JamesÖz 🔸

Karma: 5,854

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 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

JamesÖz 🔸Apr 30, 2024, 1:06 AM
16 points
7 ∶ 2
in reply to: finm’s comment on: Is there any way to be confident that humanity won’t keep employing mass torture of animals for millions of years in the future?
I’m not convinced that the chances that efforts to end factory farming will (by default) become more likely to succeed over time—what’s your thinking behind this? Given the current trajectory of society (below), whilst I’m hopeful that is the case, it’s far from what I would expect. For example, I can imagine the “defensive capabilities” of the actors trying to uphold factory farming improve at the same or faster rate relative to the capabilities of farmed animal advocates.
Additionally, I’m not sure that the information value about our future prospects, by the simple statement, outweighs the suffering of trillions of animals over coming decades. This feels like a statement that is easy for us to make as humans, who largely aren’t subject to suffering as intense as faced by many farmed animals, but it might be different if we thought about this from behind a veil of ignorance where the likely outcome for a sentient being as a life of imprisonment and pain.

JamesÖz 🔸Mar 30, 2024, 9:22 PM
6 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: AIM Animal Initiatives
Obviously, I don’t speak for OP or EA AWF fund but they literally only publish 1-3 sentences per grant so I’m not surprised at all if they don’t mention it, even if it is a consideration for them. That said, I might just be projecting because this was partially the reason why I supported giving them a grant!
Agree though that stunners aren’t literally a one-off and never touch again, but as you mention I think the overall cost of the intervention to animals helped is significantly better for shrimp stunning in my opinion, as well the avenue for industry adoption being much more clear and more likely.

JamesÖz 🔸Mar 30, 2024, 3:14 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: AIM Animal Initiatives
Yeah good point re Shrimp Welfare Project! I should have said “most animal funders don’t want to subsidise the animal ag industry without a clear mechanism for passing these costs over to the industry”.
For example, in the case of SWP, my understanding is that SWP wants to get these relatively cheap stunners ($50k and only a one-off cost) for a few major producers to show both producers and retailers that it is a relatively cheap way to improve animal welfare with minimal/no impacts on productivity. Then, I believe the idea is to get retailers (e.g. like this) to commit only to sourcing from producers who stun their shrimps, thereby influencing more producers to buy these stunners out of their own pocket (and repeat until all shrimp are being stunned before slaughter).
I think the case with feed fortification with layer hens is much less obvious and less simple due to the impact of feed costs (which are significant and ongoing), so IMO it wasn’t clear to animal funders how these costs would be passed onto the industry at a later date, rather than subsidising feed fortification in perpetuity.
A smaller note is that there is also a very small number of animal funders who follow this suffering-reduction-focused theory of change so if one major funder (e.g. OP) doesn’t fund you, this can be very problematic (as in the case of Healthier Hens). Also many funders don’t act rationally, so it’s also important the research takes that into account (not convinced that funders weren’t acting rationally in this case though).

JamesÖz 🔸Mar 30, 2024, 12:26 AM
10 points
1 ∶ 1
in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: AIM Animal Initiatives
FWIW in the early stages of Healthier Hens, I heard some of the following pieces of feedback which IMO seem significant enough that it may have been a bad decision for CE to recommend a feed fortification charity for layer hens:
- Feed costs are approximately 50% of costs for farmers, so interventions that make feed even more expensive are likely to be hard to achieve
- CE’s report focuses on subsidising this feed for farmers to lessen the potential risk of the above point, but I think misses the crucial factor where most animal funders don’t want to subsidise the animal agriculture industry without a clear mechanism for passing these costs over to industry, hence making fundraising quite hard (which did turn out to be true)
- Following on, if the subsidisation avenue was not pursued, it’s not clear what leverage Healthier Hens (or any other feed fortification charity) would have over feed mills or farms to get them to significantly increase their costs of production. For example, in the report, CE says “Entrepreneurs may pivot based on their own research: for example, they may instead partner with certifiers to encourage them to include feed standards for calcium, phosphorus, and vitamin D3 in their standards” but again, this is a significant ask of farms (and therefore certifiers) which I think was glossed over in the report.
It’s also worth noting that the experts interviewed in this report were 1 free-range egg farmer, 1 animal nutritionist and 2 Indian animal advocates (as it was originally thought to work best in India). None of them mentioned the concerns above but the person I spoke to (involved in global corporate welfare) thought that if CE had spoken to someone with reasonable global campaigning / corporate welfare experience, these problems would have been unearthed. I’m not sure how true this is but thought it was relevant info to the above discussion.
(My overall view on the meta-comment by mildlyanonymous is that it’s too vague to be useful and hard to verify many things but the intention of reducing poor allocation of talented co-founders and scarce funding is important, hence suggesting improvements to CE’s research process does seem valuable)
Edited afterwards: I added “without a clear mechanism for passing these costs over to industry” to the second bullet point after Michael’s good point below.

JamesÖz 🔸Mar 28, 2024, 3:39 PM
9 points
0 ∶ 0
on: JamesOz’s Shortform
Social Change Lab has two exciting opportunities for people passionate about social movements, animal advocacy and research to join our team!
Director (Maternity Cover)
We are looking for a strategic leader to join our team as interim Director. This role will be maternity cover for our current Director and will be a 12-month contract from July 2024. As Director, you would lead our small team in delivering cutting-edge research on the outcomes and strategies of the animal advocacy and climate movements and ensuring widespread communication of this work to key stakeholders.
Research and Communications Officer
We also have a potential opportunity for a Research and Communications Officer to join our team for 12 months. Please note this role is dependent on how hiring for our interim Director goes, as we will likely only hire one of these two roles.
Please see our Careers page for the full details of both roles and how to apply. If you have any questions about either role, please reach out to Mabli at mabli@socialchangelab.org

JamesÖz 🔸Feb 24, 2024, 1:04 AM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: emre kaplan🔸’s comment on: JamesOz’s Shortform
No I didn’t sadly—I started using Readwise instead to capture learnings from books & other mediums, as it’s got better UX than Anki in my opinion. Still yet to make a good list of concepts/facts though so ideas welcome!

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

JamesÖz 🔸Feb 13, 2024, 1:58 AM

93 points

3 comments11 min readEA link

JamesÖz 🔸Feb 5, 2024, 1:41 PM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Toby Tremlett🔹’s comment on: Who’s hiring? (Feb-May 2024)
Oopsie, thanks for the flag Toby! Will change

JamesÖz 🔸Feb 5, 2024, 12:51 PM
0 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Who’s hiring? (Feb-May 2024)
Note: Deadline is in 2 days—Wednesday, Feb 7th!
CellAg UK is hiring for a Program Associate, working one day per week, to build our community-building efforts for alternative proteins in the UK. This Program Associate will play a significant role in shaping and running our programs, such as incubating university alternative protein societies, community-building amongst early-career researchers via organising events, getting alternative proteins into UK university curricula and more. You can see additional information about the role here. If you’re interested, please apply via this form.
- Application deadline: 7th of February, 23:59 BST. Candidates will be considered on a rolling basis so early applications are encouraged.
- Contract: 1 year, working one day per week (approx. 8 hours per week). Please note that this contract would be on a self-employed/freelance basis.
- Location: Remote, UK-based
- Salary: £40,000 pro-rata
What links here?
- Digest #175 [normal] by Toby Tremlett🔹 (Feb 7, 2024, 2:11 PM; 6 points)

JamesÖz 🔸Dec 29, 2023, 12:28 AM
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: joshcmorrison’s comment on: joshcmorrison’s Quick takes
Great to see more advocacy and advocacy evaluation-related content on the EA Forum! Sharing a few things that might be of interest to you / others
- Founders Pledge has a great document on evaluating policy organisations that puts forward some interesting considerations on evaluating the counterfactual impact of an org e.g.
  - “We gather evidence from independent referees and written sources to confirm or disconfirm the charity’s own account of their impact. Below is a hierarchy of testimony evidence, ranked from the most to least desirable.
    1. Well-informed people with incentives to downplay the role played by the organisation (e.g. a rival organisation)
    2. Well-informed people with no incentive to mislead about the role played by the organisation (e.g. Government bureaucrats or politicians who were directly involved in the policy change”
    3. Well-informed people who have incentives to mislead about the role played by the organisation (e.g. An organisation’s campaign partners.)
    4. People with less information on the role played by the organisation” [I made small edits to make this shorter]
- I also recommend Hear This Idea’s podcast with Steven Teles, a political scientist who wrote a great book about advocacy within the conservative legal movement and an article about the difficulty of evaluating advocacy.

JamesÖz 🔸Dec 16, 2023, 2:12 PM
6 points
0 ∶ 0
on: JamesOz’s Shortform
I want to make some Anki cards to learn/reinforce some important concepts, research findings & facts related to animal advocacy. Any recommendations for key facts, research outputs or concepts to include? E.g. things like how many animals are killed in China, components of the BCC, etc etc

JamesÖz 🔸Dec 14, 2023, 1:12 PM
5 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Geoffrey Miller’s comment on: Where are you donating this year, and why? (Open thread)
You might be interested to ask in this Facebook group (I would love to help and thinking similar things but know approximately nothing)

JamesÖz 🔸Dec 12, 2023, 2:19 AM
3 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Guy Raveh’s comment on: EA thoughts from Israel-Hamas war
Thank you, I appreciate you engaging in a civil way too, as well as this comment!

JamesÖz 🔸Dec 9, 2023, 6:07 PM
14 points
3 ∶ 0
on: EA Germany’s 2023 Report, 2024 Plans & Funding Gap
I would be curious to hear more about the reasons behind your decision to focus specifically on getting folks into GCR-related careers, rather than other common EA cause areas, if you’re happy to share!

JamesÖz 🔸Dec 9, 2023, 6:04 PM
19 points
13 ∶ 0
in reply to: Guy Raveh’s comment on: EA thoughts from Israel-Hamas war
I disagree because at least one of the statements I quoted above is not “feelings” as you state, and they literally talk about what might be the downside of some political actions (e.g. closer to analysis on the conflict and potential resolutions).

JamesÖz 🔸Dec 8, 2023, 12:34 PM
15 points
7 ∶ 3
in reply to: Guy Raveh’s comment on: EA thoughts from Israel-Hamas war
Agreed! In that case, why not include both sides of the story to paint a fair picture, given the author thought it was fine to include more political / less-neutral statements?

JamesÖz 🔸Dec 8, 2023, 5:04 AM
41 points
21 ∶ 6
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.

JamesÖz 🔸Nov 30, 2023, 1:34 PM
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)

JamesÖz 🔸Nov 28, 2023, 4:34 AM
9 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.

JamesÖz 🔸Nov 23, 2023, 10:06 PM
70 points
26 ∶ 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?
What links here?
- The Marginal $100m Would Be Far Better Spent on Animal Welfare Than Global Health by Ariel Simnegar 🔸 (Oct 9, 2024, 8:45 PM; 79 points)

JamesÖz 🔸

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

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