I run the Studio team 80,000 Hours, which produces the 80,000 Hours podcast. 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.
That does seem like a more plausible lock in event than many. But I’d have tentatively expected that we’d send off space probes reasonably early, such that as technology gets better we can overtake the original ones. I guess a significant speed up of technological development would make a difference here though. Interested in how this affects your thinking?
Interesting, I don’t think I noticed that trend between 10 years ago and 2 years ago.
Cool!
I agree that in deciding how much to prioritise averting extinction vs improving worlds in which we persist, it’s important to think about the difference in value between (non-existence)(default survival)(actual utopia). But that argument has been around a long while. I think Ben Garfinkel was advancing the idea that (actual utopia) - (default survival) might be much larger than (default survival) - (non-existence) in the late 2010s. I’m interested in what’s changed that’s affected discourse. It’s possible the answer is ‘more people have read arguments of this form’. But in that case people who had already read those arguments should update less than if the change is eg us getting more info about how difficult alignment is.
Interesting that you don’t come across many people these days who still identify as longtermist, that’s pretty different from my experience. I think it feels more intuitive to me to identify as ‘longtermist’ than ‘effective altruist’. The former is a claim about my values (people in the future matter morally) whereas the latter is behavioural and feels presumptuous (how altruistic really am I? Am I effective at it even when I try?). But I guess I’m in the minority on that!
I was intending to pick out a group of people who have for years identified as EAs and longtermists but have changed what they’ve worked on. I was thinking it was clear in talking about EAs deprioritising a thing that I meant the ones who prioritised that highly initially, but I see how that’s confusing—I’ll edit to clarify.
Good point, thanks!
Thanks for the links!
Thank you—in a world that does often feel scary and full of suffering, it’s inspiring to remember what we can and have so far achieved.
Better luck next time
“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.
Fwiw, I think wild animal suffering and s-risks were reasonably widely discussed amongst longtermists earlier than 2015.
It would seem reasonably surprising to me if when we collonised the galaxies we spread wild animal suffering as it is on earth, so that doesn’t feel like a strong reason to try to avoid human extinction to me (even aside from the reason you point to).
S-risks do seem like a stronger reason to care less about extinction. On the other hand, the strongest arguments for the plausibility of s-risks seem to do with AI alignment to me, rather than with humans holding power. So increased emphasis on s-risks doesn’t seem to me like it would explain the trend I’m pointing to.