80,000 hours (eightythousand.org) is a new website associated with High Impact Careers, a Giving What We Can-associated effort to inform the public about "professional philanthropy" and the fact that you can do more good as a banker or entrepreneur than as an aid worker. It recently got some BBC press, and there's a neat new video.

Related to efficient charity and optimal philanthropy. Also see scope insensitivity.

New to LessWrong?

New Comment
8 comments, sorted by Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 1:06 PM

Just wanted to make something clear: 80,000 Hours is the rebranded High Impact Careers. Same team, same message -- new name.

We'd really appreciate any comments or criticisms from the LessWrong community as there seems to be a significant overlap of interests such as those linked to in the main post.

Disclaimer: I'm on the web team for 80,000 Hours.

The introductory video needs a better audio recording (both sound quality and voice acting).

This for sure. Also has too many long silences.

Is the linked website right about banking being the optimal career path for professional philanthropy or is there a more efficient method of moving resources to charities? I'm especially curious since I'll choose my degree soon.

You may wish to request a Skyped career counseling session from Carl Shulman, one of the experts behind High Impact Careers.

I've briefly tried to find a way to contact Shulman and failed. Is there a known way to contact him? Possibly useful information: I would prefer an IRC session over Skype. I've already followed the posted link, googled his name, googled his name with the word contact, looked at eightythousand.org' s contact page, and googled his name while restricting the search to eightythousand.org.

Have you used Less Wrong's "Send message" functionality?

(Edit: It's a button in the upper right corner of the page you get when you click someone's username.)

Thank you. I had assumed that Less Wrong had no private messaging when the envelope icon near the top right corner of the interface took me to the reply to my first comment.