From their homepage: "You have 80,000 hours in your career. Make the right career choices, and you can help solve the world’s most pressing problems, as well as have a more rewarding, interesting life. We’re here to give you the information you need to find that fulfilling, high-impact career. Our advice is all free, tailored for talented graduates & young professionals, and based on five years of research alongside academics at Oxford."

The 80000 hours podcast can be long winded but is at times also quite interesting.

https://80000hours.org/career-planning-tool/

The EA worldview takes some getting used to though.

Anyone can probably reach the top 5% in most non-athletic areas given enough time. But if your goal is to maximize your output having already accepted that your time on earth is limited, then the wise thing is to probably steer in directions that have high impact but for you feel disproportionately easy (compared to the general population).

Thus, I'm a big fan of Peter Theils advice to work on things that satisfy the property that: "if you weren't working on it, this problem would not get solved".

I seriously doubt that. People who have no aptitude in a field, even if they are dedicated, will be competing vs people who are also dedicated, but have the aptitude. I'd say maybe that "almost anyone can reach top 50% of most non-athletic fields", but definitely not top 5%.

Access to electricity is a massive problem and the number of people without access is actually projected to increase [1].

We need more people working on the problem and we especially need people from SSA working on it.

We are working to inspire young people and to provide them with the tools and knowledge they need to go and solve the problem of access to electricity. [2]

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/561428/forecast-of-popul...

[2] https://localelectricity.org/

Archiving, for me, is a way of travelling forward in time. Think about "time capsules" and what not.

Here's what I mean by this: If you write a message on a piece of paper, and read it the next day, your message has successfully traveled forward in time by a day. But as the days pass, the message's survival chances diminish greatly.

The goal of archiving is to give information the highest chances possible to travel forward in time, as long as possible. It's hard to evaluate how good our chances are now, but 2000 years from now, if archaeologists find information on our current society, is it more likely to be the piece of paper you wrote, or an archive that was given the best chances of survival?

It's extremely rewarding and it truly is meaningful. Archive anything. Sort and order it, index it, describe it, upload it. Do it for something you work on. The odds for you to archive something that was not done by anyone else are very high.

You may be good at something but if you are not happy ... I think mao and hilter could. R said quite good in their deeds and mao is even now has no problem in killing 30m+ (more than 1 time - Great Leap Forward and cultural revolution).

Both are not happy men. May be they have sming pic but I have not aware much.

Be happy. Do no harm.

Assume that we are not in Olympic but we are always in the game of life. With that may I quote the motto, the most important thing in life is not about winning but about participation and you have tried your best.

Good luck.

Also, that's not really how regrets work. You will be comparing the path you took to what you imagine to be the roads not taken. It's very dependent on your own unique experiences and outlook, and very hard to safeguard against. Your way of evaluating your life will change over time, so optimising for your current values gives no guarantees. Best thing to work on is stoicism and self forgiveness in my opinion.

By analogy with machine learning, instead of throwing lots of effort at a non-convex problem, you might instead choose a convex problem instead: e.g. what daily process allows you to achieve high problem solving output? what expertise can you acquire and put to use regularly, which is sustainable (no burnout, pays rent, etc)?

Your situation reminds me this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buridan%27s_ass

Start small! Make any move, even not ideal one. Just leave your comfort bubble and try each idea.

I suspect you could do more good for science by working a lifetime in some well-paid career and donating a hefty portion of it to some science-funding organization than by trying to do science yourself.

Science needs your money far more than it needs your brains.

Some people can work just for material benefit to themselves and their families. However, eventually that juice runs out because money is just not useful beyond a point. Depression is a first world problem, generally. Why is it that people who are materially better off than most of their peers in the last century become depressed?

The key, it seems, is to find a goal that is higher than immediate selfish interests of the individual or family. This might even mean staying in your current situation but just realigning "why" you are doing it to something higher. It is very hard to find an unselfish person who is depressed, unsure about what to do or unhappy in general.

The goal makes all the difference.

So, like a good git commit message :P

Jokes aside, good point and imo the number one answer to the question. Not sure why you got a dwonvote even. If you're ok with material benefits then yeah, anything goes of course. But that only gets you so far and indeed real value seems to lie beyond that. It took me alomost half a life to realize it, but altruism really does give me much more than materialsim.

Find one thing that you do want to do: something that is silently but persistently pulling you in. Ideally, something you just couldn't not do.

I'm not a religious person but I really like the tone of the "$god works in mysterious ways". You never know what your choices and path will expand into: it might be something that's related to all three energy, AI, and healthcare but you never would've guessed in the start.

You can always out-smart yourself and convince yourself to do the thing that makes sense but the sensible thing often doesn't mean something that truly fulfills you.

Because future is extremely hard to know, or even predict, all you can do is follow your light.

If I had more choice I'd choose things that interest and fascinate me anyways and serve some good. This would be (socially beneficial) science and empowering information tools for the web.

¹ https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

² Need a product manager for a cool product? Please let me know.

Also, these fields are not evil or useless like weapon design or hedge funds. They are actually useful to society, so you feel like contributing to the general good.

Don’t worry about healthcare, there are thousands of people who work on healthcare.

And, if I may, if you did work on healthcare, your very own contribution to solving this problem would most likely be very small. Unless you somehow become the Elon Musk of healthcare... which you know, may or may not happen.

1. How about AI for Healthcare?

2. I don't believe you can do great work in an area you're not personally excited about. So, if the thought of spending the next 30 years working in the healthcare sector is not exciting to you at the moment, then, chances are that if you were to pick this path, you'd be OK at it at best, and that's not good enough to make any difference on a larger scale.

(transcript : http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html)

If you were going to be Elon Musk, you wouldn't be asking us for advice.

"You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever." - Steve Jobs

You can however increase the odds of things coming on your path that you'll be passionate about:

- Pursue a wide range of interests, jobs in different industries

- Fearlessly trying lots of different stuff, for ex. go skydiving, go rock climbing, go travel if you can, go from the beaten path of life

- Socialize and stay open and curious to different people, so you hear different viewpoints and get different interests

You could alternatively pick something that is not quite so fashionable. Eg the food system, which will require very serious attention, and perhaps have at least as much environmental impact as energy. There seem to be many areas in need of improvement, including distribution, waste handling, economics/politics/equality, arresting/reducing land use, innovating more sustainable tastes, innovating production; synthetic meat, dairy, juices, pulps, hydro-/aero-ponics, self-contained fish farms, etc.

Consider the statistics of decision, in general and simplified. In any abstract decision, there is a 50 percent probability that the correct or constructive choice will be made. If the correct path is taken, obviously no problems will exist. If the incorrect selection is made, it will become evident. When it does, there is a 50 percent probability that the choice can be reversed and the constructive path substituted in its place.

Therefore, there is only one chance in four, at the most, that an irrevocable direction may be taken in decision making. All vital decisions in the history of man have been made on much worse odds than three to one. Some were as high as one in twenty and came out positively.

To move away from the null point of indecision, take the position that any action or decision is better than none at all, based upon the odds of three to one.

More here https://pastebin.com/1tF3gqre

Focus your mentalities on yourself (eg do what you want, not what you think you should), and when the time comes for you to become aware of your calling, you will become aware of it, unintentionally. Some never do, and that's OK, as there is no requirement to.

Those that do, will find the path to success easier than those who premeditated it, in my opinion.

Do what you love, not what you think you should. This, with a positive attitude and a dribble of lady luck should get you through.

At least that my plan :)

EDIT: I should add, for me, it hasn't worked out yet, but remember. Positive attitude!

It really depends on what you did before but green renewable energy sounds interesting to me (who to some extent works in healthcare :-).

So I think you're asking the right questions but you need to look at it from a slightly different angle.

I'd also agree with you that life is short... But it's also long. You can always switch fields, learn new things, reinvent yourself. There are no rules...

I wouldn't argue with you if you hadn't said energy is something you want to work on, but I'd say that better low-carbon energy solutions are one of the most important needs on the planet right now.

You're going to make the biggest contribution if you work in the area where you're relatively better... and being excited about a field makes a hell of a difference in terms of your ability to contribute to that field vs. a field which you think is important but not all that personally interesting.

https://www.drawdown.org/solutions

Update: Yes I know these aren’t the same, but they’re related.

Regarding personal happiness, consider that how you work is much more important than what you work on.

The entire notion of a “career” is outdated. It ended back in 1980s.

Obviously then, the first one to solve is longevity

I won't work on things I fundamentally disagree with but what's important to me is life outside of work. I try to maximise my income and the availability of non-work time.

As a contractor this is what I get to do, make a packet and take a few months off here and there.

People with a drive to achieve in a particular area may be after a different sort of satisfaction in life I guess.

For me, there are four questions:

- Where are my weaknesses/blind spots? You can't fix all of them, and I'll never be a good mechanic no matter how much I try, but my feeling is that you have to work on weak areas at least enough so that you are not cognitively crippled by them. After that you have to have a team to help you avoid problems.

- How do I really know what people need? Sure, I could read a Forbes article about a muppet shortage. It might even move me to give to a charity. I might then see all of my friends giving to muppet charities and talking about their plight. But what the hell does that mean, aside from the fact that if I announce I'm doing something about muppets I get a lot of positive attention? Which leads me to the next question:

- Am I in this for others or for myself? The important thing here is that there are no right or wrong answers. If you never work on yourself you'll be crap at helping others, so trying to choose "helping others" option is probably the wrong one, at least long-term. Best stick to yourself for a while. (Some people do this wonderful cop-out where they say "if I'm building something the market pays for, I must be both helping others and myself!". I don't disagree with this, but I think it dodges the question, which is probably more like "what can I do on-purpose for the sole benefit of others that will actually directly help them in a way I can understand?)

- How am I sure I am exposed to enough in life to actually make a good choice? If you know nothing, run across somebody who needs a piece of bread and give it to them, you've picked a problem and solved it. If you know somebody who dumps high-quality food every night and drive a truck from their spot to a place where hundreds can eat, you've done the same thing -- but it helps more because you know more. So how are you sure you know enough to not waste your life giving out pieces of bread to 1500 people when you could have taken the same amount of energy and fed 1,000,000? That's the crux of the thing, at least for me.

I spent my early life working on my weaknesses while learning a lot of technical stuff. Then I switched off to working for the highest rates possible, traveling all over the world meeting people and solving whatever problems they had, not worrying about my own. I used the market to help guide me to people who were in some sort of distress. Then I looked for patterns and root causes.

As I was doing that, I went back and deepened my education in the liberal arts: philosophy, rhetoric, writing, understanding and appreciating various forms of art, and so on.

I am happy where I ended up. I am also content in knowing that I couldn't have short-circuited it by trying to "jump ahead" and solve world hunger at age 20. There are probably a bunch of folks out there who could do this. From observation I have found these people are 1) extremely smart, and 2) profoundly ignorant. They don't know a lot of stuff and they're happy not knowing. They just have problem X they are going to solve one way or another. I was never happy not-knowing, so I had to work it all out on my own.

ADD: Once you decide, of course, there's actually making it happen. That's an entirely-different question. You could decide the right way to cure cancer. You could know enough to come up with a cure. But that doesn't mean you can get anybody to listen or actually make a difference. (grin)

Some people are fortunate enough to make huge contributions, other people make small contributions, and both are totally fine. You're doing great if you're contributing positively at all.

We're all humans trying to make the world better. Even the ones that make it worse aren't to be blamed, they were simply unlucky genetically or environmentally.

It has always been on the shoulders of the most fortunate to do the most important work. It's not any different today, except that a growing percentage of society is so fortunate.

At the end of the day, we're all one human family and it's totally unimportant who did what to get us to the promise land. All humans can take rightful pride and ownership over the results of our collective effort.