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Resources on how to do good with your career — and anything else we here at 80,000 Hours feel like releasing.
Matt: Hi, listeners, and welcome to FocusCast, a podcast where three 80k staff and a fourth 80k staff member who's usually not around, focus on three to four topics in the effective altruism universe, how they matter for you and your career and your view of the world. I'm Matt Reardon from the one-on-one team.
Bella: I'm Bella from the marketing team.
Huon: I'm Huon from one-on-one.
Matt: And our kind of sort of special guest, who's not exactly a guest because he does work at 80,000 Hours, but normally lives in Canada, is Conor Barnes. Hi, Conor. Hello. Hello.
Conor: Where should I look?
Bella: Yeah, we have an intimidating number of cameras.
Conor: Now I'm just gonna stare at Matt.
Matt: It is the same number of cameras as we had before. They are just actual cameras now as opposed to iPhones and webcams.
Bella: I just feel more like I'm being paparazzied.
Matt: Amazing. Well, the person we do want to paparazzi is Conor Barnes. I guess the reason I invited you on the show was because someone else at 80k shared these hundred tips for a better life, written by Conor Barnes. And I was like, I know who Conor Barnes is. He works at 80k. I didn't know he was a writer or that he wrote tips and things like that. And I was just really kind of taken with them and thought, like, wow, these things present a sort of, like, outlook on life and the world that are super valuable. And I have in my notes here something unfailingly positive, affirmative, but also direct. So is Ned Flanders the right analogy, or should I be reaching for something else?
Conor: Okay, so I saw your notes for this, and I don't watch the Simpsons. So I went to Ariel, my fiance, and said, can you explain Ned Flanders to me? And she could, and she gave the gist. And then we watched Ned Flanders highlights. My overall takeaway, and I'm ready to change my opinion. That guy's sick. He's unfazed. So far, it seems people around him, his family, seems happy. Homer, only through his own fallen nature, does he not rejoice in him. I don't know. Flanders seems cool. Yeah. Yeah. We all agree Flanders is cool.
Huon: I also didn't watch the Simpsons.
Conor: Okay, nice.
Bella: I haven't watched the Simpsons in a good many years. I think there's, like, one element of the Flanders kind of view on life that I don't fully celebrate, which is the, like, slight puritanical streak or something. The, like, you know, there's some, like, element of, like, constraint, even when there doesn't seem to be, like, a good reason of it for this, like, born of religious convictions. That seems like...
Conor: I condemn this. Yeah, totally.
Bella: Well, otherwise, seems like an upstanding guy.
Conor: Thanks, Matt.
Matt: Ned Flanders is taken as a compliment. Conor. May be the high openness. No moustache. Ned Flanders.
Conor: Yeah. Oh, God. Someday.
Matt: Cool. I guess, like, I don't know that much about your background. Sure. And our listeners certainly don't either. I thought, from an 80k perspective, it's very interesting that I think. Am I correct that you did not get a bachelor's degree from a university or otherwise?
Conor: That is true.
Matt: How did you go from job to here, if there's a common thread you could weave between it?
Conor: Yeah, I can tell it. So I was working minimum wage jobs. I was working at HMV, which I think you have in Britain.
Bella: We do. Yeah.
Conor: Home music video.
Bella: It's hanging on.
Conor: I'm so glad it expired in Canada while I worked there. It was a beautiful place, meaning I sold CDs and movies.
Bella: Wait, doesn't HMV stand for his master's voice?
Conor: Yes. Okay. Yeah, I get this messed up sometimes.
Bella: Oh, no. I was just wondering whether my worldview is about to be shot. Okay, great.
Conor: So I was working there and then started talking to a librarian, and I was like, I'd love to have your job. And she said, oh, we're hiring, and ended up working at a library and got it. I mean, I've always loved libraries and was super enthralled. And I ended up. I did go to community college. I got a diploma in library tech, which means some different things, but for me, it meant after that, I became a cataloguer. So I created records for books. And it was sick. But I also thought I could do something more exciting. Maybe don't take that to mean libraries aren't exciting. They are just maybe even more exciting. And part of what I was doing at the time was helping out coworkers with their Excel sheets, because I found these things called formulas, and they could save time for people.
And I thought, that's the sickest thing in the world. And Ariel, my then partner, said, I think you're programming. I think what you're doing is coding, in a way. And I was like, that's very interesting. And I thought about it a lot and thought, you don't have to go to a four year programme to end up being a programmer. This could be really cool. Part of what I looked at was the careers advice from a little site called 80,000 Hours. And that helped a lot. Shoutouts. And in the end, I taught myself to code using this online curriculum. I thought about doing a bootcamp and decided to just use this curriculum.
Bella: Sorry. I think me and Huon had the same thought.
Huon: A bootcamp?
Matt: Oh, God.
Conor: Oh, no.
Bella: It's like the only way that I can reliably tell the difference between American and Canadian accents is how they pronounce that syllable.
Conor: Somebody explained it to me recently that you can hear it with tomorrow. Tomorrow?
Bella: What happened tomorrow?
Conor: Yeah, so I didn't do that. I did a curriculum called the Odin Project Shadows. And this is during COVID. I might be giving you more detail than you wanted. I'm just giving you my life story.
Matt: Yeah, yeah. It's a lot of detail, I guess, like, from job to job. So you did the Odin Project. You learned that you were still at the library at the time. I guess you moved to something else or something else. And how did the leaps happen? I think is maybe the most interesting.
Conor: Sure. Yeah. So I was wrapping up that and learning how to code, and I was like, I think I'm about ready to apply for a coding job. I think I could do this. And around the time I wrote my tips post and it spread fairly well, and then I wrote a post saying, I think I'm about to start looking for a job. And this guy messaged me on Twitter and said, I like your writing. I'm looking for an engineer. Would you want to talk? And we talked and I ended up working for this guy's startup. And that's how it worked. And I'm told by every person ever that I got insanely lucky. And that is true. And that's how I ended up coding without a degree.
Matt: I mean, if you wanted to take the luck out of it, you could just say that tips post is great.
Conor: That's very nice.
Matt: It has a viral quality. Lots of people read it. Lots of people are impressed by it. They want to know who you are. I mean, interesting story. Back office 80k stuff is like, I never really talked to you very much. And then I read the tips post and I was like, I need to know Conor more. And I like, scheduled a one on one with you. And I was like, what's your deal, man? And then I invited you here, right? I'm just going to suggest that you maybe downgrade luck a little bit and say, like, insight and ability to communicate. And communicate. I think. I think that is fundamentally valuable, which is a kind of perspective on living and focusing and getting things done.
Huon: I think there's also something about giving yourself surface area to be lucky. This was a chance occurrence, so there's a sense in which it was lucky. But how many people read the post? That's a lot of people who you're having the opportunity. The first job that I got out of university, I met the person in a rock climbing gym. Like, I was not. That was not the result of me making good choices, getting a lot of surface area. That was brute luck.
Conor: Sure, sure. Yeah, yeah. Like, it was definitely a good idea to write publicly, and it was a very good idea to write publicly. I'm going to look for a job soon. Those are things I just highly recommend. Yeah.
Matt: Now, this thing did get on LessWrong at some point. Was it originally on LessWrong or did it just end up there somehow?
Conor: No. Yeah, I cross posted it there and usually I recommend people read it there because the formatting on my site needs love. But the formatting,on LessWrong is very nice, I think.
Matt: And I was going to suggest that maybe this had something to do with how you cross paths with the EA world.
Conor: I don't think so.
Matt: You can tell us that story, though.
Conor: Sure, yeah. I'll try to keep it shorter, but for me it was very gradual. I encountered the ideas in like, 2014, 2015 on Scott Alexander's blog, and for years I thought, nah, this is kind of dumb. I was like, that doesn't make sense.
Huon: Say more.
Conor: I think I just, like, didn't really take utilitarianism seriously and thought it, like, wasn't that functional. I think also I just was being unreasonable. And at some point I said I should actually look at these arguments in depth and I see if they seem true. And read Peter Singer and was like, some of this stuff's very well argued and eventually concluded, yeah, I don't have a good comeback to this. No, you got me, Pete. And after that, gradually did get involved in things like, I took the Giving What We Can pledge in 2019, in 2020. I did a bit of stuff with 1Day Sooner. And then in 2022, I said, I want some kind of job where I can feel really stoked about my impact in the world, and that's how I ended up here.
Bella: Can you say why you didn't take utilitarianism seriously? So it's an odd way to phrase the, like, I wasn't convinced of utilitarianism. Is it like, now you just, like, weren't engaging with it, or you had some objection that you now think is wrong?
Conor: In between those two things. Part of it was being kind of dismissive of the ability to calculate consequences. And I was like, you can't figure out the long term effects with confidence. So this whole project is silly, which now I think isn't a reasonable criticism. I think it is definitely an important criticism that we have to be aware of in terms of our inability to confidently predict our consequences. But we can still, like, we can make guesses. We can, like, try and think about it instead of throwing it outright.
Matt: Yeah, I'm interested to know. I mean, and I'll open this up to anybody. Conor, we can take you off the spot a bit. Like, I always feel like the counter objection here is just like, what else do you do? What are your alternative systems for deciding how to act? And, I mean, I have my own, but I don't know if you and Bella, you had things that you would have said you would have fallen back on if you had rejected utilitarianism as, like, a guide to action.
Huon: I mean, I think that when I first came across, like, vaguely utilitarian ideas as a 15 year old, it just immediately I was like, oh, yeah, that one. It's like we were reading a sort of book of, like, a potted history of philosophy in English, and we got to the chapter on Epicurus, and it's like, pleasure is good, pain is bad. And I was like, oh, yeah, forget all this other noise. This one. So this is really not my personal story. I think maybe the real answer here is that something like virtue ethics is the right answer. I think in terms of how I actually go about my day, a lot of the time, I'm much more motivated by try and be kind, try and be honest. Yeah. I think that you actually can do most of your life very well using these kinds of heuristics. And I'm very poor at doing the utilitarian calculus for whether I should open the door for somebody when they're a step behind me, you just don't need to do that. The place where I think the utilitarian calculus really gives you a huge edge is in certain, like, more clear cut cases where it's like, oh, we're trying to decide where to donate to. And for some of these decisions, you can make really clear comparisons, and you get orders of magnitude difference, and it's pretty straightforward in that case.
Bella: I don't think I ever enjoyed the virtue ethics framing just because I think there's a slightly, really overly prescriptive part of me that is like, but what are the virtues? But tell me the list of the virtues and what they mean. But define them. But define them well. Define them clearly. I just can't get over that or anything. I think I definitely couldn't as a teenager.
Conor: It is the vibeiest.
Bella: Yeah. And I'm like, I don't want vibes. I want answers, dammit.
Huon: I think that I feel this way very strongly, like within the philosophy tutorial room or something, where it feels so unsatisfying, there's so much arbitrariness. And then once you're actually out in the world, there is that much arbitrariness when you're applying utilitarianism anyway, like, you're actually relying on rules of thumb no matter what. And so I have a lot more time for it as like a practical guide to action than, and I think that's what, I mean, I'm putting a lot of words in virtue ethicists’ mouths. My understanding is that they think of it as a very practical guide, more so than this theoretically pure thing.
Bella: Yeah, yeah. I guess I just like, was annoyed by the kind of dispute where you'd be like, okay, so I think that we should act with prudence, and I think that means Xyz and the other person would be like, I think we should act with prudence, and that means we should act in the complete opposite way. And I'd be like, well, you're now at an impasse. You now have just no more conversation to have.
Huon: Right. But I mean, we just absolutely have discussions like this about 80k strategy, where it'll be like, we have these various heuristics that we are balancing between, where it's like we want to, in fact, grow and get people interested in the ideas that we have. We want to help them individually, and then we want to have this utilitarian impact and we want to do pretty well across all of these things, but sometimes we're facing trade offs between them and we'll have discussions that are like this, where somebody will say, my heuristic is more important. The other person says, my heuristic is more important. And then, like, I guess technically this could all bottom out in utilitarianism, but it doesn't.
It's actually just this sense of like, oh, we have all gone out into the world, we all have our different experiences, and that has informed our judgement, and hopefully that allows us to make wise choices, but it might mean that we make foolish ones. And I think that's just fine.
Bella: Yeah, no, I think, like, on a day to day like level, I just completely agree with you. And then there's just like some other part of me that's like, wants the clean and like conceptually pure, like, story that goes from epistemology through metaethics through ethics through like your everyday behaviour. And like, God damn it, I wish that, you know, it would be, yeah, maybe I want to stand up for it a little bit more than what I just said implies. Like, I think that we can get closer to that than at least some people imagine, or like, that the project is not entirely pointless.
Huon: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that Joe Carlsmith has this really great post on why or like whether we should be shooting for a very systematised version of ethics. And I think that some of the points that he raises here about like, well, we actually do need to be trying, like, what's the point of doing ethics unless we're trying to make it all coherent? Seems very compelling to me. And I really worry about being too easy on ourselves and just being like, oh yeah, anything goes. You don't need to resolve these tensions because then you never manage to get to new moral progress or something.
Matt: One example Joe gives of going off a cliff with your ethics, which is the thing he's responding to in his posts about saying, we all have these damning counter examples, but we do have to try to make them coherent. Yeah, one of the damning counterexamples was, oh, but then we all have to become libertarians.
Bella: Wait, why do we all have to become libertarians?
Matt: Like, if you treated like the non aggression principle or something as like the bedrock of morality that you had to extend to all situations or things like that.
Bella: I don't do that.
Matt: Yeah, I was gonna say that's my alternative. I was pretty happy with it back in the day.
Huon: What changed?
Matt: Scott Alexander.
Bella: Oh yeah. How did he convince you?
Matt: Yeah, I think it's actually kind of an interesting detour on like how people actually change their beliefs, and that's that they like just have like some belief at time one. And then there's a long period of time after time where like something else just like grabs a greater hold of their conscious mind and they think about a lot more. And the thing they believed at time one kind of goes quiet for a while and they never have to like confront or deal with it, and they kind of like go and revisit the thing they thought at time one later, after having spent a lot of time thinking about other things and be like, oh, I don't identify with that so much anymore. It doesn't really matter too much to me. So I think Scott got me thinking.
I guess I started reading SSC when I was like 23, 24, something like that. And I was kind of just starting in the professional world and making my own decisions and having my own job and things like that. And maybe this had some correspondence with like, oh, I have to make decisions about how I want to use my property rights and respect property rights is not guiding a way to guide those decisions. Yeah. And so, yeah, I thought about what should good principles be? And then, yes, God, of course, I think has a lot of libertarian sympathies, was not coming at me too hard and had a lot of other posts that were like, I was very sympathetic to. And you decided, hey, how about this giving what we can thing? How about this helping people on the margin?
How about being kind of hardcore about measuring and judging whether you've succeeded or failed and having criteria by which you can fail? And I was like, yes, crazy.
Bella: Love that.
Conor: Crazy good.
Matt: Yeah. So I guess, like, in terms of other worldviews that people might have. Yeah. Objections to EA utilitarianism have been in the news a bit. We're recording this in early May of 2024. And, yeah, I guess there was an article about the closure of FHI in the Guardian. FHI being the Future of Humanity Institute, a sort of like EA adjacent think tank that existed for many years at Oxford dealing with things like existential risk. Well, I mean, it predates EA.
And I think if you ask, like, Nick Bostrom, who's the lead researcher there, are you an effective altruist? Is effective altruism your thing? He'd say no.
Bella: Oh, cool. I don't think I would have got like, I don't really know anything about Bostrom personally.
Matt: And, like, sure, I think a lot of people who, like, passed through there and worked there did identify as EAs. And like, a lot of this stuff points in the same direction. But it wasn't like, you know, Will MacAskill and Toby Ord, like, how do we do the most good? We set up FHI. Oh, FHI already exists and they might have some ideas that we should pick up. And so, yeah, there was definitely this, like, confluence and things like that. But, yeah, I think a lot of people have kind of said good riddance in part because, yeah, like, I guess mostly because of, like, other things that Bostrom has written and said, you know, which you can go and look that up on the EA forum or whatever.
But, you know, I think we, in our jobs, just know many of the dozens of researchers who've like, passed through FHI and produced really good and valuable work, including like one of our favourite books to recommend to people is The Precipice, which I guess gets billed as sort of an FHI production. Toby Ord, who wrote The Precipice, was there for a long time and it's like, wow, really? I think the Guardian piece in particular is kind of telling, is because the two things they cite for Bostrom were both pre existence of FHI kind of papers and comments that he had made saying, good riddance to this, the word they use, eugenicist institution, because of these things that Bostrom had said earlier.
Anyway, this is a lot of wind up to say objections to ideas in the realm of EA and utilitarianism and things like that I guess kind of going off and coming from a very different place. And I don't know what you guys kind of make of these. Like, oh, there's some squeamish trade offs that utilitarians would make or questions that utilitarians would ask and comment on that shouldn't be commented on as like a category of objection that like people should take more or less seriously. I think they probably shouldn't take it very seriously.
Huon: You mentioned a specific class of objection here, which is like, if utilitarians are talking about stuff that would normally be seen as taboo, but they're not actually endorsing it, they're just like running it through their own calculus and trying to weigh the pros and cons. How much should that be a valid critique? And I kind of want to say that it is a valid critique, or at least if you're on the outside and you don't have a tonne of context, most of the people that you go out and see in the world who are weighing the pros and cons of eugenics, they're probably bad people that you shouldn't pay much attention to. It's just a pretty good heuristic. And I think you wanted to talk about some of this question of the offence defence. Balance in critiques versus building stuff up plays right into it.
Like, there's so much stuff to read, so much stuff that you could be paying attention to. You're always trying to figure out what not to pay attention to. And I think that this kind of thing is just like, I don't think people are making a mistake if they see something that is on the face of it, bad being. Having its prose discussed and then being like, probably that person is not worth listening to because they're violating a taboo. That's just like a good enough reason to not engage further.
Matt: Yeah, I guess, like thank you for helping me, by the way, Huon, talk about something more conceptual and more interesting. Yeah. The offence defence balance. Most ideas are bad, right? That's just a true thing. I think that we kind of like how many potential ideas, most experienced by human minds. Ideas just like won't achieve very much in the world, won't be worth engaging with for most people. I mean, you have hundreds and hundreds of errant kind of thoughts a day, right? And most of them aren't even worth uttering, you know, much less like taking action on the basis of or like convincing any number of people outside yourself of. And I think like, the ratio might change as people like, put things on the Internet and like say things on podcasts, but it doesn't, like, the sign doesn't flip.
Like, it doesn't seem like most ideas are good, especially in the whole space of all people talking about all things at all times. And so what people might do is my suggestion in our doc is like, look for reasons not to think further about some proposed idea in front of them. And one reason not to think further is association with some other idea that I've rejected, however loose. Association with some person that I've already rejected, however loose. Well, actually, wait, Conor, you have a rule that is almost the opposite of the rule that I laid out. Rule number 37 from tips for a better life by Conor Barnes. Foolish people are right about most things.
So just because you've noticed that someone is foolish in one respect means you shouldn't discount them in some other respect or not consider what they're claiming on the merits. Yeah. Has this triggered any thoughts in you?
Conor: Yeah, a quick point of order. They're just tips, they're not rules. Yeah, I mean, I think this is true in an important way. Like, people who have weird and incorrect ideas about politics or philosophy or what have you, often have correct ideas around, like, mundane but useful things like how to fix a car or what have you. And I think actually that the mundane but useful things list is very long and there is a failure you can make of just dismissing a tonne of people who have lots of knowledge about lots of different things but might be wrong about a few things.
Bella: I think that's about, like my stepdad, for example. Like, I think I disagree with him on like, many like, points of, I don't know, philosophy or ideology or something. Like, I think that, you know, whenever, like, you know, we have some. This dinner table discussion about politics when I'm back there or whatever, like, you know, it usually goes, okay, but, like, you know, I'm not. Yeah, whatever. But, like, also, he's, like, insanely capable about, like, a load of things that I could just never imagine being able to do myself. Like, he built a structure adjacent to my mom's house that, like, he did it with, like, by himself, with no help.
With no, like, he just wrote the blueprint, and his blueprint was, like, on a tiny little notepad, and it was like, okay, so it's gonna be like 10ft this way and, like, 10ft that way. Great. And then just went and bought all the materials and did it. And it's just, like, very well made. And I'm like, what the heck? Like, and we, like, can't have a discussion about, like, you know, whatever. Yeah. Yeah.
Matt: Does your stepdad have any interest in podcast setup?
Bella: I think no.
Matt: Drat.
Conor: On a scale of one to a bazillion, how much does your podcast setup irritate you?
Matt: I mean, today an awful lot, because I was basically, like, setting this stuff up for the last, like, four and a half hours, and I thought it would be more like an hour, but I got a bunch of new equipment. I don't know how it works. This might sound terrible. Sorry, listeners.
Huon: I was noting this, that in your recent forum post, you had said that we don't count this towards our work hours. And I was like, Matt's sure putting in a lot of not work hours in this workday.
Matt: Yeah. So today is definitely going to end up being an exception. In the past, I just normally work more than 40 hours a week, however you price it.
Bella: But, I mean, it's 10% time. You're allowed to do whatever you want with your 10% time.
Huon: Yeah. I also do not think that Matt, in fact, I would probably push you on the margin to work a little bit less, but you would hate that and say, I'm not going to try.
Matt: I have nothing else to do with my life. Wait, where was I going to go? Here. All right. Bella's stepdad is not going to help me with the podcast setup. However, Conor. So there are things we can learn from people we otherwise might dismiss or have serious disagreements with, but there are some people we should avoid.
Conor: Yes, I believe I know the tip you're referring to. Yeah. How does it go? I guess you have it in front of you. You should read it.
Matt: The perpetually aggrieved and the angry are two classes of people which should be avoided.
Conor: Yeah, totally. I think in its original phrasing, I'm like, these are just the people you should avoid, and that covers it. I think that's clearly wrong. There are lots of people you should avoid because some people are just dangerous and can either be harmful or just harmful indirect ways. Like taking up a tonne of time, energy, and you don't need that. And sometimes the signals are crazy clear. You're just like, that person's mad about everything, or this person, nothing ever goes my way, and eventually you won't go their way and it'll suck. So, yeah, watch out.
Yeah, I think the point here is, I think I've seen people underestimate how easy it is to avoid some people. Like, you know, you have a friend, and they're like, this other person is making my life crappy in some way. Like, sometimes the advice is, oh, okay, you should see them less. It's okay for you to just avoid that. That's a legal move, as it were, in the great game of life.
Bella: Does anyone have any theories on, like, what people are doing wrong or, like, what's happening to them when they end up being, like, a kind of perpetually aggrieved person? Because, like, I'm like, man, if I was in that situation where, like, say, I felt like nothing ever went my way.
Conor: Yeah.
Bella: Like, how would I get out of it? Or, like, how would I notice?
Conor: Right, right. Yeah. I don't know. I feel like it is a framing thing. Like. Like, some people take things personally. There's, like, things not going your way, and sometimes that does just happen. Like, you are very unlucky. And then there's the second thing of the world's against me, in fact. And I think that is the thing. Like, how you respond to losing a lot.
Bella: Yeah. Or, like, assuming malice, where indifference will do. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's not the phrase. It's incompetence. But I actually think that, like, yeah, indifference is very often the thing.
Conor: Yeah, maybe the thing I'm thinking about here is the anger and also just bitterness. You can avoid bitter people. And maybe as I get older, I encounter more bitter people. And I'm like, this is too bad. I'm sorry that this is how you live your life. But sometimes people do just end up, like, being very bad for themselves and bad for people around them. And I think when you're younger, it's easier to think, I've got to find a way to help you out of this in some way, but eventually you realise there is a class that you can't help. It's grim, but here we are.
Matt: Okay, we have just about segued to our third segment, where we just talk about various of the tips for a better life that we kind of like. I have the advantage of having the show notes in front of me. Bella and Huon, I don't know if you guys had particular ones that stood out to you that you'd want to bring up. Okay, so we can just run down the list. Conor, number 17. Done is better than perfect.
Conor: Yeah. I think the overwhelming failure mode I see is, you know, the perfect being the enemy of the good. Obviously the opposite can happen, too, but I really think it usually goes the other way. And done is really nice. You know, with friends who have projects like music or writing or other things, it's, like, really encouraging, I think, for them to finish things. And for me, when I finish things, even when they're not perfect, like, it is such fuel to then keep going that I really want to emphasise it.
Bella: The precise phrasing done is better than perfect is a little bit humorous to me as a hashtag classicist, because perfect is literally latin for done.
Conor: No way. Let's go.
Bella: And in some, like, older English, it retains some of this meaning, not typically in the year of our Lord 2024.
Conor: Sure. That's a really great fun fact. I had no idea.
Matt: Yes, I think done is better than perfect is definitely the attitude we've taken towards the show. And I do think it will hopefully have propelled us towards perfect by episode seven.
Conor: Right, right.
Bella: Yeah. I mean, there's this, like, there's this, like, podcasting thing that I've heard people who are really good at podcasts say of, like, oh, you should record, you know, your first episode, but you should throw out your first episode, or you should throw out your first three episodes. Or you should, you know, not show them to anyone for a bit. Wait until you're good or whatever. But, man, our first episode was just too good, bro. Like, we shouldn't have done that. Like, like, I agree with that in general or whatever. Although maybe you're just always inclined to think that you're sick and have good words to say to them.
Conor: I recently read this about writing fiction. Like, your first novel is a practice novel.
Bella: Well, a novel's a lot to write and then throw out.
Conor: I know, eh? Like, the author very immediately was like, I know. I'm saying a lot but I thought about it, and right now I'm editing a novel that is very dear to me. But I wrote a novella a few years ago, and recently I went to reread it, and I still have a lot of affection for it, but in the reread I was like, you were kind of practicey, aren't you? Here, I see some edges, so I'm sympathetic to it, even though it is.
Matt: It’s asking a lot, throwing out the first version of things. Another thing you could say is, quit things.
Conor: Quitting is so good. Yeah. Love quitting.
Matt: This is rule 26. If on the fence, quit.
Conor: I got this from 80k. Yeah.
Bella: Wasn't there some, like, meta analysis or maybe it's just a regular study that showed that usually people say that it's better if they did.
Huon: Yeah. So my memory of this is that it's a Freakonomics experiment, and they had a whole bunch of people who were on the verge of making sort of substantial decisions where there was a status quo bias. So it would be like leaving a job or breaking up with their partner or something like this. They then gave all of those people sort of like a decision counselling session, gave them a whole bunch of resources on how to make good decisions. Some of them were then like, okay, cool, I now know what I'm going to do. Exclude from the study. So you then have these people who are still entirely on the fence, even after being given all of this support. And then they said, hey, we're going to flip a coin.
And if it's heads, you do one thing, and if it's tails, you do the other thing. And then you can check in afterwards and see how many of them did it. And it's not anywhere near a perfect effect. Lots of people ignored the coin flip because that's a pretty normal thing to do, but you can see it's still an effect. And so then they were able to see how, of the people who made a decision according to the coin, how much better did their lives go if they quit versus sticking with the status quo. And six months later they were doing quite a bit better.
I think that this is a super interesting case, because in sort of like the philosophy of RCTs, there's this classic case of tuberculosis where there were these RCTs that showed some drug treatment was really effective for tuberculosis, when you cheque in six months later, and then it turns out that the tuberculosis just becomes resistant to the drug and you're just pushing out the death by six months, which is good, but people thought that this RCT was really showing that it cured tuberculosis, and so the RCT was ineffective in its aims, and you only get to see what you measure. And so in this case, you're finding out that people are happier having quit six months later or having left their relationship six months later. And you might wonder, well, how does that hold up going further?
Like, maybe there are these specific things about the relationship or the job that aren't working out, and six months after, you're still appreciating the lack of those specific things, and you're still like, I can probably, like, there's something good coming, but maybe there's not something good coming. And I, do I want to say this publicly? Yeah, whatever. Among other reasons for ending one of my long term relationships was this study. And six months afterwards, I was quite a bit happier a year afterwards. Was I? And, like, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, this is just the thing. We don't know how it plays out longer. The study didn't have a follow up, at least as far as I'm aware. But word of caution, I think.
Conor: I gotta delete a little tip.
Matt: Oh. You were actually relying quite a bit on our advice here, and our advice may not be as solid as you were assuming it was.
Huon: I think it's probably still. Yeah. My guess is that the status quo bias is still the stronger thing and we should probably still be more willing to quit. But...
Conor: Yeah, yeah, that seems real.
Bella: I mean, especially when you're not just fighting status quo bias, but, like, choosing to quit a job or leave a long term relationship, you're gonna have to have some pretty difficult conversations. And, like, at least in my mind, like, when I've been, like, hesitating about these kinds of decisions, it was partly that I just really didn't want to have those conversations that, like, I knew would upset people. Like, I knew it would, like, have some negative emotional consequences for me and some other people in the world, and I don't want to hurt them and I don't want to do any, you know, so to me, like, that's really strong, and I want to.
Conor: Yeah, yeah. Also, you could have the thing where, like, often leaving a job or a relationship, it's the right decision, but it still sucks for a long time. And so the fact that these people seemed pretty grand, still something compared to the shape of up and then down, that we worry could happen still, it's evidence that there's going somewhere from up, whereas we could have seen just down. I think that's the scientific term. Yeah.
Matt: Discipline. Much better than motivation.
Conor: Yeah, yeah. I feel like there's a thing of, like, needing to trick yourself with motivation or like, or worse, like, wait until you're motivated. And I think that's just actually, really, I mean, it isn't reliable and it's known that it isn't reliable. And I think the better thing is just creating a crazy rock solid habit. This relates to my belief that might not be in there, that you should be crazy careful about breaking promises to yourself. You should, I think, make promises to yourself only rarely. And when you do, take them crazy seriously, because you need to teach yourself you can keep promises. And I think discipline is part of this. Like, if you're gonna accomplish something that takes a tonne of work, you're gonna need to do it consistently, and you need to believe that you're the kind of person that does it consistently.
Matt: Do you have an example promise that you make to yourself?
Conor: Here's a recent one. Two years ago, my big thing, because I tried to do a big thing every year two years ago, was writing 100 short stories. And I took that crazy seriously. It wasn't too disciplined in that. Like, I wasn't doing it every day. 100 in a year is two a week. So that made this a little easier. But I did take the rate very seriously. Like, I could see how many I had and think, oh, I've fallen behind. And there is something, like, very positive about accomplishing it and then being able to say, oh, I did that. Just do about everything. I figure now, like, yeah. Because there's, like, a negative valence to this, to talk about the discipline and the grind.
But I want to emphasise, like, the positive effects of, like, trusting yourself to accomplish huge things because you've proven it to yourself in bigger and bigger things. Like, doing the hundred stories was pretty big, and I've done smaller things before that, and since then, I can do bigger things.
Matt: So it does happen at the level of, like, here's a specific project that I want to do, and I'm going to set a deadline and kind of quality, quantity, target for that product. And that's. And I'm just going to elevate this particular project to the status of promise to myself.
Conor: Yeah, yeah. Like, this year it's editing the novel, and that can't have a quantity project in the same way. It's more nebulous. But by the end of the year, I have to send it to an agent and that'll be a marker. And I guess I could not finish it, but still send it to an agent and be really embarrassed. But the point is to have it in such a state that I can send it to an agent and feel good about it.
Huon: This feels so unrelatable to me. I feel like I make promises to myself multiple times a day and I probably break 95% of them. Kind of awful, right? Yeah. But I don't know that I could be different. And I think that why does this not sync my whole life? It's that there are other things that I like. I have different tools that I can use that maybe substitute for this. So I think that the biggest thing is that I get other people to hold me accountable in lots of small ways. Some of this is in the workplace where I have a table at the top of my weekly meeting doc with my boss, where there's just a bunch of things that I'm supposed to do every week and I just colour in the boxes. It's just very visible to somebody else.
Each of these boxes will say, I need to have done this by Monday. I need to have done this by Tuesday. So, like, very clear resolution conditions. And then I think that I take promises to other people quite seriously. So if it's like, oh, I'm going to go rock climbing with you, or I'm going to go for a walk, these things like, get me to exercise and get me to be kind of healthy, I'm going to have read this book so that we can discuss it and I get by.
Conor: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, totally. I think all of those are, like, crazy good tools and are very reasonable.
Bella: Yeah. I also can't relate to what you were talking about, Conor, but I feel like for a different reason and maybe, I don't know, I feel like I'm just kind of confused about what discipline or motivation are at all and, like, how I can recognise whether I have any of them. Like, if I don't know what the difference is, I just kind of do stuff. Does that mean I'm highly motivated all the time? Does that mean that I'm just disciplined without trying? Does that mean that I just don't pay attention to why I do what I do? I have no freaking clue.
Conor: I mean, if you do the stuff you're stoked to do all the time, whatever the label, that seems good.
Bella: Yeah, I guess I definitely fall short of my ideal version of myself in a whole bunch of ways. Like, constantly. But I also don't think I really feel bad about that on, like, a meta level or something. I'm like, well, I'm a human being. I'm gonna do that, right? I'm gonna, like, try my best, whatever that means. And then I'm like, huh. Like, have I just missed out on, like, a whole bunch of ways I could be more like the person that I want to be?
Conor: Maybe. But it sounds like it's also not the worst. Yeah. I guess that, like, part of it might be me wondering, like, we have some conception of our best selves and. But I feel like it's hard to tell how far that can go. Like, just how good at stuff one can get. So I do think, like, getting in the habit of pushing oneself is good for expanding how far you think you can go. Because I do think it's per 80k, it's easy to be under ambitious.
Bella: Right.
Matt: I think there's a thread throughout the list that you actually say explicitly on a few of the items, but might not be its own item. And Huon’s comment on breaking 95% of his promises to himself got me to think of it, which is like, start small, is like, yeah, I guess reframe in the promise case this idea of a promise as something you do very rarely, but take very seriously. And just to show yourself that it works and it works reliably, just do some very small self promise and execute on it and then just very slowly ratchet it up over time. Yeah. Does that seem like something you can reset, Huon?
Huon: I have no idea. I think that before I came to 80k, I had this self perception of myself as someone who just was going to really struggle with productivity and organisation. And the onboarding document tells you to set up your calendar, and it has this whole thing about having your personal calendar so that it doesn't have clashes. And I was like, personal calendar? What? And I talked to my boss about it and was like, I don't use one and I don't want to. That's not going to work for me. And he was basically just like, no, you're going to use one. I'm going to make you do this thing for a month and it's going to make your life better. And it has made my life so much better.
So I think that there has been some of this where I think for a long time I didn't put in the investment to get the returns and I don't know, there's maybe some amount of, like, for most of my life, I was not on ADHD medication, and now I am. And like, a plausible story that I can tell about how ADHD medication helps, because it's not like a massive effect in any given instance, but it maybe gives you enough executive function to actually use the tools that other people use to find success. But I also think that some of it was just having a lot of support and external motivation to use these things. That said, I've lived in this brain for a long time and I have a lot of experience of these kinds of things not working out.
My guess is that if I could turn this into an experiment where I think I would get some signal about whether it was working with a small amount of cost, I should run that experiment and keep going with it. If it's going well, it sounds like trying to reset on this would just be a pretty big undertaking from the beginning, and I'm sufficiently unsure about whether it would work for my psychology that I wouldn't be excited about trying.
Conor: I also think external discipline counts. If that's your method, then it counts. It doesn't have to be an internal sheer will thing.
Huon: Yeah. And I also think that I am just quite lucky in a bunch of places where my motivation does take me to relatively healthy and productive places. If not optimally so, unfortunately.
Matt: We need to get this cartoon I saw on Twitter onto the site somewhere. Maybe it already is. Do you know what I'm talking about, Conor? We're talking about discipline, right? There's this cartoon I saw on Twitter, and it's like, here's little, you plucky stick figure person. It might not be a stick figure. I think it's more animated than that. And then there's motivation is this little fairy who winks at you and smiles and says, let's go, and let's follow motivation. And then there's discipline. And discipline is this golem giant figure. So the first frame is the fairy saying, let's do it. And you're like, yeah, sure, great. And then you get distracted and wander off. And the second frame is, like, the goal. I'm saying, you will do it. And he throws you over his shoulder and just, like, drags you.
Conor: It makes so much sense to me that this clicked with you. And was this the one that most clicked with you? The thing that. No, the one that you liked was the thing about your days becoming your life. Yeah, right.
Matt: Yeah, that just hit home. Right.
Conor: I'm glad.
Matt: This is. This is tip number 34, which is how you spend every day, is how you spend your life. And I think this just, like, localised this idea. And also people familiar with Zvi Mowshowitz, who's a guest on the big podcast recently. I don't know if he coined the term, but he has a great post about it called eternal decision theory, which is something that rationalists talk about, which is basically just this concept that, all right, whatever you do today, you have to imagine this is going to give you information about how every other day hence will be. So if you say you're going to do it tomorrow, that's actually evidence that. It's actually very weak evidence that tomorrow will be different than today, because the strongest evidence for tomorrow is today.
Conor: Right, right. I think mine came. It's a quote from somebody, and I really, unfortunately, forget whom, but most of these tips are from other people. Right. That's great. Yeah. The days add up, and eventually you've lived a life, and one good way to build the kind of life you want is just to build the kind of day you want and keep going with it. Right now, I spend almost every day writing, and at some point I'll be able to say, yeah, I wrote most of my life. That's really nice. I think that's a nice thing to aim towards for whatever gives you pleasure and feels good.
Bella: Yeah, this one really resonates with me. I think, like, one weird thing that's happened in my life in the last, like, I would say 18 months is that, like, I guess the whole time you're like a teenager, and then when you're at university, and then when you're, like, just out of university, people are like, they ask you, they haven't seen you a bit. They ask you for a day about your life. You have some, like, meaningful thing to tell them. You're like, well, I, like, just did my exams for my second year. Or, like, well, I, like, just moved to London. Or, like, oh, I started this job and it's going blur. Or, like, I got a new title at my job and it's just going blur. And, like, you know, since then, I haven't really had as many things like that to say.
You know, I've, like, been a lot more like, well, life's good. And, like, yeah, there's some part of me that wants to, like, chase novelty in order to have something to say to these people, to be like, oh, well, I, like, did this thing that sounds interesting and fun to you, and I have done that a little bit, like, not fully that being my entire motivation, but at least, like, feeling. That's like a nice side effect. But then there's definitely this other part of me that is like, well, if what you have to say is like, I don't know, man, life's good. It's pretty much the same as the last time you asked, but it's good. That's, like, pretty freaking great, or something like that. Maybe just adds up to something really awesome, even though it makes me feel boring to some degree.
Conor: Yeah, yeah. I think I'm very pro boring, solid lives. Just ain't nothing wrong with it.
Bella: Yeah.
Matt: I'm feeling better about the Ned Flanders thing.
Conor: Yeah.
Matt: In the interest of time, I think we should talk about what I think is the most, like, 80k strategy relevant tip. And then we'll talk about your writing. Tip number 36. Explain problems to solve them.
Conor: Yeah. This is a thing in programming. It's called rubber ducking. And the idea is you have your rubber duck, as one does in your bathtub, and you have some problem and it makes no sense. So you verbalise it to the rubber duck, as it were, and similar things could be explaining it to a human, but the idea being, like, in the act of explaining, you conceptualise it better, or you see the ways in which your concept is bad and have to rephrase it, similar to even just writing things out, and then you go, wait, that doesn't make sense. I see the issue now.
Bella: I think the 80k, April Fool's Day, 2022, was adding a rubber duck to our list of advisors on the staff page.
Conor: That's not fair.
Bella: Yeah.
Matt: Well, my build up to this was, how real is that?
Bella: Oh, right. As in, like, how much. Is that what the advisors do?
Matt: Yeah, I guess we do some of the active explaining of the problem, but I do my read and only partial worry, because I believe in the rule, is that, like, so much of what we put out on the website and so much of what we do in advising is, like, what are the big problems in the world? What are our top priority problems? Let's start from the top. Why is it a problem? What are the different elements of the problem? And just basically describe it in lots of detail and ask lots of questions about it and hope that this points to, like, tractable things that you can do to make progress on it. Like, I don't know. I feel like it's a way to summarise our main methodology for thinking about what. What careers, interventions and things are valuable. But you look sceptical, Bella.
Bella: I'm confused because that doesn't immediately ring true to me or something. But then I'm also not sure what's wrong with it?
Matt: It's like, on the website, right? We have problem profiles, and then I guess we have career reviews. And I guess I think of the problem profiles as having a certain prominence, as being the first thing that you hit and think about. I guess if you go through the guide, it's like, pick a problem first, and that's mostly details and explanations of the problem. And it feels like a lot of weight in what we do is there. And that's actually kind of our differential from different kind of career advising services you could imagine.
Bella: So there's like, yeah, I think that last thing is very true. Right? Like, there's a million bajillion places you can go where it's like, lists of careers that exist and, like, ways to get into them and, like, reasons that they might be, like, fun and fulfilling from your perspective. And then the strange thing that 80k does is doing the stepping back and being like, no, no, wait. If you want to do good, well, I'm sorry. And there are even lots of things that are like, if you want to do good, here are a bunch of career paths you can go into. You can be like a fundraiser for nonprofits or whatever.
Or like, yeah, I've actually been looking at a number of them recently as part of a project that I'm doing, which is like, the closest thing to, quote, unquote, competitor analysis that we can really do because we don't have competitors in the traditional sense. We're not selling anything, but we have other places that people go for advice. And I've been looking at some of them. There are just loads that are like, oh, you want to do good with your career? Like, here's some ideas and some places you can go and some jobs. We have a job board and we list currently open roles and this kind of thing. Yeah. And a lot of them using this frame of, like, which problem do you care about? Which one seems relevant to you?
There was one interesting one that I looked at today that was like, it divided things up into, you could filter the job board by cause area. So it was like, you know, education, wealth inequality, like, blah. And then you could also filter it by progressive ways of working, which was like, will they let you work from home? Will they, like, give you good, like, parental leave? Will they, like, you know, do they have, like, a fair and open compensation policy like this kind of thing? Yeah. Which I thought was, like, just really interesting to combine them. Probably people are interested in both those things.
Anyway, this was a tangent and I'm bringing it back around. Which is the thing that they do there. The thing that we do that they don't do is we're like, no, okay, starting from first principles, which problem should we even be trying to solve? And that's unusual. And then like the advice about the particular career paths we go into just flows from that. And, and I think the reason that it's that way around is just that, well, the first, there's like the theoretical thing where it's cleaner, but the other thing is that there's this claim which we have backed up in an article that almost nobody reads that the difference in impact between problem areas varies more on average than the difference in impact of different roles within a problem area, different plausible roles for all of these, as like, obviously there's useless stuff you can do on any problem.
Huon: Yeah, there's also just like a bunch of different things that you can do. Like a lot of people that I speak to will say, oh, yeah, I think that, you know, AI is really important, but I'm not well suited to work on that. So I don't, I've never really looked into the arguments and I'm like, right, but you could work in policy or you could work in operations, or you could work in field building. I mean, maybe you can't for any specific one, but once you have decided that something is actually the most important problem in the world, you're probably going to become much more creative and figure out a way for you to slot in. And I think that this is a reason to at least engage someone seriously.
It only goes so far as the classic thing of Greg, what's his last name? Doctor man Greg Lewis, who thinks AI is very important but has a medical degree and so works more on biosecurity. And I'm like, great, that makes a tonne of sense to me. But I think people are far too quick to dismiss and don't engage with the arguments.
Conor: What do you think is happening there? Is it like people just have a narrow idea of what work they can do or...?
Bella: Yeah, I think it's also just like, I feel like when I, and this is just speaking for myself, when I was like thinking about what I was going to do with my career before I encountered 80k or anything like it, I like just was like, had such a strong view of like the skills that I'd already developed and already invested, and I was like, oh, well, I've studied classics, so I'm gonna, like, do something that uses classics somehow or is, like, at least a thing that people with classics degrees typically do, which is, like, such a weird, like, narrow hat to put on. But it was like, one that just, like, I don't know, it seemed like the way that people talk about careers is, like, great. Which one leads on from your degree or, like, leads on from your, like, interests or skills or the subjects you were good at in school?
Conor: I kind of wish you had found the classics EA synergy.
Bella: I have one somewhat interesting story that I tell here. It'll take 30 seconds. It's not my story. So you know how they do the intro fellowship to EA for people learning about the ideas for the first time. But there's also this second one which has changed names a bunch of times, and I don't know what EA are calling it now if they're still running it. But, like, we decided to call it the in depth fellowship or in depth seminar programme, whatever, which is like, you know, once you've done the intro one, what else do you do? And in America, a lot of schools are running it called the Intro fellowship, the Arite fellowship. Arite is Greek for virtue, or, like, yeah, general moral goodness. Okay.
And so they were like, okay, so we want a word that is in Greek to call the in depth fellowship that we can use and the thing that they were gonna call it while they were like, what's different about the in depth fellowship versus the Arite fellowship? Well, the in depth fellowship is more like applying the ideas to your career and how you can blah, blah. So we're gonna call it the Greek word for career, which they looked up, and it was doulea, except for doulea is actually the Greek word for slavery. And this is, like, the only time that, like, knowing ancient Greek would have been relevant for anything was like, yeah, it wasn't me who got them, but it was like some other classicist was like, yeah, maybe don't call it the doulos evolution.
Conor: But it's happened once. Something like this could happen.
Bella: You never know.
Huon: I think that maybe a different problem that people have here is that they really overrate the knowledge that they have learned in their undergrad and really underrate the skills where, like, Bella, you don't use your classics degree knowledge on a day to day, but you use your classics degree skills all the time because you just, like, learned a bunch about research and writing and communication and stuff. And I think this is probably the mistake people are making when they close off too quickly.
Conor: That makes sense.
Matt: Speaking of writing, Conor, we're nearing time to wrap, and I feel like you should tell the world about your writing.
Conor: So I write. That's the main thing I do for fun as a hobby. It's that or make music. But writing is the one that, by far, takes up the most time. Yeah. It gives me such unadulterated joy. The other day, Alex Lawsen asked me if I would get AI to help me edit, and I was like, no. Why would I diminish my own happiness? So right now, I'm editing a novel. I wrote the first draft last year. It's very skeletal. And this year I'm giving it all the muscles to make it actually enjoyable. The main thing I like to do is write short stories, some of which I send Bella and say, please read this. Please tell me what you think. And Bella gives very good thoughts.
Bella: I love reading your short stories.
Conor: Thank you very much. Yeah, some of them are online in various online magazines. Some are on my substack: parhelia.substack.com. Parhelia being the atmospheric phenomena where it happens on the horizon, where it seems like there are two fake suns at 60 or 30 degrees from the sun, and those are moxons or sun dogs or perhelia. And I just think that's beautiful.
Bella: Sun dogs.
Conor: Yeah. Which is less beautiful, but very interesting.
Bella: Is this like a hot dog or like a dog?
Conor: I don't think it's like a hot dog. I can say that for sure. Yeah.
Bella: Well, I was thinking it's like, you know, like this. Okay, bear with me. So there's two suns as the sun is going below the horizon.
Conor: I'm not even sure it might be coming up. It's on the horizon.
Bella: On the horizon. Then it's like there's like a cylinder of sun between them, which would be the hot dog in this analogy. Okay, never mind.
Conor: I am glad you pushed yourself.
Matt: Well, that's a fun thing for listeners to explore.
Huon: Yeah.
Conor: Yeah. You have homework.
Matt: What is the parhelia phenomenon and how much is it like a hot dog?
Conor: How much should it be like a hot dog?
Bella: And how much would the concept taste good if you could eat it? I think maybe. I think, yeah, it's like quite like a tasty word, in my opinion.
Conor: Sun dog.
Bella: Well, parhelia, but I would have said parhelia, but I don't know. Yeah.
Matt: Well, you can find short stories on parhelia dot substack.com and look up Conor Barnes for the magazine publications and look forward to his forthcoming novel sometime in 2025.
Conor: Someday. Someday. Thank you very much, Matt.
Matt: Amazing. Conor, it's been great having you in London. He normally works from Canada. That's the whole gag where Conor is a guest despite working here. And, yeah, I was glad to have you on. And thank you, everyone, for listening. Take care.