Bella

Director of Growth @ 80,000 Hours
2969 karmaJoined Working (0-5 years)Bethnal Green, London, UK

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 [email protected], or leave anonymous feedback at https://www.admonymous.co/bellaforristal :)

Comments
188

Just finished watching!! Great concept for a video, and really well executed :) Thanks for all your hard work and can't wait to see more from this channel!

(Not sure if you've got time to answer questions here, but if you do: would love to know more about your process for the animated segments? Who did those, and how long did it take?)

So glad to hear you liked the book and thanks so so much for your efforts to get it in the hands of people who might love it! :D

Today’s the day!!! 80,000 Hours (the book) launches in the US.

This is possibly one of the biggest opportunities for EA-per-se growth that we’ve seen in a while.

I’m feeling excited, but also very nervous! We’ve done our best but I don’t know how it’ll be received. I hope people like it 🙂

Shares of our launch post (especially quote tweets) and reviews on Amazon or Goodreads are really really appreciated. Fingers crossed…!!!

Bella
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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:

  • If the other spaces are 50% women, i.e. representative of gen. pop., then EA would need to be ~17% women for a 3x adjustment to make sense
  • But EA survey data suggests EA is 26% women
  • I guess you might think "professional EA orgs" or something are more male-dominated than EA survey respondents. That seems possible, depending on what you wanna count. One thing is 80k is currently majority-women and I think however you carve it up we're a big chunk of the space :)
    • (Edit: that made me curious so I went and counted; assuming I'm right about everyone's gender then we're 60% women! I think it was a bit skewed the other way when I joined 4y ago.)

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?

Clothing (there’s a world beyond EAG merch and Uniqlo)

I'm currently wearing a fully Uniqlo outfit and I'm feeling very attacked right now

Thanks Marta!! I'm also really excited for the cartoons hehe. Involved lots of Gdoc comments about which jokes are funnier — my job is so cool!

🚨 New EA book cover to critique 🚨 

http://80000hours.org/book/ 

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 )

Thanks for writing this James, interesting / potentially helpful idea! :D

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!!

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