TYPE III AUDIO (All episodes)

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client: 80000_hours
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

Narrated for the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.

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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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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

Narrated for LessWrong by TYPE III AUDIO.

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