As you may have noticed, 80k After Hours has been releasing a new show where I and some other 80k staff sit down with a guest for a very free form, informal, video(!) discussion that sometimes touches on topical themes around EA and sometimes… strays a bit further afield. We have so far called it “Actually After Hours” in part because (as listeners may be relieved to learn), I and the other hosts don’t count this against work time and the actual recordings tend to take place late at night.
We’ve just released episode 3 with Dwarkesh Patel and I feel like this is a good point to gather broader feedback on the early episodes. I’ll give a little more background on the rationale for the show below, but if you’ve listened to [part of] any episode, I’m interested to know what you did or didn’t enjoy or find valuable as well as specific ideas for changes.
In particular, if you have ideas for a better name than “Actually After Hours,” this early point is a good time for that!
Rationales
Primarily, I have the sense that there’s too much doom, gloom, and self-flagellation around EA online and this sits in strange contrast to the attitudes of the EAs I know offline. The show seemed like a low cost way to let people know that the people doing important work from an EA perspective are actually fun, interesting, and even optimistic in addition to being morally serious.
It also seemed like a way to highlight/praise individual contributors to important projects. Rob/Luisa will bring on the deep experts and leaders of orgs to talk technical details about their missions and theories of change, but I think a great outcome for more of our users will be doing things like Joel or Chana and I’d like to showcase more people like them and convey that they’re still extremely valuable.
Another rationale which I haven't been great on so far is expanding the qualitative options people have for engaging with Rob Wiblin-style reasoning. The goal was (and will return to being soon) sub-1-hour, low stakes episodes where smart people ask cruxy questions and steelman alternative perspectives with some in-jokes and Twitter controversies thrown in to make it fun. An interesting piece of feedback we’ve gotten from 80k plan changes is that it’s rare that a single episode on some specific topic was a big driver of someone going to work on that area, but someone listening to many episodes across many topics was predictive of them often doing good work in ~any cause area. So the hope is that shorter, less focused/formal episodes create a lower threshold to hitting play (vs 3 hours with an expert on a single, technical, weighty subject) and therefore more people picking up on both the news and the prioritization mindset.
Importantly, I don’t see this as intro content. I think it only really makes sense for people already familiar with 80k and EA. And for them, it’s a way of knowing more people in these spaces and absorbing the takes/conversations that never get written down. Much of what does get written down is often carefully crafted for broad consumption and that can often miss something important. Maybe this show can be a place for that.
Thanks for any and all feedback! I guess it’d be useful to write short comments that capture high level themes and let people up/down vote based on agreement. Feel free to make multiple top-level comments if you have them and DM or email me (matt at 80000hours dot org) if you’d rather not share publicly.
Feedback on third episode: Also really liked it! Felt different from the first two. Less free-wheeling, more clearly useful. (Still much more on the relaxed, informal side than main-feed 80k podcasts.)
Felt very useful to get an inside perspective on what 80k thinks its doing with career advising. I really appreciated Dwarkesh kicking the tires on the theory of change ("why not focus 100% on the tails?"), as well as the responses.
It wasn't entirely an easy listen. I identify with the common EA tropes of: trying to push myself to be more ambitious, but this doesn't come naturally so I end up often feeling bad about how non-agentic I am. Ex ante trying some things to see if I'm in the right tail of the distribution, figuring I'm probably not, and being kind of upset and adrift about it.
I personally appreciate that 80k thinks a lot about doing right by people like me. It was somewhat hard to hear Dwarkesh focus so intently people at the tails, as if the other 99% of us are a rounding error, but I see the case for it and I'm not sure it's completely wrong. (I'm not supposed to be the primary beneficiary of 80k advising / other EA resources. If I voluntarily sign up to try being an ambitious altruist, and later feel bad about not (yet) succeeding, I'm not sure I get to blame anyone except myself.)