80,000 Hours Podcast

This is a crosspost of an episode of the Eureka Podcast . The interviewer is Misha Saul, a childhood friend of Rob's, who he has known for over 20 years. While it's not an episode of our own show, we decided to share it with subscribers because it's fun, and because it touches on personal topics that we don't usually cover on the show. Rob and Misha cover: • How Rob's parents shaped who he is (if...

You wake up in a mysterious box, and hear the booming voice of God: “I just flipped a coin. If it came up heads, I made ten boxes, labeled 1 through 10 — each of which has a human in it. If it came up tails, I made ten billion boxes, labeled 1 through 10 billion — also with one human in each box. To get into heaven, you have to answer this correctly: Which way did the coin land?” You think briefly...

This is a crosspost of an episode of the Clearer Thinking Podcast: 022: Self-Improvement and Research Ethics with Rob Wiblin. Rob chats with Spencer Greenberg, who has been an audience favourite in episodes 11 and 39 of the 80,000 Hours Podcast, and has now created this show of his own. Among other things they cover: • Is trying to become a better person a good strategy for self-improvement • Why...

Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in March 2020. To do good, most of us look to use our time and money to affect the world around us today. But perhaps that's all wrong. If you took $1,000 you were going to donate and instead put it in the stock market — where it grew on average 5% a year — in 100 years you'd have $125,000 to give away instead. And in 200 years you'd have $17 milli...

Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in April 2020. Since it was founded, 80,000 Hours has done one-on-one calls to supplement our online content and offer more personalised advice. We try to help people get clear on their most plausible paths, the key uncertainties they face in choosing between them, and provide resources, pointers, and introductions to help them in those paths. I (M...

From one point of view academia forms one big 'epistemic' system — a process which directs attention, generates ideas, and judges which are good. Traditional print media is another such system, and we can think of society as a whole as a huge epistemic system, made up of these and many other subsystems.  How these systems absorb, process, combine and organise information will have a big impact on...

In its first 28 days on Netflix, the documentary The Social Dilemma — about the possible harms being caused by social media and other technology products — was seen by 38 million households in about 190 countries and in 30 languages. Over the last ten years, the idea that Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are degrading political discourse and grabbing and monetizing our attention in an alarming way h...

In the last '80k team chat' with Ben Todd and Arden Koehler, we discussed what effective altruism is and isn't, and how to argue for it. In this episode we turn now to what the effective altruism community most needs. • Links to learn more, summary and full transcript • The 2020 Effective Altruism Survey just opened. If you're involved with the effective altruism community, or sympathetic to its i...

If you want to make the world a better place, would it be better to help your niece with her SATs, or try to join the State Department to lower the risk that the US and China go to war?  People involved in 80,000 Hours or the effective altruism community would be comfortable recommending the latter. This week's guest — Russ Roberts, host of the long-running podcast EconTalk, and author of a forthc...

Today’s release is the latest in our series of audio versions of our articles. In this one — How much does a vote matter? — I investigate the two key things that determine the impact of your vote: • The chances of your vote changing an election’s outcome • How much better some candidates are for the world as a whole, compared to others I then discuss what I think are the best arguments against vot...

Had World War 1 never happened, you might never have existed.  It’s very unlikely that the exact chain of events that led to your conception would have happened otherwise — so perhaps you wouldn't have been born. Would that mean that it's better for you that World War 1 happened (regardless of whether it was better for the world overall)? On the one hand, if you're living a pretty good life, you m...

Today’s episode is the latest conversation between Arden Koehler, and our CEO, Ben Todd. Ben’s been thinking a lot about effective altruism recently, including what it really is, how it's framed, and how people misunderstand it. We recently released an article on misconceptions about effective altruism – based on Will MacAskill’s recent paper The Definition of Effective Altruism – and this episode...

Today’s release is the latest in our series of audio versions of our articles. In this one, we go through some more career options beyond our priority paths that seem promising to us for positively influencing the long-term future. Some of these are likely to be written up as priority paths in the future, or wrapped into existing ones, but we haven’t written full profiles for them yet—for example...

Today’s bonus episode is a conversation between Arden Koehler, and our CEO, Ben Todd. Ben’s been doing a bunch of research recently, and we thought it’d be interesting to hear about how he’s currently thinking about a couple of different topics – including different types of longtermism, and things 80,000 Hours might be getting wrong. Links to learn more, summary and full transcript. This is very...

Today’s release is the latest in our series of audio versions of our articles. In this one, we go through 30 global issues beyond the ones we usually prioritize most highly in our work, and that you might consider focusing your career on tackling. Although we spend the majority of our time at 80,000 Hours on our highest priority problem areas, and we recommend working on them to many of our reader...

A golf-ball sized lump of uranium can deliver more than enough power to cover all of your lifetime energy use. To get the same energy from coal, you’d need 3,200 tonnes of black rock — a mass equivalent to 800 adult elephants, which would produce more than 11,000 tonnes of CO2. That’s about 11,000 tonnes more than the uranium. Many people aren’t comfortable with the danger posed by nuclear power....

When COVID-19 struck the US, everyone was told that hand sanitizer needed to be saved for healthcare professionals, so they should just wash their hands instead. But in India, many homes lack reliable piped water, so they had to do the opposite: distribute hand sanitizer as widely as possible.  American advocates for banning single-use plastic straws might be outraged at the widespread adoption of...

The killing of George Floyd has prompted a great deal of debate over whether the US should reduce the size of its police departments. The research literature suggests that the presence of police officers does reduce crime, though they're expensive and as is increasingly recognised, impose substantial harms on the populations they are meant to be protecting, especially communities of colour.  So ma...

No democracy has ever incarcerated as many people as the United States. To get its incarceration rate down to the global average, the US would have to release 3 in 4 people in its prisons today.  The effects on Black Americans have been especially severe — Black people make up 12% of the US population but 33% of its prison population. In the early 2000's when incarceration reached its peak, the US...

80,000 Hours, along with many other members of the effective altruism movement, has argued that helping to positively shape the development of artificial intelligence may be one of the best ways to have a lasting, positive impact on the long-term future. Millions of dollars in philanthropic spending, as well as lots of career changes, have been motivated by these arguments. Today’s guest, Ben Garf...

This is the fourth release in our new series of audio articles. If you want to read the original article or check out the links within it, you can find them  here . "We’ve found that readers sometimes interpret or apply our advice in ways we didn’t anticipate and wouldn’t exactly recommend. That’s hard to avoid when you’re writing for a range of people with different personalities and initial view...

Stuart Russell, Professor at UC Berkeley and co-author of the most popular AI textbook , thinks the way we approach machine learning today is fundamentally flawed. In his new book, Human Compatible , he outlines the 'standard model' of AI development, in which intelligence is measured as the ability to achieve some definite, completely-known objective that we've stated explicitly. This is so obvio...

Today we’re launching the final entry of our ‘anonymous answers' series on the website. It features answers to 23 different questions including “How have you seen talented people fail in their work?” and “What’s one way to be successful you don’t think people talk about enough?” , from anonymous people whose work we admire. We thought a lot of the responses were really interesting; some were provo...

Today’s guest, New York Times bestselling author A.J. Jacobs, always hated Judge Judy. But after he found out that she was his seventh cousin, he thought, "You know what? She's not so bad." Hijacking this bias towards family and trying to broaden it to everyone led to his three-year adventure to help build the biggest family tree in history . He’s also spent months saying whatever was on his mind,...

Companies use about 300,000 times more computation training the best AI systems today than they did in 2012 and algorithmic innovations have also made them 25 times more efficient at the same tasks. These are the headline results of two recent papers — AI and Compute and AI and Efficiency — from the Foresight Team at OpenAI. In today's episode I spoke with one of the authors, Danny Hernandez, who...