List of 80,000 Hours content from the last 2 months, summary of which were most popular, and plans for future releases.

By 80000_Hours @ 2018-06-04T22:34 (+8)

Here's are all the content releases from 80,000 Hours since our last update here 2 months ago:

1. How exactly clean meat is created & the advances needed to get it into every supermarket, according to food scientist Marie Gibbons
2. The careers and policies that can prevent global catastrophic biological risks, according to world-leading health security expert Dr Inglesby
3. Why daring scientists should have to get liability insurance, according to Dr Owen Cotton-Barratt
4. Where are the aliens? Three new resolutions to the Fermi Paradox. And how we could easily colonise the whole universe.
5. Dr Eva Vivalt’s research suggests social science findings don’t generalize. So evidence-based development – what is it good for?
6. Prof Allan Dafoe on trying to prepare the world for the possibility that AI will destabilise global politics
7. Economist Bryan Caplan thinks education is mostly pointless showing off. We test the strength of his case.
8. Oxford University’s Dr Anders Sandberg on if dictators could live forever, the annual risk of nuclear war, solar flares, and more.
9. Politics is so much worse because we use an atrocious 18th century voting system. Aaron Hamlin has a viable plan to fix it.

Rob Wiblin also did a lengthy interview with Australian podcast The Jolly Swagmen. While a lot of it will be familiar to the kinds of people reading this forum, some things that might be new include Rob’s contrarian beliefs, the overrepresentation of Australians in EA, how 80,000 Hours’ career advice has changed, and how it might change in coming years.

In terms of downloads and listening time, the top 3 pieces were, in order, Anders Sandberg on the Fermi paradox, Bryan Caplan on the case against education, and Aaron Hamlin on voting reform.

The highest rated episodes by our advisory group were, in order, Allan Dafoe on the global politics of AI, Owen Cotton-Barratt on research safety, and Marie Gibbons on the science of clean meat.

The episode with Eva Vivalt on the external validity of social science contributed to a longstanding discussion here, which prompted us to write a short summary on this forum.

The podcast is closing in on 10,000 subscribers (though imperfectly measured), and had an average of 11,000 downloads a week over this period (though not all listened to presumably).

Over the next quarter you can expect to hear from Katja Grace on AI forecasting, Amanda Askell on infinite ethics, Paul Christiano on AI safety research, Tanya Singh on operation careers in EA, James Snowden on working at GiveWell, Yew Kwang-Ng on how he invented EA decades ago, Megan Palmer on synthetic biology, and David Roodman on doing social science for Open Phil. We'll likely also start releasing our 'advanced career guide'.

Enjoy!