80000_Hours

The case for build­ing ex­per­tise to work on US AI policy, and how to do it

• 80000_Hours 20 Nov 2018 4:52 UTC

  4 points

  on: Effec­tive Altru­ism in non-high-in­come countries

  80,000 Hours wrote some quick notes on this back in 2015:

  Po­ten­tially promis­ing ca­reer paths in poorer countries

  They were rough then and may have be­come out of date in the last 3 years, but hope­fully can still help peo­ple gen­er­ate ideas.

Cross-post: Think twice be­fore talk­ing about ‘tal­ent gaps’ – clar­ify­ing nine mis­con­cep­tions, by 80,000 Hours.

• 80000_Hours 12 Oct 2018 22:14 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: joel_duplicate0.5816669276037654's comment on: Many EA orgs say they place a lot of fi­nan­cial value on their pre­vi­ous hire. What does that mean, if any­thing? And why aren’t they hiring faster?

  We have a forth­com­ing post on whether the ex­pres­sions ‘tal­ent gap/​bot­tle­neck/​con­straint’ are gen­er­at­ing more heat than light and should be phased out in favour of more spe­cific terms.

• 80000_Hours 12 Oct 2018 19:47 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Evan_Gaensbauer's comment on: Sur­vey of EA org lead­ers about what skills and ex­pe­rience they most need, their staff/​dona­tions trade-offs, prob­lem pri­ori­ti­sa­tion, and more.

  Hi Evan,

  Re­sponses to the sur­vey do help to in­form our ad­vice but it’s only con­sid­ered as one piece of data alongside all the other re­search we’ve done over the years. Our writeup of the sur­vey re­sults definitely shouldn’t be read as our all-things-con­sid­ered view on any is­sue in par­tic­u­lar.

  Per­haps we could have made that clearer in the blog post but we hope that our frank dis­cus­sion of the sur­vey’s weak­nesses and our doubts about many of the in­di­vi­d­ual re­sponses gives some sense of the over­all weight we put on this par­tic­u­lar source.

• 80000_Hours 12 Oct 2018 19:01 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Peter_Hurford's comment on: Sur­vey of EA org lead­ers about what skills and ex­pe­rience they most need, their staff/​dona­tions trade-offs, prob­lem pri­ori­ti­sa­tion, and more.

  We’ve writ­ten a new post in part to ad­dress this ques­tion: Many EA orgs say they place a lot of fi­nan­cial value on their pre­vi­ous hire. What does that mean, if any­thing? And why aren’t they hiring faster?

Many EA orgs say they place a lot of fi­nan­cial value on their pre­vi­ous hire. What does that mean, if any­thing? And why aren’t they hiring faster?

• 80000_Hours 12 Oct 2018 6:27 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: Peter_Hurford's comment on: Sur­vey of EA org lead­ers about what skills and ex­pe­rience they most need, their staff/​dona­tions trade-offs, prob­lem pri­ori­ti­sa­tion, and more.

  Hi Peter,

  It sounds like you mostly agree with our take on earn­ing to give in the high im­pact ca­reers ar­ti­cle. That ar­ti­cle is fairly new but it will be­come one of the cen­tral pages on the site af­ter a forth­com­ing re-or­gani­sa­tion. Let us know if there are other ar­ti­cles on the site you think are in­con­sis­tent with that take—we can take a look and po­ten­tially bring them into line.

  We agree with you that earn­ing to give can be a gen­uinely great op­tion and don’t in­tend to de­mor­al­ize peo­ple who choose that path. As we write in that ar­ti­cle, we be­lieve that “any grad­u­ate in a high in­come coun­try can have a sig­nifi­cant im­pact” by earn­ing to give.

  That said, we do stand by our recom­men­da­tion that most peo­ple who might be a good fit to even­tu­ally en­ter one of our pri­or­ity paths should ini­tially pur­sue one of those paths over earn­ing to give (though while main­tain­ing a back-up op­tion). Those paths have higher up­side, so it’s worth test­ing out your po­ten­tial, while bear­ing in mind that they might not work out.

  Many of the best op­tions on these paths re­quire sub­stan­tial ca­reer cap­i­tal, so of­ten this won’t mean start­ing a di­rect im­pact job to­day. In­stead, we think many read­ers should con­sider ac­quiring ca­reer cap­i­tal that can open up these paths, in­clud­ing grad­u­ate school in rele­vant dis­ci­plines (e.g. AI/​ML, policy, or in­ter­na­tional re­la­tions) en­try level policy jobs (e.g. as a Con­gres­sional staffer, or work­ing as an early em­ployee at a startup to gain skills and ex­pe­rience in op­er­a­tions. We hope to re­lease an ar­ti­cle dis­cussing our up­dated views on ca­reer cap­i­tal soon.

  Of course, these paths aren’t a good fit for ev­ery­one, and we con­tinue to be­lieve that earn­ing to give can be a great op­tion for many.

  It’s also worth em­pha­siz­ing that our ad­vice is, of course, in­fluenced by our views on the high­est pri­or­ity prob­lems. We tried to make that clear in “high im­pact ca­reers” by in­clud­ing a sec­tion on how our recom­men­da­tions would change if some­one is fo­cused on global health or fac­tory farm­ing. In that case, we be­lieve “earn­ing to give, for-profit work and ad­vo­cacy be­come much more at­trac­tive.”

• 80000_Hours 10 Oct 2018 19:31 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Denise_Melchin's comment on: Sur­vey of EA org lead­ers about what skills and ex­pe­rience they most need, their staff/​dona­tions trade-offs, prob­lem pri­ori­ti­sa­tion, and more.

  “Does the an­swer re­fer to high im­pact op­por­tu­ni­ties in gen­eral in the world”

  That ques­tion is in­tended to look at the high­est-im­pact jobs available in the world as a whole, in con­trast with the or­gani­sa­tions be­ing sur­veyed. Given the top re­sponse was gov­ern­ment and policy ex­perts, I think peo­ple in­ter­preted it cor­rectly.

Sur­vey of EA org lead­ers about what skills and ex­pe­rience they most need, their staff/​dona­tions trade-offs, prob­lem pri­ori­ti­sa­tion, and more.

List of 80,000 Hours con­tent from the last 4 months, sum­mary of what was most pop­u­lar, and plans for fu­ture re­leases.

Th­ese are the world’s high­est im­pact ca­reer paths ac­cord­ing to our re­search − 80,000 Hours

List of 80,000 Hours con­tent from the last 2 months, sum­mary of which were most pop­u­lar, and plans for fu­ture re­leases.

• 80000_Hours 8 Apr 2018 18:10 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Alex_Barry's comment on: Com­pila­tion of 32 new(ish) 80,000 Hours re­search pieces for the effec­tive al­tru­ist community

  Hi Alex thanks I fixed 30. 2,4,6 and 15 are work­ing for me—can you email over a screen­shot of the er­ror you’re get­ting?

• 80000_Hours 6 Apr 2018 21:22 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: jpaddison's comment on: How to im­prove EA Funds

  “given the rel­a­tive abun­dance of cash available to EA orgs (through OpenPhil and Good Ven­tures), a rate as high as this is sur­pris­ing.”

  Three thoughts: i) the range of figures offered was very wide, ii) orgs that are strongly sup­ported by large in­sti­tu­tional donors gave lower figures, iii) if those orgs ex­pect OpenPhil/​GoodVen­tures/​etc to give them even more money in fu­ture years, they could still sen­si­bly re­port a high dis­count rate.

• 80000_Hours 6 Apr 2018 9:57 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Jan_Kulveit's comment on: Com­pila­tion of 32 new(ish) 80,000 Hours re­search pieces for the effec­tive al­tru­ist community

  Fair point. I thought about call­ing them ar­ti­cles… but they’re definitely not all ar­ti­cles. Thought about call­ing them ‘con­tent re­leases’ but that felt like cor­po­rate vague­ness.

  I should have gone with some­thing no­body could dis­pute: 32 new(ish) uni­ver­sal re­source lo­ca­tors. ;) - RW

Com­pila­tion of 32 new(ish) 80,000 Hours re­search pieces for the effec­tive al­tru­ist community

In­ter­view with Prof Tet­lock on epistemic mod­esty, pre­dict­ing catas­trophic risks, AI, and more

Sur­vey of lead­ers in the EA com­mu­nity on a range of im­por­tant top­ics, like what skills they need and what causes are most effective

80,000 Hours’ 20 most en­dur­ingly pop­u­lar pieces of research