TYPE III AUDIO (All episodes)

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client: 80000_hours
project_id: articles
narrator: pw
qa: km
qa_time: 0h30m
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As the 2016 US presidential campaign was entering a fractious round of primaries, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta, opened a disturbing email. The March 19 message warned that his Gmail password had been compromised and that he urgently needed to change it.

The email was a lie. It wasn’t trying to help him protect his account — it was a phishing attack trying to gain illicit access.

Podesta was suspicious, but the campai...

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client: 80000_hours
project_id: articles
narrator: pw
qa: km
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No matter which career you choose, anyone can make a difference by donating to charity, engaging in advocacy, or volunteering.

Unfortunately, many attempts to do good in this way are ineffective, and some actually cause harm.

Take sponsored skydiving. Every year, thousands of people collect donations for good causes and throw themselves out of planes to draw attention to whatever charity they’ve chosen to support. This sounds like a win-win: the fundraiser gets an exhilarating once-in-a-lifetime experience wh...

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client: 80000_hours
project_id: articles
narrator: pw
qa: km
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If you want to make a difference with your career, one place to start is to ask which global problems most need attention. Should you work on education, climate change, poverty, or something else?

The standard advice is to do whatever most interests you, and most people seem to end up working on whichever social problem first grabs their attention.

That’s exactly what our cofounder, Ben, did. At age 19, he was most interested in climate change. Here he...

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client: 80000_hours
project_id: articles
narrator: pw
qa: km
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We’ve spent much of the last 10+ years trying to answer a simple question: what are the world’s biggest and most neglected problems?

We wanted to have a positive impact with our careers, and so we set out to discover where our efforts would be most effective.

Our analysis suggests that choosing the right problem could increase your impact by over 100 times, which would make it the most important driver of your impact.

Here, we give...

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client: 80000_hours
project_id: articles
narrator: pw
qa: km
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Many people think of Superman as a hero. But he may be the greatest example of underutilised talent in all of fiction. It was a blunder to spend his life fighting crime one case at a time; if he’d thought a little more creatively, he could have done far more good. How about delivering vaccines to everyone in the world at superspeed? That would have eradicated most infectious disease, saving hundreds of millions of lives.

Here we’ll argue that...

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client: 80000_hours
project_id: articles
narrator: pw
qa: km
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People like to lionise the Mozarts, Malala Yousafzais, and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world — people who achieved great success while young — and there are all sorts of awards for young leaders, like the Forbes 30 Under 30.

But these stories are interesting precisely because they’re the exception.

Most people reach the peak of their impact in their middle age. Income usually peaks in the 40s, suggesting that it takes around 20 years for most people to reach their peak productivity.

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client: 80000_hours
project_id: articles
narrator: pw
qa: km
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Everyone says it’s important to find a job you’re good at, but no one tells you how.

The standard advice is to think about it for weeks and weeks until you “discover your talent.” To help, career advisers give you quizzes about your interests and preferences. Others recommend you go on a gap yah, reflect deeply, imagine different options, and try to figure out what truly motivates you.

But as we saw in an earlier article, becoming...

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client: 80000_hours
project_id: articles
narrator: pw
qa: km
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The trouble with self-help advice is that it’s often based on barely any evidence.

For example, how many times have you been told to “think positively” in order to reach your goals? It’s probably the most popular piece of personal guidance, beloved by everyone from high school teachers to bestselling careers experts. One key idea behind the slogan is that if you visualise your ideal future, you’re more likely to get there.

The problem? Recent research f...

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client: 80000_hours
project_id: articles
narrator: pw
qa: km
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People often come to us trying to figure out what they should do over the next 10 or 20 years. Others say they want to figure out “the right career” for them.

The problem with all of this is that, as we’ve seen, your plan is almost certainly going to change:

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client: 80000_hours
project_id: articles
narrator: pw
qa: km
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When it comes to advice on how to get a job, most of it is pretty bad.

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client: 80000_hours
project_id: articles
narrator: pw
qa: km
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Not many students are in a position to start a successful, cost-effective charity straight out of a philosophy degree. But when Thomas attended an “effective altruism” conference in London in 2018, he discovered an opportunity to start a nonprofit that could have a major impact on factory farmed animals.

Through the community, he received advice and funding, and ended up in an incubation programme. Today, Thomas’s charity, the Fish Welfare Initiative, has reduced the suffering of around one million factory farmed...

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client: 80000_hours
project_id: articles
narrator: pw
qa: km
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We’re about to summarise the whole guide in one minute. But before that, imagine a cheery thought: you’re at the end of your 80,000-hour career.

You’re on your deathbed looking back. What are some things you might regret

Perhaps you drifted into whatever seemed like the easiest option, or did what your parents did.

Maybe you even made a lot of money doing something you were interested in, and had a nice house and ca...

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client: 80000_hours
project_id: articles
narrator: pw
qa: km
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TL;DR: To have a fulfilling career, get good at something and then use it to tackle pressing global problems.

Rather than expect to discover your passion in a flash of insight, your job satisfaction will grow over time as you learn more about what kind of work fits you, master valuable skills, and use them to find engaging work that helps others.

Source:
https://80000hours.org/career-guide/summary/

Narrated for 80,000...

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client: 80000_hours
project_id: articles
narrator: pw
qa: km
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You’ll spend about 80,000 hours working in your career: 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, for 40 years. So how to spend that time is one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make.

Choose wisely, and you will not only have a more rewarding and interesting life — you’ll also be able to help solve some of the world’s most pressing problems. But how should you choose?

To answer this question, we set up an indepen...

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client: 80000_hours
project_id: articles
narrator: pw
qa: km
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We all want to find a dream job that’s enjoyable and meaningful, but what does that actually mean?

Some people imagine that the answer involves discovering their passion through a flash of insight, while others think that the key elements of their dream job are that it be easy and highly paid.

We’ve reviewed three decades of research into the causes of a satisfying life and career, drawing on over 60 studies, and we didn’t find m...

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client: 80000_hours
project_id: articles
narrator: pw
qa: km
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It’s easy to feel like one person can’t make a difference. The world has so many big problems, and they often seem impossible to solve.

So when we started 80,000 Hours — with the aim of helping people do good with their careers — one of the first questions we asked was, “How much difference can one person really make?”

We learned that while many common ways to do good (such as becoming a doctor) have less impact than you might fi...

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client: 80000_hours
project_id: articles
narrator: pw
qa: km
qa_time: 0h30m
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As the 2016 US presidential campaign was entering a fractious round of primaries, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta, opened a disturbing email. The March 19 message warned that his Gmail password had been compromised and that he urgently needed to change it.

The email was a lie. It wasn’t trying to help him protect his account — it was a phishing attack trying to gain illicit access.

Podesta was suspicious, but the campaign’s IT team...

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client: ea_forum
project_id: curated
narrator: pw
qa: km
qa_time: 0h20m
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This post is a summary of some of my work as a field strategy consultant at Schmidt Futures' Act 2 program, where I spoke with over a hundred experts and did a deep dive into antimicrobial resistance to find impactful investment opportunities within the cause area. The full report can be accessed here.

Antimicrobials, the medicines we use to fight infections, have played a foundational role in improving the length and...

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client: ea_forum
project_id: curated
narrator: pw
qa: km
narrator_time: 1h15m
qa_time: 30m
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Charity Entrepreneurship is frequently contacted by individuals and donors who like our model. Several have expressed interest in seeing the model expanded, or seeing what a twist on the model would look like (e.g., different cause area, region, etc.) Although we are excited about maximizing CE’s impact, we are less convinced by the idea of growing the effective charity pool via franchising or other independent nonprofit incubators. This is be...

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client: lesswrong
project_id: articles
feed_id: ai ai_safety
narrator: pw
qa: km
narrator_time: 4h30m
qa_time: 2h0m
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Philosopher David Chalmers asked: "Is there a canonical source for "the argument for AGI ruin" somewhere, preferably laid out as an explicit argument with premises and a conclusion?"

Unsurprisingly, the actual reason people expect AGI ruin isn't a crisp deductive argument; it's a probabilistic update based on many lines of evidence. The specific observations and heuristics that carried the most weight for...

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client: lesswrong
project_id: curated
narrator: pw
qa: km
narrator_time: 2h45m
qa_time: 1h00m
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Thanks to Drake Thomas for feedback. I. Here’s a fun scatter plot. It has two thousand points, which I generated as follows: first, I drew two thousand x-values from a normal distribution with mean 0 and standard deviation 1. Then, I chose the y-value of each point by taking the x-value and then adding noise to it. The noise is also normally distributed, with mean 0 and standard deviation 1. Notice that there’s more...

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client: ea_forum
project_id: summaries
narrator: cs
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We've just passed the half-year mark for this project! If you're reading this, please consider taking this 5 minute survey — all questions optional. If you listen to the podcast version, we have a separate survey for that here. Thanks to everyone that has responded to this already! 

Original text:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9QcmyGAjERHRFfrr7/summaries-of-top-forum-posts-1st-to-7th-may-2023

This is part of a weekly series summarizing the top posts on the EA Forum — you c...

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client: ea_forum
project_id: curated
feed_id: ai_safety
narrator: jc
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How worried about AI risk will we feel in the future, when we can see advanced machine intelligence up close? We should worry accordingly now.  

Original article:
https://joecarlsmith.com/2023/05/08/predictable-updating-about-ai-risk

Narrated by Joe Carlsmith and included on the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.

Share feedback on this narration.

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client: ea_forum
project_id: summaries
narrator: cs
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We've just passed the half-year mark for this project! If you're reading this, please consider taking this 5 minute survey — all questions optional. If you listen to the podcast version, we have a separate survey for that here. Thanks to everyone that has responded to this already! 

Original text:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wzn7hEj3BSz7us7ge/summaries-of-top-forum-posts-24th-30th-april-2023

This is part of a weekly series summarizing the top posts on...

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client: ea_forum
project_id: curated
narrator: pw
qa: km
qa_time: 0h35m 
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People often ask me for career advice related to AGI safety. This post summarizes the advice I most commonly give. I’ve split it into three sections: general mindset, alignment research and governance work. For each of the latter two, I start with high-level advice aimed primarily at students and those early in their careers, then dig into more details of the field. See also this post I wrote two years ago, containing a bunch of...

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client: ea_forum
project_id: summaries
narrator: cs
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Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/m2Y6HheC2Q2GLQ3oS/summaries-of-top-forum-posts-17th-23rd-april-2023
This podcast has just passed the 6-month mark! Please give us your feedback and suggestions so we can continue to improve — the survey should take no more than 10 minutes, and we really appreciate your input!

This is part of a weekly series summarizing the top posts on the EA Forum — you can see the full collection here. The...

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client: ea_forum
project_id: curated
narrator: pw
qa: km
qa_time: 0h45m
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The excellent report from Rethink Priorities was my main source for this. Many of the substantial points I make are taken from it, though errors are my own. It’s worth reading! The authors are Gavriel Kleinwaks, Alastair Fraser-Urquhart, Jam Kraprayoon, and Josh Morrison.

Clean water

In the mid 19th century, London had a sewage problem. It relied on a patchwork of a few hundred sewers, of...

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client: agi_sf
project_id: core_readings
feed_id: agi_sf__alignment
narrator: pw
qa: mds
qa_time: 0h15m
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One step towards building safe AI systems is to remove the need for humans to write goal functions, since using a simple proxy for a complex goal, or getting the complex goal a bit wrong, can lead to undesirable and even dangerous behavior. In collaboration with DeepMind’s safety team, we’ve developed an algorithm which can infer what humans want by being told which of two proposed behaviors is b...

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client: lesswrong
project_id: curated
narrator: pw
qa: mds
qa_time: 1h00m
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This is a post about mental health and disposition in relation to the alignment problem. It compiles a number of resources that address how to maintain wellbeing and direction when confronted with existential risk. 

Many people in this community have posted their emotional strategies for facing Doom after Eliezer Yudkowsky’s “Death With Dignity” generated so much conversation on the subject. This post intends to be more touchy-feely, dealing more directly with emotional landscapes than questions of time...

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client: ea_forum
project_id: curated
narrator: pw
qa: mds
qa_time: 0h05m
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This is a linkpost for a new 80,000 hours episode focused on how to engage in climate from an effective altruist perspective.

Rob and I are having a pretty wide-ranging conversation, here are th...

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client: ea_forum
project_id: summaries
narrator: cs
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Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/o3Gaoizs2So6SpgLH/summaries-of-top-forum-posts-27th-march-to-16th-april

This podcast has just passed the 6-month mark! Please give us your feedback and suggestions so we can continue to improve — the survey should take no more than 10 minutes, and we really appreciate your input!

This is part of a weekly series summarizing the top posts on the EA Forum — you can see the full collection here. The firs...

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project_id: curated 
narrator: pw
qa: mds
qa_time: 0h15m
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I recently spent some time reflecting on my career and my life, for a few reasons:

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client: lesswrong
project_id: curated
feed_id: ai_alignment, ai
narrator: pw
qa: km
qa_time: 0h50m
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The primary talk of the AI world recently is about AI agents (whether or not it includes the question of whether we can’t help but notice we are all going to die.)

The trigger for this was AutoGPT, now number one on GitHub, which allows you to turn GPT-4 (or GPT-3.5 for us clowns without proper access) into a prototype version of a self-directed agent.

We al...

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client: ea_forum
project_id: articles
feed_id: ai_safety
narrator: pw
qa: mds
qa_time: 0h15m
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This is a linkpost for https://www.forourposterity.com/want-to-win-the-agi-race-solve-alignment/

Society really cares about safety. Practically speaking, the binding constraint on deploying your AGI could well be your ability to align your AGI. Solving (scalable) alignment might be worth lots of $$$ and key to beating China.

Look, I really don't want Xi Jinping Thought to rule the world. If China gets AGI first, the ensuing rapid...

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client: lesswrong
project_id: curated
feed_id: ai_safety
narrator: pw
qa: km
qa_time: 0h10m
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(Related text posted to Twitter; this version is edited and has a more advanced final section.)

Imagine yourself in a box, trying to predict the next word - assign as much probability mass to the next token as possible - for all the text on the Internet.

Koan:  Is this a task whose difficulty caps out as human intelligence, or at the intelligence level of the smartest h...

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client: agi_sf
project_id: core_readings
feed_id: agi_sf__alignment
narrator: pw
qa: mds
qa_time: 0h30m
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The two tasks of supervised learning: regression and classification. Linear regression, loss functions, and gradient descent.

How much money will we make by spending more dollars on digital advertising? Will this loan applicant pay back the loan or not? What’s going to happen to the stock market tomorrow?

Original article:
https://medium.com/machine-learning-for-humans/supervised-learning-740383a2feab

Au...