All of Niel_Bowerman's Comments + Replies
Thanks for the question. To be clear, we do think growing the team will significantly increase our impact in expectation.
- We do see diminishing returns on several areas of investment, but having diminishing returns is consistent with significantly increasing impact.
- Not all of our impact is captured in these metrics. For example, if we were to hire to increase the quality of our written advice even while maintaining the same number of website engagement hours, we’d expect our impact to increase (though this is of course hard to measure).
- In our view, in
a new career service org that caters to the other cause priorities of EA?
I'm guessing you are familiar with Probably Good? They are doing almost exactly the thing that you describe here. They are also accepting donations, and if you want to support them you can do so here.
Thanks for engaging with this post! A few thoughts prompted by your comment in case they are helpful:
- 80k has been interested in longtermism-related causes for many years, including many years in which we’ve seen a lot of growth. We were interested in longtermism for several years before we received our first grant from Open Philanthropy.
- We believe there’s still a lot of need for talent in the problems areas that we focus on, so we don’t think there’s a strong reason for us to shift our focus on that front — at least for t
- We’re happy to see others offering alternatives to our career advice — this kind of competition is healthy and we are keen to encourage it in the ecosystem.
I wanted to chime in and say that while a lot of people / organizations say things like this, in my experience, 80,000 really does mean it and follows through. When we were setting up Probably Good (and not only then) the amount of encouragement and help we received from Michelle, Niel and others there has been incredible.
Hey George —thanks for the question!
We haven’t done a full annual review of 2023 and the complete data isn’t in yet, so we haven't done a thorough assessment of the answer to your question yet. The answers to your question probably differ quite a bit programme to programme. But here are a few thoughts that seemed relevant to me:
On web:
- Over the past couple of years, the biggest predictor of change in web engagement time appears to be changes in our marketing spending. In 2022 we substantially increased our marketing spend. In 2023 our marketing
Yeah, Rethink Priorities, and yeah he was just wrong, which confused me. To be clear, I don't think this was his fault, I asked the question in a kind of leading way, and he responded very quickly, and so I model this more as an unfortunate miscommunication.
Confirming that I was wrong about this in my communication with Oli. Also agreeing with Oli here on the context in which those comments were made.
I have made a note in my reflective journal entry on this event to be more careful with my comms in circumstances such as this one.
My understanding is that this refers to the combined engagement time reported across Spotify, Apple and Google.
If summaries are editable, it could be nice to keep the same length limit so that they don't balloon during editing.
Thanks for doing this - I found it helpful!
Am I correct in thinking that under 'Among all respondents' under 'Average usefulness ratings:' the category
> 80k: 2.6 +/- 0.1
is just the 80k podcast and not all of 80k? If so one could change it to:
> 80k podcast: 2.6 +/- 0.1
Yep, kudos to Will for the huge effort he’s put into the launch as well. I understand that many of the key media pieces came as a result of relationships he’s developed over the years.
I think Abie Rohrig and the broader team have been crushing it with the launch of What We Owe The Future. So so much media coverage and there are even posters popping up in tube stations across London!
Yep, kudos to Will for the huge effort he’s put into the launch as well. I understand that many of the key media pieces came as a result of relationships he’s developed over the years.
I am grateful to Will in particular for a rather long list of things. But the recent thing I will mention is the podcast interviews around WWOTF. All the ones I've heard seem very good / excellent on all the most important dimensions.
I made a thread of my favourites, with highlights and links to transcripts: https://mobile.twitter.com/peterhartree/status/1559568673920016384.
In case it's helpful, the first thing below the title on the job board says:
>Some of these roles directly address some of the world’s most pressing problems, while others may help you build the career capital you need to have a big impact later.
I'd be interested in any ideas you had for communicating more clearly that a bunch of the roles are there for a mix of career capital and impact reasons. Giving our guess of the extent to which each role is being listed for career capital vs impact reasons isn't feasible for various reasons unfortunately.
TL;DR: I think this is very under communicated
You have that line there, but I didn't notice it in years, and I recently talked to other people who didn't notice it and were also very surprised. The only person I think I talked to who maybe knew about it is Caleb, who wrote this shortform.
Everyone (I talked to) thinks 80k is the place to find an impactful job.
Maybe the people I talk to are a very biased sample somehow, it could be, but they do include many people who are trying to have a high impact with their career right now
>it kind of worries me
Is that because you think the job board shouldn't list career capital roles, because it wasn't obvious that the roles were career capital-related, or something else?
I agree with this and I appreciate you writing this up. I've also been mentioning this idea to folks after Michelle Hutchinson first mentioned it to me.
I think linking to organisations' AMAs on the EA Forum is a neat idea! Thanks for sharing. I've added it to our list of feature ideas we might build in the future.
Hey Yonatan,
Thanks for building this! I’m excited for people to play with the job board data and explore alternative ways of displaying it. It’s both helpful to job board users, and it also helps the job board team prioritise which features to build next.
(One very minor comment is that the !Org and Org fields are redundant, so you might want to just show !Orgs by default?)
Excited to see future iterations.
Hey Rocky, it was mainly driven by my guesses of where longtermist orgs are hiring at the moment. I've been getting a bunch of requests to help hiring for roles based in DC, Boston and SF Bay Area, but not as many New York. I didn't want to add too many options for brevity.
But there are of course plenty of longtermist organisations hiring in New York at the moment, e.g. these: https://80000hours.org/job-board/?location=new-york-ny
Naina (the Time journalist) and I were chatting about the aggregate funding data but couldn’t quickly find a source. I connected Naina and Tyler to work on this together. Tyler pulled together the data in part for the Time article.
I tried to do something like you're suggesting with this longtermist census.
There a trade off in how public you make the results. The more public the information is, the less information people are willing to share. I wanted to ask questions getting at "how much do you want to change job right now" and so decided not to make the results fully public.
Do you have a dashboard of money reported as donated by GWWC members anywhere? Would be great to see the amounts per year and where it's being donated to.
Wonderful post Rémi. Take all the time you need, and if you decide to get back involved then I imagine our paths will cross on the other side! 🤗
It seems to me that a decent part of the angle behind this survey is to get longtermists to consider exiting their jobs in order to found projects on the FTX Future Fund list. Do you think this is a fair assessment?
Feel free to just submit the form a second time if your situation changes. If you want to retract or withdraw any of your answers, you can email census@80000hours.org
I'll think about this some more and may make a lightweight version of this tomorrow.
(Part of the reason for posting this census here before promoting more widely on mailing lists was to get this kind of feedback. So I appreciate it! )
Good point - I had forgotten that some people might have this preference. I've added this option.
What do you think about link-sharing via Google Drive? Or would you rather have it shared with specific emails only? (The former should make sharing the results easier)
I expect people will vary on this. Maybe most people who would be happy filling in the form at all won't mind much about google drive link-sharing. (I imagine a little more nervousness b/c it's easier for people to share a link to their CV than share e.g. a pdf of their CV)
Of possible interest: 2 minutes reflection from me says that I probably won't get to filling this in b/c "writing a CV" is something I will naturally feel perfectionist about // probably I'd need to spend 1-3 days on it to feel comfortable with it going to this group, and I probably don'...
A good call to action, I feel, should be about the upper bound rather than the lower bound. I too assumed that was "<= 3 mins" purely because ">= X time" is very unusual to put in a title. Perhaps changing it to something like "<= 15 mins" would be a good idea.
Yep, the recommended orgs list on the 80,000 Hours Job Board (and the job board itself) is certainly not aiming to be comprehensive.
Thanks for writing up this post. I'm excited to see more software engineers and other folks with tech backgrounds moving into impactful roles.
Part of my role involves leading the 80,000 Hours Job Board. In case it's helpful I wanted to mention that I don't think of all of the roles on the job board as being directly impactful. Several tech roles are listed there primarily for career capital reasons, such as roles working on AI capabilities and cybersecurity. I'm keen for people to take these "career capital" roles so that in the future they can contribute more directly to making the development of powerful AI systems go well.
Thanks for sharing this data. Would it be possible to share the wording of a sample question, e.g. for 1:1s, and how the scoring scale was introduced?
I really enjoyed this post. I personally feel as though I don't understand our users enough or have detailed enough models of how they are likely to react to our content, and so I appreciate write-ups like this.
FWIW, I found the Swapcard app to be a net improvement to my EAG experience. I found it easier to schedule meetings than my default approach of Google Sheets + Calendly links + emails. I wonder if part of it is that people seem more responsive on the app than via email?
Not trying to detract from Rohin's experience. Just pipping up in case it's helpful. I also ran into a number of the issues that Rohin had, but just sighed and worked around them.
Disclaimer: I work for 80,000 Hours, which is fiscally sponsored by CEA, which runs EA Global.
My wife and I are currently allocating 10% of my income to "giving later" , investing the funds 100% in stocks in the interim.
We will likely make our regular donation to the donor lottery this year, which will come out of these funds. I would consider giving more to the donor lottery, but on first glance I am less excited about needing to put money into a DAF or equivalent if we win because it is less flexible than money in an investment account.
If users have thoughts on the ideal vehicle to put "giving later" funds in, I would be inter...
Hey Jia, I haven't done many online courses, but one that I did and enjoyed was the Coursera Deep Learning course with Andrew Ng. https://www.coursera.org/specializations/deep-learning
I think if you will be working on multi-agent RL and haven't played around with deep learning models, you will likely find it helpful. You code up a python model that gets increasingly complicated until it does things like attempting to identify a cat (if I'm remembering it correctly). It's fairly 'hands on' but also somewhat accessible to people without a t...
This post is extremely helpful, and I have referred to it multiple times as I plan my finances. Thanks again for putting it together.
The importance of this and related topics is premised on humanity's ability to achieve interstellar travel and settle other solar systems. Nick Beckstead did a shallow investigation into this question back in 2014, which didn't find any knockdown arguments against. Posting this here mainly as I haven't seen some of these arguments discussed in the wider community much.
I also recently wrote up some thoughts on this question, though I didn't reach a clear conclusion either.
[Spitballing] I'm wondering if Angry Birds has just not been attempted by a major labs with sufficient compute resources? If you trained an agent like Agent57 or MuZero on Angry Birds then I am curious as to whether the agent would outperform humans?
Louis Dixon has written a helpful summary of this talk here. It also has some interesting discussion in the comments: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NLJpMEST6pJhyq99S/notes-could-climate-change-make-earth-uninhabitable-for
This is one of the most thought-provoking (for me) posts that I've seen on the forum for a while. Thanks to you both for taking the time to put this together!
Thanks for flagging this. I think estimating temperature rise after burning all available fossil fuels is mostly educated guesswork. Both estimating the total amount of fossil fuels is hard and estimate the climate response from them is hard.
However, I hadn't seen this Winkelmann, et al. paper, which makes a valuable contribution. It suggests that the climate response is substantially sub-linear at higher levels of warming.
The notes that are currently posted above about how warm it would get if we burned all the fossil fuels were back-of-the-en...
Great question. I'm afraid I only have a vague answer: I would guess that the chance of climate change directly making Earth uninhabitable in the next few centuries is much smaller than 1 in 10,000. (That's ignoring the contribution of climate change to other risks.) I don't know how likely the LHC is to cause a black hole, but I would speculate with little knowledge that the climate habitability risk is greater than that.
As I mentioned in the talk, I think there are other emerging tech risks that are more likely and more pressing than this. But I would also encourage more folks with a background in climate science to focus on these tail risks if they were excited by questions in this space.
Hey John, unfortunately a lot of the data we use to assess our impact contains people’s personal details or comes from others’ analyses that we’re not able to share. As such, it is hard for me to give a sense of how many times more cost-effective we think our marginal spending is compared with the community funding bar.
But the original post includes various details about assessments of our impact, including the plan changes we’ve tracked, placements made, the EA survey, and the Open Philanthropy survey. We will be working on our annual review i... (read more)