The EA lens
Where can you do the most good?
The effective altruism community ranks problems by three questions: how big is it, how neglected is it, and how tractable is it — because the most good per hour or dollar hides where importance and neglect overlap. Below are all 25 Atlas problems through that lens, in tiers rather than fake-precise scores, mirroring the published views of GiveWell, 80,000 Hours, Open Philanthropy and Animal Charity Evaluators. One lens among several — the Priorities view ranks the same problems by whether the knowledge exists.
Over a century, the EA community weighs trajectory risks highest of all — pandemics that could end the run, and the transition to machine intelligence. That is why pandemic preparedness tops the tiers below, and why the After AGI problems belong in this conversation even though they can't be scored yet.
🌟 Outstanding
Where the EA community sends marginal money and careers first: big, neglected, and movable.
On a century view one engineered or natural pandemic can dominate everything else, and preparedness stays badly underfunded between crises.
GiveWell’s longest-standing top cause: enormous burden, proven $5 nets, still short of money every year.
Tens of billions of sentient animals against a few hundred million dollars of advocacy — the largest suffering-per-dollar-of-attention gap on this list.
One in three children affected, whole countries without testing, and regulation that is cheap and permanent once passed.
The word neglected is in the name: deworming and elimination cost cents per person treated.
Vaccine incentives and oral rehydration remain among the cheapest lives saved anywhere in the world.
💪 High impact
Proven and important — funded, but not fully; strong picks with the right intervention.
The biggest infectious killer receives a fraction of HIV’s funding; finding the missing cases is the tractable gap.
Chlorination at the water source is one of the best-evidenced child-survival buys of the last decade.
Fortification and therapeutic feeding are proven — the missing ingredient is delivery funding, not knowledge.
Direct cash is the benchmark every other intervention has to beat, and it scales almost without limit.
Most of these deaths have been preventable since the 1950s; a fistula repair restores a life for a few hundred dollars.
A $30–$100 surgery with instant, visible results — tractability is the star.
Tobacco taxation is arguably the most cost-effective health policy known; industry opposition, not knowledge, is the barrier.
1.2 million deaths a year attract almost no philanthropy, and the policy playbook (helmets, speed, drink-driving) is proven.
Kills millions yearly, but funding crowds toward carbon and leaves clean-air advocacy lean.
Huge burden, but the least neglected disease here — the marginal dollar often goes further elsewhere.
Upstream of nearly everything and chronically hard to move; investigative journalism is the tractable edge.
🌍 Important, but crowded or harder to move
Not less important — but the next dollar or hour faces more competition or thicker walls.
Enormous stakes and the least neglected problem on the list — EA money targets overlooked corners like advanced clean energy advocacy.
Vast scale and heavy funding; the evidence-based approaches (teaching at the right level) are only now displacing what doesn’t work.
Immense scale; the best marginal buys — girls’ education, ending child marriage — are strong, the broader space is crowded.
The bottleneck is political will, not caring — tractability for outside money is the constraint.
Housing First works, but cost per person helped runs orders of magnitude above global-health buys.
Rising and under-researched — scalable interventions are still being figured out.
Improving fast on its own as connectivity spreads; the marginal dollar adds less than the trend does.
Policy wins are real but slow, and scale is hard to price against direct suffering averted.
Three doors, depending on what you have to give: