Sven’s path to Effective Altruism

I came across Effective Altruism (EA) in late 2013 if I remember correctly. Someone pointed me to the GiveWell website and I started reading about various EA-related topics. It all started to make sense to me, but it took a little more time until I became properly engaged. I got closely involved in the EA-community from 2018 onwards, two years after attending my first EA-Event and signing up for the Trial Pledge at EA Global 2016. Later, I also  took the 10% Pledge. Donating some of my income is an important reminder to me that there are people and other sentient beings in the world who are much less privileged than me and many people I know.

What are the most important problems?

Around that time I also became serious about finding a way to change my career to help do the most good. Since early 2019, I have now been working at the Global Priorities Institute (GPI) in Oxford as Head of Research Operations. Our aim at GPI is to conduct high-level foundational academic research, but on questions that can actually have important practical implications. The idea is that our research ultimately informs decision makers who want to use their resources to do the most good. We are also trying to engage other academics in our disciplines (currently we are working in philosophy, economics and psychology) to start working on topics that we consider most important. 

Sven’s work at the Global Priorities Institute

Personally, my main responsibility at GPI is to keep the institute running; overseeing our operations, managing events, communication, administration, managing a small team,  and helping in fundraising and strategy. I find it really exciting and motivating to work with a team of researchers who are trying to solve some very hard problems whose solution might ultimately have significant positive impact.

Effective Altruism as a question

My work also fits really well with the aspect of EA that I find most convincing: seeing EA as a question rather than a specific ideology or direction on what to do. “How can we do the most good with the resources we have available?”. There is no easy answer to this question and the answer changes over time while we gain more knowledge. I am personally quite unsure about the prioritisation between different problems since this relies on many moral and empirical questions that we don’t have good answers to yet. There are many important problems and we try to find out which merit the most attention. Different people have different answers to the question – but this is not surprising, and together we can make progress on many of these problems.