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

Let’s consider two fictional Americans: 

We already know that doctors help others a lot, but many miss how big of an impact our donations to an effective charity can have.

GiveWell is an independent global health charity evaluator that has reviewed Helen Keller International (HKI) and hundreds of other charities. They recommend HKI as one of their top 9 charities for saving and improving lives, based on the findings from rigorous randomised controlled trials and meta-analyses.

Nerdy aside: Do vitamin A supplements actually work?

Elijah the engineer saves more lives in her career than Daniela, an American doctor. 

The best data we have suggests an additional doctor in developed countries saves 

This is an incredible feat. Out of the thousands of patients one doctor treats in their career, imagine how grateful you’d be if even one of those 20 lives saved were from your family or friends.

If you ran into a burning building and saved a child’s life, you’d be lauded on the news as a hero. Doctors do the equivalent once every two years, and are right to be applauded for their work.

Nerdy aside: What we mean when we say someone “saved a life”

As you get off the train, a fundraiser wearing a yellow vest and a saccharine grin asks you for a donation to Save The World By Helping Things™.

She tells you about a charity who desperately needs your help:

We help the entire community by addressing the root cause of the problem, not providing band-aid solutions. 100% of all donations go directly to those in need, so you can feel confident your donation makes a difference.

Check they aren't spending too much on CEO pay or fundraising

Look for evidence about program effectiveness

The effectiveness of the program matters more than a charity's budget.

It's very common to evaluate a charity based on how much it spends on admin, CEO pay etc. - it's how one of the most popular charity evaluation websites, Charity Navigator, works. But if we knew that a charity spent very little on fundraising and administration, we'd still know next to nothing about whether the program actually helps.

In this case, we know nothing about what Save The World By Helping Things™ does. So we can't determine whether it, you know, helps things, let alone saves the world.

And as we'll find out, most programs achieve very little. This is why examining program effectiveness is more important than assessing a charity's budget.

How much a charity helps, or how much good you accomplish through your career, depends most on the effectiveness of the actual work being done. A charity that doesn’t spend a dime on overhead won’t make even the slightest positive impact if the goal it’s pursuing isn’t worthy or if its programs aren’t effective at achieving that goal.

But more people focus on expenses than effectiveness -- falling prey to "the overhead myth":

The overhead myth is the common but mistaken idea that you can evaluate the impact of a nonprofit by how little it spends on anything apart from delivering its core program ('overhead').

An engineer donating 10% of their income would save 

 more lives in her career through her donations than an average doctor.

Imagine you're trying to help people who live in global poverty by improving their access to healthcare.

You make a donation to the most effective charity you can find, using the research from charity evaluators and the international development literature.

A donation of $4,500 can save a life, according to the best estimates we have available.

$4,500 is very likely to be higher than you were expecting, which runs against our argument of the low cost to save a life. We like to present information that doesn't conveniently fit our narrative. 🤷

However, in contrast to typical claims of effectiveness, these estimates seem particularly likely to be in the right ballpark.

In 2008, Nothing But Nets, a program of the United Nations Foundation to distribute bed nets to prevent malaria, invited us to give “$10 to send a net and save a life.”

Will your $10 donation really save a life? Well, sort of, but only in the sense that buying one $100 raffle ticket to win a $20,000 car means that you can “buy” the car for $100. Any given bednet that costs $10 to make and distribute has only a small chance of in fact preventing somebody’s death.

With malaria, we need to distribute 900 nets on average to save someone’s life.

 Which means that all things considered, charity evaluator GiveWell estimates that it actually costs ~$5 to distribute a net and

 we can prevent the equivalent of a child from dying from malaria for $4,500

The median American sits in the top 3% of income globally (see graph below).

This disquieting level of global inequality is one reason why it's possible for an engineer to save so many more lives with a simple donation than a doctor in the US does each year through their work.

Median American income compared to the world

Put in a realistic estimate of your future income after tax.

Average salaries for common US occupations after tax

Learn about how to donate effectively

Make a donation yourself

Run a fundraiser

Spread the word about effective giving

An additional doctor in the developed world saves ~20 lives in their career

The median American sits in the top 3% of the global income distribution

A donation of $4,500 to an effective charity can (actually) save someone’s life. 

If you earn the median US salary of ~$36,000 and donate 10% to an effective global health charity, you could save ~44 lives across your career – more than 1 person per year.

Donating is already an outstanding opportunity to help, but many are in a position to do even more good via their careers.

If you ran into a burning building and saved a child’s life, you’d be lauded on the news as a hero. You can achieve the equivalent many times per year without risking your life, becoming a billionaire, or changing career.

Where you might sit in the global income distribution

What you could accomplish by donating to a charity

You can save lives without a medical degree

What you'll be able to do