How can you best use your time to make a difference? What do you want to know about how to do good?
80,000 Hours now has several people working full time on research, and they would like your questions!
We’re happy to consider any questions about how to effectively make a difference, in whatever sphere of your life – volunteering, career or philanthropy. These questions could be at the conceptual or ethical level, or they could concern nitty-gritty practicalities.
We’re particularly interested in questions that are not already well addressed by other groups.
The most popular questions will receive the attention of our research team, and their findings will feature in our new careers guide. Either post your questions below, or send them to careers@80000hours.org
Comments
In general creating some basic metrics along the lines of traditional careers advisors, so that members can get some sense of the fields they might go into.
Would probably be worth separating into a list by maximum annual salary and by hourly salary, since someone working fewer hours might be able to put the time saved into good causes too.
As a slightly lower priority, the cost effectiveness of various orgs working on climate change - I’m hoping to write a proper argument on this, but the short version is that climate change research is common enough and poorly organised enough that there might be some very low hanging fruit in identifying the best groups for an individual to support. This might be more for GWWC though.
Another possibility is field testing various approaches to persuading people of certain ethical views, esp fundamental ones. It seems like there’s a lot of research on eg how to persuade people to become vegetarian, but not much on how to persuade them of norms that would affect whether they became vegetarian given the right extra stimuli (or that would persuade them to give up being veggie if it turned out to be a poor choice). I guess this is similar to Ruiari’s, except that it could just be for anyone to persuade their friends/people they were stuck in an elevator with.
As an afterthought - looking for ways to quantify the expectation from popular activities which people idly think of as ‘good’, and which might contribute to the effect Yvain talks about here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/1d9/doing_your_good_deed_for_the_day/
eg political lobbying, editing Wikipedia, discussing politics with friends or on internet forums or blogs, studying for an hour as an undergrad student (vs blagging), voting, etc. It might be quite powerful to be able to show people just how irrelevant some of their good deeds are.
Two more suggestions:
1) The effectiveness/impact of animal welfare charities/activities versus others (GiveWell-type global health interventions are probably the best standard of comparison). What are the best animal welfare organizations/causes? Is there any way we can quantify the impact of a donation to one of these places (in terms of animals saved, vegetarians created, or likelihood that new laws will be passed, maybe) so it can be compared to a donation elsewhere?
2) Careers in policy versus implementation. If I’m interested in going into international development, for example, what’s the expected value of my impact if I aim for a high level position in a policy institution (World Bank, UNDP, USAID, etc.) versus working on (or founding) on-the-ground projects? I don’t mean working as an aid worker–I’m more thinking about innovation and entrepreneurship as it relates to development work, testing out through implementation new models with the hope that they can scale up and be replicated by other institutions. (Career success in this case might look like founding a new top charity or organization.)
I’d like to see a bit more balance in some of the quoted numbers on the site. We’re told that investment bankers can save thousands of lives, but this seems to be predicated on an investment banker remaining an investment banker for a long time - but most investment bankers, especially coming from the place of most 80K members (new graduates) don’t last very long. Given that 80K is supposed to be developing new ways of thinking about career choice, I think the questions should be longer term. If i’m a 21 year old graduate, should I be going corporate finance/corporate law/entrepreneurial? At the moment, the advice is, when specific, about occupational choice (job choice) rather than career choice.
Frankly, I think some of the edgier topics of effective altruism, such as Ruari’s question about whether the world would be better or not if human beings were to be eradicated is just dangerous. I appreciate my value system may simply not align with others in terms of those values (that is, how I understand ‘the good’) that I seek to maximize (roughly, human QALYs), but it sounds like a public relations catastrophe - and I’m a dairy-reducing vegetarian, so not keen on increasing non human animal suffering. At least in terms of who earns the most money type questions, research can be neutral about where that money is donated.
The investment banker figure is also predicated on the cost of saving a life remaining roughly constant, something that will (hopefully) not be the case as easily preventable deaths from infectious diseases are reduced.]
Working harder to make money which one gives away is great. It is easy to be inspired about certain important topics, but how can we transfer that inspiration into a desire to “make more widgets” (or whatever insipid, high-paying job one might have)?
What are the best animal charities? I am a big fan of tissue engineered meat, but how likely is research into it to succeed, and if created, how widely available will it be?
I second all the questions on animal-welfare charities. :) One of my current favorite groups is The Humane League (http://www.utilitarian-essays.com/veg-ads.html).
“eg political lobbying, editing Wikipedia, discussing politics with friends or on internet forums or blogs, studying for an hour as an undergrad student (vs blagging), voting, etc. It might be quite powerful to be able to show people just how irrelevant some of their good deeds are”
Thanks, Zander. As a matter of fact, I think some of those are quite valuable, especially when done with effective causes in mind. It’s astounding how many people I’ve influenced by having discussions with friends and on Internet forums. And what are we doing now? :)
Yes, talking politics can often be not especially useful, but some targeted political actions may rank near the top of the effectiveness list. In any event, socializing is not necessarily a waste of time, since those connections will be valuable in other contexts (careers, soliciting donations, getting advice). I guess your point is just that people shouldn’t derive undue feelings of accomplishment from merely socializing.
Editing Wikipedia may sometimes be an astonishingly effective use of time (http://reducing-suffering.blogspot.com/2009/04/save-notes-to-wikipedia.html), especially if you highlight important information that’s missing or create a new page for an organization that doesn’t exist. Just think of how many people read Wikipedia articles and trust the content. And search engines usually rank Wikipedia high, so your SEO comes for free. Anyone up for writing a Wikipedia article about 80,000 Hours? ;)
I would be interested in additional work from the opposite side – how to live a more frugal lifestyle to keep costs down in order to have more income (from the high income job) to donate.
I’d also be interested in the good that can be accomplished from “ethical eating” (vegnism).
Furthermore, I’d be interested in what can be done with research, especially social science research, because this is what I personally want to go into and I think there are promising avenues here.
Lastly, I’d like more interviews with people in “high impact careers”.
What’s best to study in college if you want to create social change. How to effectively inspire many people as, say, the head of a charity you found? Information about effectively creating social change in general
Also could 80k look at the kind of questions raised here;
Specifically, do repeating returns on giving to developing world charities making them better at reducing suffering per dollar the non-human animal charities? Can we get the same kind of repetition with non-human animal charities if these charities are trying to inspire people to inspire more people or something like that?
I’d like to see engagement with the issues raised by Martin Kirk, former Head of UK Campaigns at Oxfam GB, in his recent paper Beyond Charity (
).He argues that NGOs are compromising their long term objectives by reinforcing frames that ignore the structural barriers to ending poverty. A consumer marketing approach to campaigning which encourages people to think individualistically about the actions they can take, he says, undermines the collective action necessary to address poverty’s route causes.
Is 80k similarly neglecting the potential we have to achieve things by working together? What conceptual frames does 80k encourage in its members and readers?
I think it’s important to determine which careers have the largest incomes.
On Brian’s suggestions - when reading this it seems as if one could distinguish high-impact blogging/discussing and so forth from low impact. This is an interesting and potentially useful area of research - which is a subarea of investigating various ways of influencing people (which seems to be a high-impact research question that is equally important to that of earning a lot of money but seems to have received less attention - at least in this context.
A question: At what point is it best to get people who start interacting with Effective Altruism to stop donating only to Efficient Charities (which are awesome) and start donating to technology related charities, either X-risk reduction, or transhumanist technologies in general? At what point will people be emotionally prepared to do the math and conclude that just like helping sub-saharan africa is better than helping suburbian neighbors, helping augment humans ends up creating more well-being, happiness, utilons etc… than does trying to prevent current suffering?
Diego, I’d say three things in response to your question:
Firstly, I don’t think 80k is ever going to be about telling people exactly what set of causes is best and demanding its members contribute only to causes within that set. They just ask people to weigh the evidence and apply as impartial a value system to it as possible, and follow their conclusions.
Secondly, probably more relevantly to you, there are people within it who’re focusing exclusively on researching such projects, both directly and looking into ways others can help them.
Thirdly, I don’t think anyone’s ever offered a sound argument that even a pure utility-maximiser should focus on exlusively on/eschew any of the causes that come under the ‘high impact’ subset. There’s a lengthy discussionref=”http://www.felicifia.org/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=629”>http://www.felicifia.org/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=629</a>) on this going on at Felicifia, if you’re interested.
Z
Eg, was thinking the other day if it would be a bad idea to mention complicating issues like the poor meat eater problem to aspiring EAs.
Hm, managed to make half a post above. The suggested topic was research into how to present EA issues in a compelling way.
Jesper asks an interesting question about bringing up complicating issues. First, I think we should never lie to or deceive people (http://lesswrong.com/lw/uw/entangled_truths_contagious_lies/). If tricky issues come up, let’s address them head-on.
That said, it can make sense to focus on some points more than others depending on where the audience is. If we’re approaching an audience that is just beginning to wonder if it should act altruistically, then it might be unwise to stress how complicated these issues can be. Human brains are de-motivated when issues are very much not black and white, even when the expected value of action is the same.
However, we shouldn’t refrain from discussing these topics forever. It’s important that we do bring up “poor meat eater” and the like when the audience is ready, because EAs make better decisions when they learn more. If poor meat eater is decisive against international aid, then so be it. If it’s not (perhaps because of other factors, like wild-animal suffering), then we can explain that too.
Brian: Seems reasonable.
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