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 :)
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?
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.
I’m currently wearing a fully Uniqlo outfit and I’m feeling very attacked right now