Forty hours a week, fifty weeks a year, forty years: the work is 80,000 hours. Yet it is surprising how little serious thought goes into career decisions related to, say, choosing a loan. Indeed, you should probably tell the story of how a random event changed your life. One summer a circus came to town—and that’s why I became an economist! (True story!). Career advice, if any, often amounts to the phrase “follow your passions!” Wow. If you ask people what they like, music, art and sports top the list but guess what? There are not enough jobs in those categories to go.
Benjamin Todd’s recently revised book, 80,000 Hours is a unique examination of the number-crunching profession. The book is designed along the lines of Effective Altruism and has a positive public policy function. Epidemic diseases, for example,
The world has many cults, despots and would-be school shooters who may decide they want to bring everyone down too…. The world [c]It could be one lab leak away from disaster.
Given what we know about the speed and accessibility of bioengineering tools, the chance of an epidemic killing more than 100 million people within the next century seems high, clearly equal to or greater than the risk of a major nuclear war or climate change of more than six degrees. An engineered pandemic would also kill more than 90% of the population, suggesting that its scale is too large.
But the dangers of epidemics are, still, more neglected than any of these. Compared to $6bn–$10bn in humanitarian funding for climate change, and $1.6bn in total climate finance, pandemic prevention receives only $1bn in philanthropic funding, and total spending aimed at reducing the likelihood of a severe pandemic is likely to be less than $10bn.
See also my paper Pandemic Preparation Without Romance for how to do it.
The opening chapters introduce the framework of EA but most of the book is good advice, even selfishly—advice on building skills, networking and how to actually get a job. From what I have said so far, one might get the idea that the idea is to rationally choose your career at the age of 16 and improve your life accordingly. That’s not the case! Todd rightly divides the workflows into testing, building and deploying phases. Many people do not analyze well. It’s okay to jump around in jobs and places, especially when you’re young, as long as you’re building skills and not just accumulating CV material. There is evidence, for example, that the best work of scientists often follows periods of experimentation and exploitation.
I also appreciate that Todd specifically warns against the armchair theory. Pro-and-con lists, for example, are fine but less useful than getting out of the chair and actively exploring. Go talk to people, try something for a week, go somewhere. Look for cheap tests.
Start with the easiest. Most of the time we get people who want to, say, try economics, and apply for a master’s degree. That is a huge investment of time. Instead, think about how you can learn. This may mean first reading an economics book, or taking one course.
You can think about creating an evaluation ‘ladder’. Start with the cheapest ways to check your options, then after each step, check again. The ladder might look like this:
a. Read our fair job reviews, all our research on a specific topic, and talk to LLMs about what the jobs are like (two to five hours).
b. Talk to someone in the area (two hours).
c. Talk to a friend to get an outside perspective on what’s best (two hours).
d. Talk to three other people who work in the area and read a book or two (twenty hours).
e. Based on your findings, look for a suitable project that can take one to four work weeks – such as applying for a job, volunteering in a related role, or doing a side project locally – to see what it’s like and how you do it.
f. It is only then that you consider a commitment of two to twenty-four months – such as a work placement, apprenticeship or graduate study. Being offered a probationary position with an organization for a few months can be good because both you and the organization want to quickly assess your suitability.
80000 Hours is a Random Walk Down Wall Street career advice, one book that really matters.
Explore, develop rare and valuable skills, point them to a meaningful problem, and love will follow rather than lead. And for those who don’t want to read a book, talk to an 80,000 Hour consultant. A very cheap test.
