Hello, my name’s Bella Forristal. I work at 80,000 Hours, as the director of growth.
I’m interested in AI safety, animal advocacy, and ethics / metaethics.
Previously, I worked in community building with the Global Challenges Project and EA Oxford, and have interned at Charity Entrepreneurship.
Please feel free to email me to connect at bellaforristal@gmail.com, or leave anonymous feedback at https://www.admonymous.co/bellaforristal :)
Concrete operationalization: There’s a long tail of search terms that orgs like CEA could do ad spend on that would be terms generated by highly thoughtful people. I would bet they are underspending on these terms. Also focusing on what these terms translate to in other languages, and doing more deep talent search in other countries and trying to integrate those people into our network. Is anyone buying ads on Baidu for the Chinese equivalent of the word “utilitarianism”? There could be a lot of low-hanging fruit like this that hasn’t been considered.
I would totally love somebody to do this; I know of at least one attempt to do something a bit like this a while back, but it wasn’t easy / I don’t think it went anywhere in the end.
It’s possible my team at 80k would be best placed to try it again, so it’s going back on my longlist, thanks :)
EAs are trying to win the “attention arms race” by not playing. I think this could be a mistake.
The founding ideas and culture of EA was created and “grew up” in the early 2010s, when online content consumption looked very different.
We’ve overall underreacted to shifts in the landscape of where people get ideas and how they engage with them.
As a result, we’ve fallen behind, and should consider making a push to bring our messaging and content delivery mechanisms in line with 2020s consumption.
Also, EA culture is dispositionally calm, rational, and dry.
This is a poor fit for getting any traction in the current attention landscape.
If we don’t adapt, we risk increasing irrelevance.
What’s “SMA” in this context?
This was a really great post — articulated lots of things I’ve thought but never found the time to properly write up :) Thanks for your work and for helping make it more transparent!
So far, the video’s actually on a stronger trajectory than the previous one — our last video got 7k views in its first 11.5 hours, whereas this video has 9.8k views in its first 11.5hrs :)
I do think it’s possible it gets its reach throttled because of the content, though. We tried to do everything we could to make it less likely without materially harming the message we wanted to get across (such as censoring hurtful words, and not telling the story in an exaggerated or sensationalised way).
When I was dealing with a significant + upsetting personal situation last year, I was surprised by how much everyone who I told about it was like “Ah, yeah, something kinda like that happened to me as well. It was really rough.” Some had very applicable advice, others were just commiserating, but I mostly wanted to highlight my agreement with Julia’s post!!
You’re not alone; people will understand; it’s normal & human to have this kind of thing happen.
Thanks for doing this really important work :) I think it’s great that you prioritised hard around getting signups at club fairs & around outreach near the start of the year! Sprints like this are super tough but I think are probably the right call for most organisers <3
I guess I think the main thing your analysis could be missing out is the quality / delivery of the message in 2024 versus 2025. I don’t know how you decided on what to say, but e.g. I remember getting very different responses at my club fair based on whether I asked “What’s the world’s most pressing problem?” versus “Have you heard of effective altruism?” versus “Do you want to have a positive impact with your career?” (the first one was the most likely to stop people & engage them in a conversation).
Also, your outcome measure was whether people turned up to the intro meeting. It’s possible there are confounders like: was the intro meeting at a place that was harder to get to than 2024? Was it at a time slot that competed with something else important? Was the intro event framed differently?
Anyway, thanks again for both doing and publishing your thoughts on this!! :)
I’m sorry this happened to you — I hate stepping on snails. Whenever I walk on paths and it’s raining, I take extra care to look where I’m going.
I also move snails off paths if I have the time, though beware: if you pick an exposed snail up by its shell directly, you can cause them to detach from the shell internally, which can kill them. Instead, you should tap on the shell to make them retreat inside (they fear a predator), then safely move them.
Thanks, this is a good point!! I think my ‘structural reasons’ list still basically applies to a less ambitious vision, though (but they’re all less of a big deal cos you’re doing less).
They’re both great episodes, though — relistened to #138 last week :)
FWIW the piece didn’t strike me as having the hallmarks of LLM-written prose, just as a counter-anecdote :)
I think it’d help if you spelled out more how you think these views contrast. They seem obviously consistent to me (if you have totalist views in population ethics, you think less suffering would be good).
I now get an error for the link at the top of the post; here’s another link I found which currently works: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0065280622000170
if someone doesn’t believe themselves to be a good enough fit, perhaps they’re best-placed to know that about themselves
I disagree — I think some people are just naturally under-confident, in a way that doesn’t correlate particularly well with their actual skill. For example, see these seven stories written up by my lovely colleague Luisa :)
I’d like to know if any of the paid jobs advertised on 80,000 Hours receive very low or zero applications.
Yeah, I don’t have that data sadly since it’s with all the different orgs running those rounds. I’ve run 5 hiring rounds at 80,000 Hours, and the number of applicants was 110, 91, 137, 112, and 107 — so, all around 100 :)
Two very quick thoughts:
I think maybe you and I differ on the number / variety of roles I’d be excited for readers of this Forum to apply to. It might be true that roles at e.g. CEA or 80k get many applicants (I think our record was somewhere around 500 applicants, for a recent advisor round, but I could be wrong), but I bet that there are tons of roles that get very low or zero applications from among readers of this Forum that could nevertheless be very impactful.
As an intuition pump: there are currently 715 jobs on our job board. How many of those are meeting your bar for ‘EA-aligned’? I think there’s roughly 5-10k people who consider themselves EAs. So even if a very high % of them are currently doing job searches, there’s no way that all of these roles have hundreds of EA applicants.
if I ever find myself hiring, I might be tempted to say ‘if you’re not confident in your fit, save yourself the trouble; our inbox will be full by lunch.’
The reason I wouldn’t do this is that: a) It’s very hard to be well-calibrated on whether you’re likely to be a good fit. I think some people (certain personality types; women; people from ethnic minorities) are much more likely to “count themselves out,” even if they might be a great fit. b) For jobs I’ve hired for in the past, I’m actually more excited about candidates with excellent transferable skills (high personal effectiveness, organisation, agency, social skills, prioritisation ability, taste, judgement, etc.) versus role-specific skills. But role-specific skills are much more concrete and easier to write about in a job ad. I think language like this might deter some of my favourite candidates!
These guys absolutely worked their butts off to make this video, and I think the results show it :’) Thanks Chana, Aric, Phoebe, Sam, and everyone for making something I’m so so so excited for the world to see!!
Thanks for this post!
Something it looks like you didn’t consider, and I’d be interested in your views on, are the arguments raised by this post.
Basically, the view I’ve come to in recent years is we are almost totally in the dark about the overall sign of eating wild-caught fish.
I still stick with veganism for some of the reasons you raise in the ‘moral progress’ section, but I think given current tech / welfare science, it’s very hard to feel confident in a conclusion either way.
Interesting!! Curious for any more detail on why you think this, if it’s not too annoying to write out :)
Yep, that’s one of the things I’d be super excited about!!
To that end, earlier this year I helped get started AI in Context, which has been heavily inspired by the awesome creators you mentioned above :)
It sure is time and resource-heavy to get the videos out (we’ve only managed two so far (working on the third!) even though we hired the first programme staff in early Feb), but my hope is that it’s worth it — the reception has been broadly very positive :)