This seems to essentially be the question ‘how can we best reduce xrisk?’ We’ve got people ready to write about this in the fall, if not earlier. As a teaser, it seems like you can make a pretty good argument for EA movement building dominating most of the other approaches.
Benjamin_Todd
Karma: 336
(Just making this more visible.)
Don’t read this until you’ve already thought about your questions!
But here’s what we’re already working on:
Which people can have the most impact in research careers? When does working in research trump funding research?
How should we factor our own happiness into career decisions? What leads to job satisfaction and how realistic is it to take jobs in industries we’re not passionate about?
Among the ‘effective altruist’ and xrisk organisations, which have the greatest need for more funding or skills of various sorts?
What are the best funding and career opportunities within the cause of reducing animal suffering?
Which biases and heuristics particularly affect altruistic career decisions? How can we make good career decisions?
Now vs Later issues—should I invest in training in order to earn more in the future? should I give my money now or give it later?
How many lives does someone typically save by becoming a doctor? How much can you earn as a doctor?
What opportunities are there to increase the effectiveness of large budgets by becoming some kind of grant maker?
What are the best careers tests out there? Which are based on evidence?
Apologies—I wasn’t intending to hide the fact that I help to run 80k. If I were, hopefully I would have done a better job than using my real name. Point taken about it being a cross posting on the 80k blog, but I did think the content would be of special interest to LWers, and it hasn’t been cross posted anywhere else.
This is the first post about 80k on LW by an 80k volunteer/staff member, and like Randaly says, the only two posts in the last 6 months to significantly feature 80k were about arguments for and against professional philanthropy.
Apologies for the ‘collage of buzzwords’ impression. I didn’t include a detailed description of 80k and its purpose, like the THINK post, because I wasn’t intending it to be an advert. Rather, I was intending it to be a survey. For this reason I also didn’t include much detail about what our existing work is about, hoping not to bias people towards mentioning certain topics. That was obviously a bad idea.
For what it’s worth. Here’s the areas we’re currently investigating. We’d be interested to hear which of these are of particular interest, and more interested to hear about similar types of question that you think are really important.
Which people can have the most impact in research careers? When does working in research trump funding research?
How should we factor our own happiness into career decisions? What leads to job satisfaction and how realistic is it to take jobs in industries we’re not passionate about?
Among the ‘effective altruist’ and xrisk organisations, which have the greatest need for more funding or skills of various sorts?
What are the best funding and career opportunities within the cause of reducing animal suffering?
Which biases and heuristics particularly affect altruistic career decisions? How can we make good career decisions?
Now vs Later issues—should I invest in training in order to earn more in the future? should I give my money now or give it later?
How many lives does someone typically save by becoming a doctor? How much can you earn as a doctor?
What opportunities are there to increase the effectiveness of large budgets by becoming some kind of grant maker?
What are the best careers tests out there? Which are based on good evidence?
Thanks for the write up Larks. We’re currently looking for people to get involved with writing and researching similar articles. If you might be interested, email me: ben@80000hours.org
It’s not all about donating. What’s different about us is that we really try to weigh up different career options in terms of how much difference they make. We understand ‘making a difference’ to mean ‘making good stuff happen that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.’ So, we wouldn’t just recommend working for a traditional NGO if someone was going to do that job equally well if you didn’t take it. Or if it didn’t seem to be particularly cost-effective. In carrying this out, we take an evidence-based approach, paying attention to heuristics and biases. We’d apply this to any career path. This is really different from normal careers guidance. More here. We’re not, however, proposing new ways to end poverty. We’re more about helping people choose within what’s already out there.