Choosing High-Impact Problems
There are an infinite number of problems, issues, or causes you could dedicate your life, startup, or non-profit to. What you choose to focus on will have a huge difference in whether you’ll make a significant impact on anyone or anything.
Last week, GiveWell invited UC Berkeley and Stanford effective altruists to visit their office and hear about their recent work. GiveWell is a charity evaluator that has traditionally focused on evaluating and recommending evidence-backed charities that reduce global poverty.
Recently GiveWell has also been partnering with Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz’s philanthropic foundation, Good Ventures, to research the question, “How can we accomplish as much good as possible with our giving?” as part of the Open Philanthropy Project.
The ‘open’ in Open Philanthropy Project comes from being open to many possible causes and from being open about the research and choices that are made. Some of the possible domains that the Open Philanthropy Project is considering include global health, policy advocacy, scientific research, and the reduction of global catastrophic risks.
In order to select the causes most worthwhile to focus on, Holden Karnofsky, one of the co-founders of GiveWell, explained that they try to evaluate three general heuristics about the cause:
- Importance. How important is the problem? How many beings does it affect and to what extent?
- Tractability. How effectively can we do anything to alleviate the problem?
- Crowdedness. How many other people are working on the problem?
Important, tractable, uncrowded problems are the ideal. These heuristics are relevant not just for evaluating charitable causes, but also for evaluating businesses and certain personal life decisions.
What are you focusing on right now? Are you spending an enormous amount of money or effort on something that will have a significant impact or on something that will have very little impact?
Sidenote: When do you have competitive advantage? When the answer to #2 is different for you than for everyone else. It’s worthwhile to consider what you can do better than others when making this kind of choice.
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