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 :)
Also, zoomed out that far it looks to be ongoing / on the rise. But if you look at the last 30 days it’s gone down a lot. https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/?range=latest-30&project=en.wikipedia.org&pages=Effective_altruism
Just on whether this is the most serious PR crisis in EA history: it might be, but the most accurate measure of salience / interest I have is Wikipedia pageviews, where it seems smaller than the OpenAI board drama, and much smaller than FTX.
https://x.com/bellaforristal/status/2102305645328208316
Thanks for writing & sharing this, George <3
...I’m curious if there’s any update to how you’re feeling / where your gut is at since this post was written. I’ve personally felt a lot less ‘alone’ and a lot of gratitude to some of the public responses we’ve seen in the past few days.
It might not be ‘enough’ but stuff like this exchange was pretty significant-feeling to me :)
Thanks for the heads up and for your work on this!
1.2 billion viewing minutes sounds like a lot — I’m curious if you have any estimates on the expected number of unique viewers? Or, any relevant comparisons / thoughts about similar shows and how they were received (e.g. shows which make reference to niche movements or communities and whether salience increased as a result).
No worries if you haven’t already considered these questions, but I’m curious if you have! :D
Just finished watching!! Great concept for a video, and really well executed :) Thanks for all your hard work and can’t wait to see more from this channel!
(Not sure if you’ve got time to answer questions here, but if you do: would love to know more about your process for the animated segments? Who did those, and how long did it take?)
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
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.
Yeah just Wikipedia pageviews :)
I agree it’s an imperfect proxy, and might be systematically wrong because of dynamics you describe. But it’s the most accurate proxy I know of!