Chapter 357 - The World’s Biggest Problems And Why They’re Not What First Comes To Mind[4]

Broad interventions, such as improved politics

The second strategy is to work on problems that will help us solve lots of other problems. We call these "broad interventions".

For instance, if we had a more enlightened government, that would help us solve lots of other problems facing future generations. The US government in particular will play a pivotal role in issues like climate policy, AI policy, biosecurity, and new challenges we don't even know about yet. So US governance is highly important (if maybe not neglected or tractable).

This consideration brings us full circle. Earlier, we argued that rich country issues like education were less urgent than helping the global poor. However, now we can see that from the perspective of future generations, some rich country issues might be more important, due to their long-term effects.

For instance, a more educated population might lead to better governance; or political action in your local community might have an effect on decision-makers in Washington. We did an analysis of the simplest kind of political action – voting – and found that it could be really valuable.

On the other hand, issues like US education and governance already receive a huge amount of attention, which makes them hard to improve. Read more about the case against working on US education.

We favour more neglected issues with more targeted effects on future generations. For instance, fascinating new research by Philip Tetlock shows that some teams and methods are far better at predicting geopolitical events than others. If the decision-makers in society were informed by much more accurate predictions, it would help them navigate future crises, whatever those turn out to be.

However, the category of "broad interventions" is one of the areas we're most uncertain about, so we're keen to see more research.

Capacity building and promoting effective altruism

If you're uncertain which problems will be most pressing in the future, a third strategy is to simply save money or invest in your career capital, so you're in a better position to do good when you have more information.

However, rather than make personal investments, we think it's even better to invest in a community of people working to do good.

Our sister charity, Giving What We Can, is building a community of people who donate 10% of their income to whichever charities are most cost-effective. Every $1 invested in growing GWWC has led to $6 already donated to their top recommended charities, and a total of almost one billion dollars pledged.

By building a community, they've been able to raise more money than their founders could have donated individually – they've achieved a multiplier on their impact.

But what's more, the members donate to whichever charities are most effective at the time. If the situation changes, then (at least to some extent) the donations will change too.

This flexibility makes the impact over time much higher.

Giving What We Can is one example of several projects in the effective altruism community, a community of people who aim to identify the best ways to help others and take action.

80,000 Hours itself is another example.

Better career advice doesn't sound like one of the most pressing problems imaginable. But many of the world's most talented young people want to do good with their lives, and lack good advice on how to do so. This means that every year, thousands of them have far less impact than they could have.

We could have gone to work on issues like AI ourselves. But instead, by providing better advice, we can help thousands of other people find high-impact careers. And so, we can have thousands of times as much impact ourselves.

What's more, if we discover new, better career options than the ones we already know about, we can switch to promoting them. Just like Giving What We Can, this flexibility gives us greater impact over time.

We call the indirect strategies we've covered—global priorities research, broad interventions, and promoting effective altruism—"going meta". This is because they work one level removed from the concrete problems that seem most urgent.

The downside of going meta is that it's harder to know if your efforts are effective. The advantage is they're usually more neglected, since people prefer concrete opportunities over more abstract ones, and they allow you to have greater impact in the face of uncertainty.

Find out more about promoting effective altruism.

How to work out which problems you should focus on

You can see a list of almost all the problems we've covered here:

We've scored the problems on scale, neglectedness and solvability to help make our reasoning clearer. You can read about how we came up with the scores here. Take the scores with a fist full of salt.

The assessment of problems also greatly depends on value judgements and debatable empirical questions, so we expect people will disagree with our ranking. To help, we made a tool that asks you some key questions, then re-ranks the problems based on your answers.

Finally, factor in personal fit. We don't think everyone should work on the number one problem. If you're a great fit for an area, you might have over 10 times as much impact as in one that doesn't motivate you. So this could easily change your personal ranking.

Just remember there are many ways to help solve each problem, so it's usually possible to find work you enjoy. Moreover, it's easier to develop new passions than most people expect.

Despite all the uncertainties, your choice of problem might be the single biggest decision in determining your impact.

If we rated global problems in terms of how pressing they are, we might intuitively expect them to look like this:

Some problems are more pressing than others, but most are pretty good.

But instead, we've found that it looks more like this.

Some problems are far higher-impact than others, because they can differ by 10 or 100 times in terms of how big, neglected and solvable they are, as well as your degree of personal fit. So getting this decision right could mean you achieve over 100 times as much with your career.

If there's one lesson we draw from all we've covered, it's this: if you want to do good in the world, it's worth really taking the time to learn about different global problems, and how you might contribute to them. It takes time, and there's a lot to learn, but it's hard to imagine anything more interesting, or more important.