James Özden

Me­gapro­jects for animals

An­nounc­ing a new an­i­mal ad­vo­cacy pod­cast: How I Learned to Love Shrimp

Effec­tive Altru­ism: Not as bad as you think

• James Özden 23 Nov 2022 23:57 UTC

  145 points

  81 ∶ 1

  on: Re­think Pri­ori­ties’ Lead­er­ship State­ment on the FTX situation

  Quite off-topic but I think it’s quite remarkable that RP does crisis management and simulation exercises like this! I’m glad that RP is stable financially and legally (at least in the short-term), and put a significant chunk of that down to your collective excellent leadership.

Protest move­ments: How effec­tive are they?

A case for the effec­tive­ness of protest

Some thoughts on re­cent Effec­tive Altru­ism fund­ing announcements

Ten­sions be­tween differ­ent ap­proaches to do­ing good

An ex­pert sur­vey on so­cial move­ments and protest

Rad­i­cal tac­tics can in­crease sup­port for more mod­er­ate groups

• James Özden 3 Feb 2023 18:02 UTC

  92 points

  54 ∶ 10

  in reply to: Peter Wildeford’s comment on: EA, Sex­ual Harass­ment, and Abuse

  Funnily enough, I think EA does worse than other communities /​ movements I’m involved with (grassroots animal advocacy & environmentalism). My partner and other friends (women) have often complained about various sexist issues when attending EA events e.g. men talking over them, borderline aggressive physical closeness, dismissing their ideas, etc., to the point that they doesn’t want to engage with the community. Experiences like this rarely, if ever, happen in other communities we hang out in. I think there are a few reasons for why EA has been worse than other communities in my cases:

  • I think our experiences differ on animal issues as when groups /​movements professionalise, as has been happening over the past decade for animal welfare, the likelihood that men will abuse their positions of power increases dramatically. At the more grassroots level, power imbalances often aren’t stark enough to lead the types of issues that came out in the animal movement a few years back. EA has also been undergoing this professionalisation and consolidation of power, and seems like the article above highlights the negative consequences of that.

  • As has been noted many times, EA is currently about 70% male, whilst environmentalism/​animal advocacy is majority women. I would be fairly confident that a more balanced gender ratio would mean less misogyny towards women.

  • Some EAs have a kind of “anti-woke” sentiment to the point where I actually think it could be fairly damaging e.g. it causes people to think issues related to race, gender, nationality etc aren’t important at all. I think it would be pretty valuable if everyone read a few core texts on things like racism, sexism, ableism, etc. to actually understand the every-day experiences of people facing various forms of discrimination and bigotry.

  What links here?

  • Things that can make EA a good place for women by lilly (6 Apr 2023 17:09 UTC; 182 points)

My lifelong pledge to give away 10% of my in­come each year (and where I donated in 2023)

• James Özden 19 Jul 2023 18:52 UTC

  88 points

  21 ∶ 7

  on: AMA: Peter Wilde­ford (Co-CEO at Re­think Pri­ori­ties)

  Doing some napkin-math:

  • Rethink published 32 pieces of research in 2022 (according to your database)

  • I think roughly (?) half of your work doesn’t get published as it’s for specific clients, so let’s say you produced 64 reports overall in 2022.

  • Rethink raised $10.7 million in 2022.

  • That works out to around $167k per research output.

  That seems like a lot! Maybe I should discount a bit as some of this might be for the new Special Projects team rather than research, but it still seems like it’ll be over $100k per research output.

  Related questions:

  • Do you think the calculations above are broadly correct? If not, could you share what the ballpark figures might actually be? Obviously, this will depend a lot on the size of the project and other factors but averages are still useful!

  • If they are correct, how come this number is so high? Is it just due to multiple researchers spending a lot of time per report and making sure it’s extremely high-quality? FWIW I think the value of some RP projects is very high—and worth more than the costs above—but I’m still surprised at the costs.

  • Is the cost something you’re assessing when you decide whether to take on a research project (when it’s not driven by an external client)? Do you have some internal calculations (or external tool) where you try to calculate the value of information of a given research project and weigh that up against proposed costs?

• James Özden 11 Nov 2022 13:52 UTC

  85 points

  24 ∶ 4

  in reply to: Jakob’s comment on: Some com­ments on re­cent FTX-re­lated events

  I want to push back on this a tiny bit. Just because some projects got funding from FTX, that doesn’t necessarily mean Open Phil should fund them. There’s a few reasons for this:

  There will be projects that 1) have significant funding gaps, 2) have been vetted by people you trust for both their value alignment and competence, 3) are not only shovel-ready, but already started.

  1. When FTX Future Fund was functioning, there was lots more money available in the ecosystem, hence (I think) the bar for receiving a longtermist grant was lower. This money is now gone, and lots of orgs who got FTX funding might not meet OP’s bar /​ the new bar we should have given less resources. So basically I don’t think it’s sufficient to say 1) they have significant funding gaps, 2) they exist and 3) they’ve been vetted by people you trust. IMO you need to prove that they’re also sufficiently high-quality, which might not be true as FTX was vetting them with a different bar in mind.

  Stepping in to help these projects bridge the gap until they can find new funding sources looks like an unusually cost-effective opportunity. It may also require somewhat less vetting on your end, which may matter more if you’re unusually constrained by grantmaker capacity for a while

  2. The problem I see here is that these projects might not ever find new funding sources, or it would take longer to find than is reasonable. For example, EA funding in general is quite down (e.g. tech stocks) and we’re looking at an extended period (1-2 years) of recession /​ slow growth, so keeping alive projects that don’t meet the OP longtermist bar for 1-3+ years probably isn’t the best use of money, as it’s unclear if all of these projects would definitely find funding in the future. As I say below, a 3 month exit grant to help people transition to other projects might be a better use of funds.

  3. I think your second point is a tough one as I can definitely imagine mishandling this might be bad for encouraging future folks to start-up projects in EA. That said, I think EAs of all people should be happy to accept that some charities, if they’re not amongst the most effective things to do, shouldn’t exist. If we (the EA community or Open Phil) thinks that the bottom 20% of FTX-funded projects aren’t worth funding, then we likely shouldn’t fund them. ^[1] Just like there could be a negative impact on founders being put-off by the a lack of a safety net within EA, I’m also worried that it could be bad for community epistemics (and more importantly, the world) if we’re willingly supporting projects that clearly aren’t amongst the best things we could be doing with our money. I definitely agree though some sort of exit grants over 3 months by OP /​ other EA funders might be useful to help people transition if their projects got totally tanked, but funding sub-par projects for another year or more seems less than ideal.

  I’m kind of unsure about my points above and happy to be pushed back on them—but I also don’t think it’s a simple as: if FTX funded it, those longtermist opportunities out must be great so let’s fund them.

  1. ^

     This feels a bit harsh to say, and it’s easy for me to do as I don’t have FTX funding. Apologies if it comes across as insensitive, as I understand this is a hard time for a lot of people. I really do hope people at least have enough resources to figure out alternative plans without any serious hardship.

• James Özden 12 Sep 2023 10:07 UTC

  83 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).

In­tro­duc­ing the An­i­mal Ad­vo­cacy Bi-Weekly Digest (Nov 4 - Nov 18)

• James Özden 4 May 2022 18:12 UTC

  81 points

  0 ∶ 1

  in reply to: AnonymousEAForumAccount’s comment on: Is EA “just longter­mism” now?

  Some things from EA Global London 2022 that stood out for me (I think someone else might have mentioned one of them):

  • An email to everyone promoting Will’s new book (on longtermism)

  • Giving out free bookmarks about Will’s book when picking up your pass.

  These things might feel small but considering this is one of the main EA conferences, having the actual conference organisers associate so strongly with the promotion of a longtermist (albeit yes, also one of the main founders of EA) book made me think “Wow, CEA is really trying to push longtermism to attendees”. This seems quite reasonable given the potential significance of the book, I just wonder if CEA have done this for any other worldview-focused books recently (last 1-3 years) or would do so in the future e.g. a new book on animal farming.

  Curious to get someone else’s take on this or if it just felt important in my head.

  Other small things:

  • On the sidebar of the EA Forum, there’s three recommended articles: Replacing Guilt, the EA Handbook (which as you mentioned here, is mostly focused on longtermism) and the most important century by Holden. Again, essentially 1.5 longtermist texts to <0.5 from other worldviews.

  As the main landing page for EA discussion, this also feels like a reasonably significant nudge in a specific direction.

  On a somewhat related point, I do generally think there are many less ‘thought-leaders’ for global health or animal-inclusive worldviews relative to the longtermist one. For example, we have people such as Holden, Ben Todd, Will McAskill etc. who all produce reasonably frequent and great content on why longtermism is compelling, yet very few (if anyone?) is doing content creation or thought leadership on that level for neartermist worldviews. This might be another reason why longtermist content is much more frequently sign-posted too, but I’m not 100% sure on this.

  [FWIW I do find longtermism quite compelling, but it also seems amiss to not mention the cultural influence longtermism has in certain EA spaces]

  What links here?

  • AnonymousEAForumAccount's comment on EA is more than longtermism by frances_lorenz (4 May 2022 18:37 UTC; 37 points)
  • Pro­posal: Create A New Longter­mism Organization by Brian Lui (7 Feb 2023 5:59 UTC; 25 points)

• James Özden 13 Jan 2023 10:40 UTC

  80 points

  42 ∶ 7

  in reply to: 𝕮𝖎𝖓𝖊𝖗𝖆’s comment on: I Sup­port Bostrom

  Leaving aside some object-level stuff about Bostrom’s views, I still think the apology could be much better without any dishonesty on his part. This is somewhat subjective but things that I think could have been better:

  • Don’t frame the apology at the beginning as almost purely instrumental i.e. not like “I will get smeared soon, so I want to get ahead of the game”. This makes everything come across as less genuine.

  • “What about eugenics? Do I support eugenics? No, not as the term is commonly understood.”—This is just not a useful thing to mention in an apology about racism, or at least, not in this way. Usually, if someone says “Don’t think of an elephant” then you do think of an elephant. The consequence is now people are probably more likely to think there is a link between Bostrom and eugenics than if this was written differently.

  • And some other points that Habiba mentioned in her post e.g. “I am deeply uncomfortable with a discussion of race and intelligence failing to acknowledge the historical context of the ideas’ origin and the harm they can and have caused.”

  In my opinion it just highlights some basic misunderstandings about communication and our society today, which (I think) was proven by the fairly widespread negative backlash to this incident.

Po­ten­tial The­o­ries of Change for the An­i­mal Ad­vo­cacy movement

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