[Podcast] Ben Todd on Choosing a Career and Defining Longtermism

By finm @ 2021-10-04T10:15 (+6)

This is a linkpost to https://hearthisidea.com/episodes/ben

Ben Todd is the CEO and founder of 80,000 Hours, and helped to start the effective altruism movement.

In our interview, we discuss:

• Why your choice of career could be the most important ethical decision you ever get to make;
• Why some problems are so much more neglected than others (and why that matters);
• 80K’s ‘problem, solution, leverage, personal fit’ framework for choosing a career;
• The idea of using leverage to multiply the difference you're able to make;
• Whether longtermism should be considered a research project or a social movement;
• Should effective altruism have an artistic movement?

The first half introduces 80,000 Hours and the ethical importance of career choice, but if you're familiar with that you might want to skip to ≈ the second half using the chapter markers.

The page this post links to also contains quotes from the interview, links, and further reading.

I'm posting this in case anyone wanted to share their thoughts on the topics covered in this episode. This is in the spirit of MichaelA's suggestion of posting all EA-relevant content here on the forum. Cheers!