In the process of finding my career direction, I’ve spent the last few months diving deep into catastrophic risks and biosecurity. I want to bring this field to everyones attention as biosecurity is a critically important field that many don’t consider as a career path, but it’s becoming increasingly relevant in today’s world. In this post, I want to explain why I am interested in the field and why you should be to!
80000 hours
I am going to start by plugging 80000 hours. The name of the project refers to the idea that everyone of us spends around 80000 hours at their job over the course of their life.
That is much more time to create an impact than most people could ever invest in voluntary activity or personal habits. Therefore we should consider out job to be our greatest opportunity to create a valuable impact (however that might look like for you).
The nonprofit organization 80000 hours provides you with research about potentially impactful carreers and help in making informed decisions to use this time to make the greatest possible positive impact.
And they conclude that more often than not, unconventional carreers provide the biggest positive impacts. So I highly recommend checking out their website to get inspired!
What even is a meaningful carreer?
This post is going to take you through my thought process - giving you some insights about my personality and potential guidance to ask these questions to yourself.
The 80000 hours guide argues that commonly considered variables such as sallary or amount of stress are less impactful to our long-term happiness than we tend to believe.
Indeed, above a certain income threshhold, there is no factual relationship between money and hapiness or stress. So having enough money for you and your family to survive is important, but optimizing for money does not appear to be the best long-term path.
The same appears to be true about stress - You do not want zero stress, but you also do not want to be overwhelmed constantly. Instead, the target is to find a place, where you neither get bored nor burned out.
And this is probably not achieved by lying at a tropical beach for the rest of your life.
Instead there appears to be six components to a fulfilling carreer:
- Engaging work - freedom, clear tasks, varied types of tasks, feedback
- Work that helps others - acts of kindness make the giving person happies
- Being good at it - allows for achievements, gives you freedom to negotiate what you want to persue
- Supportive colleagues - support, friends, feedback, culture
- Absence of dealbreakers - comutes, unreasonable working hours or sallaries
- The rest of your life - carreer should fit your personal life plans
Clearly, these factors go beyond following ones passion and require carefull thought and evaluation. Instead we should aim to get good at things that help others. "Getting good" basically allows you to pick a job fulfilling 5 out of the six criteria listed above, the missing one being helping others. Prioritizing giving will help you to devolop a passion for what you are doing - as it is inherently meaningful by design. While a purposeful carreer will provide you with meaning and will make it more likely for others to support you on your path, the other factors (engagement, colleagues, life plans) need to alligh with that choice as otherwise, the path can still burn you out.
Get good at what helps others
There is two dimensions to this statement - getting good (providing you with carreer opportunities and choices) and helping others (contributing to a cause others value).
But before we look into what exactly it means to "help others", a common feeling is the at times seamingly negligent impact a single person can have.
This article compares the carreer of a medical doctor (a path generally viewed as helpfull to others) with
some of the most impactful people. The estimate is that a doctor is adding reoughly 100 years of additional life to all of their patients combined. That definitely is a positive and admirable impact,
but the argument is that there a lot of people of could have the same impact by becoming a doctor and there is no infinitely extending linear relationship between number of doctors and life years in a population.
But maybe you as an individual have an alternative path that has even bigger impact?
The people with the highest positive impact created in their lifes, often created new paths instead of following existing ones. The article mentions Dr. David Nalin, who came up with a way to simplify the feeding of diarrhoea patients,
saving estimated 50 mio lives. While without Dr. Danil, someone else would have made this discovery as well, a delay of one month roughly translates to 100000 lost lives, showing how important his path was.
Another example is Karl Landsteiner, who discovered the blood groups, saving vastly more lives than even Dr. Nalin.
But it is not only about the direct benefit from an invention - also preventing catastrophies or developing novel methods for others to build upon can save lives in the long-term.
Whether a carreer is impactful or not is partly due to chance - but only partly. Planning and careful consideration can also help you to stirr your carreer towards impactful outcomes that improve peoples lives.
Doing good
This post has been talking a lot about having a positive impact, but what does that mean? Individual social impact corresponds to:
- Amount of people affected
- Extend to which these people are affected
- Long-term potential of these effects
Especially the last point makes it hard for us to intuitively estimate positive impact of actions without properly laying out a plan.
Often, short-term benefits (e.g. a doctor curing a sick person) are easier to grasp than long-term decisions (e.g. by getting involved in governance).
This is also the point where we need to look into existential risk theory, game theory and the metacrisis (Blogpost to follow on this soon!).
It also should be mentioned that there is other ways to do good outside of carreer decisions. Examples of the include
donating, political advocacy or
being a "multiplier" (essentially what this blog post tries to do). As I am currently trying to figure out my carreer path and trying to draw attention to biosecurity,
these other ideas are not discussed here further.
80000 hours
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These innovations could also transform the field of agriculture. By engineering crops to be more resilient or nutritious, bioengineering could help address food security issues, especially in the context of climate change. In space exploration, bioengineers are investigating how to grow food in extraterrestrial environments, a necessary step for long-term missions to Mars or beyond.
Main Body
While there are many benefits, these technologies also raise important ethical questions. How will society manage the potential risks of creating genetically modified organisms, or the implications of growing human tissues in the lab? These are the challenges bioengineers and policymakers will need to navigate as we move into the future.