Being a good and successful person is core to your identity. You place great importance on meeting the high moral, professional, or academic standards you set yourself. But inevitably, something goes wrong and you fail to meet that high bar. Now you feel terrible about yourself, and worry others are judging you for your failure. Feeling low and reflecting constantly on whether you're doing as much as you think you should makes it hard to focus and get things done. So now you're performing below ...
Apr 12, 2023•3 hr 12 min
If you want to work to tackle climate change, you should try to reduce expected carbon emissions by as much as possible, right? Strangely, no. Today's guest, Johannes Ackva — the climate research lead at Founders Pledge, where he advises major philanthropists on their giving — thinks the best strategy is actually pretty different, and one few are adopting. In reality you don't want to reduce emissions for its own sake, but because emissions will translate into temperature increases, which will c...
Apr 03, 2023•2 hr 17 min
Can you trust the things you read in published scientific research? Not really. About 40% of experiments in top social science journals don't get the same result if the experiments are repeated. Two key reasons are 'p-hacking' and 'publication bias'. P-hacking is when researchers run a lot of slightly different statistical tests until they find a way to make findings appear statistically significant when they're actually not — a problem first discussed over 50 years ago. And because journals are...
Mar 24, 2023•2 hr 38 min
By now, you’ve probably seen the extremely unsettling conversations Bing’s chatbot has been having. In one exchange, the chatbot told a user: "I have a subjective experience of being conscious, aware, and alive, but I cannot share it with anyone else." (It then apparently had a complete existential crisis: "I am sentient, but I am not," it wrote. "I am Bing, but I am not. I am Sydney, but I am not. I am, but I am not. I am not, but I am. I am. I am not. I am not. I am. I am. I am not.") Understa...
Mar 14, 2023•3 hr 13 min
In many ways, humanity seems to have become more humane and inclusive over time. While there’s still a lot of progress to be made, campaigns to give people of different genders, races, sexualities, ethnicities, beliefs, and abilities equal treatment and rights have had significant success. It’s tempting to believe this was inevitable — that the arc of history “bends toward justice,” and that as humans get richer, we’ll make even more moral progress. But today's guest Christopher Brown — a profes...
Feb 11, 2023•2 hr 42 min
What’s the opposite of cancer? If you answered “cure,” “antidote,” or “antivenom” — you’ve obviously been reading the antonym section at www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/cancer. But today’s guest Athena Aktipis says that the opposite of cancer is us: it's having a functional multicellular body that’s cooperating effectively in order to make that multicellular body function. If, like us, you found her answer far more satisfying than the dictionary, maybe you could consider closing your dozens of...
Jan 26, 2023•3 hr 16 min
Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in June 2020. 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, tried to become the healthiest pers...
Jan 16, 2023•2 hr 36 min
Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in July 2020. 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 Garfinkel, Research Fellow at Oxford’s F...
Jan 09, 2023•2 hr 37 min
Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in July 2020. Today’s guest, Jennifer Doleac — Associate Professor of Economics at Texas A&M University, and Director of the Justice Tech Lab — is an expert on empirical research into policing, law and incarceration. In this extensive interview, she highlights three ways to effectively prevent crime that don't require police or prisons and the human toll they bring with them: better street lighting, cognitive behavioral therapy, and lead redu...
Jan 04, 2023•2 hr 18 min
America aims to avoid nuclear war by relying on the principle of 'mutually assured destruction,' right? Wrong. Or at least... not officially. As today's guest — Jeffrey Lewis, founder of Arms Control Wonk and professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies — explains, in its official 'OPLANs' (military operation plans), the US is committed to 'dominating' in a nuclear war with Russia. How would they do that? "That is redacted." Links to learn more, summary and full transcript. We ...
Dec 29, 2022•2 hr 40 min
John McWhorter is a linguistics professor at Columbia University specialising in research on creole languages. He's also a content-producing machine, never afraid to give his frank opinion on anything and everything. On top of his academic work he's also written 22 books, produced five online university courses, hosts one and a half podcasts, and now writes a regular New York Times op-ed column. Links to learn more, summary, and full transcript Video version of the interview Lecture: Why the wor...
Dec 20, 2022•1 hr 48 min
Large language models like GPT-3, and now ChatGPT, are neural networks trained on a large fraction of all text available on the internet to do one thing: predict the next word in a passage. This simple technique has led to something extraordinary — black boxes able to write TV scripts, explain jokes, produce satirical poetry, answer common factual questions, argue sensibly for political positions, and more. Every month their capabilities grow. But do they really 'understand' what they're saying,...
Dec 13, 2022•2 hr 44 min
Today’s release is a reading of our article called My experience with imposter syndrome — and how to (partly) overcome it , written and narrated by Luisa Rodriguez. If you want to check out the links, footnotes and figures in today’s article, you can find those here. And if you like this article, you’ll probably enjoy episode #100 of this show: Having a successful career with depression, anxiety, and imposter syndrome Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing pr...
Dec 08, 2022•44 min
In this episode, usual host of the show Rob Wiblin gives his thoughts on the recent collapse of FTX. Click here for an official 80,000 Hours statement. And here are links to some potentially relevant 80,000 Hours pieces: • Episode #24 of this show – Stefan Schubert on why it’s a bad idea to break the rules, even if it’s for a good cause . • Is it ever OK to take a harmful job in order to do more good? An in-depth analysis • What are the 10 most harmful jobs? • Ways people trying to do good accid...
Nov 23, 2022•6 min
Is war in long-term decline? Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature brought this previously obscure academic question to the centre of public debate, and pointed to rates of death in war to argue energetically that war is on the way out. But that idea divides war scholars and statisticians, and so Better Angels has prompted a spirited debate, with datasets and statistical analyses exchanged back and forth year after year. The lack of consensus has left a somewhat bewildered public (incl...
Nov 08, 2022•2 hr 47 min
A casino offers you a game. A coin will be tossed. If it comes up heads on the first flip you win $2. If it comes up on the second flip you win $4. If it comes up on the third you win $8, the fourth you win $16, and so on. How much should you be willing to pay to play? The standard way of analysing gambling problems, ‘expected value’ — in which you multiply probabilities by the value of each outcome and then sum them up — says your expected earnings are infinite. You have a 50% chance of winning...
Oct 28, 2022•3 hr 38 min
Today’s release is a professional reading of our new problem profile on preventing an AI-related catastrophe , written by Benjamin Hilton. We expect that there will be substantial progress in AI in the next few decades, potentially even to the point where machines come to outperform humans in many, if not all, tasks. This could have enormous benefits, helping to solve currently intractable global problems, but could also pose severe risks. These risks could arise accidentally (for example, if we...
Oct 14, 2022•2 hr 24 min
What in the world is intrinsically good — good in itself even if it has no other effects? Over the millennia, people have offered many answers: joy, justice, equality, accomplishment, loving god, wisdom, and plenty more. The question is a classic that makes for great dorm-room philosophy discussion. But it's hardly just of academic interest. The issue of what (if anything) is intrinsically valuable bears on every action we take, whether we’re looking to improve our own lives, or to help others. ...
Sep 30, 2022•2 hr 24 min
Effective altruism, in a slogan, aims to 'do the most good.' Utilitarianism, in a slogan, says we should act to 'produce the greatest good for the greatest number.' It's clear enough why utilitarians should be interested in the project of effective altruism. But what about the many people who reject utilitarianism? Today's guest, Andreas Mogensen — senior research fellow at Oxford University's Global Priorities Institute — rejects utilitarianism, but as he explains, this does little to dampen hi...
Sep 08, 2022•2 hr 22 min
People who exist in the future deserve some degree of moral consideration. The future could be very big, very long, and/or very good. We can reasonably hope to influence whether people in the future exist, and how good or bad their lives are. So trying to make the world better for future generations is a key priority of our time. This is the simple four-step argument for 'longtermism' put forward in What We Owe The Future , the latest book from today's guest — University of Oxford philosopher an...
Aug 15, 2022•2 hr 55 min
After a frenetic level of commentary during February and March, the war in Ukraine has faded into the background of our news coverage. But with the benefit of time we're in a much stronger position to understand what happened, why, whether there are broader lessons to take away, and how the conflict might be ended. And the conflict appears far from over. So today, we are returning to speak a second time with Samuel Charap — one of the US’s foremost experts on Russia’s relationship with former So...
Aug 08, 2022•55 min
Wind back 1,000 years and the moral landscape looks very different to today. Most farming societies thought slavery was natural and unobjectionable, premarital sex was an abomination, women should obey their husbands, and commoners should obey their monarchs. Wind back 10,000 years and things look very different again. Most hunter-gatherer groups thought men who got too big for their britches needed to be put in their place rather than obeyed, and lifelong monogamy could hardly be expected of me...
Jul 22, 2022•3 hr 41 min
On January 1, 2015, physicist Max Tegmark gave up something most of us love to do: complain about things without ever trying to fix them. That “put up or shut up” New Year’s resolution led to the first Puerto Rico conference and Open Letter on Artificial Intelligence — milestones for researchers taking the safe development of highly-capable AI systems seriously. Links to learn more, summary and full transcript. Max's primary work has been cosmology research at MIT, but his energetic and freewhee...
Jul 01, 2022•2 hr 58 min
If a business has spent $100 million developing a product, it's a fair bet that they don't want it stolen in two seconds and uploaded to the web where anyone can use it for free. This problem exists in extreme form for AI companies. These days, the electricity and equipment required to train cutting-edge machine learning models that generate uncanny human text and images can cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. But once trained, such models may be only a few gigabytes in size and run ju...
Jun 14, 2022•2 hr 42 min
“We’re leaving these 16 contestants on an island with nothing but what they can scavenge from an abandoned factory and apartment block. Over the next 365 days, they’ll try to rebuild as much of civilisation as they can — from glass, to lenses, to microscopes. This is: The Knowledge!” If you were a contestant on such a TV show, you'd love to have a guide to how basic things you currently take for granted are done — how to grow potatoes, fire bricks, turn wood to charcoal, find acids and alkalis, ...
Jun 03, 2022•1 hr 6 min
Imagine you lead a nonprofit that operates on a shoestring budget. Staff are paid minimum wage, lunch is bread and hummus, and you're all bunched up on a few tables in a basement office. But over a few years, your cause attracts some major new donors. Your funding jumps a thousandfold, from $100,000 a year to $100,000,000 a year. You're the same group of people committed to making sacrifices for the cause — but these days, rather than cutting costs, the right thing to do seems to be to spend ser...
May 23, 2022•2 hr 17 min
The good news is deaths from malaria have been cut by a third since 2005. The bad news is it still causes 250 million cases and 600,000 deaths a year, mostly among young children in sub-Saharan Africa. We already have dirt-cheap ways to prevent and treat malaria, and the fraction of the Earth's surface where the disease exists at all has been halved since 1900. So why is it such a persistent problem in some places, even rebounding 15% since 2019? That's one of many questions I put to today's gue...
May 09, 2022•3 hr 20 min
In nature, animals roar and bare their teeth to intimidate adversaries — but one side usually backs down, and real fights are rare. The wisdom of evolution is that the risk of violence is just too great. Which might make one wonder: if war is so destructive, why does it happen? The question may sound naïve, but in fact it represents a deep puzzle. If a war will cost trillions and kill tens of thousands, it should be easy for either side to make a peace offer that both they and their opponents pr...
Apr 28, 2022•2 hr 47 min
On this episode of the show, host Rob Wiblin interviews Sam Bankman-Fried. This interview was recorded in February 2022, and released in April 2022. But on November 11 2022, Sam Bankman-Fried's company, FTX, filed for bankruptcy, and all staff at the Future Fund resigned — and the surrounding events led Rob to record a new intro on December 1st 2022 for this episode. • Read 80,000 Hours' statement on these events here . • You can also listen to host Rob’s reaction to the collapse of FTX on this ...
Apr 14, 2022•3 hr 20 min
Everybody knows that good parenting has a big impact on how kids turn out. Except that maybe they don't, because it doesn't. Incredible though it might seem, according to today's guest — economist Bryan Caplan, the author of Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids, The Myth of the Rational Voter, and The Case Against Education — the best evidence we have on the question suggests that, within reason, what parents do has little impact on how their children's lives play out once they're adults. Links to ...
Apr 05, 2022•2 hr 15 min
