Hi everyone,
The key news this week: we’ve updated our list of high-impact careers.
Here’s the new top 10 list:
- AI safety technical research
- Long-term AI policy
- Founder of new projects
- Grantmaker
- Help build the effective altruism community
- Operations management in high-impact organisations
- Research into global priorities
- Biorisk research, strategy, and policy
- China-related AI safety and governance paths
- Forecasting research and implementation
And see the full list (inc. 30 more recommended paths) and redesigned page.
We want to highlight some of the most important changes to our top recommendations:
First, due to the growth of funding available in our top problem areas, the key bottleneck to more progress now seems to be a lack of project founders. So, we wrote a new profile on founding impactful projects and added it to our "top recommended" list.
For the same reason, we moved earning to give in high-earning careers down into the bucket we call: "sometimes recommended if you’re an especially good fit".
We also put operations management back into the "top recommended" list. Operations became less of a bottleneck a few years ago, but with the new focus on rapidly growing new organisations, it’s back.
We added a new profile on China-related AI safety and governance to our "top recommended" list. There is very little AI safety research in China right now, but over the next 50 years, there’s a good chance that the most powerful AI systems will be developed in China. We moved our broader path in improving China-Western coordination on global catastrophic risks into our "sometimes recommended" list.
We also updated the ranking of the top recommended careers. To be clear, we think the ranking is pretty sketchy, and any one of our "top recommended" (or "sometimes recommended") paths could easily be your top option depending on your personal fit. That said, the most important change is that the demand for AI technical safety researchers seems to have risen significantly the last few years, and making progress on AI technical safety seems like the strongest candidate for the top longtermist priority — so we put AI technical safety into the number one slot.
Turning to the next tier of recommendations, after much debate, we reorganised our "sometimes recommended" paths into four categories, and put each career path writeup onto its own easy-to-share page. Click through to see each list:
We've recently added a new path, organise an effective altruism local group, to the list of other impactful options if you’re an especially good fit.
News:
- Ben was interviewed by Sam Harris for Waking Up. If you know any Sam Harris fans you’d like to introduce to 80,000 Hours, this could be the thing to send them.
Recent releases:
Top tweets from the team:
What we’ve been reading:
80,000 Hours is hiring:
- We're looking for an operations specialist to run the team that manages our office and help scale our internal processes as we grow (apply by April 3).
- We're also considering hiring a writer and research assistant to our web-team, as well as a (part-time) popular writing consultant to help us make our writing more compelling. If you're interested in any of these roles, we'd love to hear from you!
Have a great weekend,
Ben & Luisa
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80,000 Hours is a nonprofit that provides research and support to help people switch into careers that effectively tackle the world's most pressing problems.
Read about our key ideas, subscribe to our podcast, apply to speak with our one-on-one team, or find a job on our job board.
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