Episodes
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client: 80000_hours
project_id: articles
narrator: pw
qa: km
qa_time: 0h30m
---As the 2016 US presidential campaign was entering a fractious round of primaries, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta, opened a disturbing email. The March 19 message warned that his Gmail password had been compromised and that he urgently needed to change it.
The email was a lie. It wasn’t trying to help him protect his account — it was a phishing attack trying to gain illicit access.
Podesta was suspicious, but the campaign’s IT team erroneously wrote the email was “legitimate” and told him to change his password. The IT team provided a safe link for Podesta to use, but it seems he or one of his staffers instead clicked the link in the forged email. That link was used by Russian intelligence hackers known as “Fancy Bear,” and they used their access to leak private campaign emails for public consumption in the final weeks of the 2016 race, embarrassing the Clinton team.
While there are plausibly many critical factors in any close election, it’s possible that the controversy around the leaked emails played a non-trivial role in Clinton’s subsequent loss to Donald Trump. This would mean the failure of the campaign’s security team to prevent the hack — which might have come down to a mere typo — was extraordinarily consequential.
Source:
https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/information-securityNarrated for 80,000 Hours by TYPE III AUDIO.
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TL;DR: To have a fulfilling career, get good at something and then use it to tackle pressing global problems.
Rather than expect to discover your passion in a flash of insight, your job satisfaction will grow over time as you learn more about what kind of work fits you, master valuable skills, and use them to find engaging work that helps others.
Source:
https://80000hours.org/career-guide/summary/
Narrated for 80,000 Hours by Perrin Walker of TYPE III AUDIO.Share feedback on this narration.
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Missing episodes?
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client: 80000_hours
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We’re about to summarise the whole guide in one minute. But before that, imagine a cheery thought: you’re at the end of your 80,000-hour career.
You’re on your deathbed looking back. What are some things you might regret
Perhaps you drifted into whatever seemed like the easiest option, or did what your parents did.
Maybe you even made a lot of money doing something you were interested in, and had a nice house and car. But you still wonder: what was it all for?
Now imagine instead that you worked really hard throughout your life, and ended up saving the lives of 100 children. Can you really imagine regretting that?
To have a truly fulfilling life, we need to turn outwards rather than inwards. Rather than asking “What’s my passion?,” ask “How can I best contribute to the world?”
As we’ve seen, by using our fortunate positions and acting strategically, there’s a huge amount we can all do to help others. And we can do this at little cost to ourselves, and most likely while having a more successful and satisfying career too.
Source:
https://80000hours.org/career-guide/end/
Narrated for 80,000 Hours by Perrin Walker of TYPE III AUDIO.Share feedback on this narration.
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Not many students are in a position to start a successful, cost-effective charity straight out of a philosophy degree. But when Thomas attended an “effective altruism” conference in London in 2018, he discovered an opportunity to start a nonprofit that could have a major impact on factory farmed animals.
Through the community, he received advice and funding, and ended up in an incubation programme. Today, Thomas’s charity, the Fish Welfare Initiative, has reduced the suffering of around one million factory farmed fish, and has an annual budget of over half a million dollars.
If Thomas had just added loads of people on LinkedIn, this would have probably never happened. And this illustrates what many people miss about networking: the value of joining a great community.
Finding the right community can help you gain hundreds of potential allies in one go.
In fact, getting involved in the right community can be one of the best ways to make friends, advance your career, and have a greater impact. Many people we advise say that “finding their people” was one of the most important steps in their career, and life in general.
What’s more, a group of people working together can have more impact than they could individually.
In this article, we’ll explain how joining a community can help, and how to get involved.
Source:
https://80000hours.org/career-guide/community/
Narrated for 80,000 Hours by Perrin Walker of TYPE III AUDIO.Share feedback on this narration.
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CollegeFeed suggests that you “be confident” as their first interview tip, which is a bit like suggesting that you should “be employable.”Many advisors cover the “clean your nails and have a firm handshake” kind of thing.One of the most popular interview videos on YouTube, with over 8 million views, makes the wise point that you definitely mustn’t sit down until you’re explicitly invited to do so by the interviewer.
client: 80000_hours
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narrator: pw
qa: km
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When it comes to advice on how to get a job, most of it is pretty bad.Who could ever recover from taking a seat a few seconds too early?
Over the years, we’ve sifted through a lot of bad advice to find the nuggets that are actually good. We’ve also provided one-on-one coaching to thousands of people who are applying for jobs, and hired about 30 people ourselves, so we’ve seen what works from both sides. Here, we’ll sum up what we’ve learned.
The key idea is that getting a job is about convincing someone that you have something valuable to offer. So you should focus on doing whatever employers will find most convincing. That means instead of sending out lots of CVs, focus on getting recommendations and proving you can do the work. Read on to get a step-by-step guide.
Source:
https://80000hours.org/career-guide/how-to-get-a-job/
Narrated for 80,000 Hours by Perrin Walker of TYPE III AUDIO.Share feedback on this narration.
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You’ll change — more than you think.The world will change — many industries around today won’t even exist in 20 years.You’ll learn more about what’s best for you — it’s very hard to predict what you’re going to be good at ahead of time.
client: 80000_hours
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narrator: pw
qa: km
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People often come to us trying to figure out what they should do over the next 10 or 20 years. Others say they want to figure out “the right career” for them.
The problem with all of this is that, as we’ve seen, your plan is almost certainly going to change:In a sense, there is no stable “right career for you.” Rather, the best option will keep changing as the world changes and you learn more. Many people we’ve advised would never have predicted the job they’ve ended up doing.
Long-term planning could even be counterproductive. There’s a risk of becoming fixated on a specific plan, and failing to change your plans as your situation changes.
All that said, giving up on planning and setting goals probably isn’t wise either. As Eisenhower said, “Plans are useless but planning is essential.”
Having some idea of where you’d like to end up can help you spot much better opportunities to advance. In fact, if you want to have a big positive impact, we’d argue that planning is even more important. Many of the highest-impact roles require specialist career capital you’re unlikely to get by accident, such as connections to people in biosecurity or expertise in particular technical skills. Likewise, getting to the top of many fields often requires decades of focused effort.
This is the planning puzzle — most ‘plans’ will radically change long before they’re completed, but we still benefit from having them.
Given all this, how should you make a good career plan? Here are our main tips.
Source:
https://80000hours.org/career-guide/career-planning/
Narrated for 80,000 Hours by Perrin Walker of TYPE III AUDIO.Share feedback on this narration.
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client: 80000_hours
project_id: articles
narrator: pw
qa: km
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The trouble with self-help advice is that it’s often based on barely any evidence.
For example, how many times have you been told to “think positively” in order to reach your goals? It’s probably the most popular piece of personal guidance, beloved by everyone from high school teachers to bestselling careers experts. One key idea behind the slogan is that if you visualise your ideal future, you’re more likely to get there.
The problem? Recent research found evidence that fantasising about your perfect life actually makes you less likely to make it happen. While it can be pleasant, it appears to reduce motivation because it makes you feel that you’ve already hit those targets.1 We’ll cover some ways positive thinking can be helpful later in the article.
Much other advice is just one person’s opinion, or useless clichés. But at 80,000 Hours, we’ve found that there are a number of evidence-backed steps that anyone can take to become more productive and successful in their career, and life in general. And as we saw in an earlier article, people can keep improving their skills for decades.
So we’ve gathered up all the best advice we’ve found over our last 10+ years of research. These are things that anyone can do in any job to increase their career capital and personal fit — and, therefore, their positive impact.
Source:
https://80000hours.org/career-guide/how-to-be-successful/
Narrated for 80,000 Hours by Perrin Walker of TYPE III AUDIO.Share feedback on this narration.
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client: 80000_hours
project_id: articles
narrator: pw
qa: km
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Everyone says it’s important to find a job you’re good at, but no one tells you how.
The standard advice is to think about it for weeks and weeks until you “discover your talent.” To help, career advisers give you quizzes about your interests and preferences. Others recommend you go on a gap yah, reflect deeply, imagine different options, and try to figure out what truly motivates you.
But as we saw in an earlier article, becoming really good at most things takes decades of practice. So to a large degree, your abilities are built rather than “discovered.” Darwin, Lincoln, and Oprah all failed early in their careers, then went on to completely dominate their fields. Albert Einstein’s 1895 schoolmaster’s report reads, “He will never amount to anything.”
Asking “What am I good at?” needlessly narrows your options. It’s better to ask: “What could I become good at?”
That aside, the bigger problem is that these methods aren’t reliable. Plenty of research shows that while it’s possible to predict what you’ll be good at ahead of time, it’s difficult. Just “going with your gut” is particularly unreliable, and it turns out career tests don’t work very well either.
Instead, you should be prepared to think like a scientist — learn about and try out your options, looking outwards rather than inwards. Here we’ll explain why and how.
Source:
https://80000hours.org/career-guide/personal-fit/Narrated for 80,000 Hours by Perrin Walker of TYPE III AUDIO.
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client: 80000_hours
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qa: km
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People like to lionise the Mozarts, Malala Yousafzais, and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world — people who achieved great success while young — and there are all sorts of awards for young leaders, like the Forbes 30 Under 30.But these stories are interesting precisely because they’re the exception.
Most people reach the peak of their impact in their middle age. Income usually peaks in the 40s, suggesting that it takes around 20 years for most people to reach their peak productivity.
Source:
https://80000hours.org/career-guide/career-capital/
Narrated for 80,000 Hours by Perrin Walker of TYPE III AUDIO.Share feedback on this narration.
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project_id: articles
narrator: pw
qa: km
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Many people think of Superman as a hero. But he may be the greatest example of underutilised talent in all of fiction. It was a blunder to spend his life fighting crime one case at a time; if he’d thought a little more creatively, he could have done far more good. How about delivering vaccines to everyone in the world at superspeed? That would have eradicated most infectious disease, saving hundreds of millions of lives.
Here we’ll argue that a lot of people who want to “make a difference” with their career fall into the same trap as Superman. College graduates imagine becoming doctors or teachers, but these may not be the best fit for their particular skills. And like Superman fighting crime, these paths are often limited in the amount they could potentially contribute to solving a problem.
In contrast, Nobel Prize winner Karl Landsteiner discovered blood groups, enabling hundreds of millions of lifesaving operations. He would have never been able to carry out that many surgeries himself.
Below we’ll introduce five ways you could use your career to help tackle the social problems you want to help work on (which we identified in the previous article). The five ways are: earning to give, communication, research, government and policy, and organisation-building. We’ll make concrete recommendations on how to pursue each approach.
Source:
https://80000hours.org/career-guide/high-impact-jobs/
Narrated for 80,000 Hours by Perrin Walker of TYPE III AUDIO.Share feedback on this narration.
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client: 80000_hours
project_id: articles
narrator: pw
qa: km
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We’ve spent much of the last 10+ years trying to answer a simple question: what are the world’s biggest and most neglected problems?
We wanted to have a positive impact with our careers, and so we set out to discover where our efforts would be most effective.
Our analysis suggests that choosing the right problem could increase your impact by over 100 times, which would make it the most important driver of your impact.
Here, we give a summary of what we’ve learned. Read on to hear why ending diarrhoea might save as many lives as world peace, why artificial intelligence might be an even bigger deal, and what to do in your own career to make the most urgent changes happen.
In short, the most pressing problems are those where people can have the greatest impact by working on them. As we explained in the previous article, this means problems that are not only big, but also neglected and solvable. The more neglected and solvable, the further extra effort will go. And this means they’re not the problems that first come to mind.
Source:
https://80000hours.org/career-guide/world-problems/
Narrated for 80,000 Hours by Perrin Walker of TYPE III AUDIO.Share feedback on this narration.
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narrator: pw
qa: km
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If you want to make a difference with your career, one place to start is to ask which global problems most need attention. Should you work on education, climate change, poverty, or something else?
The standard advice is to do whatever most interests you, and most people seem to end up working on whichever social problem first grabs their attention.
That’s exactly what our cofounder, Ben, did. At age 19, he was most interested in climate change. Here he is at a rally, in a suitably artistic shot:
However, his focus on climate change wasn’t the result of a careful comparison of the pros and cons of working on different problems. Rather, by his own admission, he’d happened to read about it, and found it engaging because it was sciency and he was geeky.
The problem with this approach is that you might happen to stumble across an area that’s just not that big, important, or easy to make progress on. You’re also much more likely to stumble across the problems that already receive the most attention, which makes them lower impact.
So how can you avoid these mistakes, and do more good?
Source:
https://80000hours.org/career-guide/most-pressing-problems/
Narrated for 80,000 Hours by Perrin Walker of TYPE III AUDIO.Share feedback on this narration.
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client: 80000_hours
project_id: articles
narrator: pw
qa: km
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No matter which career you choose, anyone can make a difference by donating to charity, engaging in advocacy, or volunteering.
Unfortunately, many attempts to do good in this way are ineffective, and some actually cause harm.
Take sponsored skydiving. Every year, thousands of people collect donations for good causes and throw themselves out of planes to draw attention to whatever charity they’ve chosen to support. This sounds like a win-win: the fundraiser gets an exhilarating once-in-a-lifetime experience while raising money for a worthy cause. What could be the harm in that?
Quite a bit, actually.
Source:
https://80000hours.org/career-guide/making-a-difference/
Narrated for 80,000 Hours by Perrin Walker of TYPE III AUDIO.Share feedback on this narration.
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client: 80000_hours
project_id: articles
narrator: pw
qa: km
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It’s easy to feel like one person can’t make a difference. The world has so many big problems, and they often seem impossible to solve.
So when we started 80,000 Hours — with the aim of helping people do good with their careers — one of the first questions we asked was, “How much difference can one person really make?”
We learned that while many common ways to do good (such as becoming a doctor) have less impact than you might first think, others have allowed certain people to achieve an extraordinary impact.
In other words, one person can make a difference — but you might have to do something a little unconventional.
In this article, we start by estimating how much good you could do by becoming a doctor. Then, we share some stories of the highest-impact people in history, and consider what they mean for your career.
Source:
https://80000hours.org/career-guide/can-one-person-make-a-difference/
Narrated for 80,000 Hours by Perrin Walker of TYPE III AUDIO.Share feedback on this narration.
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---We all want to find a dream job that’s enjoyable and meaningful, but what does that actually mean?
Some people imagine that the answer involves discovering their passion through a flash of insight, while others think that the key elements of their dream job are that it be easy and highly paid.
We’ve reviewed three decades of research into the causes of a satisfying life and career, drawing on over 60 studies, and we didn’t find much evidence for these views.
Instead, we found six key ingredients of a dream job. They don’t include income, and they aren’t as simple as “following your passion."
In fact, following your passion can lead you astray. Steve Jobs was passionate about Zen Buddhism before entering technology. Maya Angelou worked as a calypso dancer before she became a celebrated poet and civil rights activist.
Rather, you can develop passion by doing work that you find enjoyable and meaningful. The key is to get good at something that helps other people.
Source:
https://80000hours.org/career-guide/job-satisfaction/
Narrated for 80,000 Hours by Perrin Walker of TYPE III AUDIO.Share feedback on this narration.
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client: 80000_hours
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narrator: pw
qa: km
---You’ll spend about 80,000 hours working in your career: 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, for 40 years. So how to spend that time is one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make.
Choose wisely, and you will not only have a more rewarding and interesting life — you’ll also be able to help solve some of the world’s most pressing problems. But how should you choose?
To answer this question, we set up an independent nonprofit and have done over 10 years of research alongside Oxford academics. Our only aim is to help you have the greatest possible positive impact.
Along the way, we’ve discovered some surprising things, and over 10 million people have viewed our advice.
Source:
https://80000hours.org/career-guide/introduction/
Narrated for 80,000 Hours by Perrin Walker of TYPE III AUDIO.Share feedback on this narration.
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client: 80000_hours
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qa: km
qa_time: 0h30m
---As the 2016 US presidential campaign was entering a fractious round of primaries, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta, opened a disturbing email. The March 19 message warned that his Gmail password had been compromised and that he urgently needed to change it.
The email was a lie. It wasn’t trying to help him protect his account — it was a phishing attack trying to gain illicit access.
Podesta was suspicious, but the campaign’s IT team erroneously wrote the email was “legitimate” and told him to change his password. The IT team provided a safe link for Podesta to use, but it seems he or one of his staffers instead clicked the link in the forged email. That link was used by Russian intelligence hackers known as “Fancy Bear,” and they used their access to leak private campaign emails for public consumption in the final weeks of the 2016 race, embarrassing the Clinton team.
While there are plausibly many critical factors in any close election, it’s possible that the controversy around the leaked emails played a non-trivial role in Clinton’s subsequent loss to Donald Trump. This would mean the failure of the campaign’s security team to prevent the hack — which might have come down to a mere typo — was extraordinarily consequential.
Source:
https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/information-security
Narrated for 80,000 Hours by TYPE III AUDIO.
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client: ea_forum
project_id: curated
narrator: pw
qa: km
qa_time: 0h20m
---This post is a summary of some of my work as a field strategy consultant at Schmidt Futures' Act 2 program, where I spoke with over a hundred experts and did a deep dive into antimicrobial resistance to find impactful investment opportunities within the cause area. The full report can be accessed here.
Antimicrobials, the medicines we use to fight infections, have played a foundational role in improving the length and quality of human life since penicillin and other antimicrobials were first developed in the early and mid 20th century.
Antimicrobial resistance, or AMR, occurs when bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites evolve resistance to antimicrobials. As a result, antimicrobial medicine such as antibiotics and antifungals become ineffective and unable to fight infections in the body.
AMR is responsible for millions of deaths each year, more than HIV or malaria (ARC 2022). The AMR Visualisation Tool, produced by Oxford University and IHME, visualises IHME data which finds that 1.27 million deaths per year are attributable to bacterial resistance and 4.95 million deaths per year are associated with bacterial resistance, as shown below.
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/W93Pt7xch7eyrkZ7f/cause-area-report-antimicrobial-resistance
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client: ea_forum
project_id: curated
narrator: pw
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narrator_time: 1h15m
qa_time: 30m
---Charity Entrepreneurship is frequently contacted by individuals and donors who like our model. Several have expressed interest in seeing the model expanded, or seeing what a twist on the model would look like (e.g., different cause area, region, etc.) Although we are excited about maximizing CE’s impact, we are less convinced by the idea of growing the effective charity pool via franchising or other independent nonprofit incubators. This is because new incubators often do not address the actual bottlenecks faced by the nonprofit landscape, as we see them. There are lots of factors that prevent great new charities from being launched, and from eventually having a large impact. We have scaled CE to about 10 charities a year, and from our perspective, these are the three major bottlenecks to growing the new charity ecosystem further: Mid-stage funding, Founders and Multiplying effects.
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ckokr9uhr2Cu3h5En/tips-for-people-considering-starting-new-incubators
Narrated for the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.
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client: lesswrong
project_id: articles
feed_id: ai ai_safety
narrator: pw
qa: km
narrator_time: 4h30m
qa_time: 2h0m
---Philosopher David Chalmers asked: "Is there a canonical source for "the argument for AGI ruin" somewhere, preferably laid out as an explicit argument with premises and a conclusion?"
Unsurprisingly, the actual reason people expect AGI ruin isn't a crisp deductive argument; it's a probabilistic update based on many lines of evidence. The specific observations and heuristics that carried the most weight for someone will vary for each individual, and can be hard to accurately draw out. That said, Eliezer Yudkowsky's So Far: Unfriendly AI Edition might be a good place to start if we want a pseudo-deductive argument just for the sake of organizing discussion. People can then say which premises they want to drill down on. In The Basic Reasons I Expect AGI Ruin, I wrote: "When I say "general intelligence", I'm usually thinking about "whatever it is that lets human brains do astrophysics, category theory, etc. even though our brains evolved under literally zero selection pressure to solve astrophysics or category theory problems". It's possible that we should already be thinking of GPT-4 as "AGI" on some definitions, so to be clear about the threshold of generality I have in mind, I'll specifically talk about "STEM-level AGI", though I expect such systems to be good at non-STEM tasks too. STEM-level AGI is AGI that has "the basic mental machinery required to do par-human reasoning about all the hard sciences", though a specific STEM-level AGI could (e.g.) lack physics ability for the same reasons many smart humans can't solve physics problems, such as "lack of familiarity with the field".
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QzkTfj4HGpLEdNjXX/an-artificially-structured-argument-for-expecting-agi-ruin
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