## 80,000 Hours interview OWID as civilisational psychotherapy. OWID gets 10 million visitors / month. OWID + Bret Victor vision. TTFT. OWID traffic is all search. It's all about SEO. PDFs suck. Very long term their vision is to build a content management system that replaces PDFs. A medium that can dynamically bring in latest data, so that papers stay up to date. PH: Why do academics mostly not care about promoting their work? At beginning 2020 they were 6 ppl FTE. Roser COVID-19 understanding was much influenced by Rob's crappy exponential model in Feb/Mar. Big thing that motivated Max to do more on COVID was that the media was fucking up by focussing on case numbers, not growth rate. "I was going mad, I just couldn't believe how poor this reporting was." Caplan: The news is the lie that something important happens every day. Roser, riffing on Caplan: The news is the lie that it's the new things that happen every day that are important. Thousands die every day from preventable diseases and air pollution and car accidents, this is incredibly important. But it happens all the time so it isn't reported on. When starting OWID, MR was not thinking he would influence decision makers and institutions at all! Much more focussed on researchers. But it turns out that decision-makers and institutions find their info same way as everyone else, namely through Google search. So SEO really really matters.