college, I had an internship in TV comedy, and I was really close to pursuing that professionally instead of going to grad school. And then even when I went to grad school — I went to NYU, where I now work — I took the opportunity to study improv comedy at the Upright Citizens Brigade theatre, and then I performed improv comedy in the city for several years while I was a grad student.

Luisa Rodriguez: That’s amazing. A bit of a rogue question: Is there anything that improv comedy can teach us about doing good in the world?

Jeff Sebo: Honestly, I think there are a lot of things that it can teach us about doing good. I was not taking those classes and performing improv specifically to learn life lessons that I could apply to my work and to my attempts at altruism, but I did learn some of those lessons. I can say one general one and then maybe a couple of specific ones.

So one general lesson is that philosophy and comedy are actually a lot alike. They both force us to confront cognitive dissonance, contradictions in ideas. They might do it a little bit differently. For example, a philosopher might say, “Consider this thought. Now consider this thought. See how they contradict. How will we resolve this contradiction?” Whereas a comedian might present the contradiction in an amusing manner, in a way that invites you to sit with that discomfort, and to, yes, find it amusing — but then to also reflect on it.

And good comedy can be a vehicle for social change in the same way that good philosophy can be for that reason. And sometimes it can even be a better vehicle for social change, because it operates in this more playful space that helps you to let your guard down and be a little bit more adventurous, a little bit more open minded, a little bit more receptive to novel ideas or resolutions to contradictions. So I think that can be a reminder that, even though we engage in really serious topics, it helps to have a little bit of a playful mindset sometimes so that you can have that same kind of open mindedness.

Luisa Rodriguez: Totally. You said there are a few specific ones. What were those?

Jeff Sebo: Yeah, there are also a bunch that come from improv. I can maybe mention a couple in the interest of time.

One is that, of course, a foundational principle for improv comedy is “Yes, and…” So you might enter a show or a scene with a strong idea about how you want the show or the scene to go, but then a scene partner might initiate a completely different idea, and you have to be prepared to set your idea down and enthusiastically embrace this new idea and then add to it and build this new scene with your partners.

So when you practice at improv comedy and you perform improv comedy, you really have to train yourself to not impose your will on what is happening, but rather be collaborative and open minded, to work together with others as a team, to build something together, and then to be opportunistic and to be improvisational, to keep adapting to updated circumstances. And obviously, I think that is a virtue and a mindset that translates really well to, for instance, building a career or attempting to do good with your life.

Luisa Rodriguez: Cool. Any others?

Jeff Sebo: Another is that it trains you to identify links between things that initially seem to have nothing to do with each other. So the way that you build an improv show is you start with scenes that have nothing to do with each other, and then you do second beats of those scenes. And then as the show comes to a close, you start to tie the scenes together, and then it all weaves together and it ends in this gratifying, unified state.

And similarly, I think it can help in life or in a career to have all of these different interests, all of these different aspirations, and not necessarily impose unity or integration on them right away. To let them be what they are, and then you can gradually identify surprising and interesting connections between them over time, and if you eventually develop an area of expertise, it might exist at the intersection of all of these different random interests that you had.

So allowing yourself that space for curiosity, the pursuit of seemingly unrelated things, and then discovering those connections and bringing them all together in the middle of or later on in your career, I think is a really wonderful experience, and one that was reinforced for me when I studied improv.

Another one is that if you want to construct a good improv scene, then in addition to listening to your teammates, and saying “Yes, and…” and building a scene collaboratively, it helps to put the direct goal of the scene in the show out of your mind. The direct goal would be finding the “game” of the scene — so finding a joke that can be built out over the course of the scene and can be repeated in later scenes.

But if you are thinking about that goal every time you say a line, every time you make a choice — if you are thinking “I must be funny, I must be funny; I must find the game, I must find the game” — that is a recipe for not being funny and not finding the game.

If you instead trust the process and trust your practice — if you trust all of those hours of work that you put in to doing improv with your teammates, and you simply exist within the scene, you play your characters, you pay attention to the situation — you eventually will find something genuinely organically funny, and then it will actually be funny because you were pursuing the goal indirectly rather than pursuing it directly.

And I think that has clear implications for how we live our lives and how we try to do good works too. For effective altruists or utilitarians, if we spend all of our time thinking, “How can I do the most good possible? How can I do the most good possible? How can I maximise utility? How can I maximise utility?” — that is a recipe for not doing the most good possible, for not maximising utility. You would never get out of bed in the morning, because you would be calculating the long-term consequences of which sock you put on your feet first.

Instead, if you cultivate virtuous character traits, if you build structures that incentivise and pull good actions out of you, if you find general social and professional roles in life through which you can do the most good — and then if you spend most of your time in everyday life simply playing those roles within those structures, expressing those character traits — then you will do much more good, much more effectively and sustainably in the long run, than you would have done otherwise.

Luisa Rodriguez: Nice. I love that.

Dean Spears on being open to randomness and serendipity [00:19:26]

From episode #186 – Dean Spears on why babies are born small in Uttar Pradesh, and how to save their lives

Luisa Rodriguez: What is a piece of advice that you wish you could give to your younger self?

Dean Spears: My younger self didn’t really know how things were going to go for me, and my present-day self looks back and sees a lot of surprise. I think the situations where my friends and collaborators and I have managed to sometimes accomplish something, it’s often been pretty surprising and serendipitous.

So I think one piece of advice is to be looking for that serendipity and have openness to the randomness. When you have a success, don’t take it too seriously.

Another piece of advice is to have the friends and collaborators who are going to be able to take advantage of that with you. I told you about meeting Nikhil randomly at a programme; or Mike, my collaborator on the book about birth rates, who happened to be my cubicle mate in grad school; or just so many of the collaborators in the r.i.c.e. family — and all of it are people who I’ve met happenstantially, or we’ve taken advantage of something randomly together.

So I think Pablo Picasso said something like, “Yes, inspiration strikes, but it should find you at work,” or something like that. I would say, yes, inspiration and randomness happens — and when it comes, be sure that you have the friends and the teammates that you can take advantage of it with. Because I know that if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have been able to do such useful things.

Luisa Rodriguez: Nice. I like that.

Michael Webb on how to think about career planning given the rapid developments in AI [00:21:17]

From episode #161 – Michael Webb on whether AI will soon cause job loss, lower incomes, and higher inequality — or the opposite

Luisa Rodriguez: I want to talk about some concrete career advice. A lot of our listeners are interested in how the development of AI should influence their own career planning. I guess to start, to what extent should people be keeping all of this AI progress in mind when making their career plans? Is it even a given that they should be?

Michael Webb: So I think I’m going to start with a non-answer that hopefully is still actually interesting, which is: they should totally be taking AI into account by using it to help them with career planning.

When I was thinking about careers as a 20-year-old, you have no idea what these jobs actually involve. You can read the websites on the company, and now you can, these days, read the wonderful career profiles on the 80,000 Hours website. But you still often have no idea what’s actually involved in many of these things, right? If you’re lucky, maybe you know someone who’s done the job, but often you don’t.

And now you can literally go on Claude or whatever and say, “Please pretend you are a McKinsey consultant. Do you love your job? Please be honest.” I just did this, and the answer was, “I have mixed feelings about my job as a McKinsey consultant.” It gives you a long list of pros and cons.

Luisa Rodriguez: Oh, that’s really funny.

Michael Webb: So you can do this for all kinds of stuff. The thing I always remember when I was at that point of choosing first careers, I was like, “But what do you actually do all day? You can give me all this amazing exciting stuff around the impact and the great colleagues and whatever. But what are you actually doing? And what’s the division of your time?”

And these language models actually often know the answers quite well. They’re certainly much better than whatever your first guess is. And so they can help you with that. They can help you brainstorm who to reach out to. They can help you prepare questions to ask someone that you’re having an informational chat with. You can tell them what you’re interested in, and it will suggest careers for you. You can tell it, “You are my career coach. Please figure out what questions to ask me to help me decide what to do.” All these things, it can just do an amazingly good job at out of the box.

And then in terms of how it will actually affect the choices you make, the fact the world is changing in this way: I think both it will massively influence the economy and what one should think about doing.

But at the same time, 90% of people are not going to be thinking very hard about it as they make their career plans. So it’s not that you’re going to be completely disadvantaging yourself by not thinking about it. It’s more just like, if you think about it, then you’re instantly in the top 10% of people thinking about these things.

And so, a few concrete thoughts. I think the easiest generic piece of advice is: You should think really hard about how AI is going to be useful and impact the particular things that you care about and might want to work in.

I think that there’s going to be, sure, the shortage of AI researchers directly right now, and certainly alignment researchers. But people who are like any old other thing — so people in government, people working for all the kinds of career profiles that you like to write about — who know about those, and they know about AI in some real detail: you are instantly going to have a very rare and valuable skill set.

So learning about AI as it is for its own sake, and then thinking really hard and carefully about how it interacts with the kinds of work that you’re doing, but really specialising it to your particular industry and thinking in great detail about particular tasks. And thinking about how a whole production process could be reimagined. And so thinking about those in great detail and being really thoughtful about the risks in any particular application area, as well as the more general and scary ones: I think you’re going to be so unique and rare and valuable that you’re going to have an instant, massive leg up.

So that’s one generic piece of advice. The other generic piece of advice is: You can also now upskill much more quickly for any particular question or career path. So you’re like, “What does a consultant need to know? What does a grants evaluator need to know? What does a safety researcher need to know?” All those specific things, you can actually use GPT-4 or et cetera to teach yourself, or to give you a huge leg up in that autodidactic exercise, teaching yourself, than you could before.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, great. Good advice. What jobs would be sensible to go into now, because demand for them is going to go up?

Michael Webb: I kind of think of career paths more than specific jobs.

Luisa Rodriguez: Sure. Yeah. I think that’s what I mean.

Michael Webb: And these things will kind of evolve a lot over the coming years, for all the reasons we’ve been talking about.

One theme that’s come up a lot in this conversation is that entering a highly regulated industry, you’re going to be more safe and not exposed to radical changes rather than entering one that is not regulated. And so if you’re after a nice, sturdy, stable thing, go after the strong unions / professional bodies, like American Medical Association. Because you’ll probably have a relatively easier time of things.

If, however, you’re someone who wants to lean into risk — which probably many people should much more than they in fact do, certainly when you’re young — go for the areas where there’s kind of the most change and the most likelihood of AI actually having more near-term impact.

So those are kind of industry-level thoughts. In terms of specific what you’re doing, day-to-day occupation or skills: First, a sort of generic thought is, you want to be adding value on top of large language models.

So pretend that doctors are not regulated. Imagine that we can just change things however we want as a pure market system. In that case, what I expect to see is very quickly, GPT or Claude — or whatever fancy startup that just raised lots of money, that’s just going to build a health LLM; there’s lots of these companies now — they can just do a much better job than the doctors of diagnosis and prescription and all kinds of other stuff. Particularly the GP, more entry-level stuff that requires a wide body of knowledge and everything’s changing all the time, and you don’t have much time with people and whatever, and not that much physical stuff either.

In that world, what does a human do on top? Well, probably in that world, certainly for some of the GPs of this world — again, in the pretend world where it’s not regulated, so this is not how it’s going to happen, I claim — but supposing it did, you would probably say we don’t need GPs to have anywhere near as much training as they currently are required to have, because the algorithm can do a much better job of diagnosing and prescribing.

And now, their job is really much more about the empathy, and it’s much more the small number of things which are more physical — like I had to smell you or something, until we have SmellGPT (I’m sure it’s coming), but for now, humans have to do that — and this making you feel appreciated and loved and cared for, and all those kinds of things.

Now the thing is that, I guess in a sense luckily for us, but also sadly in terms of what it means for wages: if you’re going into a job where all you’re doing is layering on empathy on top of GPT in an in-person setting, there’ll be tonnes of demand for that — but that skill of empathy is not that rare, and so you won’t get paid that much to do it. It’s not anywhere near as rare as the doctor who, today, there’s not many of them, and they have to do all these years of training, and they get paid loads and loads of money.

So it’s adding value on top of language models, and the value you’re adding is somewhat rare. Now let’s be specific: What actually are those things?

I think the first thing is social skills. There’s wonderful work by an economist called David Deming, who’s at Harvard, and his kind of breakout paper a few years ago was characterising occupations in terms of whether they’ve required high technical skills or high social skills — in particular, a two-by-two grid of low technical, low social; low technical, high social, et cetera — and looking over the last, I don’t know, 30 years at wages for people in these different buckets.

And it turned out that the only kind of jobs that have seen real outlier, fantastic wage growth are those with high technical skills and high social skills. So if you just have high social skills and no technical skills, you’ve done pretty averagely. If you have just high technical skills and no social skills, you’ve also done pretty averagely, certainly in terms of wage growth in recent decades. And if you’ve got neither, then even more so — not so good. Only those who’ve got both have done really well.

And overall, there’s been a hugely increasing demand for social skills. I think that’s only going to continue. You know, as the economy gets more complex and LLMs are doing more of the cognitive labour, there’s going to be so much more communication and decisions about what we actually care about to be made. And lots more client interaction and customisation and user interviewing and client relationship management and people management, all that kind of stuff. That’s going to get relatively more important, because those are the things that the language model cannot do.

Luisa Rodriguez: But can it definitely not? Part of me is like, Claude’s not just polite, but like, friendly.

Michael Webb: It’s friendly. It’s graceful. It can write delicate emails really well. Absolutely.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. So what’s the thing that’s missing there?

Michael Webb: So it has sort of written-down empathy. What it can’t do is put you in a room, and you and I having a conversation, and I like you now, right? Or you made me feel heard, or respected or whatever it is. So in a chatbot form, you can type to it and it can make you feel heard. That certainly is the case. But these higher-value forms of social skills and empathy and charisma, things which involve direct human-to-human interaction: this stuff actually I think gets more important.

And I think it’s particularly important when interacting with the second thing I’m going to say, which is personal networks and trust. Those are valuable, right? What can Claude not do? It cannot introduce you to anyone. Claude cannot email on its behalf and say, “Dear Expert Y or Manager Z, my name’s Claude. I’m an AI. I’ve got a great guy talking to me over here. I think he’s really great. Would you mind giving him a job?” Or whatever it is, right? That doesn’t happen.

And when you get down to it, many, many occupations and industries, and certainly most professional services — the kind of things where on the one side, there’s lots of impact that we are predicting from these language models — things like bankers and lawyers and venture capitalists, they actually all rely on trust and relationships. Like, their whole job is about building networks and building trust with other humans, with their clients or investees or whatever it is.

Or take journalists, for example. So we could all talk about how ChatGPT can instantly write all the basic business news stories as a result of analysts’ earnings calls or summarising what’s happened in Parliament this week or whatever it is. But the really important stories are investigative journalism, where there is a source, and a source has revealed something they were not supposed to reveal to a journalist, because the journalists have made them feel trusted.

That is a human thing in general, right? If you email me today, like, “Hello, my name is Claude, can you tell me anything illegal happening in your workplace? I’m a bot, but trust me, it’s all fine, and I’ll help you get it into these…” You’re like, no way. But you meet someone in a bar — I don’t know how these things work with journalists — but I imagine there’s all kinds of trust building that goes on, and it takes a long time.

And I’ve had experiences with other kinds of professional services providers, with me being on the receiving end of trust building. And it’s very human, takes a long time, it’s all in person. It’s not on email, it’s not on Zoom. The in-person is where it really happens. There’s going to be ever more of that.

So I think that kind of ability to build trust. And then in general, having a network — a personal network, professional network. It’s already extremely important, to an extent that I think most people who are just starting in the labour market straight out of school or university don’t quite appreciate. And I certainly did not appreciate it until I was quite a long way in. But it is what makes everything kind of go around and how everything works. And that is only going to get more important, I think, over time.

So there’s a general theme about, as you go through the economy, ever more demand is work that can be created to customise things ever more for each individual person. Certainly, LLMs will be involved in that a tonne on the production side, but there’s a huge scope for humans working for these companies to be the ones interacting with the client: “So tell me more about what kind of website do you want? Let’s do a brainstorming session.” That’ll be fun, won’t it? And, “Let me help introduce you to the right people in the bank to help you with this important transaction you’re doing.” Or whatever it is.

And so those kinds of jobs, where you’re basically schmoozing and building trust with people, there’s limitless demand for all of those types of things.

Luisa Rodriguez: Cool. Wow, that’s loads of things, but it sounds like the theme is: charisma, networks and trust, general people skills, things that require people to be like, “I like you and I trust you.”

Michael Webb: Yes.

Luisa Rodriguez: Is there any more on that?

Michael Webb: Beyond social skills and trust and that sort of thing, there’s another category here which is around management. We’ve touched a bit on it, but I think managing teams of AIs is going to look a bit different from managing teams of humans, and we’re going to need lots of both. But I think the thing that’s really new here is how do you manage…

Luisa Rodriguez: Teams of AIs.

Michael Webb: All these swarms, hopefully not literal swarms, but you know… As a whatever you’re doing — you’re a lawyer or you’re a researcher, whatever — you’ve now got thousands and thousands of paralegals or research assistants equivalents. What do you do with them and how do you orchestrate them? There’ll be plenty of places throughout the economy where people figure out standardised ways of orchestrating that kind of work, and it’ll be embedded in software or have performance guarantees and whatever.

But there’ll be also tonnes of the economy — the more creative parts, you know, I very much include artists and others here, as well as the more creative kind of researchers or indeed lawyers — where it’s like, no, you can’t use software for this. You can’t use a pre-baked prompt and input/output, understood thing: your job is to figure out a completely novel problem. It’s like the edge of the art. You’ve got all these very smart RA-equivalents. What do you ask them? What do you do with them? How do you check whether what they’re telling you is correct in this non-understood area where you can’t have performance guarantees because it’s brand new?

So that will be a huge, really important skill. To be honest, that is today an incredibly important skill, particularly in research. If I was in the middle of writing papers right now, writing that paper we discussed, about the impact of AI on the job market, that paper would have been so much easier to write in so many ways if I had access to GPT-4. And that paper would be much higher quality, and it would have been produced in probably a third of the time or a fifth of the time or something.

And so if you are a researcher and you’re not using these things, or figuring out how to use them right now, then I think people who are thinking about that are going to probably outcompete you quite quickly — at least if they’re competing directly with you in some research niche or whatever it is.

Luisa Rodriguez: Cool. OK, I guess flipping the question around: What jobs will not be sensible to go into now, because they’ll be more automated soon, maybe completely?

Michael Webb: That’s a trickier one, because there aren’t that many jobs which consist only of the things that GPT-4 can do. So there are examples. There was a news story recently of a bunch of people in the US and often in the Philippines as well who were content writers — very much minimum-wage-type content writers, sort of content factories — and literally it was very direct and very clear, they were laid off and they were told directly it’s because ChatGPT is better than you are. Because they were kind of outsourced labour; it was like text in/text out. And it was like, we don’t need that any more. And so people shouldn’t go and do that.

But I think there’s tonnes of writing jobs that potentially now you can be even better at because of GPT, and you can earn more money or have a better career because you’re bringing a really important extra thing. I guess one thing we haven’t mentioned, but it’s really important, is what you often will bring is the context. We obviously have to give context to these algorithms when we ask some questions. And these days, the context is like, “What do I want?” And it’s an effort of imagination to figure out how to grill yourself first about what you want, and then put that into the algorithm.

And if you’re in an organisation of some kind doing work, or indeed, working by yourself to do something of value, there’s going to be a tonne of context out there that the algorithm is not going to… You know, it by default pays attention to nothing, but it could pay attention to literally anything. So you’re pointing it to a bit of the space of things it should pay attention to. And that might just be things that it already knows about, but also might be things that are just happening in the world, or things that are secrets only you know, because you’ve spoken to someone who knows something, and that’s not on the public internet yet, or whatever it is.

And again, there’s a lot of that in the world. A huge amount of the economy, of economic value, is people knowing things before other people know them, or other context that is not public. Huge, huge, huge factors of the economy are things that are secrets, basically, or not publicly available. You, as a human, can build up your stock of secrets.

And those secrets could be that you did some user interviews with some humans and you talked to them, and you persuade them to talk to you, and no one else can get them to talk to you, and you’re asking the right questions, and you now know a lot about this kind of person. And that’s really helpful for building products for them.

Or you’ve been talking to politicians about what they really care about when it comes to this area of regulation, and they would not talk to anyone, but they talked to you, and now you’re the only person who knows what these different politicians think about this question.

Again, Claude cannot do that. GPT-4 cannot do that. Only you can do that. Maybe they’ll help you write the questions, but only you can get the context. And so other areas, of which there are many, where the scarce thing is the context, that feels to me like a pretty safe bet for the future.

Michelle Hutchinson on finding what motivates you and reaching out to people for help [00:41:10]

From episode #75 – Michelle Hutchinson on what people most often ask 80,000 Hours

Arden Koehler: Are there any common mistakes that you feel like you see people making that you think you could give advice on how to avoid?

Michelle Hutchinson: I think one thing that I somewhat frequently see is people who think that some particular area is probably the highest impact one for them to go into but don’t feel terribly passionate about it and therefore relatively quickly rule it out.

I think that seems more problematic because I think there’s this really big difference in terms of how impactful different kinds of things are. But then I also think it comes back to this thing about people having some trouble introspecting before having tried something out as to how much they’ll like it.

So I really try hard to push people if they’re in that kind of position to think through specifically what kinds of things drive their motivation and whether there would be ways of being happy working in this area that they think is highest impact that would still motivate them.

Because I think people are very different in terms of what kinds of things motivate them. So some people need to be seeing the beneficiaries in front of them all the time and that’s going to make it very difficult for you, for example, to work on a long-term horizon. Whereas other people… I tend to be the kind of person who’s very motivated by not letting my team down, which means that I can work in quite a lot of different areas, and then also by generally feeling like I’m helping people.

So while I rationally think the reason that working at 80,000 Hours is high impact is that it helps beneficiaries living many years in the future to not be wiped out, on a day-to-day level, the thing that really keeps me going is it’s great to be able to help people who are kind and want to have more impactful careers continue doing that.

So I think it’s really useful for people to get a sense of what their motivations might be like and then try out some of these things to see if they actually do suit them.

Rob Wiblin: It sounds like you were saying people would kind of suspect that they wouldn’t enjoy a particular role and then they kind of rule it out early on even though they don’t really have very strong evidence for that, and you’re like, but if it’s going to be 10 or 100 times more impactful, then maybe they should go and double check that and actually figure out for sure whether they would enjoy it or not?

Michelle Hutchinson: Yes, I think that’s my sense.

Rob Wiblin: Are there any other common mistakes that people should look out for?

Michelle Hutchinson: I think people don’t reach out as much as they should for advice to other people. People just actually really like helping each other, and so reaching out to people saying, “Hey, can I chat to you about your job? Can I get your thoughts on how I should apply for this kind of thing?,” I think that works pretty broadly.

I found this really useful when I was setting up the Centre for Effective Altruism originally. Reaching out to people who had already set up charities and saying, “Hey, can I pick your brain on what are the really important things to know when you’re applying to Companies House and The Charity Commission for setting up an organisation?” And I was pretty surprised at the time just how helpful people were.

Then, when I was working at the Global Priorities Institute doing fundraising and doing grant applications, I was doing some on virtue ethics, which is a topic in philosophy that I knew very little about. So I ended up sending the grant application that I had to the leading few virtue ethicists in the world, and I think two of the three of them replied and were willing to look over my application, which I just thought was really kind and somewhat unexpected.

It’s important to keep various things in mind when doing these kinds of reaching out. You want to make sure that your emails are really concise, that it’s very clear why you’re reaching out to them and specifically what you want from them so that they don’t feel it’s just like a cold email that went to lots of impressive people trying to generically network or something.

But I think if you do those things, and you give them a CV so it’s clear who you are, a one-line on why you’re reaching out to them specifically and a one-line on here’s what I want and it’s a smallish ask, I think it’s really surprising how often people are willing to respond.

And this can also generalise to things like if you’re interested in trying out being a researcher and you’re still at university, it can be worth reaching out to professors in your university doing the kind of research you’re interested in and saying, “Hey, are you interested in having a research assistant? Here’s my background. Here’s why I want to work with you. I really liked your two papers, this and this. Here’s the kind of skills I have that might be useful for you.” That kind of thing.

And it can be really difficult to do, right? Because everyone’s shy. No one likes rejection. You don’t really even like imposing on people and feeling that you didn’t get a response and so probably imposed on them. But I think most people actually don’t mind receiving emails like this, even if they don’t have a chance to respond, so it’s really worth trying.

Benjamin Todd on figuring out if a career path is a good fit for you [00:46:03]

From 80k team chat: Benjamin Todd on varieties of longtermism and things 80,000 Hours might be getting wrong

Benjamin Todd: You can kind of imagine normal careers advice is the opposite to us, where it would just start with like, “Okay, what are your strengths?” That would be the number one question, and then… Well, that would be it, actually.

But then with us, we kind start from, what does the world most need? Because I think that’s a really neglected perspective and also, if you want to have a big impact, it’s really important to be actually thinking about what will actually help people. And then we work back from there and think, now, how can my strengths fit into that? So we do cover both ends of the spectrum, but we tend to emphasise what the world most needs more.

Arden Koehler: Yeah. I wonder if in fact it’s fine, because maybe people are more naturally inclined to think in terms of their personal circumstances and what they’re good at because they’ve been told since they were 11 that that’s the way to choose your career. And emphasising what the world needs even more than is actually justified, if all else is equal, is maybe a good corrective.

Benjamin Todd: Yeah. That’s how I mainly feel about it.

Arden Koehler: Is there anything that you would recommend to readers to either read of ours, or somebody else’s, or to do that would help them think better about their personal fit?

Benjamin Todd: Yeah. One answer is, I’m working on a “how to plan your career” process, which we’re going to put onto the website. And then the aim of that would be to actually lead you through everything you need to think about, including your personal fit. And so hopefully if you work through that process it will mean you’ve significantly thought about personal fit.

Another thing is just whenever you’re making a career decision, obviously, do consider personal fit and bear in mind that it could outweigh which things seem most pressing in general. It could easily be that it’s better to do something that you’re good at, especially if you’re focused on this more transferable career capital focus thing that we were just talking about.

And then the third thing is, I think it is worth people at some point reflecting on their strengths and trying to really clarify what they are. And there’s a lot that could be said about how to figure out what your strengths are and also just how to predict what you’re going to be good at. That’s a whole difficult question in forecasting.

But one perspective that I think gets a little bit neglected even in the mainstream talking about what your strengths are and what you’re going to be good at, is not only thinking about broad strokes — the area, what might be a good fit — but also really thinking about the nitty-gritty day-to-day of the particular jobs. And trying to build up a picture of what does this job actually involve day-to-day, and could I see myself doing that and being motivated in it?

One exercise I found personally useful, it’s got a slightly cheesy name of The Energy Audit. But basically what you do is you look at the last two weeks in your calendar and then you try and categorise things by energising or not energising. And then you try and think about how can you do the energising ones more often.

And you can use that within your role, to try to design your role a bit better, but you can also use that to try to understand what actually are your strengths; what are the types of activities, people to work with, skills that you find most energising — which is often a good sign of something that you might have good fit with.

Arden Koehler: I guess the other thing to say here is that oftentimes people can try the work or at least talk to somebody in the domain so that they can get a better sense of this day to day and a better sense of their fit with it. And I mean, this is a lot more applicable when people are early in their careers and they can spend the summer doing an internship. And this is of course common sense, but it’s one thing to maybe emphasise.

Benjamin Todd: Yeah, we could have a huge discussion about what are the best ways to predict personal fit. One perspective is trying to predict it from the armchair and then you’ve got a whole question of forecasting and which predictor is the most powerful. Another perspective is: how can you get more information and test things out and learn about them?

And I think often people focus quite a bit on the armchair stuff, but often just by going to talk to someone in their career, you can learn so much that’s obviously really useful, that that’s a really good use of time.

Arden Koehler: Yeah. So I just listened to How to Measure Anything by Douglas Hubbard and one thing he hammers home is the more uncertain you are, the easier it is to reduce your uncertainty. If you know practically nothing about an area, just talking to somebody for half an hour is probably going to be a huge deal for making you understand what that path is like. So people who feel super uncertain, in fact, be hopeful because it’s easier to reduce your uncertainty.

Benjamin Todd: Yeah, totally.

Chris Olah on the value of unusual combinations of skills [00:50:23]

From episode #108 – Chris Olah on working at top AI labs without an undergrad degree

Rob Wiblin: Let’s look at the unconventional career track that you’ve been on in general from 2008 through 2015. What do you think we could learn from this experience? Are there any lessons that listeners can draw as to their own experience? Maybe they should go and defend one of their friends from terrorism charges? Is there anything that people could learn, or is it just too weird?

Chris Olah: Well, I think probably the most useful thing I’ve extracted has been thinking about the Pareto frontier of skills.

For example, a lot of my early contributions to machine learning were basically being able to create these really helpful illustrations of complicated ideas. What skills did I need to do that? Well, I needed both to understand machine learning, and I needed to be able to draw. I wasn’t an exceptionally good artist or scientific illustrator, and I wasn’t exceptionally knowledgeable about machine learning. But very plausibly, for a while, I was the person in the world who was the best at the intersection of machine learning and drawing.

If you think of these two-dimensional plots of different skills, or three-dimensional plots of different skills, and you think about the Pareto frontier, very often society is good at producing people who are optimised for a particular skill set, or set of skills that society has really validated as useful. We create entire pipelines training people.

But I think that often, if you can find useful intersections of skills that aren’t these couple of standard skills, there can be a lot of value. And it’s much easier to go and have a big impact, and often have a big counterfactual impact.

When I’m talking to people about their own careers, I often try to frame it in terms of, what are the skills that they’re cultivating, and what do we think the Pareto frontier with regards to these skills looks like? Do we think that there’s places where, rather than going and becoming the world’s best at one skill, they can produce a lot of value by being at an intersection of skills that other people don’t have?

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, that’s really interesting. Thinking about it theoretically, I suppose part of the reason is just that there’s so many combinations of two different things that you could throw together. So the space of possible combinations is vastly larger, and so you have a lot more to choose from. It also means that you could be the only person who’s interested in X and Y, if you choose two things that are sufficiently distant. Then you have a truly unique skill set, and you might just stumble on something that no one else has even tried to find.

Chris Olah: Exactly. And now the problem is the space is exponentially big, and you want to not just find an intersection, but the intersection has to be useful. So you have to have some taste in picking the skills that you develop. But I think that there are lots of opportunities like this, and that often it’s much less competitive than going and being good at one of the skills that society already really values as a thing to optimise for.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. I guess you could choose the wrong combination, just where there aren’t that many complementarities between the two options. You also might fall between the cracks, I suppose, of existing disciplines. Or, a common complaint that people have about doing interdisciplinary work is that if you’re doing philosophy of economics, the economics department doesn’t like you and the philosophy department doesn’t like you, and no one really feels like you’re one of them.

Chris Olah: I guess I want to distinguish this a little bit from interdisciplinary work, which I think is something slightly different. When I was doing this scientific illustration of machine learning, it was really a pure machine learning contribution. It was something that was valuable to the machine learning community and targeted at the machine learning community. I think that there is a distinction between —

Rob Wiblin: Skills, and maybe bodies of knowledge?

Chris Olah: Yeah. You could do something that was more cross-disciplinary, like you could use machine learning for scientific drawing, or something like this, but I think that’s not really what I was doing.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. Okay. So I suppose The 80,000 Hours Podcast might be an example of that. We’re at the intersection of being knowledgeable about effective altruist ideas and research, and, I guess, doing interviews and doing media, and communicating stuff. That’s maybe the unique selling point of this podcast. Do you have examples of classic skills that you can throw onto something and then maybe produce something interesting that others haven’t found?

Chris Olah: I have a favorite example of this phenomenon, which I’ll probably both slightly mistake and I actually owe to Michael Nielsen. But my understanding is that Richard Feynman… I don’t know much about physics, but I guess physicists were doing all this work solving complex integrals. And the usual set of techniques was to use tricks from complex analysis — analytic extensions and stuff like this — and try to go and solve the integrals that way.

And Feynman didn’t really know these complex analysis tools very well, but he had all of these weird tools around fractional calculus and stuff like this, and he used those instead. It’s not even that weird of a skill set, but in having a different skill set than his colleagues, he was able to have more counterfactual impact, and go and solve problems that other people couldn’t. It’s not that his tools were better; it’s just that lots of people were already trying with the other tools. And he brought a different set of tools to the table.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. I guess some options might be knowing a lot about some technical area, plus, say, knowing about operations in organisations, or knowing about how to do business, or knowing about money, or knowing how to manage people. Maybe those are combinations…?

Chris Olah: Yeah. I think people management plus technical skills is a huge superpower. It’s something that I am trying to become good at. The people who I see who are really good at it… Yeah, it’s a really amazing thing.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. They end up very sought after.

Chris Olah: Yeah. I think any communication plus technical skill. I think web development plus science is actually really underrated. I think that often being able to build interactive interfaces allows you to go and… Well, I guess the basic pitch is, I think a lot of scientists are drawn towards being very reductionist — and maybe this is more for machine learning than other fields, I’m not sure — but they tend to go and look for summary statistics, because you can easily work with summary statistics, and make line plots and things like this.

I think if you instead are able to go and create interactive tools and explore things, you tend to just interact with the data in a different way. I think there’s actually just something where, at least in machine learning, there’s a lot of value that gets left on the table. And I suspect elsewhere as well.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. Do you think that this might be slightly a Bay Area phenomenon? The thing of people really appreciating people who have quirky skills that are combined, and that maybe if you were in a more conservative social situation, maybe it would be more risky? Or is that wrong?

Chris Olah: Yeah. That might be true. Although I think in a lot of cases, if you can demonstrate that your intersection of skills produces value, I think that’s really the critical thing. Once an organisation is getting value out of your intersection of skills, whether it’s weird or not probably isn’t going to be the critical thing.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. It’s not going to be the make-or-break issue. I guess that’s maybe one other lesson, is that if you can show people that you can do stuff directly, then often you can route around credentials. I think that is quite often true.

The thing is, it actually is potentially quite hard to figure out how to produce value and how to do a good job without having the training. It requires someone who really has either just a lot of raw ability, or a lot of focus, or a lot of discipline to do things outside of a structured environment.

Chris Olah: Absolutely. I think it also depends a lot on the discipline. Practicing law without credentials isn’t something that’s going to fly.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. I think probably people aren’t just going to learn medicine through apprenticeships. For understandable reasons, it’s a somewhat credential-filled field.

Chris Olah: I would be nervous to have a doctor who did not have an MD.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, it reminds me of how you can get a free haircut if you’re willing to be someone’s first victim as a hairstylist. Perhaps it’s more difficult in a surgical environment.

Holden Karnofsky on deciding which weird ideas are worth betting on [00:58:03]

From episode #109 – Holden Karnofsky on the most important century

Rob Wiblin: A general property of the way that I think, that has always been the case across the board, is just that I’m much less inclined than average to reject ideas because they seem weird. And I think that might come in part from just a contrarian instinct, or I enjoy playing around with ideas and having ideas that are different than other people.

But I do also think, separately, it can be justified. Because people want to say, “I don’t accept that. I don’t want to take that very seriously because it’s weird.” But people’s calibration of what is weird is just based on what they’ve already observed.

And if you look at history and you look at how people’s views of physics, and economics, and religion, how all of this has changed: people in the past would think that the things that we believe and are doing now are absolutely bizarre. And if you went and got a hunter-gatherer and brought them to the modern world, they would just be completely astonished, to the same degree probably that we would be by a future involving digital people and artificial intelligence.

I just want to make the claim that it’s not safe to reject ideas that are weird — in physics, or in social science, or in predicting the future. Do you have any comments on that?

Holden Karnofsky: Well, I think what you’re saying is true, although I also think a lot of people really are better off doing exactly what you’re criticising. A lot of people are going to have much better lives if they reject things that are weird, even if they seem true. There’s a lot of bad ideas out there.

Let’s say you’re a person, and you grow up, and you don’t want to go to school — but everyone tells you to go to school, because it’d be weird if you didn’t. You go to school. Then you don’t want to get a job, but you see everyone getting a job, so you get a job. And then a bunch of cults come knocking on your door, and what they’re saying sounds really exciting, but it’s weird, so you don’t do it. I think you just won. I think that went really well for you.

And it’s true that the job you took was a weird job that people in the year 200 would have not imagined. But you did good. You did good and that worked out well for you.

So I don’t think that it’s crazy to have this anti-weirdness heuristic. I really don’t. I think what is good is to evaluate it, and poke it, and think about it over time, because what I’ve been trying to do with my life is think about what are the weird things that turn out to actually be pretty reasonable? And what are the weird things that I can just dismiss out of hand? And what are the patterns in that?

It’s like, what kinds of people should I be taking more seriously? What kinds of introductions, and language, and styles are correlated with someone who’s about to change my mind for real, instead of someone who’s about to lead me on a wild goose chase?

And I think that stuff’s really important. Honestly, I can’t say I’ve ever been a person who’s very sympathetic to, “Here’s a four-part logical argument that I delivered in five minutes; now go change what you’re doing with your life.” I’ve really never been a fan of that. And you can see the way that I’ve done things in my career is I’ve always wanted to do my homework before I make a big bet.

And maybe you’re one of those people — I don’t think I am — but maybe you’re one of those people who you just have awesome intuitions. And you’re blessed. And when things make sense to you in five minutes, that’s just because they make sense. And if something is stupid, you’ll see the problem with it immediately. And you just have this gift, and that’s great. But I don’t think I have that gift. And I also wouldn’t know initially if I did.

I’m into watching as you go through life: certain kinds of weird are worth looking into further, and may just be worth betting on. And there are certain kinds of things that it has not been helpful to me to dismiss because they’re weird. I want to do less dismissing of those things. Then you get this sort of accelerated self-improvement in your beliefs when you have that attitude, because you’re learning.

When I was at GiveWell, we were learning about bed nets and deworming — but we were also learning about what kinds of studies to trust, and what kinds of people to trust, and who turns out to be right when you learn more, and who turns out to be wrong when you learn more, and what weird stuff turns out to be crazy, and what weird stuff turns out to be exactly the sort of thing you should have been doing.

So it’s like I’m trying to do this meta-learning at the same time as I’m doing this learning. And now I’ve got a pretty well-developed sense of what kind of weird do I want to ignore, or what kind of weird do I want to get into? That would be more of the way I’d put it.

I do agree that a lifelong rule of dismissing everything just because it’s weird seems like it has to leave you short of your potential to do amazing things. But it may also stop you from doing really stupid things.

Rob Wiblin: I guess there is a pretty big distinction between how willing are you to do things that are completely non-conformist in your lifestyle or life choices — where people can learn a lot from experience — and how much should you do that in what is effectively a research project where you’re trying to get ahead of the crowd? Or like entrepreneurship: it’s a style of entrepreneurship where you’re trying to get ahead of the crowd and figure things out so you can either make more money or do more good. And in that case, rejecting things that are weird just almost certainly means that you’re going to fail.

Holden Karnofsky: Oh yeah. Once you get into the business where your whole thing is upside, you’re essentially at a startup, and you just want to do something amazing and that’s your goal. For a lot of people, that’s not their professional goal. Once it is, then it becomes extremely costly to just be dismissive of weird stuff.

Although, at the same time, it’s like you have to preserve your time to be able to look into the most important weird stuff. So you can’t go chasing down every weird thing that sounds like it might be true. You have to have some way of distinguishing.

Karen Levy on travelling to learn about yourself [01:03:10]

From episode #124 – Karen Levy on fads and misaligned incentives in global development, and scaling deworming to reach hundreds of millions

Rob Wiblin: You’ve been around; you’ve experienced a bunch of things. Is there any underrated or valuable life advice that you like to tell people that I haven’t yet given you the chance to share?

Karen Levy: Well, maybe unsurprisingly — based on what I just said about my experiences in Kenya — I would really advise people, particularly those who are interested in global health and development, to spend a substantial amount of time living somewhere other than where you grew up. And this is not only because you learn about new places, as valuable as that is. Really, it’s because of what you learn about yourself and where you come from.

We expect to feel a sense of culture shock when we visit somewhere new. But when you spend long enough far from home, you get to experience that feeling about your own home place and culture, and see it with new eyes. And it helps you understand how much is socially constructed — it helps you see the illogic or the internal contradictions of where you come from. I think it actually really helps to develop this scout mindset that Julia Galef talks about: the ability to observe and question what you take for granted as true or obvious or normal.

In this line of work in particular, I think it’s really critical for us to approach other cultures and institutions with the presumption that they probably have some of their own internal logic, and it’s incumbent upon us to try and understand it. And that conversely, we have lots of views and assumptions that are not necessarily logical or true, and that we should really be willing to question them.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. Anything else?

Karen Levy: Well, I will just end by sharing one of my favorite stories about this very topic. Some of the work I did in my earliest days in Kenya was running study abroad programs for American high school and college students in Kenya. And not surprisingly, they — as I was when I first came to Kenya — were always very interested in the exotic. That’s what attracts us. So I would often get questions, especially if we were visiting a rural area, about tribal dances or ethnic practices or things like this.

One of my very favorite things to do with groups of students in talking about cultural practices and “tribal traditions” is, I would say, “Everybody has tribal dances.” And they would say, “Well, everybody but us.” It’s the equivalent of, “Everyone else has an accent and I speak normally.”

So I would say, “No, no, no. Absolutely everyone has tribal dances.” And everyone would be very suspect of this. And so I’d say, “OK. Everybody get up and stand in a circle.” And everybody would get up and stand in a circle. And then I would say, “You put your right hand in, you put your right hand out.” And of course, everybody knows the Hokey Pokey — and what is the Hokey Pokey, if not an American tribal dance?

This was always one of my favorite examples to get people to think about this very issue that we’re talking about. We all have culture. We all have bias. We all are exotic. We’re all irrational. And being able to see your own place through those eyes really helps us develop a sense of inquisitiveness and truth seeking about the world that I think is very valuable.

Leah Garcés on finding common ground with unlikely allies [01:06:53]

From episode #99 – Leah Garcés on turning adversaries into allies to change the chicken industry

Rob Wiblin: Let’s talk about your book Grilled, which came out in 2019. In that book, you cover a lot of ground about your personal background, your work over the last couple of decades, and how you’ve had various successes over the years. For our conversation I’m keen to focus on the cases where you formed quite constructive relationships with folks like chicken farmers and executives at big meat companies, which is somewhat surprising, and these kind of relationships flourished, somewhat against the odds.

Analysing the process that you’ve been through, what do you think other people focused on social reform should take away from the experiences that you document in Grilled?

Leah Garcés: Yeah. That’s a great question. The first one is that we have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. Only talking to people who agree with us won’t get us to the solution. So recognising that the opponent quite often has the power to solve the problem, and that I don’t.

For example, I don’t care for a single chicken — the farmer does, and Perdue does. So in order to understand how to unpack this problem and end it, I have to speak to the people who are in control of it. So I’m comfortable being uncomfortable.

Another one is the simple thing of being willing to sit down and recognise that the person across from you is a human being, and has come to the decisions they’ve made out of a complex human mind. And they’ll have made decisions that you will not be aware of.

And sitting down with them and making that connection is really important. This is something that comes through a lot of negotiation. If you work on business negotiation, it’s the same thing. Find the common football team that you both like, or the baseball team that you both like. Make those common connections.

Or in my case, I sat down with one particular chicken executive, and both of us had adopted children. So we were able to connect and forget that we were supposed to be enemies in that moment, and talk about that experience — and some walls came down and some trust was built, because I recognised he was a human being and made that connection.

And the last thing is to look for win-wins and start there, rather than start with what you disagree with. So in the case of Craig Watts, I started to think about: How could I find him a different job? Rather than: How do I just end his job?

It’ll be faster and more efficient if we can find solutions where everybody wins, because they’ll be more willing to come with us. We won’t have to spend resources fighting them. Instead, they’ll just willingly come. So how can we find solutions where everybody is winning? It’s not always possible, but you should look there first.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. On the first one about building relationships with people, as I was reading the book, I was thinking there’s different interpretations you could have of events. One would be that the personal connections that you built — finding that you had both adopted children, that you back the same football team or whatever — that those personal connections were able to move the needle and to build trust, and potentially get movement on a bunch of policy areas where otherwise it wouldn’t happen. Which is entirely possible.

An alternative interpretation might be that because these companies were scared of Mercy For Animals, because they were scared of the damage that they might suffer, and perhaps looking again at the numbers, they were actually like, “Actually, making some of these reforms won’t be as costly as we think, and we’re probably going to be forced to do it anyway, so maybe let’s just get ahead.”

It’s actually a perfectly fine business decision. Those business considerations made the relationship possible. And so where previously they were unwilling to talk to you, because they decided to change anyway, now they wanted to build a more collaborative relationship.

I guess it could be quite difficult to distinguish these two cases, and to some extent, they kind of blur together. But what do you make of that?

Leah Garcés: I think both. Like I said earlier, recognising that there’s a PR risk of continuing to abuse animals, and knowing that is out there, and if your brand especially is tied to quality, or caring, or being better than others, then you’re at risk.

So I always present to companies, animal welfare can be a risk or a benefit for you. You do it badly, that’s a huge risk because here comes an undercover investigator to show what’s going on. Or it can be a benefit if you do it well and you’re leapfrogging ahead of your competitors. Consumers are only caring more and more about this issue, not less. And they’re able to access more and more information, and we’re able to get more and more footage.

I also think I had a capacity to make personal relationships, and almost like I could never satisfy my curiosity. I always liked understanding other people’s perspectives, and I was always curious about how people came to different conclusions than me. So I think that did help too, to explore that and make me more willing to be uncomfortable talking to others.

Rob Wiblin: There are some other organisations in the animal space — The Humane League jumps to mind — that take a somewhat more adversarial approach, and might be less inclined to form relationships like the ones that you’ve done.

I recall that story where you were talking to someone, I think they were in charge of communications or some other aspect of a chicken company, and they were saying, “I would love to make these changes for animals that you’re suggesting, but the public doesn’t care enough as yet. So you need to go out there and make a big fuss so that the most profitable thing for us to do is to adopt reforms, and then I’ll be able to push it through within the company, but because it would be a good business decision.”

I guess that kind of blurs the line between… It’s like, is that an adversarial relationship now? Or is it a collaborative one? I guess it’s a little bit of both. What is the right mix, do you think, of these adversarial approaches, where you kind of do use the stick, and other times when you use the carrot? How can we know how to strike the right balance as a movement as a whole?

Leah Garcés: The short answer is you need both. But we always start with a cooperative effort because it’s more efficient. It’s less resources. If you can sit down with someone and get them to do what you feel is the correct pathway, that’s going to cost less time and money.

So you should always ask first. You should always sit down and say, “What are the barriers? Is there anything I can do about those barriers? What’s the resistance? Is there anything I can do about that?”

But like the Costco example, we sat down with them for a year, and it was very clear, they just didn’t care. It didn’t matter. And the only thing that was going to work was public campaigning, but this should be a last resort because it’s so costly. And that was the resort we had to move to. That was the move we had to take because it was clear nothing else was going to work, except really thinking through exposing them publicly for the realities on their farm that they were benefiting from economically.

So it has to be both, but I always start with cooperative because it costs less. It’s more efficient. And it moves us along faster.

Rob Wiblin: That makes sense. So I guess the bottom line is you reach out the hand, try to form a cooperative relationship. If that doesn’t work, then you have to be adversarial. But then as soon as they’re willing to deal with you, then you want to switch back because this is going to be so much cheaper and so much faster.

Leah Garcés: 100%. Yep.

Spencer Greenberg on recognising toxic people who could derail your career and life [01:13:34]

From episode #183 – Spencer Greenberg on causation without correlation, money and happiness, lightgassing, hype vs value, and more

Rob Wiblin: On the show before, in previous interviews, I think we’ve sometimes listed the key ways that your life can go super wrong, and sometimes people really go off the rails — and that there’s really only a few ways that happens, and you should be aware of those and steer very clear of them.

One of them was to commit a crime, or some other severe wrongdoing against others even if it’s not technically a crime. Drug addiction. I guess not all drugs are created equal on that, but there’s some that have a pretty bad track record. Not treating severe mental health problems seriously, or having a severe health problem and just not getting that addressed at all, maybe because you’re in denial.

And I would say that actually another category we haven’t talked about on the show before, but I think is another way to really mess up your life in a big way, is to get very close to someone who was cruel or exploitative, and allowing them to become a really close friend or a colleague or a partner, like starting a business with someone who is really bad news. This can have a very negative effect on your life, and it’s something that people should go out of their way to not have happen.

Spencer Greenberg: I 100% agree. I think it’s a really common reason people’s lives get really messed up, is they kind of attach themselves — through marriage, through working relationships, just even sometimes through deep friendship — with people that are very harmful. And someone could be very harmful without being a bad person, so I would draw that distinction there. But there are some people that are good people, but are still very harmful. But I think learning to notice the signs…

And it doesn’t mean you can’t interact with the person at all. Maybe you could still hang out with them casually, but keeping a level of distance where they’re not so involved in your life that they can ruin your life, I think that’s the key thing.

And honestly, I’ve been burned incredibly badly by this, where there have been people in my life that I think are quite harmful people and that have hurt me tremendously.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, I was going to say I feel like kind of everyone who lives a normal life, or I suppose anyone who’s not extremely lucky, as you become a teenager, as you become an adult, you learn through experience — through bitter experience, often — about these warning signs. And that not everyone is maybe as nice as the people you knew when you were a child, and that some people really are quite toxic.

But it does feel like it’s something that it’s very hard to teach people. It’s very hard to find a 17-year-old and sit them down and say, “Here’s a list of things. If someone has these traits, you should really be wary.” It feels like people don’t take that as seriously as maybe they should until they’ve had negative experiences.

I think there’s a similar dynamic, actually, in business: that people who are early in their careers often don’t appreciate how harmful it is to make a bad hire.

Spencer Greenberg: Yeah, if one of your first employees is a harmful person, that could absolutely be devastating — can ruin your whole business, actually.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. I feel most people have a story about how at some point they made a bad hire and then they realised how important hiring was, and how important it was to actually go and call references and things like that.

Spencer Greenberg: But it’s also tricky, because you might have a really bad relationship, get burned by someone who’s very harmful, but then you might not update on what are all the signs of being harmful. You just over-anchor on the details of that person without seeing the more general pattern.

So we did a little qualitative study where we had 100 people answer the following question just in an open-ended format — they could say anything they wanted — and we asked them, “What signs do you look for that help you identify people who are likely to be untrustworthy, or who are likely to hurt you if they become a close friend or partner?”

We then took all their responses and we kind of synthesised them to look at what are the patterns of what they’re saying, where multiple people are saying the same thing. And we broke down each of the things that were patterns into kind of discrete signs to look out for.

I thought it was pretty interesting, because I wasn’t sure if I was going to agree with what people said, but I found out that really I did agree to a very large extent with what people ended up producing. And they also got me, through their answers, to think about things that I may not have thought about, but I’m like, yeah, that actually is a pretty good thing to look out for.

Rob Wiblin: What were the headline findings?

Spencer Greenberg: So here are the kind of patterns that emerged. And before we get into them, I will say that almost everyone will sometimes show these patterns. So the idea is not if someone ever shows one of these patterns, they’re bad news. It’s more like, think of it as a continuum: if someone repeatedly shows these patterns to a strong degree, you might question whether they’re a safe person, or whether they might be untrustworthy or hurt you.

So let’s dig into the specific things. The first set of patterns are around things you might call dangerous psychopathy or malignant narcissism.

So you notice that the person seems to be manipulating you or other people. You notice that they’re inconsistent; like, they’ll say one thing one time and a different thing at another time. Or you catch them being dishonest — and again, it could be to you, or maybe you just see them being dishonest with other people. A self-centredness where they seem much more interested in their own interests than in other people’s interests. Quick, very intense anger, so they suddenly become enraged. And then finally, lack of empathy.

I think what this cluster is really getting at are two personality disorders: antisocial personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder.

I will say not everyone with these disorders should be avoided. Like, there can be people who are good, ethical people who have these disorders — especially if they understand that they have these disorders; they’re seeking treatment, they’re working on themselves, and they have other compensating factors that help them avoid some of the dangers of having these disorders. But when you have someone who has these disorders to a strong degree, they’re in total denial, and they’re not working on it at all, it can pose quite a bit of danger.

Rob Wiblin: You should be on your guard.

Spencer Greenberg: You should be on your guard. Just be careful and know what you’re getting yourself into.

Rob Wiblin: This is a classic idea that on a first date, you should see whether the other person is nice to the waiter at the restaurant. And if they’re a jerk to them, that’s a sign that they maybe don’t care about people who aren’t in as strong a position of power as them. And I guess maybe this falls into another cluster you’re about to mention, but it seems like it might fall into that one.

Spencer Greenberg: Yeah. Well, you could see that being lack of empathy, for example. It could be a sign of lack of empathy. That’s just one set of things to look at.

The second cluster is around immaturity. And so this would be things like extreme emotionality. Like the person gets extremely upset over very minor-seeming things. The person seems to avoid topics when they’re upset — so instead of telling you, “That bothered me,” they just won’t talk about it; they’ll shut down; they have really poor communication. They’re lacking responsibility or accountability: maybe they mess up, but they refuse to apologise, or they just won’t take any accountability for what they did. And general poor handling of relationships. Like, if you see they have a bad relationship with everyone else in their life, that’s not a great sign.

And I think this immaturity category, maybe it’s not as potentially serious, but I think it really can be a red flag in relationships. You could get in a really bad pickle, where someone will do something, it’s harmful, but then they don’t take responsibility for it. Or they’ll be really angry at you about something: maybe you made a really minor mistake, but it wasn’t that serious, according to relatively objective third-party observers. But this person’s extremely upset about it, but then they don’t even tell you, and they’re just simmering with rage at you.

So there’s a lot of things that I think can come out here, that actually, I do think it’s a pretty important cluster.

Rob Wiblin: It could make someone a difficult colleague as well, I imagine, if you can’t have frank conversations about what things have gone well and badly.

So that was the second cluster. There’s a third one?

Spencer Greenberg: The third and final cluster is a pettiness cluster. This would be things like they talk negatively about a lot of people, like saying negative things about their other friends to you; gossiping in a way that’s harmful, where they’re spreading information that could hurt people; and extreme judgmentalness, where they’re like, that person sucks because of this little minor defect.

So this category, the pettiness, I don’t think I would have thought of this category, but I do see why it can kind of be insidious, where someone can be causing harm in a social group through these kinds of behaviours.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, I wonder whether it indicates that people might do that as part of their social positioning. So maybe they’re trying to undermine the status of other people in a group in order to big themselves up in relative terms. I mean, of course everyone has done that at some point in their life, at least once, but it’s maybe not a good thing to be doing very regularly, trying to raise your own position by dragging other people down, rather than delivering value to people around you.

Spencer Greenberg: Yeah, it’s almost like a negative-sum kind of behaviour, where you’re damaging other people’s reputations in a way that clearly we don’t want everyone in society doing that. It seems like that would lead to very bad outcomes.

Those are just three categories to think about. Again, none of them are hard and fast rules; they’re all on a spectrum. But if someone is showing these kinds of manipulative or very self-centred or very sudden rage kinds of behaviours, that’s in the first category. If they’re showing a lot of immaturity — like failure to acknowledge their mistakes, really bad communication, seem to be fighting with everyone in their life — that’s the immaturity category. And then finally the pettiness category.

Just things to be on the lookout for, to help you avoid people that might hurt you. So hopefully a list like this could help accelerate people a little bit, just getting them thinking about what are the different signs you might want to look out for.

Holden Karnofsky on the many jobs that can help with AI [01:23:13]

From episode #158 – Holden Karnofsky on how AIs might take over even if they’re no smarter than humans, and his 4-part playbook for AI risk

Rob Wiblin: What’s another way that some listeners might be able to help with this general issue by changing the career that they go into or the skills that they develop?

Holden Karnofsky: Yeah. So I wrote a post on this, called “Jobs that can help with the most important century.”

The first thing I want to say is that I just do expect this stuff to be quite dynamic. Right now, I think we’re in a very nascent phase of evals and standards. I think we could be in a future world where there are decent tests of whether AI systems are dangerous, and there are decent frameworks for how to keep them safe, but there needs to be just more work on advocacy and communication so that people actually understand this stuff, take it seriously, and that there is a reason for companies to do this. And also, there could be people working on political advocacy to have good regulatory frameworks for keeping humanity safe.

So I think the jobs that exist are going to change a lot. And I think my big thing about careers in general is: if you’re not finding a great fit with one of the current things, that’s fine, and don’t force it.

You have person A and person B. Person A is doing something that’s not clearly relevant to AI or whatever — let’s say they’re an accountant; they’re really good at it, they’re thriving, they’re picking up skills, they’re making connections, and they’re ready to go work on AI as soon as an opportunity comes up (which that last part could be hard to do on a personal level).

Then you have person B who kind of has a similar profile, but they force themselves to go into alignment research, and they’re doing quite mediocre alignment research — so they’re, like, barely keeping their job. I would say person A has the higher expected impact.

I think that would be the main thing on jobs: do something where you’re good at it, you’re thriving, you’re levelling up, you’re picking up skills, you’re picking up connections. If that thing can be on a key AI priority, that is ideal. If it cannot be, that’s OK, and don’t force it.

So that is my high-level thing. But I am happy to talk about specifically what I see as some of the things people could do today, right now, on AI that don’t require starting your own org, and are more like you can slot into an existing team if you have the skills and if you have the fit. I’m happy to go into that.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. For people who want more advice on overall career strategy, we did an episode with you on that back in 2021: episode #110: Holden Karnofsky on building aptitudes and kicking ass. So I can definitely recommend going back and listening to that. But more specific roles, are there any ones that you wanted to highlight?

Holden Karnofsky: Yeah. I mean, some of them are obvious. There’s people working on AI alignment. There’s also people working on threat assessment, which we’ve talked about, and dangerous capability evaluations at AI labs or sometimes at nonprofits. And if there’s a fit there, I think that’s just an obviously great thing to be working on. We’ve talked about information security, so I don’t think we need to say more about that.

I think there is this really tough question of whether you should go to an AI company and do things there that are not particularly safety or policy or security — just like helping the company succeed. In my opinion, that can be a really great way to skill up, a really great way to personally become a person who knows a lot about AI, understands AI, swims in the water, and is well positioned to do something else later.

There’s big upsides and big downsides to helping an AI company succeed at what it’s doing, and it really comes down to how you feel about the company. So it’s a tricky one, but it’s one that I think is definitely worth thinking about, thinking about carefully.

Then there’s roles in government and there’s roles in government-facing think tanks, just trying to help, and I think that the interest is growing. So trying to help the government make good decisions, including not making rash moves, about how it’s dealing with AI policy, what it’s regulating, what it’s not regulating, et cetera.

So those are some things. I had a few others listed in my post, but I think it’s OK to stop there.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. One path, broadly speaking, was going and working in the AI labs, or in nearby industries or firms that they collaborate with, and I guess there’s a whole lot of different ways you could have an impact there.

I suppose the other one is thinking about governance and policy, where you could just pursue any kind of government and policy career, try to flourish as much as you can, and then turn your attention towards AI later on, because there’s sure to be an enormous demand for more analysis and work on this in coming years. So hopefully, in both cases, you’ll be joining very rapidly growing industries.

Holden Karnofsky: That’s right. And for the latter, the closer the better. So working on technology policy is probably best.

Rob Wiblin: What about people who don’t see any immediate opportunity to enter into either of those broad streams? Is there anything that you think that they could do in the meantime?

Holden Karnofsky: Yeah. I did talk before about the kind of person who could just be good at something and kind of wait for something to come up later. It might be worth emphasising that the ability to switch careers is going to get harder and harder as you get further and further into your career.

So in some ways, if you’re a person who’s being successful, but is also making sure that you’ve got the financial resources, the social resources, the psychological resources, so that you really feel confident that as soon as a good opportunity comes up to do a lot of good, you’re going to actually switch jobs, or have a lot of time to serve on a board or whatever — it just seems incredibly valuable.

I think it’s weird because this is not a measurable thing, and it’s not a thing you can, like, brag about when you go to an effective altruism meetup. And I just wish there was a way to kind of recognise that the person who is successfully able to walk away, when they need to, from a successful career has, in my mind, more expected impact than the person who’s in the high-impact career right now, but is not killing it.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. So I expect an enormous growth in roles that might be relevant to this problem in future years, and also just an increasing number of types of roles that might be relevant, because there could just be all kinds of new projects that are going to grow, and will require people who are just generally competent — you know, who have management experience, who know how to deal with operations and legal, and so on. They’re going to be looking for people who share their values.

So if you’re able to potentially move to one of the hubs and take one of those roles when it becomes available, if it does, then that’s definitely a big step up, relative to locking yourself into something else where you can’t shift.

Holden Karnofsky: I was going to say also that, spreading messages we talked about, but I have a feeling that being a person who is a good communicator, a good advocate, a good persuader, I have a feeling that’s going to become more and more relevant, and there’s going to be more and more jobs like that over time.

Because I think we’re in a place now where people are just starting to figure out what a good regulatory regime might look like, what a good set of practices might look like for containing the danger. And later, there’ll be more maturity there and more stress placed on “and people need to actually understand this, and care about it, and do it.”

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. I mean, setting yourself the challenge of taking someone who is not informed about this, or might even be sceptical about this, and, with arguments that are actually sound (as far as you know), persuading them to care about it for the right reasons and to understand it deeply: that is not simple. And if you’re able to build the skill of doing that through practice, it would be unsurprising if that turned out to be very useful in some role in future.

Holden Karnofsky: And I should be clear there’s a zillion versions of that, that have dramatically different skill sets. So there’s people who work in government, and there’s some kind of government subculture that they’re very good at communicating with in government-ese. And then there’s people who make viral videos. Then there’s people who organise grassroots protests. There’s so many. There’s journalists: there’s highbrow journalists, lowbrow journalists.

Communication is not a generalisable skill. There’s an audience, and there’s a gazillion audiences, and there are people who are terrible with some audiences and amazing with other ones. So this is many, many jobs, and I think there’ll be more and more over time.

Danny Hernandez on using world events to trigger you to work on something else [01:30:46]

From episode #78 – Danny Hernandez on forecasting and the drivers of AI progress

Arden Koehler: Is there any sort of underappreciated idea that you think our listeners would benefit from hearing?

Danny Hernandez: Something that Allan Dafoe talked about on one of your podcasts was that he had decided that he was going to work on AI policy once we beat Go. That was going to be his trigger. He could kind of ignore AI until that happened, and then he would work on it.

And I think this is a very good way of viewing things that there isn’t a lot of evidence for right now — or that the evidence seems too murky or too small amounts of it to make a decision — is to just be like when would there be enough evidence for me to pay attention to this thing or to start working on it, and to think about those kinds of triggers for people’s major decisions around AI or around other things.

Arden Koehler: It must be kind of hard to pick a trigger, and then not reconsider it. I could imagine picking the Go trigger but then you get there and you’re like, “Oh, but I was misguided. I didn’t realise how unimpressive this was going to be” or something like that.

Danny Hernandez: Yeah, I think there’s some downside. I think what happens otherwise is that it’s like reality is unsurprising and you just think that you expected that. So I think there’s tradeoffs.

Arden Koehler: At least you know that there was a time when you didn’t expect that to be business as usual.

Danny Hernandez: I think commitments like that you should maybe think of as like 80% or 90% commitments or something. Like you haven’t literally bound your hands, but this is your strong intention as to what would convince you, and I think that that’s a thing to do.

I think another way you could phrase it is if you believe AI progress is fast, what would progress look like that would convince you it’s slow? Paint a picture of that five years from now. What does slow progress look like to you? And now you’re like, “Oh yeah, progress is actually slow.” And what could have happened that would convince you that it’s actually fast. But you can make what would update you clear to yourself and others and that for big decisions, this is generally worthwhile. It’s a lot of rigour to do for smaller things.

Arden Koehler: It’s another version of getting precise about your beliefs.

Danny Hernandez: Yeah, that’s my style.

Sarah Eustis-Guthrie on exploring and pivoting in careers [01:33:07]

From episode #207 – Sarah Eustis-Guthrie on why she shut down her charity, and why more founders should follow her lead

Luisa Rodriguez: 80,000 Hours recommends lots of people try out a particular career path, and then lots of those people have to figure out, “Is this the right thing? Should I keep investing in this thing and making this bet?” And sometimes they have to decide that actually, no, they shouldn’t continue down that career path.

So I think this question of how to decide whether to double down or pivot is really important and really broadly applicable. How do you think that organisations, but also individuals, should think about how and whether to continue on their bet or pivot and do something else?

Sarah Eustis-Guthrie: That’s a great question. It’s certainly something I think about all the time. I think the most important part is to think clearly about what path you’re on, what the different assumptions are that would suggest that that’s a really good path, and try to dig into: Are there ways that you could try and test those assumptions? What is the balance of the evidence in one direction or the other that suggests that maybe this is a really good path or maybe this is a bad path?

Thinking really clearly about this, for me, usually looks like a spreadsheet. So for postpartum family planning, I made this big spreadsheet that was: What are the biggest concerns about it as an intervention? How certain am I in each of these concerns? How much does this concern affect the bottom line impact of the intervention? And then talking to a bunch of different people and getting their input into it.

And I think it’s important to remember as a baseline that you are going to be uncertain on every decision to some extent. You have to say, what’s the level of uncertainty that I’m comfortable with? I have these uncertainties, but the fact that I have so many uncertainties that are of sufficient size and affect the bottom line so much that that’s just greater than the amount of uncertainties that I’m comfortable with, or comparing it to comparable options.

So I think that if you can be as clear as possible in articulating what you believe, and creating opportunities for yourself where you can maybe test the ground-level truth of that assumption, is really important.

And that’s extra tough when you’re working in really speculative areas. Maybe you’re thinking about something that’s far off in the future or that’s really speculative, but if you can at least concretely articulate, “This is exactly how speculative it is,” that makes a big difference in how well you can think about it.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, yeah, yeah. A kind of related idea that has helped me is: assessing how speculative a project is and estimating the chances of success or failure. If the project seems worth doing given those odds, I give it my best shot, and aim to think of it as a good and worthwhile bet even if it doesn’t work out. Then, I set a timeframe (like three months) to gather more information, kind of testing things out.

If I reach a point where things look promising, I continue, which is a success. If not, deciding to stop is also a success! Regardless of the outcome, I’ve followed my plan and made good choices with the information I have.

Sarah Eustis-Guthrie: Right. I am the world’s biggest advocate of reevaluation points. I think that everyone should have reevaluation points both personally and organisationally, where you’re going to sit down and you’re going to say, “We have this strategy. Our whole approach rests on these assumptions. A, should we have these assumptions in the first place? And B, how well are we actually doing in achieving this thing? Maybe there’s different approaches to achieving our goal in a better way that’s more effective.”

I think that the genius of reevaluation points is that it both ensures that you have a time when you’re going to be reflecting on your approach, and it also gives you permission to set aside your concerns on a day-to-day basis. So you write down that concern in your reevaluation doc, and then you go back to regular life — and you know that you’re going to have a moment where you come back and say, “Wait a minute, is this actually a good idea?”

And I think that it’s really easy for organisations to not do this. Someone from a very large charity came up to me after a talk I gave on this topic and said, “We totally don’t do this at all.” I was really surprised, because I guess I just kind of figured that everyone did this. But the fact of the matter is I think that this kind of big-picture strategic thinking just isn’t often incentivised. So maybe if your funder isn’t going to pay for you to spend some time doing this thing, I mean, that’s where you get all your money, so you’re not going to spend time doing this thing.

So I think it’s really important as individuals and as organisations to be intentional about having this reevaluation point — because if it turns out that you were doing a suboptimal thing all along, that’s a big problem.

Benjamin Todd on making tough career decisions [01:38:36]

From episode #71 – Benjamin Todd on the key ideas of 80,000 Hours

Rob Wiblin: So we’ve been talking about a lot of different considerations that people could bring to bear when planning out their career. Is it possible to bring this into any cohesive decision making process, a step-by-step process that people can use to do all these things in a way that’s not overwhelming?

Benjamin Todd: It’s funny you say that. We have just what you’re looking for!

Rob Wiblin: We didn’t plan this ahead of time. It’s all spontaneous.

Benjamin Todd: One we call the process summary, which is just what are the steps to go through to actually make a long-term career plan and figure out your next step. Then we also have a separate process which is called the decision-making process, which is when you have a couple of career options, A, B and C, and you want to choose between them specifically.

In our advice in general, it’s really easy to focus on the concrete career paths that we talk about because they’re really salient — but with any career decision, it’s going to be a really individual thing where you’re going to have to factor in a lot of personal circumstances, your own strengths, all those kinds of things.

Unfortunately we can’t just come up with a list of the top 10 careers that everyone should do. You always have to think through your own decision, so we try and help with that by providing these processes as well.

I’m not going to go over them now as it’s better just to read through them when you’re facing a specific decision, but for now could just highlight a couple of points to particularly emphasise.

I think one big thing is that it’s easy to focus a bit too much on analysis rather than concretely gaining information. Sometimes you come across people who’ve been racking their brains analysing these options, whereas they could’ve just gone and found out something that would have immediately made the decision more obvious.

One example recently was, we came across an academic who was considering whether to do a sabbatical for a year in another location, and they thought about it a bunch, but they hadn’t considered just going to visit that place for a week, which would have probably made it a lot more clear whether they would actually want to spend a whole year there.

We also sometimes see the opposite mistake, where someone has just quit their job and then they’re going to think full time about their career. That often seems a bit risky unless you’ve got a very clear plan worked out for what you’re going to do with this time and how you’re going to make sure you have answers at the end.

In general, we’d encourage people to do a series of cheap tests or cheap ways to gain information which go in ascending order of cost. Often initially the most useful thing is just to go and talk to people about the job, and that’s the most useful information to gain. Then later you can go onto more involved things — spending a week in the location, the sabbatical example, or doing some kind of trial work, applying to the job. These are bigger tests, and then you might even want to try the job for a year or something as a much bigger commitment.

The key thing is to be thinking about what are actually the key uncertainties, what actually would help me decide between option A and B, and how might I figure those out, and how might I get information that answers those uncertainties?

The other most common mistake is probably just not considering enough options. That’s maybe the biggest single piece of advice or biggest issue that’s uncovered in the decision-making literature: when people are faced with decisions, they can often improve the decision by just considering a wider range of options than they’re initially considering. We come across people who’ve been following our advice for a while and just haven’t considered options that seem obvious for them.

One example we mentioned in our annual review was Cullen who was a lawyer at Harvard, and someone with that background, that’s a great preparation to work on AI policy, but they hadn’t really considered that. They were thinking about earning to give or maybe environmental law, a bunch of other areas, and they ended up actually making a bunch of applications in that area along with their other jobs. They got a job offer from FHI, which is now where they’re a researcher.

Just a final thing on decision making: Career decisions are a really messy domain where our intuitions are not necessarily a good guide. If you want to get better at making career decisions, a lot of that involves making these really difficult predictions about the future, like how successful might you be in different fields? How high impact might this charity be?

All the best advice we’ve found on how to get better at that skill of making better predictions is Phillip Tetlock’s work. We’ve got two other podcasts with him which provide a great introduction to all that kind of stuff.

Rob Wiblin: Another comment on decision making is that every so often I encounter people who are stressing a lot about their next career decision and want to work on it right away and make lots of decisions, especially decisions that they think will have ramifications over many decades.

It seems like going through all this process, learning all of this information, and then figuring out how to get yourself in a different career track is going to take probably at least months, possibly years. People shouldn’t feel an enormous pressure to reassess all of these things right away. It’s a marathon, not a sprint, in my mind.

Benjamin Todd: Yeah, I think that’s right. Just in general, these kinds of decisions can be very overwhelming, but it’s always really useful to then try to bring it down to what specific options are on the table, what actually are my key uncertainties, how might I figure those out?

That’s what we hope the decision-making process helps with. It’s just a checklist, or a bunch of prompts and questions that can help you at least make sure you haven’t missed anything obvious and do the best job you can of making the best decision you can, which is all you can do.

Hannah Ritchie on being selective when following others’ advice [01:44:22]

From episode #160 – Hannah Ritchie on why it makes sense to be optimistic about the environment

Luisa Rodriguez: What’s one of the most valuable mistakes you’ve ever made, and how can our listeners learn from it?

Hannah Ritchie: In terms of advice, I think a lot of people would have advised me against a lot of the trajectories I’ve gone on, where I’m sure they would have said, “I think that’s a mistake.”

And I think this comes back a little bit to being this generalist. And I’ve been told many times, “If you want to progress in academia, you have to write papers” — and kind of my point is that I don’t really want to progress in academia.

So I think one of the lessons I’ve learned is to be quite selective about who I take advice from. I think if you’re going to go down a traditional pathway, there’s loads of great advice out there, and people can give you amazing advice, especially if they’ve climbed the ranks in that field.

If you’re kind of straddling many different ones, you need to be a bit more careful, because it’s such a non-trodden path, and people often can’t see outside their traditional pathway that they followed. So I think, for me, because I have become more of a generalist, it’s actually served me well to ignore some of the pieces of advice I’ve had in the past.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. Yeah, I would guess it’s true of at least some of our listeners, who are trying to have impacts with their career, often the problems they’re trying to address are neglected, and the solutions they’re interested in are also neglected. And probably it involves, for some of them, some amount of nontraditional path-taking. That definitely feels true of me.

And it sounds like it’s really probably easy to get advice from people who’ve gone the traditional path, and then be like, “Oh, no. Am I doing the wrong thing? I’m supposed to stay in academia.” And it sounds like you’re saying, for you, it’s been really important to… Would you say it was like taking advice from people who share more of your values, or who understand your goals better?

Hannah Ritchie: I think that there’s a fine line. My advice is not to ignore all advice. I think there you can very easily fall into a trap of, “No one understands what I’m trying to do, so I need to pave my completely new path on my own.” I don’t think that’s the case. There are people that can give you really good advice, but I think you need to just be a bit more selective.

You need to find people that can maybe think slightly beyond the conventional. And also have people that you really trust, that really want to give you advice in your best interests — not about, I don’t know, trying to serve an academic institution, for example.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Alex Lawsen on getting good mentorship [01:47:25]

From 80k After Hours: Alex Lawsen on avoiding 10 mistakes people make when pursuing a high-impact career

Luisa Rodriguez: Another common mistake you’ve seen people make is not following conventional wisdom on careers as much as they should. I’m sure there are lots of examples of this, but is there one that comes to mind?

Alex Lawsen: Maybe the most important example is underemphasising the value of getting good mentorship. Partly this is a conventional piece of wisdom about careers. In particular there’s another level of the conventional wisdom aspect here, where I think lots of good mentorship is available outside of the specific focus that you might have for your career.

This might be like, if you’re interested in being a researcher, doing a project with someone who is an academic, but not an academic who’s interested in exactly the technical field you want. And just there isn’t a tonne of mentorship in the very narrow fields that most people who are focusing really hard on impact are pointing at — partly because they’ve picked those for neglectedness, among other things.

You should be thinking about how fast you’re able to learn and improve, especially early on. And I claim — as a former teacher, to be fair, so there’s some bias here — that who is helping you learn, who can you point to as a good example, is a really big aspect of how good a job is for you.

Luisa Rodriguez: Nice. Have you had the experience of getting good mentorship? And how valuable was that for you?

Alex Lawsen: Yeah, I think I’ve experienced a variety of qualities of mentorship, and maybe this is why this is extremely salient, but I think some of the experiences I’ve had here, being managed by Michelle — especially as I’ve transitioned into management myself — have just allowed me to develop far faster than I would have done absent that. It’s just really useful to be able to make mistakes and feel psychologically safe enough to say, “Hey, I think I messed up this thing. Can we talk about what I maybe should have done instead?”

Maybe that’s a specific example of the kind of mentorship that can be really valuable, is someone who you trust enough and feel safe enough with to ask them about specific things you’ve messed up, and get feedback on how to fix them, rather than just try a different thing next time. And a large part of that is that you also want to rate them enough that you are going to listen to them when they say, “You should have done this.”

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. Why do you think so many people are failing to get this, given how valuable it is?

Alex Lawsen: I think part of it is that your ideal mentor is someone who has the same values as you, who knows you really well, and who is spending a tonne of time helping you improve at this thing, while also the thing you’re doing is something you’re already good at and is really good for the world.

And that’s just a lot of things, and there’s not that many people like that for most people. And then in particular, if you’re in a small community of often pretty young people, it’s going to be unusually hard to find a mentor who is also part of that community.

So some of this is just there are not that many great mentors to go around. If you find one that ticks all of the boxes, you’re really lucky, and you should really be excited about that. But if you don’t find one who ticks the specific box of being a great mentor for you, then maybe I just want to say, upweight that consideration compared to several others — even “How much impact am I having right now, this second?” — especially if you are planning to be trying to do good for quite a while.

I would encourage more people than are currently doing it, in my opinion, to sacrifice some immediate impact over the next few months or years for a really good learning opportunity where they can put themselves in a great position to do good work later.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, so practically speaking, that might mean something like if two roles seem pretty great, and you’re choosing between them, and one of them seems a bit better on impact, and the other one has exceptionally good mentorship: it’s not crazy to choose the one that’s plausibly worse on impact in order to get the huge boost from the mentorship.

Alex Lawsen: Yeah, I think that sounds right. Maybe another example of this would be something like, let’s stick with an academic one: say you’re trying to find a supervisor for a research project, maybe for a graduate degree.

And there’s someone who is known for just producing phenomenal students year after year. This could be that their students get into the top conferences; it could be that their students just go on to have really successful careers in other fields; it could just be that you’ve spoken to some of their current students and they’ve said, “She’s always there for me, and is really supportive with all of the stuff that I’ve struggled with, and knows so much about this field.”

And then there’s also someone who, maybe even it’s not that you know that they’re bad on any of these axes, but you just don’t know them that well. But they have an interest in clean air specifically for pandemic prevention, and that is the thing you’re really interested in.

Ideally find out more information about both. Grad school is a big decision. Asking to speak to some current students of both seems like a good idea. But it seems possible that, if you’re going to be doing some relevant research in both, taking the mentor who is a bit less aligned with your ultimate values, but way better for you at actually helping you learn a bunch of useful skills in research, I imagine that’s the best trade more often than I perceive people to be taking it.

Luisa Rodriguez: Cool. Are there other examples of conventional career wisdom that people are ignoring or just not putting enough weight on?

Alex Lawsen: I think another one is just doing a normal job at a company or organisation that’s known for being run well.

I think there are tradeoffs. If you join some small scrappy startup with only three people, then it seems totally possible that you get to gain a bunch of responsibility really quickly, and that might be the best choice for some people. But sometimes just really established programmes that know how to grab smart graduates without much work experience, and turn them into extremely valuable employees really quickly, just are actually good at that. I don’t know, trying really hard to do a thing for many years probably makes you at least decent at that thing.

Maybe if I can think of some specific examples from different fields here, I notice that many of the people I am just incredibly impressed with on their ability to think about different quantitative technical problems have at some point worked at Jane Street.

Luisa Rodriguez: Interesting. OK.

Alex Lawsen: And to be clear, I think some of this is probably that whoever Jane Street’s recruiters are, they’re doing a really good job of just selecting people who are super bright and talented. But my guess is that some of it is that there’s a bunch of competent people that work there, and they know how to take a certain kind of bright, talented person and help them learn how to think about particular things in a particular way. And at least if that is the case, then that should upweight your potential decision to go in that direction.

Chris Olah on cold emailing that actually works [01:54:49]

From episode #108 – Chris Olah on working at top AI labs without an undergrad degree

Rob Wiblin: I’ve seen in your articles that you’re also just generally a big proponent of writing cold emails to people. You found that that’s worked pretty well for you. Do you think that generalizes to others as well?

Chris Olah: I get a lot of cold emails, and 99% of them are terrible. They’re like, “Can you do my homework for me?” or, “Can you answer this basic question that I could Google for one minute and answer?”

So I think people get this impression that cold emailing doesn’t work, because of course if you send emails like that, people are overwhelmed and aren’t going to respond. Or, even if you send a nicely written email and you’re like, “I’m trying to get into machine learning. Can you do a half-hour phone call with me to talk about how to do that?” Even that, you’re not very likely to get a response from.

But I think the thing that people miss is that if you write really good cold emails, it’s actually not that hard to be the best email I received that week. And I think that if you’re willing to invest energy in understanding what a researcher or a group is working on, and you’re specifically referring to their papers, and you have thoughtful questions about things, that people will pay a lot of attention to that. It very often works well.

I think there’s a big gap in what people mean when they talk about cold emails. And if you’re willing to put in the work, and if you just genuinely really care about what somebody is doing, and have put in the work to understand it, and can talk about it really intelligently, that’s going to come through. It’s a much more compelling reason for the person to talk to you than other things.

Rob Wiblin: Right. It sounds like you don’t think that people should write tonnes of cold emails to all kinds of people, but if there is someone whose work you’re really into, whose work you really understand, then you should not be sheepish about emailing them. Because even if they’re getting other emails, yours is really going to potentially stand out, if you can demonstrate that you have actually read their paper.

Chris Olah: Well, and the other thing is, I think there’s a lot of people who are trying to look at how to get into machine learning. And what they do is they send lots of emails to people, or they email famous people.

I think what you should actually be doing is trying to figure out who you would be really excited to work with, and really understand their work. Ideally pick somebody who’s a little bit less famous maybe, and then reach out to that person with an email where you’ve put a lot of work into it being clear that you’ve read their work, and connecting your interests to theirs, and things like this.

There’s a number of emails that have been really important for me, where I spent a week writing them. I think that was a totally worthwhile investment, and I think that’s not how people usually think about cold emails.

Rob Wiblin: That’s so interesting. How do you feel about length? Maybe we’re getting a little bit into the weeds of email technique here, but go on.

Chris Olah: I think a lot of the most impactful emails I’ve written were only a few paragraphs long, less than one page. But I read five of that person’s papers beforehand, and I think that comes through in subtle ways. And I didn’t integrate it super ham-fistedly, but I was writing to them because I genuinely was invested and cared about their work, and had shared interests with them. I think that’s very, very different.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. I think the main lesson that I’ve learned — this is a different class of cold email; this is asking people for small favors or for feedback or offering advice — certainly the shorter it is, the more likely people are to answer.

Maybe also if you can really condense down the information that you want to convey into just a couple of sentences, people are much more likely to absorb it. Because people are flicking through their email inbox pretty quickly and often they have other things going on, and if they open an email and it’s a wall of text, then you definitely run the risk that they’re just going to close it and then never get back to it, because it’s just too much. They don’t yet know whether it’s really worth investing the time in.

Chris Olah: Yeah. If you’re writing something long, you want to really optimise the introduction for that reason.

Pardis Sabeti on prioritising physical health to do your best work [01:58:34]

From episode #104 – Pardis Sabeti on the Sentinel system for detecting and stopping pandemics

Rob Wiblin: On this topic of overcoming big challenges in life and in your career, you suffered this really horrific car accident in 2015, which almost killed you, and it took days of surgery and I guess years of physical therapy to recover from. I guess it’s the kind of thing you never fully recover from.

Most people suffer some horrible setback in their life or career at some point which takes them out of work for months or maybe years — whether it’s physical illness, mental illness, bereavement, an important project falling apart and breaking their heart — and those tragedies can be really hard to bounce back from.

Did you learn anything about how to recover from physical illnesses and personal tragedy from that accident, and find a way to get back on your feet?

Pardis Sabeti: Yeah. So just to set the stage, it was actually July 2015, just as things were starting to calm down a little bit after Ebola. And I was at a conference of all places, and basically I was in an accident where I was catapulted onto boulders, and I shattered my pelvis and both my knees. It required four all-day surgeries, about 30 hours of surgery. And I now have six plates and 30 giant rods that stitch together my pelvis and my knees.

So it’s a lot. It’s a lot. It definitely knocked me into the present, into literally the room I was in and nothing else. I was basically hospital-bound, bed-bound for four months. And yeah, it’s a daily recovery process. It’s a lifetime recovery process.

And I think the things that I learned from that was… In the world today, everything seems to be in the mind — and ultimately our mind does not work if our body doesn’t work. It just doesn’t. So the thing is: we cannot forget our bodies. It is the engine that runs everything else. So it forced me to take a moment and say, “I need to make this body work.”

And for somebody who never even takes a day off without doing some work, I couldn’t do anything but that. So I just turned all my attention to doing my physical therapy, becoming a scientist of injury, and trying to figure out how to make my body work. And since then, I dedicate a lot of my time — every day I have to dedicate time — to working my body, and working all of these scar tissues and bones that are with me as best as I can.

So I think that ultimately it’s probably the thing that I learned the most about: if my body is not well then I can’t do my best work. And ultimately you have to support yourself in everything you do.

I think that also when I run my lab it’s in that same way. I know I run the team; we run hard. It’s not that we don’t run hard. I pulled more all-nighters than I want to admit this year. But I still always try to hold the fort and say, “I have to take care of myself.” It’s just really important.

The other thing is also how much you can do with exercise and paying attention to it. The fact of the matter is most of these things can be solved. While I love Western medicine, we are way too reliant on it. And I think some of the best support I’ve gotten is from outside modalities that are really remarkable, and I don’t think we use enough other ways of improving our health and our wellbeing.

For examples, other than obviously during the surgeries and a few weeks after, I stopped using pain medication. Even though it sounds crazy, I found that massage did what I needed to do. Massage is amazing. It’s underutilised. And then after massage, a stretching modality that I use called resistance stretching, those things were really amazing and are outside of what we call medicine, but I think they were far more potent and powerful. I think that there’s a lot of really interesting stuff there.

Rob Wiblin: I guess it makes complete sense that it’s very hard for the brain to work really well if the rest of the body that it’s attached to isn’t being kept in good shape. I feel that most of my friends take that view, and think that it’s good holistically to exercise, and to stay in shape, and take care of your physical health. Have you found that people don’t think that?

Pardis Sabeti: I think people do that conceptually, but do they really do that? And particularly, I would say for me, I’ve gone to medical school. Medical school is designed to make you anxious, depressed, and unhealthy. I always find it really remarkable that basically we would never go to a barber with bad hair or a facialist with bad skin, but our doctors often have such poor health. For example, it’s pretty remarkable how little personal health is valued in the medical training and profession.

I do think that there are a lot of industries in which personal health is not valued. It’s sad to me that I think the medical profession has some of the highest rates of suicide and depression of any, and those are the people that are the keepers of our health. That’s a real issue for me. It speaks to like, what is the integrity of the process you’re doing?

And it’s not their fault. You’re just beaten into that, where it’s all about all-nighters and all of that. So I do think that while conceptually, yes, people get that that matters, I think in practice, no. Too often not. And I didn’t, I was running myself into the ground.

Rob Wiblin: The stories I’ve heard about the indignity and the cruelty that people go through during medical training I found mind-boggling. And obviously it’s terrible for them, and it’s very dangerous to patients as well, because it means that people can’t do proper work because they’re just being run into the ground. You don’t want your surgeon to be run into the ground.

Chris Olah on developing good taste and technique as a researcher [02:04:39]

From episode #108 – Chris Olah on working at top AI labs without an undergrad degree

Rob Wiblin: I know you’ve written this article about how people can develop good taste in what to research and how to go about it. Could you give people a summary of your views there?

Chris Olah: Sure. First of all, I don’t consider myself at all an expert on this. This is just what’s worked for me, and when I’ve been mentoring people, things that I’ve found helpful.

But I think it’s often helpful to divide being a good researcher into two parts. One is taste — so your ability to pick good problems and pick good avenues to attack those problems, and things like this.

The second you might call technique, or execution. Maybe if you picture a chemist working with vials and pipettes and weird things, it’s pretty clear that there’s a whole technique to manipulating that laboratory equipment. I think that it’s subtler in other fields, but I think that there is something — certainly in machine learning, of the technique of training models, and even just being a good programmer, and doing very minute things of manipulating your code editor, or manipulating distributed systems, and stuff like this.

I think that there’s a question of how do you develop both of those skills.

For taste, I think that’s probably the hardest one to develop. I tried to come up with a list of exercises that one could do. An example, and I think probably the most useful one, is just write down a list of problems that you think might be important to work on. And then have somebody else, ideally your mentor, go and just rate them one to 10.

Because one of the really hard things about developing taste is that you have such a slow feedback loop on learning lessons, because you have to do the entire project normally. What you want to do is use a mentor or use somebody else as a cheap proxy for getting feedback. And then if you disagree with their feedback, you can either talk to them about it, or maybe you even want to go and do that experiment.

I think that could be useful. There’s lots of other things. I think reading about the history of science is helpful. I think trying to write just about why you think things are important is helpful. In any case, I think there’s a bunch of exercises there.

Then, on the technique side, I actually think the most valuable thing here is working closely with people who have good technique. At least in machine learning, and probably other computer science disciplines, pair programming with people is immensely valuable. I think that there’s a lot of stuff that’s hard to communicate in other forms, but gets passed along when people are pair programming. I think for developing technique, often pair programming is the highest leverage thing to do.

Rob Wiblin: That’s really interesting. I guess in fields of work, in tasks where they have a physical embodiment — actually moving things around in the physical world — people get to see one another and they get to learn from watching them, what they’re doing, and figure out how to do it better. And for work on computers, that exists much less.

Chris Olah: Exactly.

Rob Wiblin: There just seems to be a culture in general. When you arrive at an organisation, and you’re trying to get training, for example, from your manager, you don’t literally sit behind them all day and watch what they do. Maybe that would be sensible, but you can’t just sit behind them and watch their screen, and then see, how do they move the windows? How do they reply to people? That doesn’t happen.

And I guess that means that it’s possible for people to just miss really basic stuff potentially. It sounds like maybe in programming, there is this pair programming thing in part to fill this gap because it’s maybe such a severe problem there.

Chris Olah: Yeah. I think there’s an increase in culture at a lot of organisations of pair programming. I feel like I hear people talking about it a lot more. And yeah, I’ve found that it’s really helpful for passing this stuff along. I myself am constantly learning from other people when I work with them, and I hope that they’re learning from me as well.

I think your point about how when it’s not physical the technique gets hidden by that is a really good one.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. I think that culture exists in part because people are worried about… Well, I guess there are two reasons. One is sheepishness, perhaps, about people disagreeing with how they’re going about their work. It’s easy to just hide it and never have people watch your screen.

Another might be that you’re worried about confidentiality. You don’t want other people looking over your shoulders and reading your emails. There’s a real norm of not looking at other people’s screens in general. But it seems like maybe we should think about ways to work around that. Like, you would have a specified time when someone literally is just going to watch you work, and then you try to not do anything that would be too sensitive where they shouldn’t be looking at the screen.

I think I’d be fascinated to see how my colleagues just go about their day. Do they switch windows as often as I do? I don’t know. Sometimes some of these basic skills are so key to your productivity that it could be worthwhile.

Chris Olah: Well, I think it’s also not just teaching; I think often you can just push through things faster if you have a second person with you. Jeff and Sanjay are famous for being extremely impactful at Google, and they’re pair programming all the time.

Rob Wiblin: So they sit together with their computers next to one another and they just work together on a problem?

Chris Olah: Yeah.

Rob Wiblin: That’s really interesting. Do you have a theory for why that’s not more common? It seems like it might be just a really sensible way to get things done.

Chris Olah: I think it is modestly common in programming and software engineering. I guess the thing that I’m trying to highlight here is that it’s a really useful… I think people sometimes feel like it’s just a nice way to work, or it’s an effective way to work. But especially if you’re trying to develop technique, I think it’s the best way to go and transmit it that I’m aware of.

Benjamin Todd on why it’s so important to apply to loads of jobs [02:09:52]

From episode #71 – Benjamin Todd on the key ideas of 80,000 Hours

Benjamin Todd: One point I wanted to highlight is the importance of making a lot of applications. One of our team members, Howie Lempel, when he was trying to get a job at a think tank, he applied to about 30 places, including some economic research institutes, lots of think tanks. And he got turned down by almost all of them, though he got a job offer from Brookings, which is pretty much one of the most prestigious think tanks.

That just shows that even someone who’s qualified to get into some of the top jobs in a sector still needs to apply really widely and might get rejected a lot of times.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, I don’t envy people who are applying for jobs. It’s something that everyone has to go through potentially many times in their lives, but it’s a very stressful thing to do. Even if you’ve been at the top of your game, you potentially have to just apply for so many jobs, and accept the fact that you’re just going to be rejected potentially again and again and again. It could be quite demoralising.

Benjamin Todd: Yeah, and sometimes, especially early in our career, we might not have gone through a process of getting rejected 30 times in a row. It’s a pretty difficult experience to go through. Yeah, a typical job application process might only have a couple of percent acceptance rate, so you can see from that that as a ballpark, you’re going to be thinking that you need to apply to, say, 20 to maybe more than 50 places to be confident of having a job.

Rob Wiblin: One thing to keep in mind is just how random the job application process is. Very often organisations, especially in these very skilled jobs, are looking for someone with very specific capabilities and the ability to get along with a very particular manager or a very particular team — where someone could be qualified in lots of ways, but then if they were randomly missing one idiosyncratic factor, then potentially they may just not be suitable for it. It’s not a condemnation of them as a person by any means.

Benjamin Todd: Exactly. There’s your general purpose skills and then you need the specific skills needed in that job, but then you also need the fit with the team and fit with that specific manager. So someone who’s really talented in many ways could easily get turned down from many jobs.

Rob Wiblin: Another thing to keep in mind perhaps that might provide some comfort if someone’s applying to lots of jobs and not getting in is that if you’re not getting rejected from most of the jobs you’re applying for then you’re almost certainly not being ambitious enough about the places that you’re trying to get into.

Given how many hours you spend working at a job that you get, versus how many hours it takes to apply for a job, maybe it’s good to have only a few percent acceptance rate, because you should be aiming sufficiently high, or trying to be sufficiently ambitious that you should be getting turned down most of the time.

Benjamin Todd: Yeah, it’s a bit of a difficult question, because we definitely come across people who are both. Some people are overconfident and some people are underconfident.

We’ve found people who ended up working at great organisations in the community, but beforehand they had to be encouraged to apply; they didn’t think they would get the job. And then they ended up doing really well at it, kind of to their surprise. People like that need to be encouraged to apply more widely.

Though we’ve also found people who… Recently someone was saying, “My backup job is to work at an effective altruism organisation” — but many of those positions are actually really competitive, and that’s not going to serve as a good backup.

But I agree with what you’re saying that, in general, I think the error is to not apply enough — because as you say, there’s this asymmetry where spending several months making applications is unpleasant, but if you can get that even better role, that’s many years of having that better role. In general, the potential upsides are greater than the downsides.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. The main reason people don’t do that, I think, is that as you’re saying, it’s unpleasant to apply for jobs, which I suppose is a reason not to do it. Inasmuch as you find it unpleasant, that’s a reason to try to cut short the process a bit. But if you can find a way to grit through and apply for even more places and try to get something that’s even better and that doesn’t bother you too much, then maybe it’s worth having a crack.

Benjamin Todd: Yeah. In general, also try to have some stretch options where you think you maybe don’t have a good chance of getting them, but you’re trying to maybe push yourself a bit in case you’re being underconfident, but also try to have a bunch of backup options to ensure that you have something solid at the end of the process.

One other thing is, there is a lot you can do to increase your odds of getting a specific job, and we cover a bunch of advice on that in the article itself. But then even accounting for that, even if you can bring up your odds, it’d be pretty hard to bring them up to more than 10% per job, and so you’d still need to apply to quite a large number of places.

Varsha Venugopal on embracing uncomfortable situations and celebrating failures [02:14:25]

From episode #113 – Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

Rob Wiblin: Do you have any general life advice that you think is underrated?

Varsha Venugopal: I think one experiment I have done over the last few years which has served me well is around putting myself in uncomfortable situations. It’s almost like building a muscle. There’s a whole classic book on this, which is called Feel the Fear…and Do It Anyway.

And especially, I think as an entrepreneur, you get thrown in uncomfortable situations quite a lot, and I think consciously and deliberately choosing to do that in your daily life — whatever that is, buying something expensive you otherwise absolutely wouldn’t or talking loudly somewhere where you wouldn’t — it just, I think in a way, helps you increase your comfort zone and helps you face some of those uncomfortable situations better.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. I guess, well, talking more loudly in a public space isn’t super important itself, but I guess the idea is you’re training this general ability when it does actually matter at some point to be able to violate convention or do something that you haven’t done before.

Varsha Venugopal: Yeah. Another one my colleagues talk about is the idea of collecting failures, which I think is super useful for entrepreneurs to think about. In fundraising it’s almost a stat, right? You have 90% negative responses for every 10% positive. So it’s almost again, deliberately aiming to go get those negatives so you can increase the odds for some of the positives.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. Collect them in what way? Oh, I see. The idea is you should consider it a success every time you’re rejected for a job or a grant or something, because that makes it more motivating to do it.

Varsha Venugopal: Or consider it a failure, but celebrate it anyway. So go out there and collect some of them. Maybe it doesn’t have to be huge failures, but just on a daily basis, you may be afraid to go talk to someone, but just do it because it’s another failure in your pot.

Rob Wiblin: That’s super interesting. There’s some people on Twitter who I think they publish every time they get rejected for a paper from a journal or every time they get turned down for a job and things like that.

It’s unpleasant to be rejected for a paper or for a job or a grant or whatever else. But then if you can make content out of it, where you get to share your misery with the public and people get to talk about it. Of course, everyone has been turned down for so many things before, it somehow makes it perhaps more enjoyable or motivating for folks because they get to share their frustration.

Varsha Venugopal: I think at some point it almost became a meme, right? There was some Princeton professor who posted something on all his failures and I think it took it to a different level. But I think fundamentally there is something there we could all aspire to do more of: fail.

Rob Wiblin: I guess it’s the challenge with all sorts of discussion about how to be more successful, or all lifestyle advice is that you only get this top 10% of things that people are willing to share. Most of our lives we prefer to keep private rather than sharing on social media or putting it in a podcast, which can very much bias what kinds of things you hear.

Varsha Venugopal: True.

Rob Wiblin: So obviously most people’s CVs are like all of the papers they did publish, all the jobs they did get. If they went through and put into their CV every single time that they were rejected for anything, it would have made it incredibly long — but entertaining, and I think relatable.

Luisa’s outro [02:17:43]

Luisa Rodriguez: Hey listeners, I hope you enjoyed revisiting some of those moments!

As I said in the intro, we have loads more resources on the 80,000 Hours website to help you with finding a career that does good in the world, including a step-by-step career planning guide, weekly research newsletter, and one-on-one career advising. The best part is that we’re a nonprofit, so everything we provide is free! Check that out at 80000hours.org.

All right, thanks to the production team for putting that compilation together. We’ll be back with a fully new interview very soon!