One Minute in Hell

When I say we have important problems to solve, this is what I mean

Quick, angry post today.

My career advice articles have argued that there are unacceptable levels of suffering and risk in the world, but that you can do something about it. I think they’ve been popular because people are desperate to wring some meaning from their work, and the only serious way to do that is to consider the wellbeing of others.

But clearly I wasn’t specific enough. A commenter recently accused me of being vague and sanctimonious about the world’s problems, caring more about joining some “good person club” than actually improving the world. They said the phrase “poorest people” is abstract.

Fine, let’s get concrete, but it won’t be fun. I think most people don’t realize the scale of horrific and preventable suffering that exists today because it’s hard to look at. I empathize with this, but if you can look for just one minute, I think you should stare into hell. Once you have, I think the question “what important problem should I try to solve?” becomes much easier to answer.¹

One minute dying of malaria

Aisha can’t breathe. Her palms are cold and pale. She presses her body against her mother, delirious and confused, seeking any comfort from the pain. She tries to cry but her voice is faint. She doesn’t understand what’s happening.

Like most severe malaria patients, Aisha is under five years old. A parasite is destroying her red blood cells faster than her body can replace them. Her nascent immune system was unprepared and was already weakened by malnourishment before she was infected by a mosquito bite.

Aisha was picking pink hibiscuses just two days ago, smiling proudly when she handed the bouquet to her mother. Malaria comes on fast. The disease is hard to detect and treat in small children because early symptoms mirror a dozen other common illnesses until it’s too late.

Aisha’s mother holds her and prays. Please, God. Please. Let it pass before the seizures. Give her any help, anything. She doesn’t deserve this.

In 2025, a child under five died of malaria (on average) once every minute. These deaths are preventable: seasonal preventative medicine costs about $7 per child, an insecticide-treated bednet costs $6, and vaccines are increasingly promising. At scale, this means you can save a life for between $3000 to $5500.

I’m sorry if I’m being preachy or making you feel uncomfortable, but there’s a button on your screen right now that can fight back hell. This level of preventable suffering shouldn’t exist at all, but last year foreign aid cuts disrupted malaria prevention campaigns for tens of millions of additional children. Even a few dollars can go a long way, though some give 10%, and it’s possible that you could use your career to work on these problems directly.

One minute in a factory farm

The tag bolted through her ear calls her G-2251. She squealed when they hole-punched her with it on her second day of life, and she’s worn it ever since.

G-2251 bites hard on metal. Forty million years of evolution have made her an intelligent, social forager, but she’s encased in a cage so tight that she can’t turn around. She has untreated wounds and ulcers. Her sense of smell (over a thousand times stronger than a human’s) is overwhelmed by the feces and dried blood that surround her. She’ll spend her life here.

G-2251 is pregnant. She scratches the empty floor helplessly, driven by an urge to build a nest for her children. She’ll raise them in a cage for ten days before they’re taken away and she’s inseminated again. Her sons will be castrated and have their tails removed without painkillers or anesthetic. Some of her daughters will move to crates of their own.

As you read this, millions of pigs in the US and tens of millions globally are tortured like this in factory farms. Congress is set to pass a bill to make it even worse, condemning millions more pigs under the gruesomely named “Save Our Bacon Act.” There’s still time to call your lawmakers.

Luckily, charitable donations to animal welfare campaigns have been remarkably effective at ending the inhumane treatment of animals. Animal Charity Evaluators estimates that their top performing charity can help 21 sows per dollar. FarmKind has a calculator to see their estimates for how many animals they can help per dollar. Please consider donating.

We don’t have to do this to the creatures that we’re lucky enough to share this earth with.

One minute in humanity’s fragile final years

The Hiroshima chapter of The Making of the Atomic Bomb is the most horrifying thing I’ve ever read. I cried; my friend said it made him sick. Eyewitnesses saw “men whose whole bodies were covered with blood, and women whose skin hung from them like a kimono, plunged shrieking into the river” –I’ll stop there. But you should know that a nuclear weapon is probably pointed at your location right now.

Of course, the scale of death and suffering caused by nuclear weapons directly is nothing compared to the future they’d throwing away. If a nuclear winter caused human extinction or irreversible collapse, trillions of lives would never get to feel love or joy. Even with conservative population estimates, extinction would mean eighty trillion people would never get to be born, outnumbering us ten thousand to one.

We’ve only had this technology for a few generations. We’ve barely tested the stability or wisdom of our institutions, let alone our leaders, to thoughtfully manage these risks. There’s a finite number of times that you can roll the dice on an existentially dangerous technology.

Unfortunately, we may be developing even more targeted technological threats. We’re beginning to see advances in bioengineering that could allow a bad actor to develop a novel pathogen or release mirror bacteria. Most people don’t want to destroy the biosphere (they’re part of it), but pathogens can escape from research labs and sophisticated bioterrorists have existed before. Experts and industry leaders in AI have also warned that if we use AI to develop new minds much smarter than us which pursue their own goals, it could threaten humanity.

Hell could be a billion years of silence. It could be ~80,000,000,000,000 lives wiped away by one generation’s stupidity.

Fighting back hell is a pretty good vocation

This is ostensibly a career advice blog. You want a more meaningful career than “Junior VP for Partnerships and Acquisitions.” How about fighting hell?

As mentioned, donations really can help reduce the suffering caused by preventable diseases and torture on factory farms. Some people find it profoundly meaningful to donate 10% of their income to the causes they think will do the most good in the world.

For ~$5000 you can know that a life was saved because of you. This is an insane fact about the world that a lot of people don’t realize. If you pulled a child from a burning building, you’d rightfully be commended by friends and family as a hero– you’d remember that day for the rest of your life.

Beyond donations, you could also consider using your career to work on important problems directly. I’ve written about this in general terms here on my blog, but there are career support organizations like ProbablyGood, Animal Advocacy Careers, and 80,000 Hours² that try to help people find jobs solving pressing problems.

I think 99% of people will find this all too uncomfortable to think about, and so do nothing. By making it to the end of this post, you’re already an outlier for trying to confront the scale of problems in the world directly. If you’re still here, it might feel meaningful to make even a small donation or to spend a few minutes reading about where you can help solve these problems.

Effective Altruism

I didn’t come up with the idea that preventable diseases, torture on factory farms, and catastrophic risks are the most pressing problems in the world. There’s an intellectual community called Effective Altruism (which I’ve written about in several of my posts) that has heavily informed my thinking.

This community argues that we should try to use reason and evidence to choose problems based on the scale of suffering they cause, how solvable they are, and how neglected they are at current margins. I think the niche of being ambitious about work while thinking strategically about where that work will actually do good is surprisingly unfilled– that’s probably one reason why my career advice posts have been well received.

I think that at its best, Effective Altruism is a question, not an ideology. “How can I do the most good with the resources available to me?” People in this community have found very different answers to this question (as you can see in my one minute examples above), but I admire the community’s shared focus on thinking strategically about comparing different problems and determining which efforts will actually solve them.

If you’re interested in learning more, I recommend:

• Famine, Affluence and Morality by Peter Singer

• The Moral Imperative Towards Cost-Effectiveness by Toby Ord

• Doing Good Better by Will MacAskill (the new ten year anniversary edition was just released!)

• The Precipice by Toby Ord (you can get a free copy here)

• 80,000 Hours

1. This is a pessimistic post about the unsolved problems that I think are moral catastrophes. However, I think it’s also important to remember Max Roser’s phrase: “The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better.”

2. I work at 80,000 Hours, but this blog reflects my own views and is a space to write about these issues in a more informal context outside of work hours. 80,000 Hours is mostly focused on mitigating catastrophic risks from AI now, though it also has a lot of useful career content on the website.