List of 80,000 Hours content from the last 4 months, summary of what was most popular, and plans for future releases.

By · Published October 1st, 2018

Cross posted from the Effective Altruism Forum.

Here’s your regular reminder of everything 80,000 Hours has released over the last four months, since our last roundup. If you’d like to get these updates more regularly, you can join our newsletter.

We’ve done a major redesign of our job board, increasing the number of vacancies listed there from ~20 to over 100. It has doubled its traffic since the first half of the year, and is now one of the five most popular pages on the whole site.

  1. High impact job board

We’ve released two in-depth articles that should be of special interest to the community:

  1. These are the world’s highest impact career paths according to our research. This is an update of our top recommended careers.
  2. Should you play to your comparative advantage when choosing your career? New theoretical content on the relevance of comparative advantage, and thoughts on how to practically evaluate it.

We released 9 podcast episodes totalling 19.5 hours, covering lots of key topics in EA in significant depth (in chronological order):

  1. How the audacity to fix things without asking permission can change the world, demonstrated by Tara Mac Aulay
  2. Tanya Singh on ending the operations management bottleneck in effective altruism
  3. Finding the best charity requires estimating the unknowable. Here’s how GiveWell tries to do that, according to researcher James Snowden.
  4. Prof Yew-Kwang Ng is a visionary economist who anticipated many key ideas in effective altruism decades ago. Here’s his take on ethics and how to create a much happier world. (Plus a bonus guide to his most influential work.)
  5. How much should you change your beliefs based on new evidence? Dr Spencer Greenberg on the scientific approach to solving difficult everyday questions
  6. How well can we actually predict the future? Katja Grace on why expert opinion isn’t a great guide to AI’s impact and how to do better
  7. David Roodman on incarceration, geomagnetic storms, & becoming a world-class researcher
  8. Tackling the ethics of infinity, being clueless about the effects of our actions, and having moral empathy for intellectual adversaries, with philosopher Dr Amanda Askell
  9. Daniel Ellsberg on the creation of nuclear doomsday machines, the institutional insanity that maintains them, and a practical plan for dismantling them.

Based on a combination of downloads, listening time and percentage completion, the top 3 podcast episodes were, in order, Dr Spencer Greenberg on scientifically solving everyday questions, Tara Mac Aulay on the audacity to fix things, and Amanda Askell on moral empathy.

The highest rated episodes by our advisory group were, in order, Tara Mac Aulay on the audacity to fix things, Dr Spencer Greenberg on scientifically solving everyday questions, with a tie for third place between Estimating the unknowable with James Snowden and David Roodman on becoming a world-class researcher.

The podcast is closing in on 12,000 subscribers (though imperfectly measured), and had an average of 10,300 downloads a week over this period (though not all listened to presumably).

We also released several other articles:

  1. Congressional staffers have surprising power over budgets & legislation. Here’s what it takes to become one.
  2. Randomised experiment: If you’re genuinely unsure whether to quit your job or break up, then you probably should. This received over 50,000 views from places like reddit.
  3. American with a science PhD? Get a fast-track into AI and STEM policy by applying for the acclaimed AAAS Science & Technology Fellowship by Nov 1.
  4. Quiz: Psychology results in top journals – can you guess which ones were true, and which didn’t replicate? (Partly made for fun though it has brought in 2,000 newsletter subscriptions.)
  5. We also revised our article Why you should consider applying for grad school right now.

Over the next quarter on the podcast you can expect to hear from Hilary Greaves on the Global Priorities Institute, Catherine Olsson and Daniel Ziegler on getting jobs in AI safety, Paul Christiano on his work to align AI with human interests, Tyler Cowen on his book Stubborn Attachments, David Denkenberger on feeding everyone no matter what, and Brian Christian on algorithms to live by. We’ll also keep releasing our “advanced series” on in-depth articles covering the key questions in EA career choice.

Enjoy!