Unusually in-depth conversations about the world's most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them. Subscribe by searching for '80000 Hours' wherever you get podcasts. Produced by Keiran Harris. Hosted by Rob Wiblin and Luisa Rodriguez.
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A collection of ten top episodes of the 80,000 Hours Podcast, designed to bring you up to speed on ten pressing issues the effective altruism community is working to solve.
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A collection of ten top episodes of the 80,000 Hours Podcast, specifically selected to help listeners get up to speed on effective altruism as quickly as possible.
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A compilation of ten key episodes on artificial intelligence and related topics from 80,000 Hours. Together they'll help you learn about how AI looks from a broadly longtermist, existential risk, or effective altruism flavoured point of view.
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The 80000 Hours Career Guide — Find a fulfilling career that does good
Benjamin Todd & the 80,000 Hours team
Coming September 4: an audio version of the 2023 80,000 Hours Career Guide also available on Amazon, Audible, and free on our website (https://80000hours.org/career-guide/). It contains 11 chapters, from 'What makes for a dream job?' to 'Which jobs help people the most?' to 'What’s the best way to gain connections?' It also has 9 appendices on a range of topics like 'All the evidence-based advice we found on how to be more successful in any job' and 'is it ever OK to take a harmful job in or ...
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#210 – Cameron Meyer Shorb on dismantling the myth that we can’t do anything to help wild animals
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"I really don’t want to give the impression that I think it is easy to make predictable, controlled, safe interventions in wild systems where there are many species interacting. I don’t think it’s easy, but I don’t see any reason to think that it’s impossible. And I think we have been making progress. I think there’s every reason to think that if w…
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#209 – Rose Chan Loui on OpenAI’s gambit to ditch its nonprofit
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One OpenAI critic calls it “the theft of at least the millennium and quite possibly all of human history.” Are they right? Back in 2015 OpenAI was but a humble nonprofit. That nonprofit started a for-profit, OpenAI LLC, but made sure to retain ownership and control. But that for-profit, having become a tech giant with vast staffing and investment, …
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#208 – Elizabeth Cox on the case that TV shows, movies, and novels can improve the world
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"I think stories are the way we shift the Overton window — so widen the range of things that are acceptable for policy and palatable to the public. Almost by definition, a lot of things that are going to be really important and shape the future are not in the Overton window, because they sound weird and off-putting and very futuristic. But I think …
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#207 – Sarah Eustis-Guthrie on why she shut down her charity, and why more founders should follow her lead
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"I think one of the reasons I took [shutting down my charity] so hard is because entrepreneurship is all about this bets-based mindset. So you say, “I’m going to take a bunch of bets. I’m going to take some risky bets that have really high upside.” And this is a winning strategy in life, but maybe it’s not a winning strategy for any given hand. So …
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Bonus: Parenting insights from Rob and 8 past guests
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With kids very much on the team's mind we thought it would be fun to review some comments about parenting featured on the show over the years, then have hosts Luisa Rodriguez and Rob Wiblin react to them. Links to learn more and full transcript. After hearing 8 former guests’ insights, Luisa and Rob chat about: Which of these resonate the most with…
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#206 – Anil Seth on the predictive brain and how to study consciousness
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"In that famous example of the dress, half of the people in the world saw [blue and black], half saw [white and gold]. It turns out there’s individual differences in how brains take into account ambient light. Colour is one example where it’s pretty clear that what we experience is a kind of inference: it’s the brain’s best guess about what’s going…
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How much does a vote matter? (Article)
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If you care about social impact, is voting important? In this piece, Rob investigates the two key things that determine the impact of your vote: The chances of your vote changing an election’s outcome. How much better some candidates are for the world as a whole, compared to others. He then discusses a couple of the best arguments against voting in…
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#205 – Sébastien Moro on the most insane things fish can do
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"You have a tank split in two parts: if the fish gets in the compartment with a red circle, it will receive food, and food will be delivered in the other tank as well. If the fish takes the blue triangle, this fish will receive food, but nothing will be delivered in the other tank. So we have a prosocial choice and antisocial choice. When there is …
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#204 – Nate Silver on making sense of SBF, and his biggest critiques of effective altruism
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Rob Wiblin speaks with FiveThirtyEight election forecaster and author Nate Silver about his new book: On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything. Links to learn more, highlights, video, and full transcript. On the Edge explores a cultural grouping Nate dubs “the River” — made up of people who are analytical, competitive, quantitatively minded, risk…
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#203 – Peter Godfrey-Smith on interfering with wild nature, accepting death, and the origin of complex civilisation
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"In the human case, it would be mistaken to give a kind of hour-by-hour accounting. You know, 'I had +4 level of experience for this hour, then I had -2 for the next hour, and then I had -1' — and you sort of sum to try to work out the total… And I came to think that something like that will be applicable in some of the animal cases as well… There …
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Luisa and Keiran on free will, and the consequences of never feeling enduring guilt or shame
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In this episode from our second show, 80k After Hours, Luisa Rodriguez and Keiran Harris chat about the consequences of letting go of enduring guilt, shame, anger, and pride. Links to learn more, highlights, and full transcript. They cover: Keiran’s views on free will, and how he came to hold them What it’s like not experiencing sustained guilt, sh…
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#202 – Venki Ramakrishnan on the cutting edge of anti-ageing science
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"For every far-out idea that turns out to be true, there were probably hundreds that were simply crackpot ideas. In general, [science] advances building on the knowledge we have, and seeing what the next questions are, and then getting to the next stage and the next stage and so on. And occasionally there’ll be revolutionary ideas which will really…
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#201 – Ken Goldberg on why your robot butler isn’t here yet
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"Perception is quite difficult with cameras: even if you have a stereo camera, you still can’t really build a map of where everything is in space. It’s just very difficult. And I know that sounds surprising, because humans are very good at this. In fact, even with one eye, we can navigate and we can clear the dinner table. But it seems that we’re b…
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#200 – Ezra Karger on what superforecasters and experts think about existential risks
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"It’s very hard to find examples where people say, 'I’m starting from this point. I’m starting from this belief.' So we wanted to make that very legible to people. We wanted to say, 'Experts think this; accurate forecasters think this.' They might both be wrong, but we can at least start from here and figure out where we’re coming into a discussion…
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#199 – Nathan Calvin on California’s AI bill SB 1047 and its potential to shape US AI policy
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"I do think that there is a really significant sentiment among parts of the opposition that it’s not really just that this bill itself is that bad or extreme — when you really drill into it, it feels like one of those things where you read it and it’s like, 'This is the thing that everyone is screaming about?' I think it’s a pretty modest bill in a…
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#198 – Meghan Barrett on challenging our assumptions about insects
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"This is a group of animals I think people are particularly unfamiliar with. They are especially poorly covered in our science curriculum; they are especially poorly understood, because people don’t spend as much time learning about them at museums; and they’re just harder to spend time with in a lot of ways, I think, for people. So people have pet…
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#197 – Nick Joseph on whether Anthropic's AI safety policy is up to the task
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The three biggest AI companies — Anthropic, OpenAI, and DeepMind — have now all released policies designed to make their AI models less likely to go rogue or cause catastrophic damage as they approach, and eventually exceed, human capabilities. Are they good enough? That’s what host Rob Wiblin tries to hash out in this interview (recorded May 30) w…
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#196 – Jonathan Birch on the edge cases of sentience and why they matter
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"In the 1980s, it was still apparently common to perform surgery on newborn babies without anaesthetic on both sides of the Atlantic. This led to appalling cases, and to public outcry, and to campaigns to change clinical practice. And as soon as [some courageous scientists] looked for evidence, it showed that this practice was completely indefensib…
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#195 – Sella Nevo on who's trying to steal frontier AI models, and what they could do with them
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"Computational systems have literally millions of physical and conceptual components, and around 98% of them are embedded into your infrastructure without you ever having heard of them. And an inordinate amount of them can lead to a catastrophic failure of your security assumptions. And because of this, the Iranian secret nuclear programme failed t…
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#194 – Vitalik Buterin on defensive acceleration and how to regulate AI when you fear government
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"If you’re a power that is an island and that goes by sea, then you’re more likely to do things like valuing freedom, being democratic, being pro-foreigner, being open-minded, being interested in trade. If you are on the Mongolian steppes, then your entire mindset is kill or be killed, conquer or be conquered … the breeding ground for basically eve…
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#193 – Sihao Huang on the risk that US–China AI competition leads to war
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"You don’t necessarily need world-leading compute to create highly risky AI systems. The biggest biological design tools right now, like AlphaFold’s, are orders of magnitude smaller in terms of compute requirements than the frontier large language models. And China has the compute to train these systems. And if you’re, for instance, building a cybe…
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#192 – Annie Jacobsen on what would happen if North Korea launched a nuclear weapon at the US
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"Ring one: total annihilation; no cellular life remains. Ring two, another three-mile diameter out: everything is ablaze. Ring three, another three or five miles out on every side: third-degree burns among almost everyone. You are talking about people who may have gone down into the secret tunnels beneath Washington, DC, escaped from the Capitol an…
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#191 (Part 2) – Carl Shulman on government and society after AGI
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This is the second part of our marathon interview with Carl Shulman. The first episode is on the economy and national security after AGI. You can listen to them in either order! If we develop artificial general intelligence that's reasonably aligned with human goals, it could put a fast and near-free superhuman advisor in everyone's pocket. How wou…
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#191 (Part 1) – Carl Shulman on the economy and national security after AGI
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This is the first part of our marathon interview with Carl Shulman. The second episode is on government and society after AGI. You can listen to them in either order! The human brain does what it does with a shockingly low energy supply: just 20 watts — a fraction of a cent worth of electricity per hour. What would happen if AI technology merely ma…
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#190 – Eric Schwitzgebel on whether the US is conscious
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"One of the most amazing things about planet Earth is that there are complex bags of mostly water — you and me – and we can look up at the stars, and look into our brains, and try to grapple with the most complex, difficult questions that there are. And even if we can’t make great progress on them and don’t come to completely satisfying solutions, …
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