Every day, almost everything we do is about prioritisation. When I pick BLT or egg-mayo, I’m prioritising. When a small business owner decides whether to hire a new worker or install a new machine, they’re prioritising. When we decide to increase the cost of energy in order to reduce future climate change, we’re prioritising.
In fact, one of the most dramatic conflicts of the twentieth century was over how best to prioritise. Capitalists advocated a spread-out strategy, where individual choices combine to guide the priorities of entire societies. Socialists believed that a central organisation is needed to set priorities for societies.
There are powerful reasons for avoiding the problem.
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It’s hard to know where to start. We’d have to, for example, find some way to compare reductions in human rights abuses with reductions in child deaths. It seems unlikely we’ll ever find a rigorous way to do that.
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It’s steeped in value judgements. No matter which way you go, you’ll have to make some ideologically loaded decisions. How much do you value unborn children? Animals? Artistic expression? Happiness? Some people will disagree with you no matter which attitude you take.
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It is hugely complex to analyse. How much good can you do by delivering humanitarian aid to conflict zones? Well, are you going to take into account the risk that delivering aid will prolong the conflict? You really have to. But then perhaps a long conflict might be just the thing to force a whole region to take international cooperation and governance issues seriously. You can’t follow the causal chain all the way down the rabbit hole.
But none of those are good reasons. The simple truth is that we have no choice: we have to prioritise our work. Whenever any person, group or government makes any decision about how to spend or what to work on they are implicitly making these comparisons.
And they’re doing it badly, carelessly, and unconsciously.
There are some groups working to tackle the challenge of global prioritisation. Organisations like the Disease Control Priorities Project try to engage with a specific part of the challenge. The Copenhagen Consensus has engaged lots of specialists in a broad range of fields to present the case for many types of opportunity, and has worked on comparing the best of them.
No one, though, is addressing the problem that matters most to the members of 80,000 Hours. No one, that is, until now. Over the next few months, 80,000 Hours will be putting together a rough first pass at answering the question “Suppose I’m willing to put the next ten years of my work behind any cause there is. Which one will make the biggest difference?”
It’s not going to be perfect, or even close. It will take advantage of modern research, with all the disadvantages and question-marks that entails. It will depend on a lot of assumptions, but where possible we’ll make those assumptions clear to let you decide. The first step, and one of the most important, is the list of challenges. Here’s where you come in. I’ve got a list I’ll post in a bit, but I don’t want to bias you. What do you think the most important challenges facing humanity are? Post suggestions below.
Comments
sub-optimal career choice
Nice post!
Researching the biological implementation of suffering and possible ways to redesign the sentient phenotypes to be equally functional without suffering ( i.e. Abolitionism, http://hedweb.com/abolitionist-project/index.html ).
This could use the attention of neuroscientists and renowned bioethicists.
If you cluster some problems, then surely, existential risks in general. But too many factors mislead people. Career advice help in this case.
Why does this post not mention GiveWell (http://www.givewell.org/), which does try to answer this question (http://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities).
You’re absolutely right that GiveWell is doing great work addressing part of this issue. The reason I don’t think of them as a global prioritisation programme is because they focus on a sub-problem (developing world aid) rather than the broader one. They do this for a good reason - a first pass suggests that developing world aid might be one of the most promising fields.
There are lots of organisations that do good work identifying and ranking cost-effective opportunities. The issue is that there aren’t a lot that rank globally - between different disciplines.
Givewell also has blog posts about why they think health in the developing world is likely to be one of the world’s best giving opportunities full stop. And it’s worth pointing out that Givewell Labs has the aim of considering any giving opportunities. On the other hand, Givewell is only interested in what you can do with your money i.e. finding funding gaps. Seb is more focused on what you can do with your career i.e. finding talent gaps. And even within funding opportunities, there will be opportunities Givewell is not considering.
That’s quite ambitious! I would add “radical uncertainty about the future” to the list of complicating factors.
John, I’m very sorry. You’re absolutely right that GiveWell Labs is really relevant and should have been mentioned in this post. It’s a pretty substantial oversight, and I’ll try to work it in.
Incidentally, Here’s my current working list of issues that matter enough to consider. (Some if only to rule them out). · Ageing · Animal Welfare · Biodiversity · Climate change · Communicable diseases · Conflict and arms proliferation · Education · Existential risk · Financial instability · Global prioritisation and metacharity research · Governance and corruption · Immorality · Insufficient charitable giving · Insufficient economic growth · Irrationality · Land degradation · Malnutrition and hunger · Migration · Natural disasters · Non-communicable diseases · Population growth · Unborn children · Research: social science · Research: natural science · Sanitation and access to clean water · Social inequality · Subsidies and trade barriers · Wealth inequality
Existential risk seems like it should be a set of categories rather than a monolithic concept to research in its entirety or pass over. Subcategories would presumably include these and others (including those that don’t necessarily involve extinction but permanently impair sentient flourishing):
Global nuclear war · Nanotech/grey goo · Bioterrorism · Naturally occuring disease · Permanent societal collapse · Stable despotic global regimes · Social causes of strife that might provoke any of the above · Runaway climate change that renders the earth uninhabitable (probably a separate category from climate change as we usually conceive it) · Sufficient consumption of local resources to prevent our ever having the means to reach further ones (where local could be defined various ways, eg using all resources on Earth, the solar system, or somehow using up one set of resources in such a way as to prevent our having intermediary technologies necessary to exploit a different set of resources) · Asteroid impact · Other astronomical events (fluctuations in the Sun, nearby supernovae etc) · Unforeseen results of new technologies · Unfriendly AI · Doloriumref=”http://reflectivedisequilibrium.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/are-pain-and-pleasure-equally-energy.html)-biased”>http://reflectivedisequilibrium.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/are-pain-and-pleasure-equally-energy.html)-biased</a> future (not really X-risk, but probably going to interest similar sorts of people)
(slight problem with breaking it up like this is it makes X-risk look overrepresented in a list if you don’t think the arguments for focusing on it are conclusive - as I actually don’t - or if you just have a value system that downgrades its importance)
In fact, all these categories are very broad. For example, one of the categories is “Research: Natural Science”. There’s room for subdivision within those categories.
Perhaps the idea of insufficient economic growth needs to be relooked at as well? I would say the focus on growth to the exclusion of other economic benchmarks is an issue… Other categories I think are extremely important are more practical: primarily energy and energy consumption/generation/distribution (like if the rest of the “developing” world were to suddenly be developed, where we would get the energy for them to live the same quality of life that the developed world currently lives at? Energy for 4 billion people is not an easy engineering feat, especially if you want to be conscious of human induced climate change)
Hmmmm…:
Inequity for women and girls is a key issue. It has many levels starting from female infanticide to unequal pay. It varies in degree between under-developed, developing and developed countries, but this is truly a global problem. It is one of those issues that can solve many other issues - like poverty, education, healthcare etc and most importantly, it brings forward half of the talent pool in the world more likely to solve such large problems when provided the opportunities.
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