6.1 Your own comparison

You've now seen four problems. Here is a reminder of each, using the three questions from Unit 1.

• Global health and poverty. Millions of deaths a year, mostly preventable. Strong evidence on what works. Substantial funding already, though recent aid cuts have opened gaps.
• Animals in farming. Tens of billions of animals a year. Very little funding relative to that scale. How big the problem is depends heavily on how much you think animals' experiences count.
• Pandemics and other catastrophic risks. Unlikely in any given year, but potentially catastrophic. Some defences are cheap, and very few people work on them.
• Advanced AI. Fast progress, large disagreement about the risks. A small but growing field.

Now rate each problem from your own point of view. There are no right answers. Use whatever you believe, including your uncertainty.

What drives your ranking? Look at where your scores differ most from someone who ranked things differently. Usually the difference comes down to one of two things.

• Values. How much animals' experiences count. How much future generations count. Whether you prefer a certain small benefit to a small chance of a very large one.
• Beliefs about the facts. How fast AI will progress. Whether extra money for pandemic defences actually reduces risk. How long animal welfare reforms will last.

Both kinds of disagreement can be reasoned about, though in different ways. Week 4 of the EA Fellowship does this properly: participants rank causes at the start of the week, work through the frameworks, and compare their rankings again at the end.