All of Niel_Bowerman's Comments + Replies

Rob Wiblin interviewed nuclear‑war planner‑turned‑whistle‑blower Daniel Ellsberg, five years before he died.  Here's a quote from the interview:

I act as if we still have a chance to find our way out of this. … It’s definitely not a waste for some of us to keep trying to explore if there’s a way out of the precarious situation humanity is in. I only wish I’d started doing it 50 years earlier.

What 80k programmes will be delivering in the near-term 

In response to questions that we and CEA have received about how, and to what extent, our programme delivery will change as a result of our new strategic focus, we wanted to give a tentative indication of our programme’s plans over the coming months. 

The following is our current guess of what we’re going to be doing in the short term. It’s quite zoomed in on the things that are or aren’t changing as a result of our strategic update, rather than going into detail on: a) what things we’ve deci... (read more)

I haven't read it, but Zershaaneh Qureshi at Convergence Analysis wrote a recent report on pathways to short timelines.  

Hey Nick, just wanted to say thanks for this suggestion.  We were trying to balance keeping the post succinct, but in retrospect I would have liked to have included more of the mood of Conor’s comment here without losing the urgency of the original post.  I too hate that this is the timeline we’re in.

I’m really sorry this post made you sad and confused. I think that’s an understandable reaction, and I wish I had done more to mitigate the hurt this update could cause.  As someone who came into EA via global health, I personally very much value the work that you and others are doing on causes such as global development and factory farming.  

A couple comments on other parts of your post in case it’s helpful:

I also struggle to understand how this is the best strategy as an onramp for people to EA - assuming that is still part of the purpose

Thanks David.  I agree that the Metaculus question is a mediocre proxy for AGI, for the reasons you say.  We included it primarily because it shows the magnitude of the AI timelines update that we and others have made over the past few years.  

In case it’s helpful context, here are two footnotes that I included in the strategy document that this post is based on, but that we cut for brevity in this EA Forum version:

We define AGI using the Morris, et al./Deepmind (2024) definition (see table 1) of "competent AGI" for the purposes of

Hey Greg!  I personally appreciate that you and others are thinking hard about the viability of giving us more time to solve the challenges that I expect we’ll encounter as we transition to a world with powerful AI systems.  Due to capacity constraints, I won’t be able to discuss the pros and cons of pausing right now. But as a brief sketch of my current personal view: I agree it'd be really useful to have more time to solve the challenges associated with navigating the transition to a world with AGI, all else equal. However, I’m relatively more ... (read more)

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)

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

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.  

Here to help! 😛

I'm guessing a secondment is not a common term in the US?  

What is their level of familiarity with machine learning and/or computer science?

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! 

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.  

>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. 

Neat!  Do you want to make a graph using the inflation-adjusted data?

Nope.  

Nice!  So far we've had around 3000 responses.

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.

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!  🤗 

Thanks for the feedback.  Epistemic institutions are one of the FTX Future Fund  project categories that they use in this post.  I appreciate that that is fairly obscure!  Do you think it would be helpful to link to this post and the 80k problem areas page from that question?

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

Thanks for the helpful pushback.  I've changed the title to include "it'll only take a few mins".

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. 

Thanks!

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)

Thanks, I've added your suggestion. 

I was meaning to say  "3 or more minutes". 

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.  

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... (read more)