[BLANK_AUDIO] As you know we have got two special guests today. So, I want to introduce to you first, Will [INAUDIBLE] Who is a graduate student at the University of Oxford. In England he's just about to complete his PhD, he's also a research associate at the Uehiro Center for Practical Ethics, which is a center at the University of Oxford that does research into practical ethics, and he's the founder of 80,000 hours. Which, if you've been looking at some of the information about that, and, he's going to be talking to you specifically about that issue. Will's going to speak for about 20 minutes, with, the PowerPoint presentation that's behind me. Then, from, rather more in the region - Matt Wyga who was a student here at Princeton just a couple of years ago as you are. Graduated from Princeton and is now working for An arbitrage firm in New York City called Janestreet. And we'll tell you about the way he's furthering his career, and doing good by doing that. So, Matt will speak for about ten minutes, and that should leave us with plenty of time for questions and discussions of the issues that both. Will and Matt have raised. So Matt. Will, sorry, over to you. >> Thank you Peter, and thank you all for coming here. It's an absolute delight to speak for you all. So as Peter said, I'm the founder of 80,000 hours. The idea behind this organization Is that it aims to help people like you, talented, motivated but ain't young people to do as much good as they can in the course of their career. And I'm going to be telling you about just one idea that we've had an idea that's called earning to give, and, and, by no means, going to say that this is always the best way to make a difference in the world. There's one way that you might not have thought of that has a lot more arguments behind it than you might have thought. So, we're called 80,000 hours because that's the number of hours you'll typically work over the course of your life, and you might think, whoa, what a drudgery is that. That's such an incredibly long time. But one thing I want to emphasize is that actually when you compare some of the biggest problems in the world, that means, global poverty, 1.4 billion people living on less than $1.25 a day. Where that means what $1.25 would buy in the US in 2005. So it's already taking into account the fact that money goes further overseas, when you look at the idea that 20 million people every year die of easily preventable diseases, when you think about the tens of billions of animals that are unnecessarily harmfully treated in factory farms, and then killed for food. Or when you look at the costs of climate change, which will amount to over $7 trillion, you realize that actually the amount of time you've got to make a difference is absolutely tiny compared to the size of the, the world's most pressing problems. So it's not like you can think, well, which of these problems do I want to solve. Rather you've gotta think. Which problem can I make the biggest dent in? So the fact that you've got only 8,000 hours means that you have this really tough question. You have to think, how should I allocate those hours? Which causes should I pursue? Which careers should I pursue? And I'm going to be helping you to answer that question. So, first I'm going to just debunk a little myth. So, a lot of people when they discuss, kind of, careers that make a difference, it's as if it it's easy to do that, and there's this very common slogan, should just, follow your passion. The idea is the We'll discover some core or some activity that you'll feel is your calling. And then when you pursue that, that's how you know you can make the most difference. And I think that's a very bad piece of advice and I'll just tell a little story in order to illustrate that. So does anyone know what this is? I will allow you to shout out if you want. >> Yeah. >> So in particular it's called play pump, and in the early 20, 2000's this idea got absolutely huge. The idea is supposed to be win-win, so it was a playground merry-go-round that at the same time would function as A water pump. So it would harness the power of youthful energy. Children would play on it and in doing so water would be pumped up and clean water would be provided for the village. This got huge. It was a media sensation. The then First Lady Laura Bush, she gave $14 million to fund play pumps. I figure that was nearly unmatched by the case foundation. It got, won a UN world development market place award. And the media just absolutely loved it. They made puns like solving poverty is child's play. Or going up the magic roundabout. There were just two problems with the idea. The first is that, it costs three times as much as a traditional water pump, and pumps less water. And, in fact, it pumps so little water that, children would need to play on it 27 hours per day, in order to provide enough water, for the village. But, the second and even more damning problem is that this wasn't any fun. So unlike a normal playground merrygoround, the point is that you can push it and then the momentum means that you can spin freely. Not so with this play pump. Because in order to be able to actually pump water you need a constant torque. So that meant that you had to keep pushing it. In order for the water to be, to be pumped. This meant that the children would get incredibly tired, very quickly, And, they wouldn't want to play in the play pump, quite understandably. Apart from, in one village, where they were actually paid to do so. So, this meant that, so, it was often left to the elderly women of the village. You have to, push this play pump. Many hours of the day. And we find the whole process kind of degrading as you might expect. Not only that, it was also kind of dangerous. So a number of people broke limbs while pushing the play pump, some people would vomit in exhaustion. So this was an actually disaster. The best thing that happened about the program is that it admitted. It was game over. Several years later, after extensive media backlash, and investigation by the U.N. But, what I want to illustrate with this aside from the fact that good ideas on its face can do very little good at all. Is just how, following your passion can go astray. This is Trevor Field, he was the one who pioneered the PlayPump. So he was a great example of someone trying to do good through following his passion. Prior to getting involved in development he worked in advertising for Penthouse magazine, so try to move to something that you thought might have made more of a difference. And in an interview before it was revealed just how disastrous this program was this is what he gave. Said you've just got to do it. This was his advice. The most important thing is just, you find something you're passionate about, that you think is great and you don't look at the evidence. Who needs that? You just go and pursue this thing that you're really excited about. And this is the sort of reasoning that I really want to caution against. It's incredibly difficult to know how to do good in the world. And so I am going to answer friends, answer this question, you know, by being a bit of a geek by doing your homework. How much good can you really do over the course of your career, if you're really trying. Okay, I'm going to give three main points, just three concepts for you take away with and try to apply to your own career decisions. The first will be the idea of working in effective causes. This is the one that I'll [UNKNOWN]. It's most important in practical terms because some causes are thousands, or tens of thousands more cost effective than others. The second is the idea of just getting leverage. It might sound trivial but the more influence you have, the more good you can do. But the implications of that can be unexpected. And then the third is where it gets kind of philosophically interesting is the idea of doing something that wouldn't have happened otherwise. And again that's a crucial consideration when thinking about your own career. So let's begin with working in effective causes. You think, well, maybe this sounds obvious on its face, but how do you work out effectiveness. well, the absolute gold standard way of working out what an effective cause is. Is by using a randomized control file. So the idea is, you've got some drug, some intervention you want to test. You've got your pop, target population, and on the left, in order to work out if something is effective you divide the groups, you divide the population into two groups. You've got your control group, you don't give them the intervention, you've got your intervention group, you give them the drug or whatever you want to test and then the difference that intervention makes is the difference between how well off those in the intervention group are compared with how well off those in the control group are. And, again, anyone who's done empirical science, this should be very familiar. But, remarkably, it's just, often, left out of, development. It's actually just fairly difficult to internalize, in general. So, the reason why quack medicine, or Kind of pseudoscientific medicine is so popular is because people don't think about this. They don't think about what would've happened otherwise. They will feel unwell, then they'll take some new, something called frog juice, that's very popular, that's Mix of aloe vera, kind of native boot and, a mashed up frog. And they'll take that, and then maybe they'll feel better afterwards. And, what they neglect, and they think, oh well it was effective then, I felt better. But what they neglect is that they might have felt better otherwise. The analogy in development of the well-to-do good is you might do something and see progress But you just, without a control group, you really don't know whether you would've that benefit would've happened other ways. In fact, maybe there would've been an even greater benefit if you haven't been involved, in which case you not only didn't do good, you were actually actively harmful. So, that's mentioning effectiveness, but you also, what we cared about is kind of how good the actions that you're doing are. And, how can you measure good, isn't that inherently subjective? Well, economists have spent quite a lot of work in order to do this, in order to try to work out how different interventions and activities compare. And they've used, they have two kind of major metrics. So one is the quality adjusted life year, or QALY. And this is the the third [UNKNOWN] of health economists. So the idea is there's two ways I can give you a health benefit. The first is to extend your life. So, no one has really ever saved a life. You might start someone's heart, but then low and behold they'll die of something else a few years later. The only benefit you can really provide in terms of saving someone's life is extending their life. And in general the more you can extend somebody's life by, the better. If I saved out of the path of a bus and pushed you in front of a train, saving your life, but extending your life by only a few minutes, that wouldn't be much of a benefit. But if I pull you out of the path of a pass and allow you to live another 30 years, that would be a substantial benefit. So one component of this metric is the idea of giving people additional years of life. So if their life is already good, then extending that life by a certain number of years is a benefit. The second aspect that it incorporates Is the idea of making someone's life better off while they are alive. So if you cure treat someone who has a problem with migraines for example, as a doctor. You wouldn't have made their life any longer. Migraines aren't going to shorten someone's life. But you have made their life better off while they're alive, and that's a good thing as well. And, what the QALY method does, is use an extensive survey data in order to work out how the people you're trying to help, make trade-offs between having a longer life and having a higher quality of life, while they're alive. And then, it uses those fade-offs, in order to, have this kind of, one unified metric of equality, adjusted like, That way the idea is the more quality adjusted life years you can give to a population, the better. And so using this, you can compare very quite different interventions. So for example if you distribute long lasting insecticide to beat the bednets in the developing world. This is in order to prevent children from getting malaria. Then you'll give one quality adjusted year, that's one year of very high quality health. You'll be able to provide that for just $50. In contrast, if you provide, train and provide guide dogs, guide dogs are very expensive, cost about $70,000. The amount you're spending in order to give someone the equivalent of one year of a very high quality health, but in this case by improving the quality of their life, is much less than $50,000 per quality adjusting life year. In terms of the benefits, in terms of the benefits of human health and well-being. The difference between bed nets and guide dogs, is the difference between, saving or providing one quality adjusted life here, and providing 10,000. So the difference in impact is a factor of 10,000. Now, you can use quality adjusted life years to compare everything. They're kind of the gold standard. And when you have randomized controlled trials, that's amazing. It's not always possible and the economists quite often [INAUDIBLE] to the idea of benefit-cost analysis. So this is the idea of simply looking at how much money is spent on a certain intervention and how much money does that generate. So micronutrients for example. Most malnutrition in the developing world isn't due to a lack of calories, it's due to a lack of vitamins, of micro nutrients. And if you provide supplementation of vitamin A, Zinc, and Iron. Then every dollar you spend on this program will generate about $40 in increased income, for the people who you're helping. So it's a very cost effective intervention. Okay, so this is the idea of cost effectiveness. Your most important things that you can measure this, and that some activities are thousands of times more cost effective than others. Second big idea is the idea of leverage. So, this should sound kind of of trivial, but it's very important, which is just simply if you have more power over the world, more resources that you can influence than you can do, you can use those resources to do more good. This can be unintuitive, so a friend of mine worked at The World Bank for about five years. And he was, is a command maker within the world bank, and he was deciding which programs got funded and which didn't. Within the world bank this isn't thought of as the sexiest position, it's somewhere towards an admin role, and he could have got something much more reputable and higher status. But in the course of this position he was able to. Move about 500 million dollars to causes that he thought were doing 10 times as much good, with that money. So by taking this position where it maybe wasn't as high status but had a huge influence over resources that were being spent, he was able to move absolutely massive amount of money to causes that were more effective. The third idea is doing something that wouldn't have happened otherwise. And I'll introduce this with the beautiful George Clooney. So, this is a little bit before your time, but this is Dr. Doug Ross in ER. And he's kind of portrayed as, his ups and downs, but portrayed as Something of moral hero. And doctors in general are, so the idea is they save lives on a regular basis and thats kind of amazing. But, if we ask the question, how much good does a doctor do? So how many lives does a doctor save? Theres two mistakes that we've got to be wary of making. So the simple view of how many lives a doctor saves would be to take the doctor, look at how many lifesaving operations or treatments they perform over the course of their life, add all those up and then that's the number of lives saved. But that makes two mistakes and both make the mistake of not thinking about what would have happened otherwise. Like we saw with, like the mistake of, alter, like, quack-meds, in, in, the plan to make some profiles. The first is the fact that. So, supposing, Doctor Doug Vaas had just disappeared, no one took his place. Would those life-saving interventions, treatments and operations, not have happened? And the answer is, they would have happened anyway. Life saving surgeries and treatment are the most important things a doctor can do. That means that if that doctor hadn't been there, the other doctors in the hospital and, in fact, across the whole U.S., would have compensated. They'd have done the most imoprtant things that Dr. Vaas wouldn't have done, and instead, they'd have neglected the least important things like [INAUDIBLE] minor ailments, and indeed there are over 800000 doctors in the US alone, and if you become a doctor, its not like you're the average doctor you are adding one doctor, so the difference you are making is the difference in total health benefit given that the US has 800000 doctors or 800001 doctors. And that might be, that's almost certainly a lot smaller than, the figure that you get if you just add up how many life saving surgeries there are, over the course of a doctors career. So that's the first way you can make a mistake. The second way is that supposing Dr. Douglas decided never to go into medical school. Well, it's simply not the case. The, There would have been one fewer doctor in the country. But, if he hadn't gone into that oval tool, someone else would have done, someone else would have taken the position that he went into. So, rather than the difference being, kind of, all the good you directly do, the difference that he makes is the difference between. How much good he does, and how much good the person who would have been in his shoes would have done. So supposing he was saving ten lives every week, or performing ten life saving surgeries. If the person in his shoes had been, let's say, a lot worse than him and only saved nine lives every week. Then the difference he makes the number of lives that are saved as a result of him Is only one life saved per week. It's not ten. And so taking into account this fact that you've gotta look at what would've happened other ways can often make, the difference you make much less than you might think. [BLANK_AUDIO]
