Benjamin Todd

Global Priorities Research If you're uncertain which global problem is most pressing, here's one answer.

More research is needed.

Only a tiny fraction of the billions of dollars spent each year trying to make the world a better place goes towards research to identify how to spend those resources most effectively, what we call global priorities research.

As we've seen, some approaches are far more effective than others, so this research is hugely valuable.

A career in this area could mean working at Open Philanthropy, the Global Priorities Institute, Rethink Priorities, Economics Academia, Think Tanks, and elsewhere.

Broad interventions, such as Improved Politics,

The second strategy is to work on problems that will help us solve lots of other problems.

We call these broad interventions.

For instance, if we had more enlightened governments, that would help us solve lots of other problems facing future generations.

The US government in particular will play a pivotal role in issues like climate policy, AI policy, biosecurity, and new challenges we don't even know about yet.

So US governance is highly important, if maybe not neglected or tractable.

political action in your local community might have an effect on decision makers in Washington.

In the last chapter, we did an analysis of the simplest kind of political action, voting, and found that it could be really valuable.

On the other hand, issues like US governance already receive a huge amount of attention, which makes them hard to improve.

We generally favor more neglected issues with more targeted effects on future generations.

For instance, fascinating research by Philip Tetlock shows that some teams and methods are far better at predicting geopolitical events than others.

If the decision makers in society were informed by much more accurate predictions, it would help them navigate future crises, whatever those turn out to be.

However, the category of broad interventions is one of the areas we're most uncertain about, so we're keen to see more research on it.

Capacity building and promoting effective altruism

If you're uncertain which problems will be most depressing in the future, a third strategy is to simply save money or invest in your career capital, so you're in a better position to do good when you have more information.