Key Ideas
Here, we aim to summarise the key ideas of Effective Altruism and 80,000 Hours’ research into impactful careers. We won’t cover all the nuance or calculations, so if you want a more thorough understanding of the ideas behind making possibly the most important decision of your life to make a difference, we recommend reading 80,000 hours’ 20 articles of key ideas, which you can get through in a weekend.
Given the many different perspectives the idea of “doing good” and the many different approaches to achieving it, determining how one can make a meaningful impact is a difficult task.
The way we approach this question at HI-Eng is through the values and methods of Effective Altruism.
What is Effective Altruism?
Effective Altruism (EA) is an international movement based on a central question: how can we do the most good with our limited resources? The community is composed of charities, funding organisations, think tanks, university groups, and other impact-focused organisations, of which HI-Eng is one.
EA has a few core values and heuristics that help us evaluate our choices and guide our efforts to answer this question.
EA’s Values
Universal Compassion
The EA community takes the well-being of others very seriously, and someone’s well-being should not be discarded on the basis of their location in space, location in time, or even species. The most essential commitment of effective altruism is to actively try to make the world a better place. At HI-Eng, we aim to engineer a world that increases the well-being of all who share it, including sentient animals and future generations.
Scientific Mindset
EA strives to use evidence and reason to determine the most effective ways to improve the world. As a movement, we recognise how difficult it is to know how to do the most good, and therefore try to avoid overconfidence, to seek out informed critiques of our own views, to be open to unusual ideas, and to take alternative points of view seriously. The scientific mindset helps us to consider the opportunities available to us, critically evaluate the effectiveness of our options, consider our personal strengths, and pursue opportunities that maximise our personal impact.
Collaborative Spirit
EA is committed to building a friendly, open, and welcoming environment in which many different approaches can flourish, and in which a wide range of perspectives can be evaluated on their merits. In order to encourage cooperation and collaboration between people with widely varying backgrounds and ways of thinking, we resolve to treat people of different worldviews, values, backgrounds, and identities kindly and respectfully.
Integrity
Because we believe that trust, cooperation, and accurate information are essential to doing good, we strive to be honest and trustworthy. More broadly, we strive to follow the rules of good conduct that allow communities (and the people within them) to thrive.
Open-Mindedness
As a community, EA is committed to these principles, not to a specific cause. Our goal is to do as much good as we can, and are open to focusing our efforts on any group of beneficiaries, and to using any reasonable methods to help them. If good arguments or evidence show that our current plans are not the best way of helping, we will change our beliefs and actions.
How Do We Evaluate Impact?
To find out how much good a particular project, job, or organisation might do, people in the EA community tend to use the Importance, Tractability, Neglectedness, or ITN framework.
Importance
Importance is the magnitude of a problem. If this problem is solved, how many people will benefit, and by how much? All things being equal, it’s better to help more people than fewer people.
As an example, malaria is one of the most deadly preventable diseases still afflicting humans, at more than 200 million cases and 400 thousand cases annually. Quantifying its prevalence and death toll allow us to compare the importance of malaria to other pressing problems.
Often in engineering, we prioritise projects by importance - there is little sense in fine-tuning the brakes if the engine keeps blowing up!
Tractability
Tractability is the solvability of the problem. How much closer do you get to solving a problem per unit of additional investment?
This concept is common in engineering - all else being equal, it’s better to pick problems you can fix at a lower cost.
Neglectedness
Neglectedness describes how overlooked the problem is. If a problem already has a lot of attention, talent, and funding directed towards it, what additional value would your effort bring to the table? Even if the intervention is tractable and the problem is important, it might be most impactful for you to focus on a more neglected area.
Putting These Into Practice
Now we have these values and tools under our belt, where do we go from here?
Problem Prioritisation
There are so many pressing problems in the world that it’s impossible for you as an individual to work on all of them. Using the ITN framework from above, these problems can be compared - researchers have found that some issues receive hundreds of times less attention than others relative to how big and solvable they seem. As a result, which issue you decide to focus on is most likely the biggest driver of your impact.
Intervention Prioritisation
Once you’ve identified the most pressing problem for you to work on, the next step is to find the intervention that could make the most progress on the world’s most pressing problems. Some solutions can make 10 to 100x more progress per year of work, so aiming to support more effective solutions is a way to increase your contribution.
Some paths give you more leverage (i.e. mobilise more resources like money, attention and skill towards solving the most pressing problems). These paths include working in government and policy; mobilising others or spreading ideas; helping people or organisations that already have a lot of influence; making well-targeted donations; or helping to develop selected research and technology.
Personal Fit
Finding the career where you can do the most impact also depends on you - this is your ‘personal fit’. Personal fit is a function of your individual strengths, your likelihood of success in a particular field, and how much you enjoy your work. Personal fit is important for your contributions to be effective and personally sustainable.
To figure out what problems and jobs are a good personal fit for you, we recommend keeping an open mind and trying out many different paths in the real world. This could involve learning more about high-impact cause areas, speaking to someone in the area, doing research, doing side-projects, trying internships or volunteering, and taking on full-time jobs. As you learn more about your potential fit for various problems and careers, we at HI-Eng support you in doing what is best for you and your impact, and that could involve changing fields, changing engineering discipline, or even pivoting out of engineering altogether.
It is important to remember that most people reach their maximum potential for impact around mid- or late-career, so you might have more time than you expect to test your fit before you decide on a career path to pursue.
