Test Your Knowledge of the World’s Biggest Problems
The quiz in 15 seconds
I created a 5-15 min quiz on three of humanity’s biggest problems:
Global Health—e.g., how many children die every year from malaria?
Animal Welfare—e.g., how many chickens are killed for meat every year?
Existential Risk—on the risk of extinction and permanent collapse from nuclear winter, engineered pandemics, and artificial intelligence.
The quiz in 30 seconds
The World’s Biggest Problems quiz aims to shift people’s donations and talent (e.g., by redirecting their career) toward solving these problems.
We’re publishing it today on Clearer Thinking, a website with almost 70 tools on decision-making and rationality.
At the start of the quiz, you can choose which sections interest you. Each section has 11 multiple-choice questions. After each question, you’ll see the answer with a graph (often from Our World in Data), the linked source, and sometimes a brief description of an organization working on the issue. At the end, you’ll get the following:
🃏 A flashcard deck (for Anki here) to remember these 33 facts forever
🔑 A list of key steps on how to do the most good with your career and donations
📊 A free report with your results and how well you did compared to others—probably better than average since you’re on the EA Forum ;)
Link to the World’s Biggest Problems quiz here.
What you can do
The most valuable thing you can do is send the quiz to people new to EA. If you’re an EA communicator or group organizer, you might consider sharing it when informing people about the problems that EA is trying to solve.
If you have line-by-line comments on potential improvements, you can leave them in this Google Doc.
Credits
Finally, I’d like to share that I partnered with clearerthinking.org to develop this quiz. I want to thank Spencer Greenberg for creating guidedtrack.com, the infrastructure that supports the quiz, and for supporting me from day one.
I’m a big fan of Gapminder and their quizzes on global development. Good to see more content like that. I even scheduled an event at EA Anywhere based on your quiz. Thanks for putting it all together!
Great idea, I’m curious to know how it goes! :)
Best, André