BenjaminTodd

They look at people who switch into entrepreneurship, and then consider the whole sample, so I don't think survivorship bias is a big issue.

I agree it would be good to go more fine grained in the categories though.

Yes - they try to address that in the paper, but it's hard.

We totally agree - we go into that in the post e.g. see the conclusion section.

We discuss this somewhat in the post - the line at which you say something "works" is arbitrary. We explore how the choice of definition changes the stat.

Some of it is that, but much less so for the meta-analyses. We have a bunch more comments about this in the doc.

Hi all, I'm the author of the post and happy to take questions.

We think even if AGI is only invented in 50 years, then it's still worth doing some work on the control problem today, so our view isn't that dependent on whether we're currently in an AI investment bubble or not.

However, if you did really believe the hype, and think that ML will lead to major breakthroughs in the next decade or so, then that would make it even more urgent.

We're going to work on the causes that we think our most pressing, so to be consistent, we're going to end up recommending the same things we work on.

At 80,000 Hours, our focus is also not on giving money. We're trying to help people find jobs in these areas, often in academia or policy and many other sectors.

There's also real research progress being made. Here are some of the issues people are working on:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.06565

More info on the pros and cons of water:

http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/publication/post-2015-con...

http://blog.givewell.org/2016/05/03/reservations-water-quali...

We're a fan of CCC - they're one of the main resources we've drawn upon, and we agree with many of these recommendations under the heading of global health.

However, they focus on what will most help the global poor in the near term. We're interested in considering the full range of issues, especially those that are important from the perspective of the long-term future (for reasons explained in the article).

Yes, though unfortunately he didn't write up his reasoning.

This is taken into account in the figures, which are purchasing parity adjusted. You can see more detail in the footnotes.

There also more in-depth discussion here: https://80000hours.org/2017/04/how-accurately-does-anyone-kn...

Hi, I'm the author of the post. I agree this is a very interesting area to look into. It would fall under "meta" in the main post. Here's some more info: http://blog.givewell.org/2015/04/21/science-policy-and-infra...

Our estimate of the mean is still 400-900k, whereas the mean in sports/arts/entertainment is only about $70k. https://80000hours.org/articles/highest-paying-jobs/ Even the junior roles in trading are higher paid than this.

You're right that you also need to account for the chance of dropping out of the role all together, which is hard. (Though drop out rates are high in both sports and finance.)

It seems difficult because the roles exist on a spectrum. I'd be interested in how to make the titles and claims more precise.

Thank you for the interesting estimates!

Thanks for the extra data point.

I totally agree you can't easily use these figures as your expected earnings, since you need to adjust for the chance of drop out. (And also future industry prospects and many other factors.) Also agree about quant funds being different.

By "portfolio manager" I (the author) just mean the more senior person who oversees trading. It seems like a couple of different titles get used.

We don't mean portfolio management in the sense of advising individuals on what to do with their portfolio, which is what some investment banks use. That's a totally different job.

Like I say, this article is only based on a couple of interviews, and we still have a lot to clear. I'd be keen to get more data.

Read the rest of the guide :) https://80000hours.org/career-guide/

That's what always happens. People who like upvote and move on (or do nothing). People who are critical comment.

It's really hard to do a voting ring on HN. The algorithm is very sensitive. We've triggered it accidentally before, just because friends of ours, who we didn't ask, upvoted it.

There is a chicken and egg problem - if you don't have the motivation to apply motivation techniques, then it's hard to get started.

One of former staff members got out of this rut by using commitment techniques. https://80000hours.org/2013/04/increase-your-productivity-to... (And click through to the next post)

You might also find The Motivation Hacker by Nick Winter a good, quick summary.

We mainly rely on review papers, meta-analysis and expert consensus, rather than single unpowered studies.

However, you don't need to have strong evidence behind a technique for it to be worth trying – if the upside is high enough or the costs are low enough, it could still be worth it.

If the evidence is in the footnotes (and further reading) then doesn't that mean it's not useless cliches?

Hey, I clarified the situation in the intro:

> In many cases, the evidence isn’t as strong as we’d like. Rather, it’s the best we’re aware of. We’ve tried to come to an all-considered view of what makes sense to try, given (i) the strength of the empirical evidence, (ii) whether it seems reasonable to us, (iii) the size of the potential upside, (iv) how widely applicable the advice is, and (v) the costs of trying. The details are given in the further reading we link to and the footnotes.

> We’ve put the advice roughly in order. The first items are easier and more widely applicable, so start with them, then move on to the more difficult areas later. The order is also partly based on an upcoming analysis of which skills are most valuable.

I agree some of the advice overlaps, but it's a little hard to avoid. Most of the areas are inter-related. I'd be interested in ideas on how to reorg.

I'd like to find a better resource to link to. For now I've clarified that we cover advice on how to exercise more here: https://80000hours.org/career-guide/how-to-be-successful/#9-...

We cover a ton of advice on that in this section: https://80000hours.org/career-guide/how-to-be-successful/#9-...

We mention that on our full article on job satisfaction:

https://80000hours.org/career-guide/job-satisfaction/

We try to summarise the best advice we've found in the article: https://80000hours.org/career-guide/how-to-be-successful/#5-...

But we'd like to find more.

Yeah, the difference is that "positive psychology" is scientific field, and they haven't discovered that "thinking positive" helps with being more successful. I changed the title of the sub-section.