Global Challenges Project - Library
  • EA Student Groups Handbook
Where and How to Intervene

Where and How to Intervene

In this week of the programme, we explore how to prioritise between strategies for improving the long term future. Some resources this week argue that prioritisation is crucial because the best options for improving the world are tens, hundreds or thousands of times better than others. We think about some tools for comparing global problems and solutions to those problems: direct quantification (including comparing risky options in terms of expected value) and the ‘Importance, neglectedness, tractability’ framework.

Curriculum

Core Materials

The importance of prioritisation:

🔗
Effective altruism in a nutshell - 80,000 Hours
🔗
Why the problem you work on is the biggest driver of your impact - 80,000 Hours
🔗
Expected value
🔗
'Can one person change the world? What the evidence says' 80,000 Hours

How to prioritise:

🔗
The importance, neglectedness and tractability framework for comparing problems - 80,000 Hours
🔗
How to Measure Anything - Douglas W. Hubbard

Recommended Reading

🔗
'An evaluation framework for comparing interventions' - Michael Dickens. An alternative to the INT framework, focussed on comparison of interventions.
🔗
‘Chapter 6: Why voting is like donating thousands of dollars to charity’ in ‘Doing Good Better’ by William Macaskill

Examples of making progress on big questions using quantitative reasoning and the INT framework:

🔗
'What is the likelihood that civilisational collapse would lead to human extinction?' - Luisa Rodriguez
🔗
'Space governance is important, tractable and neglected' - Tobias Baumann

Next in the Introduction to Longtermism Series

Topics

A longtermist career
A longtermist career
A longtermist career
Inspiration from people who are doing longtermist work