So You Want to Change the World. Now What?
Is saying you want to change the world a cliché? Maybe. But wanting to change the world is also a common reason people consider going back to school.
And honestly, I’m one of those people.
If graduate school is, at its core, a way to pivot — from one career to another, from one field of study to another, from one set of job prospects to another — then the logical first question we need to answer is what do we want to pivot to?
If your answer to that question is that you want to pivot to working on one or more of the world’s biggest, most important problems, then you’ve come to the right post.
Because I do too.
What are the world’s most important problems?
Our first challenge here is to identify the world’s most important problems. After all, if your goal is to pivot into working on the problem with the most potential positive impact if it were solved, then we need some way to figure out what problems have the most potential positive impact.
Unsurprisingly, this is difficult to measure objectively.
As I thought about this over the past few months, my initial attempt at ranking problems in order of importance was primarily built on what I’ll describe as the width of their impact. What I was looking for and thinking about were the type of problems that, if solved, would solve a whole host of other problems.
Root cause problems.
Problems at the end of a row of problem dominoes.
These problems tend to be interdisciplinary. They are the type of problems that come up in conversation about a variety of broken systems or challenges facing humanity. They are the underlying systemic issues that get blamed, but also get progressively worse, because solving them would involve people from so many different political parties, organizations, sectors, companies, and areas of expertise that organizing one concerted effort to tackle them would be unprecedented. A few examples are education, inequality, and how incentives exacerbate these problems in capitalist democracies.
But my problem-dominoes ranking isn’t the only way to determine the importance of problems. When I was researching this issue, I stumbled upon an entire field called global priorities research that is specifically focused on answering the exact question we’re asking here:
How do you determine which problems are the most important, objectively?
As you can imagine, I’m fascinated by the various methods people are using to answer this question. I originally found this research focus mentioned on a website called 80,000 Hours, which is specifically focused on answering the question of how you can spend the time you have in your career making the most positive impact on the world. 80,000 hours has a blog, a podcast, and several related centers for research, so expect a follow-up post (or several) on this topic after I’m able to explore more of their ideas.
In the meantime, in addition to the question “What is the most important problem in the world?”, there is another relevant question we need to think about.
Which of the world’s most important problems do we want to work on?
On initial review, 80,000 Hours’ problem ranking system seems to weight how much impact one additional individual could have on a particular problem as a part of the overall importance ranking. Problems that don’t have as many people focused on solving them right now would benefit more from one additional person working on them. They also seem to pull the ease (or at least, the existence) of potential solutions into their ranking. So generally, it seems that problems with large potential positive impacts, that are under-worked, with clear solutions (probably the opposite of my interdisciplinary domino problems that would require the cooperation of virtually every person, organization, and entity in power) would be ranked as highly important.
Aside from my amateur ideas on ranking problems and 80,000 Hours’ more complete and professionally researched method, there is another question we need to address: which of the world’s most important problems do you and I want to work on, specifically?
To answer this question, we effectively need a personal problem ranking methodology in addition to our general ranking. Because even if we do rank curing a particular disease as one of the most important problems facing the world, I am never going to become a medical doctor that works on disease cures. Put simply, I am not interested in working in a medical research lab.
But you may be.
So, in addition to our objective problem ranking, we need a subjective problem ranking. To establish this, we need to think about the type of work we actually want to do on a daily basis, what we value in a role, and what we find interesting enough to both study at the graduate level and do for the rest of our lives.
No pressure.
So, Now What?
Make a plan.
Jokes aside, I don’t know my objective or subjective ranking of problems yet at this point, but I do have a few general ideas about problems I might be interested in working on long-term (like those domino problems mentioned above). I intend to spend the next six months doing general reading and research to build my understanding about the most important problems in the world, what organizations, entities and people are currently working on them, what type of work they are doing to move solutions forward, and what meaningful work on each problem looks like on a daily basis. At the end of six months, I’ll re-evaluate to see if I’ve learned enough to narrow things down.
I’m currently working on a general reading plan/syllabus for this learning project. I’ll write up a post outlining that plan and the process I used to create it as soon as it is complete. If you have any thoughts or ideas for it, please let me know.
