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Top areas to work on
Preventing an AI-related catastrophe
Catastrophic pandemics
Nuclear war
Great power war
Climate change
Capacity building
Building effective altruism
Global priorities research
Improving decision making
Other promising areas
Civilisation resilience
Artificial sentience
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Factory farming
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Wild animal suffering
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Our list of top high-impact career paths
AI safety technical research
AI governance and policy
Biorisk research, strategy, and policy
Information security in high-impact areas
Expert in AI hardware
Helping build the effective altruism community
China-related AI safety and governance
Grantmaker
Operations in high-impact organisations
Research into global priorities
More promising paths
Be a founder
Software engineering
Journalism
See more →
How to build great career capital
See our top recommendations →
See all career reviews →
Read the full series →
Introduction
Your most important decision
Foundations
A definition of impact
Longtermism
Harmful jobs
Global priorities
Problem selection
Existential risks
Top problems list
Contribution
How to think about your contribution
Effective solutions
List of high-impact careers
Personal fit
Gut instinct
Differences in productivity
Comparative advantage
Strategy
Ambition
Coordination
Exploration
Impact and satisfaction
Accidental harm
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All content tagged "Sometimes-recommended careers"

2024

April

#184 – Zvi Mowshowitz on sleeping on sleeper agents, and the biggest AI updates since ChatGPT
Podcast

March

Christian Ruhl on why we’re entering a new nuclear age — and how to reduce the risks
Podcast (80k After Hours)
#183 – Spencer Greenberg on causation without correlation, money and happiness, lightgassing, hype vs value, and more
Podcast
#182 – Bob Fischer on comparing the welfare of humans, chickens, pigs, octopuses, bees, and more
Podcast

February

#179 – Randy Nesse on why evolution left us so vulnerable to depression and anxiety
Podcast
#178 – Emily Oster on what the evidence actually says about pregnancy and parenting
Podcast
AI governance and policy (Updated)
Career review

2023

December

Engineering skills
Skill
#175 – Lucia Coulter on preventing lead poisoning for $1.66 per child
Podcast
#174 – Nita Farahany on the neurotechnology already being used to convict criminals and manipulate workers
Podcast
Experience with an emerging power (especially China) (Updated)
Skill
Research skills (Updated)
Skill
Policy and political skills (Updated)
Skill
Software and tech skills (Updated)
Skill
Specialist knowledge relevant to a top problem (Updated)
Skill
Organisation-building (Updated)
Skill
Communicating ideas (Updated)
Skill
Academic research (Updated)
Career review
Improving China-Western coordination on global catastrophic risks (Updated)
Career review
The highest-impact career paths our research has identified so far (Updated)
Article

November

#173 – Jeff Sebo on digital minds, and how to avoid sleepwalking into a major moral catastrophe
Podcast
#172 – Bryan Caplan on why you should stop reading the news
Podcast
#171 – Alison Young on how top labs have jeopardised public health with repeated biosafety failures
Podcast
#170 – Santosh Harish on how air pollution is responsible for ~12% of global deaths — and how to get that number down
Podcast

October

Experience with an emerging power (especially China) (First published)
Skill
#168 – Ian Morris on whether deep history says we’re heading for an intelligence explosion
Podcast
#167 – Seren Kell on the research gaps holding back alternative proteins from mass adoption
Podcast
#166 – Tantum Collins on what he’s learned as an AI policy insider at the White House, DeepMind and elsewhere
Podcast

September

Research skills (First published)
Skill
Policy and political skills (First published)
Skill
Software and tech skills (First published)
Skill
Specialist knowledge relevant to a top problem (First published)
Skill
Organisation-building (First published)
Skill
Communicating ideas (First published)
Skill
Expert in AI hardware (First published)
Career review
#162 – Mustafa Suleyman on getting Washington and Silicon Valley to tame AI
Podcast

August

#161 – Michael Webb on whether AI will soon cause job loss, lower incomes, and higher inequality — or the opposite
Podcast
#160 – Hannah Ritchie on why it makes sense to be optimistic about the environment
Podcast

July

#158 – Holden Karnofsky on how AIs might take over even if they’re no smarter than humans, and his four-part playbook for AI risk
Podcast
#157 – Ezra Klein on existential risk from AI and what DC could do about it
Podcast
#156 – Markus Anderljung on how to regulate cutting-edge AI models
Podcast

June

#155 – Lennart Heim on the compute governance era and what has to come after
Podcast
AI governance and policy (First published)
Career review
AI safety technical research
Career review
#154 – Rohin Shah on DeepMind and trying to fairly hear out both AI doomers and doubters
Podcast
Information security in high-impact areas (Updated)
Career review

May

#152 – Joe Carlsmith on navigating serious philosophical confusion
Podcast

April

Why we’re adding information security to our list of priority career paths
Blog post
#148 – Johannes Ackva on unfashionable climate interventions that work, and fashionable ones that don’t
Podcast
Journalism (Updated)
Career review

March

#147 – Spencer Greenberg on stopping valueless papers from getting into top journals
Podcast
Luisa and Robert Long on how to make independent research more fun
Podcast (80k After Hours)
#146 – Robert Long on why large language models like GPT (probably) aren’t conscious
Podcast
Earning to give in quantitative trading (Updated)
Career review
Why and how to earn to give (Updated)
Article

February

#145 – Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasn’t inevitable
Podcast

January

#144 – Athena Aktipis on why cancer is actually one of the fundamental phenomena in our universe
Podcast

2022

December

#143 – Jeffrey Lewis on the most common misconceptions about nuclear weapons
Podcast
#142 – John McWhorter on key lessons from linguistics, the virtue of creoles, and language extinction
Podcast
Information security in high-impact areas (First published)
Career review
#141 – Richard Ngo on large language models, OpenAI, and striving to make the future go well
Podcast
Marcus Davis on founding and leading Rethink Priorities
Podcast (80k After Hours)

November

#140 – Bear Braumoeller on the case that war isn’t in decline
Podcast

October

#139 – Alan Hájek on puzzles and paradoxes in probability and expected value
Podcast
Anonymous advice: If you want to reduce AI risk, should you take roles that advance AI capabilities?
Article

September

Journalism (First published)
Career review
#137 – Andreas Mogensen on whether effective altruism is just for consequentialists
Podcast

August

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

July

#134 – Ian Morris on what big-picture history teaches us
Podcast
#133 – Max Tegmark on how a ‘put-up-or-shut-up’ resolution led him to work on AI and algorithmic news selection
Podcast

June

#132 – Nova DasSarma on why information security may be critical to the safe development of AI systems
Podcast
#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, and mental health under pressure
Podcast
Climate change
Problem profile
Data collection for AI alignment
Career review
#129 – Dr 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
#127 – Sam Bankman-Fried on taking a high-risk approach to crypto and doing good
Podcast

February

#121 – Matthew Yglesias on avoiding the pundit’s fallacy and how much military intervention can be used for good
Podcast
China-related AI safety and governance paths
Career review
Software engineering
Career review
#120 – Audrey Tang on what we can learn from Taiwan’s experiments with how to do democracy
Podcast

2021

December

#119 – Andrew Yang on our very long-term future, and other topics most politicians won’t touch
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

Expert in AI hardware (Updated)
Career review
Manager of a long-term philanthropic fund
Career review
Investigate a potentially pressing but unexplored global issue
Career review
Research & advocacy promoting impactful climate solutions
Career review
Organise an effective altruism local group
Career review
Expert on formal verification
Career review
Public intellectual
Career review
Specialist in emerging global powers
Career review
Research management
Career review
Become an executive assistant for someone doing especially high-impact work
Career review
Policy careers focused on other pressing global issues
Career review
Non-technical roles in leading AI companies
Career review
Historian of large societal trends, inflection points, progress, or collapse
Career review
Earning to give in quantitative trading (First published)
Career review
Research into global priorities
Career review

September

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

July

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

June

#104 – Dr 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

April

#97 – Mike Berkowitz on keeping the U.S. a liberal democratic country
Podcast
#96 – Nina Schick on disinformation and the rise of synthetic media
Podcast

March

#95 – Kelly Wanser on whether to deliberately intervene in the climate
Podcast
#94 – Ezra Klein on aligning journalism, politics, and what matters most
Podcast
#92 – Brian Christian on the alignment problem
Podcast

2020

December

#89 – Owen Cotton-Barratt on epistemic systems & layers of defence 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
#85 – Mark Lynas on climate change, societal collapse & nuclear energy
Podcast
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

#79 – A.J. Jacobs on radical honesty, following the whole Bible, and reframing global problems as puzzles
Podcast

May

#78 – Danny Hernandez on forecasting and the drivers of AI progress
Podcast
#77 – Marc Lipsitch on whether we’re winning or losing against COVID-19
Podcast
#76 – Tara Kirk Sell on COVID-19 misinformation, who’s done well and badly, and what we should reopen first
Podcast

April

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

March

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

February

#69 – Jeff Ding on China, its AI dream, and what we get wrong about both
Podcast

January

#68 – Will MacAskill on the moral case against ever leaving the house, whether now is the hinge of history, and the culture of effective altruism
Podcast

2019

December

#67 – David Chalmers on the nature and ethics of consciousness
Podcast
#66 – Peter Singer on being provocative, EA, how his moral views have changed, & rescuing children drowning in ponds
Podcast

November

#65 – Ambassador Bonnie Jenkins on 8 years of combating WMD terrorism
Podcast

October

#64 – Bruce Schneier on how insecure electronic voting could break the United States — and surveillance without tyranny
Podcast

August

Philosophy academia
Career review

June

#59 – Cass Sunstein on how social change happens, and why it’s so often abrupt & unpredictable
Podcast

April

#56 – Animals in the wild often suffer a great deal. We ask Persis Eskander what — if anything — should we do about that
Podcast

March

#55 – Mark Lutter on trying to end poverty by founding well-governed ‘charter’ cities, ft Tamara Winter
Podcast

February

#53 – Kelsey Piper on whether journalists have room to write about important things
Podcast

January

#51 – Martin Gurri on the revolt of the public & crisis of authority in the information age
Podcast

2018

December

#50 – We could feed all eight billion people through a nuclear winter. David Denkenberger is working to make it practical.
Podcast
#49 – Rachel Glennerster on a year’s worth of education for under a dollar and other ‘best buys’ in development
Podcast

November

ML engineering for AI safety & robustness: a Google Brain engineer’s guide to entering the field
Article
#47 – PhD or programming? Fast paths into aligning AI as a machine learning engineer, according to ML engineers Catherine Olsson & Daniel Ziegler
Podcast

October

#46 – Philosopher Hilary Greaves on moral cluelessness, population ethics, probability within a multiverse, & harnessing the brainpower of academia to tackle the most important research questions
Podcast
#45 – Economist Tyler Cowen says our overwhelming priorities should be maximising economic growth and making civilisation more stable. Is he right?
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
Academic research (First published)
Career review

September

#43 – Daniel Ellsberg on the creation of nuclear doomsday machines, the institutional insanity that maintains them, and a practical plan for dismantling them
Podcast
#42 – Amanda Askell on tackling the ethics of infinity, being clueless about the effects of our actions, and having moral empathy for intellectual adversaries
Podcast

August

#41 – If the US put fewer people in prison, would crime go up? Not at all, according to Open Philanthropy’s renowned researcher David Roodman.
Podcast

July

#38 – Yew-Kwang Ng on ethics and how to create a much happier world
Podcast
#36 – Tanya Singh on ending the operations management bottleneck in effective altruism
Podcast

May

#33 – Oxford’s Anders Sandberg on solar flares, the annual risk of nuclear war, and what if dictators could live forever?
Podcast
#32 – Economist Bryan Caplan thinks education is mostly pointless showing off. We test the strength of his case.
Podcast
#30 – Eva Vivalt’s research suggests social science findings don’t generalize. So evidence-based development – what is it good for?
Podcast
#29 – Where are the aliens? Anders Sandberg on three new resolutions to the Fermi Paradox and how we could easily colonise the whole universe
Podcast

April

#28 – Owen Cotton-Barratt on why daring scientists should have to get liability insurance
Podcast
#26 – How exactly clean meat is created & the advances needed to get it into every supermarket, according to food scientist Marie Gibbons
Podcast

March

#25 – Why we have to lie to ourselves about why we do what we do, according to economist Robin Hanson
Podcast

February

Improving China-Western coordination on global catastrophic risks (First published)
Career review
#20 – Bruce Friedrich makes the case that inventing outstanding meat replacements is the most effective way to help animals
Podcast
#19 – Samantha Pitts-Kiefer on her job worrying about any way nukes could get used
Podcast

January

#18 – Ofir Reich on using data science to end poverty and the spurious action/inaction distinction
Podcast
#17 – Will MacAskill fears our descendants will probably see us as moral monsters. What should we do about that?
Podcast

2017

December

#16 – Michelle Hutchinson hopes to shape the world by shaping the ideas of intellectuals. Will global priorities research succeed?
Podcast

November

#15 – Phil Tetlock on predicting catastrophes, why keep your politics secret, and when experts know more than you
Podcast
Why you should consider applying for grad school (but make sure you’re aware of the potential drawbacks of attending!)
Blog post

October

#13 – Claire Walsh on testing which policies work & how to get governments to listen to the results
Podcast
#9 – Christine Peterson on the ’80s futurist movement and its lessons for today’s idealists
Podcast

September

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

August

#5 – Alex Gordon-Brown on making millions for charity each year by working in quant finance
Podcast

June

Which professions are paid too much given their value to society?
Blog post
#2 – David Spiegelhalter on risk, statistics, and improving the public understanding of science
Podcast
The Schwarzman Scholarship: An exciting opportunity to learn more about China and get a Masters in Global Affairs
Blog post

May

How much do hedge fund traders earn?
Blog post
Which industry has the highest-paying jobs?
Article

2016

February

Interview: trying to change the resources industry from the inside
Blog post
Doing good through for-profits: Wave and financial tech
Blog post

2015

December

Podcast with Ben West, who expects to donate tens of millions for charity through tech entrepreneurship
Blog post

November

One of the most exciting new effective altruist organisations: An interview with David Goldberg of the Founders Pledge
Blog post
Take the growth approach to evaluating startup nonprofits, not the marginal approach
Blog post

October

Startup employees don’t earn more
Blog post

September

The return to coding bootcamps may not remain so high forever
Blog post
Are too many people going into biomedical research – or too few?
Blog post
What do journalists say about journalism as a high-impact career?
Blog post

August

What’s it like being a nonprofit in Y Combinator?
Blog post

July

Think tank research
Career review
The highest-impact career paths our research has identified so far (First published)
Article

June

Should you go into journalism to make a difference?
Blog post
Economics PhDs
Career review
New in-depth profile on software engineering
Blog post

April

Get paid to do existential risk reduction research
Blog post

February

How to start a career in technology (even if you studied art)
Blog post

2014

December

The camel doesn’t have two humps – update to software engineering profile
Blog post
Learn to code in 16 weeks for free in the UK at Founders and Coders
Blog post

October

What I learned quitting my job to found a tech startup
Blog post
Update on Peter’s career story
Blog post
Tips on careers in journalism from NPR correspondent David Folkenflik
Blog post

September

Why and how to earn to give (First published)
Article

August

Trading in quantitative hedge funds (for earning to give) (First published)
Career review
Found a tech startup (First published)
Career review

July

Trading in quantitative hedge funds (for earning to give) (Updated)
Career review
Found a tech startup (Updated)
Career review
Careers in journalism – an interview with Larissa MacFarquhar
Blog post

June

The payoff and probability of obtaining venture capital
Blog post
Case series – why and how to learn programming
Blog post

May

How much do Y Combinator founders earn?
Blog post
Biographies of Top Entrepreneurs
Blog post

April

App Academy interview with Buck Shlegeris
Blog post

February

Interview with Matt Gibb
Blog post
Assessing the social value produced by founding Google
Blog post
In which career can you make the most difference?
Blog post

January

Case study: can I earn more in software or finance?
Blog post
Interview with leading HIV vaccine researcher – Prof. Sir Andrew McMichael
Blog post
Case study: choosing between working at effective altruist organisations, earning to give, and graduate school
Blog post
Research into the earnings of software engineers
Blog post

2013

December

A comparison of medical research and earning to give
Blog post

November

Careers advice from top tech entrepreneur Marc Andreessen
Blog post
Live Q&A in Oxford with Dame Stephanie Shirley
Blog post

October

Why I’m doing a PhD
Blog post
Interview with Matt Clifford
Blog post

September

Should more altruists consider entrepreneurship?
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

June

Maximizing your donations via a job
Blog post

April

Is most research a waste?
Blog post

February

Bringing it all together: high impact research management
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

February

Software engineering: Britain vs Silicon Valley
Blog post
Entrepreneurship: a game of poker, not roulette
Blog post

January

Salary or startup? How do-gooders can gain more from risky careers
Blog post

2011

November

High Impact Science
Blog post

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80,000 Hours is an Effective Ventures project. Effective Ventures Foundation (UK) (EV UK) is a charity in England and Wales (with registered charity number 1149828, registered company number 07962181, and is also a Netherlands registered tax-deductible entity ANBI 825776867). Effective Ventures Foundation USA Inc. (EV US) is a section 501(c)(3) organization in the USA (EIN 47-1988398). EV UK and EV US are separate charities that collaborate closely under the “Effective Ventures” name.

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