What are your questions about making a difference?

Good question. We tend to take our charity evaluation from Givewell (though we've started our evaluation in some areas). So, we wouldn't be able to easily answer this. I don't think we've ever come across a charity which openly states its terms of surrender. What I can say is that the charities that tend to get recommended have a very focused method (e.g. distributing malaria nets) with a measurable outcome (less malaria), so it's pretty obvious if their failing, and that would cause them to lose funding.

that's a good one. It's going on the list. We have an upcoming series about happiness and career choice. The first (and one of the upcoming posts) are partially relevant. Drethelin's suggesting a good general strategy. If spending's the problem, you could also consider giving up on altruism in that domain, and making a difference in some other way. This is an example of macrooptimisation

You could do both at the same time to feel good about donating as well as spending on yourself. Charity auctions, kickstarters, etc. are good ways to do this.

FOSS increases the general economic output. If you expect more people to donate to appropriate causes, it would generate a greater impact over time. However, if you feel that the public chooses their donation targets poorly, then writing proprietary software and donating that money yourself will produce larger benefits. This is ignoring the potential for "changing things" through the software itself, which is too difficult to calculate.

That's a fairly common and very interesting question. Carl's got some thoughts on it, which we'll hopefully get written up. It's closely linked to two big and controversial issues: how good is economic growth and how good is technological progress? It's a case of weighing your contribution to that against the extra donations you can make.

It's not all about donating. What's different about us is that we really try to weigh up different career options in terms of how much difference they make. We understand 'making a difference' to mean 'making good stuff happen that wouldn't have happened otherwise.' So, we wouldn't just recommend working for a traditional NGO if someone was going to do that job equally well if you didn't take it. Or if it didn't seem to be particularly cost-effective. In carrying this out, we take an evidence-based approach, paying attention to heuristics and biases. We'd apply this to any career path. This is really different from normal careers guidance. More here. We're not, however, proposing new ways to end poverty. We're more about helping people choose within what's already out there.

Quite a few 80k members are interested in entrepreneurship. We'd definitely like to investigate these kinds of questions. But haven't found anyone yet.

Quilting has been the standard discussion as long as I've heard discussions about such targeting - quilt design software has been around for a long time. I don't know of any lists in general, though one might expect more and more such niches to be discovered as programming (or hiring programmers) becomes easier.

No. Google shows that there's 5 other posts that focus on 80,000 Hours, of which one is a link by somebody who doesn't work for 80K, the most recent one is a criticism of 80K, and the other three all date back at least 6 months.

Let's be consequentialists about this. Are "ads" necessarily bad? Previously, I suggested that people dislike ads and advertisers because they introduce what social scientists call "market norms" somewhere where regular social norms typically prevail. (A product listing page on Amazon isn't an ad, because you expected market norms on Amazon. Put the same information on a billboard and it becomes an ad.) But marketplace transactions frequently generate producer and consumer surplus, so from a consequentialist perspective they can be definitely be good. (You wouldn't pay $5 for a sandwich unless the sandwich was worth more to you than the $5. The sandwich maker wouldn't sell you the sandwich for $5 unless the $5 was worth more to them than the sandwich.)

This "ad" isn't even an advertisement for a marketplace transaction, it's an offer to provide a service for free: specifically, free research in to how to do more good with your career. It looks like folks are objecting to it because it kind of superficially resembles the way people typically describe marketplace transactions they wish to engage in. How about we stop reasoning by an analogy?

I agree, however, that there's a risk with ads that the person making the ad fails to take in to account the attentional cost from people who see the ad but don't wish to engage in any transaction. (Spam would be the extreme example of this.) So when determining whether to allow an ad or not, how about estimating attentional costs and subtracting that from estimated total producer and consumer surplus?

Downvoted for not providing evidence or argument supporting the claim that the topic and content of the post constitutes an "ad" for 80,000 Hours.

There must be some, and it we'd certainly like to investigate which areas of industry are the most harmful. But in general, it's pretty hard for a career to result in the deaths of 600 people, which is a lower bound for what you could do with $1m (you could also fund SI for 1-2 years...). The most common harmful careers seem to inflict economic damage, and since the average dollar is spent on stuff which produces much less welfare than malaria nets or catastrophic risk research, you have to do a lot of it to outweigh your donations, like maybe 1-2 orders of magnitude more. Of course, doing lots of harm with your career might still be ethically impermissible. There's also some tricky questions regarding the long term compounding benefits of economic growth.

I've opted for the second option, finding it easier to engage my natural laziness than stay motivated in any particular direction.

This seems to essentially be the question 'how can we best reduce xrisk?' We've got people ready to write about this in the fall, if not earlier. As a teaser, it seems like you can make a pretty good argument for EA movement building dominating most of the other approaches.