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

How PlayPumps work

At a non-profit conference, you strike up a conversation with the founder of a (real) charity called Roundabout Water Solutions. They tell you:

We take a water pump, and install it as part of a merry-go-round for kids to play on for only $14. The village gets a pump to provide clean water, the kids get a new toy, and we put ads on the water tank to offset their cost. It’s a win-win-win!

After the conference, you discover that regular hand pumps cost $3.50 and move more clean water per minute than PlayPumps.

No effect - the PlayPump is the same as the alternative

PlayPumps are more expensive and less effective than hand pumps but are still being installed.

The resistance generated by pumping the water makes the merry-go-round difficult to spin, so kids don't want to play on it.

PlayPumps cost $14, four times the cost of a standard hand pump, but only have 20-30% the output.

There aren't many profitable opportunities to advertise where PlayPumps are installed.

PlayPumps are more expensive and less effective than hand pumps, but are 

Playpumps work less well than hand pumps and are more expensive. So funding them would have a negative effect compared to funding hand pumps.

PlayPumps aren't an isolated instance. It is all too common for 

In fact, most do. Of the charitable programs that have been rigorously evaluated, 

don’t effectively accomplish their aims.

If we want our actions to have the largest impact, it is 

. The key is thinking critically to tell the difference!

Most social programs are ineffective

Nerdy aside: What do you mean by ‘rigorously evaluated’?

You have a $10M budget to fight 3 diseases. Each disease has 200 patients,  you can only treat each patient once, and a patient's disease is cured after they've received one year of healthy life per person.

How should you allocate $10M to help the most?

Answer: How is this calculated?

When faced with the world’s many issues, it’s natural to 

However, splitting our efforts equally across problems results in 

 involved. Remember the hospital example above - giving equal money to each disease saved far fewer lives than giving more money to the most efficient treatment options.

In this scenario, the selection that results in the 

 requires focusing on where our resources go the furthest in helping.

Similarly, in our careers, focusing on problems where our efforts accomplish the most is the 

most important factor determining our impact

Imagine you’re in charge of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) response to a 

 in a local population of common squawkers (

There’s a vaccine to protect the common squawker, but it’s not cheap.

For a smaller outbreak that occurred previously, the EPA determined that they should be willing to pay $1M to save 25,000 birds ($40 per bird).

To be consistent with its prior valuations, the government should be willing to pay a similar amount per bird.

if it’s part of a group of 200 birds than if it were part of a group of 20 birds.

 why it might difficult to linearly increase the amount paid to help more people (or birds), such as a lack of funding.

 that can distort our assessment. One example is known as scope neglect.

When three different groups were asked a similar question in a now-famous 

no significant relationship to the number of birds saved.

Survey participants willingness to pay had no relationship to the size of the problem

The government should be willing to pay $8M (200,000 birds x $40/bird).

Scope neglect (or scope insensitivity) is a cognitive bias that occurs when an option that would 

help people twice as much doesn’t get twice the amount of attention

It doesn’t make sense to calculate the effects of our actions for most decisions we make day-to-day, but literally 

crunching the numbers can help reduce our biases for important decisions 

As we’ll see, while most attempts to help achieve little, the 

Nerdy aside: Why might we have scope neglect?

The options below are four possible government strategies for reducing greenhouse gases.

What is CO2e?

the Clean Power Plan (CPP) was on average almost five times more cost-effective

Nerdy aside: Why was the CPP effective?

Nerdy aside: Why are solar subsidies less cost-effective on average than other policies?

 is the most effective at reducing CO2e emissions.

That’s the equivalent to finding out that a 

The most effective global health charities save around 

 than the marginal UK public health program.

Assume that it costs the same amount to implement the most effective solution to both problems.

The factors that determine cost-effectiveness

That means if you find a solution that’s 10x more effective against a 100x more important problem, that means you’ll achieve 

1000x more impact is like achieving what you would have achieved during a 40-year 

How to achieve hundreds of times more

What you'll be able to do