Take Rosa Parks, who in 1955 refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus, sparking a protest which led to a Supreme Court ruling that segregated buses were unconstitutional. Parks was a seamstress in her day job, but in her spare time she was involved with the civil rights movement. When Parks sat down on that bus, she wasn’t acting completely spontaneously: just a few months before she’d been attending workshops on effective communication and civil disobedience, and the resulting boycott was carefully planned by Parks and the local NAACP. After she was arrested, they used widely distributed fliers to launch a total boycott of buses in a city with 40,000 African Americans, while simultaneously pushing forward with legal action. This led to major progress for civil rights.

There are many ways to communicate ideas. One is social advocacy, like Rosa Parks. Another is more like being an individual public intellectual, who can either specialise in a mass audience (like Carl Sagan), or a particular niche (like Paul Farmer, a medical anthropologist who wrote about global health). Or you can learn skills in marketing and public relations and then work as part of a team or organisation to spread important ideas.

Why are communication skills valuable?

In the 20th century, smallpox killed around 400 million people — far more than died in all the century’s wars and political famines.

Although credit for the elimination of smallpox often goes to D.A. Henderson (who directly oversaw the programme), it was Viktor Zhdanov who lobbied the World Health Organization to start the elimination campaign in the first place — while facing significant opposition from the members of the World Health Assembly (the proposal passed by just two votes). Without his communication skills, smallpox’s elimination probably would not have happened until much later, costing millions of lives, and possibly not at all.

So why has communicating important ideas sometimes been so effective?

First, communicating ideas is a way to have an impact on a large scale. Ideas can spread quickly, so communicating ideas is a way for a small group of people to have a large effect on a problem. Ideas can also stick around once they’re out there, meaning your impact persists.

If you can mobilise two people to support an issue, that’s potentially twice as impactful as working on it yourself.

Technology has magnified these effects even further. More than ever before, normal people can launch a social movement, lobby a government, start a campaign that influences public opinion, or just persuade their friends to take up a cause. When successful, these efforts can have a lasting impact on a problem that goes far beyond what the communicators could have achieved directly.

Second, spreading ideas that are important for society in a concerted, strategic way is neglected. This is because there’s usually no commercial incentive to spread socially important ideas. Moreover, the ideas that are most impactful to spread are those that aren’t yet widely accepted. Standing up to the status quo is uncomfortable, and it can take decades for opinion to shift. This means there’s also little personal incentive to stand up for them.

Third, communicating ideas is an area where the most successful efforts do far more than the typical efforts. The most successful communicators influence millions of people, while others might struggle to persuade more than a few friends. This means that it’s a high-risk strategy in the sense that your efforts might very well come to nothing. But it’s also high reward, and if you’re an especially good fit for communicating ideas, it might well be the best thing you can do. (Read about why we think more people should dream big if they want to do good.)

We think there are many high-leverage opportunities to use communications skills to help address the global problems we’re focused on today.

The problems we highlight are unusually neglected, so often few people work on them or even know they’re problems. This means that simply telling people about these problems (and effective solutions to them) can be high impact by increasing the number of talented people who might want to help. (Indeed, that’s part of our own strategy for impact!)

More specifically, communicators can help do things like:

• Encourage the consideration of ideas about the way AI might shape this century.
• Put concern for nuclear security back onto the political agenda.
• Spread important values, like moral concern for nonhuman animals and distant future generations.
• Mobilise efforts to prevent a pandemic much worse than COVID-19.
• Stand up for technology agnosticism to tackle climate change, especially for approaches that are unfairly unpopular (e.g. nuclear energy) or unknown (e.g. hot rock geothermal) or unsexy (e.g. decarbonising the cement industry rather than electric cars).
• Spread the ideas of effective altruism, as well as adjacent ideas like improving judgement and decision making (as in the example of Julia Galef below).
• Provide AI researchers and policymakers with the understanding required to successfully navigate the challenge of AI alignment.

Spreading important ideas like those above might not only have immediate benefits in terms of getting more people to work on these issues — it also helps to advance society’s understanding of these ideas, moving the discourse forward, making important ideas more mainstream, and eventually shaping policy and social norms.

You can see more information on the best solutions to the global problems we focus on in our problem profiles.

Another advantage of learning these skills is that they can be applied to almost any pressing problem. Almost all organisations have some need for marketing, public relations, and other external communications, and almost all problem areas have ideas that would be useful to spread. This gives you a lot of future flexibility.

Moreover, although some versions of this skill set are mainly useful in the social sector and for having an impact (e.g. how to run a direct action campaign), there are skills in this area that are highly paid and make you generally employable, such as marketing, sales, or public relations. Similarly, building an audience as an individual communicator often opens up a wide range of future career opportunities within your audience. So, learning these skills can give you backup options if you decide to step back from doing good for a while or earn to give.

A word of warning: it seems fairly easy to accidentally do harm if you promote mistaken ideas, promote good ideas in a way that turns people off (e.g. by being sensationalistic or dishonest), or draw people’s attention away from even more important issues. So, be careful about communicating ideas without much input from others, and, if you’re building communication skills, you may also need to build especially good judgement about which ideas to communicate and how to best communicate them.

What does building communication skills typically involve?

Content creation skills

One path we recommend to readers is to become a content creator. This often includes:

• Journalism
• Social media content creator
• Writing books
• Public intellectual

Less often among our readers it might involve:

• Film/TV/documentary director
• TV or Radio presenter
• Actor or musician

You’ll want to focus on the medium that’s the best fit for you, with the goal of building the most valuable audience you can for spreading important ideas.

Content creation careers often involve the following steps:

1. Honing your craft. Typically, a content creation career starts with learning your medium and then learning how to communicate effectively with a certain target audience (usually starting small, like with Twitter or a blog).

   Being really prolific helps a lot. If you’re able to make loads of different videos, or write 100 articles to pitch to various media outlets, that will substantially increase your chances of success. So if you’re blogging once a month and it’s not working out, see if there’s a way you could write a lot more.

2. Building an audience. If you’re working in a large organisation — for example, as a journalist — the idea is to build career capital so you can move somewhere that has a large audience.

   If you’re pursuing a career where you work more individually — for example, as a social media influencer or writing books — you’ll need to build an audience yourself. To do this, create lots of material to develop an audience to grow your future impact.
   You can probably jump around between working in large organisations and working individually — focus on finding opportunities where you’ll learn the most.

   In this stage, you shouldn’t necessarily be focusing on impact right away, but rather anything that builds your reach and credibility. Lots of digital platforms provide high-quality data that you can use to get rapid feedback on your content — so you can, for example, A/B test strategies.

   Bear in mind, the goal is not just to reach the largest number of people possible — it can be more impactful to have a niche but influential audience. You want to aim to build the biggest impact-adjusted audience you can.

   Credibility also often requires expertise, so you might also want to use this time to build that expertise by learning about the ideas you think are most important. (One great way of doing that — while practising your content creation skills — is learning by writing.)

3. Promoting the most important ideas. Once you have an audience, you can increasingly focus on figuring out how to use it to have the most impact. This usually involves thinking carefully about which ideas are (i) important (i.e. impactful if people know and act on them), (ii) neglected (i.e. not well known by your target audience already), and (iii) relevant or interesting to your audience, so that they’re more likely to be inspired to help with them.

The specific skills, qualifications, and approaches you’ll need to build will depend on the audience you’re trying to influence. If you’re aiming to communicate ideas to ~100 policymakers who specialise in a certain topic (like Viktor Zhdanov), the strategies you’ll use will be very different from someone aiming to communicate to the population in general (like Rosa Parks).

Some example approaches:

• Subject matter expert: trying to become known for being the point person on a particular topic — works best for more technical or niche audiences
• Translation: taking expert positions and making them accessible to a larger audience (e.g. science journalists, nonfiction authors) — sometimes works best for niche audiences (such as when translating technical research for policymakers) and other times works best for wider audiences
• Mass-media presenter: speaking to a large, mainstream audience (e.g. TV personalities, many journalists) — works best for creating mass buy-in for ideas

We’ve worked with some readers who have succeeded as individual creators, but it’s important to bear in mind many of these options are seen as glamorous, which makes them competitive.

For instance, a recent poll found that the most desired career path among Gen Z is Youtuber. And less than 1% of YouTube channels have over 100,000 subscribers.

If you enter one of the more competitive areas, like film, the competitive pressure can often mean you have to spend a large fraction of your career creating the most commercially viable and popular content rather than focusing on the most important ideas.

While we’ve worked with several readers who have become journalists, these other paths are often seen as glamorous careers, which makes them very competitive — so we typically recommend them less often.

However, if you think you might be able to succeed at getting to the top of one of these paths (and especially if you’re already on track), it’s often worth continuing. After getting established, it’s often possible to then devote, say, 20% of your time to projects that you think are socially valuable. You’ll also likely gain connections with many others who have large audiences, helping you spread important ideas indirectly.

Organisational communication skills

Another option is to learn skills like the following, and then work as part of an organisation or team who are spreading important ideas:

• Marketing
• Public relations
• Sales and negotiation
• Social advocacy and campaigning
• Visual design
• Copywriting and editing
• TV/film/radio production
• Publishing

The structure of these careers are similar to those focused on organisation-building skills, so see that profile for more specific advice on getting started and evaluating your fit. If you’re focusing on a niche audience of policymakers, then this skill set also blurs into the “policy influencer” roles covered under policy and political skills.

Briefly, you’ll want to start by working with a team who are outstanding at these kinds of skills.

That might involve joining a team that’s already working on an important problem, but it’s more common to first work at an organisation that doesn’t have much positive impact but can offer you mentorship and feedback. For example, you could learn digital marketing by working at a top startup or agency.

Once you have skills to offer, two options include:

• Find a job with a team who are spreading important ideas. This could look like working at an advocacy nonprofit, joining a political campaign, or being head of public relations for an author.
• Join an impactful organisation and work on their communications, public relations, or marketing strategies.

Communicating ideas alongside another job

Some jobs make communicating ideas their central focus, such as those we listed right above.

But it’s also possible to learn to spread ideas well in any job by:

• Being a sensible advocate for good ideas in conversation and refining your views over time
• Engaging with and recommending articles, books, podcasts, and the like to family, friends, colleagues, and others in your circles
• Posting ideas and articles on social media

You can also communicate ideas as a side project. For example:

• Run a podcast, blog, or Twitter feed with a significant following.
• If you’re an academic, do media appearances or write books aimed at a popular audience part time (i.e. be a ‘public intellectual’).
• Run a meetup, like an effective altruism group, and create materials for it (e.g. talks).

It’s possible to build skills for communicating ideas while you’re in a normal, stable job which gives you space to pursue projects like these on the side (although, if you want this to become your core skill set, we’d generally recommend eventually making building these skills your primary career focus, which can be hard to do if it’s a side project).

The careers that put you in the best position to spread important ideas (and learn to do so effectively) are those that let you:

• Build a platform (e.g. anything that makes you well known in your field)
• Get influential connections (e.g. working in government or policy)
• Gain credibility (e.g. being a respected academic)

Being super successful at anything that’s slightly public facing (for example, roles in academic research, or in government, or founding a business) can also put you in a good position to spread important ideas, even if communicating ideas isn’t a core part of the role. If Ariana Grande came to us for career advice, we wouldn’t recommend she quit music and become an AI safety researcher. Rather, we’d discuss how she might use her platform to spread important ideas that might appeal to her fans.

We haven’t worked with Ariana, but we have worked with an Olympic tennis player, Marcus Daniell. He decided to use his position — and especially his connections — to set up High Impact Athletes, which encourages professional athletes to pledge a fraction of any prize money they win to high-impact charities.

Communication also doesn’t need to be through nonfiction. For example, Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality popularised ideas about the importance of agency and how common biases affect our ability to make good decisions (though using fiction to get across important ideas without manipulation is a rare skill).

Community building

Communication careers are defined by their focus on spreading ideas on a big scale, but it’s also possible to have a similar impact on a more person-to-person level as a community builder.

Some community building involves running events and organising others — similar to organisation-building roles. But at its core is the specific skill of building connections with others.

Community building often works well as a part-time position. For instance, Kuhan was a student at Stanford when they came across 80,000 Hours, and realised the importance of reducing existential risks. However, they also saw there were no organisations on campus focusing on that idea. So they founded the Stanford Existential Risk Initiative, which runs courses and conferences about the topic to build a community of students aiming to work on these risks.

Example people

How to evaluate your fit

How to predict your fit in advance

Some signs that you’re a good fit for building skills for communicating ideas include:

• You find it relatively easy to develop content in some medium. For example, you might find it very easy to write — whether that’s marketing copy or academic reports or popular articles. Similarly, you might find it fairly easy to make videos. Bear in mind that almost everyone finds writing and other creative work difficult. If you’ve found in your life that you can do this for a few hours a day and actually finish some work, you’re doing well.
• People tend to think you communicate clearly in that medium.
• You consume lots of content in your medium — for example, if you want to be a writer, you often spend all day reading blogs or articles.
• You are verbally fluent and have good social skills — but there are many exceptions. For example, someone can be nerdy and awkward but make an amazing blogger.
• You might need some basic quantitative skills — at least enough to be able to understand data about your work.
• You feel like you’ll be motivated by people seeing the work you’ve produced.

If you’re doing something like public relations in an organisation, then the advice in our organisation-building skill profile may also be applicable.

How to tell if you’re on track

Once you’ve started exploring communicating ideas, you’ll want to ask yourself: “How generally successful am I by the standards of the communication track I’m on?”

For instance, if you’re trying to become a journalist, are you on track to land a job after several years of trying?

Check our career reviews to see if we have a career profile covering the specific pathway you’re interested in. (Though we regret we haven’t yet written profiles on many of the common media careers.)

If you’re focusing on content creation work, some good signs that you’re on the right track are:

• You’re producing lots of content.
• You get good feedback on your content, relative to people who have spent a similar amount of time on it (don’t forget that most public communicators have honed their craft for years, often long before they were famous).
• You find it easy to connect with your target audience (through at least one medium) and convince at least some of them of new ideas.
• You’re starting to build a following or career capital that might lead to a following in the future.

It’s hard to generalise about what levels of following are ‘good’ at different stages. Here are some extremely rough guides for what might be promising after 2–4 years for different media:

• You’re often able to get 100,000 views per video on YouTube or 100,000 likes per video on TikTok.
• You have a podcast with over 1,000 subscribers, and a typical episode you release gets 3,000 downloads (though podcasts are especially hard to launch if you don’t already have an audience).
• As a blogger, you have a newsletter or Substack with over 5,000 subscribers.
• You have 10,000 followers on Twitter.
• If you’re aiming to get published in mainstream media outlets, you have had content in more than two major publications (e.g. The Guardian, Vox).

As a reminder: you don’t necessarily need to be writing about important issues at the early stages — what matters is that you will bring in more of these issues in the future.

How to get started building communication skills

You can start building a communication skill set by studying anything — or doing any job — that will let you practice writing, public speaking, or creating any other type of content.

If you’re not able to do communication in your main work responsibilities, you can practice with independent work on the side, such as blogging, tweeting, media, podcasting, tiktoking, etc. It can even be possible to write a book alongside another job. (Though for anyone doing independent public work, make sure you avoid publishing something unintentionally offensive, as this could affect your career prospects for a long time, even if the offence is the result of a misunderstanding.)

Having a portfolio of content can help you if you want to get into most communications roles, including ones at large organisations (like marketing or PR).

Content creation skills

For aspiring writers, we recommend getting into the habit of writing regularly — ideally every day (even if it’s only a few hundred words) — and posting your writing publicly on Facebook, Twitter, or a blog.

For spoken content, you should practise in any ways you can — for example, give presentations in your professional area, join your local Toastmasters group, make video blogs, or start a podcast.

Whatever your chosen medium or platform, try to create something regularly, and then actively try to learn from what you’ve done — think carefully about measurable goals you might want to achieve, and see whether and why you meet them.

What content should you produce?

Content that’s great can achieve far more reach and impact than content that’s merely good. People tend to produce much higher quality content when they’re naturally interested in a topic and working in a medium they genuinely like.

So we’d encourage you to look at examples of successful content, or find people doing what you want to do, then paying attention to where your intrinsic motivation leads you rather than just focusing on strategically selecting the ‘best’ topic or media type.

It can be worth doing some strategic thinking — for example, you might look at how the recommender algorithms work on various platforms and what kinds of content they are more likely to boost.

Which medium should you choose?

It may take some time to find the medium that’s the best fit for you. Someone might love long-form blog posts but hate Twitter; others find their niche in video, media appearances, and public talks. Experiment with different media to find the one that comes most naturally and is most motivating.

That said, as a secondary consideration, it can make sense to focus on media that are new and rapidly growing (it’s much easier to gain followers on new social media platforms than established ones) or are especially good for reaching a certain audience (e.g. HackerNews for the tech industry) and that fit your message (e.g. books and podcasts are better for complex ideas).

Finding your audience

To get started, you might ask yourself: “What’s a type of person that I understand and communicate well with, better than most people wanting to make a difference do?” If you’re a student, this might be fellow students. Or it could be others in your industry (e.g. biologists, policymakers). Or it could be a mass audience, like educated Americans. You might also pay attention to why it might be valuable to reach a certain audience.

Once you’re clearer on who your target audience is, your main aim should probably be to build your general ability to communicate with that audience. You might want to try to get any job that involves communicating with your chosen audience and allows you to get feedback on a regular basis — whether or not you’re producing content on topics directly related to pressing global problems.

If you’re interested in communicating with fairly general/widespread audiences, most jobs in journalism, and many in public relations and corporate communications, would be useful. If you’re focused on a more niche audience (e.g. AI scientists), then you might want to work somewhere where you can meet lots of people in that audience.

Once you’ve developed your skills and audience, then it’s time to focus more on having an impact, which we cover in the next section.

Organisational communication skills

The structure of these careers are similar to ones focused on organisation-building skills — you can get started by finding any role that will let you start learning one of these skills, like any role in marketing, editing, public relations, lobbying, visual design, or campaigning.

For communications roles at organisations, it can help to spend some time getting good at presenting yourself, for example by building a personal website with nice copy and good presentation. This lets you practise your skills as well as having something to show off to potential employers.

For more — including which organisations you should work for — take a look at how to get started building organisation-building skills.

Get funding

If you’d like to pursue this type of career, there is sometimes funding available. Some sources to consider include:

• The Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund sometimes makes small grants that could help you transition into these types of careers. For instance, if you’d like to test out making YouTube videos about one of our recommended problems full time for three months, you could ask for $10,000; or if you’re interested in working in journalism but can’t earn enough money right away, you could ask for a salary top-up. They’re also interested in helping cover the costs of internships or graduate school.
• Longview Philanthropy funds media projects within effective altruism. For instance, it recently helped fund a $100,000 prize for new blogs.
• Open Philanthropy is interested in funding marketing related to effective altruism.

Apply for free one-on-one advising

Want more individualised advice before diving in? There’s a lot more to be said about:

• How to find the communication career that’s the best fit for you
• What strategy to take for getting started in communication careers
• How to best use your following if you already have one

Get in touch with our one-on-one team, and we may also be able to introduce you to people in these paths.

APPLY TO SPEAK WITH OUR TEAM

Find jobs that use communication skills

Filter our job board by ‘outreach’ to find jobs in this category:

View all opportunities

Once you have these skills, how can you best apply them to have an impact?

Once you have the skills and an audience, the question becomes which messages to focus on to have the biggest impact.

Some messages are more important to spread than others, but some messages are also easier to spread. You need to consider both factors and how their significance multiplies.

Moreover, you need to customise the analysis for your audience. The messages that are important and likely to spread among Ariana Grande fans are totally different from those likely to spread among philosophy academics.

Some key factors for comparing messages include the following (which is an adapted version of our problem framework):

1. Important — if this idea spread among your audience, how much impact would result?
2. Neglected — how widely known is this idea by your audience already? How much is it already discussed by other creators in your space?
3. Is it of interest to your audience? Or otherwise possible to get attention for given your platform? This makes it more likely to spread.
4. Is it personally interesting and motivating for you to work on?

The aim is to find messages or topics that do best on the multiple of all four factors.

Here’s a process you could go through to generate ideas:

1. Make a list of the global problems you think are most pressing.
2. Generate ideas for messages and ideas that could, if spread more widely among your audience, enable more progress on these problems. This could be calls to get more people working on these problems, information about the best solutions to them, or messages to help decision makers understand these issues better. To do this, explore the resources in our problem profiles and then speak to experts in the area about what would be helpful.
3. Think about which messages could be most of interest to your audience or a good fit for your platform.
4. Experiment with spreading those that seem most promising. It might take some trial and error to find an idea and framing that resonates with your audience. In particular, before taking on a big project like a book or documentary, try to test it out in a smaller version.

We listed a couple of examples of ideas we’d like to see spread above.

In practice, you’ll likely want to continue to publish a mixture of content that builds your audience or pays the bills and content that you think is especially impactful.

Career paths we’ve reviewed that use these skills

• Academia
• Building effective altruism
• Party politics
• Journalism
• Public intellectual
• Working at an AI lab
• Non-technical roles at AI labs
• Think tank careers
• Work at a nonprofit that focuses on advocacy
• Non-technical role at an AI lab
• Organise an effective altruism local group
• Pursuing fame in arts and entertainment

Learn more

Our articles and podcasts:

• What do journalists say about journalism as a high-impact career? — interviews with Dylan Matthews, Derek Thompson, and Shaun Raviv
• Podcast: Kelsey Piper on room for important advocacy within journalism
• Podcast: Ezra Klein on aligning journalism, politics, and what matters most
• Podcast: Spencer Greenberg on stopping valueless papers from getting into top journals
• How to be an effective advocate

See all our articles and episodes on advocacy careers

Some of the best resources we’ve found about individual communication:

• Messages to spread to help with the most important century
• Write Useful Books — one of the best guides we’ve read to writing good nonfiction
• The Priceonomics Content Marketing Handbook — a guide to writing shareable, data-driven online articles
• How to be popular on the internet by Tom Scott

Read next:  Explore other useful skills

Want to learn more about the most useful skills for solving global problems, according to our research? See our list.

Continue →

The post Communicating ideas appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

A lack of understanding and coordination between all these countries and the West means we might not tackle those challenges as well as we can (and need to).

So it’s going to be very valuable to have more people gaining real experience with emerging powers, especially China, and then specialising in the intersection of emerging powers and pressing global problems.

Why is experience with an emerging power (especially China) valuable?

China in particular plays a crucial role in many of the major global problems we highlight. For instance:

• The Chinese government ‘s spending on artificial intelligence research and development is estimated to be on the same order of magnitude as that of the US government.¹
• As the largest trading partner of North Korea, China plays an important role in reducing the chance of conflict, especially nuclear conflict, on the Korean peninsula.
• China is the largest emitter of CO2, accounting for 30% of the global total.²
• China recently became the largest consumer of factory-farmed meat.³
• China is one of the most important nuclear and military powers.
• As home to nearly 20% of the world’s population,⁴ it will play a central role in mitigating pandemics.
• China is increasingly a leader in developing new technologies; Beijing is widely seen as a serious competitor to Silicon Valley⁵ and is the majority source of non-US ‘unicorns.’⁶

As a result, it’s difficult to understand the scale and urgency of these pressing problems without understanding the situation in China. What’s more, it’ll be difficult to solve them without coordination between Western groups and their Chinese equivalents.

At the same time, China is not well understood in the West.

Interest in China has grown in the last decade, but it still lags behind many other countries. For instance, in American colleges and universities, the number of students studying French is three times larger than those studying Chinese,⁷ while the starting level of cultural difference is larger.

All this suggests that having experience with China could be an extremely useful skill for improving collaboration between China and the West on many of the world’s most pressing problems, avoiding potentially dangerous conflicts and arms-race-like dynamics, and improving the actions and policy of governments and institutions in both China and the West.

Of course, a similar argument could be made for gaining expertise in other powerful nations, for example: India, Brazil, or Russia.

However, we see Russia as likely to be less important than China because it has a weaker technology industry, so isn’t nearly as likely to play a leading role in AI or biotech development. It has a much smaller economy and population in general and hasn’t been growing at anywhere near the rate of China, so seems less likely to be a central global power in the future. Also, as a result of the Russia-Ukraine war, most Western citizens should probably avoid travelling to Russia.

For some similar reasons, India and Brazil also seem less likely to play a leading role in shaping new technologies than China. The existence of many English speakers in India also means there are more people able to fill the coordination gap already, reducing the need for additional specialists.

Given this, we’ve spent most of our time researching China. As a result, we focus less on other emerging powers in this article, and most of our specific examples focus on China.

However, we do think that gaining experience with these other countries is likely to be valuable and is currently under-explored, especially given how important they could become in the next few decades. In fact, if you’re at the beginning of your career, it may even be valuable to think about which countries are most likely to be particularly influential in a few decades and focus on gaining expertise there. Becoming an expert in any emerging global power could be a very high-impact option and could be the best option for some people.

What does building and using experience with an emerging power involve?

Building this skill set involves working in roles that will give you real opportunities to learn about an emerging power, especially in the context of trying to solve particularly pressing problems.

Ideally, you’ll pick one emerging power, and try to gain experience specifically in and about that country. This might include working in policy, as a foreign journalist, in some parts of the private sector, in philanthropy, in academic research, or in any number of other roles from which you’ll learn about an emerging power (some of which we discuss in more detail below).

These roles overlap with ways you might build and use other impactful skills, like research or communicating ideas. That’s because, in order to have an impact with your experience of an emerging power, you’ll usually need to use other skills as well: for example, you might be doing research on AI safety in China (using research skills), developing or implementing US foreign policy (using policy and political skills), or writing as a journalist in India (using communication skills).

The distinguishing feature of this skill is that you’ll build deep cultural knowledge, a broad network, and real expertise about an emerging power, which will open up unique and high-impact ways to contribute.

Working with foreign organisations on any topic requires an awareness of their culture, history, and current affairs, as well as good intuitions about how each side will react to different messages and proposals. This involves understanding issues like:

• What are attitudes like, in the emerging power you’re learning about, around doing good and social impact?
• If you wanted to make connections with people in the emerging power interested in working on major global challenges, what messages should you focus on, and what pitfalls might you face? How does professional networking function in the emerging power in general?

We expect that fully understanding these topics will require deep familiarity with the country’s values, worldviews, history, customs, and so on — noting, of course, that these also vary substantially within large countries like China, India, and Russia.

Eventually, you’ll move from building the skill to a position where you can use this experience to help solve pressing global problems. To use this skill best, you might also need to combine it with knowledge of a relevant subject — some of which we discuss here. We discuss some ways to have an impact with this skill in the final section below.

Example people

How to evaluate your fit

How to predict your fit in advance

This is likely to be a great option for you if you are from one of these countries, if you have spent a substantial amount of time there, or if you’re really obsessively interested in a particular country. This is because the best paths to impact likely require deep understanding of the relevant cultures and institutions, as well as language fluency (e.g. at the level where you might be able to write a newspaper article about biotechnology in the language).

If you’re not sure, you could study in one of these countries for a month, or do some other kind of short visit or project, to see how interesting you find it. (Although recent tension between the US and China could mean that spending significant time in China could exclude you from certain government positions in the US or other countries — many of which could be very high-impact career options — so this is a risk.)

Other signs you might be a great fit:

• Bilingualism or other cross-cultural communication skills. Experience living abroad or working in teams with highly diverse backgrounds could help build this.
• Strong networking abilities and social skills.
• Excellent judgement and prudence. This is important because there’s a real possibility of accidentally causing harm when interacting with emerging powers.

We think it’s also important that you’re interested in trying to help all people equally and identifying the most effective ways to help, aiming to have well-calibrated judgements that are justified with evidence and reason. We’ve found these attitudes are quite rare, especially in foreign policy, which is often focused on national interest.

How to tell if you’re on track

Only a few people we know have ever tried really gaining this skill, so we’re not quite sure what success looks like.

It’s worth asking “how strong is my performance in my job?” for whatever you are doing to build this skill. Don’t just ask yourself — you’ll get the best information by talking to the people you work with or the people who you think are excellent at understanding the emerging power you’re focusing on.

Hopefully, after 1–2 years, you will have:

• Started building a strong network in the country you’re learning about
• Learned something substantially important and impressive, like knowing a language to (almost) fluency
• Found a fairly stable job relevant to the emerging power you’re learning about where you’re rapidly able to learn more (like one of the things we list below)
• Built up knowledge of a global problem that you can combine with your experience of the emerging power to have an impact later

How to get started building experience with an emerging power

Broadly, the aim is to get a useful combination of the following as quickly as possible:

1. Knowledge of the intersection of an emerging power and an important global problem, such as the topics listed below
2. Knowledge of and connections with the community working on the pressing global problems you want to help tackle
3. A general understanding of the language and culture of an emerging power, which probably requires spending at least a year living in the country. (Though again, having a background in China or Russia — and possibly even just visiting — could exclude you from some Western government jobs.)

Below is a list of specific career steps you can take to gain the above knowledge. Most people should pursue a combination depending on their existing expertise and personal fit.

For many people, the best option at the start of your career won’t be any of the steps in this section. Instead, you could take a step towards building a different skill that you’ll use in conjunction with experience of an emerging power — even if that initial step has absolutely nothing to do with an emerging power.

This option has significant flexibility, since it would be easy to switch into another career if you decide not to focus on an emerging power.

To learn more, we’d particularly highlight our articles on how to get started building:

• Research skills
• Policy and political skills
• Communicating ideas
• Organisation-building skills

We’d guess that these are the most relevant skills to combine with experience of an emerging power, but we’re not sure — for more, see all our articles on skills.

But if you’re ready to start building this skill in particular, here are some ways to do it.

Go to the country and learn the language

If you’re a fluent English speaker, it takes around six months of full-time study to learn a Western European language. For other languages — like Chinese — this time might be more like 18 months.⁸ (Learning to write Chinese can take much longer and isn’t clearly worth it.)

You can learn most effectively by living in the country and aiming to speak the language 100% of the time.

We’ve written about learning Chinese in China in more detail.

We’re not sure how valuable it would be to learn other languages common in emerging powers, like Hindi, Russian, or Portuguese. In general, it’ll depend on the ease of learning the language and the prevalence of English in the country you’re focusing on — especially among decision makers.

Teaching English in an emerging power

What’s the easiest job for someone smart but lazy? The top answer to this question on Quora claims that it’s teaching English in China.

The huge demand for English teachers means that this option is open to most native English college graduates. These positions typically pay $15,000–$30,000 per year, include accommodation, and might only require four hours of work per day. For instance, you get a monthly salary of $2,100–2,800 per month during a typical one-year program offered by First Leap. Job benefits include work visa sponsorship arrangement, flight to China, and a settling-in allowance of up to $1,500. Another program, Teach in China, offers $900–1,800 per month in compensation, but also provides rent-free housing and can be pursued for just one semester. This is more than enough to live in a small Chinese city. You can earn even more if you do private tutoring as well, although the Chinese government is currently clamping down on the private tutoring industry.

It’s harder to get paid positions teaching in India without previous teaching experience.

This option won’t get you equally useful skills and connections as the other options in this list, but you will be able to learn about a culture and study a language at the same time. However, doing this through a prestigious fellowship — such as the Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Programme — could mitigate this downside.

Build connections with people working on top problems

If you are a citizen of an emerging power, then we’d guess the best first step would be to get involved in the community of people working on the world’s most pressing problems and ideally volunteer or intern with some organisations working on these risks, like those on our list of recommended organisations.

If you have connections and trust with other altruistically-minded people, you can help them learn about China and help coordinate their efforts.

With that in mind, we’d also recommend getting involved with the effective altruism community, where there are lots of people working on the kinds of global problems that this skill is relevant for.

Work in top companies or a foreign office of a top Western company

Working at any high-performance company — such as a top startup — is a generally great initial step to build career capital. And if that company is based in an emerging power, you’ll get to learn about the country at the same time. For example, you could look at startups that have been funded by top Chinese venture capitalists, such as HongShan Capital, IDG Capital, and Hillhouse Capital. One VC even told us that they’d provide job recommendations if asked, as they often know which of their companies are best-performing. Read more about startup jobs.

You don’t need a technical background to work at a startup: there are often roles available in areas like product management, business development, operations, and marketing.

In general, the aim would be to learn about an emerging power, gain useful experience, and make relevant connections — rather than push any particular agenda or otherwise try to have an impact right away.

Another advantage of this option is that you could follow it into earning to give. In some countries (like China), charities, research, and scholarships can often only be funded by citizens of that country, which could make earning to give a more attractive option if you are a citizen.

You could also aim to work at an office of a top Western consultancy, finance firm, or professional services firm in the country you’re learning about. This offers many of the standard benefits of this path — namely a prestigious credential, flexibility, and general professional development — while also letting you learn about an emerging power. We’ve heard some claims that your career might advance faster if you start in London or New York, but this advantage seems to be shrinking due to the increasing opportunities and importance of emerging powers. However, the accessibility of these jobs can be precarious and highly dependent on your nationality — for example, China is increasingly cracking down on foreign consultancies. Another consideration is that salaries are generally lower in emerging powers, even at international firms (with the exception of Hong Kong).

Do relevant graduate study

Which subjects?

If you want to work on issues around future technology, then it might be better to study something like synthetic biology or machine learning, and then increase your focus on an emerging power later.

Alternatively, you could start studying economics, international relations, and security studies, with a focus on a particular emerging power. Ideally, you could also focus on issues like emerging technologies, conflict, and international coordination. See ideas for high-impact research within China studies.

It’s also useful to have a general knowledge of the language, history, and politics of the emerging power you’re studying. So another way to get started might be to pursue area or language studies (one source of support available for US students is the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships Program), perhaps alongside one of the topics listed above.

All of these subjects are useful, so we’d recommend putting significant weight on personal fit in choosing between them. Some will also better keep your options open, such as economics and machine learning. See our general advice on choosing graduate programmes.

Should you study in the country you’re gaining experience with?

Once you’ve chosen a programme that’s a good fit, we think it’s generally best to aim to go to the highest-ranked university possible — whether that’s in the West or the country you’re studying — rather than specifically aiming to study in a foreign country. It’s probably more useful to gain an impressive credential than spend time living in the country since there are many other ways to do that.

An alternative is to look for a joint programme, such as — in the case of China — the dual degree offered by Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the Department of International Relations at Tsinghua University. John Hopkins is highly ranked for policy master’s degrees, so this course combines a good credential with the opportunity to study in China.

You might also consider the Schwarzman Scholars programme — a one-year, fully-funded master’s programme at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Approximately 20% of all US students studying in China are on this programme.

If you don’t yet have many connections with the effective altruism community and want to get involved, then you could also use graduate study as an opportunity to gain these connections by being based in one of the main hubs, including the San Francisco Bay Area, London, Oxford, Cambridge, and Boston.

If you’re a Chinese citizen interested in studying in the West, you might want to consider that:

• The Rhodes Scholarship at the University of Oxford has about four scholars per year from mainland China and one from Hong Kong.
• The China Oxford Scholarship offers up to 20 scholarship places to students from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau to pursue postgraduate studies at the University of Oxford.

Work as a foreign journalist

If you’re proficient in a foreign language, you could try becoming a foreign correspondent in the country you’re gaining experience with. It could help if you have a related degree from a top university (e.g. China studies or international relations with a focus on East Asia).

English-language news agencies such as Reuters, the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, and Bloomberg maintain large bureaus across the world (including in Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong) and often hire younger journalists.

Most major international publications such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Financial Times also have a small but significant presence in many major world cities where you can apply for internships. A fresh graduate should expect to intern for about six months before finding a full-time position.

If you’re focused on China and coming from the West, it is often easier to find work at China-based English-language publications where you can do original journalism, such as the South China Morning Post (which has a graduate scheme), Caixin Media, or Sixth Tone. We do not recommend working for Chinese state media, as there will be few opportunities to create original content and most work will likely be polishing articles translated from English.

We also don’t recommend directly writing about effective altruism in China because we think it’s particularly easy to cause harm.

Work in philanthropy in an emerging power

If you’re interested in doing good in an emerging power, it helps to understand attitudes about doing good in that country. One way to do that is to learn about philanthropy. You could also aim to make connections with philanthropists in an emerging power — this comes with the added benefit of building a network of (often wealthy) do-gooders.

One career option here is to work at research institutions dedicated to the topic of philanthropy. For example, in China, these include:

• China Global Philanthropy Institute, which was established in Shenzhen by five prominent Chinese and American philanthropists: Bill Gates, Ray Dalio, Niu Gensheng, He Qiaonyu, and Ye Qingjun. The institute organises training programmes such as the Global Philanthropy Leaders Program for China’s High Net Worth Individuals
• Institute for Philanthropy at Tsinghua University, which aims to be a leading institute for research on philanthropy and become a top national think tank in China. It has conducted research for Giving Pledge
• China Philanthropy Research Institute at Beijing Normal University
• Harvard Ash Center: China Philanthropy Project

You could also find a list of other philanthropy research centres from the Global Chinese Philanthropy Initiative.

There are also Western foundations that work in emerging powers. The Berggruen Institute, Ford Foundation, and Gates Foundation all work in China.

To explore this, you could attend relevant conferences. For instance, if you’re a social entrepreneur interested in China, you could attend a Nexus Global Youth Summit in the region. It’s a network that brings together young philanthropists and social entrepreneurs. If you would like to learn more about the latest developments in Chinese philanthropy, you could attend the International Symposium on Global Chinese Philanthropy by the Global Chinese Philanthropy Initiative, and the Chinese and Chinese American Philanthropy Summit by Asia Society in Hong Kong.

Before pursuing these options, it might be useful to first learn about best practices in Western philanthropy, perhaps by taking any role (even a junior one) at Open Philanthropy, GiveWell, or other strategic philanthropy organisations.

What other knowledge should you gain to have an impact?

We think the most pressing global problems often relate to global catastrophic risks and emerging technology — though there are many other important issues you could work on, like factory farming.

Once you’ve chosen a particular emerging power, you can gain expertise in the following topics. These are all vital issues to understand in the West as well, but the intersection of these issues with China (and other emerging powers) is particularly neglected.

AI safety and strategy

Safely managing the development of transformative AI may require unprecedented international coordination, and it won’t be possible to achieve this without an understanding of global emerging powers and coordination with organisations in these countries. This means understanding issues like:

• What is the state of AI development in the emerging power you’re learning about?⁹
• What attitudes do technical experts in the emerging power have towards AI safety and their social responsibility? Who is most influential?
• How does the government of the emerging power shape its technology policy? What attitudes does it have towards AI safety and regulation in particular?
• What actions are likely to be taken by the government and companies in the emerging power concerning AI safety?

(Read more about AI strategy and policy, and about China-related AI safety and governance paths.)

Biorisk

Global coordination is also necessary to reduce biorisk. This means understanding issues like:

• What is the state of synthetic biology research in the emerging power you’re learning about?¹⁰
• What attitudes do biology researchers in the emerging power have towards safety and social responsibility?
• How does government technology policy in the emerging power relate to the risks from this technology?

International coordination and foreign policy

Expertise on any of the following issues (among others) could be highly useful:

• How, when, and why does the emerging power you’re learning about provide public goods globally?
• If you’re focusing on China, what do its foreign non-government organisation laws and domestic charity laws mean for its international collaboration on global causes?
• What are the emerging power’s foreign policy priorities, and how is it likely to handle the possibility of global catastrophic risks?
• How can coordination between the West and the emerging power you’re focusing on be increased and the chance of conflict be decreased?
• How should Western government policy concerning catastrophic risks relate to policy in the emerging power?

Other global problems

Many of the key organisations working to reduce factory farming are expanding rapidly into China, India, and Brazil, so expertise in these countries and factory farming is also useful.

Knowledge of China seems less important within global health and development than in many of the other global problems we focus on. This is because China is not as important a player in international aid and global health. It also seems easier to find people who are already experts on the intersection of China and development policy than with the topics listed above. We’d guess a knowledge of India would be more relevant to global health and development.

Once you have this skill, how can you best apply it to have an impact?

In general, having an impact with this skill involves three steps — not necessarily in this order:

1. Choosing 1–3 top problems to focus on. It’s possible you’ll want to do something highly problem-specific (like doing AI research in an emerging power), but it’s also possible you’ll want to do something more broadly applicable (like working as a journalist). Either way, the problem you work on is a substantial driver of your impact, so it helps to have 1–3 top problems in mind.
2. Building a complementary skill, such as research, communicating ideas, organisation-building, or policy and political skills. Most ways of having an impact are going to involve applying your experience with an emerging power using one of these other skills.
3. Find a job that uses your complementary skill in a way that’s highly relevant to the emerging power you have experience with. Decide between jobs depending on your personal fit. If you can’t find one of those jobs, try to get a job that continues building your skills. For example, there might be a great policy job available that has nothing to do with emerging powers — and you can always switch back later in your career.

With that in mind, we’d recommend reading the relevant article for your complementary skill — these articles also contain ideas on having an impact using that skill. Depending on your personal fit, those ideas could be higher impact than the specific suggestions in this article.

Also, many of the options in the section above on how to get started could easily become impactful as you gain experience, for example:

• Working in top foreign companies
• Working as a foreign journalist
• Working in philanthropy

Below we list some additional options that are harder to enter without a few years building up your skills.

Work in an AI lab in safety or policy

If you’re a citizen of an emerging power, especially China, you could try working for an AI lab in that country. The lab could be commercial or academic.

You could try to get a role working in technical safety research, and, in the long run, you could aim to progress to a senior position and promote increased interest in and implementation of AI safety measures internally.

You could also try working as a governance or policy advisor at a top AI lab — this could be a lab based in the emerging power or a role at a western AI lab focused on emerging power dynamics.

It’s possible that other roles in labs could be good for building AI-related career capital — but many such roles could be harmful. (For more, read our career review of working at leading AI labs.)

To learn more, read our career review of China-related AI safety and governance paths.

Work at a think tank

You could work at a Western think tank, studying issues specifically relevant to pressing problems in the emerging power you’re focusing on. Some think tanks focus more on the most relevant topics than others. For instance, Center for Security and Emerging Technology, Center for a New American Security, Centre for the Governance of AI, Brookings Institution, and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace seem relevant for issues related to existential risks. (There are doubtless others we’re not aware of.) One risk is that it can be much more difficult to work on China-Western coordination if you’ve had a job at a think tank that’s generally seen as particularly anti-China.

Beyond that, it could also be useful to work on anything concerning international coordination and foreign policy, such as the US-China Relations Independent Task Force of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States. Another option is to work at a joint partnership institution, such as Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy by applying to their Young Ambassadors Program in Beijing.

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to enter roles in Chinese think tanks if you’re not a Chinese citizen, and this may also be the case in other emerging powers (we’re not sure).

If you are a Chinese citizen, you could aim to work in a top Chinese think tank. You could look to work at a think tank doing AI-related work or look more broadly at think tanks such as the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations.

You can read more about think tank roles in our separate career profile.

Work in roles focused on an emerging power in organisations focused on reducing existential risks

Many key organisations working on existential risks want to better understand China to inform their work. For instance, representatives of many AI risk research organisations we recommend have attended conferences in China.

These organisations struggle to find altruistically motivated people with deep knowledge of top problems as well as knowledge of China. They also struggle to find people connected to relevant Chinese experts. So you could use this skill set to aid organisations working on existential risks.

Academic research in an emerging power

Academic research could be a very high-impact career path, especially when the research is focused on a top problem, like biorisk research or technical AI safety research.

If you want that research to have an impact, your role as an academic could become closer to advocacy, using a communication skill set. For example, you could work on AI safety at a top Chinese university lab, which could be valuable both for making progress on technical safety problems and for encouraging interest in AI safety among other Chinese researchers — especially if you progress to take on teaching or supervisory responsibilities. (Read more.)

Other options

Advising parts of international organisations focused on AI, such as the UN Secretary General’s High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation or the OECD’s AI Policy Observatory, could provide opportunities for impact.

In industry, it could be worth exploring opportunities in semiconductor or cloud computing companies in emerging powers, especially in China. This is based on our view that shaping the AI hardware landscape could be a high-impact career path.

You might also consider supporting the translation of materials related to pressing problems into the language of the emerging power, in particular reputable academic materials — although be aware that this can be easy to get wrong.

Finally, there are likely many other promising opportunities to apply this skill now and in the future that we don’t know about. After all, a notable thing about this skill is that it involves gaining knowledge that Western organisations — like 80,000 Hours — lack by default. So if you go down this route you may well discover novel opportunities to use it.

Find jobs that use experience with an emerging power

If you think you might be a good fit for this skill and you’re ready to start looking at job opportunities that are currently accepting applications, see our curated list of opportunities. You could filter by policy or location to find relevant roles.

View all opportunities

Career paths we’ve reviewed that use this skill

• China-related AI safety and governance paths
• Improving China-Western coordination on global catastrophic risks
• Specialist in emerging global powers

Learn more about building experience with an emerging power

Top recommendations

• Podcast: Jeffrey Ding on China, its AI dream, and what we get wrong about both
• AI safety, security, and stability among great powers by Andrew Imbrie and Elsa B. Kania
• For more recommendations, see Syllabus: artificial intelligence and China by Jeffrey Ding, Sophie-Charlotte Fischer, Brian Tse, and Chris Byrd

Read next:  Explore other useful skills

Want to learn more about the most useful skills for solving global problems, according to our research? See our list.

Continue →

The post Experience with an emerging power (especially China) appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

The thing is, lots of jobs at charities just aren’t that impactful.

Some charities focus on programmes that don’t work, like Scared Straight, which actually caused kids to commit more crimes. Others focus on ways of helping that, while thoughtful and helpful, don’t have much leverage, like knitting individual sweaters for penguins affected by oil spills (this actually happened!) instead of funding large-scale ocean cleanup projects.

But there are also many organisations out there — both for-profit and nonprofit — focused on pressing problems, implementing effective and scalable solutions, run by great teams, and in need of people.

If you can build skills that are useful for helping an organisation like this, it could well be one of the highest-impact things you can do.

In particular, organisations often need generalists able to do the bread and butter of building an organisation — hiring people, management, administration, communications, running software systems, crafting strategy, fundraising, and so on.

We call these ‘organisation-building’ skills. They can be high impact because you can increase the scale and effectiveness of the organisation you’re working at, while also gaining skills that can be applied to a wide range of global problems in the future (and make you generally employable too).

Why are organisation-building skills valuable?

A well-run organisation can take tens, hundreds, or even thousands of people working on solving the world’s most pressing problems and help them work together far more effectively.

An employee with the right skills can often be a significant boost to an organisation, either by directly helping them deliver an impactful programme or by building the capacity of the organisation so that it can operate at a greater scale in the future. You could, for example, set up organisational infrastructure to enable the hiring of many more people in the future.

What’s more, organisation-building skills can be applied at most organisations, which means you’ll have opportunities to help tackle many different global problems in the future. You’ll also be flexibly able to work on many different solutions to any given problem if you find better solutions later in your career.

As an added bonus, the fact that pretty much all organisations need these skills means you’ll be employable if you decide to earn to give or step back from doing good all together. In fact, organisational management skills seem like some of the most useful and highest paid in the economy in general.

It can be even more valuable to help found a new organisation rather than build an existing one, though this is a particularly difficult step to take when you’re early in your career. (Read more on whether you should found an organisation early in your career.) See our profile on founding impactful organisations to learn more.

What does organisation-building typically involve?

A high-impact career using organisation-building skills typically involves these rough stages:

1. Building generally useful organisational skills, such as operations, people management, fundraising, administration, software systems, finance, etc.
2. Then applying those skills to help build (or found) high-impact organisations

The day-to-day of an organisation-building role is going to vary a lot depending on the job.

Here’s a possible description that could help build some intuition.

Picture yourself working from an office or, increasingly, from your own home. You’ll spend lots of time on your computer — you might be planning, organising tasks, updating project timelines, reworking a legal brief, or contracting out some marketing. You’ll likely spend some time communicating via email or chatting with colleagues. Your day will probably involve a lot of problem solving, making decisions to keep things going.

If you work for a small organisation, especially in the early stages, your “office” could be anywhere — a home office, a local coffee shop, or a shared workspace. If you manage people, you’ll conduct one-on-one meetings to provide feedback, set goals, and discuss personal development. In a project-oriented role, you might spend lots of time developing strategy, or analysing data to evaluate your impact.

What skills are needed to build organisations?

Organisation builders typically have skills in areas like:

• Operations management
• Project management (including setting objectives, metrics, etc.)
• People management and coaching (Some manager jobs require specialised skills, but some just require general management-associated skills like leadership, interpersonal communication, and conflict resolution.)
• Executive leadership (setting and achieving organisation-wide goals, making top-level decisions about budgeting, etc.)
• Entrepreneurship
• Recruiting
• Fundraising
• Marketing (which also benefits from communications skills)
• Communications and public relations (which also benefits from communications skills)
• Human resources
• Office management
• Events management
• Assistant and administrative work
• Finance and accounting
• Corporate and nonprofit law

Many organisations have a significant need for generalists who span several of these areas. If your aim is to take a leadership position, it’s useful to have a shallow knowledge of several.

You can also pick just one skill to specialise in — especially for areas like law and accounting that tend to be their own track.

Generally, larger organisations have a greater need for specialists, while those with under 50 employees hire more generalists.

Example people

How to evaluate your fit

How to predict your fit in advance

There’s no need to focus on the specific job or sector you work in now — it’s possible to enter organisation-building from a very wide variety of areas. We’ve even known academic philosophers who have transitioned to organisation-building!

Some common initial indicators of fit might include:

• You have an optimisation mindset. You frequently notice how things could be done more efficiently and have a strong internal drive to prevent avoidable errors and make things run more smoothly.
• You intuitively engage in systems thinking and enjoy going meta. This is a bit difficult to summarise, but involves things like: you’d notice when people ask you similar questions multiple times and then think about how to prevent the issue from coming up again. For example: “Can you give me access to this doc” turns into “What went wrong such that this person didn’t already have access to everything they need? How can we improve naming conventions or sharing conventions in the future?”
• You’re reliable, self-directed, able to manage your time well, and you can create efficient and productive plans and keep track of complex projects.
• You might also be good at learning quickly and have high attention to detail.

Of course, different types of organisation-building will require different skills. For example, being a COO or events manager requires greater social and system building skills, whereas working in finance requires fewer social skills, but does require basic quantitative skills and perhaps more conscientiousness and attention to detail.

If you’re really excited by a particular novel idea and have lots of energy and excitement for the idea, you might be a good fit for founding an organisation. (Read more about what it takes to successfully found a new organisation.)

You should try doing some cheap tests first — these might include talking to someone who works at the organisation you’re interested in helping to build, volunteering to do a short project, or doing an internship. Then you might commit to working there for 2–24 months (being prepared to switch to something else if you don’t think you’re on track).

How to tell if you’re on track

All of these — individually or together — seem like good signs of being on track to build really useful organisation-building skills:

• You get job offers (as a contractor or staff) at organisations you’d like to work for.
• You’re promoted within your first two years.
• You receive excellent performance reviews.
• You’re asked to take on progressively more responsibility over time.
• Your manager / colleagues suggest you might take on more senior roles in the future.
• You ask your superiors for their honest assessment of your fit and they are positive (e.g. they tell you you’re in the top 10% of people they can imagine doing your role).
• You’re able to multiply a superior’s time by over 2–20X, depending on the role type.
• If you’re aiming to build a new organisation, write out some one-page summaries of ideas for new organisations you’d like to exist and get feedback from grantmakers and experts.
• If founding a new organisation, you get seed funding from a major grantmaker, like Open Philanthropy, Longview Philanthropy, EA Funds, or a private donor.

This said, if you don’t hit these milestones, you might still be a good fit for organisation-building — the issue might be that you’re at the wrong organisation or have the wrong boss.

How to get started building organisation-building skills

You can get started by finding any role that will let you start learning one of the skills listed above. Work in one specialisation will often give you exposure to the others, and it’s often possible to move between them.

If you can do this at a high-performing organisation that’s also having a big impact right away, that’s great. If you’re aware of any organisations like these, it’s worth applying just in case.

But, unfortunately, this is often not possible, especially if you’re fresh out of college, for a number of reasons:

• The organisations have limited mentorship capacity, so they most often hire people with a couple of years of experience rather than those fresh out of college (though there are exceptions) and often aren’t in a good position to help you become excellent at these skills.
• These organisations usually hire people who already have some expertise in the problem area they’re working on (e.g. AI safety, biosecurity), as these issues involve specialised knowledge.
• We chose our recommended problems in large part because they’re unusually neglected. But the fact that they’re neglected also means there aren’t many open positions or training programmes.

As a result, early in your career it can easily be worth pursuing roles at organisations that don’t have much impact in order to build your skills.

The way to do this is to work at any organisation that’s generally high-performing, especially if you can work under someone who’s a good manager and will mentor you — the best way to learn how to run an organisation is to learn from people who are already excellent at this skill.

Then, try to advance as quickly as you can within that organisation or move to higher-responsibility roles in other organisations after 1–3 years of high-performance.

It can also help if the organisation is small but rapidly growing, since that usually makes it much easier to get promoted — and if the organisation succeeds in a big way, that will give you a lot of options in the future.

In a small organisation you can also try out a wider range of roles, helping you figure out which aspects of organisation-building are the best fit for you and giving you the broad background that’s useful for leadership roles in the future. Moreover, many of the organisations we think are doing the best work on the most pressing problems are startups, so being used to this kind of environment can be an advantage.

One option within this category we especially recommend is to consider becoming an early employee at a tech startup.

If you pick well, working at a tech startup gives you many of the advantages of working at a small, growing, high-performing organisation mentioned above, while also offering high salaries and an introduction to the technology sector. (This is even better if you can find an organisation that will let you learn about artificial intelligence or synthetic biology.)

We’ve advised many people who have developed organisation-building skills in startups and then switched to nonprofit work (or earned to give), while having good backup options.

That said, smaller organisations have downsides such as being more likely to fail and less mentorship capacity. Many are also poorly run. So it’s important to pick carefully.

Another option to consider in this category is working at a leading AI lab, because they can often offer good training, look impressive on your CV, and let you learn about AI. That said, you’ll need to think carefully about whether your work could be accelerating the risks from AI as well.

One of the most common ways to build these skills is to work in large tech companies, consulting or professional services (or more indirectly, to train as a lawyer or in finance). These are most useful for learning how to apply these skills in very large corporate and government organisations, or to build a speciality like accounting. We think there are often more direct ways to do useful work on the problems we think are most pressing, but these prestigious corporate jobs can still be the best option for some.

However, it’s important to remember you can build organisation-building skills in any kind of organisation: from nonprofits to academic research institutes to government agencies to giant corporations. What most matters is that you’re working with people who have this skill, who are able to train you.

Should you found your own organisation early in your career?

For a few people, founding an organisation fairly early in your career could be a fantastic career step. Whether or not the organisation you start succeeds, along the way you could gain strong organisation-building (and other) skills and a lot of career capital.

We think you should be ambitious when deciding career steps, and it often makes sense to pursue high-upside options first when you’re doing some career exploration.

This is particularly true if you:

• Have an idea that you’ve seriously thought about, stress tested, and got positive feedback on from relevant experts
• Have real energy and excitement for your idea (not for the idea of being an entrepreneur)
• Understand that you’re likely to fail, and have good backup plans in place for that

It can be hard to figure out if your idea is any good, or if you’ll be any good at this, in advance. One rule of thumb is that if, after six months to a year of work, you can be accepted to a top incubator (like Y Combinator), you’re probably on track. But if you can’t get into a top incubator, you should consider trying to build organisation-building skills in a different way (or try building a completely different skill set).

There are many downsides of working on your own projects. In particular, you’ll get less direct feedback and mentorship, and your efforts will be spread thinly across many different types of tasks and skills, making it harder to develop specialist expertise.
To learn more, see our article on founding new projects tackling top problems.

Find jobs that use organisation-building skills

See our curated list of job opportunities for this path, which you can filter by ‘management’ and ‘operations’ to find opportunities in this category (though there will also be jobs outside those filters where you can apply organisation-building skills).

View all opportunities

Once you have these skills, how can you best apply them to have an impact?

The problem you work on is probably the biggest driver of your impact, so the first step is to decide which problems you think are most pressing.

Once you’ve done that, the next step is to identify the highest-potential organisations working on your top problems.

In particular, look for organisations that:

1. Implement an effective solution, or one that has a good chance of having a big impact (even if it might not work)
2. Have the potential to grow
3. Are run by a great team
4. Are in need of your skills

These organisations will most often be nonprofits, but they could also be research institutes, political organisations, or for-profit companies with a social mission.¹

For specific ideas, see our list of recommended organisations. You can also find longer lists of suggestions within each of our problem profiles.

Finally, see if you can get a job at one of these organisations that effectively uses your specific skills. If you can’t, that’s also fine — you can apply your skills elsewhere, for example through earning to give, and be ready to switch into working for a high-impact organisation in the future.

Career paths we’ve reviewed that use organisation-building skills

These are some reviews of career paths we’ve written that use ‘organisation-building’ skills:

• Operations management
• Helping build the effective altruism community
• Non-technical roles in leading AI labs
• Earning to give
• Founding new projects tackling top problems
• Become an executive assistant for someone doing especially high-impact work
• Working at effective nonprofits
• Research management

Read next:  Explore other useful skills

Want to learn more about the most useful skills for solving global problems, according to our research? See our list.

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After witnessing recent groundbreaking research into RNA, they realised there was an opportunity to use this technology to rapidly create new vaccines for a wide range of diseases. But few existing companies were focused on that application.

They decided to found a company. And 10 years later, they were perfectly situated to develop a highly effective vaccine against COVID-19 — in a matter of weeks. This vaccine played a huge role in curbing the pandemic and has likely saved millions of lives.

This illustrates that if you can find an important gap in a pressing problem area and found an organisation that fills this gap, that can be one of the highest-impact things you can do — especially if that organisation can persist and keep growing without you.

Why might founding a new project be high impact?

If you can find an important gap in what’s needed to tackle a pressing problem, and create an organisation to fill that gap, that’s a highly promising route to having a huge impact.

But here are some more reasons it seems like an especially attractive path to us, provided you have a compelling idea and the right personal fit — which we cover in the next section.

First, among the problems we think are most pressing, there are many ideas for new organisations that seem impactful. But it seems like there’s comparatively few people able to execute on them.

This is probably because founder skills are rare, which means that if you do have these skills, using them is a very impactful thing to do.

Moreover, the donors to the problems we’re most focused on would often like to donate more money each year if only there were more projects that met their bar for effectiveness.

Again, this means if you can create an organisation that’s sufficiently effective, it’s possible to raise millions of dollars relatively quickly — and we’ve seen this happen.

Second, building an organisation is a route to leverage. By creating a scalable system and team for delivering an impactful programme, through economies of scale, you can achieve much more than you could individually. Moreover, if the organisation can continue to exist without you working there, then that impact can persist into the future.

More broadly, founding new organisations is an example of a high-upside, low-probability way to have an impact, and these are often especially promising due to the reasons we outline in our article on why to be more ambitious.

Even a moderate chance of success with potentially high-impact ventures could rank as one of the most influential paths you might take. (We also argue, though, that you should be careful to limit the downsides).

Finally, founding a project can also — depending on your personality — be among the best options for building your career capital, since it’s impressive (even if you fail), and you’ll need to learn a huge amount. (Though many people learn more in a more structured environment where they can get close mentorship, rather than ‘learning by doing’ or the ‘sink or swim’ approach you get in entrepreneurship.)

You might have noticed that many of the reasons that make founding an impactful organisation impactful also make it hard. So we don’t suggest entering this path lightly.

In the next section, we talk about what’s required.

What does it take to succeed?

Founding a successful social impact organisation is not easy.

We often speak to people who first decide they want to be entrepreneurs and then look around for an idea to execute on. This often results in finding an idea that sounds reasonable but is not actually amazing. It’s also likely not a route to staying motivated for the 5–10 years you probably need to get something off the ground.

Here are some of the things you need to succeed.

A good enough idea

This sounds obvious, but spotting an idea that’s actually good is not easy.

Once you’ve identified a pressing problem area, it’s hard to identify what’s most needed to solve those problems and which remaining gaps are most pressing.

It’s then even harder to figure out how to build an organisation around filling those gaps that can actually raise funding, attract a good enough team, and scale up.

Moreover, while the world of doing good is not especially efficient (especially compared to the world of making money), it is efficient enough that the most obvious ideas are often taken.

Finding a great idea that isn’t yet taken, therefore, usually requires some kind of ‘edge’ compared to other people interested in doing good, such as discovering something new or being much more motivated by the idea than others. And finding something like this often requires significant expertise within a pressing problem or being lucky to stumble over an idea others have neglected.

This is one reason why great startup ideas often emerge out of fun projects that weren’t expected to turn into organisations.

You need to be able to convince donors

On a more practical level, you’ll need to convince funders that your idea is worth their resources (whether you’re raising donations as a nonprofit or investment as a for-profit).

Donors who want to maximise their impact should only be willing to fund projects above a certain ‘bar’ for cost effectiveness based on their estimate of how effectively they’ll be able to deploy funds in the long term.

So, your project will only get off the ground if you can convince donors that it has a reasonable shot of being more cost-effective than this bar (read more). Different funders have different bars, and the bars often aren’t explicit.

Generally, here are some of the features funders we most often work with are looking for in ideas and projects they want to support:

• Problem area: Does it address one of the most pressing problems?
• Solution: Are you focusing on an intervention that has at least some chance of making a big difference to the problem? Have you found a compelling gap in the field? (See hits-based giving.) Or is it evidence-backed, cost-effective, and scalable?
• Do you have a great team?
• Does it seem like you have the skills to build a well-functioning and scalable organisation?

Many nonprofit donors aren’t as systematic as this and give more based on which projects they find exciting. Raising money from these kinds of donors can help you get off the ground, but they’re often a less reliable source of funding.

One advantage of funders who have a clear bar is that, provided you clear the bar, they’ll be open to giving you more and more funding as you scale up (until you hit diminishing returns).

It may be harder to impress funders than you think, because of:

• Overoptimism — estimates of cost-effectiveness typically regress to the mean when done more carefully. Pilot programmes are also typically significantly more cost-effective than the scaled-up version of a programme.
• Counterfactuals — e.g. if a fundraising charity appears to raise $100, typically some of that money would have been donated anyway, and that needs to be removed from the estimate.
• The opportunity cost of labour invested in the project — if you hire people who could have had a positive impact otherwise, such as by earning to give, then their effective ‘cost’ could be much higher than their salaries.
• Indirect ways the project could have a negative impact or affect others trying to do good — e.g., it might create PR risks.
• Time discounting reduces the benefits of a project that takes a long time to pay off.

While it’s often well worth testing out many ideas to see if they can succeed, it’s not an easy thing to do, and we should expect most projects to not work out.

An idea that really motivates you

Successful founders are typically obsessed with their idea and find it hard to imagine working on anything else. This level of motivation is often necessary to see an idea through despite facing challenges like key team members leaving, missing a fundraising target, or having major projects fail — all of which happen in the lifetime of most startups.

This is another reason why sitting down and trying to think of startup ideas in the abstract often doesn’t work. Developing the level of obsession required often requires working in the area for years until the gap really starts to bother you.

In the case of 80,000 Hours, I was motivated in part to solve a problem I actually had: I had all these questions about how to have an impact with my career, but the existing resources didn’t answer them or had answers that seemed wrong. I couldn’t let people be wrong on the internet, and this compelled me to get started.

That said, we have seen people who are really motivated by a particular issue (like factory farming), or even doing good and effective altruism in general, and this has provided enough motivation to found an organisation, even without being intensely motivated by the particular programme they’re implementing. And in the nonprofit space, taking a ‘top down’ approach to finding an idea can sometimes work.

Having a founding team you love working with is also a huge factor here.

Leadership potential

Running a social impact organisation requires significant skill, and in particular, some degree of leadership potential — i.e. the ability to develop a vision and inspire people to back it.

Many founders who seem formidable today did not seem impressive when they first started. So you shouldn’t eliminate this path if you don’t feel like a CEO right now. But you can look for small-scale signs of potential, such as whether you can convince one or two people to support the idea and whether you often have lots of ideas for ways to make things better.

Generalist skills

Founders tend to be generalists — running a startup requires juggling more duties than one can really learn how to do ‘the right way.’ It crucially relies on the ability and willingness to handle many things ‘just well enough’ (usually with very little training or guidance), and focus one’s energy on the few things that are worth doing ‘reasonably well.’

Enough knowledge of the area

We encourage people to work on issues like biosecurity and AI safety, which require specialist knowledge and connections. You can often gain these within around a year if you make meeting people in the area your top priority (though it’s useful to have more experience than that).

In the for-profit world, industry experience and age are both correlated with probability of success, and we expect the same applies to projects aiming to do good.¹

Having these connections can also help avoid accidentally setting back the field.

Good judgement

Nonprofit ideas often lack good feedback mechanisms (such as revenue), which means that the leader’s judgement about what the biggest priorities are is much more important. It’s easy to focus on the wrong thing and lose most of what matters. (Learn more about how to develop your judgement.)

The ability, willingness, and resilience to work on something that might not work out

Not everyone has the flexibility to try a project for a while that is likely to not go anywhere. You can try to reduce the risks by testing it as a side project first. (It’s also important to have a backup plan, which we discuss in our career planning course.)

That said, it’s also easy to overstate the downsides of starting a new project. You might well find it wouldn’t be hard to return to regular employment (especially if you have a specific backup plan and/or have some savings), and you’ll likely gain good career capital that will serve you in your next role.

Here’s an article that goes into more depth about the bottlenecks to entrepreneurship within longtermism.

Examples of people pursuing this path

Next steps if you already have an idea

If you already have an idea you feel really motivated by, we’d encourage you to pursue testing it further.

Even if it doesn’t work out, you’ll probably learn a lot about entrepreneurship and the problem area in question. Most people in our community (and many people in general) respect someone who’s tried to do something ambitious and difficult, even if it didn’t work out. You’ll probably end up with at least similarly good career capital to what you would have otherwise.

The next steps typically involve further testing out your idea, since getting started is often the quickest way to learn about whether funders and potential hires are interested, how quickly you can make progress, and what the main strategic uncertainties are. This could mean trying to pursue it on the side while you stay in your current job, or if you have the flexibility, you could aim to work on it exclusively for a few months.

Pick one very small and simple version of your idea as the test. An extremely common mistake among founders is to try to do way too much at once. Most great startups have an idea that can be simply explained even at scale, and when you’re just getting started, it’s even more important to start small.

People underestimate how hard it is just to do one thing well — but doing something well on a small scale is the best way to build trust with funders and unlock more resources to expand your idea to the next stage.

Besides starting small, try to design a test that can resolve one of your key uncertainties about the project. Ask yourself, “What’s the minimum amount of validation I need to justify the next level of funding?” Then do that. If it works out, go to the next level of scale.

It’s hard to give much more general purpose advice, so if the idea is for a project within one of our priority problem areas or problem areas that seem promising, then we’d be interested to speak to you.

If you’re further along, you could:

• Apply for seed funding from one of the Effective Altruism Funds, including the Long-Term Future Fund and the Infrastructure Fund, which focus on some of the problems we think are most pressing.
• Apply to Charity Entrepreneurship, which helps grow organisations within global health and animal welfare, as well as ‘meta charities.’
• Submit an expression of interest to Rethink Priorities, which offers fiscal sponsorship and extensive operational support through its Special Projects Program to particularly promising ventures that advance its mission
• If your idea is within global health, see GiveWell’s Incubation Grants.
• If you have an idea for a bigger project, aim to speak to someone at Open Philanthropy about it.
• There are also ‘angel donors’ in the community who can make $100,000 grants to new projects — you may be able to meet them by being generally involved in effective altruism.

There are also many other organisations that can help you outside of the effective altruism ecosystem. For example:

• 80,000 Hours got a lot out of Y Combinator’s nonprofit programme.
• Fast Forward is an incubator for tech nonprofits.
• Skoll helps social entrepreneurs.
• And there are other nonprofit accelerators worth exploring.

In the first couple of years, you’re probably doing reasonably well if your organisation is in a reasonable financial position, hasn’t had any clear disasters, and has done pretty well at attracting talent. Beyond that, how long to stick with your project is a difficult judgement call.

Next steps if you don’t have an idea yet

Normally we recommend working within the problem areas that you might want to found something within.

You could seek almost any job that gives you either organisation building skills or that lets you work within the relevant problem area.

The ideal option would probably be working in a small but rapidly growing, high-performing organisation focused on a pressing problem because this will let you learn how to run this kind of organisation.

It’s ideal to work in a generalist role where you can practise different skills needed in running an organisation (e.g. recruiting, strategy, management, finances).

If you’re not able to find an impactful organisation that’s high-performing, you could consider working at a tech startup instead in an organisation-building role (or any other kind of organisation-building role).

Alternatively, you could work at a highly-relevant organisation that’s less well-performing (though this is risky), or find a different kind of role that lets you learn about the area. This could even involve working in applied research or policymaking, since this can be a route to understanding a complex global issue and spot gaps related to it.

Working within the problem area will help you gain relevant knowledge and connections while giving you a chance to stumble across gaps you might help fill. This is more likely if you’re excited to explore ideas on the side at the same time.

Another option is to find a position that lets you or encourages you to explore project ideas on the side — many startups began in graduate school for this reason. Alternatively you could find a 9–5 style job at a company with lots of potential cofounders.

There’s a difficult question about how ‘directed’ to be about finding an idea. In the for-profit world, people often say that the best ideas are stumbled across rather than the result of a deliberate search. There’s also a lot of scepticism about whether someone can be ‘handed’ an idea from someone else — the thought is that if you don’t come up with the idea yourself, you’re unlikely to be obsessed with it enough to make it work.

This, however, seems to be somewhat less true in the nonprofit world. We think it can be worth entertaining other people’s ideas and seeing if they catch your motivation. If you have the flexibility, you could consider taking 3–12 months off from your normal work to learn about and test ideas.

Might founding a for-profit company just aimed at growth rather than impact be good training for later starting another high-impact organisation? You’ll probably learn a lot, but this often involves being locked in for 5–10 years. So it isn’t generally the most efficient route to founding a project with direct impact (though it could give you money and other good career capital).

Lists of ideas

If you’re interested in hearing the most promising current ideas, we’d encourage you to apply for our one-on-one advice, and we can introduce you to people trying out new projects.

To give you a flavour of what exists, here are some of the best public lists we’re aware of:

• Concrete projects for reducing existential risk from Rethink Priorities
• Big biosecurity projects by Andrew Snyder-Beattie and Ethan Alley on the EA Forum
• Gaps in effective altruism by Michelle Hutchinson on the EA Forum
• Charity Entrepreneurship’s top meta charity ideas and ideas in global health, animal welfare, and mental health
• Our profile on founding effective international development nonprofits
• Alternative protein project ideas by the Good Food Institute (and you may also want to listen to our podcast with the founder, Bruce Friedrich)

Want one-on-one advice on pursuing this path?

If you think this path might be a great option for you, but you haven’t found the right idea for a new organisation to found, our team might be able to tell you about ideas that aren’t public yet and introduce you to others pursuing this path.

APPLY TO SPEAK WITH OUR TEAM

Read next:  Learn about other high-impact careers

Want to consider more paths? See our list of the highest-impact career paths according to our research.

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How much should you do what seems right to you, even if it seems extreme or controversial, vs how much should you moderate your views and actions based on other perspectives?

If you moderate too much, you won’t be doing anything novel or ambitious, which really reduces how much impact you might have. The people who have had the biggest impact historically often spoke out about entrenched views and were met with hostility — think of the civil rights movement or Galileo.

Moreover, simply following ethical ‘common sense’ has a horrible track record. It used to be common sense to think that homosexuality was evil, slavery was the natural order, and that the environment was there for us to exploit.

And there is still so much wrong with the world. Millions of people die of easily preventable diseases, society is deeply unfair, billions of animals are tortured in factory farms, and we’re gambling our entire future by failing to mitigate threats like climate change. These huge problems deserve radical action — while conventional wisdom appears to accept doing little about them.

On a very basic level, doing more good is better than doing less. But this is a potentially endless and demanding principle, and most people don’t give it much attention or pursue it very systematically. So it wouldn’t be surprising if a concern for doing good led you to positions that seem radical or unusual to the rest of society.

This means that simply sticking with what others think, doing what’s ‘sensible’ or common sense, isn’t going to cut it. And in fact, by choosing the apparently ‘moderate’ path, you could still end up supporting things that are actively evil.

But at the same time, there are huge dangers in blazing a trail through untested moral terrain.

The dangers of extremism

Many of the most harmful people in history were convinced they were right, others were wrong — and they were putting their ideas into practice “for the greater good” but with disastrous results.

Aggressively acting on a narrow, contrarian idea of what to do has a worrying track record, which includes people who have killed tens of millions and dominated whole societies — consider, for example, the the Leninists.

The truth is that you’re almost certainly wrong about what’s best in some important ways . We understand very little of what matters, and everything has cascading and unforeseen effects.

Your model of the world should produce uncertain results about what’s best, but you should also be uncertain about which models are best to use in the first place.

And this uncertainty arises not only on an empirical level but also about what matters in the first place (moral uncertainty) — and probably in ways you haven’t even considered (‘unknown unknowns’).

As you add additional considerations, you will often find that not only does how good an action seems to change, but even whether the action seems good or bad at all may change (‘crucial considerations’).

For instance, technological progress can seem like a clear force for good as it raises living standards and makes us more secure. But if technological advances create new existential risks, the impact could be uncertain or even negative on the whole. And yet again, if you consider that faster technological development might get us through a particularly perilous period of history more quickly, it could seem positive again — and so on.

Indeed, even the question of how to in principle handle all this uncertainty is itself very uncertain. There is no widely accepted version of ‘decision theory,’ and efforts to make one quickly run into paradoxes or deeply unintuitive implications.

It’s striking that almost any moral view taken entirely literally leads to bizarre and extreme conclusions:

• A deontologist who wouldn’t lie to save the entire world
• Radical ‘deep ecology’ environmentalists who think it would be better if humans died out
• The many counterintuitive implications of utilitarianism

How are we to wrestle with all these different perspectives?

The case for moderation

One thing that’s clear is that the course of action that seems best likely has some serious downsides you haven’t considered.

Partly this is true due to good old-fashioned self-delusion. But even for an honest and well-intentioned actor, there are good reasons to expect this mismatch to happen theoretically, and it has been seen empirically.

Whenever someone proposes an action that seems unusually impactful, further investigation is far more likely to produce reasons that the impact is less good than it first seemed.

Indeed, there are good reasons to think that aggressively maximising based on a single perspective is almost bound to go wrong in the face of huge uncertainty.

The basic idea is that if your model is missing lots of what matters, and you try to aggressively push for one outcome that makes sense to you, it’ll probably come at the expense of those other values and outcomes that are missing from your model. (This idea is closely related to Goodhart’s Law and the AI alignment problem.)

This kind of naive optimisation is especially likely to go wrong when the things that are missing from your model are harder to measure than the main thing you’re focused on, since it’s so seductive to trade a concrete gain for an ill-defined loss.

There are many more reasons to moderate your views:

• Epistemic humility: If lots of people disagree with you about what’s best, and they have similar (and likely greater) information to you, then there’s little reason to think you’re right and they’re wrong.
• Reputation effects: If you take extreme actions, and especially if they turn out badly, you’ll become seen as a bad, reckless, or norm-breaking actor by others. And you’ll also damage the reputation of the causes, ideas and communities you’re associated with. This is an especially big deal since all your impact is mediated by being able to work with and coordinate with other people.
• Signalling and norm setting: Actions we take have direct and indirect effects. One key type of indirect effects that may be overlooked is that they signal to others what’s acceptable, shaping the kind of society we live in. If we send the signal that social norms can easily be broken whenever any given individual thinks of a reason to do so, that’s damaging.
• Character: Humans are creatures of habit. Acting unilaterally or on extremist views in one situation is likely to turn you into the type of person who disregards norms habitually.
• Efficiency arguments: Other people care about doing good to some degree, so truly easy ways to do a lot of good should have been taken already. If you think you’ve found an apparently outsized way to do a lot of good, you should be sceptical of your reasoning.
• Trade: If you don’t think a certain outcome matters that much, but lots of others do, it’s often worth putting some weight on those values, since it will facilitate cooperation in the future.
• The unilateralist’s curse: If everyone working on an issue simply pursues the course of action that makes sense to them, this will lead to the field as a whole systematically taking overly risky actions.
• Chesterton’s fence: Common sense or conventional ways of doing things often contain evolved wisdom, even if we can’t see why they work (also see the The Secret of Our Success).
• Burnout: You have lots of needs, so focusing too much on a single goal is likely to be shortsighted and cause you to become unhappy and give up.

All this means that some degree of moderation is crucial. The difficult question then is to moderate by how much and in what ways.

Striking the balance

After FTX, I definitely feel like moderation is even more important than I thought before. But striking the right balance still feels very hard.

I think the question of how much to moderate may well be the biggest driver of differences in cause selection in effective altruism. People who are more into moderation are more likely to work on global health, while those who are less moderate are more likely to work on AI alignment. (I’m not saying this is a good state of affairs – I think there are ways to work on AI alignment that are compatible with moderation – but it seems likely empirically.)

And the tradeoff comes up in many other places, for instance:

• How much money to spend on saving time even if doing so isn’t normal in the charity sector and could easily be self-serving
• How countercultural vs normal should the your life outside of work be
• Deciding when it’s justified to break norms, be inconsiderate or say unpopular things in order to advance some other important goal
• How possible it is to be more successful than average at conventional things like making money, running an organisation or making predictions
• How much it makes sense to be really ambitious, maximise, and optimise

The spectrum also has many dimensions. Moderation can sometimes look like humility, prudence, pluralism or cooperativeness. Here I’m just trying to point at the broad cluster of ideas, rather than precisely define a single concept.

So, under what circumstances should you bet against conventional wisdom, and how much should you moderate?

Here are some notes about how I currently think about the balancing act in my own decision making, which I think of as attempt to create a cautious contrarianism:

1. Use conventional wisdom as your starting point or prior.
2. Generally stick with conventional wisdom except for a couple of carefully thought through ‘bets’ against it. You should have an explanation for what other people are missing. Spotting one important way people are wrong is already hard enough, so you need to pick your battles — and being unconventional has costs. So for example, if a startup is launching an innovative product, it should probably just apply best practices in its corporate management, rather than also trying to innovate in how to run a company.
3. In working out what these bets should be, don’t just apply a single perspective. Consider a range of perspectives, including common sense, expert opinion and other plausible models and heuristics, weighing them based on their strength. Seek out the best reasons you might be wrong. Remind yourself that you’re very likely to be deluding yourself.
4. It’s safest to eliminate any courses of action that seem very bad according to one important perspective. If you can’t do this, proceed cautiously and be open to changing your mind.
5. In particular, don’t do anything that seems very wrong from a common sense perspective ‘for the greater good.’ Respect the rights of others and cultivate good character. Yes, in principle there are exceptions to this rule, but if you think you’re one of them, you’re almost certainly not.
6. Once you’ve limited your downsides, then seek the course of action with the most upside according to your different perspectives. It’s OK to have your actions driven by one perspective, and to aim ambitiously at long shots, if other perspectives are ambivalent or neutral about it (rather than very negative). Maximise with moderation.
7. The more leverage, scale and effect on other people you seek, the more vetting and caution to apply. Chatting about a radical policy with a friend is totally different from pushing for a government to adopt it.

Here are some more notes about the nuances of applying these:

• In general, it’s much more important to moderate your actions (since they could have big direct negative consequences for others) than your views. Indeed, it can be actively good to try to develop unusual views about a topic, since that can add to the collective wisdom. I don’t mean to advance a strong form of epistemic modesty in which you should believe what everyone else believes.
• It’s also useful to distinguish between your internal ‘impressions’ — how things seem to you — and your ‘all-considered view,’ which takes account of the outside view and peer disagreement. It’s fine and often healthy to foster contrarian impressions, but when taking high-stakes action, it’s important to use your all-considered view.
• It’s helpful to think in terms of upsides, downsides, and the median case. Your all-considered view might be that a contrarian position has an 80% chance of being wrong, but if in the 20% scenario acting on it would do a lot of good, and being wrong won’t have big downsides, then it can be well worth betting on that contrarian view — even though it’s most likely to be wrong.
• I’ve framed things in terms of “eliminate big downsides, then seek upsides” since I think that’s a reasonable approximation that’s relatively easy to apply. A more sophisticated version could involve something more like a moral parliament, in which different perspectives have a different number of votes according to your confidence in them, and they collectively bargain to come up with the overall policy. For example, a deontological perspective would be very opposed to violating rights, whereas a utilitarian one will want to do whatever helps the most people. Collectively, this could end up as picking the action that helps the most people but doesn’t violate rights.

All this is pretty complicated to apply, and I’m not sure it would provide bright enough lines to do much to prevent dangerous behaviour in practice, so more work to develop these norms seems useful. We also need other mechanisms to prevent bad behaviour, like good governance — this post is only about one perspective on the problem.

If the main concern is to avoid dangerous behaviour, then I think point (5) about not harming others is most important.

Part of this is because the cases that seem most problematic historically seem to mostly involve dishonesty, rights violations, and domination over others (e.g. totalitarian communism and fascism).

Cautious contrarianism

There are lots of ways to support radical ideas that don’t have these features, such as non-violent protest or academic debate. It’s possible and necessary to have sandboxes, such as academia, where radical ideas can be explored and developed without immediate attempts to apply them.

Or consider the Shrimp Welfare Project. Promoting shrimp welfare sounds a bit nuts at first, but even if shrimp welfare turns out to be entirely unimportant, it’s not doing direct, serious harm to anyone — the likely worst case is that resources are wasted.

People who want to do good are on the safest ground when they can find projects like these. They’re on the most shaky ground when they try to force change on society as a whole.

Another simpler framework would be ‘constrained maximisation.’ Try to do the most good you can, but within the constraints of respecting rights, having a good character and your other important personal goals.

Here are some things that I think follow from cautious contrarianism:

• Have some balance in your life. Doing more good isn’t the only thing that matters. It’s healthy to have a life that’s normal in most other ways.
• Always consider multiple kinds of outcomes — don’t measure everything in terms of QALYs or existential risk reduction.
• Take peer disagreement seriously, especially when others think your actions might cause a lot of harm.
• Don’t surround yourself only with people who share your worldview. Have some friends or colleagues with other views.
• Both means and ends matter.
• It basically rules out individual acts of violence, even if you think it might be justified to respond to a major risk like climate change or AI.
• I don’t identify as a utilitarian — I think there’s a bunch of truth in it, but we’re too uncertain about ethics for me to identify with any single perspective.
• Don’t reinvent the wheel. Apply best practice in most areas of your life.

None of these are absolutes. Gandhi definitely didn’t ‘live an otherwise normal life’ and that was part of his influence. It’s plausible there are cases when you should violate these guidelines, but you should do so deliberately, cautiously, and with considered awareness of the downsides.

Some warning signs that could suggest someone isn’t applying cautious contrarianism:

• Willingness to break norms or twist the truth to help their project
• Almost never taking on board criticism or deferring to peers: I don’t think people are obligated to respond to all criticism that’s directed at them all the time, but if you know someone well who’s doing a high-stakes project, you should see at least some serious attempts to engage with the best critics.
• Expressing a lot of confidence about totally unsettled areas like philosophy or topics way outside their area of expertise
• Being a unilateralist, that is, doing things a large fraction of their field thinks have significant harm
• Making rapid and radical changes to their whole life based on a single argument or philosophical view

However, it’s not a warning sign to seriously consider weird ideas with radical implications.

Almost all ideas could lead to crazy, harmful, or weird-seeming implications if pursued to their logical end or allowed to dominate your life. You need to learn the skill of holding multiple conflicting perspectives in mind and coming to some kind of synthesis of them.

Unfortunately there’s no fully principled way to make these tradeoffs, but I think we face something similar in normal life all the time with internal conflicts. Maybe part of you wants to be a parent, but part of you wants freedom. These drives would lead to very different lives, so how do you balance them?

There is no easy answer, and completely overriding either drive would be bad. Hopefully, you can come to some kind of compromise or synthesis that both sides of yourself are happy with.

Likewise, we have to do our best to balance contradictory worldviews and perspectives.

When it comes to effective altruism in particular: doing more good matters and is underappreciated, but it’s not the only thing that counts, and shouldn’t be the only focus of your life.

The post Some thoughts on moderation in doing good appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

Career decisions have a big impact on your life, so it’s natural to want to feel confident in them.

Unfortunately, you don’t always get this luxury.

For years, I’ve faced the decision of whether to focus more on writing, organisation building, or something else. And despite giving it a lot of thought, I’ve rarely felt more than 60% confident in one of the options.

How should you handle these kinds of situations?

The right response isn’t just to guess, flip a coin, or “follow your heart.”

It’s still worth identifying your key uncertainties, and doing your research: speak to people, do side projects, learn about each path, etc.

Sometimes you’ll quickly realise one answer is best. If we plot your confidence against how much research you’ve done, it’ll look like this:

But sometimes that doesn’t happen. What then?

Stop your research when your best guess stops changing.

That might look more like this:

This can be painful. You might only be 51% confident in your best guess, and it really sucks to have to make a decision when you feel so uncertain.

But certainty is not always achievable. You might face questions that both (i) are important but (ii) can’t realistically be resolved — which I think is the situation I faced.

However, if you’ve done your research and your best guess has stopped changing, then you’ve probably done the research that is worth doing — it’s time to make a decision and simply try something for a while.

In short: aim for a stable best guess, not confidence.

The alternative is to keep researching your options to try to get even more confident. But if your best guess is no longer changing very much with additional research, that research isn’t producing much value, while you’re incurring the costs of delay.

In my case, I decided to focus on writing for a while, but I still don’t feel confident it’s the right call.

One extra piece of comfort: you can always try the new path for a few years, and then if it doesn’t work, try something else.

Learn more:

• Gregory Lewis published a great post about this topic — the graphs above are taken from him.
• Near the end of our career planning process, we lead you through how to investigate your key uncertainties, and when to stop your deliberation.
• Lack of confidence can sometimes be about anxiety rather than information. If you’re struggling to commit, I find it helpful to make a list of: (i) what might go wrong, (ii) how I could prevent that from happening, (iii) how I could cope if it did happen, and (iv) the costs of delay. More here.

The post How much should you research your career? appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

This is a lot of impact compared to most jobs, but it’s less than many expect (and we think less than many of the careers we recommend most highly).

One reason is that issues like health in rich countries already receive a (relatively) large amount of attention.

In this article, we’ll touch on another reason: the impact of a clinical doctor is limited by the number of people they can treat with their own two hands, which puts a cap on the potential size of their contribution.

For instance, Greg decided to switch from clinical medicine to research into health policy, since an improvement to key government policies could affect millions of people — far more than he could ever treat himself.

This illustrates a broader point: careers that do good are often associated with certain job titles — doctor, teacher, charity worker, and so on. Intuitively, people group careers into those that ‘help’ and everything else.

But your job title isn’t what matters — what matters is the scale of the contribution you’re able to make in solving pressing problems.

Even within careers that help, there are often huge differences in how much they help.

And we’ll show there are far more ways to contribute than just pursuing traditional ‘helping’ careers, including jobs that contribute through more indirect routes, like mobilising others, spreading ideas, donating, or conducting research.

By expanding your options, it’s often possible to find a career that’s both more fulfilling and higher impact.

What do we mean by the ‘contribution’ of a career path?

The impact you can have in different careers is driven by three main factors:

1. How pressing the problems are that you focus on
2. The scale of the contribution the path lets you make to tackling those problems
3. Your personal fit for the path

The first factor is about how much good would be done if more people worked on the problem in general.

The second and third factors are about how much you’re personally able to help solve the problem.

Specifically, the second factor (and subject of this article) is about whether a career path puts a typical person in a good position to help tackle the problems they’re trying to solve. (The third is about your personal ability to take advantage of that opportunity, which we deliberately won’t take into account in this article.)¹

This second factor matters because there are huge differences in how big a contribution different paths let you make, even holding personal fit constant.

There are broadly two (overlapping) ways to find careers that let you make a bigger contribution to solving a problem:

1. Find career paths that offer more leverage.
2. Find career paths that let you work on more effective solutions.

In the rest of this article, we’re going to focus on the first: leverage.

The ‘leverage’ of a career path is roughly the value of the resources you’re able to put toward your chosen solutions. ‘Resources’ here could be people you mobilise, financial resources, or the value of your own labour. We’ll give lots of examples in what follows.

The effectiveness of the solution, meanwhile, is how much progress on the problem results per unit of resources contributed — we cover it in another article.

Generally, it’s most important to focus on increasing your leverage early in your career, which you can then point toward the most effective solutions later on.

So how can you increase your leverage? Here are some examples.

How can you get more leverage in your career?

Improve governments or other large institutions

When we think of careers that ‘do good,’ we might not first think of becoming an unknown government bureaucrat. But senior government officials often oversee budgets of tens or even hundreds of millions. If you could enable those budgets to be spent just a couple of percent better, that would be worth millions of extra dollars spent on those programmes. And at the same time, government is often crucial in addressing many of the issues we most recommend people work on.

For instance, Suzy Duester wanted to become a public defender to ensure disadvantaged people have good legal defence. But she realised that while in that role she might improve criminal justice for perhaps hundreds of people over her career, by changing policy she might improve the justice system for thousands or even millions. Even if the impact per person is smaller, the numbers involved give her the chance of making a greater impact.

She was able to use her legal background to enter government, and now works in the Executive Office of the President of the US on criminal justice reform, and from there she can explore other areas of policy in the future.

Putting government aside, you can make a similar argument about helping to improve other large institutions, like bodies that do scientific grantmaking. Most researchers want to focus on research, rather than administering grants, so these positions often receive little attention. But grantmakers can influence how tens of millions of dollars are allocated — by improving that, you could enable more effective research to be done than you could achieve yourself.

Learn more about careers in government and policy and grantmaking.

Mobilise others

Suppose you’ve discovered an impactful job. One option is to try to take the job yourself. This is tempting because doing good directly gives us a greater warm glow, and often more praise.

But another option is to try to find someone else to take it, who’s an even better fit than you. If you succeed, it’s not only more impactful, it also frees you up to do something else useful.

This is an example of being a multiplier — it’s often possible to have a greater impact by mobilising others than working on issues directly.

What matters is that more good gets done, not that you do it with your own two hands.

This was the original motivation for founding 80,000 Hours itself: we thought that if we could help just a handful of people have high-impact careers, that would do several times as much good as pursuing those careers ourselves.

You can be a multiplier in any job, though you can also pursue it full time as do the staff at 80,000 Hours.

Being a multiplier isn’t always better — after all, at some point someone needs to do the actual work. And some efforts to be a multiplier don’t have net positive returns (i.e. they generate less than one year of extra effort per year invested). But it’s important to consider as an option. We’d be excited to see, perhaps, 10–20% of our readers pursue it.

Spread ideas

You can mobilise people on a person-to-person level, but it can be even more impactful to spread ideas via writing, public speaking, or in the media. This can not only reach more people, but can also change how society perceives these issues, and contribute to intellectual progress on them. Many of the highest-impact people in history have been communicators or advocates or one kind or another.

To pursue a communication career, you could consider working in journalism, documentaries, the media, or advocacy organisations, or you could try to build a following on social media, or build a network in an important area. You could also build skills like graphic design, videography, or marketing, and work to help other communicators.

While in many communication careers, such as journalism, you might have to spend most of your time writing about the topics your employer wants you to cover, or on efforts to build your readership, it’s often possible to spend 10% of your time (and perhaps a lot more later in your career) spreading the ideas you think are most important and neglected, which can have a big impact.

Learn more about communication careers.

Help someone else who’s making a big contribution

When thinking of careers that do good, being a personal assistant is another that doesn’t first come to mind. But if you know a person or an organisation who’s having a big impact, you can lend your skills to help further their impact. If you know someone who’s having a big impact, and you can make them 10% more effective, then you’ll also be having a significant impact.

Alexander Hamilton is a famous historical example of someone who took this strategy. Despite his desire to contribute to the American Revolution on the battlefield, he accepted a position as George Washington’s aide, using his writing skills to craft crucial letters on behalf of the general to Congress and other leaders fighting in the war. Washington was a hugely impactful person in his day, and the consequences of the American Revolution continue to shape the world. It’s plausible that Hamilton’s role as an effective aide increased Washington’s likelihood of leading the American colonists to eventual victory, contributing significantly to history-changing events.

Learn more about being an impactful executive assistant

Build organisations

Building out organisations can be a route to leverage, since a well-run organisation can enable tens, hundreds, or even thousands of people to work together more effectively on pressing problems.

These organisations could either be nonprofits or for-profits, depending on what the problem most needs.

You might be able to make an even bigger contribution by starting a new organisation, especially if it’s focused on a new and innovative way to tackle a neglected problem.

Learn more about organisation-building careers and founding impactful projects.

Further research and technology

You can gain leverage through research, because if you discover a new idea or technology, it can be shared with everyone nearly for free, or at least a lot cheaper than it would be for them to create it themselves. The low marginal cost of spreading ideas means that discoveries can rapidly have impact on a big scale.²

Furthermore, new discoveries persist, contributing to a compounding body of knowledge over time.

For both reasons, many of the highest-impact people in history were researchers, such as Norman Borlaug or Alan Turing.

More practically, research seems like a key bottleneck in many of the problems we think are most pressing. For instance, the key to AI alignment is coming up with better technical solutions to the alignment problem, and better policy ideas for how to manage the transition to an AI-driven economy.

Researchers can also help to discover entirely new ways of tackling these problems, or even discover entirely new problems to focus on. Since the most effective ways of helping are far more impactful than average ways of helping, a discovery like this is really valuable.

Learn more about research careers and careers in research management.

Donate money

If you don’t want to change careers, or have a skill set that can’t easily be used to tackle pressing problems directly, you can ‘convert’ your skills into skilled labour working on the world’s most pressing issues by earning and donating money.

You might not want to work at a nonprofit yourself, but by working in (for example) software engineering or accounting and donating some of your income, you might be able to fund the salaries of several nonprofit workers.

This is a way to leverage the skills you happen to have in order to increase your impact.

We call this earning to give — finding a career that uses your strengths and allows you to donate more, even if its direct impact is only neutral (not harmful). The more you’re able to donate, and the more effectively you can direct it, the bigger your leverage.

Over 500 of our readers are earning to give. For example, John Yan decided that he could best contribute by staying in his current job (software engineering) and donating 10–30% of his income to effective charities. Collectively the contributions of these readers will add up to tens of millions of dollars in donations, which can do a huge amount of good.

Learn more about careers earning to give.

A word of caution: leverage, harm and corruption

The more leverage you have, the more potential you have to do good.

But also the more potential you have to do harm.

If you support the wrong idea, make a serious mistake, or act unethically, there can be great costs. And if you have more leverage, the costs can be even greater.

Moreover, as you gain more leverage, you may face more temptations to act badly — by bending the rules or considering yourself an exception. “Power corrupts” is a cliché for a good reason.

This might be hard to imagine if you’re at the start of your career, but if you end up in a powerful position in government, running a large organisation, with a degree of fame, or with lots of money, you may face situations where acting ethically will pose a risk of losing the large influence you have — like a politician lying to stay in office. This can be true even if you didn’t seek power for your own benefit.

And typically, the more leverage you have, the harder it will be for people to disagree with you, because they’ll fear the consequences. You’ll also be tempted to believe quite strongly in your own abilities, due to your recent success. So gaining leverage might also mean becoming less able to make good decisions just at the point when you most need to make good decisions.

Therefore, unlike most of the other factors we cover in our advice, leverage is a double-edged sword.

First, we think it’s vital to avoid taking actions that are widely seen as unethical (like lying to your staff, or bending the truth to be more persuasive to an audience), even if it’s in order to protect your leverage and thus your ability to do more good. See our article on careers that do harm.

More broadly, we’d encourage you to try to match your leverage to your capabilities. For example, the more leverage you get, the more important it is to vet your ideas and make sure there are people around you who will ensure you’re on the right track. We have more advice in our article on accidental harm.

If you’re contemplating a career path in which you might gain a lot of power, such as political office or making a huge amount of money, it can be worth thinking in advance about how you’ll stay committed to your ideals.

One of the best things you can do is to maintain a group of advisors from before you were powerful, who also care about your goals and are willing to call you out — and who are not dependent on you for their own ability to make a difference.

It may also be possible to pre-commit by, for example, making a public pledge to donate or support certain causes. This allows even more people to keep you accountable.

Finally, it can be worth explicitly sketching in advance what systems you’ll use to constrain and improve your decision making if you’re successful. For instance, you can put more effort into creating a good board for your startup so that it’ll be ready if your organisation grows rapidly. Or you could sketch out how you’d design a foundation to distribute money carefully.

Conclusion

Many people who want to do good feel like they have a choice between traditional helping careers (which might not be a good fit for them), or ‘selling out’ and doing a corporate job with little or no impact.

But what matters isn’t your job title, but rather how much of an opportunity your job gives you to contribute to solving pressing problems.

We’ve tried to show that it’s possible to make a big contribution in a very wide range of jobs by finding routes to get more leverage — from being an unknown government bureaucrat, to a personal assistant, to a quantitative trader.

Indeed, these more unusual and abstract ways of contributing are often more neglected by people who are trying to have a positive impact, meaning there is more low-hanging fruit to be taken. And so while more indirect paths are not always best, they’re well worth having on the table.

In addition, we’ve tried to show the impact of traditional helping careers can vary hugely depending on how the role is used. A doctor working on health policy or research can sometimes help thousands of times more patients.

This shows it’s important not just to classify jobs as those that ‘help’ vs those that don’t, but rather to try to roughly weigh up how much leverage you might have in different paths, and to focus on the opportunities that seem biggest.

(And then also to weigh up the other factors we cover like personal fit and career capital.)

One implication of all this is that there are many more routes to contributing than the traditional helping careers. Many people we’ve worked with have, by broadening their options, been able to find paths that do a lot of good and that fit them better. Or they’ve found a more indirect route to helping which generates less warm glow, but is more satisfying in another way — for example, it may offer more intellectual satisfaction or may be carried out with colleagues they really like.

This makes it possible for them to find a career that’s both more personally fulfilling and more impactful than their initial options.

Read next

This article is part of our advanced series. See the full series, or keep reading:

• 

  The best solutions are far more effective than others

  Read more
• 

  The highest-impact career paths our research has identified so far

  Read more
• 

  Longtermism: a call to protect future generations

  Read more

The post In which career can you make the biggest contribution? appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

Not always. When asked, more than 75% of Division I basketball players thought they would play professionally, but only 2% actually made it. Whether or not the players in the survey were making a good bet, they overestimated their chances of success… by over 37 times.

This level of overconfidence is common, and means that “be more ambitious” may not always be the right advice. Some people even enjoy taking risks, which explains why they buy lottery tickets even though they lose money on average. Whether to be more ambitious depends on the domain and the person in question.

However, if your aim is to have positive impact on the world, we think we can make a rational case for setting ambitious goals.

In short, our advice is to do as much as you can to set up your life so that you can afford to fail, eliminate paths that might cause significant harm, and then aim as high as you can. As a slogan: limit downsides, then target upsides.

What do we mean by being more ambitious?

We mean you should aim high. More concretely, we mean you should:

1. Make a list of longer-term career paths you could aim towards.
2. Think about how much positive impact you’d have if each path goes really well (what we call an ‘upside scenario’).
3. Think about what will happen if the path goes badly. Modify or eliminate any options that might have a big negative impact — either on your life or on the world.
4. Then, to choose between the remaining paths, seriously consider pursuing the one with the best outcome in the upside scenario.

To be more precise, we can define the upside scenario as the top 5% or top 10% of possible outcomes. But even when you have no idea what the probabilities are, you can still broadly target paths with high upsides. (You can also apply this rule of thumb at the level of setting goals for specific projects, though our focus here is on longer-term career paths.)

Aiming high means looking for paths that might turn out really well — even if they seem wacky, or there’s a good chance they won’t work out.

Four reasons to be more ambitious

When we advise people on their impact, they often want to feel confident they’ve done ‘some’ good with their career, rather than bet on a small chance of achieving much more. This is understandable, because it’s satisfying to know that you’ve achieved something rather than nothing.

But if your aim is to help people, rather than just feel satisfied, it could be a big mistake. By being open to long shots, ambitious people can greatly increase their expected impact — even accounting for the chance their projects fail.

Here are four reasons why people who want to do good should be more open to taking risks than the norm.

1. A small chance of achieving a lot can still be worth a great deal (and much more than in your personal life)

There are realistic ways you can make a contribution to some of the most important and neglected issues of our time.

More than that, there’s a chance you could achieve something amazing. Maybe you can start an important new charity, or run a media campaign that shifts people’s views of a crucial issue. Maybe you could even win a Nobel Prize, be elected to Congress, become prime minister, or found a ‘megaproject’ nonprofit. If you go in with, and are able to uphold, a firm commitment to doing good, any of these wild achievements could allow you to have an outsized impact.

These kinds of outcomes are all unlikely of course. But they might be more likely than you think.

And even if the chance of an amazing outcome is very low, it could still be worth betting on. Why?

From the perspective of making the world better, helping two people is twice as good as helping one.

Taking this idea further, a 10% chance of saving 200 lives is better than a 90% chance of saving 10. This follows from the idea of expected value.¹

If thousands of our readers all pursued projects with a 10% chance of success, there would be hundreds of successes, even if most don’t work out.

These are toy examples, and in reality we’ll never know the probabilities or outcomes with much confidence. But it illustrates that it can be worth setting ambitious goals and betting on comparatively unlikely outcomes — if the odds and upsides are high enough.

This is much less true in your personal life. Gaining 10 new friends isn’t twice as good as gaining five, since what we most care about is feeling like we have a community of some kind. Most people would prefer $10 million with certainty compared to a 20% chance of $100 million. This is because money (and most other things) have sharply diminishing value for individuals. So in your personal life, long-shot gambles are much less attractive — aim for ‘good enough’ rather than maximising the potential upside.

Psychologically, most people are also loss-averse — losing a friend is a lot more painful than gaining one is joyful — which makes it even more important to avoid big risks.

None of this applies to actually making the world a better place, where helping twice the number of others, or helping them twice as much, really is twice as good. If you’ve saved one life already, that doesn’t make it any less valuable to save another. So do-gooders should be more open to taking risks.

This isn’t to say you should be entirely risk-neutral – some risk aversion is still appropriate, especially with respect to resources rather than impact.

This is because even at large scales, there are still diminishing returns to altruistic resources, since it’s harder to, say, spend $10 billion well than $1 billion.

So while giving up a certainty of $2 million of donations in exchange for a 20% chance of $20 million seems reasonable, giving up a 100% chance of $2 billion for a 20% chance of $10 billion doesn’t seem like obviously a good idea. (This is even more true if your gambles are correlated with other altruists, which they will be if they’re correlated to the stock market.)

It’s also important to note the argument for being less risk averse is only about upsides. There are major practical and moral reasons to be risk-averse about the chance of doing a lot of harm, which is why we say to eliminate downsides.

But in short, we think people aiming to do good have more reason to aim high than normal. In other words: ‘satisfice’ your personal goals, but be ambitious about your impact.

2. Upside scenarios can be where most of the expected impact is from

Another difference with the world of doing good is that there’s a large skew in outcomes. Most importantly, we’ve seen that in many fields, especially those like research or entrepreneurship, the most successful people are often responsible for a significant fraction of the total impact.

This means that the expected value of entering the field is significantly driven by the value of the upside scenario (adjusted for how likely it is). So, ‘having the most impact’ often boils down to ‘focus on the (non-crazy) scenario with the most upside.’

This won’t always be true, but it’s at least worth seriously thinking about what great outcomes might be possible, on the chance it is possible for you.

Speculatively, focusing on upsides might be becoming more important as technological advancement means that extreme changes are happening more and more often.

One dizzying implication of this way of thinking is that from the perspective of your impact, if one scenario is far higher impact than the others, it can sometimes be ideal to act as if it’s going to happen and basically ignore the other scenarios.

3. You might surprise yourself

If you aim high, you might be positively surprised: maybe you can actually achieve the upside scenario, and you’ve discovered an amazing path.

If, however, you discover the upside scenario is not going to happen, you can probably switch to something else without great costs.

In other words, there’s an asymmetry: by aiming high, you might find an amazing career path, while if it doesn’t work out, you’re probably in a similar situation to before.

You can read more about this in our article on exploration, where we show that you stand to learn the most from pursuing paths that might be amazing, but where you’re also really uncertain how they’ll turn out. The greater the uncertainty, the more you’ll learn by trying it.

We’ve worked with lots of people who applied to a new job way out of their comfort zone, thinking it was a long shot, and then not only went on to land the position, but also excel in it.

4. Low-probability bets are neglected

Is the world of doing good more dominated by people who are overconfident (like would-be professional basketball players) or people who are risk-averse? Our impression is that it’s the latter. If so, this means high-upside paths will be relatively neglected — perhaps especially at the very highest end.

Why do we have this impression? One reason is that many efforts to do good are done by governments and nonprofits, and their incentives make it hard for them to take low-probability, high-upside bets.

Suppose a government bureaucrat can fund a programme that has a 10% chance of an amazing outcome, like speeding up vaccines for COVID-19 in 2020. After funding five projects that don’t work, this bureaucrat will probably lose their job, even if the expected value of each project was very high. On the other hand, if the bet pays off, they’ll get few rewards — maybe a bit of praise from their colleagues, or a modest raise, if they’re lucky. These incentives make people risk-averse.

We’ve seen some empirical evidence of this. In one study, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute took a more risk-tolerant approach to funding medical research and seemed to get better results than the US National Institutes of Health — the more conservative government agency.

Carl Shulman discusses these dynamics on our podcast. Open Philanthropy also argues that in the world of philanthropy, higher-risk bets are often better.

In other words, since most people don’t aim high, as you aim higher, you face less and less competition. This means the odds of success decline more slowly than you might expect. For example, while it might be harder to found a nonprofit with a budget of $100 million than $10 million, it’s not obvious it’s 10 times harder.

Limiting downside risks

We’ve given the arguments for aiming high, but you can only set truly ambitious goals after you’ve limited the downsides, so we’ll also talk briefly about why and how to do that — setting yourself up to be more ambitious.

Why limit downsides first?

Downsides for the world

The arguments above to ‘focus on upsides’ only works when the potential for making things better is a lot higher than making them worse.

In the world of doing good, it’s sometimes possible to make things a lot worse than they were before. For example, you might launch a social programme aiming to reduce crime, only to find the evidence suggests it made crime worse. We discuss how easy it can be to accidentally make things worse in a separate article.

There are also many important reasons to avoid career paths that could do significant harm, even if you think the good will outweigh the bad, as we also cover in a separate article.

So, if you’re considering a path or project that might have a big negative impact (rather than merely fail and not achieve much), then you need to be very cautious. In general, we’d recommend simply avoiding projects like this, and then focusing on the biggest upsides among your remaining options.

Personal downsides

If you aim high, there’s a good chance you won’t succeed.

As we’ve seen, it’s perfectly reasonable to be risk- and loss-averse about your personal life. This means it’s important to avoid risks that might make you a lot less happy, or embark on paths with unacceptable downsides, like not being able to support someone who is financially dependent on you.

You’ll also be able to have a greater long-term impact if you can”stay in the game” and keep trying until you succeed. So, there are even purely altruistic reasons to minimise any risks of outcomes that might prevent you from trying again, like damaging your mental or physical health, or ruining your reputation.

How to limit downsides

Even if you can’t easily estimate how likely risks are to materialise, you can often do a lot to limit them, freeing yourself up to focus on upsides.

We discuss how to avoid setting back your cause in our separate article on accidental harm.

Turning to your own life, over time, you can aim to set up your life to make yourself more able to take risks. Some of the most important steps you can take include:

• Building up your financial security. If you’re at constant risk of failing to make your rent, that’s a serious downside you can’t discount.
• Looking after your physical and mental health and important relationships, so that your lifestyle is sustainable.
• Building valuable career capital that gives you backup options, e.g. through building skills or finding good mentors.

When comparing different career paths, here are some tips:

1. Consider ‘downside scenarios’ for each of the paths you’re considering. What might happen in the worst 10% of scenarios?

2. Look for risks that are really serious. First, consider ways that path or course of action might make the world much worse. Second, consider the personal risks. It’s easy to have a vague sense that you might ‘fail’ by embarking on an ambitious path, but what would failure actually be like? The personal risks to be most concerned about are those that could prevent you from trying again, or that could make your life a lot worse. You might find that when you think about what would actually happen if you failed, your life would still be fine. For example, if you apply for a grant for an ambitious project and don’t get it, you will have just lost a bit of time.

3. If you identify a serious risk of pursuing some option, see if you can modify the option to reduce that risk. Many entrepreneurs like Bill Gates are famous for dropping out of college, which makes them look like risk-takers. But besides the security provided by his upper middle-class background, Gates also made sure he had the option to return to Harvard if his startup failed. By modifying the option, starting Microsoft didn’t involve much risk at all. For personal risks, often the most useful step you can do here is to have a good backup plan, and this is part of our planning process.

4. If you can’t modify the path to reduce the risk of a significant negative impact or blow to your personal life to an acceptable level, eliminate that option and try something else.

5. Check with your gut. If you feel uneasy about embarking on a path even after taking the steps above, there may be a risk you haven’t realised yet. Negative emotions can be a sign to keep investigating to figure out what’s behind them.

What are the reasons against aiming high?

Here are some of the main counterarguments to the case for being more ambitious:

1. Your estimate of the value of the upside option probably contains a huge amount of uncertainty, which means that on further investigation, it probably won’t be as good as it seems (“regression to the mean“). This will be even worse if you’re prone to overconfidence.

2. Focusing on upsides can make it feel more justified to incur big risks. This is why we emphasise first limiting downsides.

3. It may be demotivating. Some people find it exciting to aim high – and some like to follow leaders with an ambitious plan. But others much prefer to feel like they’re doing “some good” with confidence. If you aim high, there’s a greater chance that at the end, you look back and haven’t achieved much.

4. If you aim high and succeed, especially in areas like finance and politics, you may be more likely to be corrupted by your newfound power and influence. So if you’re aiming high, it’s important to set up safeguards.

For these reasons, ambition can easily be taken too far. How ambitious to be is a question of balance, and our intention here is to encourage a tilt in the direction of ambition – especially for those who are chronically under-ambitious or have imposter syndrome.

Conclusion

We advise people who are overconfident, as well as people who are underconfident.

The more underconfident you are, the more important it is to try to aim higher; while the most overconfident people should likely focus on more realistic plans. So which way to tilt depends on your personality.

That said, if your aim is to have an impact, our sense is that underconfidence is typically the more common mistake. Provided you’ve limited the downsides, it’s better to aim a little too high than too low.

Being more ambitious doesn’t need to involve irrationally convincing yourself that success is guaranteed. To be worth betting on, you just need to believe that:

• Success is possible
• Your downsides are limited
• The expected value of pursuing the path is high

If you’ve found a path that might be amazing, make a backup plan and give it a go. It may not work out, but it might be the best thing you ever decide to do.

Learn more

• Expected value: how can we know what makes a difference when uncertain? by Benjamin Todd
• Black swan farming by Paul Graham
• Optimism for Realists: The Optimism Heuristic by Danny Hernandez
• Julia Galef argues you don’t need to be irrationally overconfident to succeed in The Scout Mindset — listen to this interview with her by Noah Smith
• Searching for outliers by Ben Kuhn
• When Should Altruists Be Financially Risk-Averse? and Should Altruists Leverage Investments? by Brian Tomasik
• Risk aversion and investment for altruists by Paul Christiano

Read next

This article is part of our advanced series. See the full series, or keep reading:

• 

  Doing good together: how to coordinate effectively and avoid single-player thinking

  Read more
• 

  Career exploration: when should you settle?

  Read more
• 

  Ways people trying to do good accidentally make things worse, and how to avoid them

  Read more

The post Be more ambitious: a rational case for dreaming big (if you want to do good) appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

By getting clearer about your definition, you can better target your efforts. So how should you define social impact?

Over two thousand years of philosophy have gone into that question. We’re going to try to sum up that thinking; introduce a practical, rough-and-ready definition of social impact; and explain why we think it’s a good definition to focus on.

This is a bit ambitious for one article, so to the philosophers in the audience, please forgive the enormous simplifications.

A simple definition of social impact

If you just want a quick answer, here’s the simple version of our definition (a more philosophically precise one — and an argument for it — follows below):

Your social impact is given by the number of people¹ whose lives you improve and how much you improve them, over the long term.

This shows that you can increase your impact in two ways: by helping more people over time, or by helping the same number of people to a greater extent (pictured below).

We say “over the long term” because you can help more people either by helping a greater number now, or taking actions with better long-term effects.

This definition is enough to help you figure out what to aim at in many situations — e.g. by roughly comparing the number of people affected by different issues. But sometimes you need a more precise definition.

A more rigorous definition of social impact

Here’s our working definition of “social impact”:

“Social impact” or “making a difference” is (tentatively) about promoting total expected wellbeing — considered impartially, over the long term.

We don’t think social impact is all that matters. Rather, we think people should aim to have a greater social impact within the constraints of not sacrificing other important values – in particular, while building good character, respecting rights and attending to other important personal values. We don’t endorse doing something that seems very wrong from a commonsense perspective in order to have a greater social impact.

In fact, we even think that paying attention to these other values is probably the best way to in fact have the most social impact anyway, even if that’s all you want to aim for.

In the rest of this article, we’ll expand on:

1. Why we think social impact is primarily about promoting what’s of value — i.e. making the world better
2. Why we think making the world a better place is in large part about promoting total expected wellbeing
3. How social impact fits with other values
4. How we can assess what makes a difference in the face of uncertainty

We believe that taking this definition seriously has some potentially radical implications about where people who want to do good should focus, which we also explore.

Two final notes before we go into more detail. First, our definition is tentative — there’s a good chance we’re wrong and it might change. Second, its purpose is practical — it aims to cover the most important aspects of doing good to help people make better real-life decisions, rather than capture everything that’s morally relevant.

Social impact is about making the world better

What does it mean to act ethically? Moral philosophers have debated this question for millennia, and have arrived at three main kinds of answers:

1. Being virtuous — e.g. being honest, kind, and just
2. Acting rightly — e.g. respecting the rights of others and not doing wrong
3. Making the world better — e.g. helping others

These correspond to virtue ethics, deontology, and consequentialism, respectively.

Whatever you think about which perspective is most fundamental, we think all three have something to offer in practice (we’ll expand on this in the rest of the article). So we could say that a simple, general recipe for a moral life would be to:

1. Cultivate good character
2. Respect constraints, such as the rights of others
3. And then do as much good as you can

In short, character, constraints and consequences.

When our readers talk about wanting to “make a difference,” we think most interested in the third of these perspectives — changing the world for the better.

We agree focusing more on doing good makes sense for most people. First, we don’t just want to avoid doing wrong, or live honest lives, but actually leave the world better than we found it. And more importantly, there’s so much we can do to help.

For instance, we’ve shown that by donating 10% of their income to highly effective charities, most college graduates can save the lives of over 40 people over their lifetimes with a relatively minor sacrifice.

From an ethical perspective, whether you save 40 lives or not will probably be one of the most significant questions you’ll ever face.

In our essay on your most important decision, we argued that some career paths open to you will do hundreds of times more to make the world a better place than others. So it seems really important to figure out what those paths are.

Even philosophers who emphasise moral rules and virtue agree that if you can make others better off, that’s a good thing to do. And they agree it’s even better to make more people better off than fewer. (More broadly, we think deontologists and utilitarians agree a lot more than people think.)

John Rawls was one of the most influential (non-consequentialist) philosophers of the 20th century, and he said:

All ethical doctrines worth our attention take consequences into account in judging rightness. One which did not would simply be irrational, crazy.²

Since there seem to be big opportunities to make people better off, and some seem to be better than others, we should focus on finding those.

This might sound obvious, but most discussion of ethical living is very focused on reducing harm rather than doing more good.

For instance, when it comes to fighting climate change, there’s a lot of focus on our personal carbon emissions, rather than figuring out what we can do to best fight climate change.

Asking the second question suggests radically different actions. The best things we can do to fight climate change probably involve working on, advocating for, and donating to exceptional research and advocacy opportunities, rather than worrying about plastic bags, recycling, or turning out the lights.

Why is there so much focus on our personal emissions? One explanation is that ethical views originate from before the 20th century, and sometimes from thousands of years ago. If you were a medieval peasant, your main ethical priority was to help your family survive, without cheating or harming your neighbors. You didn’t have the knowledge, power, or time to help hundreds of people or affect the long-term future.

The Industrial Revolution gave us wealth and technology not even available to kings and queens in previous centuries. Now, many ordinary citizens of rich countries have enormous power to do good, and this means the potential consequences of our actions are usually what’s most ethically significant about them.

But this isn’t to say that we can ignore harms. In general, we think it’s vital to avoid doing anything that seems very wrong from a commonsense perspective, even if it seems like it might lead to a greater social impact, and to cultivate good character

In general, we see our advice as about striving to have a greater impact, within the constraints of your other important values.

So, we think ‘social impact’ or ‘making a difference’ should be about making the world better. But what does that mean?

What does it mean to “make the world better”?

We imagine building a world in which the most beings can have the best possible lives in the long term — lives that are free from suffering and injustice, and full of happiness, adventure, connection, and meaning.

There are two key components to this vision — impartiality and a focus on wellbeing — which we’ll now unpack.

Impartiality: everyone matters equally

When it comes to ‘making a difference,’ we think we should strive to be more impartial — i.e. to give equal weight to everyone’s interests.

This means striving to avoid privileging the interests of anyone based on arbitrary factors such as their race, gender, or nationality, as well as where or even when they live. We also think that the interests of many nonhuman animals should be given significant weight, although we’re unsure of the exact amount. Importantly, we’re also concerned about potentially sentient future digital beings, which could exist in very large numbers and whose welfare could be in part determined by how we design them.

The idea of impartiality is common in many ethical traditions, and is closely related to the “Golden Rule” of treating others as you’d like to be treated, no matter who they are.

Acting impartially is an ideal, and it’s not all that matters. As individuals, we all have other personal goals, such as caring for our friends and family, carrying out our personal projects, and having our own lives go well. Even considering only moral goals, it’s plausible we have other values or ethical commitments beyond impartially helping others.

We’re not saying you should abandon these other goals and strive to treat everyone equally in all circumstances.

Rather, the claim is that insofar as your goal is to ‘make a difference’ or ‘have a social impact,’ we don’t see good reason to privilege any one group over another — and that you should therefore have some concern for the interests of strangers, nonhumans, and other neglected groups.

(And even if you think that the ultimate ideal is to have equal concern for all beings, as a matter of psychology, you probably have other, competing goals, and it’s not helpful to pretend you don’t.)

In Peter Singer’s essay, Famine, Affluence, and Morality, he imagines you’re walking and come across a child drowning in a pond. Everyone agrees that you should run in and save the child, even if it would ruin your new suit and shoes.

This illustrates a principle that many people can get behind: if you can help a stranger a great deal with little cost to yourself, that’s a good thing to do. This shows that most people give some weight to the interests of others.

If it also turns out that you have a lot of power to help others (as we argued above), then it would imply that social impact should be one of the main focuses of your life.

Impartiality also implies that you should think carefully about who you can help the most. It’s common to say that “charity begins at home,” but if everyone’s interests matter equally, and you can help more people who are living far away (e.g. because they’re without cheap basic necessities you can provide), then you should help the more distant people.

We’re convinced that a degree of impartiality is reasonable, and that many people should try thinking harder about impartiality than they are used to. But there remains huge questions about how impartial to be.

The trend over history seems to have been towards a greater impartiality and a wider and wider circle of concern, but we’re unsure where that should stop. For instance, compared to people today, how exactly should we weigh the interests of nonhuman animals, people who don’t exist yet, and potential digital beings? This is called the question of moral patienthood.

Here’s an example of the stakes of this question: we don’t see much reason to discount the interests of future generations simply because they’re distant from us in time. But because there could be so many people in the future, the main focus of efforts to do good should be to leave the best possible world for those future generations. This idea has been called ‘longtermism,’ and is explored in a separate article. We think longtermism is an important perspective, which is part of why we say “over the long term” in our definition of social impact.

This section was about who to help; the next section is about what helps.

Wellbeing: what does it mean to help others?

When aiming to help others, our tentative hypothesis is that we should aim to increase their wellbeing as much as possible — i.e. enable more individuals to live flourishing lives that are healthy, happy, fulfilled; are in line with their wishes; and are free from avoidable suffering.

Although people disagree over whether wellbeing is the only thing that matters morally, almost everyone agrees that things like health and happiness matter a lot — and so we think it should be a central focus in efforts to make a difference.

Putting impartiality and a focus on wellbeing together means that, roughly, how much positive difference an action makes depends on how it increases the wellbeing of those affected, and how many are helped — no matter when or where they live.

What wellbeing consists of more precisely is a controversial question, which you can read about in this introduction by Fin Moorhouse. In brief, there are three main views:

• The hedonic view: wellbeing consists in your degree of positive vs negative mental states such as happiness, meaning, discovery, excitement, connection, and equanimity.
• The preference satisfaction view: wellbeing consists in your desires being fulfilled.
• Objective list theories: wellbeing consists in achieving certain goods, like friendship, knowledge, and health.

In philosophical thought experiments, these different views have very different implications. For instance, if you support the hedonic view, you’d need to accept that being secretly placed into a virtual reality machine that generates amazing experiences is better for you than staying in the real world. If instead you support (or just have some degree of belief in) the preference satisfaction view, you don’t have to accept this implication, because your desires can include not being deceived and achieving things in the real world.

In practical situations, however, we rarely find that different views of wellbeing drive different decisions, such as about which global problems to focus on. The three notions correlate closely enough that differences in views are usually driven by other factors (such as the question of where to draw the boundaries of the expanding circle discussed in the previous section).

What else might matter besides wellbeing? There are many candidates, which is why we say promoting wellbeing is only a “tentative” hypothesis.

Preserving the environment enables the planet to support more beings with greater wellbeing in the long term, and so is also good from the perspective of promoting wellbeing. However, some believe that we should preserve the environment even if it doesn’t make life better for any sentient beings, showing they place intrinsic value on preserving the environment.

Others think we should place intrinsic value on autonomy, fairness, knowledge, and many other values.

Fortunately, promoting these other values often goes hand in hand with promoting wellbeing, and there are often common goals that people with many values can share, such as avoiding existential risks. So again, we believe that the weight people put on these different values has less effect on what to do than often supposed, although they can lead to differences in emphasis.

We’re not going to be able to settle the question of defining everything that’s of moral value in this article, but we think that promoting wellbeing is a good starting point — it captures much of what matters and is a goal that almost everyone can get behind.

How good is it to create a happy person?

We’ve mostly spoken above as if we’re dealing with potential effects on a fixed population, but some decisions could result in more people existing in the long term (e.g. avoiding a nuclear war), while others mainly benefit people who already exist (e.g. treating people who have parasitic worms, which rarely kill people but cause a lot of suffering). So we need to compare the value of increasing the number of people with positive wellbeing with benefiting those who already exist.

This question is studied by the field of ‘population ethics’ and is an especially new and unsettled area of philosophy.

We won’t try to summarise this huge topic here, but our take is that the most plausible view is that we should maximise total wellbeing — i.e. the number of people (again including all beings whose lives matter morally) who exist in all of history, weighted by their level of wellbeing. This is why we say “total” wellbeing in the definition.

That said, there are some powerful responses to this position, which we briefly sketch out in the article on longtermism. For this reason, we’re not certain of this ‘totalist’ view, and so put some weight on other perspectives.

Expected value: acting under uncertainty

How do you know what will increase wellbeing the most?

In short, you don’t.

You have to weigh up the different likelihoods of different outcomes, and act even though you’re uncertain. We believe the theoretical ideal here is to take the action with the greatest expected value compared to the counterfactual. This means taking into account both how much wellbeing our actions could result in, and how likely those outcomes are, and adding them together.

In practice, we try to approximate this with rules of thumb, like the importance, neglectedness, tractability framework.

Going into expected value theory would take us too far afield, so if you want to learn more, check out our separate articles:

• Expected value: how to act when you’re uncertain what will help?
• Counterfactuals and how they change our view of what does good
• Cluelessness: can we know the effects of our actions?

Why do we emphasise respecting other values?

This is to remind us of how much could be left out of our definition, and how radical our uncertainty is.

Many moral views that were widely held in the past are regarded as flawed or even abhorrent today. This suggests we should expect our own moral views to be flawed in ways that are difficult for us to recognise.

There is still significant moral disagreement within society, among contemporary moral philosophers, and, indeed, within our own team.

And past projects aiming to pursue an abstract ethical ideal to the exclusion of all else have often ended badly.

We believe it’s important to pursue social impact within the constraints of trying very hard to:

• Not do anything that seems very wrong from a commonsense perspective
  • E.g. to not violate important legal and ethical rights
• Cultivate good character, such as honesty, humility and kindness
• Respect other people’s important values and to be willing to compromise with them
• Respect your other important personal values, such as your family, personal projects and wellbeing

First, following these principles most likely increases your social impact in the long-term, once you take account of the indirect benefits of following them and the limitations of your knowledge.

Second, many believe following these principles is inherently valuable. We’re morally uncertain so try to consider a range of perspectives and do what makes sense on balance.

You can read more about why we think following principles like the above makes sense no matter your ethical views in these additional articles:

• Is it ever okay to take a harmful job in order to do more good?
• Moral uncertainty: how to act when you’re uncertain about what’s good
• Doing good together: how to coordinate effectively and avoid single-player thinking)
• Ways people trying to do good accidentally make things worse, and how to avoid them

Considering these principles, if we had to sum up our ethical code into a single sentence, it might be something like: cultivate a good character, respect the rights of others, and promote wellbeing for the wider world.

And we think this is a position that people with consequentialist, deontological, and virtue-based ethics should all be able to get behind — it’s just that they support it for different reasons.

Conclusion

We’re not sure what it means to make a difference, but we think our definition is a reasonable starting point that many people should be able to get behind:

“Social impact” or “making a difference” is (tentatively) about promoting total expected wellbeing — considered impartially, over the long term.

We’ve also gestured at how social impact might fit with your personal priorities and what else matters ethically, as well as many of our uncertainties about the definition — which can have a big effect on where to focus.

We think one of the biggest questions is whether to accept longtermism, so we’ve dedicated a whole separate article to that question.

From there, you can start to explore which global problems are most pressing based on whatever definition of social impact you think is correct.

You’ll most likely find that the question of which global problems to focus on is more driven by empirical or methodological uncertainties than moral ones. But if you find a moral question is crucial, you can come back and explore the further reading below.

In short, if you have the extraordinary privilege to be a college graduate in a rich country and to have options for how to spend your career, it’s plausible that social impact, as defined in this way, should be one of your main priorities.

Learn more

Top recommendations

• Why not to take a harmful career even if you think it’ll do more good.
• Podcast: Will MacAskill on moral uncertainty, utilitarianism, and how to avoid being a moral monster
• Podcast: Toby Ord on the perils of maximising the good that you do

Read next

This article is part of our advanced series. See the full series, or keep reading:

• 

  Longtermism: a call to protect future generations

  Read more
• 

  Is it ever OK to take a harmful job in order to do more good? An in-depth analysis

  Read more
• 

  Counterfactuals and how they change our view of what does good

  Read more

The post What is social impact? A definition appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

• The best interventions were around 10,000 times more cost effective than the worst, and around 50 times more cost effective than the median.
• If you picked two interventions at random, on average the better one would be 100 times more cost effective than the other.
• The distribution was heavy-tailed, and roughly lognormal. In fact, it almost exactly followed the 80/20 rule — that is, implementing the top 20% of interventions would do about 80% as much good as implementing all of them.
• The differences between the very best interventions were larger than the differences between the typical ones, so it’s more important to go from ‘very good’ to ‘very best’ than from ‘so-so’ to ‘very good.’

He published these results in The Moral Imperative towards Cost-Effectiveness in Global Health,² which became one of the papers that started the effective altruism movement. (Note that Ord is an advisor to 80,000 Hours.)

This data appears to have radical implications for people interested in doing good in the world; namely, by working on one of the best interventions in global health, you could achieve about as much as 50 people working on typical interventions in that area.

In some earlier research, I showed that many charitable interventions don’t seem to work at all. But the DCP2 data showed that even among interventions that work, there are still huge differences in impact, suggesting it would be worth going to great efforts to find the most effective ones.

So it’s crucial to know the extent to which this is true, and whether the results extend beyond global health.

At the time, it was widely assumed these patterns would hold, but this wasn’t carefully checked.

In this article, I’ve attempted to check these claims — I would really welcome further research into these questions, ideally by someone trained in social science.

In the first section, I list all the datasets I’ve seen comparing cost-effectiveness, and compare them to Ord’s findings in global health — finding that the 80/20 pattern basically holds up. (There is more technical information — log standard deviations, and log-binned histograms showing distribution shapes — in the additional data appendix.)

In the second section, I explore what we can learn from this data about how much solutions differ in effectiveness within cause areas, all things considered.

I’ll argue the true forward-looking differences between interventions within cause areas are not as large or decision-relevant as these results make them seem; though they’re still far more important than most realise. In other words, they’re underrated by the world in general, but may be overrated by fans of effective altruism.

In the third section, I speculate about the implications for how to choose interventions within a cause, arguing that it shows that the edge you gain from having a data-driven approach is less than it first seems.

Overall, I roughly estimate that the most effective measurable interventions in an area are usually around 3–10 times more cost effective than the mean of measurable interventions (where the mean is the expected effectiveness you’d get from picking randomly). If you also include interventions whose effectiveness can’t be measured in advance, then I’d expect the spread to be larger by another factor of 2–10, though it’s hard to say how the results would generalise to areas without data.

1. Data on how much solutions differ in effectiveness within cause areas

The original dataset: Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries (second edition)

I’ll start with the dataset used in Ord’s original paper as our point of comparison.

The DCP2 was published in 2006. It compared 107 interventions within global health in poor countries, ranging from surgery to treat Kaposi’s sarcoma, to public health programmes like distributing free condoms to prevent AIDS.

For each intervention, there’s an estimate of how much illness it prevents — measured in disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) — and how much it costs. The ratio of the two is the cost effectiveness.

If we line up the interventions in order of cost effectiveness (shown on the Y-axis), we get the following graph:

We can see that the first 60 interventions are near the zero line, and so aren’t very effective. But the top 20 or so achieve a huge amount per dollar.

Other studies of global health

In the blog post GiveWell’s top charities are increasingly hard to beat, Alexander Berger, co-CEO of Open Philanthropy³, found three surveys of cost-benefit analyses for health interventions in the developing world: the DCP2, the more current third edition of the same report (DCP3)⁴, and a WHO-CHOICE review (which in turn provides two datasets: one for the average costs of the interventions, and one for the incremental costs).

This allows us to compare the DCP2 to some alternative and more current analyses. They turn out to show a similar pattern.

Disease Control Priorities (third edition)

WHO-CHOICE (using average cost effectiveness)

WHO-CHOICE (using incremental cost effectiveness)

Health in high-income countries: public health interventions in the UK (NICE)

Berger also found a dataset for the UK — National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE)⁵ — which enables us to extend the analysis to a high-income country.

The data is related to public health, and covers about 200 interventions focused on things like helping people stop smoking, reducing traffic accidents, improving dental health, and increasing testing for sexually transmitted infections. (The analysis was done in terms of quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) added instead of DALYs avoided, but for our purposes we can take these as equivalent.)

Here we find a similar pattern to health interventions in poor countries. Overall, the degree of spread seems similar or slightly larger than the DCP2.

However, in the DCP2, the mean, median, and top 2.5% are respectively 25x, 38x, and 16x higher, so the whole distribution is shifted upwards — in other words, interventions are way more cost effective in developing vs developed countries.

In fact, the difference in cost effectiveness of health interventions for rich and poor countries is so significant that even the top 2.5% of interventions in the NICE data creates fewer extra years of healthy life per pound spent than the mean in the developing world DCP2 data — and note the mean is the effectiveness you’d expect if you picked randomly. (Health in poor countries and health in rich countries are usually considered different cause areas by people interested in effective altruism in part for this reason.)

Interestingly, this roughly lines up with the difference in income between the UK and these countries, which makes sense, since richer people will generally be able to pay a lot more to protect their health (and logarithmic returns to health spending will mean the cost-effectiveness difference is proportional to the difference in income).

One additional source of data we didn’t have a chance to review is the CEVR CEA registry, which contains over 10,000 cost-effectiveness analyses on health interventions — this would be worth checking in future work.

US social interventions: Washington State Institute for Public Policy Benefit-Cost Results database

Now, can we extend the analysis beyond health?

Alexander Berger also found a database of cost-benefit analyses for about 370 US social policies, compiled by the Washington State Institute for Public Policy.⁶ The data spans issues from substance use disorders, to criminal justice reform, to higher education and public health, so gives us information on multiple cause areas.

The studies aimed to account for a variety of benefits from the programmes (rather than just health), which were then converted into dollars and compared to the costs (also measured in dollars).

First, looking at positive cost-benefit interventions (i.e. where interventions were worth the money spent), we again find a similar pattern:

Note: there are no units because cost-benefit ratios are unitless.⁷

Interestingly, and unlike within health, about 70 (19%) of the interventions had negative benefits — i.e. they made people worse off overall.

Though, they were distributed in a similar way. This is evidence in favour of a recent paper about ‘negative tails’ in doing good.

But before we get too pessimistic, it’s important to remember that only a minority of interventions had a negative impact. The mean over the entire dataset was still positive. This means that on average people in the field are doing good — it’s just important to choose carefully.

Criminal justice reform

Since these interventions span many different issues, we might ask what would happen if we further break down the data.

First, let’s focus only on criminal justice reform — just one of the causes in the full dataset.

The overall degree of spread is somewhat reduced, though still significant. This is what we’d expect since it’s a narrower domain, since one source of variation — the differences between cause areas — has been eliminated (though it could also be caused by a small sample size meaning there were no outliers in the sample).

Summary statistics (ignoring the interventions with negative cost effectiveness):

Pre-K to 12 education

We find a similar pattern of reduced but still significant spread if we focus only on education interventions.

It’s also interesting to note that there seem to be significant differences between the issues: the education interventions come out about four times more cost effective on average compared to criminal justice reform, even though both are in the same broad area of US social interventions.

Summary statistics (ignoring the interventions with negative cost effectiveness):

Climate change: Gillingham and Stock

Kenneth Gillingham and James Stock assessed the cost effectiveness of about 20 interventions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.⁸ They compared the interventions in terms of tonnes of CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) greenhouse gas emissions avoided per dollar.

The pattern here was very similar to the DCP2.

Summary statistics (ignoring the interventions with negative cost effectiveness):

Note: the authors gave a range of cost-effectiveness estimates for each intervention — for our analysis we used the middle of these ranges.

Education in the UK: The Education Endowment Foundation

The UK’s Education Endowment Foundation provides a toolkit that summarises the evidence on different UK education interventions.

Danielle Mason, Head of Research at the organisation, told me that the toolkit attempts to include all relevant, high-quality quantitative studies.

Each type of intervention is assessed based on (i) strength of evidence; (ii) effect size, measured in ‘months of additional schooling equivalent’; and (iii) cost. See how these scores are assessed here. We only considered studies with a “strength of evidence” score greater than 1.

This data roughly follows a similar distribution to the survey of US social interventions above, though the degree of spread is smaller. This could be because the variety of interventions studied is smaller. It might also be because most of the figures are based on meta-analyses, rather than single estimates. Single estimates tend to be more noisy, increasing spread. Meta-analyses are also more likely to be positive because they combine lots of smaller studies, so are less likely to be underpowered.

It’s unclear whether this data follows the same sort of heavy-tailed or lognormal distribution as the interventions discussed above. While the mean of the data is only slightly higher than the median, few interventions were studied, meaning it’s hard to determine the overall distribution.

Education in low-income countries: Education Global Practice and Development Research Group Study

The Education Global Practice and Development Research Group conducted a study of 41 education interventions⁹ in low- and middle-income countries, published in 2020.

They compared interventions in terms of how many additional years of schooling they produced per $1,000, aiming to take into account both the number and the quality of the years. They called their metric “learning-adjusted years of schooling” (LAYS).

This education data is much more clearly heavy-tailed — even more so than the DCP2 — and likely follows a lognormal distribution.

Some other datasets

The following studies are less comprehensive and rigorous than those above, but also help to check the general pattern in some different areas. I’ve included them to be comprehensive in what’s covered, and to avoid cherry picking studies that back up my findings. I’d be interested to learn about more studies of this kind.

Note that all of these are much narrower sets of interventions than those covered above, which will likely reduce spread. They also don’t explicitly account for costs, which I’ll argue in the AidGrade section means they probably understate spread.

AidGrade’s dataset of international development interventions — a potential counterexample?

We’ve seen some arguments against interventions being heavy-tailed based on AidGrade‘s dataset. They have a large dataset of interventions within international development, going beyond health.

They found that the distribution of effect sizes for interventions in their data was roughly normal rather than lognormal, though had a slightly heavier-than-normal positive tail.

However, this doesn’t mean that the distribution of cost effectiveness is normal, because there are two further factors to consider:

First, effect size is measured relative to many different types of outcome. This means that, roughly speaking, an intervention that cured 20% of people of the common cold would be given the same value as an intervention that cures 20% of people of cancer. Ideally there would be an attempt to weigh up the value of different outcomes across different studies (such as with DALYs, LAYS, or tonnes of CO2). This would add a source of variation, increasing spread.

Perhaps more importantly, costs also need to be considered. The costs of different interventions often differ by orders of magnitude, and so dividing by cost could increase spread a lot.

This would not be the case if costs and impact were closely correlated (which is what we’d hope to see if resources are allocated efficiently); however, empirically there seems to be a weak relationship between the two.

For instance, in the DCP2 data, dividing the average impact in DALYs by costs increases the degree of spread.

I’ve observed the same pattern in the other datasets I’ve checked. For instance, the Education Endowment Foundation dataset includes both average impact (measured in months of extra schooling equivalent) and costs, and the distribution of impact per cost is wider than average impact alone.

Without accounting for these two additional factors, we can’t draw conclusions about the shape of the distribution of cost effectiveness.

And my expectation is that if we did consider them, the distribution would become much wider, and would most likely be lognormal like the others.

You can see more explanation of the issue here.

Personal actions to fight climate change

Founders Pledge produced estimates of the effectiveness of various personal lifestyle decisions for fighting climate change. They produced two sets of estimates: one accounts for government climate targets and policies, and the other does not.

This data shows somewhat less spread than in other datasets; however, they only compare “actions,” without fully correcting for how some of these actions are probably much more costly than others. If we added this additional source of variation, and calculated “CO2 averted per unit of effort,” then I would expect a significantly wider spread.

Founders Pledge also estimated that a US $1,000 donation to their top choice climate charity — which seems somewhat comparable to the costs of the interventions here — would avert 100 tonnes of CO2. If we included this in the dataset, then the top intervention would be 250 times the median, and 140 times the mean.

(The below figures do not include this intervention.)

Units of tonnes of CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) greenhouse gas emissions avoided, accounting for policy.

Get Out the Vote tactics

In Get Out the Vote: How to Increase Voter Turnout, the authors reviewed strategies for political parties in the US to encourage people to vote. They looked at 19 strategies — including various kinds of direct mailing, leafleting, phoning, and door-to-door knocking — first estimating how much they increased turnout as a percentage¹⁰:

Then they made estimates of cost effectiveness:

This dataset is too small to properly measure its shape, but we can see that four of the interventions didn’t have measurable effects, while the top clearly stood out.

Patterns in the data overall

Focusing mainly on the large datasets (>50 interventions), here are the key summary stats:

What patterns do we see?

There appears to be a surprising amount of consistency in the shape of the distributions.

The distributions also appear to be closer to lognormal than normal — i.e. they are heavy-tailed, in agreement with Berger’s findings. However, they may also be some other heavy-tailed distribution (such as a power law), since these are hard to distinguish statistically.

Interventions were rarely negative within health (and the miscellaneous datasets), but often negative within social and education interventions (10–20%) — though not enough to make the mean and median negative. When interventions were negative, they seemed to also be heavy-tailed in negative cost effectiveness.

One way to quantify the interventions’ spread is to look at the ratio of between the mean of the top 2.5% and the overall mean and median. Roughly, we can say:

• The top 2.5% were around 20–200 times more cost effective than the median.
• The top 2.5% were around 8–20 times more cost effective than the mean.

Overall, the patterns found by Ord in the DCP2 seem to hold to a surprising degree in the other areas where we’ve found data.

2. Given this data, how much do solutions within a cause area actually differ in effectiveness?

In the DCP2, the top 2.5% of interventions were measured to be on average about 50 times more cost effective than the median. Does that mean you can actually have 50 times the impact?

It’s unclear, and I think it’s probably hard.

For one thing, the data we’ve covered are mostly backward-looking, and may not be a good reflection of realistic forward-looking estimates that take account of all sources of error, including model error.

Here’s an extreme example of the difference. Imagine 1,000 people buy lottery tickets, and one wins. The measured backward-looking distribution of payoffs is extreme — one person won a huge amount and everyone else won nothing. But beforehand, everyone had the same chance of winning, so there was no difference in the forward-looking value of the lottery tickets to each person.

Something similar could be happening in our studies. Perhaps many interventions looked similarly promising ahead of time, but only a handful succeeded — so it’s only when we look back that we see a large spread.

In this section, I list some ways that the data might overstate the degree of spread that’s looking forward, and some ways it might understate it. Overall, my guess is that the data overstates the true differences, but there is still a lot of spread.

(Note there’s nothing new about what I’m saying here (e.g. see this post by GiveWell from 2011). However, I often don’t see these points appreciated, so I thought it would be useful to relist them. These points are based on conversations I’ve had with people who have done research on these topics. I’m not a statistician and would love to see a more rigorous analysis.)

Ways the data might overstate the true degree of spread

Regression to the mean

There’s a huge degree of error in the estimates. Even if the estimates of DALYs averted per dollar were correct, DALYs don’t perfectly reflect improvements in health, and improvements in health aren’t all that matter.

Studies also often fail to generalise to different future contexts. Eva Vivalt found:

The typical study result differs from the average effect found in similar studies so far by almost 100%. That is to say, if all existing studies of an education program find that it improves test scores by 0.5 standard deviations — the next result is as likely to be negative or greater than 1 standard deviation, as it is to be between 0-1 standard deviations.

The median absolute amount by which a predicted effect size differs from the true value given in the next study is 99%. In standardised values, the average absolute value of the error is 0.18, compared to an average effect size of 0.12.

So, colloquially, if you say that your naive prediction was X, well, it could easily be 0 or 2*X — that’s how badly this estimate was off on average. In fact it’s as likely to be outside the range of between 0 and 2x, as inside it.

Finally, studies often have incorrect findings. In the replication crisis, it’s been found that perhaps 20–50% of studies don’t replicate, depending on the field and methodology.

All this error in the estimates means that the interventions that appear to be best have probably benefitted from positive luck, and are not as good as they seem — a phenomenon called regression to the mean.

In other words, measured impact is given by true impact and noise or random variation. If an intervention seems really good, it might be due to its true impact being high, or because the noise happened to be positive.

Going forward, noise is as likely to be negative as positive. This means that future measurements of the best interventions will probably look worse.

How large is this effect?

As a rough guide, researchers I’ve spoken to seem to think that effectiveness of the better interventions should be reduced by at least twofold, though the reduction could be tenfold or more.

Regression to the mean can also change the order of the interventions, because the effect is stronger for more error-prone estimates.

Interventions may no longer be available

The existence of research on an intervention doesn’t mean that it’s practical for a philanthropist or government to carry it out, and this is especially true of the best interventions.

If 1% of actors in the field are sensitive to evidence, then they will focus on the most promising 1% of interventions, ‘cutting off’ the tail of the distribution. This means that the best available interventions are often worse than the best that have been studied.

We’ve seen this play out in global health. One of the most cost-effective interventions in the data was vaccinating children, but these opportunities are almost all taken by the Gates Foundation and other international aid agencies.

Non-primary outcomes might be important too

All of my remarks apply only to the primary outcome studied (e.g. DALYs), but we also need to consider that most interventions have multiple outcomes that might matter.

For instance, many investments in health benefit the patients (as measured by DALYs) but might also have positive or negative effects on health infrastructure in the country, such as through training medical professionals, or discouraging government investment.

If these effects are small compared to the primary outcome, they can be safely ignored. They can also be ignored if they correlate closely with the primary outcome, because then we can use the primary outcome as a proxy for them.

For instance, many health programmes will also boost the income of the recipients (because if you’re healthy, you can earn more), but we should expect income benefits to correlate with health benefits, so the effects on income will partially factor out when we compare cost-effectiveness ratios.

However, if these other outcomes are large and positive (or if they anticorrelate with the primary outcome), then accounting for them could reduce the apparent difference in effectiveness between interventions measured on the primary outcome.

For instance, if one version of a programme spends more time training local healthcare providers, it might cost more to implement (reducing its effectiveness measured with DALYs in the short term) while doing more to improve health infrastructure and having a longer-lasting impact.

If the non-primary outcomes are large and negative, then they could completely reverse which interventions seem best.

Ways the data could understate differences between the best and typical interventions

Differences in execution and location

Some organisations will implement the same intervention better than others. Accounting for this difference will increase the spread in effectiveness between best and worst organisations you might support.

Once we’ve excluded organisations that seem obviously incompetent (which perhaps have zero impact), my impression is that the degree of variation on this factor is relatively small — perhaps around a factor of two between plausibly good organisations.

However, this is not guaranteed. For highly complex interventions, there are multiple steps that all need to be completed successfully, and if any step fails, the whole intervention fails. In economics this is called an ‘O-ring’ production process. In such a process, a small difference in the chance of successfully implementing each step adds up to a large difference in the chance of completing the whole process.

In addition, great organisations seem to produce more positive non-primary outcomes. For example, GiveDirectly has carried out several studies of its work, helping to create data on different ways of doing cash transfers that inform international development efforts more broadly.

In a similar vein, implementing the same intervention in different locations can have a big effect on cost effectiveness. For instance, malaria deaths in Burkina Faso are about five times the rate in Kenya, and about 50 times the rate in India. For a preventative intervention like nets, the benefit is proportional to the chance of infection, which makes a proportional difference to cost effectiveness.

Selection effects in which interventions were chosen

Which interventions are studied are not chosen at random; instead, they are chosen because they are unusually interesting and more likely to have especially large positive effects. Normally the point of running a trial is to find something better than what people currently focus on.

Running a trial is also expensive, so any intervention that has made it to that point must have a serious backer, which is probably also evidence that it’s better than average.

This is a reason to expect interventions that have been measured to be better than the full set of interventions that could be measured — i.e. there will be lots of hopeless interventions that no one wanted to research. This (combined with ignoring non-primary outcomes) could explain why so few of the interventions have negative effectiveness, even though it seems likely that some non-negligible fraction of international development interventions were negative.

The findings are probably better interpreted as the spread of effectiveness among interventions that were ‘plausibly good,’ rather than all interventions in the area — which will show more spread.

One improvement that could be made in future work would be to weight each intervention by the amount invested in it.

Difficult-to-measure programmes are not included

When we look at empirical studies of effectiveness, they often only cover interventions that can be measured in trials, and nearly always exclude interventions like funding research and lobbying government.

If we look at the history of philanthropy, many of the highest-impact interventions seem to be much less measurable, and have involved advocacy, policy change, and basic research.

This means that we should expect some of the best interventions in an area to be missing from these reviews. If these were added, then it would increase the potential spread of effectiveness among everything that’s available (though not among the interventions that have been studied).

I expect that the field of global health provides a best-case scenario for using data to select cost-effective interventions. This is because global health interventions are relatively easy to measure, which makes regression to the mean less pressing. In an area with much weaker estimates, like criminal justice reform, I expect the true degree of spread is more overstated than the data suggests.

Coming to an overall estimate of forward-looking spread

To come to an overall estimate of the degree of spread, you need to consider your priors,¹² the strength of the empirical evidence, and the significance of the factors above.

I don’t expect the ‘market’ for charitable interventions to be especially efficient, which means there is scope for large differences. And since effectiveness is given by a product of factors, there’s potential for a heavy tail.

Moreover, if we’re unsure between an efficient world with small differences and an inefficient world with big differences, then our expected distribution has a lot of spread.¹³

My overall view is that there’s a lot of spread, though not as much as naively going with the data would suggest.

Perhaps the top 2.5% of measurable interventions within a cause area are actually 3–10 times better than the mean of measurable interventions, rather than the 8–20 times better we see in the data (and the lower end seems more likely than the upper end to me).

If we were to expand this to also include non-measurable interventions, I would estimate the spread is somewhat larger, perhaps another 2–10 fold. This is mostly based on my impression of cost-effectiveness estimates that have been made of these interventions — it can’t (by definition) be based on actual data. So, it’s certainly possible that non-measurable interventions could vary by much more or much less.

Overall, I think it’s defensible to say that the best of all interventions in an area are about 10 times more effective than the mean, and perhaps as much as 100 times.

3. How much can we gain from being data-driven?

People in effective altruism sometimes say things like “the best charities achieve 10,000 times more than the worst” — suggesting it might be possible to have 10,000 times as much impact if we only focus on the best interventions — often citing the DCP2 data as evidence for that.

This is true in the sense that the differences across all cause areas can be that large. But it would be misleading if someone was talking about a specific cause area in two important ways.

First, as we’ve just seen, the data most likely overstates the true, forward-looking differences between the best and worst interventions.

Second, it often seems fairer to compare the best with the mean intervention, rather than the worst intervention.

One reason is that as the effectiveness of an intervention approaches zero, the ratio between it and the best intervention approaches infinity. So by picking from among the worst interventions, you can make the ratio between it and the best arbitrarily high. This is a real problem, because the worst interventions do often have zero (or even negative) cost effectiveness. (Though it does also say something about the world that such ineffective interventions are being implemented!)

What if we compare the best interventions to the median rather than the worst?

If someone has already chosen a particular intervention that you know is near the median, then you could point out that the backward-looking difference in cost effectiveness is often over 100 times.

But if we don’t know anything about what they’ve chosen, then it seems more accurate to model them as picking randomly.¹⁵ That means they might pick one of the best interventions by chance. A random guess gives you the mean of the distribution rather than the median.

In a distribution with a heavy positive tail,¹⁶ the mean tends to be a lot higher than the median. For instance, in the DCP2 the mean was 22 DALYs averted per $1,000, compared to five DALYs averted for the median — about four times higher.

Moreover, if it’s possible to use common sense to screen out the obviously bad interventions, then they may effectively be picking randomly from the top 50% of interventions, and their expected impact would be twice the mean.

So, comparing the best to the mean, rather than to the worst or median, will tend to reduce the degree of spread.

If we also consider the difficult-to-measure interventions that are missing from the datasets, but make up the positive tail, the difference between the mean and the median will be even larger.

Overall, my guess is that, in an at least somewhat data-rich area, using data to identify the best interventions can perhaps boost your impact in the area by 3–10 times compared to picking randomly, depending on the quality of your data.

This is still a big boost, and hugely underappreciated by the world at large. However, it’s far less than I’ve heard some people in the effective altruism community claim.

In addition, there are downsides to being data-driven in this way — by insisting on a data-driven approach, you might be ruling out many of the interventions in the tail (which are often hard to measure, and so will be missing).

This is why we advocate for first aiming to take a ‘hits-based’ approach, rather than a data-driven one.

Another important implication is that I think intervention selection is less important than cause selection. I think the difference between interventions in a single problem area is much smaller than the difference in effectiveness between problem areas (e.g. climate change vs education) — which I think are often a hundredfold or a thousandfold, even after accounting for the issues mentioned here (such as regression to the mean). I go through the argument in the linked article — but one quick way to see this is that comparing across causes introduces another huge source of variation in how much good an intervention does.

This means, in terms of effectiveness, it’s more important to choose the right broad area to work in than it is to identify the best solution within a given area.

This is one reason why the effective altruism community focuses so much on deciding which problem to focus on, rather than trying to improve the effectiveness of efforts within a wide range of causes.

Though of course it’s ideal to both find a pressing problem and an effective solution. Since the impact of each step is multiplicative, the combined spread in effectiveness could be 1,000 or even 10,000 fold.

Thank you especially to Benjamin Hilton for doing most of the data analysis in this post, and for Toby Ord’s initial comments on the draft. All mistakes are my own.

Discuss this article on the EA Forum. Or ask me a question about it on Twitter here.

You might also be interested in

• Is it fair to say most social interventions don’t work?
• Some solutions are far more effective than others
• Can you guess which government programmes work?
• Podcast: Alexander Berger on improving global health and wellbeing in clear and direct ways

Appendix: Additional data

Standard deviation log₁₀ cost effectiveness

Another way of looking at the spread of these distributions is by looking at the standard deviation of the log cost effectiveness.

This is because these are heavy-tailed distributions, so the regular standard deviation isn’t meaningful. Instead, we can take the log of cost effectiveness.

Many heavy-tailed distributions are lognormal; the log of a lognormal distribution is a normal distribution, so then we can look at the standard deviation of this normal distribution as usual.

This shows that the health interventions were indeed the most heavy-tailed, though there is still a lot of spread within the other areas.

Log-binned histograms showing distribution shape and full datasets

We can use histograms to group the data into sections and give an intuitive idea of the distribution shape for each set of data. Because this data spans many orders of magnitude, these histograms are binned such that each bar has equal width on a log scale. In general, these histograms confirm the hypothesis that these distributions have heavy tails — most look qualitatively similar to power law distributions.

DCP2

DCP3

Get the data

WHO-CHOICE

Health in high-income countries: public health interventions in the UK (NICE)

Washington State Institute for Public Policy Benefit-Costs Results database

Positive interventions:

Negative interventions:

Criminal justice reform:

Pre-K to 12 education:

Get the data

Climate change: Gillingham and Stock

Get the data

Education Endowment Foundation Toolkit

Get the data

Education Global Practice and Development Research Group Study

Get the data

Founders Pledge: personal actions to fight climate change

Get the data

Get Out the Vote tactics

Get the data

The post How much do solutions to social problems differ in their effectiveness? A collection of all the studies we could find. appeared first on 80,000 Hours.