Nathan Labenz: evaluation

Transcript context

…Thanks so much for having me. I'm A longtime listener. That's very kind. I've certainly followed your work for a long time as well. So premise of today's conversation is AI is going to be a big deal. The decisions that get made around exactly how to shape it, how to deploy it, how to govern it over the next few years could have a really outsized impact on the future for a long time to come. I want to get into that and get your take on how people who maybe don't work directly in the space yet or who do what kind of work but are not sure if they're making the biggest impact that they can, how they might think about pivoting their careers to try to have the most positive, try to make the most positive contribution that they can. But maybe before we get into that, I'd love to just set the stage with what's the backstory behind 80,000 Hours? What's the story of the name? What are the principles that you guys use as you think about how to advise people and how to think about their careers? And with that table set, then we'll dive into the AI moment that we're in. Cool. Yeah. The name 80,000 hours is taken from the typical length of a career. So 2,000 hours a year for 40 years. And the idea is that's the biggest decision you'll ever make from the perspective of your personal life. But even more so from the perspective of your impact on the world, that the biggest lever you have to pull. And yeah, maybe it almost sounds obvious, but so much discourse about what it means to have an impact is focused on things like buying fair trade or turning off the lights or cycling to work. And it's like all these every little help type decisions. But because your career is for most adults, it's like about the majority of their working life. It's about half their working life. So it's more than everything else you do put together. Even a really small improvement in your career, especially in terms of its impact, is going to dwarf the impact of all these other small changes you could make. So it's really worth thinking about really carefully. But at the same time, so much careers advice just is basically a bunch of stories of successful people or it's just a bunch of slogans like follow your passion. And it's not really given like the huge stakes of this decision. It's not treated with all the seriousness and research that you should actually bring to bear on such an important question. And the organization comes from, well, we were students at Oxford. asking ourselves, what should we do with our own lives? And we wanted to find something that would be enjoyable and would pay the bills and would make a contribution to society. And we were like, well, which paths would be best? There's like more than one path we could go down. It was really hard to get any good advice on which to pursue. So we started actually just doing our own research on this. And that turned into a talk we gave at Oxford And of that there was 24 or so people in the audience in the first ever talk and about six of them eventually totally changed their lives to coming and talking about the ideas. And several of them came to us and said, well, you should really start an organization about this. is like clearly, these are clearly powerful ideas no one else is talking about. And yeah, that was the start in 2010 was the first ever talk. And then I started working full-time on it straight after I graduated. And then that's what I did for the first 10 years of my career was then running an organization trying to figure out which careers are best.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.