James Özden

Karma: 4,235

Currently grantmaking in animal advocacy, at Mobius. I was previously doing social movement and protest-related research at Social Change Lab, an EA-aligned research organisation I’ve founded.

Previously, I completed the 2021 Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program. Before that, I was the Director & Strategy lead at Animal Rebellion + in the Strategy team at Extinction Rebellion UK, working on movement building for animal advocacy and climate change.

My blog (often EA related content)

Feel free to reach out on james.ozden [at] hotmail.com or see a bit more about me here

James Özden 8 Dec 2023 5:04 UTC
5 points
3 ∶ 2
in reply to: Guy Raveh’s comment on: EA thoughts from Israel-Hamas war
Not Ofer but I think he laid it out pretty clearly:
The author mentioned they do not want the comments to be “a discussion of the war per se” and yet the post contains multiple contentious pro-Israel propaganda talking points, and includes arguments that a cease-fire is net-negative. Therefore it seems to me legitimate to mention here the following.
I feel similarly to Ofer—this post has many interesting personal reflections, which I’m glad the author shared. At the same time, it seemed like there were several pro-Israel comments that feel similar to the rhetoric used to justify the killing of large numbers of civilians in Gaza (as a reminder for readers, roughly 17,000 Palestinians have been killed, with 70% of them being women or children under 18, relative to approx. 1,150 in Israel)
Some examples of these comments:
But now I also think much more about good and evil, and if stopping evil can justify many lives lost (if yes, how many? How do you even start to answer that?).
There’s at least one potential scenario that comes to mind in which protests end up being net negative in the long run. If global protests cause an early long term ceasefire, in the short term, fighting will stop, and lives will be saved. However, terror groups all over the world will learn that if they embed themselves within a civilian population, take hostages and use human shields, Western public opinion will protect them from a military response for even the most barbaric of attacks. In the long run, the chance of more frequent and more vicous attacks, and the use of human shields, will go up significantly, leading to even higher death tolls.
Without getting into it too much, the second comment seems to totally overlook the fact that Israel has been illegally encroaching on Palestinian land, forcing people out of their homes and restricting access to basic rights like food and water for the past few decades. In my view, it’s the allowance of this by the international community which has been net negative, and led to the ongoing occupation of Palestine and the war we currently have.

James Özden 30 Nov 2023 13:34 UTC
4 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Empirical data on how teenagers hear about EA
This is super interesting Jamie, thanks for writing it up! FWIW I would be interested in the marketing successes and failures of LEAF as well as pre-post cause prioritisation changes, if they weren’t too time intensive to write up.

(The former is for me thinking about podcast marketing and the latter is general interest)

James Özden 28 Nov 2023 4:34 UTC
7 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Sjir Hoeijmakers’s comment on: GWWC’s evaluations of evaluators
THL’s corporate campaigns is our best guess donation opportunity to maximise expected impact (alongside the AWF). If we thought we could have easily justified any one of ACE’s other recommendations was better—or even just as good—from that perspective, we would have recommended them, but we currently can’t. And please note that “justifying” here isn’t about finding “certainty of positive impact”: we are looking for the expected value case (as we do for the AWF and our other recommendations as well).
Based on your paragraph below from the ACE Report, I’m inferring that you only looked at three (out of 11) ACE recommendations, which only included charities evaluated in 2023, rather than 2022? So by default, GFI, Sinergia, Fish Welfare Initiative, Kafessiz and DVF were all excluded from potentially being identified (which seems illogical, as there is no obvious reason to think that charities evaluated in 2022 would be less cost-effective).^[1]
ACE helpfully — and on very short notice — provided us with private documentation to elaborate on the cases for three of its 2023 charity recommendations [emphasis mine]. Unfortunately — potentially in part because of time constraints ACE had — we still didn’t find these cases to provide enough evidence on the marginal cost-effectiveness of the charities to justify relying on them for our recommendations.
Given you only looked at three of the ACE 2023 recommendations (and you didn’t say which ones), I’m wondering how you can make such a strong claim for all of ACE’s recommended charities?
If we thought we could have easily justified any one of ACE’s other recommendations [emphasis mine] was better—or even just as good—from that perspective, we would have recommended them, but we currently can’t.
On a slightly unrelated point: For the referral from OP, I would be curious to hear if you asked them “What is the most cost-effective marginal giving opportunity for farmed animal welfare” (to which they replied THL’s corporate campaigns) or something closer to “Do you think THL is a cost-effective giving opportunity on the margin?”
This is a much stronger claim than we are making (THL’s corporate campaigns being the “single best marginal giving opportunity”): we think it’s one of the two best donation opportunities we can, from the information we have available, recommend to a broad set of donors to maximise their expected impact.
Fair enough! I should have said “One of the top 2 marginal giving opportunities” but I still think I stand by my point that many experienced animal advocates would disagree with this claim, and it’s not clear that your charity recommendation work has sufficient depth to challenge that (e.g. you didn’t evaluate groups yourself), in which case it’s not clear why folks should defer to you over subject-matter experts (e.g. AWF, OP or ACE).
1. ^
  You might say there is weaker evidence of their cost-effectiveness as it’s been a year since they were evaluated but since you said you focused on the expected value case rather than certainty of positive impact, I assume this wasn’t your issue.

James Özden 23 Nov 2023 22:06 UTC
67 points
24 ∶ 2
in reply to: Emily Oehlsen’s comment on: Open Phil Should Allocate Most Neartermist Funding to Animal Welfare
One reason why we are moving more slowly is that our current estimates of the gap between marginal animal and human funding opportunities is very different from the one in your post – within one order of magnitude, not three. And given the high uncertainty around our estimates here, we think one order of magnitude is well within the “margin of error” .
I assume that even though your answers are within one order of magnitude, the animal-focused work is the one that looks more cost-effective. Is that right?
Assuming so, your answer doesn’t make sense to me because OP funds roughly 6x more human-focused GHW relative to farm animal welfare (FAW). Even if you have wide uncertainty bounds, if FAW is looking more cost-effective than human work, surely this ratio should be closer to 1:1 rather than 1:6? It seems bizarre (and possibly an example of omission bias) to fund the estimated less cost-effective thing 6x more and justify it by saying you’re quite uncertain.
Long story short, should we not just allocate our funding to the best of our current knowledge (even by your calculations, more towards FAW) and then update accordingly if things change?

James Özden 23 Nov 2023 21:42 UTC
38 points
12 ∶ 4
in reply to: mildlyanonymous’s comment on: GWWC’s evaluations of evaluators
Agree with lots of the above.
It also just seems very bizarre that the GWWC’s animal fund pays out half to EA AWF and half to THL. Surely if you thought that EA AWF was a good evaluator or donation opportunity for donors, you would just let them manage the entirety of the fund? As then EA AWF would be able to distribute to THL if they actually thought THL was the most effective use of funds on the margin. And if not, even better, as they can give to more effective opportunities.
Also responding to the below points in your ACE evaluation report:
We also think that recommending at least one competitive alternative to the AWF in the animal welfare space — if we transparently and justifiably can — is valuable.
I’m also curious why you felt the need to recommend at least one competitive alternative to the AWF, when the AWF itself is a fairly diversified fund? Arguably, you marked ACE down for similar reasoning in your evaluation of their Movement Grants (that they were spreading their grants across many groups rather than focusing mostly on the most effective groups)
However, we still think funding them [THL] is likely highly cost-effective, and the most justifiable charity recommendation we can currently make, based on the available evidence and our limited time.
We decided not to make an explicit comparison between THL’s corporate campaign work and the AWF in terms of their marginal cost-effectiveness, as we thought we would be unlikely to find a justifiable difference between the two in the limited time we had available, including because the types of evidence we have for each are so different.
Statements like this make me worry that this evaluation focused too much on the certainty of some positive impact, rather than maximising expected impact (i.e. measurability bias). As mentioned in the comment above, you would struggle to find many experienced animal advocates who would confidently recommend THL as the single best marginal giving opportunity. In reality, they would likely either advocate for a spread of groups using different approaches or just simply give to a fund (e.g. EA AWF or ACE).

James Özden 15 Nov 2023 21:43 UTC
34 points
7 ∶ 3
on: Notes on not taking the GWWC pledge (yet)
Thanks for sharing this! It’s great to have some honest and open conversations about the GWWC pledge.
FWIW I think perceived wisdom is that around 6-12 months of living expenses is pretty good as an emergency fund, which might help in terms of your runway value curve. For example, that might look like £1.8k per month (which I think is roughly the UK average) x 6-12 = £10-20k. Ideally, this would be in instant access savings, rather than stocks (but this isn’t true in my case).
Other thoughts: I think unless you expect your situation to change dramatically in the next year (e.g. you leave your job), it seems reasonable that you could both save for an emergency fund (at least partially) and donate 10%? For example, if you have a salary of £50k, that’s a takehome salary of £37k, which might be broken down like:
- Living expenses = £1.8k x 12 = £22k (maybe this is slightly on the frugal side but I’m just indexing on this UK average, obviously it depends where you live)
- Donations = £5k
- Runway = £10k

James Özden 8 Nov 2023 1:32 UTC
64 points
28 ∶ 0
on: 10 years of Earning to Give
This is a beautiful post—appreciate your transparency, honesty and (not least) your generosity!

James Özden 19 Oct 2023 17:30 UTC
4 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: jackva’s comment on: An expert survey on social movements and protest
Sorry Johannes, I can’t believe I never replied to this! Better late than never I hope.
In terms of how we selected these academics, we created a list of about 100 academics whom we had read their papers and thought they were high quality or they were the editors of top journals in the field (in Sociology and Political Science). We asked them to fill out the survey (just over 50% of this list replied) and we also asked them to send it to 2-3 other academics who they thought would be well-placed to do the survey too.

Six months in—new animal advocacy podcast episodes from How I Learned to Love Shrimp

James Özden19 Oct 2023 0:22 UTC

74 points

0 comments1 min readEA link

James Özden 18 Oct 2023 15:43 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Bella’s comment on: How has FTX’s collapse impacted EA?
Off-topic but asking for personal interest:
Would you be up for explaining (briefly) how you calculate your podcast metrics? E.g.
- Total listening time estimate using March 2022 method (40% Apple up to Nov 2019 then ’75% in the Big 3′)
- Big 3 subscriber estimate at end of period
(I couldn’t figure out what Big 3 was in this context nor your March 2022 method)

James Özden 17 Oct 2023 18:47 UTC
11 points
7 ∶ 0
in reply to: GiveDirectly’s comment on: Ending extreme poverty through cash transfers should be a central EA cause
With much of the $200B/year in Official Development Assistance going to interventions of question effectiveness and over a trillion dollars sitting in private foundations, the EA movement can and should open the aperture of how it thinks about what it recommends beyond the marginal donation.
We’re optimistic the movement could influence existing pots of money orders of magnitude larger than what it does today, thus doing even more good in the world. This could perhaps have been more clearly argued in the post, open to your thoughts / feedback!
FWIW I think this is quite interesting and worth putting in the original post. Fundamentally, EAs might (reasonably) disagree with the best use of $500M in the realm of global health but I think the argument that direct cash transfers could be a cost-effective use of $200B/year in Official Development Assistance, where other interventions we’ve found aren’t maybe that scalable, is one worth talking about.
Similarly, I think the ambition to move past just influencing marginal EA dollars (very small relatively) to government aid funding is also exciting and gets around some of the critiques by folks on this post (e.g. it’s much better than the counterfactual, more scalable than GiveWell interventions, governments can’t/won’t fund policy advocacy to improve their own aid, etc etc.)

James Özden 9 Oct 2023 20:55 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Party Politics for Animal Advocacy: Part 1: Animal-focused minor political parties
You say it’s upcoming but would very much love to hear your thoughts on influencing minor political parties vs working with dominant parties!

James Özden 9 Oct 2023 20:51 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Party Politics for Animal Advocacy: Part 1: Animal-focused minor political parties
This is super interesting, thanks to you Ren and the Animal Ask team for doing such a cool bit of research!
One question re funding—I assume that most of these countries have laws to prevent outside money coming into electoral campaigning in that country (e.g. the US and the UK). Do you know if this is likely the case? As I can see that being a very clear barrier why this approach might be hard without local major donors in specific countries.

James Özden 29 Sep 2023 22:28 UTC
8 points
6 ∶ 0
in reply to: Larks’s comment on: EA Vegan Advocacy is not truthseeking, and it’s everyone’s problem
I assume that’s not what Elizabeth was talking about though, given the lack of relation to nutrition, so I’m still not sure if her comment about punishment is reasonable in this context.
Less relevant but I also think the ACE example is slightly different as it was penalising charities for views that they disagree with, rather than investigating questions it doesn’t like.
(FWIW I also think ACE has changed sufficiently since that incident that I think it’s unlikely to happen again, but who knows)

James Özden 29 Sep 2023 19:03 UTC
11 points
5 ∶ 0
on: EA Vegan Advocacy is not truthseeking, and it’s everyone’s problem
EA vegan advocacy has both pushed falsehoods and punished people for investigating questions it doesn’t like.
What evidence do you have that it has punished people?

James Özden 12 Sep 2023 10:07 UTC
82 points
23 ∶ 3
on: Announcing the Meta Coordination Forum 2023
Thanks for sharing this—I really appreciate the transparency!
A quick question on the attendees: Are there any other (primarily) animal advocacy-focused folks within the 43 attendees or is it just Lewis? I don’t know the exact breakdown of meta EA efforts across various cause areas but I would be somewhat surprised if meta animal work was below 2% of all of meta EA spending (as is implied by your ¹⁄₄₃ ratio). There are several notable meta EA animal orgs doing work in this space (e.g. Animal Charity Evaluators, EA Animal Welfare Fund, Farmed Animal Funders, Focus Philanthropy and Animal Advocacy Careers) so wondering if Lewis is meant to represent them all? If so, I think that’s a pretty tough gig! Would be curious to hear more about what determined the relative cause area focuses of the attendees or if there’s some dataset that shows meta EA spending across various cause areas.
(Note: I’m aware there is some overlap between other attendees and animal work e.g. Joey and Charity Entrepreneurship, but it’s not their primary focus hence me not including them in my count above).

James Özden 4 Sep 2023 19:32 UTC
10 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Re-announcing Pulse
Very glad to hear this is still happening!

Are you planning on asking any question related to farmed animals? If so, which ones? And if not, would you be up for doing so?

If you’re not yet but would consider it: I’m happy to talk to a few relevant US folks to suggest some questions. Obviously RP has a very solid animal welfare so asking them is potentially an easier option but happy to do so regardless if you think it’ll be useful.

James Özden 31 Aug 2023 17:34 UTC
6 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Michelle Hauser’s comment on: Should I patent my cultivated meat method?
That’s interesting to hear. What’s the reasoning for the non-limiting patent being preferable over the pure open-science approach?

James Özden 31 Aug 2023 17:31 UTC
6 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Giving gladly, giving publicly
This is great, thanks for sharing this!
I’m trying to do more of this myself e.g. via a triathlon fundraiser I’m doing (coincidentally, with 1 of 2 recipients also being THL UK!). I’ve also done a post about this on Twitter and Facebook, to hopefully encourage some of my less philanthropic friends to get involved. Would be curious to hear what feedback or engagement you get.

James Özden 24 Aug 2023 7:08 UTC
5 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Recommendations for charities for animal suffering offsets?
Eh I disagree—most people rarely, if ever, speak to their friends and family about their donations so I think it’s unlikely for much to spread via that medium. On the other hand, people very often share meals with friends, family and other folks where the topic of animal welfare is much more likely to come up and be discussed (e.g. “oh you picked the vegan option, how come?”.

James Özden

Six months in—new an­i­mal ad­vo­cacy pod­cast epi­sodes from How I Learned to Love Shrimp

Six months in—new animal advocacy podcast episodes from How I Learned to Love Shrimp