My favorite things 80,000 Hours published last month

80,000 Hours publishes a lot of new content every month. As a new writer here, I wanted to highlight some of my favorite pieces by colleagues that haven’t made it to Substack since I joined. These are pieces that I’ve learned something from or have recommended to friends — I hope you enjoy!

• Macrostrategy research career review: in some ways, macrostrategy underlies everything we do at 80,000 Hours — we can’t help people do the most good with their careers without understanding what problems are the most important and what solutions might solve them. If you enjoy thinking deeply about what humanity should actually be doing, this is the career review for you.

• AI safety fieldbuilding career review: the field of AI safety is growing fast, with lots of talented people working on hard problems directly. But there are still bottlenecks stopping more people from being able to do good work here. This review could help you to develop the talent and build the infrastructure for AI safety to keep people safe.

• Want to upskill in AI policy? Here are 57 useful resources: this post is exactly what the title says and it’s great. Send it to all your friends who are thinking about AI policy work!

• Podcast episode: Will MacAskill on why AI character matters even more than you think: if, like me, you spend a lot of time talking to AI models, you might be thinking about how they shape you. We tend to absorb traits from the people we spend time with — that’ll probably be true for AIs, too, so how do we want to be shaped? Will MacAskill has been thinking about that and similar questions, and I found his answers interesting. As a linguistics nerd, I also enjoyed hearing him say “moral” and “model” in quick succession (a Scottish flipped ’r’ sounds a lot like a ’d’).

• Podcast episode: Village gossip, pesticide bans, and gene drives: 17 experts on the future of global health: it’s true — 80,000 Hours has pivoted to focus a lot more on AI risk, and we’ve had less new global health content lately. But I still think about (and donate to) global health, and this is a great compilation of experts talking about what actually works. One of my favorites: an effective intervention that finds village “influencers” and recruits them to promote vaccines.