by Tobias Baumann. First published in 2022.
An audio version of this article is available. It may not include all details and links available in the original article. For accuracy and completeness, please refer to the full text below.
Introduction
In this post, we outline our thoughts on promising paths for those who wish to use their career to reduce suffering. What we do in our professional life is arguably our best opportunity to do good, far more so than other decisions such as consumption choices or voting (which is not to say that those are not also important). Choosing a high-impact career is therefore of critical importance for aspiring effective altruists.
80,000 Hours has written extensively about career choice for altruistic impact, focusing on careers aiming to reduce existential risks and global catastrophic risks. (Cf. their key ideas and career guide.) We don’t want to reinvent the wheel, so this post will mostly talk about the key commonalities and differences when approaching career choice from a suffering-focused perspective.
However, it is notoriously difficult to give generic career advice. In determining your career path, factors such as personal fit, comparative advantage, and career capital need to be taken into account. Additionally, we’d like to stress the need to think and explore things for yourself, rather than uncritically trusting the career ideas outlined here (or elsewhere) as necessarily being the best. It is also instructive to consider lessons learned by others.
If you’d like to dedicate your career to reducing suffering or s-risks, we encourage you to get in touch. In a personal conversation, we could provide suggestions that take into account your specific background, skill set, and motivation.
High-impact career paths
The following list of promising career paths is (by its brief nature) highly inexhaustive. It’s hard to do justice to all the possible high-impact careers and the nuance needed in evaluating them. The purpose here is mostly to give a sense of how we think about this.
Career choice is also closely related to one’s views on cause prioritisation. As outlined in our Strategic Plan, we believe that capacity building is a key priority: we wish to ensure that future civilization will be in a better position to reduce suffering (and motivated to do so). This view inspires many of the following career paths.
Research on macrostrategy and other high-priority topics
We believe that further research on how to best reduce suffering is highly valuable. This is because there is currently great uncertainty in terms of what the largest sources of (future) suffering are and what we can do now to have a robustly positive impact. Our Open Research Questions are a starting point for how to approach these issues. (Of course, that’s not to say that those are the only questions worth researching; for instance, we think research on moral circle expansion, especially relating to wild animal suffering or artificial sentience, is also very important.)
You can test your fit for a research career on your own by first reading up on existing resources and then writing essays or research articles with your own thoughts (comparable to, e.g., Brian Tomasik’s Essays on Reducing Suffering).
Additionally, you can apply for either an internship or a permanent position at CRS or other research organisations (e.g. the Center on Long-Term Risk), though we would only recommend this if you are already deeply familiar with key ideas and concepts relating to effective altruism (especially relating to s-risks). Depending on the topic you’d like to research, academia or think tanks can be an attractive platform to develop and disseminate new ideas. On the other hand, research organisations in effective altruism tend to offer more freedom to work on highest-priority topics, or to try out different areas.
While we believe that a research career can be high-impact, it is not for everyone. To make significant research contributions in high-priority areas, one needs not only general research skills, but also good judgement, a willingness to work on unconventional topics, and the ability to balance many considerations and deal with uncertainty.
Non-research roles at high-impact organisations
There is no need to despair if research is not for you, as there are plenty of other options that are also high-impact. A key way to contribute is to take a non-research role at an organisation that does important work in terms of reducing suffering. Depending on your skill set and the organisation’s needs, this can entail
- Operations
- Communications
- Fundraising
- Management
- Research support
- Grantmaking
- Community building
- Outreach
We can’t give a definite answer to the question of “which organisations do important work” here. You could consider organisations that explicitly endorse suffering-focused moral views; these include the Center on Long-Term Risk (CLR), the Organisation for the Prevention of Intense Suffering (OPIS), and, of course, the Center for Reducing Suffering (CRS).
We also think that the inclusion of more beings, such as wild animals and (potential) future artificial minds, in humanity’s sphere of moral concern is likely to reduce future suffering. In this respect, we would recommend the work of Animal Ethics and Sentience Institute. (Of course, there are many organisations doing good work in this area.)
Lastly, you could consider founding a new project if you have a good idea, though we would not recommend that at the beginning of your career.
Careers in politics, journalism or civil service
Political influence is a key “resource” that’s necessary to be able to effectively reduce suffering. We therefore think that careers in politics or adjacent areas are worth considering, subject to good personal fit. These may include diverse career paths such as party politics, journalism, civil service, advocacy on high-priority topics, or becoming a public intellectual.
Such careers can offer a platform to raise awareness of important issues. It can also contribute to making political debate more evidence-based and reasonable (cf. the priority area of improving institutional decision-making), although this is not very neglected or targeted. As in the previous cases, we are most excited about careers that focus on aspects that are especially important from a suffering-focused perspective.
In particular, we think reducing excessive political polarisation and tribalism is important, as these represent a risk factor for s-risk. In general, we recommend that anyone with a public profile takes care to avoid needless controversy that might endanger the reputation of effective altruists or suffering reducers. (See also Why altruists should be cooperative.)
One of the greatest benefits of careers in this area lies in the ability to raise awareness of relevant issues and thereby contribute to a greater focus on (severe) suffering in politics — imagine, for example, something akin to Kelsey Piper’s work, but from a suffering-focused perspective.
A key problem is that we are often highly uncertain about whether concrete policies reduce or increase suffering overall, though we can still make informed estimates. Magnus Vinding’s upcoming book on Reasoned Politics will go into detail on this.
Careers in AI safety or AI governance
It is possible, though far from clear, that shaping the development of artificial intelligence is an exceptional lever to have an impact on the long-term future. We won’t reiterate that discussion here (see e.g. 80,000 Hours’ profile, Brian Tomasik’s analysis of artificial intelligence, Magnus Vinding’s AI foom reading list, Lukas Gloor’s Why altruists should prioritise AI plus reply, Summary of my views on AI risk). There is great uncertainty, but on balance we think that careers in this area are worth considering if you have the appropriate skill set and motivation.
80,000 Hours has written helpful pieces on both technical AI safety and AI policy. We agree that both paths are worth considering. However, we would note that work on AI safety is often aimed at ensuring the alignment of such systems with human values, which is arguably not the most important aspect from a suffering-focused perspective. We are more excited about work that is targeted at preventing s-risks in particular, which has been termed worst-case AI safety. If you are interested in this field, a helpful starting point can be the research agenda of the Center on Long-Term Risk, which focuses on cooperation and conflict in the context of transformative AI.
A similar point holds for work on AI-related governance or policy (see e.g. this research agenda by the Future of Humanity Institute). We are most excited about work on aspects that are linked to worst-case outcomes, such as the risk of conflict and misuse by malicious actors.
If you are interested in this, you can take a look at 80,000 Hours’ Job board on AI strategy & governance roles.
Earning to give
Another plausible career path that’s often discussed among effective altruists is earning to give. To compare earning to give to other careers, a key question is the degree to which the organisations or causes one would donate to are funding-constrained, rather than constrained by talent or other factors.
It is well known that there are large funders in effective altruism (e.g. the Open Philanthropy Project), such that effective altruism as a whole is usually not considered very funding-constrained. In relative terms, there is less of an abundance of funding among suffering-focused organisations and individuals, but we would still characterise the current situation as more talent-constrained than funding-constrained. (Of course, these are very complex questions, but going into detail is beyond the scope of this post.)
Overall, considering that funding is expected to continue to grow in the future, we would recommend earning to give if you have the potential to make a lot of money (donating $200,000 per year or more, as a rough guideline), or as a default option if you are not a good fit for the other career paths we’ve outlined.
Conclusion
A common pattern is that the career paths we recommend overlap with many of 80,000 Hours’ recommendations, with a focus on somewhat different aspects when going into detail. But there are also careers that are popular in the effective altruism community that we believe are less of a priority from a suffering-focused perspective, such as work on biosecurity or nuclear security. This is in part because reducing extinction risk is less robustly positive in terms of reducing future suffering, and in part because we don’t think these priority areas are neglected compared to efforts to reduce s-risks.
We are, however, in full agreement with 80,000 Hours’ advice to focus on exploring different options and on building career capital, especially early on, rather than trying to plan everything in advance. It is good to network with people, get advice, and regularly write up your thoughts. Younger effective altruists should also be patient: while we all (rightly) desire to do impactful work immediately, research suggests that most people reach their peak output, in terms of both quantity and quality, at age 40–60.