JamesÖz 🔸

Karma: 5,888

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 🔸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.

JamesÖz 🔸Feb 7, 2023, 6:00 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Ula Zarosa’s comment on: Appreciation thread Feb 2023
Thank you Ula <3

JamesÖz 🔸Feb 3, 2023, 6:02 PM
90 points
54 ∶ 11
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 (Apr 6, 2023, 5:09 PM; 183 points)

JamesÖz 🔸Jan 16, 2023, 9:11 AM
−1 points
3 ∶ 1
in reply to: Geoffrey Miller’s comment on: Do better, please …
Could you clarify your last paragraph I quoted then? Im genuinely unsure why you used the word “allegedly”, if you do believe the far-right ideas have causes large amounts of harm?

I also wasn’t clear on what you meant by second or third-hand in this context, so clarifying that would also help me understand your position better.

JamesÖz 🔸Jan 15, 2023, 10:40 PM
3 points
9 ∶ 6
in reply to: Geoffrey Miller’s comment on: Do better, please …
I’m confused by this—you say:
“the Blank Slate doctrine that all individuals must have exactly equal abilities, preferences, & values, and any empirical evidence challenging this doctrine must be instantly slandered)”
But when I look up Blank Slate doctrine on Google—I find nothing remotely related to this claim. Instead I see a lot of something like this:
“According to blank slate theory, the mind is completely blank at birth. From there, education, environment, and experiences – which are external, as well as material and/or immaterial – shape the child’s process of development.”
Also it’s not clear to me what you mean by “far-left”—do you have more specific labels in mind? I consider myself fairly left-wing but have never heard of this doctrine, and highly doubt that my even more lefty friends would endorse anything like your claim above.
Examples include every ‘idealistic’ communist regime that degenerated into a totalitarian nightmare, internal genocide, & surveillance state.
In this, you’re only considering far-left regimes that are highly state-controlled, rather than both libertarian and left-wing societies (e.g. anarchistic). If you look for these examples, you might actually find things are going pretty well internally (e.g. Zapatistas or Rojava) and that these societies don’t seek to eradicate sub-groups of a population—which is pretty uniform for far-right ideologies.
trying to tally up the relative historical harms that allegedly resulted, usually second- or third-hand, from holding certain views [emphasis mine].
Can you clarify what you mean here? I’m trying to be charitable but seems like you’re trying to cast doubt on the fact that far-right ideologies have caused harm to people, or diminish the harm that has been caused. Would appreciate you specifying exactly what you meant as this could easily be interpreted as this pretty reprehensible view.

JamesÖz 🔸Jan 13, 2023, 4:17 PM
1 point
9 ∶ 9
in reply to: 𝕮𝖎𝖓𝖊𝖗𝖆’s comment on: I Support Bostrom
This seems too simple. The email was going to be made public, which would (and did) cause harm to many people, so an apology could try to mitigate the harm of his words being shared in 2022. His apology largely failed on this point (in my opinion).

JamesÖz 🔸Jan 13, 2023, 10:40 AM
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.

JamesÖz 🔸Jan 13, 2023, 9:42 AM
28 points
20 ∶ 8
on: I Support Bostrom
Responding to one point only: I think more poorly of Bostrom being a “grand strategist for humanity” if he thinks the apology he wrote was the best one he honestly could have, given the large backlash and potential impact on his work and EA. Seems like quite a large mistake IMO (especially if the investigation now launched by Oxford leads to him losing his post)

Link to article mentioning the investigation: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/blacks-more-stupid-than-whites-wrote-oxford-don-8gsj8l0wf

edit: added the word honestly to be clearer

JamesÖz 🔸Jan 3, 2023, 10:18 PM
16 points
6 ∶ 3
in reply to: Jan_Kulveit’s comment on: If EA Community-Building Could Be Net-Negative, What Follows?
- this New Yorker piece, with Zoe explaining “My recommendations were not intended to catch a specific risk, precisely because specific risks are hard to predict” but still saying … “But, yes, would we have been less likely to see this crash if we had incentivized whistle-blowers or diversified the portfolio to be less reliant on a few central donors? I believe so.””My recommendations were not intended to catch a specific risk, precisely because specific risks are hard to predict” but still saying … “But, yes, would we have been less likely to see this crash if we had incentivized whistle-blowers or diversified the portfolio to be less reliant on a few central donors? I believe so.”
To be fair, this seems like a reasonable statement on Zoe’s part:
- If we had incentivised whistle-blowers to come forward around shady things happening at FTX, would we have known about FTX fraud sooner and been less reliant on FTX funding? Very plausibly yes. She says “likely” which is obviously not particularly specific, but this would fit my definition of likely.
- If EA had diversified our portfolio to be less reliant on a few central donors, this would have also (quite obviously) mean the crash had less impact on EA overall, so this also seems true.
Basically, as other comments have stated, you do little to actually say why these proposed reforms are, as you initially said, bad or would have no impact. I think if you’re going to make a statement like:
“it seems clear proposed reforms would not have prevented or influenced the FTX fiasco”
You need to actually provide some evidence or reasoning for this, as clearly lots of people don’t believe it’s clear. Additionally, if it feels unfair to call Zoe “not epistemically virtuous” when you’re making quite bold claims, without any reasoning laid out, then saying it would be too time-intensive to explain your thinking.
For example, you say here that you’re concerned about what democratisation actually looks like, which is a fair point and useful object-level argument, but this seems more like a question of implementation rather than the actual idea is necessarily bad.

JamesÖz 🔸Dec 29, 2022, 3:45 PM
10 points
5 ∶ 0
in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: StrongMinds should not be a top-rated charity (yet)
meta-comment: If you’re going to edit a comment, it would be useful to be specific and say how you edited the comment e.g. in this case, I think you changed the word “disregarded” to something weaker on further reflection.

JamesÖz 🔸Dec 27, 2022, 11:20 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Ben_West🔸’s comment on: Radical tactics can increase support for more moderate groups
Thanks for the comment Ben—that’s very kind of you!

JamesÖz 🔸Dec 27, 2022, 8:03 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jamie_Harris’s comment on: Radical tactics can increase support for more moderate groups
Thanks for the kind words! Our new Director of Research did all the analysis for this (I still did the methodology) and he’s quite a whiz at data analysis, so he can take all the credit for that side of things!
Good to know that it fits in well with your previous findings. I also think this supports a similar loose set of hypotheses I had going into this.
Re it being less good for issues with low levels of public support, I think what you say is broadly true, with a caveat. I think for issues with low public support, it’s not often that there is a big base of people who oppose an issue and we slowly win people other; Instead, I think it’s more like that most of the population don’t really have a view, and using radical tactics, you’re getting them to actually form a view on an issue. I think the best example for me of this is the chart below, which shows public support for BLM (the group, not the issue) post-George Floyd protests. I think Animal Rebellion does similar stuff—It will turn a bunch of people off, it will probably attract some people, but ultimately it’s getting a lot more people to actually take a stance. Obviously the balance of this is important, and something that it doesn’t feel like we have great evidence on.

JamesÖz 🔸Dec 24, 2022, 8:03 PM
6 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: What you prioritise is mostly moral intuition
Thanks for the thoughtful reply Michael! I think I was thinking more along what you said in your edit: empirical beliefs are very important, but we (or EAs at least) don’t really disagree on them e.g. objectively there are billions of chickens killed for food each year. Furthermore, we can actually resolve empirical disagreements with research etc such that if we do hold differing empirical views, we can find out who is actually right (or closer to the truth). On the other hand, with moral questions, it feels like you can’t actually resolve a lot of these in any meaningful way to find one correct answer. As a result, roughly holding empirical beliefs constant, moral beliefs seem to be a crux that decides what you prioritise.
I also agree with your point that differing moral intuitions probably lead to different views on worldview prioritisation (e.g. animal welfare vs global poverty) rather than intervention prioritisation (although this is also true for things like StrongMinds vs AMF).
Also appreciate the correction on person-affecting views (I feel like I tried to read a bunch of stuff on the Forum about this, including a lot from you, but still get a bit muddled up!). Will read some of the links you sent and amend the main post.

JamesÖz 🔸Dec 20, 2022, 4:30 PM
8 points
4 ∶ 0
on: SoGive’s 2023 plans + funding request
This is very cool! One thing that was particularly notable for me:

“In 2023, we aim to recruit c50-100 new volunteers”

This is a crazy high number! How many do you guys have currently? And do you do much active recruitment or do volunteers tend to find SoGive organically?

JamesÖz 🔸Dec 20, 2022, 12:05 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Sanjay’s comment on: Radical tactics can increase support for more moderate groups
Ah I’ve understood you now! I don’t see what you said being a problem as we explicitly put a sentence description in the survey for both JSO and Friends of the Earth explaining a tiny bit about who they were (e.g. they use radical tactics) without anchoring respondents too much. So I’m quite confident that respondents would have known JSO was utilising more disruptive tactics relative to Friends of the Earth. In addition, given how much media coverage JSO got during this week (and for previous actions) I would be quite surprised if a good proportion of people in the UK (50%+?) hadn’t already seen some reference to JSO in the context of arrest, police or disruptive protest.
Agreed about the stated intentions vs action point. I think increasing support for a policy can be a useful public opinion signal, but JSO probably also wants increased desire to take action on climate change (e.g. sign a petition, attend protest, etc), which we didn’t find a change in.

JamesÖz 🔸 19 Dec 2022 12:45 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Joseph Richardson’s comment on: Radical tactics can increase support for more moderate groups
Hi Joseph, thanks for your comment! It might have been a misunderstanding but we’re definitely not claiming the top panel of Figure 4 is causal. It might have been because I cut out parts of our result section from the full report to make the EA Forum post shorter, but we discuss that the top part is cross-sectional as you say, and the bottom panel of Figure 4 (with difference scores) is more causal evidence.

JamesÖz 🔸 19 Dec 2022 11:26 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Sanjay’s comment on: Radical tactics can increase support for more moderate groups
Hi Sanjay, thanks for the good questions! Since you said you were looking, the most relevant bit of research to this topic is by Simpson et al. (2022) who did experimental research on the radical flank effect, both for radical tactics and a radical agenda. Interestingly, they find that a radical agenda had no effect, but radical tactics did. On your questions:
- On the 92% figure, we weren’t explicit about this but yes, we also estimate that this is over-inflated vs reality for the reasons you said (people do weird things on surveys). In both this survey and a previous one for Animal Rebellion, we asked decoy questions about awareness of fictional organisations, and elicited awareness values of around 60% and 20% respectively, which is obviously very weird. We’re not exactly sure how we’re going to use this information to adjust our estimates, so feedback welcome. I wasn’t too concerned about that particular result as I actually think that value is the least interesting of all of our findings, and don’t think it’s particularly informative for understanding the actual impact JSO had. I’ll make an edit in the document though to be more explicit that this is likely overinflated so good point!
- We hadn’t done that particular analysis (for people who went from 0 awareness to >0 awareness) but we can definitely do so! I’ll put that on the list of additional analyses to do (or consider doing).
- This is definitely a good point and like you say, a limitation of surveys as we can generally only gather people’s stated intentions, rather than their actions. There seems to be a good amount of research that supports increased identification with a movement leads to increased willingness to join and support the movement (E.g. financially) so I think the link isn’t super tenuous.

JamesÖz 🔸 19 Dec 2022 11:12 UTC
11 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: jsteinhardt’s comment on: Update on spending for CEA-run events
To continue the tangent, I’m pretty sure this is not true for Huel. From their UK website:
All ingredients listed in Huel Powder v3.0 and Black Edition Huel are low FODMAP and for this reason they can be used alongside the Low FODMAP Diet and as part of your dietary routine if you have IBS. If you have IBS and an extremely busy lifestyle where convenience is a top priority, Huel could form a part of your eating routine to ensure you are achieving a regular meal pattern and optimal nutrition.