JamesÖz 🔸

Karma: 5,921

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 🔸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 🔸Nov 23, 2023, 9:42 PM
31 points
12 ∶ 5
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).

JamesÖz 🔸Nov 15, 2023, 9:43 PM
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

JamesÖz 🔸Nov 8, 2023, 1:32 AM
71 points
30 ∶ 0
on: 10 years of Earning to Give
This is a beautiful post—appreciate your transparency, honesty and (not least) your generosity!

JamesÖz 🔸Oct 19, 2023, 5:30 PM
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

JamesÖz 🔸Oct 19, 2023, 12:22 AM

74 points

0 comments1 min readEA link

JamesÖz 🔸Oct 18, 2023, 3:43 PM
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)

JamesÖz 🔸Oct 17, 2023, 6:47 PM
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.)

JamesÖz 🔸Oct 9, 2023, 8:55 PM
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!

JamesÖz 🔸Oct 9, 2023, 8:51 PM
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.

JamesÖz 🔸Sep 29, 2023, 10:28 PM
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)

JamesÖz 🔸Sep 29, 2023, 7:03 PM
15 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?

JamesÖz 🔸Sep 12, 2023, 10:07 AM
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).

JamesÖz 🔸Sep 4, 2023, 7:32 PM
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.

JamesÖz 🔸Aug 31, 2023, 5:34 PM
6 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: MH ’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?

JamesÖz 🔸Aug 31, 2023, 5:31 PM
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.

JamesÖz 🔸Aug 24, 2023, 7:08 AM
6 points
3 ∶ 1
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?”.

JamesÖz 🔸Jul 21, 2023, 11:53 AM
16 points
2 ∶ 0
on: AMA: Peter Wildeford (Co-CEO at Rethink Priorities)
What is some RP research that you think was extremely important or view-changing but got relatively little attention from the EA community or relevant stakeholders?

JamesÖz 🔸Jul 21, 2023, 11:52 AM
13 points
1 ∶ 0
on: AMA: Peter Wildeford (Co-CEO at Rethink Priorities)
What are some of your proudest ‘impact stories’ from RP’s research? E.g. you did research on insects and now X funders will dedicate $Y million to insect welfare

JamesÖz 🔸Jul 19, 2023, 6:52 PM
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?

JamesÖz 🔸

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