Chapter 357 - The World’s Biggest Problems And Why They’re Not What First Comes To Mind[4] (2/2)

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.