Are you new to 80,000 Hours, and wondering where to start?

Here’s a quick summary of our most popular blog posts from over the past year to make it much easier to get a quick overview of our key content and ideas. Even if you’ve been around the site for a while, you might might find something here you’ve missed or forgotten about!

Our core ideas

What is effective altruism? And what does it really mean to be an effective altruist?

What does it really mean to make a difference? How the common sense view often gets it wrong

Why do we need an evidence-based approach? It’s not always obvious what works, and the impact of different career paths can vary massively.

It’s hard to tell which careers make the most difference, but estimation and quantification are the best tools we have.

Types of high impact career

Could you make more difference in the corporate sector than working for a charity?

How to create the world’s most effective charity

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

The power of effective activism

How to do important research

A career in charity evaluation?

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

High impact science

Career planning

Should you plan your career?

Our research on how to find a job you’ll love

Making better career decisions: common biases and how to overcome them, and two questions you won’t want to ask yourself but should.

The best existing resources for planning your career

Interviews with high impact people

How to make a difference in research: An interview with Nick Bostrom

Interview with Holden Karnofsky, co-founder of GiveWell

How to choose a research topic: An interview with Anders Sandberg

Advice on going into a research career: An interview with Richard Thaler

Trading, donating and charter cities: An interview with Ben Gilbert

Interview with Brian Tomasik

Other resources

Effective Altruists on Facebook

A blog on Effective Altruism curated by William MacAskill, 80,000 Hours founder.

The Giving What We Can blog, our sister organisation

The GiveWell blog