The 80,000 Hours Career Guide — Find a fulfilling career that does good Part 4: Want to do good? Here’s how to choose an area to focus on.
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Sep 3, 2023 Explore the process of choosing a career focus that can make a difference by considering scale, neglect, urgency, and impact. Prioritize neglected areas for social impact, like healthcare in poor countries. Choose an area to focus on by identifying big, neglected, and solvable problems. Select the right problem for maximum impact by examining the criteria for identifying pressing problems.
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Assessing Problem Urgency
- Use three questions to assess which problems are most urgent.
- Consider scale, neglect, and solvability, based on research by Open Philanthropy and the Global Priorities Institute.
Unplugging Chargers
- A BBC campaign encouraged unplugging phone chargers to save energy.
- This had negligible impact compared to home insulation, highlighting our poor intuitive scaling.
Scope Neglect
- Research shows we're bad at intuitively assessing scale differences (scope neglect).
- Use numbers for comparison, even rough ones, to avoid this bias.