Hello, my name’s Bella Forristal. I work at 80,000 Hours, as a marketer. 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 :)
Bella
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This is so cool to see! Thanks for putting it together and for posting :)
Just an FYI, Week 11 refers to the 80,000 Hours career guide, but actually links to our key ideas series, which we’ve now stopped updating.
Thanks for sharing this — it feels like you really didn’t “have to” in some sense, but I appreciated some of the insight into how the process is going and reading your learnings!
Thanks for your thoughtful comment, & thanks for providing some more explicit/concrete examples of the kind of thing you’d like to see more of — that was really helpful!
(And I hadn’t read that article you linked before, or thought about the “missing middle” as a frame — thanks!)
I think I’m now more confident that I disagree with the argument you’ve laid out here.
The main reason is that I disagree with your claim that we’d be able to do more good by reviewing our methodology & de-emphasising neglectedness.
I basically just think neglectedness is really important for what I’m trying to do when I’m trying to do good.
I think there are really compelling arguments for working on e.g. immigration policy and criminal justice reform, that are going to appeal to a much broader audience than the one on this Forum. You don’t need to be, like, a ‘moral weirdo’ to think that it’s unnacceptable that we keep humans in near-indefinite imprisonment for the crime of being born in the wrong country.
And I think the core strength of EA is that we’ve got a bunch of ‘moral weirdos,’ who are interested in looking at ways of doing good for which there aren’t clear, emotionally compelling arguments, or that don’t seem good at first. E.g. when improving education, everyone thinks it seems good to provide teachers and textbooks, but fewer people think of removing intestinal parasites. [1]
I recognise this isn’t anywhere close to a watertight defence of the current main focus of longtermists versus the other kinds of interventions you highlighted, but I think it’s the core thing driving why I don’t currently buy the argument you laid out here :)
[1] putting aside for one second the arguments about whether this actually works, lol! Was just the first example that came to mind of something deeply “unsexy” that EAs talk about.
Hi! I enjoyed reading this; thanks for writing and posting it!
I’d make a tentative guess that many (most?) longtermists would totally agree with a ton of the substantive claims in this post — or at least I do — such as:
Substantive equality, as defined in this post, is the right way to think about equality
(Though I’ll register that I personally find discussions about equality to often be pretty confusing/unhelpfully framed, when we don’t agree on a) what quantities should be equal, b) how they’re currently distributed, and c) and what it would look like for them to be equal)
Systemic marginalisation matters, and should be taken very seriously
The developing world is hugely important when thinking about building a better future (& will become more so over time)
I think one way we could make discussions about the kinds of issues you’ve brought up here go better would be to make them more concrete and explicit about the kinds of things we’d like to see more of versus less of.
Here’s my attempt to summarise the ‘my claim’ section (do you think this seems right?)
‘Systemic issues [such as] weak national institutions and widening inequalities to systemic biases with regards to their race and gender (as well as ableism, cis-heteronormativity, etc.) and...anti-immigration stances...are quite likely to persist into the future if they are not strategically and intentionally addressed.’
[Just paraphrasing for brevity] Longtermists should think more carefully about what this means for their work.
‘It is not good enough to work only towards ensuring that the longterm future exists...we ought to strive to ensure that those who will live then live sufficiently well.’
‘The currently pursued longtermist interventions by the community are too narrow, almost entirely focused on preventing or mitigating x-risks.’
I feel like I’d be much better able to figure out whether I agreed with your argument here, if I had a few examples of the kinds of things you’d be interested in seeing longtermists do more of to ‘broaden’ the interventions we pursue.
I think some of them I’d really support, and others I’d be less excited about — at least in part because my impression is that lots of methods we know of for fighting inequality are pretty popular with mainstream movements for doing good (so they’re less neglected than weirder stuff EAs tend to do).
Thanks again for your post! :D
Might it be worth applying to Oxbridge for another subject anyway? (Not sure how different the options are).
Are we worried beak trimming ban is net neg? Because of increased pecking/deaths from cannibalism & infected wounds.
Wow.
Banning CO2 slaughter and mutilations seems… way ahead of anything I would have guessed might happen soon. I would’ve guessed that at least a ban on dehorning is way outside the range of plausible things that would be done for animal welfare.
Nice, that helped clear this up for me!
I think there is a typo here:
(1-0.8)% of vaccinated and as yet uninfected people would be.
Should say:
(1-0.8)*x% of vaccinated and as yet uninfected people would be.
Right?
(else I’m still confused, heh.)
I’m confused — would someone mind explaining to me how the quoted numbers show 71-80% efficacy?
(Sorry I’m probably being mathematically illiterate here, but if it’s a problem I have, maybe others will too!)
New 80,000 Hours feature: Listen to audio versions of our podcast transcripts
Hey Yonatan —I think the more relevant part of my post is the following, which hopefully answers your question? Let me know if it doesn’t.
There are some details I can’t give because (as I said in the post) I don’t have permission from the relevant people to talk about it publicly.
We can’t be sure how many additional people will change to a high-impact career as a result, in large part because we have found that “career plan changes” of this kind take, on average, about 2 years from first hearing about 80k.
Still, our current best guess is that these efforts will have been pretty effective at helping people switch careers to more impactful areas.
Partly this guess is based on the growth in new audience members that we’ve seen (plus 80k’s solid track record of getting new people to eventually switch to more impactful careers), and partly it’s based on a few “proof of concept” switches we’ve seen already.
For example, some small-scale social media ads which 80k ran in 2017 as an experiment led to at least one person switching to a career we’re especially excited about (and 70 people who reported changing their career plans due to 80k).[3] We’ve also already encountered[4] several people who found us via our marketing who seem likely to switch to a more impactful career.[5]
This makes sense to me, but I don’t think I provided anything in this post which you could easily use to compare to your project here.
How would you go about guessing whether the cost of what you were doing was higher or lower than that of 80k’s outreach?
I’m not sure I understand what you mean by ‘using this as a baseline to compare other EA outreach efforts’? Is there some specific outcome metric you’d want to use as a baseline?
In general, I think what works best in outreach can be pretty context-specific, and I wouldn’t recommend everything I’ve done to people with different goals & constraints.
Being more reluctant to do your own outreach after learning about this makes sense if you think there’s some optimal growth rate in EA which we are at or nearly at. If you learn that I’m doing lots of outreach, then it decreases the value of additional outreach (unless we are not yet at or near the optimal rate of growth).
Hey — thanks, yeah, I did try that at the time but IIRC it didn’t fix the issue. However the issue fixed itself in the following couple days, so, not sure what happened but I’m not getting the error!
Tysm for looking into it!
Hey Cillian — thanks so much for a really thoughtful/detailed question!
I’ll take this one since I was the only staff member on marketing last year :)
The short answer is:
Marketing ramped up considerably over the second half of 2022. Web engagement time grew a lot more in the second half of 2022 as well — if we just compare Q3 &Q4 2020 and 2022, engagement time grew 50% (rather than 10%).
But that still doesn’t look like web engagement time rising precisely in step with marketing investment, as you point out!
We don’t know all the reasons why, but the reasons you gave might be part of it.
There are five other reasons I want to mention:
marketing didn’t focus on engagement time
people we find via marketing seem less inclined to use our advice than other users
there’s a headwind on engagement time
site engagement time doesn’t count the book giveaway
2020 was a bumper year!
The long answer...
It’s true that there’s only a 10% rise in engagement time between 2020 and 2022.
The main thing going on here is that marketing investment didn’t rise until the second half of 2022 — I spent a while trying out smaller scale pilots. So the spend is very unevenly distributed.
If we compare just Q3 and Q4 (i.e. Q3 and Q4 2020 with Q3 and Q4 2021 and Q3 and Q4 2022), there was a 6% fall from 2020 to 2021, and then a 59% rise from 2021 to 2022, resulting in an overall 50% rise from 2020 to 2022!
But our marketing budget still rose by a lot more than 50% — so what’s going on there?
I’ll start out with the reasons you gave then add my own:
Maybe the price of acquiring new users / engagement hours increases geometrically or something
Yeah I don’t exactly know how the price of finding new users increases, but we should probably expect some diminishing returns from increased investment.
It looks like marketing drove a large increase in newsletter subs. Maybe they’re engaging with the content directly in their inbox instead?
I think this might be a smallish part of it — I’ve noticed an effect where if the email we send on the newsletter is itself full of content, people click through to the website less than if the newsletter doesn’t itself provide much value.
I don’t think this can account for tons of what we’re seeing, though, just cos I don’t think the emails work as a 1:1 replacement for 80k’s site (I can’t really imagine there being much of a ‘substitution effect’ here).
Maybe you expect a lag in time between initial reach & time spent on the 80k website for some reason (e.g. because people become more receptive to the ideas on 80k’s website over time, especially if they’re receiving regular emails with some info about it)
I think this might be a pretty big part of what’s going on.
There does seem to be a significant ‘lag time’ from people first hearing about us and people making an important change to their careers (about 2 years on average) and I think there’s often a lag before people get really engaged with site content, too.
Also, bear in mind that because of what I said about the ‘unevenness’ of growth from marketing, people who found out about us this year are mostly still really new.
Maybe marketing mainly promoted podcast / 1-1 service / job board (or people reached by marketing efforts mainly converted to users of these services)
Yep, I did put some resources directly towards promoting the podcast, and a much smaller amount of resources towards directly promoting 1-1 (about 7% of the budget as a whole, and probably more like 10% of my time). So this could be (a small) part of what’s going on.
There are five other main things I think explain this effect:
Marketing didn’t focus on engagement time
My focus was really on reaching new users, rather than trying to get people to spend time with our content.
For example, last year I spent almost zero effort and resources on trying to get people who already knew about 80,000 Hours to engage with stuff on the site.
People who find out about us via marketing are, on average, less interested in our advice
I talked about this a little bit in my post that you linked.
I think this is probably a pretty big factor here!
There’s a headwind on engagement time, i.e. engagement time by default seems to go down over time
We think this is because, e.g.:
Articles that were last updated longer ago are seen as less relevant by search engines and deprioritised
Things we wrote become out of date and less useful to people
There might be some broader internet trend where people are spending more time on social media and less time on individual websites
Our current metric doesn’t incorporate engagement time from reading the books in the book giveaway
However, we are looking into including it in future reporting!
My (still ongoing) analysis of survey results about the book giveaway suggest that this engagement time is at least tens of thousands of hours, possibly >100k hrs.
(For context, our average monthly engagement time since Jan 2021 is about 8,000 hours (ha!)).
2020 was weird
We saw a very large spike in traffic in early 2020 — partly because we had content on COVID when many places didn’t, and partly because of the broader trend where tons of sites got a lot more traffic as people were staying home and spending more time online.
So 2020 might be an “inappropriate benchmark” or something like that.
Okay I hope that gives you an insight into what I think is going on here! Sorry for length :)
Slaughter, probably.
(plus: no access to the outdoors; much larger-than-optimal social groups; separation from young/inability to raise young; handling & transportation to slaughter; problems arising from selective breeding for weight gain e.g. perpetual hunger, higher incidence of injuries like breast bone fractures)
Being a shallow report, should be used to decide whether or not more research and work into a particular problem area should be prioritised.
I think there’s a word or two missing here?
It’d probably also be helpful to spell out IEDs as ‘improvised explosive devices’ in the summary :)Thanks for publishing this!
I take a multivitamin which includes B12 and a bunch of other water-soluable vitamins. I also separately supplement Omega 3 & Vit D. I take Choline when I remember to.
Hey — this is probably totally the wrong place for this question, but, shrug.
I love Guesstimate. But right now I’m getting an ‘ERROR SAVING’ on all my models. It looks like this is a documented issue here but I couldn’t find a fix. Any ideas?
My favourite feature isn’t on here at all, which is making yourself automatically unavailable during sessions/talks you’ve said you’re going to!