One way to think about this is in terms of a ‘world portfolio’ - what would the ideal allocation of resources be for all social causes? And where are we farthest from that ideal allocation? All else equal, you are likely to be able to do far more good in an area that is not getting the attention it deserves. If an important problem is already widely recognised, then it is likely that a lot of people are already trying to solve it, in which case it will usually be harder for a few extra people who decide to work on the issue to have a very large impact. Read more about the importance of choosing the right problem.Ī key consideration for where to work is how society is currently allocating resources. This page is meant to help readers make that choice. This combination means you can have an outsized impact by helping tackle them.įor this reason, we think our most important advice for people who want to make a big positive difference with their careers is to choose a very pressing problem to work on. Moreover, it seems like some of the issues in the world that are biggest in scale - especially those that could affect the entire future of humanity, like mitigating risks from AI or biorisks - are also among the most neglected. because it only affects people in one or a few countries), or the best opportunities for improving the situation are already being taken by others.
Holding all else equal, we think that additional work on the most pressing global problems can be between 100 and 100,000(!) times more valuable in expectation than additional work on many more familiar social causes like developed world education, where your impact is typically limited by the smaller scale of the problem (e.g. We think some problems are much bigger and more neglected than others, such that by choosing carefully, an additional person can have a far greater impact. We count ourselves as part of this community because we share this aim. We’re especially keen to build the effective altruism community, because it explicitly aims to work on whichever global challenges will be most pressing in the future. We think it can be extremely valuable to invest in organisations and communities of people who are trying to do good as effectively as possible. Building communities to solve problems.Comparing global issues involves lots of uncertainty and difficult judgement calls, and there have been surprisingly few serious attempts to make such big-picture comparisons, so we’re strongly in favour of work that might help resolve some of this uncertainty - whether in the form of research or in the form of trying to see what works in more speculative areas. Building capacity to explore problems.Though there is a growing movement working to address these issues, work on mitigating many risks remains remarkably neglected - in some cases receiving attention from only a handful of researchers. We think that mitigating these risks, while increasing the chance these technologies allow future generations to flourish, may be the crucial challenge of this century. New transformative technologies may promise a radically better future, but also pose catastrophic risks. Emerging technologies and global catastrophic risks.You can see some of the most important aspects of our worldview in the ‘foundations’ section of our key ideas series, especially our article on how we define social impact.Īll this has led to a few themes in the issues we tend to prioritise most highly:
#We were here together objects bugged full#
To see the reasons why we listed each individual problem, click through to see the full profiles.Īssessments of the scale and tractability of different global issues depend on your values and worldview. To assess the problems based on this framework, we mainly draw upon research and advice from subject-matter experts and advisors in the effective altruism research community, including the Global Priorities Institute, Rethink Priorities, and Open Philanthropy, though we also make some of our own judgement calls in borderline cases. To learn about this framework, see our introductory article on prioritising world problems. The primary way we do that is by trying to compare global issues based on their scale, neglectedness, and tractability. Our aim is to find the problems where an additional person can have the greatest social impact - given how effort is already allocated in society.
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