What's the effect of installing PlayPumps compared to funding hand pumps?

PlayPumps International

Good intentions aren’t enough

Imagine you’re in charge of a hospital…

Causes don't deserve support. People do.

How much should the government pay to save 200,000 birds?

How to avoid scope neglect

Which strategy do you think brings the greatest reduction in CO2e emissions per $100 of US government spending?

How many more lives does the most effective global health charity save per $100 spent than additional UK public health spending?

How much more can be accomplished per $100 implementing the most effective solution for Problem B than Problem A?

What is the best way for you to help?

We are in triage every second of every day

Why the problem you work on is the biggest driver of your impact

How to achieve hundreds of times more

Have more people died from causes directly related to terrorism or COVID-19 over the last 50 years globally? How much more?

Factor 1: Importance

How much does the US government spend on terrorism vs. pandemics?

Factor 2: Neglectedness

Do preventative-care home visits to elderly patients by healthcare professionals improve life expectancy?

Do drug substitution programs reduce criminal offending among drug addicts?

Does formally processing crimes committed by juveniles reduce criminal re-offending?

Factor 3: Tractability

The ITN framework

Which of the following problems is higher impact to work on according to the ITN framework?

The ITN framework, cost-effectiveness, and cause prioritisation

Introduction to EA – Why & How to Prioritize Problems to Work On

Global priorities research & shaping the ideas of intellectuals

We can use science to end poverty faster. But how much do governments listen to it?

Choosing the most critical problem

What happened to GDP per capita in England after 1825?

Our wealth across the ages

The industrial revolution changed everything

Comparing wealth across countries and time

We’ve seen progress across most areas of our lives

Billions now live free from extreme poverty

We’ve become vastly better educated

In what period did global life expectancy grow the most?

Our growing life expectancy

We could make the future radically better

Takeaways

The world is much better; The world is awful; The world can be much better

We radically improved the world, and could again

Know whether you’re actually helping

What impact did your colleague have from pushing the doctor out of the way to do CPR?

The real impact of saving a life

What was your true counterfactual impact?

Real positive change wouldn't have happened without you

Does Scared Straight help difficult kids commit less crime?

Scared straight?

You can accomplish more in hard-to-replace jobs

'Replaceability' isn't as important as you might think (or we've suggested)

Shapley values: Better than counterfactuals

How to be irreplaceable

Who deserves our concern?

Should you report the kidnapping to the police?

Kidnapper conundrum

We should care for moral patients

A golden rule

The all-knowing dictator

The blind dictator

We’re making moral progress

Same-sex relationships are now legal in the majority of countries

Approval of marriage between Black people and White people flipped from 4% to 94%

Many more women now enter the workforce than a century ago

We’re not done yet

Being a moral entrepreneur

Our descendants will probably see us as moral monsters

Identifying and tackling prejudice

Every answer has an element of uncertainty

Expected value is a tool for handling uncertainty

Assuming you could afford to lose, should you take this bet?

Let’s make a bet

Averting a nuclear disaster

What is the expected value, in additional years of healthy life, of a dose of Paxlovid?

Paxlovid

Expected value is used by leaders across industries

Which of your options has the highest expected value?

Sink or swim

Probabilities can be subjective and made up

If we accept GiveWell’s analysis, what increase should we expect for receiving deworming treatment?

Deworm The World

Expected value doesn’t handle extremes gracefully

The Fox And The Hedgehog: A Story of Triumphs and Tragedy

Moral cluelessness, population ethics, and probability within a multiverse

How to manage uncertainty in impact

Which problem should you work on?

Your career is loooooong…

You could change the course of history

There’s never been a better time to change the world

Which option would have a bigger direct impact on CO2 emissions?

Which of these factors has the strongest relationship with happiness on average?

Which graph best describes the relationship between income and happiness?

You can be financially secure and impactful

Take action

How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You)

80,000 Hours: Find a fulfilling career that does good

Making the most of your career

At what age is the average American’s salary the highest?

Build career capital to set yourself up for success

How often do we change our minds about our values, relative to what we expect?

Conduct quick tests to find your best long-term option

To get the best score you can, how many hours should you research before you start writing?

How much should you research?

What percent of technology startups fail to return a positive investment?

Reach high, with a backup

Score your options

Career exploration: when should you settle?

What to do when you’re uncertain

How many citations do the top 20% of scientists account for?

1_How many citations do the top 20% of scientists account for

You won’t know if something’s a good fit for you until you’ve tried it

What percent of American undergraduate students change degrees?

Take small steps to become more confident in a degree

How many passionate students are there in sports, music, or art for every job?

Don't blindly follow your passion

How often, on average, does a member of Gen Z change jobs?

Try out more options than you think you need to

Which undergraduate degree has the highest median salary?

Choose a flexible degree to not lock yourself in

High school is 12 years long. What is the value, in increased earnings, of finishing that last year of high school compared to finishing only 11 years?

Prestigious degrees open doors

Infrequently asked questions

Many Undergrads Should Take Light Courseloads

Half-assing it with everything you've got

What to study at university

Compare your long-term paths

Create a plan that makes sense for you

Your most impactful, fulfilling career

Common misconceptions

How many lives a doctor saves

What's more important to check to find out if this charity would actually help people?

Save The World By Helping Things™

The overhead myth

Compared to a doctor, how many more lives per year does Elijah, the engineer, save?

What does it cost in the field of global health to save a life, to the nearest order of magnitude?

How does the median American income compare to the rest of the world?

How rich will you be?

You can save lives without a medical degree

Join or build a community changing the world

Confidently taking your next steps

How you can help now

How to actually change the world

Caveats: How this answer might be misleading or incomplete

COVID-19 has killed roughly 40 times more people than terrorism.

All else being equal, solving a problem that 

Much effort is spent advocating for solutions that accomplish a fraction of other solutions.

For example, donating $10 to an effective climate change solution would avert 

 CO2 than recycling a plastic bag 1000 times.

If you live in the developed world, the benefit of reducing more CO2 from the donations isn’t outweighed by the impact of plastic pollution, because almost all 

plastic waste comes from countries with less efficient waste management

Given that COVID-19 alone killed roughly 40x more people than terrorism over the last 50 years, how much more or less does the US government spend on preventing pandemics?

The US government spends ~35x more on terrorism than pandemics.

 the scourge of cancer, or one of the first people to work on climate change mitigation.

You can sketch out the important subproblems for others to work on and pave the way for 

Cancer and climate change are less often overlooked today

 than when they were initially discovered. This means that while they remain important problems, an extra person working towards solving them is likely to have a smaller impact than previously.

There are many important problems that have been neglected, and have not received the attention 

of millions of smart, dedicated people. You can have an outsized impact by working to solve them.

Nerdy aside: One reason why progress in new fields is easier

Nerdy aside: We overestimate the frequency of commonly-discussed events

professionals aim to prevent cognitive and functional impairment

, thus reducing institutionalization and prolonging life.

Healthcare practitioners such as nurses proactively identify issues that could cause a loss of independence such as risks of falls, provide information about health conditions, and try to catch undiagnosed diseases.

Positive effect - the program prolonged life

Negative effect - the program shortened life

or the risk of being hospitalized, according to high-quality evidence from two separate meta-analyses.

There’s some evidence that home visits may have a 

 and physical functioning, but these differences may not be perceptible by patients. They may also confer some mental health benefits, though that's less well-researched.

 in several countries such as Denmark and Australia.

Nerdy aside: Why might home visits not reduce mortality?

Substitution programs have been developed in order to improve drug users' quality of life and decrease their criminal involvement.

 that is chemically similar to heroin but less addictive, like methadone.

Positive effect - the program reduced criminal offending

Negative effect - the program increased criminal offending

Substitution programs reduced drug use and criminal activity, according to a meta-analysis of 22 studies containing 4,372 participants.

Similar results have been found from meta-analyses conducted in other geographies like the European Union.

Nerdy aside: Why might substitution programs reduce crime?

The justice system allows for a lot of discretion in how to handle cases of juvenile offenses. Proponents claim formal processing – for example via a jail sentence – will 

, as those sentenced wouldn’t like to have that happen again.

Formal processing was found in a meta-analysis of 29 studies to increase the risk of criminally reoffending.

Despite this fact, there are over 1 million delinquency cases processed at the intake stage by U.S. juvenile courts with nearly 55% of which are formally processed.

Nerdy aside: Why might formal processing increase crime?

If you’ve identified preventing pandemics as an important, neglected problem, you still need approaches to 

. And unfortunately, most attempts to help fail.

how much of a difference it is possible to make in the outcome of a problem

As you likely discovered in the last three questions, it’s difficult, but crucial, to 

Tips: Find a more tractable approach

Open Philanthropy, a major foundation (and full disclosure: one of Non-trivial’s largest funders), has developed a 

 for analyzing the benefit of additional resources (such as time, money, or attention) spent on a problem.

Let's use this framework to compare the effectiveness of working on two different problems.

Both MND and TB cause an immense amount of suffering, and treating or eliminating either disease would be a 

However, if you are an equally equipped for both problems (for example, have good ideas and adequate training to solve them), you’d likely achieve more by 

 the global burden of disease, receives a similar amount of funding, and has more effective treatments presently available.

According to the ITN framework, working on 

Choosing the most critical problem

What you'll be able to do