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Many academics want to do important research that makes the world a better place. Unfortunately, there’s virtually no guidance out there.
We’re aiming to build a resource of strategies and ideas for finding high impact research questions, as well as practical information about how to get involved with them.
In this post, we take a first step and explore how to find research questions that need your talent.
I recently came accross Taylor Conroy, who’s using an innovative fundraising technique to let ordinary people to raise $8,500 to build a school with just an evening’s work. The method has since been expanded to include water pumps and libraries. The fundraising is amazing, but I can’t help slightly regretting the goal towards which Taylor has directed his considerable talents. Building a school is a motivating, tangible project, which seems to obviously be a good thing. They can send you pictures of it after it’s built. But is this really where we should be directing our efforts?
Late one evening a police officer comes across a man on the way home from a party. He is quite drunk and looking for something under a lamppost. “What are you looking for?” asks the policeman. “My keys,” the man replies, pointing down the road a little way, “I dropped them over there.” The policeman is baffled, “Then why are you looking for them here?”. “Because there’s no light over there.”
The joke is old but it gets to the heart of the debate over quantification. Is it best to look for keys under lampposts?
There’s a second method for high impact philosophy. Let’s call it the bottom-up method.
Begin by asking ‘which are the biggest decisions that one typically makes in life?’
In a series of posts, I will offer a perspective on the “quantum quest” – the evolving attempt to make tomorrow better than today. Changing the world is certainly a quest. And while the evolution may appear to be smooth and continuous, it happens in discrete steps hence the “quantum”.
Somalia is in crisis. For decades it has been racked by civil war, famine, and political violence. Members of 80,000 Hours who want to help the people of Somalia will most likely explore various ways they can help and assess them quantitatively. Is it obvious that quantitative methods provide the correct tools to deal with a crisis like this? Or instead can quantification limit the kinds of possible interventions we think about, blinding us to significant long term solutions?
If we’re to believe the Internet, various apologists for materialism have quipped that whoever said money can’t buy happiness didn’t know where to shop. Indeed, the happiness of others can be bought at bargain-basement prices with a donation to an effective charity. If you’re thinking of donating a substantial portion of your income, though, it’s natural to wonder how your well-being will be affected. What can research tell us about this..?
Who was the most important person in the 20th century? JFK? Einstein? Bill Gates? On the one hand it’s a silly question. On the other our different approaches to answering it tell us a lot about how we think about issues of great importance…
Why are so many people dissatisfied with their jobs? A big part of the problem is that we’re pretty bad at predicting how happy things will make us, or how long that happiness will last. This has some serious ramifications for career choice…
When we talk about giving to charities there’s a dirty secret we try really hard not to mention. Some charities are “bad”.
Imagine you’re offered the top job at SCI one of the world’s most cost-effective charities should you take it?
Making a difference can lead to a satisfying career, so you might think we should just focus on making a difference, and happiness will follow. But, a I will show, we’re also more likely to succeed, and therefore to make more difference, in careers we enjoy. So we still need to think about which careers we’ll enjoy.
Every day, almost everything we do is about prioritisation. Given how important prioritisation is, and how much people seem to care about doing it right, it’s startling that relatively little research is done into how best to prioritise the most important issues facing society.
What do you think the most important challenges facing humanity are…?
We all want to find a career which makes us happy: but for many there seems to be a conflict between doing what one loves, and making a difference. My initial interest in 80,000 Hours was sparked by a desire to resolve a conflict between wanting to make a difference in my career, and wanting to pursue philosophy research (which I considered fairly low impact.)(1) I recognised that I could potentially make more difference by applying my numerical skills to a high-earning career and donating to greater causes – but the thing is, I just don’t want to do this. And shouldn’t this count for something, even for the aspiring effective altruist? Should we have to give up doing what we love in order to make a difference?
Among the goals of 80,000 hours is to provide resources to our community on the issues that matter most to us. As a result, we took the initiative to launch a new web-page dedicated to Effective Animal Activism: http://effectiveanimalactivism.org/, as a part of 80,000 hours, for our members to research, share, and act upon the most effective forms of giving our time or money to help animals.
If you want to be satisfied at work, what characteristics should you look for? Prestige, money, something you’re passionate about, a corner office? Books on careers guidance often start by asking you to consider your values and desired lifestyle, and then to find a job that matches them. But why expect this approach to work? Research has shown that the only consistently present characteristic of satisfying jobs is that the work itself is mentally challenging (1)(2). This suggests that finding challenging work should be the starting point for a satisfying career.
Lots of social interventions end up doing more harm than good. Many more make no difference at, and they’re just a waste of resources. At times, we’ve probably argued with friends about which interventions we’d like to see, and which we wouldn’t. But are we any good at judging what’s likely to work?
Try and guess which of these eight programs made a difference, which had no effect, and which made things worse…
This is an exciting time for 80,000 Hours. One month ago we took on our first full-time staff members. Over this summer there will be six of us working full-time on 80,000 Hours…
Should you go into a research career? Here’s one striking fact about academic research that bears on this question: in most fields, the best few researchers get almost all the attention…
In the last post, I showed that we can’t blindly follow the widely-quoted careers guidance “do what you’re passionate about.” A more reasonable idea is that “do what you’re passionate about” is a heuristic for career choice but even this doesn’t seem like good advice…