Four Decades of Good

Book Review:

Benjamin Todd and the 80,000 Hours team, "80,000 Hours: Find a Fulfilling Career That Does Good", Centre for Effective Altruism, 2016.

As an appropriate follow-up to my book review of Will MacAskill's Doing Good Better (link), I have recently read 80,000 Hours's career guide in book form. Their career guide is available for free online (on their website 80000hours.org), but I thought the PDF edition would be nice. And as I'm soon finishing my Master's degree, it was personally relevant.

For the unfamiliar, 80,000 Hours is a nonprofit organization that is part of the effective altruism movement, and focuses on giving advice on how to choose and plan a career that is both fulfilling and has a maximally-positive social impact. Their name comes from the fact that the average person does about eighty thousand hours of work in their career over a lifetime. This is relevant because it puts into perspective the importance of making the right career decisions, plus the fact that most people don't spend anywhere near 800 hours (i.e. 1% of their careers) deliberately planning to boost their impact or satisfaction. Part of the reason might be the lack of good, evidence-backed career advice out there, which is what 80,000 Hours aims to fix.

The book may be divided roughly into three parts. The first part explores which career options may be the most impactful in the long term. The second part is about how to take concrete steps toward achieving those goals. The final part, which is a set of appendices, includes more specific reviews of particular careers and problem areas.

***

So, which long-term options should you aim for in your career?

• Your dream job may not entail "following your passion", or pursuing the highest-earning or most stress-free job. Instead, pursue something that helps others and which you can get good at. The six key ingredients for a dream job are: (1) work you are good at; (2) work that helps others; (3) engaging work that lets you enter a state of flow -- work is likelier to be engaging if it gives you independence, clear tasks, variety, and feedback; (4) supportive colleagues; (5) lack of major negatives like unfair pay, long commutes, very long hours and job insecurity; and (6) work that fits the rest of your personal life.
• Some careers have far more impact than others, but almost any college graduate in the developed world can make a difference, simply by donating 10% of their income to the world's poorest people. Other ways of making a difference include voting (on important issues like global trade, climate change, migration and technology policy) and supporting others in doing good.
• The world's most pressing problems are those that are big in scale, neglected, and solvable. Furthermore, for your own career it helps if there is a personal fit (e.g. you have relevant expertise and are motivated to work on the problem). Based on 80,000 Hours's research, some of the biggest problem areas include: risks from artificial intelligence, promoting effective altruism, global priorities research, factory farming, biosecurity, nuclear security, extreme climate change, land use reform, smoking in the developing world, and developing-world health.
• There are four main ways that you can contribute to solving a problem: direct work, earning to give, research, and advocacy. The best approach will depend on the problem area (some might need more research while others might need more funding or changes in policy), as well as your potential to excel -- because the most successful people in a field achieve far more than the typical person; so personal fit matters.

We already notice an overlap with the contents of Doing Good Better, although there are some differences too. For example, MacAskill lists U.S. criminal justice reform and international labor mobility as potential high-impact cause areas, whereas Ben Todd in the 80,000 Hours book does not. However, 80,000 Hours includes AI risk, global priorities research, promoting effective altruism, and land use reform, which Doing Good Better does not.

Both books agree that "follow your passion" is not good career advice, because we are bad at predicting what will make us happy (and the recency effect means we also don't accurately remember which experiences made us happy). Passion isn't all you need for satisfying work, and following your passion may lead you into competitive areas where it is harder to find a job. Additionally, people's interests change, so "following your passion" can needlessly limit your options. Other common advice includes choosing a highly-paid, low-stress job. But evidence shows that additional income above $75,000 does not increase day-to-day felt happiness. Stress isn't always a bad thing, because a job that is demanding but still achievable, with meaningful work in a supportive context, results in a fulfilling challenge (which is better than boredom).

Both books also point out that becoming a doctor in a developed country has a lower impact than many people suspect, because there are already many doctors and the most important medical procedures will probably get done regardless of whether or not you join the ranks of doctors. An average doctor might save about four lives in their career. In comparison, Dr. David Nalin might have saved about 500,000 lives by discovering that a cheap salt-sugar water mix can treat diarrhea. Dr. Karl Landsteiner saved approximately ten million lives by discovering blood groups, and the Soviet Lieutenant-Colonel Stanislav Petrov arguably saved a billion lives by avoiding a nuclear war. So there can be a huge difference in impact between paths. Effective altruism is all about being high-impact (i.e. helping more people and helping people to a greater degree). But if we can't all be Petrov, what can we do to have a significant social impact?

Again, both books emphasize that people in the West have a great opportunity, because the average income of a college graduate in a country like the U.S. is so much higher than that of a poor individual in a country like Kenya, that giving 10% of one's annual income would be enough to double the income of 34 people living in extreme poverty each year. In fact, the organization Giving What We Can allows you to make a public pledge to donate 10% of your income to effective charities (like GiveDirectly, which provides direct cash transfers) right now. While people naturally want to do good in their local communities, the scale-neglectedness-solvability framework suggests that global poverty is a more pressing problem than U.S. poverty on all three dimensions. Ranking problems like this involves difficult judgment calls, but it is important because the most effective actions achieve far more than average.

Therefore, by working out which problems are most pressing, and choosing the most effective approaches to contributing (considering earning to give, advocacy, research, and direct work), and doing something you will enjoy and excel at (i.e. personal fit), you can do far more good with your career than normally thought.

***

How can you put all of this into practice? This is where 80,000 Hours really starts to differentiate itself from other elements of the effective altruism community. It offers much more detailed advice than does Doing Good Better. Here are some short-term issues to consider:

• Behind many great achievements are many years of experience, so building valuable and flexible career capital early on will place you in a better position to have a more impactful and satisfying career in the long run. Career capital includes things like skills, connections, credentials, and runway (i.e. savings). If you aren't sure which problems to work on, then gaining flexible career capital is particularly important. Some ways to build career capital include: working in an organization with a reputation for high performance (e.g. top consultancy firms); doing certain graduate studies (e.g. economics or computer science); learning valuable transferable skills (e.g. marketing or data science); taking opportunities to achieve impressive socially valuable things (e.g. founding an organization); and doing things like networking and learning how to learn.
• Finding the right career for you will require more than introspection -- you need to go out and test your hypotheses by trying things. Make an initial list of options, and cut it down as you learn more. Do cheap and easy tests first (e.g. speaking to people). Try your options in the best order (e.g. it is better to go from business jobs to non-profit jobs than vice versa). Keep adapting your plan over time.
• To make a flexible career plan you can use the A/B/Z method, which asks you to come up with a "Plan A" (your top option), "Plan B" (nearby alternatives) and "Plan Z" (a temporary fallback in case everything goes wrong). You should review your plan at least once per year. The best option will keep changing because you will change, the world will change, and you'll learn more about what is best for you.
• To actually find a job, you need to think from the employer's point of view and do what they'll find most convincing; in other words, it's like a "sales" process. Three steps that will increase your chance of success are: (1) get lots of leads, i.e. opportunities that could turn into a job, for example by asking for introductions; (2) convince employers to hire you -- it helps to prove that you can do the work by actually doing it (e.g. doing a project before the interview) or explaining exactly how you can solve their problems; and (3) once you get an offer, negotiate for benefits like getting the employer to match your donations to charity, or working on a certain team. Throughout the process, stay motivated by setting specific goals (e.g. talking to people or applying for a job every day), making a public commitment, and pair up with someone who is also job hunting.
• Community can be just as important, or even more so, than networking. The effective altruism community can help you by sharing leads, helping you find ways to do good better, potentially giving you access to donors, and so on. You can get involved by reading Doing Good Better, signing up for the newsletter, meeting your local community or attending a conference, looking for projects that you can contribute to, and joining the LinkedIn group.

It is unlikely that, on your deathbed, you will regret saving the lives of a hundred children. If you explore to find the best options, invest in your career capital, do work that helps others, keep adapting your plan to find the best personal fit, and work together with a community, then you will have a good career. The 80,000 Hours career framework can be summarized in the following illustration:

The rest of the book comprises 9 appendices (yes) and suggestions for further reading. The appendices deal with topics like the meaning of making a difference, biases that can affect career decisions, the 80,000 Hours decision framework, how to do high-impact research, donating time and money now vs. later, advice for undergraduate students, and summaries of problem profiles and career reviews. Personally, I think the most important is Appendix 2, "Eleven ways to put yourself in a better position in any job". These tips for improving career capital are:

1. Look after yourself and take care of the basics, like sleep, exercise, eating right and maintaining close friendships.
2. Look after your mental health and seek professional help if you have a mental health problem.
3. Take advantage of positive psychology, by using techniques such as gratitude journaling, learning basic cognitive behavioral therapy, practicing mindfulness, and adopting a growth mindset.
4. Save money -- it is recommended to have a runway of six to twelve months' living expenses.
5. Surround yourself with great people, e.g. by networking.
6. Do what you can to become more productive, like using the Pomodoro technique, the "Getting Things Done" (GTD) system, reviewing your key goals each week and month, and building a regular daily routine.
7. Learn how to learn -- use methods like spaced repetition to learn skills faster.
8. Become more rational, for example by attending a workshop by the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR).
9. Teach yourself useful skills, like persuasion, negotiation, data analysis, written communication, analysis and problem-solving, management, and programming.
10. Consider changing city; move to areas where key industries are clustered (e.g. San Francisco for the tech industry).
11. Become an expert and innovator. Expertise takes about 10-30 years of focused practice to build. Do this after you've done the steps above.

In terms of career reviews, Appendix 8 offers the following suggestions:

• Careers that are good for building career capital include: data science, economics PhD, founding effective non-profits, management consulting, marketing, product manager in tech, software engineering at large tech firms, startup early employee, and tech startup founder.
• Careers that have a large direct impact include: biomedical research, foundation grant-maker, founding effective non-profits, journalism, party politics, policy-oriented civil service, program manager in international organizations, tech startup founder, think tank research, and valuable academic research.
• Careers that are good for earning to give include: high-end law, management consulting, medical careers, tech startup founder, and trading in quantitative hedge funds.
• Careers that have a large potential for advocacy include: foundation grant-maker, journalism, party politics, policy-oriented civil service, program manager in international organizations, and valuable academic research. 

***

Overall, I give this book 4 out of 5 stars. Its good points include the summaries at the end of each chapter, the many book recommendations, its use of illustrative examples, and the very practical "Apply this to your career" sections at the end of the chapters. 80,000 Hours is not merely a theoretical review but a useful guidebook which tells you how to apply the ideas. I would highly recommend it to anyone who is thinking about their career, whether still a student or already experienced and thinking about switching careers.

The weaknesses of the book, and the reasons I didn't give it a full five stars, are: (i) it contains too many links to websites -- this is slightly annoying when reading a PDF and not having an internet connection; (ii) the text itself has some errors, like missing punctuation marks; (iii) the writing style is a bit too informal for my tastes; and (iv) while the information is solid, the advice is not too surprising. Most of the added value of 80,000 Hours comes from the fact that it is based on the principles of effective altruism. The rest of the advice -- like doing something you are good at, looking for job openings that are not advertised, having enough savings to fall back on, looking for work that fits your personal life etc. -- is stuff that one may encounter in plenty of other sources.

Nonetheless, I will surely be using the advice in my own career.