Here are some of our favourite and most important articles, posts, and podcast episodes we published in 2024:

Articles

Factory farming — There’s a clear candidate for the biggest moral mistake that humanity is currently making: factory farming. We raise and slaughter 1.6-4.5 trillion animals a year on factory farms, causing tremendous amounts of suffering.

The moral status of digital minds — Understanding whether AI systems might suffer, be sentient, or otherwise matter morally is potentially one of the most pressing problems in the world.

Should you work at a frontier AI company? — Working at a frontier AI company is plausibly some people’s highest-impact option, but some roles could be extremely harmful. So it’s critical to be discerning when considering this option — and particularly open to changing course. We’ve previously written about this topic, but explored it in more depth this year while taking account of recent developments, such as prominent departures at OpenAI.

Risks of stable totalitarianism — Some of the worst atrocities have been committed by totalitarian rulers. In the future, the threat posed by these regimes could be even greater.

Nuclear weapons safety and security — Nuclear weapons continue to pose an existential threat to humanity, but there are some promising pathways to reducing the risk.

Other posts

AI for epistemics — Our president and founder, Benjamin Todd, wrote about one of the most exciting ideas he’s heard about recently: using advancing AI technology to improve our decision making and understanding of the world.

Why we get burned out — and what helps — Laura González Salmerón, an 80,000 Hours adviser, wrote about how she experienced burnout in a previous role, and what you can learn from her experience.

What are the biggest misconceptions about biosecurity? — We asked experts about key mistakes they see in the field. They gave us their frank, and sometimes conflicting, answers.

Podcast episodes

Carl Shulman part one and part two — We explored wild answers to the question: what if we develop AI systems that can accomplish everything the most productive humans can?

Meghan Barrett — Can insects suffer? Meghan makes a strong case for taking the possibility very seriously in this genuinely mind-bending episode.

Randy Nesse — Understanding why evolution left many people prone to severe depression and anxiety may help us better manage mood disorders.

Sihao Huang — How can the US and China avoid a destructive AI arms race that no one would win?

Rose Chan Loui — One critic has described OpenAI’s plan to jettison nonprofit status as “the theft of at least the millennium and quite possibly all of human history.” Are they right?

Rachel Gennerster — A pioneer in the field of development economics talked about how we can leverage market forces to drive innovations that can solve climate change, pandemics, and other global problems.

The post 2024 in review: some of our top pieces from this year appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

If you’re anything like me, December is a busy time. You’re wrapping up projects, reviewing the past year’s work, planning for holidays, and buying gifts. (Not to mention, drafting a newsletter!)

So “giving season” — the time of year when most charitable donations are made — may just feel like one more thing to do. But donating is one of the most important decisions you can make.

Consider that:

• If you have an average UK/US income and donate 10% of it, this year you can save a child who would otherwise have died of malaria.
• There are other cause areas where you can potentially have an even bigger impact.

Of course, the high stakes of giving can make it feel even worse to rush it, and even more daunting.

I’ve definitely struggled to live up to my ideals when faced with this. I can confirm that New Year’s Eve is not when you want to deal with details like finding a quick online payment method. And I used to be the executive director of Giving What We Can and a grantmaker for the EA Infrastructure Fund — so if you also struggle with this, you’re not alone!

My bottom line advice is: find ways to make fewer decisions. They’re stressful and time consuming.

Below are two key tips that work for me and make my giving season slightly less hectic.

1. Take a pledge

The biggest factor in ensuring I donate reliably is my pledge with Giving What We Can. I’ve promised to give 10% of my salary annually to the organisations I think can most effectively help others. This means I don’t stress about how much to give each year — I just donate 10%.

As Giving What We Can celebrates its 15th anniversary, I’ve been reflecting on my own pledge. Initially, I struggled to believe I could live up to the inspiring examples of those around me promising to give 10% of their income over the whole of their lives.

It took me two full years to actually pluck up the courage to pledge. But in the 13 years since, I’ve never once regretted it. I now have a husband, house, and son, and none of that has diminished my drive to help make a better world by donating.

While you don’t have to donate during giving season — you can make the choice whenever you want — there are some advantages to doing so. For example:

• Many charities plan their budgets around the donations they receive at this time.
• In some places, like the US, there can be tax reasons to get your donations in by the end of the year.

If you want to learn more about taking the 10% Pledge, I’d recommend reading more about it. And if you’re curious but not ready to fully commit, I’d suggest checking out the trial pledge.
Caption: Giving What We Can gives out pledge pins for members.

2. Rely on recommendations you think you can trust

In the past, I’ve really felt the pull to look into the details of specific charities to decide where and how much I should donate. I think it’s been useful for me to have evaluated how charities work and how they compare.

But this is time consuming to do well, so many people take advantage of the fact that there are full-time charity and grant evaluators who will do the work for us.

These include:

• GiveWell, which evaluates global health charities
• Effective Altruism Funds (where I used to work), which has separate funds for global development, animal welfare, the long-term future, and EA infrastructure
• Recommended funds and charities from Giving What We Can
• Local giving platforms, for example Effektiv Spenden in Germany

If you want to look more into specific charities you might donate to, the Effective Altruism Forum is particularly active during giving season. Many different charities and organisations have posted about their funding needs and the case that their work is high impact. You can start exploring options here.

I think staff at Open Philanthropy tend to be particularly insightful about donating — which makes sense, since its aim as a philanthropic foundation is to help others as much as it can. Some members of staff shared their donation suggestions for individuals in a post on the forum, which you might find useful. (Open Philanthropy is a major funder of 80,000 Hours. I’ve been following their recommendations since before I worked at orgs they funded.)

Finally, if you’re feeling rushed off your feet this festive period, but still care about donating impactfully, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Even an imperfect choice can have a big impact.

Learn more:

• How to choose where to donate
• Why and how to earn to give
• No matter your job, here’s 3 evidence-based ways anyone can have a real impact

The post Two key tips for giving season appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

When I was in the last years of my PhD studying representations of science and technology in fiction, I started feeling tired every day. I was checked out from my research, and I had a nagging sense that I wasn’t as good at it as I used to be.

I now realise I was experiencing burnout — and these feelings are quite common.

The World Health Organisation will tell you that burnout is an occupational syndrome that results from chronic workplace stress. It’s characterised by energy depletion, increased negativity and cynicism about your job, and reduced efficacy.

In my case, I was struggling with a mismatch between my work and what I thought really mattered. I was doing a PhD to become a literature professor, but my research seemed fundamentally disconnected from what I cared about: helping with pressing world problems.

Once something feels pointless, it’s very difficult to muster the motivation to get it done.

The silver lining is that now I can use this experience to help others in my role as a career advisor. And here is one piece of advice I often give: if you can, try to find work that aligns with what you think matters. In order to do this, it’s important to first reflect on what problems you care about and how to best tackle them.

That said, there are many different ways people develop burnout. For example:

• If you’re working on something you think is important, the fact that it feels important can make it more overwhelming and stressful.
• You believe that your work is important but find it uninteresting or unpleasant — especially if it conflicts with other life priorities. That’s why we recommend taking your personal fit into account when choosing a role or career path.
• Your working environment is toxic in some way, e.g. you lack people who support you and value your contributions.
• A breakdown in expectations arises between you and others in your workplace, or between your expectations and what’s realistic, leading to frustration.

One common misconception is that burnout is always caused by overworking, which can make it difficult to identify burnout early. Long hours can definitely contribute to burnout. But some people work 10-hour days and avoid burnout, while someone else might “work” on her PhD thesis (i.e. look at a blank page) for three hours a day and burn out quickly.

For this reason, vacations and holidays aren’t necessarily a simple fix. Burnout is caused by systemic issues that make you associate work with negative feelings, especially feelings of failure. Unless those root causes are addressed, time off may only provide temporary relief.

With the caveats that the causes of burnout are still not very well understood, and that I’m not a mental health professional, here are some tools that might help if you’re suffering from burnout or trying to avoid it:

• Get support from peers, leadership, and mental health professionals. This is one of the most consistent findings in the scientific literature. Talking to others can help you get the validation that you may struggle to provide for yourself, brainstorm coping strategies, and find solace in shared challenges.
  • If you’re trying to find a therapist, it’s important to find one who has the right skills and tools to help you. Our career guide has some tips and additional resources that can help.
• If you can, try to find alignment between your work, goals, and values. You can make a long-term plan to make a career change if that could be helpful. But there will always be trade-offs you have to make with your career — for example, supporting your family may require staying at a job you find less than ideal. Remember that there are ways to pursue your values and have an impact, no matter your job.
• Try to avoid ambiguity in your role. This is an extension of the above. If you don’t even know what the underlying purpose of your work is, or what you’re supposed to be doing and why, you can’t tell if you’re succeeding. It’s easy to feel like a failure when you have not established a winning condition. Talking to your manager or others on your team about what it means for you to do well in your role may be valuable.
• Don’t forget the basics: getting enough sleep, shortening (or somehow improving) your commute, getting exercise, and making room for things that make you happy outside of work. If your job is making your life miserable in a bunch of different ways, and possibly even affecting your physical health, it’s only natural to develop negative feelings towards it, and for your productivity to take a hit.

Our society has normalised the idea that work is synonymous with suffering, something to be endured for the sake of survival. I feel immensely privileged that this is not my experience. If you’re struggling with a job that feels meaningless, I hope you know this fate is not inevitable.

And if you’re already pursuing a fulfilling career that does good, but always falling short of your very high standards, I’m afraid there are no magical solutions. But there are some things that might help. Surround yourself with people you respect who will remind you of the good work you’re doing — even when it’s difficult for you to believe it. Set clear and realistic goals. Also: get enough sleep!

If you know of any magical solutions, do let me know. Asking for a friend.

Learn more:

• Burnout: What is it and how to treat it by Elizabeth Van Nostrand
• How to be productive without burning out (with Anne-Laure Le Cunff)
• How to balance impact and doing what you love
• Tim LeBon on how altruistic perfectionism is self-defeating
• Hannah Boettcher on the mental health challenges that come with trying to have a big impact
• My experience with imposter syndrome — and how to (partly) overcome it by Luisa Rodriguez

The post Why we get burned out — and what helps appeared first on 80,000 Hours.