I (Rob Wiblin) was joined on the selection committee by Will MacAskill, Hilary Greaves, Simran Dhaliwal, and Max Daniel.

80,000 Hours is a project of EV US and EV UK, though under Niel’s leadership, it expects to be spinning out and creating an independent legal structure, which will involve selecting a new board.

We want to thank Brenton Mayer, who has served as 80,000 Hours interim CEO since late 2022, for his dedication and thoughtful management. Brenton expressed enthusiasm about the committee’s choice, and he expects to take on the role of chief operations officer, where he will continue to work closely with Niel to keep 80,000 Hours running smoothly.

By the end of its deliberations, the selection committee agreed that Niel was the best candidate to be 80,000 Hours’ long-term CEO. We think Niel’s drive and attitude will help him significantly improve the organisation and shift its strategy to keep up with events in the world. We were particularly impressed by his ability to use evidence to inform difficult strategic decisions and lay out a clear vision for the organisation.

Niel was very forthcoming and candid with the committee about his weaknesses. His focus on getting frank feedback and using it to drive a self-improvement cycle really impressed the selection committee.

The committee considered three internal candidates for the CEO role, as well as dozens of other candidates suggested to us and dozens of others who applied for the position. In the end, we scored the top candidates on good judgement, inspiringness, social skills, leveraging people well, industriousness and drive, adaptability and resilience, commitment to the mission of 80,000 Hours, and deep understanding of the organisation.

Among other things, these scores were based on: input from 80,000 Hours directors on the organisation’s general situation; staff surveys; ‘take-home’ work tests; and a self-assessment of their biggest successes and mistakes. We also consulted, among others, Michelle Hutchinson, the current director of the 1on1 programme, as well as former 80,000 Hours CEOs Howie Lempel and Ben Todd, for their views on the decision.

In the end Niel stood out to us as the person most likely to drive 80,000 Hours in the right direction.

We can’t wait to see what he does in this new role and how 80,000 Hours pursues its vital mission in this new chapter.

Niel wanted to share the following message:

I love 80,000 Hours, and I’m thrilled and honoured to become CEO at this exciting time. I’ve learned so much working here, and I’m continually impressed by the dedication and the impact of the incredible team I get to work with. I am especially grateful for the admirable leadership of Brenton Mayer and look forward to building on this solid groundwork.

80,000 Hours has an impressive track record helping grow the community of people tackling some of the world’s most pressing problems. In light of all the challenges we collectively face as we navigate this century, the world needs many more dedicated people matching their talents to high-impact careers. This is the core of 80,000 Hours’ mission, and I can’t wait to get to work!

The post Announcing Niel Bowerman as the next CEO of 80,000 Hours appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

At the start of a new year, we often reflect on how to improve and develop better habits. People often want to exercise more or become better at self-study. I, for one, wanted to consistently get to work earlier.

But actually making progress requires more than just wanting it — it takes a systematic approach. Doing this is a key part succeeding at your current job, improving your career trajectory, and even just being more fulfilled generally. (Read more in our article on all the evidence-based advice we found on how to be more successful in any job.)

You want to take something that’s a problem in your life and find a solution that becomes second nature.

For example, for some people, getting to work at an early hour is just part of their normal routine — they barely have to think about it. But if that’s not the case for you – like it wasn’t for me – you’ll need to make a conscious change, and work on it until it becomes second nature.

But lots of things block us from forming these new habits and skills.

The key is closing the loop — get feedback about your problem, analyse why you haven’t adopted the habit yet, make a change, test it out, and repeat:

1. Feedback – track your progress and your errors, or get coaching.
2. Debug – reflect on what has gone wrong and why (perhaps via journaling).
3. Design – create a plan to improve, like changing your environment or using “trigger-action” habits.
4. Test – try out the changes and see if they work.
5. Repeat the loop – both at the object level (e.g. getting to work on time) and the meta level (improving your habit formation system).

For example, if you want to develop the habit of exercising more, first track how often you currently exercise. Notice that you skip workouts frequently. Dig into the reasons why — maybe you’re too tired after work. So try shifting your workout to the morning. See if that sticks for a few weeks. If not, try something else you think might work, like exercising with a friend.

If that doesn’t work, keep debugging why exactly it doesn’t work, and trying new things that might help. For habits that I really want to form, I often debug for 5-25 minutes before picking a new test to try. If you keep this up, you will hopefully either develop the habit, or you’ll decide it’s not worth the effort to build the habit (which is also an acceptable outcome!).

To make habits stick, use “trigger-action” plans. Use habits you already have as triggers, like adding stretches to your routine right after brushing your teeth. Build chains and sequences of habits. Use supporting habits to reinforce others, like planning each morning to support getting to work on time.

Developing skills and habits takes patience, effort, and the right techniques. But with a systematic approach and deliberate practice, you can make steady progress. Over time, you’ll be surprised how far you can go.

For more practical tips, you can read our article on how to build useful skills and traits for your career and how to be more successful in your current job.

If you want to watch a video with similar advice about building good habits, we suggest this one from Kurzgesagt.

The post Practical steps to form better habits in your life and career appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

We published a lot of pieces aimed at helping our readers have more impactful careers, including a completely updated career guide, our revamped advanced series, around 35 podcast episodes, dozens of blog posts, and a bunch of updates to our career reviews and problem profiles.

We’d like to highlight some of the new content that stands out to us:

Standout blog posts

• How to cope with rejection in your career — Luisa Rodriguez, one of the hosts of The 80,000 Hours podcast, wrote this powerful personal piece about her experience with career rejection, the unexpected benefits of getting rejected, and helpful tips for dealing with it that have worked for her. If you have ever struggled with rejection, I think this piece might help you feel less alone.

• My thoughts on parenting and having an impactful career — Michelle Hutchinson, the director of the one-on-one programme at 80,000 Hours, wrote this thoughtful reflection on her decision to become a parent, the effects of parenthood on her career and social impact, and the challenges and benefits of being a parent in a community of people trying to have an impactful career.
  

• Some thoughts on moderation in doing good — in this post, 80,000 Hours founder Ben Todd addressed why moderation may be underrated by people trying to have a big social impact and how to avoid the pitfalls of extremism. This piece thoughtfully offers actionable advice on how to strike a balance between aiming to do more good and pursuing other goals in your life.

Standout articles

• Most popular: What makes for a dream job? — this is our most popular article of the year, one of our most frequently read pages ever, and the first chapter of our newly overhauled career guide! We reviewed decades of research on job satisfaction and discovered that ‘follow your passion’ is probably not the best advice if you want a satisfying career. Instead, we found six key ingredients of a dream job. If you’re looking to find a more satisfying career path in 2024, reading this article is a great place to start.

• Longtermism: a call to protect future generations — in our newly launched advanced series, we discuss one of the ideas that motivates much of our work: longtermism. In short, this means we think improving the prospects for all future generations — if possible — is among the most morally important things we can do.

• Should you work at a leading AI lab? — AI labs could be a force for good or harm. While there is a risk you could contribute to harm in these roles, you might also directly reduce the risks through safety research, governance work, and information security roles. I think this is an important piece to read.

• AI governance and coordination — opportunities to positively shape the development of AI are rapidly emerging in government, research institutes, and industry. This work has the potential to be high-impact by helping shape how society prepares and responds to the challenges of AI technology. But this is a high-stakes area with potentially large downsides.

• Great power conflict — we think the risk of a catastrophic great power war is a top world problem. Our new article argues that trying to reduce the risk might be among the highest-impact options for your career.

Standout podcast episodes

• Lennart Heim on the compute governance era and what has to come after — Lennart explains how regulation of supercomputing resources like advanced AI chips can help reduce the risks of quickly advancing AI systems.

• Kevin Esvelt on cults that want to kill everyone, stealth vs wildfire pandemics, and how he felt inventing gene drives — Kevin, an MIT biologist, lays out the case that engineered pandemics are among the biggest dangers facing humanity.

• Ajeya Cotra on accidentally teaching AI models to deceive us — will AI models be saints, sycophants, or schemers? Ajeya discusses how AI models with different motivations could emerge that perform similarly to each other during training, but behave very differently elsewhere. This is a great episode to dive into why aligning AI with human goals and values might be very tricky.

• Seren Kell on the research gaps holding back alternative proteins from mass adoption — Seren discusses the state of the science behind alternative proteins, as well as the challenges and opportunities for progress towards making them as tasty, cheap, and convenient as meat, dairy, and egg products.

• Alex Lawsen on avoiding 10 mistakes people make when pursuing a high-impact career — Alex, a former 80,000 Hours advisor, offers useful guidance on how to avoid some common career mistakes he has seen, including not failing enough (yes, really!) and taking the 80,000 Hours problem and career rankings too seriously.

And there’s more to come in 2024!

The 80,000 Hours team will continue researching, writing, and podcasting about the areas we think you could have the most impact with your career. We’re excited to continue helping our readers find fulfilling careers that do good!

The post 2023 in review: some of our top pieces from last year appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

This giveaway has been open to all newsletter subscribers since early 2022. The number of orders we get depends on the number of new subscribers that day, but in general, we get around 150 orders a day.

Over the past week, however, we received an overwhelming number of orders. The offer of the free book appears to have been promoted by some very popular posts on Instagram, which generated an unprecedented amount of interest for us.

While we’re really grateful that these people were interested in what we have to offer, we couldn’t handle the massive uptick in demand. We’re a nonprofit funded by donations, and everything we provide is free. We had budgeted to run the book giveaway projecting the demand would be in line with what it’s been for the past two years. Instead, we had more than 20,000 orders in just a few days — which we anticipated would run through around six months of the book giveaway’s budget.

We’ve now paused taking new orders, and we’re unsure when we’ll be able to re-open them.

Because of this large spike in demand, we’ve had to tell many people who subscribed to our newsletter hoping to get a physical book that we’re not able to complete their order.

We deeply regret this mistake. We should have had a better process in place to pause the book giveaway much sooner, so that no orders were placed that we couldn’t fulfil, and so no one signed up to the newsletter thinking they would get a hard copy of a book when they wouldn’t.

Update — January 26, 2024:

While we may have to close orders if we get overwhelmed again in the future, we have made several changes to improve the process of the book giveaway to address this problem.

1. We added new terms and conditions to the giveaway so new subscribers are better informed about the availability of books in certain formats, our data privacy policy, and the circumstances in which we may be unable to fulfil paperback orders.
2. We improved the system that alerts us to unexpectedly high volumes of paperback book orders so that more of us are aware sooner.
3. We developed clearer internal recommendations and procedures for when and how to pause the giveaway.

These changes will help us respond more quickly to these situations in the future, which we hope will limit the number of orders placed that we cannot fulfil.

Our readers’ trust in our services is extremely important to us, and we’re very sorry to let down the people who won’t get the books they signed up for.

We understand that this might make some readers trust us less. All we can say is that we commit to doing better in the future. We’re reviewing our book giveaway processes so that going forward, we will be able to consistently fulfil all orders as expected.

If you’re reading this and you were one of the users affected:

• Please accept our sincerest apologies for not being able to deliver on our promise to you.
• You can still get access to the 80,000 Hours career guide in these ways:
  • Download a free ebook copy of the guide by clicking here.
  • Or, if you’d prefer an audiobook version, you can listen to it online or on a podcast app.
  • Finally, you can also read the chapters on our website.

We’d also like to address any concerns readers may have concerning the processing of user data that we obtained during this period:

If you’d like to unsubscribe from our newsletter, because of this or any other reason, you can do so at any time by clicking the ‘unsubscribe’ link in the footer of any email from us. If you unsubscribe, we won’t email you again.

User data collected by us will be processed in accordance with our privacy policy, which you can read on Effective Ventures’ website here.

We will never sell any user data, for any reason.

Users who ordered a book will also have provided some of their personal data to our distribution partner, Impact Books, such as the delivery address for their book and their email. You can read their privacy policy here. Like us, they will never sell your data, for any reason.

We’ve asked Impact Books to delete all the personal data they had gathered from any user whose order we did not fulfil, and they will do so. So you can be confident that we will not benefit in any way from your provision of this data.

We hope this clears up some potential concerns in this area.

We apologise once again for not sending out all the requested books, and we’re really sorry that we let people down.

We think our book giveaway is a valuable service, so we’re motivated to get it restarted in a sustainable way — and we will strive to make sure we avoid a mistake like this in the future. We also hope that some of those who are disappointed to not receive a paperback book can make use of other versions of our advice, which are (and will remain) available for free online.

Update — Book giveaway re-opened on January 26, 2024:

We have re-opened our book giveaway for free paperback orders! If you have already signed up to our newsletter, you can order a paperback book by emailing book.giveaway@80000hours.org. Otherwise, you can get your book by subscribing to our newsletter as normal.

We greatly appreciate the patience of our new subscribers while we prepared to re-open the giveaway.

The post An apology for our mistake with the book giveaway appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

That’s 32 of our favourite ideas packed into one episode that’s so bursting with substance it might be more than the human mind can safely handle.

Find this episode wherever you get podcasts:

• 
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There’s something for everyone here:

• Ezra Klein on punctuated equilibrium
• Tom Davidson on why AI takeoff might be shockingly fast
• Johannes Ackva on political action versus lifestyle changes
• Hannah Ritchie on how buying environmentally friendly technology helps low-income countries
• Bryan Caplan on rational irrationality on the part of voters
• Jan Leike on whether the release of ChatGPT increased or reduced AI extinction risks
• Athena Aktipis on why elephants get deadly cancers less often than humans
• Anders Sandberg on the lifespan of civilisations
• Nita Farahany on hacking neural interfaces

…plus another 23 such gems from the rest of our 2023 guest lineup.

And they’re in an order that our audio engineer Simon Monsour described as having an “eight-dimensional-tetris-like rationale.”

I don’t know what the hell that means either, but I’m curious to find out.

And remember: if you like these highlights, note that we release 20-minute highlights reels for every new episode over on our sister feed, which is called 80k After Hours. So if you’re struggling to make time to listen to every single one, you can always get some of the best bits of our episodes.

We hope for all the best things to happen for you in 2024, and the podcast team will be back with a new episode soon!

The post Special podcast holiday release: One highlight from every episode in 2023 appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

80,000 Hours is a project of the Effective Ventures group — the umbrella term for Effective Ventures Foundation and Effective Ventures Foundation USA, Inc., which are two separate legal entities that work together. It also includes the projects Giving What We Can, the Centre for Effective Altruism, and others.

We’re incredibly grateful to the Effective Ventures leadership and team and the other orgs for all their support, particularly in the last year. They devoted countless hours and enormous effort to helping ensure that we and the other orgs could pursue our missions.

And we deeply appreciate Effective Ventures’ support in our spin-out. They recently announced that all of the other organisations under their umbrella will likewise become their own legal entities; we’re excited to continue to work alongside them to improve the world.

Back in May, we investigated whether it was the right time to spin out of our parent organisations. We’ve considered this option at various points in the last three years.

There have been many benefits to being part of a larger entity since our founding. But as 80,000 Hours and the other projects within Effective Ventures have grown, we concluded we can now best pursue our mission and goals independently. Effective Ventures leadership approved the plan.

Becoming our own legal entity will allow us to:

• Match our governing structure to our function and purpose
• Design operations systems that best meet our staff’s needs
• Reduce interdependence with other entities that raises financial, legal, and reputational risks

There’s a lot for us to do to make this happen. We’re currently in the process of finding a new CEO to lead us in our next chapter. We’ll also need a new board to oversee our work, and new staff for our internal systems team and other growing programmes.

We’re excited to begin this next chapter and to continue providing research and support to help people have high-impact careers!

The post Announcing our plan to become an independent organisation appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

There are lots of pressing problems in the world, and even more possible solutions. We mostly focus on careers, but donating to effective organisations tackling these problems — if you can — is another great way to help.

But how can you figure out where it’s best to donate?

Our article on choosing where to donate lays out how you can make this choice. First, you have to decide whether:

• You want to defer to someone you think is trustworthy, shares your values, and has already evaluated charities. Just following their recommendations can save you work. (We discuss some options below.)
• You want to do your own research instead, which might allow you to find unusually high-impact options matched to your specific values, plus improve your knowledge of effective giving.
• You can also enter a donor lottery — learn more about them here.

If you decide to do your own research, you can use our article to figure out how much time you should spend. For example, we think young people might especially benefit from doing research since they’ll learn lessons about charity evaluation that they can apply for a long time in the future.

If you do your own research, we recommend you:

1. Decide which global problems you think are most pressing right now.
2. Find the best organisations within your top 2–3 problem areas.
3. Choose the one that’s furthest from meeting its funding needs if you have to break a tie.

We have more details about this process in the article.

We don’t think you should just defer to us on where to donate (we don’t do charity evaluations). But we know other organisations in the effective altruism community that share values with many of our staff and readers, and they provide vetted recommendations and opportunities to donate. These include:

• Long-Term Future Fund (EA Funds)
• Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund (EA Funds)
• Giving What We Can
• GiveWell
• Founders Pledge’s expert-led fund for climate change

Note that EA Funds, GWWC, and 80,000 Hours are all projects of Effective Ventures.

Finally, you could donate to us! 80,000 Hours has room for more funding, and your donation would support our work providing free research and help for people who want to tackle pressing world problems with their careers.

You can find out more about how and why to donate to us and why on our site.

There’s also been a lot of thought-provoking fascinating discussion about giving this year on the Effective Altruism Forum that we recommend. Check out where people are donating and why? and a dialogue on donation splitting as two interesting places to get started.

We hope this advice enables you to make more impactful and informed donations to help others!

Learn more:

• How to choose where to donate — our full article on this topic

The post Not sure where to donate this year? Here’s our advice. appeared first on 80,000 Hours.