Possible-bias disclosure: am longtermist, focused on x-risk.
I haven’t heard all of the podcast episodes under consideration, but methodologically I like the idea of there being a wide variety of ‘intro’ EA resources that reflect different views of what EA causes and approaches are best, cater to different audiences, and employ different communication/pedagogy methods. If there’s an unresolved disagreement about one of those things, I’d usually rather see people make new intro resources to compete with the old one, rather than trying to make any one resource universally beloved (which can lead to mediocre or uncohesive designed-by-committee end products).
In this case, I’d rather see a new podcast episodes collection that’s more shorttermist and see whether a cohesive, useful playlist can be designed that way.
And if hours went into carefully picking the original ten episodes and deciding how to sequence them, I’d like to see modifications made via a process of re-listening to different podcasts for hours and experimenting with their effects in different orders, seeing what “arcs” they form, etc., rather than via quick EA Forum comments and happy recollections of isolated episodes.
Hi Rob, I also like the idea of “there being a wide variety of ‘intro’ EA resources that reflect different views of what EA causes and approaches are best, cater to different audiences, and employ different communication/pedagogy methods.”
However, it’s not easy for “people make new intro resources to compete with the old one, rather than trying to make any one resource universally beloved (which can lead to mediocre or uncohesive designed-by-committee end products).” Most people do not have the brand or reach of 80,000 Hours.
It’s likely that only very popular figures in the EA community would get substantial reach if they made an Intro to EA collection, and it would still likely not be as large as the reach of 80,000 Hours’s. As such, 80,000 Hours’s choice of what Intro to EA resources to include is quite hard to compete with, and thus should ideally be more representative of what the community thinks.
I do see that many hours probably went into picking the ten episodes. But it seems like 80K didn’t get enough feedback from more people (or a wider variety of people) before releasing this. Hence I’m giving my feedback this way, and judging from the upvotes, quite a few people agree with me.
Of course, I agree that more testing and re-listening could be done. But I would think that a significant % of people who get interested in EA, including quite a few people who are into longtermism, first get interested in global health and development or animal welfare, before getting interested in longtermism. And I think 80K might be losing out on these people with this feed.
And if hours went into carefully picking the original ten episodes and deciding how to sequence them, I’d like to see modifications made via a process of re-listening to different podcasts for hours and experimenting with their effects in different orders, seeing what “arcs” they form, etc., rather than via quick EA Forum comments and happy recollections of isolated episodes.
I agree that that’s how I want the eventual decision to be made. I’m not sure what exactly the intended message of this paragraph was, but at least one reading is that you want to discourage comments like Brian’s or otherwise extensive discussion on the contents of the podcast list. In case anyone reads it that way, I strongly disagree.
This has some flavor of ‘X at EA organisation Y probably thought about this for much longer than me/works on this professionally, so I’ll defer to them’, which I think EAs generally say/think/do too often. It’s very easy to miss things even when you’ve worked on something for a while (esp. if it’s more in the some months than many years range) and outsiders often can actually contribute something important. I think this is already surprisingly often the case with research, and much more so the case with something like an intro resource where people’s reactions are explicitly part of what you’re optimizing for. (Obviously what we care about are new-people’s reactions, but I still think that people-within-EA-reactions are pretty informative for that. And either way, people within EA are clearly stakeholders of what 80,000 Hours does.)
As with everything, there’s some risk of the opposite (‘not expecting enough of professionals?’), but I think EA currently is too far on the deferry end (at least within EA, I could imagine that it’s the opposite with experts outside of EA).
Meta: Rereading your comment, I think it’s more likely that your comment was either meant as a message to 80,000 Hours about how you want them to make their decision eventually or something completely different, but I think it’s good to leave thoughts on possible interpretations of what people write.
Criticizing 80K when you think they’re wrong (especially about object-level factual questions like “is longtermism true?”).
Criticizing EAs when you think they’re wrong even if you think they’ve spent hundreds of hours reaching some conclusion, or producing some artifact.
(I.e.: try to model how much thought and effort people have put into things, and keep in mind that no amount of effort makes you infallible. Even if it turns out the person didn’t make a mistake, raising the question of whether they messed up can help make it clearer why a choice was made.)
Using the comment section on a post like this to solicit interest in developing a competitor-podcast-episode-intro-resource.
Loudly advertising your competitor episode list here, so people can compare the merits of 80K’s playlist to yours.
The thing I don’t endorse is what I talk about in my comments.
Conversely, if the 80K intro podcast list was just tossed together in a few minutes without much concern for narrative flow / sequencing / cohesiveness, then I’m much less averse to redesign-via-quick-EA-Forum-comments. :)
Possible-bias disclosure: am longtermist, focused on x-risk.
I haven’t heard all of the podcast episodes under consideration, but methodologically I like the idea of there being a wide variety of ‘intro’ EA resources that reflect different views of what EA causes and approaches are best, cater to different audiences, and employ different communication/pedagogy methods. If there’s an unresolved disagreement about one of those things, I’d usually rather see people make new intro resources to compete with the old one, rather than trying to make any one resource universally beloved (which can lead to mediocre or uncohesive designed-by-committee end products).
In this case, I’d rather see a new podcast episodes collection that’s more shorttermist and see whether a cohesive, useful playlist can be designed that way.
And if hours went into carefully picking the original ten episodes and deciding how to sequence them, I’d like to see modifications made via a process of re-listening to different podcasts for hours and experimenting with their effects in different orders, seeing what “arcs” they form, etc., rather than via quick EA Forum comments and happy recollections of isolated episodes.
Hi Rob, I also like the idea of “there being a wide variety of ‘intro’ EA resources that reflect different views of what EA causes and approaches are best, cater to different audiences, and employ different communication/pedagogy methods.”
However, it’s not easy for “people make new intro resources to compete with the old one, rather than trying to make any one resource universally beloved (which can lead to mediocre or uncohesive designed-by-committee end products).” Most people do not have the brand or reach of 80,000 Hours.
It’s likely that only very popular figures in the EA community would get substantial reach if they made an Intro to EA collection, and it would still likely not be as large as the reach of 80,000 Hours’s. As such, 80,000 Hours’s choice of what Intro to EA resources to include is quite hard to compete with, and thus should ideally be more representative of what the community thinks.
80K will somewhat solve this problem themselves since they will create their own feed that exposes people to a wider variety of problems and topics, and possibly they could create a near-termist feed aside from that too. But I still think it would be better if what 80K marketed as an “Intro to EA” feed had more global health and dev’t and animal welfare content. I talk more about this here.
I do see that many hours probably went into picking the ten episodes. But it seems like 80K didn’t get enough feedback from more people (or a wider variety of people) before releasing this. Hence I’m giving my feedback this way, and judging from the upvotes, quite a few people agree with me.
Of course, I agree that more testing and re-listening could be done. But I would think that a significant % of people who get interested in EA, including quite a few people who are into longtermism, first get interested in global health and development or animal welfare, before getting interested in longtermism. And I think 80K might be losing out on these people with this feed.
I agree that that’s how I want the eventual decision to be made. I’m not sure what exactly the intended message of this paragraph was, but at least one reading is that you want to discourage comments like Brian’s or otherwise extensive discussion on the contents of the podcast list. In case anyone reads it that way, I strongly disagree.
This has some flavor of ‘X at EA organisation Y probably thought about this for much longer than me/works on this professionally, so I’ll defer to them’, which I think EAs generally say/think/do too often. It’s very easy to miss things even when you’ve worked on something for a while (esp. if it’s more in the some months than many years range) and outsiders often can actually contribute something important. I think this is already surprisingly often the case with research, and much more so the case with something like an intro resource where people’s reactions are explicitly part of what you’re optimizing for. (Obviously what we care about are new-people’s reactions, but I still think that people-within-EA-reactions are pretty informative for that. And either way, people within EA are clearly stakeholders of what 80,000 Hours does.)
As with everything, there’s some risk of the opposite (‘not expecting enough of professionals?’), but I think EA currently is too far on the deferry end (at least within EA, I could imagine that it’s the opposite with experts outside of EA).
Meta: Rereading your comment, I think it’s more likely that your comment was either meant as a message to 80,000 Hours about how you want them to make their decision eventually or something completely different, but I think it’s good to leave thoughts on possible interpretations of what people write.
Yeah, I endorse all of these things:
Criticizing 80K when you think they’re wrong (especially about object-level factual questions like “is longtermism true?”).
Criticizing EAs when you think they’re wrong even if you think they’ve spent hundreds of hours reaching some conclusion, or producing some artifact.
(I.e.: try to model how much thought and effort people have put into things, and keep in mind that no amount of effort makes you infallible. Even if it turns out the person didn’t make a mistake, raising the question of whether they messed up can help make it clearer why a choice was made.)
Using the comment section on a post like this to solicit interest in developing a competitor-podcast-episode-intro-resource.
Loudly advertising your competitor episode list here, so people can compare the merits of 80K’s playlist to yours.
The thing I don’t endorse is what I talk about in my comments.
Conversely, if the 80K intro podcast list was just tossed together in a few minutes without much concern for narrative flow / sequencing / cohesiveness, then I’m much less averse to redesign-via-quick-EA-Forum-comments. :)