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Read the full guide →
Introduction
Your most important decision
Summary
Foundations
A definition of impact
Future generations & their moral significance
Effective altruism
Global priorities
Why problem selection is crucial
The case for reducing existential risks
This could be the most important century
Our current list of pressing problems
Contribution
Which careers let you contribute most?
Some solutions are far more effective than others
Our list of high-impact careers
Personal fit
Fit is more important than you think
Strategy
What is career capital?
How much to explore?
Coordination and impact
Balancing impact and doing what you love
Aim higher: a rational case for dreaming big
Three career stages
Conclusion
How much do careers differ in impact?
Read the full guide →
Go to problems hub →
Top areas to work on
Preventing an AI-related catastrophe
Catastrophic pandemics
Building effective altruism
Global priorities research
Nuclear war
Epistemics and institutional decision making
Climate change
Great power conflict
Other promising areas
Promoting positive values
Space governance
See more →
Go to problems hub →
See all our career reviews →
Key categories of impactful careers
Government and policy
Organisation-building at effective nonprofits
Research
Applying an unusual strength to a needed niche
Communication
Earning to give
List of top-recommended career paths
AI safety technical research
Long-term AI policy
Founder of new projects
Helping build the effective altruism community
Grantmaker
Operations management in high-impact organisations
Research into global priorities
Biorisk research, strategy, and policy
China-related AI safety and governance
Forecasting research and implementation
Sometimes-recommended paths
High-impact but especially competitive
Promising but under-researched
Impactful if you're an especially good fit
Recommended career capital
Steps to build your skills and network
Making the most of your current job
Doing good in any career
How to invest in yourself
See all our career reviews →
See all planning resources →
Create a high-impact career plan
8-week career planning course
Summary
Career plan template
Annual career check-up
Make good career decisions
Make an immediate decision
Improve your decision-making skills
See all planning resources →
Selected topics
Moral philosophy
Skills
Job satisfaction
Anonymous advice
Unconventional advice
What to study
Advocacy
Catastrophic risks
Meta-causes
Priority paths
See all topics →
Top articles from outside our guides
What makes for a dream job?
Best charities to donate to
Misconceptions about effective altruism
High-impact research questions
What are your chances of getting elected to Congress, if you try?
How many lives does a doctor save?
What's the impact of voting?
Advice for undergraduates
All articles →

2017 career guide
All career guide pages →
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Big picture (101)
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Topic archive: Research

Subtopics in "Research":

Academic Research (81)
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Graduate study (15)
- PhDs (11)
Research manager (6)

Filter by content type:
All136
Podcasts70
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Problem profiles2

All content tagged "Research"

2022

September

#137 – Andreas Mogensen on whether effective altruism is just for consequentialists
Podcast
Global priorities research (Updated)
Problem profile

August

#136 – Will MacAskill on what we owe the future
Podcast

July

#134 – Ian Morris on what big picture history teaches us
Podcast

June

#131 – Lewis Dartnell on getting humanity to bounce back faster in a post-apocalyptic world
Podcast

May

#130 – Will MacAskill on balancing frugality with ambition, whether you need longtermism, & mental health under pressure
Podcast
Climate change
Problem profile
#129 – James Tibenderana on the state of the art in malaria control and elimination
Podcast

April

#128 – Chris Blattman on the five reasons wars happen
Podcast

March

Engineering
Career review

February

Software engineering
Career review
#120 – Audrey Tang on what we can learn from Taiwan’s experiments with how to do democracy
Podcast

2021

December

#118 – Jaime Yassif on safeguarding bioscience to prevent catastrophic lab accidents and bioweapons development
Podcast

November

#117 – David Denkenberger on using paper mills and seaweed to feed everyone in a catastrophe, ft Sahil Shah
Podcast
#116 – Luisa Rodriguez on why global catastrophes seem unlikely to kill us all
Podcast
#115 – David Wallace on the many-worlds theory of quantum mechanics and its implications
Podcast

October

Investigate a potentially pressing but unexplored global issue
Career review
Mitigating climate change using effective altruist approaches
Career review
Public intellectual
Career review
Information security
Career review
Expert in AI hardware
Career review
Specialist in emerging global powers
Career review
Research management
Career review
Historian of large societal trends, inflection points, progress, or collapse
Career review
Forecasting and related research and implementation
Career review
Biorisk research, strategy, and policy
Career review
Research into global priorities
Career review
AI safety technical research
Career review
Long-term AI policy strategy research and implementation
Career review
#113 – Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India
Podcast
#112 – Carl Shulman on the common-sense case for existential risk work and its practical implications
Podcast

September

#111 – Mushtaq Khan on using institutional economics to predict effective government reforms
Podcast

August

#109 – Holden Karnofsky on the most important century
Podcast
#108 – Chris Olah on working at top AI labs without an undergrad degree
Podcast
#107 – Chris Olah on what the hell is going on inside neural networks
Podcast

July

#106 – Cal Newport on an industrial revolution for office work
Podcast

June

#104 – Pardis Sabeti on the Sentinel system for detecting and stopping pandemics
Podcast
#103 – Max Roser on building the world's first great source of COVID-19 data at Our World in Data
Podcast
#102 – Tom Moynihan on why prior generations missed some of the biggest priorities of all
Podcast

May

Effective Altruism: Ten Global Problems — curated episodes from The 80,000 Hours Podcast
Article
#98 – Christian Tarsney on future bias and a possible solution to moral fanaticism
Podcast

March

#95 – Kelly Wanser on whether to deliberately intervene in the climate
Podcast
#92 – Brian Christian on the alignment problem
Podcast

January

#90 – Ajeya Cotra on worldview diversification and how big the future could be
Podcast
Rob Wiblin on self-improvement and research ethics
Blog post

2020

December

#89 – Owen Cotton-Barratt on epistemic systems & layers of defense against potential global catastrophes
Podcast

November

#87 – Russ Roberts on whether it's more effective to help strangers, or people you know
Podcast

October

#86 – Hilary Greaves on Pascal's mugging, strong longtermism, and whether existing can be good for us
Podcast

August

Research questions that could have a big social impact, organised by discipline
Article
How to use your career to help reduce existential risk
Article
Why I’ve come to think global priorities research is more important than I thought
Blog post
#84 – Shruti Rajagopalan on what India did to stop COVID-19 and how well it worked
Podcast
Ideas for high-impact careers beyond our priority paths
Blog post

July

#83 – Jennifer Doleac on ways to prevent crime other than police and prisons
Podcast
#82 – James Forman Jr on reducing the cruelty of the US criminal legal system
Podcast

June

#80 – Professor Stuart Russell on why our approach to AI is broken and how to fix it
Podcast

May

#77 – Professor Marc Lipsitch on whether we're winning or losing against COVID-19
Podcast

April

Policy and research ideas to reduce existential risk
Blog post
#74 – Dr Greg Lewis on COVID-19 & catastrophic biological risks
Podcast

March

#72 – Toby Ord on the precipice and humanity's potential futures
Podcast

February

#70 – Dr Cassidy Nelson on the twelve best ways to stop the next pandemic (and limit COVID-19)
Podcast

January

#68 – Will MacAskill on the paralysis argument, whether we're at the hinge of history, & his new priorities
Podcast

2019

December

#67 – David Chalmers on the nature and ethics of consciousness
Podcast
#66 – Peter Singer on provocative advocacy, EA, how his ethical views have changed, and drowning children
Podcast

October

#64 – Bruce Schneier on the big risks in computer security, secrets, and surveillance without tyranny
Podcast

September

#63 – Vitalik Buterin on better ways to fund public goods, blockchain's failures, & effective giving
Podcast

August

Philosophy academia
Career review

June

#58 – Pushmeet Kohli of DeepMind on designing robust & reliable AI systems and how to succeed in AI
Podcast

April

#56 – Persis Eskander on wild animal welfare and what, if anything, to do about it
Podcast

2018

December

#50 – Dr David Denkenberger on how to feed all 8 billion people through an asteroid/nuclear winter
Podcast
#49 – Dr Rachel Glennerster on a year's worth of education for under $1 and other development best buys
Podcast

November

#47 – Catherine Olsson & Daniel Ziegler on the fast path into high-impact ML engineering roles
Podcast

October

#46 – Hilary Greaves on moral cluelessness, population ethics, & harnessing the brainpower of academia to tackle the most important research questions
Podcast
#45 – Prof Tyler Cowen's stubborn attachments to maximising economic growth, making civilization more stable & respecting human rights
Podcast
New career review on becoming an academic researcher: Highlights on your chances of success, which fields have highest GRE scores, & having impact outside research
Blog post
#44 – Dr Paul Christiano on how OpenAI is developing real solutions to the 'AI alignment problem', and his vision of how humanity will progressively hand over decision-making to AI systems
Podcast
Academic research
Career review

September

#42 – Amanda Askell on moral empathy, the value of information & the ethics of infinity
Podcast

August

#41 – David Roodman on incarceration, geomagnetic storms, & becoming a world-class researcher
Podcast
#39 – Spencer Greenberg on the scientific approach to solving difficult everyday questions.
Podcast

July

#38 – Prof Yew-Kwang Ng on anticipating EA decades ago & how to make a much happier world
Podcast
#36 – Tanya Singh on ending the operations management bottleneck in effective altruism
Podcast

May

#33 – Dr Anders Sandberg on what if we ended ageing, solar flares & the annual risk of nuclear war
Podcast
#32 – Prof Bryan Caplan on whether the Case Against Education holds up, totalitarianism, & open borders
Podcast
#30 – Dr Eva Vivalt on how little social science findings generalize from one study to another
Podcast
#29 – Dr Anders Sandberg on three new resolutions for the Fermi Paradox and how to easily colonise the universe
Podcast

April

#28 – Dr Owen Cotton-Barratt on why scientists should need insurance, PhD strategy & what if AI progresses fast
Podcast
#26 – Marie Gibbons on how exactly clean meat is created & the advances needed to get it in every supermarket
Podcast

March

#25 – Prof Robin Hanson on why we have to lie to ourselves about why we do what we do
Podcast

February

#20 – Bruce Friedrich on inventing outstanding meat substitutes to end speciesism & factory farming
Podcast

January

#17 – Prof Will MacAskill on moral uncertainty, utilitarianism & how to avoid being a moral monster
Podcast

2017

December

#16 – Dr Hutchinson on global priorities research & shaping the ideas of intellectuals
Podcast

November

#15 – Prof Tetlock on how chimps beat Berkeley undergrads and when it’s wise to defer to the wise
Podcast
Why you should consider applying for grad school right now
Blog post

October

#13 – Claire Walsh on testing which policies work & how to get governments to listen to the results
Podcast
#11 – Dr Spencer Greenberg on speeding up social science 10-fold & why plenty of startups cause harm
Podcast

September

#7 – Julia Galef on making humanity more rational, what EA does wrong, and why Twitter isn’t all bad
Podcast

June

#2 – Prof David Spiegelhalter on risk, stats and improving understanding of science
Podcast

April

Should you wait to make a difference? (Updated)
Article
Why and how to earn to give (Updated)
Article

2016

June

How to do high impact research (Updated)
Article

May

To find work you love, don’t (always) follow your passion (Updated)
Article

April

Global priorities research (First published)
Problem profile

February

Plan change story: interview with Dillon Bowen, founder of Effective Altruism group at Tufts University
Blog post

2015

September

Are too many people going into biomedical research – or too few?
Blog post

June

I want to make a difference. Should I become a philosopher?
Blog post
Should you do a computer science PhD?
Blog post
Why an economics PhD might be the best graduate program
Blog post
Economics PhDs
Career review
Advice on entering a US economics PhD from the UK with a non-quantitative background
Blog post
Check with your gut, but don’t go with it (Updated)
Article

April

Get paid to do existential risk reduction research
Blog post

March

Education research: Interview with Dan Greene
Blog post

2014

October

Should you wait to make a difference? (First published)
Article
Check with your gut, but don’t go with it (First published)
Article

September

Why and how to earn to give (First published)
Article
How to do high impact research (First published)
Article
To find work you love, don’t (always) follow your passion (First published)
Article

August

Job satisfaction research
Article

February

In which career can you make the most difference?
Blog post

January

Interview with leading HIV vaccine researcher – Prof. Sir Andrew McMichael
Blog post

2013

December

A comparison of medical research and earning to give
Blog post
Economics PhD the only one worth getting?
Blog post

November

Career Opportunities for Economics PhDs
Blog post

October

Why I’m doing a PhD
Blog post
The value of economics PhDs: A conversation with Robin Hanson
Blog post

July

Looking for a seriously high-impact job using your managerial skills?
Blog post
The Future of Humanity Institute is hiring a high-impact project manager
Blog post

April

Is most research a waste?
Blog post

February

Bringing it all together: high impact research management
Blog post
Vegetarian Research
Blog post

January

How to make a difference in research: An interview with Nick Bostrom
Blog post
Should you go into research? – part 2
Blog post

2012

December

3 Ways to Advance Science
Blog post
How to choose a research topic: An interview with Anders Sandberg
Blog post

October

Open Source Technology: A Career in Engineering
Blog post
How to do important research
Blog post

September

How to be a high impact philosopher, part II
Blog post

August

Should you go into research? – part 1
Blog post

July

The high impact PA: how anyone can bring about ground-breaking research
Blog post

May

How to be a high impact philosopher
Blog post

2011

November

High Impact Science
Blog post

Filter by content type:
All136
Podcasts70
Blog posts37
Career reviews18
Key articles9
Problem profiles2

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80,000 Hours is a project of the Effective Ventures Foundation (England and Wales registered charity number 1149828 and registered company number 07962181) with a registered 501(c)(3) Exempt Organization in the USA (Centre for Effective Altruism USA Inc., EIN 47-1988398).

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© 2021 – all rights reserved. Please contact us if you wish to redistribute, translate, or adapt this work.

80,000 Hours is a project of the Effective Ventures Foundation (England and Wales registered charity number 1149828 and registered company number 07962181) with a registered 501(c)(3) Exempt Organization in the USA (Centre for Effective Altruism USA Inc., EIN 47-1988398).

Please contact us to suggest ideas, improvements, or corrections.

We do our best to provide useful information, but how you use the information is up to you. We don’t take responsibility for any loss that results from the use of information on the site. Please consult our full legal disclaimer and privacy policy.

© 2021 – all rights reserved. Please contact us if you wish to redistribute, translate, or adapt this work.