My views and aspirations for both my professional and my personal life have been profoundly influenced by the Effective Altruism (EA) / 80,000 Hours movement. This post is meant to introduce those who haven’t encountered this movement to it. See Part II for some of my reflections in light of this overarching philosophy.
Intro to Effective Altruism and 80,000 Hours
Note: Instead of citing everything in the paragraphs below, I’m including a list of links at the end of this post, which I encourage you to explore!
The core question of EA / 80,000 Hours is: how can I most effectively help other people, given finite resources? There are many ways in which we can help others: directly and indirectly, material and non-material goods and services, in the short-term and in the long-term, concentrated and dispersed across individuals…
80,000 Hours often highlights the impact you can have in your career, but EA also encompasses the impact you can have by giving money to organizations which are doing good, engaging in advocacy, or helping others to increase their impact. Some of the key ideas promoted by EA / 80,000 Hours include focusing on cost-effectiveness, long-termism, personal fit, and collaboration with others.
Cost-effectiveness means optimization of positive impact per dollar spent. To motivate this: it has been shown that the best global health interventions can be orders of magnitude more cost-effective than others. Thankfully, there are now organizations whose purpose is to determine the cost-effectiveness of different charitable organizations.
EA / 80,000 Hours also argues that if we factor in the wellbeing of future generations, then long-term impacts become more and more favorable. In terms of high-impact careers, this often translates into research- or policy-based vocations.
Regarding personal fit, 80,000 hours makes a pretty strong case that we are most effective in jobs that align with our skills, interests, and personalities. However, they also discuss how individual abilities are most often built, not innate, so we can guide ourselves in certain directions over time if so we choose. While figuring out what kind(s) of work to pursue, they advocate “cheap” tests such as reaching out to others and trying things out on small scales. College is a great time to do this, as I discuss in The Power of Showing Up and Reaching Out.
Collaboration is crucial for addressing large-scale and/or complex problems. Although collaboration has not always been promoted as a core idea by the EA/80,000 Hours community, I am highlighting it here because of my personal belief in its importance. Some conclusions that stuck out to me from 80,000 Hours’ article about collaboration are that to maximize coordination within a shared-aims community, we should:
Prioritize upholding norms of kindness and honesty
Invest in community capital
Be willing to specialize, explore, and even take opportunities with worse personal fit if they play to our comparative advantages
Though there are many directions to take the above list of ideas, some actions that immediately come to mind for the fields that I’m interested in are:
Promote transparency in science and policy-making
Mentor others and develop strong collaboration skills
Lean into unusual skill sets, as I discuss in Pursuing STEM, Motivated by the Humanities
Finally, one of the things I appreciate about the core philosophical framework of 80,000 Hours is their emphasis on moral uncertainty and moderation. I believe it is important for all of us to remain intellectually humble and to avoid choosing extreme courses of action unless there is broad consensus on the existence of substantial evidence that the benefits of doing so will outweigh the costs. Note: despite this acknowledgement, most of the EA / 80,000 Hours arguments tend to lean utilitarian.
The overarching goal of exploring these ideas is to develop a framework for thinking about our impact on others that allows us to move forward on an informed path, instead of being paralyzed or moving forward on an ineffective (or even harmful) path.
Resources to Explore
There are so many well-written, in-depth but also accessible resources provided by EA / 80,000 Hours. Here are links to some of the core resources and other articles that have most resonated for me. These in turn link to many other articles, so if these topics interest you, you may find yourself going down a rabbit hole, as I have done many times!
Note that nearly all of the resources related to high-impact careers are intended for a college-educated audience with the ability to choose / change their career path. However, the resources related to effective donations are relevant for almost everyone.
Should You Wait to Make a Difference? (donating time or money now versus investing in career capital and/or investing money)
Anyone Can Have an Impact (discussion of charity and volunteering)
Career Framework (thinking through impact, personal satisfaction, career capital, etc.)
Problem Framework (thinking through scale, solvability, and neglectedness)
Problem Profiles (the global issues that 80,000 Hours thinks are currently most pressing)
High-Impact Careers (the careers that 80,000 Hours thinks currently hold the highest potential for impact)
EA Applied to Climate Change (including this because I'm very interested in this topic)
And here's Part II of my thoughts on having an impact, in which I reflect on my experiences and things I've learned along the way.