JamesÖz 🔸

An ex­pert sur­vey on so­cial move­ments and protest

• JamesÖz 🔸Jul 4, 2023, 5:19 PM

  27 points

  9 ∶ 0

  on: High risk, low re­ward: A challenge to the as­tro­nom­i­cal value of ex­is­ten­tial risk miti­ga­tion (David Thorstad)

  Meta-comment: For the future, it might be better for GPI to not post several summaries/​working papers at the same time. I can currently see four GPI posts on the EA Forum homepage and this makes it a bunch less likely that I will read all 4 (personally, I can only handle so much academic global priorities research at once). A suggestion is that spreading this content out over e.g. 4 weeks might increase uptake/​reading but just my personal opinion!

• JamesÖz 🔸Jun 24, 2023, 4:16 PM

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: AMA: Ed Mathieu, Head of Data & Re­search at Our World in Data

  To what degree is the content on OWID decided by OWID vs influenced by donors?

  For example, I vaguely remember seeing that Longview had donated to OWID then also noticed OWID’s newer work on longtermism. Was there any relation between these and generally how do you try to maintain editorial independence when soliciting donations from foundations/​donors who have specific objectives?

• JamesÖz 🔸Jun 1, 2023, 9:55 AM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Rad­i­cal tac­tics can in­crease sup­port for more mod­er­ate groups

  Small relevant bump that if anyone is interested in hearing more about this work, we’re actually organising a webinar about it! It’ll be on Monday 5th of June, 6-7pm BST and you can sign up here.

• JamesÖz 🔸Jun 1, 2023, 9:51 AM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: JamesOz’s Shortform

  Social Change Lab is hosting a webinar on Monday 5th of June around our previous research that radical tactics can increase support for more moderate groups. If you want to hear more about our research, some slightly updated findings and ask questions, now is your time!

  It’ll be on June 5th, 6-7pm BST and you can sign up here.

• JamesÖz 🔸May 16, 2023, 3:11 PM

  9 points

  1 ∶ 1

  on: JamesOz’s Shortform

  I’m hiring for a new Director at Social Change Lab to lead our team! This is a hugely important role so if anyone is at all interested, I do encourage you to apply. Any questions, please feel free to reach out as well.

  -

  Social Change Lab is a nonprofit conducting and disseminating social movement research to help solve the world’s most pressing problems. We’re looking for a Director to lead our small team in delivering cutting-edge research on the outcomes and strategies of social movements, and ensuring widespread communication of this work to key stakeholders. You would play a significant role in shaping our long-term strategy and the programs we want to deliver. See more information below, the full job description here and apply here.

  • Application deadline: 2nd of June, 23:59 BST. Candidates will be considered on a rolling basis so early applications are encouraged. Apply here.

  • Contract: Permanent, working 37.5 hours/​week.

  • Location: London or UK preferred, although fully remote or overseas applications will also be considered.

  • Salary: £48,000-£55,000/​year dependent on experience.

  If anyone is interested or knows someone who might be a good fit, please share the job advert with them or let me know. You can also see some more context on the leadership change here.

• JamesÖz 🔸May 16, 2023, 7:41 AM

  13 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: How much fung­ing is there with dona­tions to differ­ent EA an­i­mal char­i­ties?

  This is only somewhat related but I would be keen to get your thoughts Brian on this talk and related paper on positive wild animal welfare? They argue that wild animal welfare isn’t necessarily so clear cut to be negative and there are some positive elements as well that we often don’t discuss. I’m no expert and you’ve probably thought about wild animal suffering more than most people so I would be very curious to hear what you think.

  There’s a lot in the talk but I found the slides below particularly interesting to think about (timestamp: 30:13) as it implies that even with heavily r-selected species, the deaths and suffering of juveniles may not dominate overall suffering.

  

  

  What links here?

  • MichaelStJules's comment on Be­ing swal­lowed live is a com­mon way for wild aquatic an­i­mals to die by MichaelStJules (Jun 9, 2024, 4:39 PM; 6 points)

• JamesÖz 🔸May 5, 2023, 9:07 PM

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Sarah Cheng’s comment on: An­nounc­ing a new an­i­mal ad­vo­cacy pod­cast: How I Learned to Love Shrimp

  Thank you for the kind words and great feedback! This initially slipped our mind but tanks to your comment, we’re now doing so :)

• JamesÖz 🔸Apr 21, 2023, 2:02 PM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: GabeM’s comment on: An­nounc­ing a new an­i­mal ad­vo­cacy pod­cast: How I Learned to Love Shrimp

  Thanks for the feedback! We actually ran this by some people who thought it was okay but on second thought, it does look a bit too curled up for our liking. We’ll be changing it shortly so thanks for the nudge :)

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

• JamesÖz 🔸Apr 10, 2023, 8:58 AM

  7 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Will Aldred’s comment on: EA & “The cor­rect re­sponse to un­cer­tainty is *not* half-speed”

  If you can, could you elaborate more on what caused this uncertainty at/​after the retreat?

Ten­sions be­tween differ­ent ap­proaches to do­ing good

• JamesÖz 🔸Mar 17, 2023, 1:05 AM

  5 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: MathiasKB🔸’s comment on: Mathi­asKirkBonde’s Shortform

  Can you share any other examples of what you’ve asked? Feeling somewhat uncreative on how to apply LLMs to day-to-day work!

• JamesÖz 🔸Mar 5, 2023, 11:31 AM

  6 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: An­i­mal welfare cer­tified meat is not a step­ping stone to meat re­duc­tion or abolition

  +1 to different presentation—a few graphs and/​or tables would have helped me get my head around this much quicker! Very interesting research so thank you for doing it :)

• JamesÖz 🔸Feb 23, 2023, 11:41 AM

  6 points

  5 ∶ 3

  in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: A state­ment and an apology

  I think there are tradeoffs here though (and I have also talked to women who like the status quo and I assume men do).

  Just flagging that this sentence made me quite uneasy. Of course when you’re talking about removing the institutional power of an oppressing group (e.g. men, white people, humans, etc.) that group will not want to lose their power or status. This doesn’t make it any less important or moral though!

  An exaggerated version of this might look like “There are some trade-offs to giving black people the right to vote. Most white people enjoy our political system the way it is, so we would have to consider what they would lose as well”.

  If it’s not clear, I think this is the wrong way of thinking about it. I also don’t have any obvious solutions, but I think men should be much more willing to take steps to try correct unearned social power e.g. basic reading on feminist topics, don’t talk over women (or considering how much men are speaking vs women in a group discussion), be mindful of your social power, err on the cautious side for physical touching /​ sexual advances, don’t be defensive when you get called out, etc.

• JamesÖz 🔸Feb 21, 2023, 4:14 PM

  30 points

  24 ∶ 4

  in reply to: titotal’s comment on: A state­ment and an apology

  Adding to your points, I think the Time article is very likely understating (I think by a significant margin) the amount of sexual harassment or otherwise unwanted male advances. For example, there was only one case about Owen in the article but he himself admits (see below quote) there were at least 4 other occasions where his actions might have been misguided /​ overstepped the mark.

  Was this incident an isolated case? Yes and no. I think this was by some way my most egregious mistake of this type. However, in my time in EA there have been four other occasions on which I expressed feelings of attraction towards someone in a way that — in retrospect as I’ve developed a more nuanced understanding of power dynamics — I regret.

  Generally, I think we can expect to see some “survivorship bias” e.g. reporters who want to uncover instances of sexual harassment might struggle because people who have faced these experiences might never engage properly with the EA community. For example, say someone new attends an EA event and faces some level of misogyny by male attendees - they will just never attend an EA event again. So of course an article about reported cases will miss a significant proportion of incidents! As a result, it is very hard to track these incidences, especially if they occur at the early stages of someone’s exposure to EA.

  (There’s a whole other point about internalised patriarchy where women will just tolerate some non-negligible level of sexism and not report it or even think it’s a problem, but that’s probably another conversation).

• JamesÖz 🔸Feb 14, 2023, 10:15 PM

  7 points

  3 ∶ 0

  on: Philan­thropy to the Right of Boom [Founders Pledge]

  I’m very much a layman to the field of nuclear risk but I found this piece extremely engaging and interesting! I definitely think applying the principles of robust diversification to important issues is a key way for EAs to bring value, and would love to see it applied to other cause areas.

• JamesÖz 🔸Feb 10, 2023, 12:26 PM

  11 points

  12 ∶ 5

  in reply to: Habryka [Deactivated]’s comment on: [At­las Fel­low­ship] Why do 100 high-school­ers need $50k each from Open Philan­thropy?

  I appreciate you clarifying your thinking but just wanted to flag some disagreement with aspects of your comment.

  If you think it was a waste of money, I have made much worse interior design decisions (in-general furniture is really annoyingly expensive, and I’ve bought couches for $2000 that turned out to just not work for us at all and were too hard to sell), and I consider this one a pretty strong hit.

  I find this a weird counterargument to the claim that “X was not a cost-effective use of money” as you’re essentially saying “You think X is bad? You should have seen Y and Z, they were much worse!”

  (To clarify, the reason why it’s so expensive is because it’s a kinetic sculpture with a moving magnet and a magnetic ball that draws programmable patterns into the sand at the center of the table, so it’s not just like, a pretty coffee table)

  Maybe I have too low an appreciation of art but a table that has programmable sand patterns does literally sound like “a pretty coffee table”. I’m not convinced that this additional benefit is worth the additional $1900 (or whatever is required to buy a reasonably nice coffee table that achieves 99% of the same benefit).

  The table is currently serving as a centerpiece of our central workspace social room, and has a pretty large effect on good conversations happening since it seems to hit the right balance of being visually interesting without being too distracting while also being functional

  I’m just extremely sceptical about this claim that the table has a pretty large effect on good conversations. In what way is it having a pretty large (positive) effect on conversations? And how can you even know that (say) a $300 dollar table wouldn’t have provided the same effect? This feels a lot like motivated reasoning to me e.g. “I will buy very nice things for myself/​my team because it helps me/​us be more productive, which is very important to making sure we do good in the world” when I would guess that the counterfactual impact on doing good is trivially small.

  my counterfactual earning rate being in the hundreds of dollars per hours, and I think it definitely is sometimes worth my time/​money to buy an occasional expensive piece of furniture.

  Even by your own lights, I think your analysis seems wrong. I think it’s very reasonable that a $500 dollar would have achieved approximately the same (alleged) impact on improving conversations relative to your $2200 table. So since you don’t value your time at more than $1700 per hour, it would have been very reasonable to spend an hour finding a cheaper table (maybe ignoring the situation with Atlas), which is very doable. That said, I also think this kind of reasoning “My time is worth so much per hour I can make somewhat counter-intuitive trade-offs for very rational reasons” can sometimes be quite suspect, for similar motivated reasoning concerns. I agree it might be reasonable to use this logic sometimes, but I’m not sure this is a good example of it.

• JamesÖz 🔸Feb 8, 2023, 12:13 AM

  26 points

  9 ∶ 2

  in reply to: Buck’s comment on: Pro­posal: Create A New Longter­mism Organization

  How come you think that? Maybe I’m biased from spending lots of time with Charity Entrepreneurship folks but I feel like I know a bunch of talented and entrpreneurial people who could run projects like the ones mentioned above. If anything, I would say neartermist EA has a better (or at least, longer) track record of incubating new projects relative to longtermist EA!

• JamesÖz 🔸Feb 7, 2023, 11:33 PM

  23 points

  6 ∶ 5

  in reply to: Buck’s comment on: Pro­posal: Create A New Longter­mism Organization

  My guess is that this new neartermist-only EA would not have the resources to do a bunch of things which EA currently does—it’s not clear to me that it would have an actively maintained custom forum, or EAGs, or EA Funds. James Snowden at Open Phil recently started working on grantmaking for neartermist-focused EA community growth, and so there would be at least one dedicated grantmaker trying to make some of this stuff happen. But most of the infrastructure would be gone.

  This paragraph feels pretty over the top. When you say “resources” I assume you mean that neartermist EAs wouldn’t have enough money to maintain the Forum, host EAGs, run EA Funds, etc. This doesn’t feel either that accurate, partially on the account that I don’t think those infrastructure examples are particularly resource or labour-intensive, or sufficient money is available to make them happen:

  • Forum: Seems like 1-2 people are working FTE on maintaining the forum. This doesn’t seem like that much at all and to be frank, I’m sure volunteers could also manage it just fine if necessary (assuming access to the underlying codebase).

  • EA Funds: Again, 1-2 FTE people working on this, so I think this is hardly a significant resource drain, especially since 2.5 of the funds are neartermist.

  • EAGs: Yes, definitely more expensive than the above two bits of infrastructure, but also I know at least one neartermist org is planning a conference (tba) so I don’t think this number will fall to 0. More likely it’ll be less than it is right now, but one could also reasonably think we currently have more than what is optimally cost-effective.

  Overall it seems like you either (1) Think neartermist EA has access to very few resources relative to longtermist EA or (2) that longtermist EA doesn’t have as much direct work to spend money on so by default they spend a higher % of total funds on movement infrastructure?

  For (1): I would be curious to hear more about this, as seems like without FTX, the disparities in neartermist and longtermist funding aren’t huge (e.g. I think no more than 10x different?). Given that OP /​ Dustin are the largest funders, and the longtermist portfolio of OP is likely going to be around 50% of OP’s portfolio, this makes me think differences won’t be that large without new longtermist-focused billionaires.

  For (2): I think this is largely true, but again I would be surprised if this led to longtermist EA being willing to spend 50x more than neartermist EA (I could imagine a 10x difference). That said, a few million for neartermist EA, which I think is plausible, would cover a lot of core infrastructure.