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.

I'm not on the podcast team but just quickly jumping in to say we do release highlights on the 80k After Hours feed! Not sure if they're planning one for this episode but it'd be a good candidate, I agree!

Edit: sorry, we actually release highlights episodes for every main feed episode — my bad for the misinfo!

Hey Emily, I'm sorry to hear you've had trouble figuring out how your broad skill set fits in.

For the roles I'm hiring for right now, specific experience is less relevant than evidence of the most important skills for the role. Copying directly from the job description for the Head of Marketing role, for example:

• A strong interest in effective altruism, longtermism, and/or having a big, positive impact in the world — ideally with experience in applying EA principles in real-world decisions
• Strong judgement; the ability to consider complex strategic questions evenhandedly, communicate them clearly, and get others on board

(This is just the first two from a longer list!)

When I'm evaluating candidates, I expect these traits to show up in various different ways at different stages of the application. To give some sense, here's what I've written in some of my own documents about how those two traits will show up in the initial application form:

• Excitement about the role; they seem EA / longtermist (or say that they are).
  Mention interest in EA on the application form (with evidence).
• Their answers seem thoughtful. Clear communication; lucid, easy-to-engage-with writing.

Does that help give you a sense of the kinds of things I'm looking for that aren't specific experience?

I'm not sure if this really answers your question, but I hope it's helpful & let me know if there's anything else I could share!

Hi Pranshul,

Thanks for your comment, and I'm really glad to hear you'd be excited about working at 80k!

I think being a new high school graduate is not a dealbreaker for us / doesn't directly rule you out, so you'd be very welcome to put in an application on our website!

However, for full transparency's sake, I do think I should say that I'd guess it will be a fairly significant downside compared to candidates with more experience, and I'd be somewhat surprised if ended up hiring someone with no prior work experience or tertiary education.