Global Challenges Project - Library
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Career Priorities and High Impact Opportunities Beyond Longtermism

Career Priorities and High Impact Opportunities Beyond Longtermism

In this week of the programme, we’ll consider how different factors fit together when choosing a career: which global problems you’re working on; which solutions you will be trying to implement with your career; how personally suited you are to the work and whether it fulfils your other priorities, beyond your desire to help improve the future.

We will also discuss whether it makes sense for longtermists to also be interested in pursuing the best opportunities for improving the world today, perhaps because of ‘worldview diversification’.

Curriculum

Core materials

Preliminary:

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'Advice on how to read our advice' - 80,000 Hours

On personal fit and personal skills:

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'Have a particular strength? Already an expert in a field? Here are the socially impactful careers 80,000 Hours suggests you consider first' - 80,000 Hours
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'My current impressions on career choice for longtermists' - Holden Karnofsky

On the case for doing non-longtermist work:

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'Worldview Diversification' Holden Karnofsky for Open Philanthropy
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'Contrasts with longtermism' and 'Arguments for working on global health and wellbeing', in Alexander Berger's appearance on the 80,000 Hours podcast

Recommended reading

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'How to identify your personal strengths' - 80,000 Hours
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'We reviewed over 60 studies about what makes for a dream job. Here’s what we found.' - 80,000 Hours

More to explore

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'Famine, affluence and morality' - Peter Singer. This essay argues that there are strong moral demands on us to make sacrifices when the benefits we could produce for others are drastically larger than the costs to us from making these sacrifices. Views like Singer’s suggest we should always prioritise impartial impact when it conflicts with our other priorities.