Our top 3 lessons on how not to waste your career on things that don’t change the world

Evidence of Counterproductive Interventions

• The "Scared Straight" government program, despite receiving billions in funding and winning awards, increased recidivism rates among participating youth.
• Three meta-analyses confirmed the program's negative impact; one study estimated that every $1 spent generated $200 in societal harm.
• While participants showed reduced crime rates compared to their own past, non-participant controls improved at even higher rates, making the program net-negative.
• David Anderson notes that 75% or more of rigorously evaluated social programs yield small, no, or negative effects.

Framework for Evaluating Social Problems

• 80,000 Hours, in collaboration with Oxford academics, developed a three-question framework to assess the potential impact of career choices: Scale, Neglect, and Solvability.

Dimension 1: Scale

• The BBC's campaign to reduce energy use from mobile phone chargers was dismissed by physicist David Mackay as ineffective, saving only 0.01% of Britain's personal energy use.
• Mackay compared the charger initiative to bailing out the Titanic with a tea strainer.
• By contrast, improving home insulation cuts personal energy use by approximately 10%, making it 1,000 times more impactful in scale.
• To assess scale, one must estimate the number of people helped, the magnitude of benefit per person, and the long-term consequences of solving the issue.

Dimension 2: Neglect

• Popular issues like climate change are often less high-impact due to economic diminishing returns, where high competition reduces individual marginal impact.
• Global pandemics present a risk comparable to climate change but receive under 10% of the funding and attention, making them potentially higher-impact due to neglect.
• High-impact opportunities often exist where problems unfairly overlook groups like the world's poorest people or address low-probability events.

Dimension 3: Solvability

• Interventions should prioritize approaches with rigorous evidence, such as malaria nets proven to prevent disease.
• High-impact strategies may also include testing promising new approaches or high-variance actions with small success probabilities but massive potential payoffs (e.g., specific political campaigns or fundamental research).
• Lack of evidence-backed solutions should be a primary filter for discarding potential problems.

Implementation and Personal Fit

• Problems should be evaluated on a graph where no single option scores perfectly on all three dimensions; the optimal choice maximizes the overall score.
• Personal fit is a critical variable; engaging in work that is boring or where one lacks aptitude reduces the likelihood of success regardless of the problem's scale, neglect, or solvability.
• The transcript teases further analysis on specific high-impact areas, including ending diarrhea, artificial intelligence, and career-specific actions.