My intuition leads me to think that focusing on improving life quality and eradicating poverty in all forms (not just extreme) would be highly impactful. This is because lifting more people out of poverty means that they have more free time to pursue self actualization, and therefore more likely to pursue EA and an impactful career. It’s essentially the idea behind egoistic altruism (cute video below).
Essentially, I feel that egoistic altruism would be a highly effective purpose to orient my career around. However, my search results haven’t turned up a lot of existing research into whether poverty alleviation (as a means to leveraging the number of humans working on important problems) is /actually/ an effective cause to pursue.
If you have any thoughts, articles or even just intuitions about this yourself, I’d love to hear them. Bonus points if you have insights on whether technology is an effective means to reduce poverty. Please feel free to interrogate any presumptions I’m making.
I agree that it’s valuable to recognize the downstream impact that making the world a better place can have on your own livelihood. However, the feedback cycle is likely to be decades or longer, and might be hard to use as motivation on a daily basis. In my experience it’s valuable to have more immediate motivators, such as the welfare you might be creating directly with a job focused on making the world a better place, the team you might be working with, or a passion for the technology or product you are working on itself.
Technology is surely a mechanism for reducing poverty (think of the industrial revolution, green revolution, vaccines and drugs). However, a large chunk of our technological output also goes towards marginal quality of life improvements for the already-rich.
Hey all! 😊
My intuition leads me to think that focusing on improving life quality and eradicating poverty in all forms (not just extreme) would be highly impactful. This is because lifting more people out of poverty means that they have more free time to pursue self actualization, and therefore more likely to pursue EA and an impactful career. It’s essentially the idea behind egoistic altruism (cute video below).
Essentially, I feel that egoistic altruism would be a highly effective purpose to orient my career around. However, my search results haven’t turned up a lot of existing research into whether poverty alleviation (as a means to leveraging the number of humans working on important problems) is /actually/ an effective cause to pursue.
If you have any thoughts, articles or even just intuitions about this yourself, I’d love to hear them. Bonus points if you have insights on whether technology is an effective means to reduce poverty. Please feel free to interrogate any presumptions I’m making.
Thanks! 💜
Jack
Welcome! And thanks for posting this.
I agree that it’s valuable to recognize the downstream impact that making the world a better place can have on your own livelihood. However, the feedback cycle is likely to be decades or longer, and might be hard to use as motivation on a daily basis. In my experience it’s valuable to have more immediate motivators, such as the welfare you might be creating directly with a job focused on making the world a better place, the team you might be working with, or a passion for the technology or product you are working on itself.
Technology is surely a mechanism for reducing poverty (think of the industrial revolution, green revolution, vaccines and drugs). However, a large chunk of our technological output also goes towards marginal quality of life improvements for the already-rich.