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 :)
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!
Strong upvote for the erosion of trust being one of the things I’m really worried about.
Hi—could you share any impressions of the room for more funding here? How much money could be effectively deployed by the team working on this? Do they have fundraising targets?
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?
(Probably has been suggested before but thought I’d add): A small indicator for the original poster of the top-level post in the comments. Like the microphone on Reddit.
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 :)
3,134 people clicked through to the 80k longtermism article from the Kurzgesagt video. At time of writing, the video has 4.2m views, meaning 0.07% of viewers clicked the link. 85 of those people subscribed to the 80k newsletter (2.24% conversion rate, compared to a 4.2% site average).
This is so cool
Highlighting:
Adult Blattodea and Diptera meet 6⁄8 criteria to a high or very high level of confidence, constituting strong evidence for pain (see Table 1, below). This is stronger evidence for pain than Birch et al. (2021) found for decapod crustaceans (5/8), which are currently protected via the UK Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022.
My current credence in the ability of decapod crustaceans to feel pain is really high, so seeing that there’s more evidence for Blattodea and Diptera (on these criteria) is huge, thank you!
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
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 :)
This was a beautiful story, and it made me cry. I especially liked the section about compassion. Thanks for sharing it, and for writing it.
Hey! I work at 80k doing outreach.
Thanks for your work here!
I think the data from 80k overall tells a bit of a different story.
Here’s a copy of our programmes’ lead metrics, and our main funnel metrics (more detailed).
As you can see, some metrics take a dip in Q1 and Q2 2023: site visitors & engagement time, new newsletter subscribers, podcast listening time, and applications to advising.
I’d like to say four things about that data:
It seems pretty plausible to me that lower interest in EA due to the FTX crash is one (important) factor driving those metrics that took a dip. That said:
All of those seem to have “bounced back” in Q3
Our website (and to some extent podcast) metrics are very heavily driven by how much outreach & marketing we do. In Q4 2022, we spent very little on marketing compared to the rest of 2022 & 2023, which I think is a significant contributor to the trend.
It looks like the second half of 2022 was just an unusually high-growth period (for 80k, and I think EA more broadly), and falling from that peak is not particularly surprising due to regression to the mean. Maintaining a level of growth that high might have been possible, but it would be historically very unusual.
To make a more general point, I think a number of the metrics you cite in the post show returning to levels from early 2022, or 2021, which (at least to me) doesn’t seem like ‘worrisome deterioration of EA activity’ but rather something more like ‘a return to a historically normal level of growth for EA.’