Take Rosa Parks, who in 1955 refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus, sparking a protest which led to a Supreme Court ruling that segregated buses were unconstitutional. Parks was a seamstress in her day job, but in her spare time she was involved with the civil rights movement. When Parks sat down on that bus, she wasn’t acting completely spontaneously: just a few months before she’d been attending workshops on effective communication and civil disobedience, and the resulting boycott was carefully planned by Parks and the local NAACP. After she was arrested, they used widely distributed fliers to launch a total boycott of buses in a city with 40,000 African Americans, while simultaneously pushing forward with legal action. This led to major progress for civil rights.

There are many ways to communicate ideas. One is social advocacy, like Rosa Parks. Another is more like being an individual public intellectual, who can either specialise in a mass audience (like Carl Sagan), or a particular niche (like Paul Farmer, a medical anthropologist who wrote about global health). Or you can learn skills in marketing and public relations and then work as part of a team or organisation to spread important ideas.

Why are communication skills valuable?

In the 20th century, smallpox killed around 400 million people — far more than died in all the century’s wars and political famines.

Although credit for the elimination of smallpox often goes to D.A. Henderson (who directly oversaw the programme), it was Viktor Zhdanov who lobbied the World Health Organization to start the elimination campaign in the first place — while facing significant opposition from the members of the World Health Assembly (the proposal passed by just two votes). Without his communication skills, smallpox’s elimination probably would not have happened until much later, costing millions of lives, and possibly not at all.

So why has communicating important ideas sometimes been so effective?

First, communicating ideas is a way to have an impact on a large scale. Ideas can spread quickly, so communicating ideas is a way for a small group of people to have a large effect on a problem. Ideas can also stick around once they’re out there, meaning your impact persists.

If you can mobilise two people to support an issue, that’s potentially twice as impactful as working on it yourself.

Technology has magnified these effects even further. More than ever before, normal people can launch a social movement, lobby a government, start a campaign that influences public opinion, or just persuade their friends to take up a cause. When successful, these efforts can have a lasting impact on a problem that goes far beyond what the communicators could have achieved directly.

Second, spreading ideas that are important for society in a concerted, strategic way is neglected. This is because there’s usually no commercial incentive to spread socially important ideas. Moreover, the ideas that are most impactful to spread are those that aren’t yet widely accepted. Standing up to the status quo is uncomfortable, and it can take decades for opinion to shift. This means there’s also little personal incentive to stand up for them.

Third, communicating ideas is an area where the most successful efforts do far more than the typical efforts. The most successful communicators influence millions of people, while others might struggle to persuade more than a few friends. This means that it’s a high-risk strategy in the sense that your efforts might very well come to nothing. But it’s also high reward, and if you’re an especially good fit for communicating ideas, it might well be the best thing you can do. (Read about why we think more people should dream big if they want to do good.)

We think there are many high-leverage opportunities to use communications skills to help address the global problems we’re focused on today.

The problems we highlight are unusually neglected, so often few people work on them or even know they’re problems. This means that simply telling people about these problems (and effective solutions to them) can be high impact by increasing the number of talented people who might want to help. (Indeed, that’s part of our own strategy for impact!)

More specifically, communicators can help do things like:

• Encourage the consideration of ideas about the way AI might shape this century.
• Put concern for nuclear security back onto the political agenda.
• Spread important values, like moral concern for nonhuman animals and distant future generations.
• Mobilise efforts to prevent a pandemic much worse than COVID-19.
• Stand up for technology agnosticism to tackle climate change, especially for approaches that are unfairly unpopular (e.g. nuclear energy) or unknown (e.g. hot rock geothermal) or unsexy (e.g. decarbonising the cement industry rather than electric cars).
• Spread the ideas of effective altruism, as well as adjacent ideas like improving judgement and decision making (as in the example of Julia Galef below).
• Provide AI researchers and policymakers with the understanding required to successfully navigate the challenge of AI alignment.

Spreading important ideas like those above might not only have immediate benefits in terms of getting more people to work on these issues — it also helps to advance society’s understanding of these ideas, moving the discourse forward, making important ideas more mainstream, and eventually shaping policy and social norms.

You can see more information on the best solutions to the global problems we focus on in our problem profiles.

Another advantage of learning these skills is that they can be applied to almost any pressing problem. Almost all organisations have some need for marketing, public relations, and other external communications, and almost all problem areas have ideas that would be useful to spread. This gives you a lot of future flexibility.

Moreover, although some versions of this skill set are mainly useful in the social sector and for having an impact (e.g. how to run a direct action campaign), there are skills in this area that are highly paid and make you generally employable, such as marketing, sales, or public relations. Similarly, building an audience as an individual communicator often opens up a wide range of future career opportunities within your audience. So, learning these skills can give you backup options if you decide to step back from doing good for a while or earn to give.

A word of warning: it seems fairly easy to accidentally do harm if you promote mistaken ideas, promote good ideas in a way that turns people off (e.g. by being sensationalistic or dishonest), or draw people’s attention away from even more important issues. So, be careful about communicating ideas without much input from others, and, if you’re building communication skills, you may also need to build especially good judgement about which ideas to communicate and how to best communicate them.

What does building communication skills typically involve?

Content creation skills

One path we recommend to readers is to become a content creator. This often includes:

• Journalism
• Social media content creator
• Writing books
• Public intellectual

Less often among our readers it might involve:

• Film/TV/documentary director
• TV or Radio presenter
• Actor or musician

You’ll want to focus on the medium that’s the best fit for you, with the goal of building the most valuable audience you can for spreading important ideas.

Content creation careers often involve the following steps:

1. Honing your craft. Typically, a content creation career starts with learning your medium and then learning how to communicate effectively with a certain target audience (usually starting small, like with Twitter or a blog).

   Being really prolific helps a lot. If you’re able to make loads of different videos, or write 100 articles to pitch to various media outlets, that will substantially increase your chances of success. So if you’re blogging once a month and it’s not working out, see if there’s a way you could write a lot more.

2. Building an audience. If you’re working in a large organisation — for example, as a journalist — the idea is to build career capital so you can move somewhere that has a large audience.

   If you’re pursuing a career where you work more individually — for example, as a social media influencer or writing books — you’ll need to build an audience yourself. To do this, create lots of material to develop an audience to grow your future impact.
   You can probably jump around between working in large organisations and working individually — focus on finding opportunities where you’ll learn the most.

   In this stage, you shouldn’t necessarily be focusing on impact right away, but rather anything that builds your reach and credibility. Lots of digital platforms provide high-quality data that you can use to get rapid feedback on your content — so you can, for example, A/B test strategies.

   Bear in mind, the goal is not just to reach the largest number of people possible — it can be more impactful to have a niche but influential audience. You want to aim to build the biggest impact-adjusted audience you can.

   Credibility also often requires expertise, so you might also want to use this time to build that expertise by learning about the ideas you think are most important. (One great way of doing that — while practising your content creation skills — is learning by writing.)

3. Promoting the most important ideas. Once you have an audience, you can increasingly focus on figuring out how to use it to have the most impact. This usually involves thinking carefully about which ideas are (i) important (i.e. impactful if people know and act on them), (ii) neglected (i.e. not well known by your target audience already), and (iii) relevant or interesting to your audience, so that they’re more likely to be inspired to help with them.

The specific skills, qualifications, and approaches you’ll need to build will depend on the audience you’re trying to influence. If you’re aiming to communicate ideas to ~100 policymakers who specialise in a certain topic (like Viktor Zhdanov), the strategies you’ll use will be very different from someone aiming to communicate to the population in general (like Rosa Parks).

Some example approaches:

• Subject matter expert: trying to become known for being the point person on a particular topic — works best for more technical or niche audiences
• Translation: taking expert positions and making them accessible to a larger audience (e.g. science journalists, nonfiction authors) — sometimes works best for niche audiences (such as when translating technical research for policymakers) and other times works best for wider audiences
• Mass-media presenter: speaking to a large, mainstream audience (e.g. TV personalities, many journalists) — works best for creating mass buy-in for ideas

We’ve worked with some readers who have succeeded as individual creators, but it’s important to bear in mind many of these options are seen as glamorous, which makes them competitive.

For instance, a recent poll found that the most desired career path among Gen Z is Youtuber. And less than 1% of YouTube channels have over 100,000 subscribers.

If you enter one of the more competitive areas, like film, the competitive pressure can often mean you have to spend a large fraction of your career creating the most commercially viable and popular content rather than focusing on the most important ideas.

While we’ve worked with several readers who have become journalists, these other paths are often seen as glamorous careers, which makes them very competitive — so we typically recommend them less often.

However, if you think you might be able to succeed at getting to the top of one of these paths (and especially if you’re already on track), it’s often worth continuing. After getting established, it’s often possible to then devote, say, 20% of your time to projects that you think are socially valuable. You’ll also likely gain connections with many others who have large audiences, helping you spread important ideas indirectly.

Organisational communication skills

Another option is to learn skills like the following, and then work as part of an organisation or team who are spreading important ideas:

• Marketing
• Public relations
• Sales and negotiation
• Social advocacy and campaigning
• Visual design
• Copywriting and editing
• TV/film/radio production
• Publishing

The structure of these careers are similar to those focused on organisation-building skills, so see that profile for more specific advice on getting started and evaluating your fit. If you’re focusing on a niche audience of policymakers, then this skill set also blurs into the “policy influencer” roles covered under policy and political skills.

Briefly, you’ll want to start by working with a team who are outstanding at these kinds of skills.

That might involve joining a team that’s already working on an important problem, but it’s more common to first work at an organisation that doesn’t have much positive impact but can offer you mentorship and feedback. For example, you could learn digital marketing by working at a top startup or agency.

Once you have skills to offer, two options include:

• Find a job with a team who are spreading important ideas. This could look like working at an advocacy nonprofit, joining a political campaign, or being head of public relations for an author.
• Join an impactful organisation and work on their communications, public relations, or marketing strategies.

Communicating ideas alongside another job

Some jobs make communicating ideas their central focus, such as those we listed right above.

But it’s also possible to learn to spread ideas well in any job by:

• Being a sensible advocate for good ideas in conversation and refining your views over time
• Engaging with and recommending articles, books, podcasts, and the like to family, friends, colleagues, and others in your circles
• Posting ideas and articles on social media

You can also communicate ideas as a side project. For example:

• Run a podcast, blog, or Twitter feed with a significant following.
• If you’re an academic, do media appearances or write books aimed at a popular audience part time (i.e. be a ‘public intellectual’).
• Run a meetup, like an effective altruism group, and create materials for it (e.g. talks).

It’s possible to build skills for communicating ideas while you’re in a normal, stable job which gives you space to pursue projects like these on the side (although, if you want this to become your core skill set, we’d generally recommend eventually making building these skills your primary career focus, which can be hard to do if it’s a side project).

The careers that put you in the best position to spread important ideas (and learn to do so effectively) are those that let you:

• Build a platform (e.g. anything that makes you well known in your field)
• Get influential connections (e.g. working in government or policy)
• Gain credibility (e.g. being a respected academic)

Being super successful at anything that’s slightly public facing (for example, roles in academic research, or in government, or founding a business) can also put you in a good position to spread important ideas, even if communicating ideas isn’t a core part of the role. If Ariana Grande came to us for career advice, we wouldn’t recommend she quit music and become an AI safety researcher. Rather, we’d discuss how she might use her platform to spread important ideas that might appeal to her fans.

We haven’t worked with Ariana, but we have worked with an Olympic tennis player, Marcus Daniell. He decided to use his position — and especially his connections — to set up High Impact Athletes, which encourages professional athletes to pledge a fraction of any prize money they win to high-impact charities.

Communication also doesn’t need to be through nonfiction. For example, Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality popularised ideas about the importance of agency and how common biases affect our ability to make good decisions (though using fiction to get across important ideas without manipulation is a rare skill).

Community building

Communication careers are defined by their focus on spreading ideas on a big scale, but it’s also possible to have a similar impact on a more person-to-person level as a community builder.

Some community building involves running events and organising others — similar to organisation-building roles. But at its core is the specific skill of building connections with others.

Community building often works well as a part-time position. For instance, Kuhan was a student at Stanford when they came across 80,000 Hours, and realised the importance of reducing existential risks. However, they also saw there were no organisations on campus focusing on that idea. So they founded the Stanford Existential Risk Initiative, which runs courses and conferences about the topic to build a community of students aiming to work on these risks.

Example people

How to evaluate your fit

How to predict your fit in advance

Some signs that you’re a good fit for building skills for communicating ideas include:

• You find it relatively easy to develop content in some medium. For example, you might find it very easy to write — whether that’s marketing copy or academic reports or popular articles. Similarly, you might find it fairly easy to make videos. Bear in mind that almost everyone finds writing and other creative work difficult. If you’ve found in your life that you can do this for a few hours a day and actually finish some work, you’re doing well.
• People tend to think you communicate clearly in that medium.
• You consume lots of content in your medium — for example, if you want to be a writer, you often spend all day reading blogs or articles.
• You are verbally fluent and have good social skills — but there are many exceptions. For example, someone can be nerdy and awkward but make an amazing blogger.
• You might need some basic quantitative skills — at least enough to be able to understand data about your work.
• You feel like you’ll be motivated by people seeing the work you’ve produced.

If you’re doing something like public relations in an organisation, then the advice in our organisation-building skill profile may also be applicable.

How to tell if you’re on track

Once you’ve started exploring communicating ideas, you’ll want to ask yourself: “How generally successful am I by the standards of the communication track I’m on?”

For instance, if you’re trying to become a journalist, are you on track to land a job after several years of trying?

Check our career reviews to see if we have a career profile covering the specific pathway you’re interested in. (Though we regret we haven’t yet written profiles on many of the common media careers.)

If you’re focusing on content creation work, some good signs that you’re on the right track are:

• You’re producing lots of content.
• You get good feedback on your content, relative to people who have spent a similar amount of time on it (don’t forget that most public communicators have honed their craft for years, often long before they were famous).
• You find it easy to connect with your target audience (through at least one medium) and convince at least some of them of new ideas.
• You’re starting to build a following or career capital that might lead to a following in the future.

It’s hard to generalise about what levels of following are ‘good’ at different stages. Here are some extremely rough guides for what might be promising after 2–4 years for different media:

• You’re often able to get 100,000 views per video on YouTube or 100,000 likes per video on TikTok.
• You have a podcast with over 1,000 subscribers, and a typical episode you release gets 3,000 downloads (though podcasts are especially hard to launch if you don’t already have an audience).
• As a blogger, you have a newsletter or Substack with over 5,000 subscribers.
• You have 10,000 followers on Twitter.
• If you’re aiming to get published in mainstream media outlets, you have had content in more than two major publications (e.g. The Guardian, Vox).

As a reminder: you don’t necessarily need to be writing about important issues at the early stages — what matters is that you will bring in more of these issues in the future.

How to get started building communication skills

You can start building a communication skill set by studying anything — or doing any job — that will let you practice writing, public speaking, or creating any other type of content.

If you’re not able to do communication in your main work responsibilities, you can practice with independent work on the side, such as blogging, tweeting, media, podcasting, tiktoking, etc. It can even be possible to write a book alongside another job. (Though for anyone doing independent public work, make sure you avoid publishing something unintentionally offensive, as this could affect your career prospects for a long time, even if the offence is the result of a misunderstanding.)

Having a portfolio of content can help you if you want to get into most communications roles, including ones at large organisations (like marketing or PR).

Content creation skills

For aspiring writers, we recommend getting into the habit of writing regularly — ideally every day (even if it’s only a few hundred words) — and posting your writing publicly on Facebook, Twitter, or a blog.

For spoken content, you should practise in any ways you can — for example, give presentations in your professional area, join your local Toastmasters group, make video blogs, or start a podcast.

Whatever your chosen medium or platform, try to create something regularly, and then actively try to learn from what you’ve done — think carefully about measurable goals you might want to achieve, and see whether and why you meet them.

What content should you produce?

Content that’s great can achieve far more reach and impact than content that’s merely good. People tend to produce much higher quality content when they’re naturally interested in a topic and working in a medium they genuinely like.

So we’d encourage you to look at examples of successful content, or find people doing what you want to do, then paying attention to where your intrinsic motivation leads you rather than just focusing on strategically selecting the ‘best’ topic or media type.

It can be worth doing some strategic thinking — for example, you might look at how the recommender algorithms work on various platforms and what kinds of content they are more likely to boost.

Which medium should you choose?

It may take some time to find the medium that’s the best fit for you. Someone might love long-form blog posts but hate Twitter; others find their niche in video, media appearances, and public talks. Experiment with different media to find the one that comes most naturally and is most motivating.

That said, as a secondary consideration, it can make sense to focus on media that are new and rapidly growing (it’s much easier to gain followers on new social media platforms than established ones) or are especially good for reaching a certain audience (e.g. HackerNews for the tech industry) and that fit your message (e.g. books and podcasts are better for complex ideas).

Finding your audience

To get started, you might ask yourself: “What’s a type of person that I understand and communicate well with, better than most people wanting to make a difference do?” If you’re a student, this might be fellow students. Or it could be others in your industry (e.g. biologists, policymakers). Or it could be a mass audience, like educated Americans. You might also pay attention to why it might be valuable to reach a certain audience.

Once you’re clearer on who your target audience is, your main aim should probably be to build your general ability to communicate with that audience. You might want to try to get any job that involves communicating with your chosen audience and allows you to get feedback on a regular basis — whether or not you’re producing content on topics directly related to pressing global problems.

If you’re interested in communicating with fairly general/widespread audiences, most jobs in journalism, and many in public relations and corporate communications, would be useful. If you’re focused on a more niche audience (e.g. AI scientists), then you might want to work somewhere where you can meet lots of people in that audience.

Once you’ve developed your skills and audience, then it’s time to focus more on having an impact, which we cover in the next section.

Organisational communication skills

The structure of these careers are similar to ones focused on organisation-building skills — you can get started by finding any role that will let you start learning one of these skills, like any role in marketing, editing, public relations, lobbying, visual design, or campaigning.

For communications roles at organisations, it can help to spend some time getting good at presenting yourself, for example by building a personal website with nice copy and good presentation. This lets you practise your skills as well as having something to show off to potential employers.

For more — including which organisations you should work for — take a look at how to get started building organisation-building skills.

Get funding

If you’d like to pursue this type of career, there is sometimes funding available. Some sources to consider include:

• The Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund sometimes makes small grants that could help you transition into these types of careers. For instance, if you’d like to test out making YouTube videos about one of our recommended problems full time for three months, you could ask for $10,000; or if you’re interested in working in journalism but can’t earn enough money right away, you could ask for a salary top-up. They’re also interested in helping cover the costs of internships or graduate school.
• Longview Philanthropy funds media projects within effective altruism. For instance, it recently helped fund a $100,000 prize for new blogs.
• Open Philanthropy is interested in funding marketing related to effective altruism.

Apply for free one-on-one advising

Want more individualised advice before diving in? There’s a lot more to be said about:

• How to find the communication career that’s the best fit for you
• What strategy to take for getting started in communication careers
• How to best use your following if you already have one

Get in touch with our one-on-one team, and we may also be able to introduce you to people in these paths.

APPLY TO SPEAK WITH OUR TEAM

Find jobs that use communication skills

Filter our job board by ‘outreach’ to find jobs in this category:

View all opportunities

Once you have these skills, how can you best apply them to have an impact?

Once you have the skills and an audience, the question becomes which messages to focus on to have the biggest impact.

Some messages are more important to spread than others, but some messages are also easier to spread. You need to consider both factors and how their significance multiplies.

Moreover, you need to customise the analysis for your audience. The messages that are important and likely to spread among Ariana Grande fans are totally different from those likely to spread among philosophy academics.

Some key factors for comparing messages include the following (which is an adapted version of our problem framework):

1. Important — if this idea spread among your audience, how much impact would result?
2. Neglected — how widely known is this idea by your audience already? How much is it already discussed by other creators in your space?
3. Is it of interest to your audience? Or otherwise possible to get attention for given your platform? This makes it more likely to spread.
4. Is it personally interesting and motivating for you to work on?

The aim is to find messages or topics that do best on the multiple of all four factors.

Here’s a process you could go through to generate ideas:

1. Make a list of the global problems you think are most pressing.
2. Generate ideas for messages and ideas that could, if spread more widely among your audience, enable more progress on these problems. This could be calls to get more people working on these problems, information about the best solutions to them, or messages to help decision makers understand these issues better. To do this, explore the resources in our problem profiles and then speak to experts in the area about what would be helpful.
3. Think about which messages could be most of interest to your audience or a good fit for your platform.
4. Experiment with spreading those that seem most promising. It might take some trial and error to find an idea and framing that resonates with your audience. In particular, before taking on a big project like a book or documentary, try to test it out in a smaller version.

We listed a couple of examples of ideas we’d like to see spread above.

In practice, you’ll likely want to continue to publish a mixture of content that builds your audience or pays the bills and content that you think is especially impactful.

Career paths we’ve reviewed that use these skills

• Academia
• Building effective altruism
• Party politics
• Journalism
• Public intellectual
• Working at an AI lab
• Non-technical roles at AI labs
• Think tank careers
• Work at a nonprofit that focuses on advocacy
• Non-technical role at an AI lab
• Organise an effective altruism local group
• Pursuing fame in arts and entertainment

Learn more

Our articles and podcasts:

• What do journalists say about journalism as a high-impact career? — interviews with Dylan Matthews, Derek Thompson, and Shaun Raviv
• Podcast: Kelsey Piper on room for important advocacy within journalism
• Podcast: Ezra Klein on aligning journalism, politics, and what matters most
• Podcast: Spencer Greenberg on stopping valueless papers from getting into top journals
• How to be an effective advocate

See all our articles and episodes on advocacy careers

Some of the best resources we’ve found about individual communication:

• Messages to spread to help with the most important century
• Write Useful Books — one of the best guides we’ve read to writing good nonfiction
• The Priceonomics Content Marketing Handbook — a guide to writing shareable, data-driven online articles
• How to be popular on the internet by Tom Scott

Read next:  Explore other useful skills

Want to learn more about the most useful skills for solving global problems, according to our research? See our list.

Continue →

The post Communicating ideas appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

Below we list 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 policy careers outside AI and biosecurity policy that seem promising from a longtermist perspective.

Others, like information security, we think might be as promising for many people as our priority paths, but because we haven’t investigated them much we’re still unsure.

Still others seem like they’ll typically be less impactful than our priority paths for people who can succeed equally in either, but still seem high-impact to us and like they could be top options for a substantial number of people, depending on personal fit—for example research management.

Finally some—like becoming a public intellectual—clearly have the potential for a lot of impact, but we can’t recommend them widely because they don’t have the capacity to absorb a large number of people, are particularly risky, or both.

Who is best suited to pursue these paths? Of course the answer is different for each one, but in general pursuing a career where less research has been done on how to have a large impact within it—especially if few of your colleagues will share your perspective on how to think about impact—may require you to think especially critically and creatively about how you can do an unusual amount of good in that career. Ideal candidates, then, would be self-motivated, creative, and inclined to think rigorously and often about how they can steer toward the highest impact options for them—in addition to having strong personal fit for the work.

We compiled the list below by asking 6 advisers about paths they think are currently undervalued—including by 80,000 Hours. If something was suggested twice, we took that as a presumption in favor of including it.

Our full article on high-impact career paths has more context for these ideas as well as our priority paths, and will also be kept up to date (while this blog post won’t be).

Become a historian of large societal trends, inflection points, progress, or collapse

We think it could be high-impact to study subjects relevant to the long-term arc of history — e.g, economic, intellectual, or moral progress from a long-term perspective, the history of social movements or philanthropy, or the history of wellbeing. Better understanding long trends and key inflection points, such as the industrial revolution, may help us understand what could cause other important shifts in the future (see more promising topics).

Our impression is that although many of these topics have received attention from historians and other academics (examples: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5), some are comparatively neglected, especially from a more quantitative or impact-focused perspective.

In general, there seem to be a number of gaps that skilled historians, anthropologists, or economic historians could help fill. Revealingly, Open Philanthropy commissioned their own studies of the history and successes of philanthropy because they couldn’t find much existing literature that met their needs. Most existing research is not aimed at deriving action-relevant lessons.

However, this is a highly competitive path, which is not able to absorb many people. Although there may be some opportunities to do this kind of historical work in foundations, or to get it funded through private grants, pursuing this path would in most cases involve seeking an academic career. Academia generally has a shortage of positions, and especially in the humanities often doesn’t provide many backup options. It seems less risky to pursue historical research as an economist, since an economic PhD does give you other promising options.

How can you estimate your chance of success as a history academic? We haven’t looked into the fields relevant to history in particular, but some of our discussion of parallel questions for philosophy academia or academia in general may be useful.

It may also be possible to pursue this kind of historical research in ‘non-traditional academia,’ such as at groups like the Future of Humanity Institute or Global Priorities Institute. Learn more about the Global Priorities Institute by listening to our podcast episode with Michelle Hutchinson.

Non-technical roles in leading AI labs

Although we think technical AI safety research and AI policy are particularly impactful, we think having very talented people focused on safety and social impact at top AI labs may also be very valuable, even when they aren’t in technical or policy roles.

For example, you might be able to shift the culture around AI more toward safety and positive social impact by talking publicly about what your organization is doing to build safe and beneficial AI (example from DeepMind), helping recruit safety-minded researchers, designing internal processes to consider social impact issues more systematically in research, or helping different teams coordinate around safety-relevant projects.

We’re not sure which roles are best, but in general ones involved in strategy, ethics, or communications seem promising. Or you can pursue a role that makes an AI lab’s safety team more effective — like in operations or project management.

That said, it seems possible that some such roles could have a veneer of contributing to AI safety without doing much to head off bad outcomes. For this reason it seems particularly important here to continue to think critically and creatively about what kinds of work in this area are useful. You can read more in our article about whether it’s good to work at a leading AI lab (whether in technical or non-technical roles).

Some roles in this space may also provide strong career capital for working in AI policy by putting you in a position to learn about the work these labs are doing, as well as the strategic landscape in AI.

Be research manager or a PA for someone doing really valuable work

Some people may be extraordinarily productive compared to the average. (Read about this phenomenon in research careers.). But these people often have to use much of their time on work that doesn’t take the best advantage of their skills, such as bureaucratic and administrative tasks. This may be especially true for people who work in university settings, as many researchers do, but it is also often true of entrepreneurs, politicians, writers, and public intellectuals.

Acting as a personal assistant can dramatically increase these peoples’ impact. By supporting their day-to-day activities and freeing up more of their time for work that other people can’t do, you can act as a ‘multiplier’ on their productivity. We think a highly talented personal assistant can make someone 10% more productive, or perhaps more, which is like having a tenth (or more) as much impact as they would have. If you’re working for someone doing really valuable work, that’s a lot.

In general, we want to emphasize that helping others have a greater positive impact than they would have had otherwise is an important and valid way to do good (for instance, that’s our strategy here at 80,000 Hours).

Another related path is working in research management. Research managers help prioritize research projects within an institution and help coordinate research, fundraising, and communications to make the institution more impactful. Read more here. In general, being a PA or a research manager seems valuable for many of the same reasons working in operations management does — these coordinating and supporting roles are crucial for enabling researchers and others to have the biggest positive impact possible.

Policy careers that are promising from a longtermist perspective

There is likely a lot of policy work with the potential to positively affect the long run future that doesn’t fit into either of our priority paths of AI policy or biorisk policy.

We aren’t sure what it might be best to ultimately aim for in policy outside these areas. But working in an area that is plausibly important for safeguarding the long-term future seems like a promising way of building knowledge and career capital so that you can judge later what policy interventions might be most promising for you to pursue.

Possible areas include:

• Finding ways to safeguard political systems against ‘authoritarian backsliding’, for instance by improving the security of voting processes.
• Promoting international cooperation and peace, which also makes civilization more robust.
• Working on policies to reduce extreme risks from climate change.
• Other ‘broad interventions’ for making governments generally better at navigating global challenges, e.g. promoting ‘approval voting’ (a form of voting reform).
• Interventions aimed at giving the interests of future generations greater representation, for example the introduction of the Wellbeing of Future Generations bill in the UK parliament. (Read some more preliminary ideas for institutional designs meant to take into account the interests of future generations.)

See our problem profiles page for more issues, some of which you might be able to help address through a policy-oriented career.

There is a spectrum of options for making progress on policy, ranging from research to work out which proposals make sense, to advocacy for specific proposals, to implementation. (See our write-up on government and policy careers for more on this topic.)

It seems likely to us that many lines of work within this broad area could be as impactful as our priority paths, but we haven’t investigated enough to be confident about the most promising options or the best routes in. We hope to be able to provide more specific guidance in this area in the future.

Become a specialist on Russia, India, or another potentially powerful country

We’ve argued that because of China’s political, military, economic, and technological importance on the world stage, helping western organizations better understand and cooperate with Chinese actors might be highly impactful.

We think working with China represents a particularly promising path to impact. But a similar argument could be made for gaining expertise in other powerful nations, for example Russia or India. If you’re at the beginning of your career, it may even be valuable to think about which countries are most likely to be particularly influential in a few decades, and focus on gaining expertise there.

This is likely to be a better option for you if you are from or have spent a substantial amount of time in one of these countries. The best paths to impact here likely require deep understanding of the relevant cultures and institutions, as well as language fluency (e.g. at the level where you might be able to write a newspaper article about longtermism in the language).

If you are not from one of these countries, one way to get started might be to pursue area or language studies (one source of support available for US students is the Foreign Language and Area Studies scholarship programme), perhaps alongside economics or international relations. You could also start by working in policy in your home country and slowly concentrate more and more on issues related to the country you want to focus on, or try to work in philanthropy or directly on a top problem there.

There are likely many different promising options in this area, both for long-term career plans and useful next steps. Though they would of course have to be adapted to the local context, some of the options laid out in our article on becoming a specialist in China could have promising parallels in other national contexts as well.

Become an expert in AI hardware

Advances in hardware, such as the development of more efficient, specialized chips, have played an important role in raising the performance of AI systems and allowing them to be used economically.

There is a commonsense argument that if AI is an especially important technology, and hardware is an important input in the development and deployment of AI, specialists who understand AI hardware will have opportunities for impact — even if we can’t foresee exactly the form they will take.

Some ways hardware experts may be able to help positively shape the development of AI include:

• More accurately forecasting progress in the capabilities of AI systems, for which hardware is a key and relatively quantifiable input.
• Advising policymakers on hardware issues, such as export, import, and manufacturing policies for specialized chips. (Read a relevant issue brief from CSET.)
• Helping AI projects in making credible commitments by allowing them to verifiably demonstrate the computational resources they’re using.
• Helping advise and fulfill the hardware needs for safety-oriented AI labs. (Read more about whether supporting AI labs could cause harm.)

These ideas are just examples of ways hardware specialists might be helpful. We haven’t looked into this area very much (though we do talk a bit about AI hardware as a path to impact at the end of our podcast episode with Danny Hernandez). So, we are pretty unsure about the merits of different approaches, which is why we’ve listed working in AI hardware here instead of as a part of the AI technical safety and policy priority paths.

We also haven’t come across research laying out specific strategies in this area, so pursuing this path would likely mean both developing skills and experience in hardware and thinking creatively about opportunities to have an impact in the area. If you do take this path, we encourage you to think carefully through the implications of your plans, ideally in collaboration with strategy and policy experts also focused on creating safe and beneficial AI.

Information security

Researchers at Open Philanthropy have argued that better information security is likely to become increasingly important in the coming years. As powerful technologies like bioengineering and machine learning advance, improved security will likely be needed to protect these technologies from misuse, theft, or tampering. Moreover, the authors have found few security experts already in the field who focus on reducing catastrophic risks, and predict there will be high demand for them over the next 10 years.

In a recent podcast episode, Bruce Schneier also argued that applications of information security will become increasingly crucial, although he pushed back on the special importance of security for AI and biorisk in particular.

We would like to see more people investigating these issues and pursuing information security careers as a path to social impact. One option would be to try to work on security issues at a top AI lab, in which case the preparation might be similar to the preparation for AI safety work in general, but with a special focus on security. Another option would be to pursue a security career in government or a large tech company with the goal of eventually working on a project relevant to a particularly pressing area. In some cases we’ve heard it’s possible for people who start as engineers to train in information security at large tech companies that have significant security needs.

Compensation is usually higher in the private sector. But if you want to work eventually on classified projects, it may be better to pursue a public sector career as it may better prepare you to eventually earn a high level of security clearance.

There are certifications for information security, but it may be better to get started by investigating on your own the details of the systems you want to protect, and/or participating in public ‘capture the flag’ cybersecurity competitions. At the undergraduate level, it seems particularly helpful for many careers in this area to study CS and statistics.

Information security isn’t listed as a priority path because we haven’t spent much time investigating how people working in the area can best succeed and have a big positive impact. Still, we think there are likely to be exciting opportunities in the area, and if you’re interested in pursuing this career path, or already have experience in information security, we’d be interested to talk to you. Fill out this form, and we will get in touch if we come across opportunities that seem like a good fit for you.

Become a public intellectual

Some people seem to have a very large positive impact by becoming public intellectuals and popularizing important ideas — often through writing books, giving talks or interviews, or writing blogs, columns, or open letters.

However, it’s probably even harder to become a successful and impactful public intellectual than a successful academic, since becoming a public intellectual often requires a degree of success within academia while also having excellent communication skills and spending significant time building a public profile. Thus this path seems to us to be especially competitive and a good fit for only a small number of people.

As with other advocacy efforts, it also seems relatively easy to accidentally do harm if you promote mistaken ideas, or even promote important ideas in a way that turns people off. (Read more about how to avoid accidentally doing harm.)

That said, this path seems like it could be extremely impactful for the right person. We think building awareness of certain global catastrophic risks, of the potential effects of our actions on the long-term future, or of effective altruism might be especially high value, as well as spreading positive values like concern for foreigners, nonhuman animals, future people, or others.

There are public intellectuals who are not academics — such as prominent bloggers, journalists and authors. However, academia seems unusually well-suited for becoming a public intellectual because academia requires you to become an expert in something and trains you to write (a lot), and the high standards of academia provide credibility for your opinions and work. For these reasons, if you are interested in pursuing this path, going into academia may be a good place to start.

Public intellectuals can come from a variety of disciplines — what they have in common is that they find ways to apply insights from their fields to issues that affect many people, and they communicate these insights effectively.

If you are an academic, experiment with spreading important ideas on a small scale through a blog, magazine, or podcast. If you share our priorities and are having some success with these experiments, we’d be especially interested in talking to you about your plans.

Journalism

For the right person, becoming a journalist seems like it could be highly valuable for many of the same reasons being a public intellectual might be.

Good journalists keep the public informed and help positively shape public discourse by spreading accurate information on important topics. And although the news media tend to focus more on current events, journalists also often provide a platform for people and ideas that the public might not otherwise hear about.

However, this path is also very competitive, especially when it comes to the kinds of work that seem best for communicating important ideas (which are often complex), i.e., writing long-form articles or books, podcasts, and documentaries. And like being a public intellectual, it seems relatively easy to do make things worse as a journalist by directing people’s attention in the wrong way, so this path may require especially good judgement about which projects to pursue and with what strategy. We therefore think journalism is likely to be a good fit for only a small number of people.

Check out our interview with Kelsey Piper of Vox’s Future Perfect to learn more.

Become an expert on formal verification

‘Proof assistants’ are programs used to formally verify that computer systems have various properties — for example that they are secure against certain cyberattacks — and to help develop programs that are formally verifiable in this way.

Currently, proof assistants are not very highly developed, but the ability to create programs that can be formally verified to have important properties seems like it could be helpful for addressing a variety of issues, perhaps including AI safety and cybersecurity. So improving proof assistants seems like it could be very high-value.

For example, we might eventually be able to use proof assistants to generate programs for solving some sub-parts of the AI ‘alignment problem‘. This would require we be able to correctly formally specify the sub-problems, for which training in formal verification is plausibly useful.

We haven’t looked into formal verification yet much, but both further research in this area and applying existing techniques to important issues seem potentially promising to us. You can enter this path by studying formal verification at the undergraduate or graduate level, or learning about it independently if you have a background in computer science. Jobs in this area exist both in industry and in academia.

Use your skills to meet a need in the effective altruism community

The effective altruism community seeks to support people trying to have a large positive impact. As a part of this community, we may have some bias here, but we think helping to build the community and make it more effective might be one way to do a lot of good. Moreover, unlike other paths on this list, it might be possible to do this part time while you also learn about other areas.

There are many ways of helping build and maintain the effective altruism community that don’t involve working within an effective altruism organisations, such as consulting for one of these organizations, providing legal advice, or helping effective altruist authors with book promotion.

Within this set of roles, we’d especially like to highlight organizing student and local effective altruism groups. Our experience suggests that these groups can be very useful resources for people to learn more about different global problems and connect with others who share their concerns (more resources for local groups).

We think these roles are good to pursue in particular if you are very familiar with the effective altruism community and you already have the relevant skills and are keen to bring them to bear in a more impactful way.

Nonprofit entrepreneurship

If you can find a way to address a key bottleneck to progress in a pressing problem area which hasn’t been tried or isn’t being covered by an effective organisation, starting one of your own can be extremely valuable.

That said, this path seems to us to be particularly high-risk, which is why we don’t list it as a priority path. Most new organizations struggle, and nonprofit entrepreneurship can often be even more difficult than for-profit entrepreneurship. Setting up a new organisation will also likely involve diverting resources from other organisations, which means it’s easier than it seems to set the area back. The risks are greater if you’re one of the first organizations in an area, as you could put off others from working on the issue, especially if you make poor progress (although this has to be balanced against the greater information value of exploring an uncharted area).

In general, we wouldn’t recommend that someone start off by aiming to set up a new organisation. Rather, we’d recommend starting by learning about and working within a pressing problem area, and then if through the course of that work you come across a gap, and that gap can’t be solved by an existing organisation, then consider founding a new one. Organisations developed more organically like this, and which are driven by the needs of a specific problem area, usually seem to be much more promising.

There is far more to say about the question of whether to start a new organisation, and how to compare different nonprofit ideas and other alternatives. A great deal depends on the details of your situation, making it hard for us to give general advice on the topic.

If you think you may have found a gap for an organisation within one of our priority problem areas, or problem areas that seem promising that we haven’t investigated yet, then we’d be interested to speak to you.

If you want to learn about entrepreneurship in the context of effective altruism you might enjoy this career profile interview with Jade Leung. You might also be interested in checking out these resources on effective nonprofits, or the organization Charity Entrepreneurship, especially if you’re interested in global health or animal welfare.

Create or manage a long-term philanthropic fund

Some of the best opportunities for making a difference may lie far in the future. In that case, investing resources now in order to have many more resources available at that future time might be extremely valuable.

However, right now we have no way of effectively and securely investing resources over such long time periods. In particular, there are few if any financial vehicles that can be reliably expected to persist for more than 100 years and stay committed to their intended use, while also earning good investment returns. Figuring out how to set up and manage such a fund seems to us like it might be very worthwhile.

Founders Pledge — an organization that encourages effective giving for entrepreneurs — is currently exploring this idea and is actively seeking input. It seems likely that only a few people will be able to be involved in a project like this, as it’s not clear there will be room for multiple funds or a large staff. But for the right person we think this could be a great opportunity. Especially if you have a background in finance or relevant areas of law, this might be a promising path for you to explore.

Explore a potentially pressing problem area

There are many neglected global problems that could turn out to be as or even more pressing than those we currently prioritise most highly. We’d be keen to see more people explore them by acquiring relevant training and a network of mentors, and getting to know the relevant fields.

If the problem area still seems potentially promising once you’ve built up a background, you could take on a project or try to build up the relevant fields, for instance by setting up a conference or newsletter to help people working in the area coordinate better.

If, after investigating, working on the issue doesn’t seem particularly high impact, then you’ve helped to eliminate an option, saving others time.

In either case we’d be keen to see write-ups of these explorations, for instance on the Effective Altruism Forum.

We can’t really recommend this as a priority path because it’s so amorphous and uncertain. It also generally requires unusual degrees of entrepreneurialism and creativity, since you may get less support in your work, especially early on, and it’s challenging to think of new projects and research ideas that provide useful information about the promise of a less explored area. However, if you fit this profile (and especially if you have existing interest in and knowledge of the problem you want to explore), this path could be an excellent option for you.

The post Ideas for high-impact careers beyond our priority paths appeared first on 80,000 Hours.