Hello, my name’s Bella Forristal. I work at 80,000 Hours, as the head of marketing.
I’m interested in animal advocacy, moral circle expansion, and normative ethics.
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 :)
I hadn’t heard of cornucopia.org before.
I quickly skimmed three of their highest-scoring egg producers. The main things that worried me:
“Spent hens sold live.” What does that mean? I worry about transport conditions, and about hens being sold to inexperienced, “backyard”, or small-scale operations that won’t ensure a quick death or stunning before slaughter.
No mention of providing veterinary care, or euthanasia for very sick hens
Large flock sizes (hundreds)
[Disclaimer: I’m not an animal welfare or hen care expert!!]
This summary was helpful — I’ve tried a couple times to engage with the original paper but found it hard, whereas this was very readable & I now think I understand the main points at a basic level :)
(& let’s not forget the fetal calves who are still gestating when their mothers go to slaughter. They’re killed slowly, if they ever get purposefully slaughtered at all rather than just left to asphyxiate. Obviously, it’s unclear whether they’re conscious, but I’ve read accounts of them moving, opening eyes, trying to breathe, etc.).
Just adding: the discussion of dairy cows, here and elsewhere, tends to focus on the experience of the adult cattle & the suffering for them of being milked, deprived of their babies, etc.
But it’s not implausible to me that the majority of the disvalue from dairy is in the lives of the calves born to dairy cows. In typical milk-producing operations, adult cows have 1 calf every 18 months or so; 50% of them are male, and so are killed within a few hours to a few months after birth.
(& these lives more likely to be net negative because they have less time to experience positive things to outweigh the terror and pain of death. Undoubtedly, some of their deaths will be quite quick, but others are slow and brutal.)
(Also, veal calves are treated very badly—intense confinement to reduce movement to keep the meat tender, dietary restriction to keep the meat pale, individual confinement in a tiny ‘hutch’, etc.)
The idea behind why eating babies is more likely to be net negative is that there’s a shorter lifespan of positive experiences to balance out the terror and pain of death.
From my experience watching lots of slaughterhouse footage and reading accounts from workers, even the best humane conditions still involve, routinely, a (shorter or longer) period in which the animal goes through the process of dying. This is probably pretty bad. If they only lived for a few weeks before that, it’s harder to imagine it’s a good deal overall.
all aspects effective autism
Can’t tell if joke or typo, but I enjoyed it either way
(Nitpick: The title should be ‘EA ‘communities’ should be ‘professional associations.’ Change my mind’)
Hey Aidan!
I’m not sure — I didn’t do this in this post/didn’t have any plans to, mostly because I’m unsure how much our experiences would generalise to different contexts.
Performance of our ads within the same channel can vary by up to a couple orders of magnitude, so I’m just not sure how helpful it’d be for others.
That said, if you’re considering a specific project, I’d probably be happy for me or one of my team to chat to you about it based on our experience?
As far as we can tell (e.g. by looking at metrics in the Google ads platform directly) this percentage viewed incorporates all ads served on YouTube (which is most, but not all of them).
Average percentage viewed was indeed a lot worse on other ad platforms :)
Hey Sasha!
Yes, we ran a bunch of ads to show the videos to new audiences.
I agree with you that organic growth would lead to more engagement in the form of likes and comments, and that it’d increase the credibility of the video in the eyes of viewers.
However, on balance I don’t think it’d have been better overall to not promote these videos. (Of course, I could be wrong!)
There’s two main reasons:
I think the videos would have been seen by many fewer people (& I think the videos have important ideas in them, so I’m excited for more people to watch them)
I think we still see really good engagement with the videos themselves. The average view duration for the AI video is currently 58.7% of the video, and 25% of viewers watched the whole video. Though we don’t have internal comparisons for content of this length, a quick Google suggests that 50% avg view duration or higher is “good.”
Also, organic growth on YouTube:
Is subject to uncontrollable variation, and very hard to directly predict
Is more likely with more “popular” and “exciting” topics, which we didn’t necessarily want to restrict ourselves to
Is best achieved via very consistent uploads, which we weren’t sure we should commit to at this time
Hope that helps explain our decisionmaking here!
This was cool to read — a number I didn’t know! :D
cruxy essential, difficult consideration
‘Crux’ has a quasi-formal definition when used by EA/rat types. I think your definition might be good enough for navigating discussions where the word is used, but I think crux (as formally defined) is a cool/useful concept :)
Wow, thanks for drawing my attention to this (hadn’t really considered it at all before).
My gut pessimistic instinct is that this’d be intractable to implement — at least in the US — because administering anaesthesia could perhaps be seen as an implicit admission of moral personhood. I also doubt anaesthesia would get much support from pro-life advocates, since they oppose abortions altogether.
I hope that I could be proven wrong about that, though. Maybe a good next step could be for someone to talk to some doctors who administer abortions & get a few reactions?
Two generically positive compliments (e.g. ‘You’re cool!’ (not a real example))
A couple of items where someone I work with felt the form was the best medium by which to give some work-related feedback — they did actually de-anonymise, but it gave them a place to put their feedback which was a) accessible to nobody else and b) unobtrusive & didn’t immediately prompt a conversation.
One person said words to the effect ‘I thought you did a good job at [x public event where they saw me]’
One person commented on my social presence, in a slightly off-beat way that I think would have been hard/unlikely to say in person.
One person commented on someone I follow on Twitter.
This was a really great & informative report; thanks for your work here.
You’re almost certainly already aware, but just in case you’re not (since AFAICT you didn’t mention it directly) there’s a CE report on this topic!
(Edit: mentioning just because my first thought on reading this report was ‘huh, I wonder if CE have considered recommending this idea to cofounders? If not, they probably should!’)
I have gotten feedback on my admonymous a total of 7 times, in the ~year that I’ve had it.
I haven’t really properly solicited that feedback at any point, just had it passively linked on my social media & Slack profile.
I’d say none of those 7 feedback items were really really useful, but they were mostly a bit useful, and often made me feel happy/good to know.
Thanks — this was helpfully accessible to my not-very-mathsy brain!
I have a vague fear that this doesn’t do well on the ‘try not to have the main net effect be AI hypebuilding’ heuristic.
Hey Sam — thanks for this really helpful comment. I think I will do this & do so at any future places I live with wool carpets.