I got another anonymous question! :)

In the post about 80K’s pivot to AGI, you discuss active headhunting for specific roles relevant to AGI. To what extent do you expect a candidate in this role (and 80K’s outreach more broadly) to focus on your historic audience (ambitious, altruistic young people) vs active outreach to those with relevant skills for making AGI go well (e.g. ML professionals, lawyers)?

The kind-of-annoying but true answer is "some of both!"

I expect that a reasonably high proportion of our new outreach efforts will be focused on trying to find people who are particularly well-suited to contributing to making AGI go well. But:

• I think we'll continue with a lot of the kinds of outreach that's worked well for us in the past (since we can continue to execute on it efficiently)
• I think we should still take the lowest-hanging fruit of outreach to our historical audiences

I also put quite a lot of weight on the argument that 80k as a product has been historically really valuable to a certain kind of person; we have hypotheses about how / why, but ultimately, making big changes we should expect to see some regression to the mean. So I'm keen for us to not entirely stop using our previous strategy.

But if e.g. the website changes so much that it doesn't make sense to reach people without a prior interest in AI, then that might change (tho, FWIW, I think this is pretty unlikely, at least in the near future / without the web team's views changing).

I got the following anonymous question:

Heya Bella! When is the preferred start date for engagement specialist role? And, how late a start would you be willing to accept?

The preferred start date is basically as soon as possible after we conclude the evaluation process!

But, we understand folks will have notice periods, and other obligations that might mean they need to wait a while.

I think needing to wait e.g. several months is a (significant-ish) downside, but we'd be willing to do so for the right applicant!

Ah — thanks so much David for adding the more recent link!! I'll add that into the job ad on our site too :)

I loved your telling of de Sousa Mendes' story — thanks for sharing it. The moral courage he showed is really beautiful to me :)

Just speaking for myself — I'm not a college student, but I'm totally happy to get meeting requests where the only point is to hang out / meet the person! Sometimes these kinds of meetings are awesome :) But I'd prefer the person to send a connection request saying that rather than not have any message attached.

By the way, it looks like there might be some problem with the Forum UI here, as this post has some text suggesting that, since writing this comment, I changed my mind from "29% agree" to "14% agree." But I haven't intentionally changed my vote on the top banner, or changed my mind.

I agreed, but mostly because of my unfortunately-dim view of the tractability of work increasing the value of futures where we survive.

(I didn't read all the comments so someone else might have said this already)

I think this post is admirable for trying to persuasively correct a mistake you see people making — but I end up disagreeing because of equivocation between end factory farming and end factory farming within our lifetimes.

I think the goal is to end factory farming, & my sense is most of the harms you're worried about only accrue when people have an unrealistic sense of how likely that is overall (not guaranteed) & how soon that might happen (maybe not for a very long time, or perhaps ever).

See some (limited) discussion of this in 80k's new factory farming article which I was reading earlier today by coincidence.

Thanks for writing this Zach! The broad strokes of the dynamics here are not news to me (I work at 80k which is a project of EV) but lots of the detail was novel and feels good to know.

By my count, animal welfare is 100x more neglected than global health (Edit: global development, not global health — my mistake). I'm unsure how much bigger it is in scale (given that making trades between humans and animals is hard) — but I'd guess it's very very much larger in scale.