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.
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
Yes, connecting with other parents is really useful! My go to place for this right now is the Parents in EA facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/1669940986561413). What people do around EA Global is one of the things that gets discussed in there.
Really glad to hear this resonated with you. Good luck figuring out how and when to go home x
Thanks for such a thorough update!
One type of specialist we’re pretty bottlenecked on is people who work in cybersecurity, and have a good sense of how to succed in that industry.
On advisees, we’re particularly keen to speak to people later on in their careers, who can credibly join government agencies who care a lot about years of experience.
I would say that it’s reasonably even on these right now, and actually what we’re most bottlenecked on is hiring to our team. If you know someone who you’d appreciate getting career advice from, please encourage them to apply!
Thanks for the question! We find specialists in lots of different ways, including:
- People working at high impact orgs who we actively reach out to because we are fans of their work.
- People who applied for coaching themselves in the past—
Meeting them at conferences (we try to attend both generalist conferences like EA Global and more specialist ones like the AI Security Forum).
- People referred to us by others already in our network.
Good to know, thank you!
Thanks for writing this! It seems really useful for people getting started on their career to hear concrete experiences others have had.
I’m so impressed with your persistence in finding roles that help others as much as possible. In your place finding it difficult to get the roles I wanted, I can imagine selecting for roles I’d enjoy and would pay well, rather than continuing to look for roles that helped others like in animal advocacy. I also imagine feeling kind of bitter about my bad luck. I’m so grateful for how resiliently you’ve stuck with the project of longrun having impact, and how kindhearted rather than frustrated you’ve continued to be.
A couple of other thoughts about the ideas in the post:
One way people might think of getting short term grants is as being analogous to getting post docs in academia—doing one post doc is expected, two is fine, but after that if you’re not finding longterm positions you probably want to be considering non-academic jobs in addition to academic ones.
How good/bad it is to have a stable job vs being on a grant varies a lot by person, and by life stage. Personally, I really value stability (eg living in the same place) and prefer having a manager, but have reasonable financial stability. Some of my friends really appreciate variety and independence. Others need more financial stability than I do. It could easily be the right decision for a person never to be willing to work on a grant rather than taking a stable job, even though the grant would be a much better option for someone else.
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!