I work as head of the podcast and one-on-one teams for 80,000 Hours. Previously I worked at the Global Priorities Institute, ran Giving What We Can and was a Fund Manager at the Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund.
Comments here are my own views only, not my present or past employers’, unless otherwise specified.
“And the reason EA will be great again is that the best EAs, of which there are many, all want to be EAs. It’s in their bones. If they weren’t staring down the barrel of an intelligence explosion, or if the prospect of transformative AI somehow disappears with relative certainty, they would open their Animal Welfare for Dummies books the next day. Or they’d roll up their sleeves to defend America. Some of them are doing these things now. The point is that the EAs are ready to do what’s right with no fuss and no ego. Believe it or not, that’s what AI safety work entailed just seven or eight years ago.”
<3
“The reader will note that I am not the best of us.”
The reader notes that one day you’ll have to stop pretending, and grudgingly admit that you are.
”the way we’ll know EA is really winning is when the Oxford crew is wholly eclipsed by a new generation of even more ambitious and clear-thinking altruists”
Amen
You have such a way with words.
Really glad to be able to help, at least a little. As you say, we’re in this together.
Job hunting is an especially difficult time to deal with this. Good luck in your search!
Thanks for this!
We’re less focused on uni-students right now, just because there’s a longer lead time from them hearing the content and being able to work on the areas we’re highlighting. Having said that, there are obviously also significant advantages of targetting the group—they’re particularly flexible in what they work on, and are often keen to learn about different world views.
We do actually do some putting shorts on instagram! We haven’t engaged as much with Tiktok yet, in large part because our team isn’t that familiar with the platform. We’re interested in experimenting with it in future though!
Thanks for letting me know your experience with the podcast. I’m sorry you’re finding it less valuable right now. To be clear, things like the Ajeya and Hugh White episodes are centrally the kinds of episodes we’ll still be putting out a lot of (in fact, we’ve recorded another episode with Ajeya which we’re currently getting towards releasing). We’ll likely still do occasional episodes like the Levy and Glennerster ones, but fewer.
I agree that AI risk is an incredibly large, complex area and that it’s going to take a lot more work for us to build out a full understanding of it!
Thanks for letting us know about your experience with it!
Yes, length is one of the things we’re interested in experimenting with. We’ve also started putting a bit more work into producing written ‘interview in a nutshell’ sections on the transcripts, so that people can get the key insights swiftly (or use it to decide whether to listen to the full episode).
Are there particular formats you have in mind?
If you haven’t come across it yet, you might be interested in the work 80k’s video team does.
Thanks for all the suggestions!
Thanks for the nudge. I agree it seems crucial to try to find things that are actually different to cover—both for the sake of being interesting and more importantly to actually have an impact. I’d love to hear any particular suggestions you have about things that seem underexplored and important to you!
With respect to numbers of episodes:
- We’re considering potential new hosts publishing on new feeds. They might try a different format, or they might try the same format but a different target audience—
Over the last ~year, most of our growth has been on youtube, rather than audio feeds. As far as we can tell, on youtube it’s very uncommon to find new episodes directly via a subscription, and relatedly there seems to much less of an effect of reduction in engagement if you have episodes more than once per week.
This is all pretty tentative. For example, we might find that the audiences we can reach on youtube turn out to be much worse than via other means. That might push us towards trying to increase the quality rather than quantity of episodes. But it would also help enable us to improve quality if we had more capacity—Rob has historically felt the need to rush to get episodes out, and could usefully spend decidedly more time researching / editing episodes.
Useful to know, thanks
Thanks for the feedback!
Thanks for letting us know! That’s useful data.
I don’t ever learn how good the people I rejected were!
Definitely agree this is a challenge and limits learning from hiring rounds. I don’t quite agree with the strength of this statement though. A great thing about the agency and tenacity of people in our community is that people often apply to a bunch of roles at similar organisations, and so you end up seeing what people you turned down work on from afar, and how well that goes. It seems reasonably informative to me to track which people end up doing great work at other orgs, and thinking through how much of that seems down to the role being different vs your hiring process having been a false negative, and thinking through what the process would have looked like to have avoided the false negative.
This post really resonates with me, and its vision for a flourishing future for EA feels very compelling. I’m excited that you’re thinking and writing about it!
Having said that, I don’t know how to square that with the increased specialisation which seems like a sensible outcome of doing things at greater scale. Personally, I find engaging on the forum / going to EAGs etc pretty time/energy-intensive (though I think a large part of that is because I’m fairly introverted, and others will likely feel differently). I also think there’s a lot of value in picking a hard goal and running full pelt at it. So from my point of view, I’d prefer solutions that looked more like ‘create deliberate roles with this as the aim’ and less like ‘harangue people to take time away from their other roles’.
I do not have the spirit to throw myself into a direct work project[3]
Fwiw, GTP seems like reasonably little evidence about whether you could find a role you enjoyed that you also thought had substantial direct impact. There are so many different roles with direct impact, and setting up your own charity start up is very different from working at existing charity in a more defined role, or working in government, or for a large tech company.
Obviously, changing direction in your career is a substantial undertaking, and it’s reasonable to not want to do it. But the reason shouldn’t be that you hated doing GTP—there are a lot of other options out there that you might find yourself intrinsically motivated by. Seems at least worth a chat with 80k about?
[1]
Not at all biased by how very much I enjoyed working with you at GWWC/CEA :-p
Better luck next time