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.
Benjamin_Todd
Karma: 113
What are your questions about making a difference?
[LINK] How to calibrate your confidence intervals
We’ve collated a list of all the approaches that seem to be on the table in the effective altruism community for improving the long-run future. There’s some other options, including funding GiveWell and GCRI. This doc also explains a little more of the reasoning behind the approaches. If you like more detail on how 80k might help reduce the risk of extinction, drop me an email at ben@80000hours.org.
In general, I think the question of how best to improve the long-run future is highly uncertain, but has high value of information, so the most important activities are: (i) more prioritisation research (ii) building flexible capacity which can act on whatever turns out to be best in the future.
MIRI, FHI, GW, 80k, CEA, CFAR, GCRI all aim to further these causes, and are mutually supporting, so are particularly hard to disentangle. My guess is that if you buy the basic picture, the key issues will be things like ‘which organisation has the most pressing room for more funding at the moment?’ rather than questions about the value of the particular strategies.
Another option would be to fund research into which org can best use donations. There’s a chance this could be commissioned through CEA, though we’ll need to think of some ways to reduce bias!
Disclaimer: I’m the Executive Director of 80,000 Hours, which is part of CEA.
There must be some, and it we’d certainly like to investigate which areas of industry are the most harmful. But in general, it’s pretty hard for a career to result in the deaths of 600 people, which is a lower bound for what you could do with $1m (you could also fund SI for 1-2 years...). The most common harmful careers seem to inflict economic damage, and since the average dollar is spent on stuff which produces much less welfare than malaria nets or catastrophic risk research, you have to do a lot of it to outweigh your donations, like maybe 1-2 orders of magnitude more. Of course, doing lots of harm with your career might still be ethically impermissible. There’s also some tricky questions regarding the long term compounding benefits of economic growth.
Quite a few 80k members are interested in entrepreneurship. We’d definitely like to investigate these kinds of questions. But haven’t found anyone yet.
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.
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?
Hi Jonah,
Great posts.
I agree these figures show it’s plausible that the value of donations in finance are significantly larger than the direct economic contribution of many jobs, though I see it as highly uncertain. When you’re working in highly socially valuable sectors like research or some entrepreneurship, it seems to me that the two are roughly comparable, with big error bars.
However, I don’t think this shows it’s plausible that earning to give is likely to be the path towards doing the most good. There are many careers that seem to offer influence over budgets significantly larger than what you could expect to donate. For instance, the average budget per employee at DfiD is about $6mn per year, and you get similar figures at the World Bank, and many major foundations. It seems possible to move this money into something similarly effective or better than cash transfers. We’ve also just done an estimate of party politics showing that the expected budget influenced towards your preferred causes is 1-80mn if you’re an Oxford graduate over a career, and that takes account of chances of success.
You’d expect there to be less competition to influence the budgets of foundations for the better than to earn money, so these figures make sense.
(And then there’s all the meta things, like persuading people to do earning to give :) )
One point to note with Carl’s 30x figure—that’s only when comparing the short-run welfare impact of a GDP boost with a transfer to GiveDirectly. If you also care about the long-run effects, then it becomes much less clear.
FYI: There has been a discussion on 80,000 Hours (started by me) about the value of this project and how to maximise it.
Givewell is effectively attempting to work out which charities most increase human welfare for dollar. So, a charity ‘fails’ if it becomes clearly less effective than the next best.
Good question. We tend to take our charity evaluation from Givewell (though we’ve started our evaluation in some areas). So, we wouldn’t be able to easily answer this. I don’t think we’ve ever come across a charity which openly states its terms of surrender. What I can say is that the charities that tend to get recommended have a very focused method (e.g. distributing malaria nets) with a measurable outcome (less malaria), so it’s pretty obvious if their failing, and that would cause them to lose funding.
(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?
Hi, I’d like to clarify that we prioritise people who are optimising around positive impact, not earning to give. If someone takes earning to give seriously, then we view that as a good indicator, but we speak to lots of people who aren’t considering earning to give careers.
I started writing a response, but decided it would be better to summarise my general thoughts on degree choice and post them on our blog. So see our latest thoughts on how to pick a degree.
Insofar as this particular situation goes, I haven’t thought about it much, so take this with a pinch of salt. My gut reaction is that CompSci is slightly more impressive than bio engineering, and if it helps you learn to program better, then the skills will be more generally useful. You also say that bio engineering is a major time sink, which I’d see as a count against it. So, my highly uncertain impression is that I’d prefer CompSci. On the other hand, if you’ll find it easier and more motivating to study bio engineering and you’ll get better grades, then I’d rate that pretty highly (especially if aiming to continue into research).
That’s a fairly common and very interesting question. Carl’s got some thoughts on it, which we’ll hopefully get written up. It’s closely linked to two big and controversial issues: how good is economic growth and how good is technological progress? It’s a case of weighing your contribution to that against the extra donations you can make.
that’s a good one. It’s going on the list. We have an upcoming series about happiness and career choice. The first (and one of the upcoming posts) are partially relevant. Drethelin’s suggesting a good general strategy. If spending’s the problem, you could also consider giving up on altruism in that domain, and making a difference in some other way. This is an example of macrooptimisation
You need to add in the endowments of the colleges as well. The richest college at Cambridge (Trinity) has an endowment of about $1.5bn; whereas the richest college at Oxford has only about $300m.
Glassdoor rarely properly includes the top paid employees (those people don’t fill out the survey). According to Goldman’s own figures, mean compensation per employee (across all employees) is ~$400k. It’ll be significantly higher if you’re in front office. Your expected earnings from a Goldman job are roughly the mean earnings multiplied by the expected number of years you’ll stay at the firm.
I think both research and advocacy (both to governments and among individuals) are highly important, and it’s very unclear which is more important at the margin.
It’s too simple to say basic research is more important, because advocacy could lead to hugely increased funding for basic research.
Hi Luke,
This is certainly really important for 80k—it’s on our list of strategic considerations to investigate.
We haven’t looked into it in depth already, beyond knowledge of some relevant psychology literature (e.g. being primed by images of money has been found to make people more selfish in a couple of (probably dodgy) studies).
We’ve put a couple of measures in place which seem like they might help to mitigate the types of drift that don’t involve updating on new information. First, making a public commitment to make the world a better place in an effective way encourages people not to drift towards being non-altruistic (while is also sufficiently broad not to commit people to moral beliefs they might well want to change e.g. that animal suffering doesn’t matter), because people want to be consistent. Second, participating in the 80k community could help to counteract destructive social pressure from workplace communities. It remains to see how well these measures work—we’ll be keeping a close eye.
Ben