Lesson 8: Wrapping up
This week you learned the primary tool for comparing cause areas, used moral uncertainty to understand why reasonable people disagree, and formed your own provisional view.
The ITN framework gives you structure. It forces you to think about scale, solvability, and how crowded the field is. Moral uncertainty explains why the inputs are so contested: different ethical frameworks genuinely pull in different directions on questions like how much animal suffering matters and how much we owe future generations. Without these tools, cause prioritisation is just vibes. With them, you can at least see why you and someone else disagree—and whether the disagreement is empirical or moral.
The goal isn’t to resolve these questions once and for all. It’s to know what you currently believe, why you believe it, and what would change your mind.
Next week takes everything you’ve done here and turns it on you. Cause prioritisation tells you which problems matter most. It doesn’t tell you where to deploy the next decade of your career, where to direct your giving, or which bets you can credibly make—those answers depend on you: your skills, your situation, your career stage, and your comparative advantage. Week 5 introduces personal fit, comparative advantage, and the explore/build/deploy framework, and ends with you holding a concrete, time-bound plan you can actually act on.
Summary
This week you learned to:
Apply the ITN framework to compare cause areas on importance, tractability, and neglectedness
Distinguish empirical uncertainty from moral uncertainty, and use expected choiceworthiness to reason through moral disagreements
Trace how different empirical beliefs and moral commitments lead to different priorities
Evaluate the main cause areas commonly prioritised in the EA community
Recognise the limits of any prioritisation framework—what it can’t capture and where judgement is essential
Form a provisional, defensible view on cause prioritisation and identify what would change your mind