Hello, my name's Bella Forristal. I work at 80,000 Hours, as a marketer. I'm interested in animal advocacy, moral circle expansion, and normative ethics. Previously, I worked in community building with the Global Challenges Project and EA Oxford, and have interned at Charity Entrepreneurship. Please feel free to email me to connect at bellaforristal@gmail.com :)
Posts
Topic Contributions
Comments
I liked this post but I think it would have been helpful if you were more clear between two claims you could be making:
- 'Reading books is (sometimes) an optimal medium of consuming information, given ~altruistic goals'
- 'Reading books is (sometimes) valuable given ~non-altruistic goals - e.g. it is pleasurable, exposes the reader to culture, etc.'
I think you move fluidly between arguing for both 1 and 2, which can be a bit confusing, especially because the framing of the post seems like you wanted to mostly argue for 1.
FWIW I basically think both are true, but with heavy emphasis on the 'sometimes' in 1. For that reason, I'd mostly be interested in a post which talks about when and how books can be optimal ways of consuming info (rather than stuff arguing for 2 which I expect ~everybody agrees with).
a moral realism that seems somewhat popular in the EA space
Could you say more about this? (My anecdata suggest that EAs typically embrace anti-realism)
Shared! Thanks Abie :)
Thank you so much, I hadn't seen this!
Thank you for the feedback - sorry you had a slightly frustrating experience!
Hey Nathan,
I actually purposefully made it a post rather than a question, as it'd be most helpful for me if people filled out the form I linked rather than replying in the comments with their answers. I figured a question would encourage the latter approach.
Can't wait for the issue on metaethical non-naturalism! Subscribed :)
Adding another comment testifying to the value of Jonathan's work:
I worked at Trajan House for a few months before he started (but left ~as he was taking on the role). I've had the opportunity to visit a couple times since then, and the impact of Jonathan's work is /extremely/ obvious to me. Every issue I'd had with the office was fixed (as far as I could tell), plus a lot more things that I hadn't even thought could be improved. It's a totally different place!
Bella from 80k here — I really liked this post, and think it points to something important - thanks for writing it!
The ‘absorbency’ of a career path is one of the things we take into account when we decide what to recommend. For instance, being a ‘public intellectual’ is something that can probably absorb only a few people, which is why it’s lower down on our list of top recommended career paths (and we note this in the profile itself, too).
(AndreFerretti asked whether 80k considers absorbency below, but I thought I'd post as a comment not a reply since it might be of general interest) :)
Thank you for writing this; I enjoyed it and thought it was novel (to me). The monk analogy seems particularly instructive.
Still - I feel uneasy because I'm not sure which category I fall into, nor which I want to fall into. Probably just because binaries are not (usually) perfect binaries!