Advice on how to read our advice (Article)

This is the fourth release in our new series of audio articles. If you want to read the original article or check out the links within it, you can find them here.

"We’ve found that readers sometimes interpret or apply our advice in ways we didn’t anticipate and wouldn’t exactly recommend. That’s hard to avoid when you’re writing for a range of people with different personalities and initial views.

To help get on the same page, here’s some advice about our advice, for those about to launch into reading our site.

We want our writing to inform people’s views, but only in proportion to the likelihood that we’re actually right. So we need to make sure you have a balanced perspective on how compelling the evidence is for the different claims we make on the site, and how much weight to put on our advice in your situation.

This piece includes a list of points to bear in mind when reading our site, and some thoughts on how to avoid the communication problems we face..."

As the title suggests, this was written with our web site content in mind, but plenty of it applies to the careers sections of the podcast too — as well as our bonus episodes with members of the 80,000 Hours team, such as Arden and Rob’s episode on demandingness, work-life balance and injustice, which aired on February 25th of this year.

And if you have feedback on these, positive or negative, it’d be great if you could email us at podcast@80000hours.org.