Can Your Career Help Change the World? You have 80,000 hours to try.

They belong to a movement called Effective Altruism, which uses science and data to determine how people can use their time, money, and skills to do the most good. Conceived by two Oxford University philosophers in the late 2000s, the EA approach is attracting new attention as the pandemic prompts many workers to re-evaluate the sense of purpose and meaning they get from their jobs. .

Much of the original goal of Effective Altruism was to encourage people to pursue lucrative careers so that they had more money to donate and to demonstrate which causes went the most to improve human lives. (Contributing to parasite deworming pills, for example, helps keep millions of children in sub-Saharan Africa in school, say effective altruists.) The first archetype of an EA sidekick was a banker from investment or technological framework that has given significant sums for such interventions.

Thanks to a nonprofit called 80,000 Hours, the movement has since expanded to help people design careers that are well suited to their talents and skills. The London-based organization, started in 2011 by EA co-founder Will MacAskill and Benjamin Todd, takes its name from the 80,000 hours you’re likely to spend in a 40-year career, assuming that you work 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year.

Of the roughly 2,000 consultations the group has held with job seekers over the past decade, some 500 have taken place in the past year, said Todd, the group’s chief executive. The Effective Altruism Forum estimates that, based on EA’s surveys, several thousand people around the world are actively engaged in the movement community.

Finding the right selfless career can take time. Adam Gleave, 28, worked in a hedge fund after graduating from the University of Cambridge, where he first met EA. His plan was to earn a lot of money to donate, and he donated part of his salary to the Long-Term Future Fund, a nonprofit focused on global challenges such as advanced artificial intelligence and pandemics. But he quit his job after 10 months.

“I felt that my work did not directly address the issues that I consider to be really important,” he says.

Rather than just donate to AI problems, he decided he could work on it himself. After conversations with 80,000 Hours members, he enrolled in a doctoral program in AI at the University of California, Berkeley. There, he develops techniques to refine machine learning systems, like those that generate product and news recommendations on social media platforms.

“I only want to work on issues that directly affect our lives,” he says. He hopes to see his technical ideas put into practice by business and government regulations, after completing his doctorate next year.

80,000 Hours advises people to aim for the most impactful job that solves the social problem of their choice. A high-impact job often means a high-level position – according to EA’s logic, working in a startup developing large-scale solutions for climate change, for example, would generally be more effective than becoming a social worker. His website includes a job board for hundreds of EA-aligned job postings, most of which are white-collar positions, such as a China-focused analyst in a Washington think tank or a gene editing research associate at an Australian biotech company.

The organization’s own priority list reflects a distinct worldview. Effective altruists focus on the really big and sometimes abstract picture, including AI, climate change, great power conflicts, outer space surveillance and governance, topics that could be excerpts from Davos or Aspen Ideas Festival programs.

Scarlette Lesma, 29, discovered EA online a few years ago and her ideas resonated with her. She had been a program manager at a software vendor for the energy industry and had become frustrated that she couldn’t draw a direct line between her job and the advancement of renewable energy. While attending EA meetings in London, she discovered Counterfactual Ventures, a venture capital firm that supports startups working for a sustainable food system. Talking about EA in her interview helped her land the job, she says, and her manager there is also on the move.

“The principles of EA really influence the way people react in our day-to-day business,” she says. The focus is on numbers and measurable impacts, she says, and several company-backed founders have achieved this through EA connections.

Many effective altruists are entrepreneurs, a particularly important career choice, according to the principles of the group. Lincoln Quirk, 35, lives in Concord, New Hampshire, and helps run a 1,000-employee startup called Wave, which enables mobile payments to sub-Saharan Africa. By focusing on countries with some of the world’s poorest populations, he says, the company’s technology is likely to have the greatest possible impact.

Mr. Quirk has attended and recruited EA meetings in the Boston area for several years. “At least 10 of our employees have come to Wave Circles from EA,” he says.

Some critics of the EA approach say it places too much emphasis on areas beyond the reach of many workers, such as AI, and neglects professions like teaching or healthcare, which also involve help people directly. A career based on an uncompromising calculation of societal impact isn’t necessarily the most rewarding, they argue.

EA’s backers say their recommendations focus on the best opportunities available to help improve the long-term future, and 80,000 hours underscore the importance of personal fit for a job more than ever before. .

I was intrigued enough to sign up for my own 80,000 hour consultation. I’m not specifically the target audience for the nonprofit, which Mr. Todd described as a “self-selected group” whose priority is to change the world in some way. (I admitted that I had some reservations, because I think my job as a journalist is to inform, not to defend.)

After summarizing my skills and experience on a brief online form, I participated in a free 30-minute Zoom call with 80,000-hour advisor Habiba Islam, who works full-time for the association after several years of management consulting at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

There’s no need to change professions, she says, but if I continued my career by EA principles, I might research stories of large-scale, but lesser-known, risks to mankind such as as AI bias or potential pandemics beyond Covid19. Or are there other impending challenges that I could overcome with my platform, she asks?

I tell him I’ll think about it.

Write to Krithika Varagur at [email protected]