Me and my co-organizer at Haverford EA are writing a 10 minute intro pitch to EA.
It's easy to come up with particular numbers for how many lives a college graduate might save (how much impact they might have) through donations. But then we want to say that we think they could have even more impact through their career. The problem is that we don't have any explicit examples of how much impact a typical high-impact career might have.
Does anyone know of a resource that goes through an example of a high-impact career and estimates its impact in QALYs or something similar?
I'm looking for something like "How much impact do doctors have?" but for any particular EA high-impact career.
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Here is one comparing founding a charity and donating to charity: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/drRsWTctSqNRveK56/what-is-the-expected-value-of-creating-a-givewell-top
(Conclusion was something like founding and running a charity maybe worth "$220K/yr to $720K/yr" of to donations to top GiveWell charities)
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Hm, this seems tricky for an intro pitch, if we're talking about careers in areas this community considers especially high-impact:
- In global development, non-earning-to-give careers in the community seem to be rare and pretty different from one another, so estimating the (near-term) impact of a typical such career seems tough.
- In existential risk reduction, it seems like quantifying the value of anything quickly gets into huge numbers, lots of guesswork, and weird questions, while in factory farming, quantifying impacts quickly gets into tricky inter-species comparisons and focusing on non-human animals. For an intro pitch, my intuition would be to lead with better-grounded and more intuitive content.
On another note: on the off chance you haven't seen them, you might find the short introductory presentations here useful.