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 :)
Today’s the day!!! 80,000 Hours (the book) launches in the US.
This is possibly one of the biggest opportunities for EA-per-se growth that we’ve seen in a while.
I’m feeling excited, but also very nervous! We’ve done our best but I don’t know how it’ll be received. I hope people like it 🙂
Shares of our launch post (especially quote tweets) and reviews on Amazon or Goodreads are really really appreciated. Fingers crossed…!!!
I think this is a great point directionally, but hard to make the maths work for the numbers you’ve suggested.
Like, for there to be 100x more incidents of interpersonal misconduct than are reported to CH… well, there’d need to be 1000s of incidents! And there are only a few thousand EAs. It could be that the rate is in the tens of percent, but I’d find that surprising.
Ditto your adjustment for women: to get a 3x adjustment given the amount of women in other spaces:
If the other spaces are 50% women, i.e. representative of gen. pop., then EA would need to be ~17% women for a 3x adjustment to make sense
But EA survey data suggests EA is 26% women
I guess you might think “professional EA orgs” or something are more male-dominated than EA survey respondents. That seems possible, depending on what you wanna count. One thing is 80k is currently majority-women and I think however you carve it up we’re a big chunk of the space :)
(Edit: that made me curious so I went and counted; assuming I’m right about everyone’s gender then we’re 60% women! I think it was a bit skewed the other way when I joined 4y ago.)
Interesting post, thanks!! Excited to see discussion of it.
One thing I wonder if it’s relevant are the sort of “mixed” pictures? Like, maybe you think totalitarian control of AI would be really bad because it increases the risk of human extinction from misalignment, by increasing the success rate of any attempted AI takeover / making it happen sooner in time (bc a totalitarian might e.g. give more control over to an AI they were using to stay in power).
Or, more vaguely, I sorta feel like if world governments / anyone with ambitions to power think that advanced AI will help them, that’s bad news for alignment efforts.
Anyway, that could be something going on for some people I think?
Clothing (there’s a world beyond EAG merch and Uniqlo)
I’m currently wearing a fully Uniqlo outfit and I’m feeling very attacked right now
Thanks Marta!! I’m also really excited for the cartoons hehe. Involved lots of Gdoc comments about which jokes are funnier — my job is so cool!
🚨 New EA book cover to critique 🚨
http://80000hours.org/book/
Tell me all the ways we messed up, and how/why the original was better actually (see for example this excellent alternative design by Catherine: https://x.com/wilhelmscreamin/status/2029302612210626958 )
Thanks for writing this James, interesting / potentially helpful idea! :D
So incredibly excited for everyone to see this video. From my slightly-outsider-insider perspective (I’m managing Chana) I really think the team gave it absolutely everything they had — just an insane amount of effort, thoughtfulness, collaboration, creativity, and love went into this. I hope you all love it as much as I do!!
Here’s the message that displays on their page if you have it turned on: ‘The Dietary Profile service is currently unavailable while we build a new and improved service which will launch later this year. In the meantime please check individual product pages for further allergen information’
I’m not sure if it always said ‘which will launch later this year’ but I’m confident it’s been broken since 2022 or so.
Sainsbury’s used to offer this (called ‘dietary profiles’, maybe used to be offered in 2021 or so?) but it got broken at some point and they’ve never fixed it. They’re already tagging new products as vegan or not, since they have a ‘new + vegan’ section, implying they wouldn’t need to do any extra categorisation work — so I’m not sure why their dietary profiles are broken.
Hey! This post feels very relevant for me (I’m Director of Growth at 80k, and manage a digital marketing team, haha!). We’ve spent $mns and years of staff time on growth + digital :)
Three major reasons we don’t invest more:
1. Low capacity to plan + execute campaigns (I failed to hire despite hundreds of hrs of effort in 2024);
2. Slow feedback loops on end-of-funnel outcomes we care most about (people changing their careers can take years)
3. Evidence suggesting that digital marketing is perhaps less likely than other growth channels to find the folks who are most likely to really love our advice (i.e., in for-profit terms, lower CLTV)
Anyway, it seems possible we should connect / chat more about this at some point! :D
I think investing in [shortform] mediums would just be good money chasing after bad.
Interesting!! Curious for any more detail on why you think this, if it’s not too annoying to write out :)
if you have in mind content like the highest-quality video essays on YouTube
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 :)
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?
So glad to hear you liked the book and thanks so so much for your efforts to get it in the hands of people who might love it! :D