Ideas for high impact careers beyond our priority paths (Article)
07 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s release is the latest in our series of audio versions of our articles. In this one, we g...
Benjamin Todd on varieties of longtermism and things 80,000 Hours might be getting wrong (80k team chat #2)
01 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s bonus episode is a conversation between Arden Koehler, and our CEO, Ben Todd. Ben’s be...
Global issues beyond 80,000 Hours’ current priorities (Article)
28 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s release is the latest in our series of audio versions of our articles. In this one, we g...
#85 - Mark Lynas on climate change, societal collapse & nuclear energy
20 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
A golf-ball sized lump of uranium can deliver more than enough power to cover all of your lifetime e...
#84 – Shruti Rajagopalan on what India did to stop COVID-19 and how well it worked
13 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
When COVID-19 struck the US, everyone was told that hand sanitizer needed to be saved for healthcare...
#83 - Jennifer Doleac on preventing crime without police and prisons
31 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The killing of George Floyd has prompted a great deal of debate over whether the US should reduce th...
#82 – James Forman Jr on reducing the cruelty of the US criminal legal system
27 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
No democracy has ever incarcerated as many people as the United States. To get its incarceration rat...
#81 - Ben Garfinkel on scrutinising classic AI risk arguments
09 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
80,000 Hours, along with many other members of the effective altruism movement, has argued that help...
Advice on how to read our advice (Article)
29 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
This is the fourth release in our new series of audio articles. If you want to read the original ar...
#80 – Stuart Russell on why our approach to AI is broken and how to fix it
22 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Stuart Russell, Professor at UC Berkeley and co-author of the most popular AI textbook, thinks the w...
What anonymous contributors think about important life and career questions (Article)
05 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Today we’re launching the final entry of our ‘anonymous answers' series on the website. It fea...
#79 – A.J. Jacobs on radical honesty, following the whole Bible, and reframing global problems as puzzles
01 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s guest, New York Times bestselling author A.J. Jacobs, always hated Judge Judy. But after h...
#78 – Danny Hernandez on forecasting and the drivers of AI progress
22 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Companies use about 300,000 times more computation training the best AI systems today than they did ...
#77 – Marc Lipsitch on whether we're winning or losing against COVID-19
18 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In March Professor Marc Lipsitch — Director of Harvard's Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics ...
Article: Ways people trying to do good accidentally make things worse, and how to avoid them
12 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s release is the second experiment in making audio versions of our articles. The first was...
#76 – Tara Kirk Sell on misinformation, who's done well and badly, & what to reopen first
08 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Amid a rising COVID-19 death toll, and looming economic disaster, we’ve been looking for good news...
#75 – Michelle Hutchinson on what people most often ask 80,000 Hours
28 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Since it was founded, 80,000 Hours has done one-on-one calls to supplement our online content and of...
#74 – Dr Greg Lewis on COVID-19 & catastrophic biological risks
17 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Our lives currently revolve around the global emergency of COVID-19; you’re probably reading this ...
Article: Reducing global catastrophic biological risks
15 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In a few days we'll be putting out a conversation with Dr Greg Lewis, who studies how to prevent glo...
Emergency episode: Rob & Howie on the menace of COVID-19, and what both governments & individuals might do to help
19 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
From home isolation Rob and Howie just recorded an episode on: 1. How many could die in the crisis, ...
#73 – Phil Trammell on patient philanthropy and waiting to do good
17 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
To do good, most of us look to use our time and money to affect the world around us today. But perha...
#72 - Toby Ord on the precipice and humanity's potential futures
07 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
This week Oxford academic and 80,000 Hours trustee Dr Toby Ord released his new book The Precipice: ...
#71 - Benjamin Todd on the key ideas of 80,000 Hours
02 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The 80,000 Hours Podcast is about “the world’s most pressing problems and how you can use your c...
Arden & Rob on demandingness, work-life balance & injustice (80k team chat #1)
25 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Today's bonus episode of the podcast is a quick conversation between me and my fellow 80,000 Hours r...
#70 - Dr Cassidy Nelson on the 12 best ways to stop the next pandemic (and limit nCoV)
13 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
nCoV is alarming governments and citizens around the world. It has killed more than 1,000 people, br...
#69 – Jeffrey Ding on China, its AI dream, and what we get wrong about both
06 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The State Council of China's 2017 AI plan was the starting point of China’s AI planning; China’s...
Rob & Howie on what we do and don't know about 2019-nCoV
03 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Two 80,000 Hours researchers, Robert Wiblin and Howie Lempel, record an experimental bonus episode a...
#68 - Will MacAskill on the paralysis argument, whether we're at the hinge of history, & his new priorities
24 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
You’re given a box with a set of dice in it. If you roll an even number, a person's life is saved....
#44 Classic episode - Paul Christiano on finding real solutions to the AI alignment problem
15 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in October 2018. Paul Christiano is one of the s...
#33 Classic episode - Anders Sandberg on cryonics, solar flares, and the annual odds of nuclear war
08 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in May 2018. Joseph Stalin had a life-extension ...
#17 Classic episode - Will MacAskill on moral uncertainty, utilitarianism & how to avoid being a moral monster
31 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in January 2018. Immanuel Kant is a profoundly inf...
#67 – David Chalmers on the nature and ethics of consciousness
16 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
What is it like to be you right now? You're seeing this text on the screen, smelling the coffee next...
#66 – Peter Singer on being provocative, effective altruism, & how his moral views have changed
05 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In 1989, the professor of moral philosophy Peter Singer was all over the news for his inflammatory o...
#65 – Ambassador Bonnie Jenkins on 8 years pursuing WMD arms control, & diversity in diplomacy
19 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
"…it started when the Soviet Union fell apart and there was a real desire to ensure security of nu...
#64 – Bruce Schneier on how insecure electronic voting could break the United States — and surveillance without tyranny
25 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
November 3 2020, 10:32PM: CNN, NBC, and FOX report that Donald Trump has narrowly won Florida, and w...
Rob Wiblin on plastic straws, nicotine, doping, & whether changing the long-term is really possible
25 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Today's episode is a compilation of interviews I recently recorded for two other shows, Love Your Wo...
Have we helped you have a bigger social impact? Our annual survey, plus other ways we can help you.
16 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
1. Fill out our annual impact survey here. 2. Find a great vacancy on our job board. 3. Learn ab...
#63 – Vitalik Buterin on better ways to fund public goods, blockchain's failures, & effective giving
03 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Historically, progress in the field of cryptography has had major consequences. It has changed the c...
#62 – Paul Christiano on messaging the future, increasing compute, & how CO2 impacts your brain
05 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Imagine that – one day – humanity dies out. At some point, many millions of years later, intelli...
#61 - Helen Toner on emerging technology, national security, and China
17 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
From 1870 to 1950, the introduction of electricity transformed life in the US and UK, as people gain...
#60 - Phil Tetlock on why accurate forecasting matters for everything, and how you can do it better
28 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Have you ever been infuriated by a doctor's unwillingness to give you an honest, probabilistic estim...
#59 – Cass Sunstein on how change happens, and why it's so often abrupt & unpredictable
17 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
It can often feel hopeless to be an activist seeking social change on an obscure issue where most pe...
#58 – Pushmeet Kohli of DeepMind on designing robust & reliable AI systems and how to succeed in AI
03 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
When you're building a bridge, responsibility for making sure it won't fall over isn't handed over t...
Rob Wiblin on human nature, new technology, and living a happy, healthy & ethical life
13 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
This is a cross-post of some interviews Rob did recently on two other podcasts — Mission Daily (f...
#57 – Tom Kalil on how to do the most good in government
23 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
You’re 29 years old, and you’ve just been given a job in the White House. How do you quickly fig...
#56 - Persis Eskander on wild animal welfare and what, if anything, to do about it
15 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Elephants in chains at travelling circuses; pregnant pigs trapped in coffin sized crates at factory ...
#55 – Lutter & Winter on founding charter cities with outstanding governance to end poverty
31 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Governance matters. Policy change quickly took China from famine to fortune; Singapore from swamps t...
#54 – OpenAI on publication norms, malicious uses of AI, and general-purpose learning algorithms
19 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
OpenAI’s Dactyl is an AI system that can manipulate objects with a human-like robot hand. OpenAI F...
#53 - Kelsey Piper on the room for important advocacy within journalism
27 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
“Politics. Business. Opinion. Science. Sports. Animal welfare. Existential risk.” Is this a plau...
Julia Galef and Rob Wiblin on an updated view of the best ways to help humanity
17 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
This is a cross-post of an interview Rob did with Julia Galef on her podcast Rationally Speaking. Ro...
#52 - Glen Weyl on uprooting capitalism and democracy for a just society
08 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Pro-market economists love to wax rhapsodic about the capacity of markets to pull together the valua...
#51 - Martin Gurri on the revolt of the public & crisis of authority in the information age
29 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Politics in rich countries seems to be going nuts. What's the explanation? Rising inequality? The de...
#50 - David Denkenberger on how to feed all 8b people through an asteroid/nuclear winter
27 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
If an asteroid impact or nuclear winter blocked the sun for years, our inability to grow food would ...
#49 - Rachel Glennerster on a year's worth of education for 30c & other development 'best buys'
20 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
If I told you it's possible to deliver an extra year of ideal primary-level education for under $1, ...
#48 - Brian Christian on better living through the wisdom of computer science
22 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Please let us know if we've helped you: Fill out our annual impact survey Ever felt that you were s...
#47 - Catherine Olsson & Daniel Ziegler on the fast path into high-impact ML engineering roles
02 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
After dropping out of a machine learning PhD at Stanford, Daniel Ziegler needed to decide what to do...
#46 - Hilary Greaves on moral cluelessness & tackling crucial questions in academia
23 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The barista gives you your coffee and change, and you walk away from the busy line. But you suddenly...
#45 - Tyler Cowen's case for maximising econ growth, stabilising civilization & thinking long-term
17 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
I've probably spent more time reading Tyler Cowen - Professor of Economics at George Mason Universit...
#44 - Paul Christiano on how we'll hand the future off to AI, & solving the alignment problem
02 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Paul Christiano is one of the smartest people I know. After our first session produced such great ma...
#43 - Daniel Ellsberg on the institutional insanity that maintains nuclear doomsday machines
25 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In Stanley Kubrick’s iconic film Dr. Strangelove, the American president is informed that the Sovi...
#42 - Amanda Askell on moral empathy, the value of information & the ethics of infinity
11 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Consider two familiar moments at a family reunion. Our host, Uncle Bill, takes pride in his barbecu...
#41 - David Roodman on incarceration, geomagnetic storms, & becoming a world-class researcher
28 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
With 698 inmates per 100,000 citizens, the U.S. is by far the leader among large wealthy nations in ...
#40 - Katja Grace on forecasting future technology & how much we should trust expert predictions
21 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Experts believe that artificial intelligence will be better than humans at driving trucks by 2027, w...
#39 - Spencer Greenberg on the scientific approach to solving difficult everyday questions
07 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Will Trump be re-elected? Will North Korea give up their nuclear weapons? Will your friend turn up t...
#38 - Yew-Kwang Ng on anticipating effective altruism decades ago & how to make a much happier world
26 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Will people who think carefully about how to maximize welfare eventually converge on the same views?...
#37 - GiveWell picks top charities by estimating the unknowable. James Snowden on how they do it.
16 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
What’s the value of preventing the death of a 5-year-old child, compared to a 20-year-old, or an 8...
#36 - Tanya Singh on ending the operations management bottleneck in effective altruism
11 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Almost nobody is able to do groundbreaking physics research themselves, and by the time his brillian...
#35 - Tara Mac Aulay on the audacity to fix the world without asking permission
21 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
"You don't need permission. You don't need to be allowed to do something that's not in your job desc...
Rob Wiblin on the art/science of a high impact career
08 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Today's episode is a cross-post of an interview I did with The Jolly Swagmen Podcast which came out ...
#34 - We use the worst voting system that exists. Here's how Aaron Hamlin is going to fix it.
01 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In 1991 Edwin Edwards won the Louisiana gubernatorial election. In 2001, he was found guilty of rack...
#33 - Anders Sandberg on what if we ended ageing, solar flares & the annual risk of nuclear war
29 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Joseph Stalin had a life-extension program dedicated to making himself immortal. What if he had succ...
#32 - Bryan Caplan on whether his Case Against Education holds up, totalitarianism, & open borders
22 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Bryan Caplan’s claim in *The Case Against Education* is striking: education doesn’t teach people...
#31 - Allan Dafoe on defusing the political & economic risks posed by existing AI capabilities
18 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The debate around the impacts of artificial intelligence often centres on ‘superintelligence’ - ...
#30 - Eva Vivalt on how little social science findings generalize from one study to another
15 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
If we have a study on the impact of a social program in a particular place and time, how confident c...
#29 - Anders Sandberg on 3 new resolutions for the Fermi paradox & how to colonise the universe
08 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Part 2 out now: #33 - Dr Anders Sandberg on what if we ended ageing, solar flares & the annual r...
#28 - Owen Cotton-Barratt on why scientists should need insurance, PhD strategy & fast AI progresses
27 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
A researcher is working on creating a new virus – one more dangerous than any that exist naturally...
#27 - Dr Tom Inglesby on careers and policies that reduce global catastrophic biological risks
18 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
How about this for a movie idea: a main character has to prevent a new contagious strain of Ebola sp...
#26 - Marie Gibbons on how exactly clean meat is made & what's needed to get it in every supermarket
10 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
First, decide on the type of animal. Next, pick the cell type. Then take a small, painless biopsy, a...
#25 - Robin Hanson on why we have to lie to ourselves about why we do what we do
28 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
On February 2, 1685, England’s King Charles II was struck by a sudden illness. Fortunately his phy...
#24 - Stefan Schubert on why it’s a bad idea to break the rules, even if it’s for a good cause
20 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
How honest should we be? How helpful? How friendly? If our society claims to value honesty, for inst...
#23 - How to actually become an AI alignment researcher, according to Dr Jan Leike
16 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Want to help steer the 21st century’s most transformative technology? First complete an undergrad ...
#22 - Leah Utyasheva on the non-profit that figured out how to massively cut suicide rates
07 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
How people kill themselves varies enormously depending on which means are most easily available. In ...
#21 - Holden Karnofsky on times philanthropy transformed the world & Open Phil’s plan to do the same
27 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The Green Revolution averted mass famine during the 20th century. The contraceptive pill gave women ...
#20 - Bruce Friedrich on inventing outstanding meat substitutes to end speciesism & factory farming
19 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Before the US Civil War, it was easier for the North to morally oppose slavery. Why? Because unlike ...
#19 - Samantha Pitts-Kiefer on working next to the White House trying to prevent nuclear war
14 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Rogue elements within a state’s security forces enrich dozens of kilograms of uranium. It’s then...
#18 - Ofir Reich on using data science to end poverty & the spurious action-inaction distinction
31 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Ofir Reich started out doing math in the military, before spending 8 years in tech startups - but th...
#17 - Will MacAskill on moral uncertainty, utilitarianism & how to avoid being a moral monster
19 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Immanuel Kant is a profoundly influential figure in modern philosophy, and was one of the earliest p...
#16 - Michelle Hutchinson on global priorities research & shaping the ideas of intellectuals
22 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In the 40s and 50s neoliberalism was a fringe movement within economics. But by the 80s it had becom...
#15 - Phil Tetlock on how chimps beat Berkeley undergrads and when it’s wise to defer to the wise
20 Nov 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Prof Philip Tetlock is a social science legend. Over forty years he has researched whose predictions...
#14 - Sharon Nunez & Jose Valle on going undercover to expose animal abuse
13 Nov 2017
Contributed by Lukas
What if you knew that ducks were being killed with pitchforks? Rabbits dumped alive into containers?...
#13 - Claire Walsh on testing which policies work & how to get governments to listen to the results
31 Oct 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In both rich and poor countries, government policy is often based on no evidence at all and many pro...
#12 - Beth Cameron works to stop you dying in a pandemic. Here’s what keeps her up at night.
25 Oct 2017
Contributed by Lukas
“When you're in the middle of a crisis and you have to ask for money, you're already too late.” ...
#11 - Spencer Greenberg on speeding up social science 10-fold & why plenty of startups cause harm
17 Oct 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Do most meat eaters think it’s wrong to hurt animals? Do Americans think climate change is likely ...
#10 - Nick Beckstead on how to spend billions of dollars preventing human extinction
11 Oct 2017
Contributed by Lukas
What if you were in a position to give away billions of dollars to improve the world? What would you...
#9 - Christine Peterson on how insecure computers could lead to global disaster, and how to fix it
04 Oct 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Take a trip to Silicon Valley in the 70s and 80s, when going to space sounded like a good way to get...
#8 - Lewis Bollard on how to end factory farming in our lifetimes
27 Sep 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Every year tens of billions of animals are raised in terrible conditions in factory farms before bei...
#7 - Julia Galef on making humanity more rational, what EA does wrong, and why Twitter isn’t all bad
13 Sep 2017
Contributed by Lukas
The scientific revolution in the 16th century was one of the biggest societal shifts in human histor...
#6 - Toby Ord on why the long-term future matters more than anything else & what to do about it
06 Sep 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Of all the people whose well-being we should care about, only a small fraction are alive today. The ...
#5 - Alex Gordon-Brown on how to donate millions in your 20s working in quantitative trading
28 Aug 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Quantitative financial trading is one of the highest paying parts of the world’s highest paying in...
#4 - Howie Lempel on pandemics that kill hundreds of millions and how to stop them
23 Aug 2017
Contributed by Lukas
What disaster is most likely to kill more than 10 million human beings in the next 20 years? Terrori...