Your 80,000 Hours of Impact:

An Introduction to Effective Altruism in Careers


We all want to make a difference in our careers. If we are going to spend 80,000 hours hard at work, over several decades, there is a lot we can ask of that time—that it enables us to support ourselves and our families, that we enjoy the tasks enough and that the world is made better for our efforts in some way, or at least that we are not harming others.


When we think about the positive impact our work can have, it is easy to conjure images of a healthcare worker on the frontlines in a refugee camp, or the chief fundraiser for a nonprofit, and imagine a simple binary between “heroic” and “regular” jobs. For those of us who are satisfied in our current organizations, are there other ways we can contribute through our careers to helping people outside of our immediate circle? And for those of us currently open to a new job or career direction, are the jobs that come to mind first as altruistic actually the ones that make the greatest difference?


These are the driving questions behind 80,000 Hours, the career arm of Effective Altruism. The Effective Altruism (EA) community conducts scientific research on maximizing the positive impact your money, your time or your job could have on pressing world problems. As one of its founders, William MacAskill, puts it: “Effective altruism is an intellectual project, using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible. And it’s also a practical project: to take action based on the research, and build a better world.”


This article will briefly introduce a few resources provided by 80,000 Hours, as well as ways anyone can make a difference in any position. I will then outline the most effective ways to donate, and what EA has identified as the most pressing global problems, recommending that people find jobs in these fields or raise awareness for others. I will also end with personal lessons we can draw from how the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) and 80,000 Hours are structured.


If we seriously consider and lean into an uncomfortable truth—that some ways of giving are more helpful than others—we open ourselves up to having a greater positive impact. 


80,000 Hours Resources


80,000 Hours has specific, concrete resources, not just for applying EA to your work, but for succeeding in and being fulfilled in your work in general. Everything on the site is research-backed, and most of its articles explain the data and reasoning behind its advice. The site offers a free annual review tool and free one-on-one career advising, as well as a few dozen guides on topics like Leverage, Personal Fit and Job Satisfaction. 


One of these guides is the “Three ways anyone can make a difference, no matter their job.” This article explains in-depth how the interventions of donating effectively, political advocacy and being a multiplier for others (raising awareness about both problems and specific actions/job opportunities that others can take) have a much greater impact than we may think. Donating and mobilizing others are intricately linked to our day jobs and worth considering when making career decisions. 80,000 Hours goes so far as to suggest that the most ethical job you can take is any high-paying one if you are earning to give, intending from the start to make impactful donations.


Giving What We Can


Effective Altruism acknowledges that not everyone needs to be, or even should be, on the ground helping out on big issues. Many charitable organizations in the US have enough volunteers but no resources for those volunteers to give out. It is often the least glamorous or Facebook picture-worthy ways of giving that makes the biggest genuine difference in the lives of those who are less fortunate. If you are happy with your career path, keep going! Consider taking a pledge with Giving What We Can to continually donate some percentage of your income to outstanding charities.


Giving What We Can is a guide to choosing the most effective charities for issues you care about. The website explains that “Indicators of reputable, worthwhile organizations include: reliance on evidence, cost-effectiveness, transparency, room for funding and track record. Cause selection and charity evaluation can take a lot of time and effort, and many donors aren’t able to work it into their busy schedules. To help you get started, we’ve put together a list of trustworthy, effective charities working on some of the most pressing causes.” Giving What We Can also helps donors make the process more efficient, such as having employers match donations or donating using a fund. 


Pressing Global Problems


If you are interested in having your full-time job directly bear on urgent world problems, here is a quick look at the 80,000 Hours list. What these issues have in common—and the reason other causes you may currently support are not in these top four—is that these are existential risks. Not finding a solution soon enough could lead to a disaster that humanity would never recover from.



Public health experts predicted a catastrophic pandemic years before Covid-19, and many researchers believe we are at risk for an even worse pandemic (natural or through engineered bioweapons) before the end of the century. Potential career interventions include supporting organizations specifically dedicated to this subject, like the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk; working with government stakeholders like the Department of Defense, CDC or WHO; and research management.



There are around 16,000 nuclear weapons in the world today. A nuclear war between the US and Russia would kill 35-77 percent of the US population within the first 30 days, and the resulting ash would block sunlight and lower temperatures, killing off crops and livestock and creating a famine for years. This is a difficult area for individuals to help out in, as the risk is dominated by decisions at the highest levels of foreign policy and the military, but supporting think tanks like the Nuclear Threat Initiative or working to improve foreign relations at other nuclear weapon flashpoints like India and Pakistan are two of many ways we can still help mitigate the risk of nuclear weapon launches.



This problem is more familiar to everyone. That said, more work is needed on developing and implementing solutions, with advocacy and green energy being two of the strongest leverage points. 


“Convincing someone to entirely give up plastic bags for the rest of their life (about 10,000 bags) would avoid ~ 0.1 tonnes of CO2 emissions. In contrast, convincing someone to take just one fewer transatlantic flight would reduce CO2 emissions by more than 10 times as much. 


“And rather than trying to change personal consumption in the first place, we’d argue you could do even more to reduce emissions by advocating for greater funding of neglected green technology.”



It can be difficult to have a sober discussion about artificial intelligence. The lack of clarity about what this could look like causes us to picture only the far-fetched examples movies provide. Nevertheless, most experts predict that within the 21st century, a third revolution in human life, like the agricultural and industrial revolutions, will be caused by artificial superintelligence. What makes this problem a priority is not the distinct threat of Skynet but instead how little work has been done to understand what will happen to the world when AI exceeds human capabilities.


“This might be the most important transition of the next century—either ushering in an unprecedented era of wealth and progress or heralding disaster. But it’s also an area that’s highly neglected. While billions are spent making AI more powerful, we estimate fewer than 100 people in the world are working on how to make AI safe.”



Applying the EA Framework for Yourself


Coming back to the here and now, to the relatively smaller challenges we face each day, the Effective Altruism movement embodies two revolutionary, empowering mindsets that can inform our decisions within any current career position. 


The first is radical accountability. The website of the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA), a US/UK-based nonprofit that coordinates and supports other EA organizations, has a page titled Our Mistakes, which lists both underlying problems and specific errors that the organization either has corrected or is now working to correct. In their words, the purpose of this page is: 


Many of us do not proactively acknowledge our own mistakes, even to ourselves, which interferes with our ability to learn from them. Owning your mistakes and committing to fixing them will build your trust and confidence in yourself and give you a clearer sense of what commitments to take on and what guidelines or boundaries to set in the future. Scaling this up, taking a radical accountability approach with your partner or work teammates dissolves potential long-term resentment by bringing issues out into the sunlight, and your honesty will encourage them to do the same. As an organization, having a page like this will keep away PR crises and lawsuits and may increase customer loyalty because it demonstrates that you have nothing to hide. Finally, at all levels, a preemptive commitment to report your mistakes is an incredibly powerful tool in stopping yourself from making unethical decisions.


The value of embracing uncertainty also underlies the Our Mistakes page and the rest of the recommendations from the CEA. The CEA admits that because it is mainly focused on future issues, it will likely make more mistakes, such as overestimating the progression of a problem over the next 20 years. This has not led their goal to feel futile. Instead, they say, “We think the right response is to be extremely humble about what we can ever know, but then do our best to work out which kinds of actions have the best long-term effects and to focus on those.” Not being able to fully anticipate the consequences of our actions is difficult to accept, and it is a source of anxiety for many adults. Recognizing that you have incomplete knowledge and imperfect judgment and taking that into account (by creating slack in the budget or timeline for a project, for example) while staying committed to making the best, most informed decisions you can is a recipe for less-stressful outcomes and continuous improvement.