I’m Director of Special Projects at 80,000 Hours. My role changes quarter-to-quarter but currently I work in four areas (in decreasing order of the amount of time I spend on them):
On org-wide strategy
On special projects (like the longtermist survey)
On the job board
On parts of 80,000 Hours’ operations
I really enjoyed this post. I personally feel as though I don’t understand our users enough or have detailed enough models of how they are likely to react to our content, and so I appreciate write-ups like this.
Hey George —thanks for the question!
We haven’t done a full annual review of 2023 and the complete data isn’t in yet, so we haven’t done a thorough assessment of the answer to your question yet. The answers to your question probably differ quite a bit programme to programme. But here are a few thoughts that seemed relevant to me:
On web:
Over the past couple of years, the biggest predictor of change in web engagement time appears to be changes in our marketing spending. In 2022 we substantially increased our marketing spend. In 2023 our marketing spend was not dramatically larger than in 2022. This is reflected in the web engagement time metrics. (We are actively investigating the cost-effectiveness of marginal marketing spending, and are not fundraising for marketing as part of this public fundraising round as it is already being covered by Open Philanthropy.)
We have also put more effort into driving off-site engagement time in 2023, e.g. via our AI video, improvements to our newsletter, etc. This is not included in the engagement time metrics in the chart, but we estimate that in 2023 we grew off-site engagement time notably more than we did on-site engagement time.
On podcast:
The drivers of engagement with the podcast are more mysterious to me, and I have trouble making accurate predictions of future engagement time with the podcast. Viewed on a quarterly basis, growth in the podcast appears to be healthy.
On advising:
In 2023 we focused more on growing and systematising headhunting, active outreach and systems, and relatively less on increasing call numbers.
We didn’t make as many calls as we had hoped to, due in part to a manager on the team leaving.
We also put relatively more focus on improving call quality, for example by putting in place feedback systems. This was a focus because we grew the team in 2021 and 2022 and wanted more systems to keep everyone in sync and ensure continued quality.
On job board:
We’ve actually reduced our FTE input into the job board in 2023, but we are still seeing solid quarter-on-quarter growth.
Additional points:
Some of our staff growth came from hires to our internal systems team, which should strengthen our capacity over time but won’t result in direct improvements on these metrics.
We do expect some diminishing returns to staff growth over time. I’ll address this in another comment on this thread.
This is one of the most thought-provoking (for me) posts that I’ve seen on the forum for a while. Thanks to you both for taking the time to put this together!
a new career service org that caters to the other cause priorities of EA?
I’m guessing you are familiar with Probably Good? They are doing almost exactly the thing that you describe here. They are also accepting donations, and if you want to support them you can do so here.
Hi Lauren, this is Niel from 80,000 Hours. We’ve already discussed this over email, but I’m excited that new organisations are being set up in this space. 80,000 Hours has limited resources and is not planning on increasing the amount we invest in improving our advice for animal advocates in the near term. I’m hopeful that Animal Advocacy Careers will be able to better serve the animal advocacy community than we can. Best of luck with the project!
Thanks for engaging with this post! A few thoughts prompted by your comment in case they are helpful:
80k has been interested in longtermism-related causes for many years, including many years in which we’ve seen a lot of growth. We were interested in longtermism for several years before we received our first grant from Open Philanthropy.
We believe there’s still a lot of need for talent in the problems areas that we focus on, so we don’t think there’s a strong reason for us to shift our focus on that front — at least for the time being.
In evaluating our impact, you should consider whether the causes where we focus seem most pressing to you. If you think our focus areas are not that pressing, we think it’s reasonable to be less interested in donating to us.
We’re happy to see others offering alternatives to our career advice — this kind of competition is healthy and we are keen to encourage it in the ecosystem.
All that said, we do have a lot of advice to people who are not that interested in longtermism. For example, our job board features opportunities for people working on global health and animal issues, and our career guide offers advice that is widely applicable, including about how readers could approach thinking through the question of which problems are most pressing for themselves.
Thanks for the question. To be clear, we do think growing the team will significantly increase our impact in expectation.
We do see diminishing returns on several areas of investment, but having diminishing returns is consistent with significantly increasing impact.
Not all of our impact is captured in these metrics. For example, if we were to hire to increase the quality of our written advice even while maintaining the same number of website engagement hours, we’d expect our impact to increase (though this is of course hard to measure).
In our view, investments in 80k’s growth are still well above the cost-effectiveness bar for similar types of organisations and interventions in the problem areas we work on.
Yeah, Rethink Priorities, and yeah he was just wrong, which confused me. To be clear, I don’t think this was his fault, I asked the question in a kind of leading way, and he responded very quickly, and so I model this more as an unfortunate miscommunication.
Confirming that I was wrong about this in my communication with Oli. Also agreeing with Oli here on the context in which those comments were made.
I have made a note in my reflective journal entry on this event to be more careful with my comms in circumstances such as this one.
I agree with this, and try (sometimes awkwardly) not to put the phrase “effective altruist” in materials whose intended audience is the general public, much as I do with the acronyms GWWC and 80k.
My worry though is that people will use “effective altruists” as a phrase to describe people in our movement unless we give them a better one to use. Other than “aspiring effective altruist”, which I have used occasionally when talking with journalists, I don’t find any of the others ‘sticky’ enough.
I would love to hear suggestions from others on a short memorable phrase that we can use to describe ourselves collectively and as individuals, because I worry that otherwise “effective altruists” will end up being used.
What is you high-level on take on social justice in relation to EA?
Naina (the Time journalist) and I were chatting about the aggregate funding data but couldn’t quickly find a source. I connected Naina and Tyler to work on this together. Tyler pulled together the data in part for the Time article.
Thanks for sharing this data. Would it be possible to share the wording of a sample question, e.g. for 1:1s, and how the scoring scale was introduced?
FWIW, I found the Swapcard app to be a net improvement to my EAG experience. I found it easier to schedule meetings than my default approach of Google Sheets + Calendly links + emails. I wonder if part of it is that people seem more responsive on the app than via email?
Not trying to detract from Rohin’s experience. Just pipping up in case it’s helpful. I also ran into a number of the issues that Rohin had, but just sighed and worked around them.
Disclaimer: I work for 80,000 Hours, which is fiscally sponsored by CEA, which runs EA Global.
Great question. I’m afraid I only have a vague answer: I would guess that the chance of climate change directly making Earth uninhabitable in the next few centuries is much smaller than 1 in 10,000. (That’s ignoring the contribution of climate change to other risks.) I don’t know how likely the LHC is to cause a black hole, but I would speculate with little knowledge that the climate habitability risk is greater than that.
As I mentioned in the talk, I think there are other emerging tech risks that are more likely and more pressing than this. But I would also encourage more folks with a background in climate science to focus on these tail risks if they were excited by questions in this space.
I think Abie Rohrig and the broader team have been crushing it with the launch of What We Owe The Future. So so much media coverage and there are even posters popping up in tube stations across London!