Webinar
Our top 3 lessons on how not to waste your career on things that don’t change the world
- The Scared Straight program is estimated to generate $200 of societal harm for every dollar spent, with participants expected to commit more crimes than similar non-participants.
- Rigorous evaluations suggest approximately 75% of social programs yield small or no effects, while some produce negative outcomes, making evidence-less program selection highly likely to result in negligible impact.
- A methodology for comparing problem importance is planned, utilizing research from a billion-dollar foundation to address the risk that unassessed individuals end up in low-impact roles.
- Three key evaluation questions regarding scale, neglect, and solvability will be summarized for viewers, with the expectation that no single opportunity will score highly on all three dimensions.
- A problem may warrant pursuit even if solvability seems low, provided it is sufficiently large and neglected, though success may involve a low probability of working paired with massive impact potential.
- The risk of a widespread epidemic occurring within a lifetime is rated above 50%, with pandemics projected to be comparable in scale to climate change despite receiving under 10% of the associated funding.
- Home insulation is projected to reduce personal energy use by approximately 10%, a scale a thousand times greater than the at-most 0.01% savings from stopping mobile phone chargers from being left plugged in.
- Artificial intelligence is identified as a potential issue of greater importance than other current risks.
- Popular working areas are predicted to often be lower impact due to diminishing returns, while the highest impact problems may be those never previously considered.
- Career selection requires balancing problem impact with personal satisfaction, as working on a problem in a role that is boring or one is bad at yields no point.
- Future series content may reveal that ending diarrhea could save as many lives as achieving world peace.