Habiba's Quick takes

Habiba Banu

199

I'm going to be leaving 80,000 Hours and joining Charity Entrepreneurship's incubator programme this summer!

The summer 2023 incubator round is focused on biosecurity and scalable global health charities and I'm really excited to see what's the best fit for me and hopefully launch a new charity. The ideas that the research team have written up look really exciting and I'm trepidatious about the challenge of being a founder but psyched for getting started. Watch this space! <3

I've been at 80,000 Hours for the last 3 years. I'm very proud of the 800+ advising calls I did and feel very privileged I got to talk to so many people and try and help them along their careers!

I've learned so much during my time at 80k. And the team at 80k has been wonderful to work with - so thoughtful, committed to working out what is the right thing to do, kind, and fun - I'll for sure be sad to leave them.

There are a few main reasons why I'm leaving now:

New career challenge - I want to try out something that stretches my skills beyond what I've done before. I think I could be a good fit for being a founder and running something big and complicated and valuable that wouldn't exist without me - I'd like to give it a try sooner rather than later.
Post-EA crises stepping away from EA community building a bit - Events over the last few months in EA made me re-evaluate how valuable I think the EA community and EA community building are as well as re-evaluate my personal relationship with EA. I haven't gone to the last few EAGs and switched my work away from doing advising calls for the last few months, while processing all this. I have been somewhat sad that there hasn't been more discussion and changes by now though I have been glad to see more EA leaders share things more recently (e.g. this from Ben Todd). I do still believe there are some really important ideas that EA prioritises but I'm more circumspect about some of the things I think we're not doing as well as we could (e.g. Toby's thoughts here and Holden's caution about maximising here and things I've posted about myself). Overall, I'm personally keen to take a step away from EA meta at least for a bit and try and do something that helps people where the route to impact is more direct and doesn't go via the EA community.
Less convinced of working on AI risk - Over the last year I've also become relatively less convinced about x-risk from AI - especially the case that agentic deceptive strategically-aware power-seeking AI is likely. I'm fairly convinced by the counterarguments e.g. this and this and I'm worried at the meta level about the quality of reasoning and discourse e.g. this. Though I'm still worried about a whole host of non-x-risk dangers from advanced AI. That makes me much more excited to work on something bio or global health related.

So overall it seems like it was good to move on to something new and it took me a little while to find something I was as excited about as CE's incubator programme!

I'll be at EAG London this weekend! And will hopefully you'll hear more from me later this year about the new thing I'm working on - so keep an eye out as no doubt I'll be fundraising and/or hiring at some point! :)

Habiba Banu

199

Career choice

Community

I'm going to be leaving 80,000 Hours and joining Charity Entrepreneurship's incubator programme this summer!

I've been at 80,000 Hours for the last 3 years. I'm very proud of the 800+ advising calls I did and feel very privileged I got to talk to so many people and try and help them along their careers!

There are a few main reasons why I'm leaving now:

New career challenge - I want to try out something that stretches my skills beyond what I've done before. I think I could be a good fit for being a founder and running something big and complicated and valuable that wouldn't exist without me - I'd like to give it a try sooner rather than later.
Post-EA crises stepping away from EA community building a bit - Events over the last few months in EA made me re-evaluate how valuable I think the EA community and EA community building are as well as re-evaluate my personal relationship with EA. I haven't gone to the last few EAGs and switched my work away from doing advising calls for the last few months, while processing all this. I have been somewhat sad that there hasn't been more discussion and changes by now though I have been glad to see more EA leaders share things more recently (e.g. this from Ben Todd). I do still believe there are some really important ideas that EA prioritises but I'm more circumspect about some of the things I think we're not doing as well as we could (e.g. Toby's thoughts here and Holden's caution about maximising here and things I've posted about myself). Overall, I'm personally keen to take a step away from EA meta at least for a bit and try and do something that helps people where the route to impact is more direct and doesn't go via the EA community.
Less convinced of working on AI risk - Over the last year I've also become relatively less convinced about x-risk from AI - especially the case that agentic deceptive strategically-aware power-seeking AI is likely. I'm fairly convinced by the counterarguments e.g. this and this and I'm worried at the meta level about the quality of reasoning and discourse e.g. this. Though I'm still worried about a whole host of non-x-risk dangers from advanced AI. That makes me much more excited to work on something bio or global health related.

So overall it seems like it was good to move on to something new and it took me a little while to find something I was as excited about as CE's incubator programme!