If you want to improve the world as much as possible, what should you do with your career? Should you become a doctor, an engineer or a politician? Should you try to end global poverty, climate change, or international conflict? These are the questions that the research group, 80,000 Hours tries to answer. They try to figure out how individuals can set themselves up to help as many people as possible in as big a way as possible.

To learn more about their research, Ariel invited Rob Wiblin and Brenton Mayer of 80,000 Hours to the FLI podcast. In this podcast we discuss "earning to give", building career capital, the most effective ways for individuals to help solve the world's most pressing problems -- including artificial intelligence, nuclear weapons, biotechnology and climate change. If you're interested in tackling these problems, or simply want to learn more about them, this podcast is the perfect place to start.

80,000 Hours with Rob Wiblin and Brenton Mayer

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Almost nobody is able to do groundbreaking physics research themselves, and by the time his brilliance was appreciated, Einstein was hardly limited by funding. But what if you could find a way to unlock the secrets of the universe like Einstein nonetheless? 

Today’s guest, Tanya Singh, sees herself as doing something like that every day. She’s Executive Assistant to one of her intellectual heroes who she believes is making a huge contribution to improving the world: Professor Bostrom at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute (FHI). 

She couldn’t get more work out of Bostrom with extra donations, as his salary is already easily covered. But with her superior abilities as an Executive Assistant, Tanya frees up hours of his time every week, essentially ‘buying’ more Bostrom in a way nobody else can. She also help manage FHI more generally, in so doing freeing up more than an hour of other staff time for each hour she works. This gives her the leverage to do more good than other people or other positions. 

In our <a href="https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tara-mac-aulay-operations-mindset/?utm_campaign=podcast__tanya-singh&utm_source=80000+Hours+Podcast&utm_medium=podcast">previous episode</a>, Tara Mac Aulay objected to viewing operations work as predominately a way of freeing up other people's time: 

“A good ops person doesn’t just allow you to scale linearly, but also can help figure out bottlenecks and solve problems such that the organization is able to do qualitatively different work, rather than just increase the total quantity”, Tara said. 

<a href="https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tanya-singh-operations-bottleneck/?utm_campaign=podcast__tanya-singh&utm_source=80000+Hours+Podcast&utm_medium=podcast">Full transcript, summary and links to learn more.</a> 

Tara’s right that buying time for people at the top of their field is just one path to impact, though it’s one Tanya says she finds highly motivating. Other paths include enabling complex projects that would otherwise be impossible, allowing you to hire and grow much faster, and preventing disasters that could bring down a whole organisation - all things that Tanya does at FHI as well. 

In today’s episode we discuss all of those approaches, as we dive deeper into the broad class of roles we refer to as ‘operations management’. We cover the arguments we made in <a href="https://80000hours.org/articles/operations-management/?utm_campaign=podcast__tanya-singh&utm_source=80000+Hours+Podcast&utm_medium=podcast">‘Why operations management is one of the biggest bottlenecks in effective altruism’</a>, as well as: 

* Does one really need to hire people aligned with an org’s mission to work in ops? 
* The most notable operations successes in the 20th Century. 
* What’s it like being the only operations person in an org? 
* The role of a COO as compared to a CEO, and the options for career progression. 
* How do good operation teams allow orgs to scale quickly? 
* How much do operations staff get to set their org’s strategy? 
* Which personal weaknesses aren’t a huge problem in operations? 
* How do you automate processes? Why don’t most people do this? 
* Cultural differences between Britain and India where Tanya grew up. 

Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below. 

The 80,000 Hours podcast is produced by Keiran Harris.

#36 - Tanya Singh on ending the operations management bottleneck in effective altruism

How are we to make progress on AI alignment given moral uncertainty?  What are the ideal ways of resolving conflicting value systems and views of morality among persons? How ought we to go about AI alignment given that we are unsure about our normative and metaethical theories? How should preferences be aggregated and persons idealized in the context of our uncertainty? 

Moral Uncertainty and the Path to AI Alignment with William MacAskill is the fifth podcast in the new AI Alignment series, hosted by Lucas Perry. For those of you that are new, this series will be covering and exploring the AI alignment problem across a large variety of domains, reflecting the fundamentally interdisciplinary nature of AI alignment. Broadly, we will be having discussions with technical and non-technical researchers across areas such as machine learning, AI safety, governance, coordination, ethics, philosophy, and psychology as they pertain to the project of creating beneficial AI. If this sounds interesting to you, we hope that you will join in the conversations by following us or subscribing to our podcasts on Youtube, SoundCloud, or your preferred podcast site/application.

If you're interested in exploring the interdisciplinary nature of AI alignment, we suggest you take a look here at a preliminary landscape which begins to map this space.

In this podcast, Lucas spoke with William MacAskill. Will is a professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford and is a co-founder of the Center for Effective Altruism, Giving What We Can, and 80,000 Hours. Will helped to create the effective altruism movement and his writing is mainly focused on issues of normative and decision theoretic uncertainty, as well as general issues in ethics.

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Will’s current normative and metaethical credences
-The value of moral information and moral philosophy
-A taxonomy of the AI alignment problem
-How we ought to practice AI alignment given moral uncertainty
-Moral uncertainty in preference aggregation
-Moral uncertainty in deciding where we ought to be going as a society
-Idealizing persons and their preferences
-The most neglected portion of AI alignment

AIAP: Moral Uncertainty and the Path to AI Alignment with William MacAskill

New episodes no longer on SoundCloud, please go subscribe on a podcast app or here: https://80000hours.org/podcast/

#36 - Tanya Singh on ending the operations management bottleneck in effective altruism

The 80,000 Hours Podcast with Rob Wiblin

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