What's the effect of installing PlayPumps compared to funding hand pumps?

PlayPumps International

Good intentions aren’t enough

Imagine you’re in charge of a hospital…

Causes don't deserve support. People do.

How much should the government pay to save 200,000 birds?

How to avoid scope neglect

Which strategy do you think brings the greatest reduction in CO2e emissions per $100 of US government spending?

How many more lives does the most effective global health charity save per $100 spent than additional UK public health spending?

How much more can be accomplished per $100 implementing the most effective solution for Problem B than Problem A?

What is the best way for you to help?

We are in triage every second of every day

Why the problem you work on is the biggest driver of your impact

How to achieve hundreds of times more

Have more people died from causes directly related to terrorism or COVID-19 over the last 50 years globally? How much more?

Factor 1: Importance

How much does the US government spend on terrorism vs. pandemics?

Factor 2: Neglectedness

Do preventative-care home visits to elderly patients by healthcare professionals improve life expectancy?

Do drug substitution programs reduce criminal offending among drug addicts?

Does formally processing crimes committed by juveniles reduce criminal re-offending?

Factor 3: Tractability

The ITN framework

Which of the following problems is higher impact to work on according to the ITN framework?

The ITN framework, cost-effectiveness, and cause prioritisation

Introduction to EA – Why & How to Prioritize Problems to Work On

Global priorities research & shaping the ideas of intellectuals

We can use science to end poverty faster. But how much do governments listen to it?

Choosing the most critical problem

What happened to GDP per capita in England after 1825?

Our wealth across the ages

The industrial revolution changed everything

Comparing wealth across countries and time

We’ve seen progress across most areas of our lives

Billions now live free from extreme poverty

We’ve become vastly better educated

In what period did global life expectancy grow the most?

Our growing life expectancy

We could make the future radically better

Takeaways

The world is much better; The world is awful; The world can be much better

We radically improved the world, and could again

Know whether you’re actually helping

What impact did your colleague have from pushing the doctor out of the way to do CPR?

The real impact of saving a life

What was your true counterfactual impact?

Real positive change wouldn't have happened without you

Does Scared Straight help difficult kids commit less crime?

Scared straight?

You can accomplish more in hard-to-replace jobs

'Replaceability' isn't as important as you might think (or we've suggested)

Shapley values: Better than counterfactuals

How to be irreplaceable

Who deserves our concern?

Should you report the kidnapping to the police?

Kidnapper conundrum

We should care for moral patients

A golden rule

The all-knowing dictator

The blind dictator

We’re making moral progress

Same-sex relationships are now legal in the majority of countries

Approval of marriage between Black people and White people flipped from 4% to 94%

Many more women now enter the workforce than a century ago

We’re not done yet

Being a moral entrepreneur

Our descendants will probably see us as moral monsters

Identifying and tackling prejudice

Every answer has an element of uncertainty

Expected value is a tool for handling uncertainty

Assuming you could afford to lose, should you take this bet?

Let’s make a bet

Averting a nuclear disaster

What is the expected value, in additional years of healthy life, of a dose of Paxlovid?

Paxlovid

Expected value is used by leaders across industries

Which of your options has the highest expected value?

Sink or swim

Probabilities can be subjective and made up

If we accept GiveWell’s analysis, what increase should we expect for receiving deworming treatment?

Deworm The World

Expected value doesn’t handle extremes gracefully

The Fox And The Hedgehog: A Story of Triumphs and Tragedy

Moral cluelessness, population ethics, and probability within a multiverse

How to manage uncertainty in impact

Which problem should you work on?

Your career is loooooong…

You could change the course of history

There’s never been a better time to change the world

Which option would have a bigger direct impact on CO2 emissions?

Which of these factors has the strongest relationship with happiness on average?

Which graph best describes the relationship between income and happiness?

You can be financially secure and impactful

Take action

How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You)

80,000 Hours: Find a fulfilling career that does good

Making the most of your career

At what age is the average American’s salary the highest?

Build career capital to set yourself up for success

How often do we change our minds about our values, relative to what we expect?

Conduct quick tests to find your best long-term option

To get the best score you can, how many hours should you research before you start writing?

How much should you research?

What percent of technology startups fail to return a positive investment?

Reach high, with a backup

Score your options

Career exploration: when should you settle?

What to do when you’re uncertain

How many citations do the top 20% of scientists account for?

1_How many citations do the top 20% of scientists account for

You won’t know if something’s a good fit for you until you’ve tried it

What percent of American undergraduate students change degrees?

Take small steps to become more confident in a degree

How many passionate students are there in sports, music, or art for every job?

Don't blindly follow your passion

How often, on average, does a member of Gen Z change jobs?

Try out more options than you think you need to

Which undergraduate degree has the highest median salary?

Choose a flexible degree to not lock yourself in

High school is 12 years long. What is the value, in increased earnings, of finishing that last year of high school compared to finishing only 11 years?

Prestigious degrees open doors

Infrequently asked questions

Many Undergrads Should Take Light Courseloads

Half-assing it with everything you've got

What to study at university

Compare your long-term paths

Create a plan that makes sense for you

Your most impactful, fulfilling career

Common misconceptions

How many lives a doctor saves

What's more important to check to find out if this charity would actually help people?

Save The World By Helping Things™

The overhead myth

Compared to a doctor, how many more lives per year does Elijah, the engineer, save?

What does it cost in the field of global health to save a life, to the nearest order of magnitude?

How does the median American income compare to the rest of the world?

How rich will you be?

You can save lives without a medical degree

Join or build a community changing the world

Confidently taking your next steps

How you can help now

How to actually change the world

Lifestyle profile of average log earnings

Since it’s difficult to measure productivity or impact directly, we can use 

dramatically more economically productive

We see rising productivity in other data, such as when people are most likely to do work that 

By making thoughtful choices early in your career, you can set yourself up to achieve more when you've amassed more skills, clout, and experience.

The average American’s salary is the highest age 51 - 60.

We aren’t born with the innate abilities to achieve world optimization.

So when evaluating your career options, you should consider how well a degree or job sets you up to 

Any of your skills, connections, knowledge, degrees, financial resources and reputation can enable you to achieve more. That’s your 

Career capital is just all the choices that permanently increase your 

. For example, if you learn a new language, complete a high-profile project, or form a strong relationship with someone you admire, it can keep opening doors indefinitely.

It’s good to be excited about the next big opportunity, but make sure you’re also building skills and relationships that 

Accurately – About as often as we expect

The End of History Illusion

 to their personalities, preferences, and values over time.

 options that match their current interests.

This underscores the importance of building 

in to our plans: we change a lot, and more than we expect.

We change our mind more often than we expect.

Many people think that their motivations and interests are set in stone, but 

This means that it's important to test out different options 

 before spending tens of thousands of hours working in them.

 you could do right now to explore a field:

Examples of quick ‘tests’

A term paper is due tomorrow, worth a large chunk of your grade. Unfortunately, you forgot about it, and have only 

There are two actions available to you, and each takes exactly one hour. You can either 

You don’t actually have any ideas yet, so if you just write without any research, each hour of writing only nets you 5 points out of 100 on your final grade, to give you a failing grade of 50.

But don’t despair, you can do some research as well as write, to improve your grade.

An hour of researching doesn’t get you any credit directly, but helps shape your thinking for when you do start writing: specifically, each hour of research has a 50% chance you find nothing, and a 50% chance that you find something great, which gives you an 

To get the best shot at a good grade, you needed to spend a lot of your time researching, even though any given of hour of research might turn up nothing.

This is just a toy example, but the real world is full of cases where you need to 

 between figuring out what to do, and then actually doing the best action you’ve found.

Some of the biggest examples of this are choosing where to attend college, choosing a life partner, and choosing a career.

, and in a variety of scenarios it’s important not to neglect the exploration phase.

Nerdy aside: What’s the value of information?

Nerdy aside: Show me the math

It could go better or worse depending on luck, but with 

 and 6 hours of writing, you should expect to score about 90 points - you’ll squeak by with an A!

It’s better to find our strongest option earlier than later, as then we’ll have the 

 in a job that’s more satisfying or impactful.

But it’s challenging to know our strongest option without having 

Quick tests are a great way to explore your options 

Some quick tests you could do right now

 is a new company that may or may not ever be profitable, but that has some chance (often small) of becoming highly profitable. Think about Google in 1998. They often seek massive investments up front to try to grow and turn a profit for their stakeholders.

However, they can still be worth starting because of how valuable it’d be if they succeeded. By one estimate, the average net worth of founders who go through Y Combinator – the most prestigious startup accelerator – increased by 

So while it makes sense to be ambitious, it 

Another reason to have fallbacks is that some people report 

 of technology startups fail to return a positive investment.

To make a really big difference to the world, it is likely that you will 

You’ll have to try to do things that are really hard, or that no one else is doing. To empower yourself to be ambitious, it’s smart to 

A safe fall-back ensures that you’ll still be able to eat, have a roof over your head, good relationships etc. if it all fails.

One component of this back up is having a cash buffer in case you fall on hard times. We generally recommend saving

If you have options in mind, it can be helpful to score them in terms of their probable impacts on your career capital. Here’s a sample table with some ideas a talented high schooler might consider (or dream about).

If you want to fill out a table of your own, make a copy of 

What to do when you’re uncertain

What you'll be able to do