Bella
Bio
Hello, my name's Bella Forristal. I work at 80,000 Hours, as the director of growth.
I'm interested in AI safety, animal advocacy, and ethics / metaethics.
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, or leave anonymous feedback at https://www.admonymous.co/bellaforristal :)
Posts 16
Comments185
Interesting post, thanks!! Excited to see discussion of it.
One thing I wonder if it's relevant are the sort of "mixed" pictures? Like, maybe you think totalitarian control of AI would be really bad because it increases the risk of human extinction from misalignment, by increasing the success rate of any attempted AI takeover / making it happen sooner in time (bc a totalitarian might e.g. give more control over to an AI they were using to stay in power).
Or, more vaguely, I sorta feel like if world governments / anyone with ambitions to power think that advanced AI will help them, that's bad news for alignment efforts.
Anyway, that could be something going on for some people I think?
🚨 New EA book cover to critique 🚨
Tell me all the ways we messed up, and how/why the original was better actually (see for example this excellent alternative design by Catherine: https://x.com/wilhelmscreamin/status/2029302612210626958 )
So incredibly excited for everyone to see this video. From my slightly-outsider-insider perspective (I'm managing Chana) I really think the team gave it absolutely everything they had — just an insane amount of effort, thoughtfulness, collaboration, creativity, and love went into this. I hope you all love it as much as I do!!
Here's the message that displays on their page if you have it turned on: 'The Dietary Profile service is currently unavailable while we build a new and improved service which will launch later this year. In the meantime please check individual product pages for further allergen information'
I'm not sure if it always said 'which will launch later this year' but I'm confident it's been broken since 2022 or so.
Sainsbury's used to offer this (called 'dietary profiles', maybe used to be offered in 2021 or so?) but it got broken at some point and they've never fixed it. They're already tagging new products as vegan or not, since they have a 'new + vegan' section, implying they wouldn't need to do any extra categorisation work — so I'm not sure why their dietary profiles are broken.
Hey! This post feels very relevant for me (I'm Director of Growth at 80k, and manage a digital marketing team, haha!). We've spent $mns and years of staff time on growth + digital :)
Three major reasons we don't invest more:
1. Low capacity to plan + execute campaigns (I failed to hire despite hundreds of hrs of effort in 2024);
2. Slow feedback loops on end-of-funnel outcomes we care most about (people changing their careers can take years)
3. Evidence suggesting that digital marketing is perhaps less likely than other growth channels to find the folks who are most likely to really love our advice (i.e., in for-profit terms, lower CLTV)
Anyway, it seems possible we should connect / chat more about this at some point! :D
I think this is a great point directionally, but hard to make the maths work for the numbers you've suggested.
Like, for there to be 100x more incidents of interpersonal misconduct than are reported to CH... well, there'd need to be 1000s of incidents! And there are only a few thousand EAs. It could be that the rate is in the tens of percent, but I'd find that surprising.
Ditto your adjustment for women: to get a 3x adjustment given the amount of women in other spaces: