You know you can get a different education, or move to a job that pays more or grow the necessary skills to earn more or create more impact. This means more people eating food for more meals in their lives. YAY!

Choosing an area to focus on

The standard advice is to do whatever most interests you, and most people seem to end up working on whichever social problem first grabs their attention.

You cannot allow availability to choose for you what you should work on. You are not a stupid, you have science and you have tools to make better decisions or the best decisions given the available information.

Another important thing to realize is that you are young. You are looking at 80k hrs ahead of you to create impact. To have a fulfilling career you need other things beside passion. We should not worry about giving up things we like now or things that we are comfortable or even good at doing. If it requires us to move and do something new we shouldn’t be too worried atleast looking at if things will be interesting/motivating. We can get interested about other things too.

In addition to this one must also consider his personal fit while choosing an area to work on. Of course, if all my life I have been an introvert, afraid to talk to people, maybe I should avoid tasks involving constantly meeting people and making an impression on them to help the organization fund-raise. I could better pro gramme and make more money to GIVE. But if that is what is needed, then we could develop the required skills with practice (needs to be investigated if the particular skill can come out of practice, sometimes your genes don’t allow you to). With ‘personal fit’, I would consider things that I have a higher chance of grasping and getting into considering my history. I am 27 and would also need to consider that upto 30 years of age is my peak for learning new things at a fast pace. So the whole ‘personal fit’ for me would involve, looking at my history to decide which area I will have a high probability of success, without burning out, factoring in my current age as well. All these to make a decision about the area I would work on.

Finally, factor in personal fit. We don’t think everyone should work on the number one problem. If you’re a great fit for an area, you might have over 10 times as much impact as in one that doesn’t motivate you. So this could easily change your personal ranking.

Just remember there are many ways to help solve each problem, so it’s usually possible to find work you enjoy. Moreover, it’s easier to develop new passions than most people expect.

For example, for me, I suspect I am good at analytical problem solving, i.e., analyzing an issue and coming up with solutions, hypothesis etc… Going into law or medicine seems too far-fetched than say for example going into DATA science. Moving into Data science actually seems natural considering my background. Personal fit to me sounds like something in which (only) you (can) see which field/job has high probability to gain your interest without you burning out.

If you are a mathematician all your life, it would pay to use your skills say in data science or other high impact careers, instead of going in the direction of a philosophy degree I guess.

The career advice by 80k hrs as follows:

Big in scale: What’s the magnitude of this problem? How much does it affect people’s lives today? How much effect will solving it have in the long-run?

Neglected: How many people and resources are already dedicated to tackling this problem? How well allocated are the resources that are currently being dedicated to the problem? Are there good reasons why markets or governments aren’t already making progress on this problem?

Solvable: How easy would it be to make progress on this problem? Do interventions already exist to solve this problem effectively, and how strong is the evidence behind them?

To find the problem you should work on, also consider, personal fit. Could you become motivated to work on this problem? If you’re later in your career, do you have relevant expertise?

The are basics that you want to consider while making a decision on which problem you want to work on.

Worlds biggest problems that need your attention

So the 80k hrs website suggests [a list][80k-list] of most pressing problems for me to work on. Taking the quiz on which problem ranking would change to suit my understanding of the universe, I think is a very wrong idea. I trust 80k’s sincere research, judgment and their evaluation. In addition of course we look at the personal fit.

For lack of any other better way to shorten the list, I took the quiz and it suggested to me that I could work on the following:

  • Global priority research
  • Health in poor countries
  • AI

All of the areas require funding. For some it is not really a bottleneck as explicitly mentioned by [80k hours][80k-list], but talent is. I guess with the next essay I will delve into what each area seems to need and how I see myself working in those areas.

But before that…

Earning to give

Earning to give seems like a great option. Based on what needs funding at the moment you can funnel your savings into that particular source. I try to see myself in roles where I may fit and I suspect at max if I moved to data science, I could earn about 200k on a really good year of which 100k should be easy to give. Where I give this money, doesn’t really seem to be the hard question now. Both 80k org and GiveWell suggest places to where contributions would lead to huge impact. Every year I could re-evaluate my decision.

There seem to be not many people earning to give to the places with highest impact. About 3000 members only, have actually pledged the 10% to charity openly using the website. The way I see the pop up on 80k website often, especially in global prio research suggesting that they want to do one on one help, is only suggesting to me that- considering their budget of 115k pounds- that there are very few people working in the organization and probably very few people asking for help even. And Eleizers [less wrong website][less-wrong] despite having millions of viewers, fails to show up as donations in the [MIRI][less-wrong] donation page. Only 3000 donors have donated throughout its lifetime.

[less-wrong][https://intelligence.org/topcontributors/]

If earning to give is what we should be doing then, I want to earn much much more than what I do now.

Which jobs are highest-paying? In short, it’s jobs in finance, management, medicine, law, real estate and technology.

What are some of the best options overall? The following offer a good combination of pay, flexibility and outlook. We’ve also already advised people who’ve taken them and been satisfied.

Tech startup founder Quantitative trading Some other promising options taken by plenty of people we’ve advised include: Software engineering Startup early employee Data science Management consulting

Law, investment banking and medicine are other obvious high earning options, but we think they’re a bit worse than the ones above based on their weaker combination of flexibility, growth of the area and direct impact. Art and Entertainment can be highly paid, but the chances of success are sufficiently low that the pay is low on average

Choose an employer that matches your donation 1:1

You’re a good fit for a higher earning option. Don’t become a consultant if you’d hate it – you’ll be more likely to burn out and put your career in a worse long-term position, and you won’t earn that much anyway. Even if you only care about your impact, it’s important to be good at your job.

We need to think what is good for us in the long term.

In fact, if you’re especially focused on the global problems we think are most pressing, especially within the effective altruism community, then we don’t think earning to give should be your first choice. This is because these areas seem more talent constrained than funding constrained. Instead, we recommend trying to first contribute directly, in effective non-profits, government or research.

Red flag? 80k org suggesting to first contribute directly in effective non-profits, government or research. This means that I should atleast consider other things than earning-to-give

Next I guess it would be nice to do a compilation of the jobs and their impact. A post involving different profiles and what 80k org suggests and a path for you to achieve it. This could be followed on with more realistic examples which would come out of interviewing people you know.