Jamie_Harris

• Jamie_Harris 15 Aug 2022 21:01 UTC

  6 points

  on: New study on whether an­i­mal welfare re­forms af­fect wider at­ti­tudes to­wards animals

  Faunalytics’ summary: https://​​faunalytics.org/​​what-messaging-makes-people-oppose-animal-farming/​​

• Jamie_Harris 28 Jul 2022 19:17 UTC

  12 points

  on: Re­think Pri­ori­ties 2022 Mid-Year Up­date: Progress, Plans, Funding

  I’m a bit confused by this bit:

  “We presently have to turn down some large commissions due to lack of staff capacity, and lack of funds in place to expand our team (or to maintain the team at its current size).”

  Do you charge for your commissions? I’m struggling to get my head around why the ability to take commissions could be constrained by both lack of funding and staff capacity.

  Thoughts I have about what might explain it /​ what you might mean:

  • you don’t actually charge and so more commissions just means more work for free. (Or you accept low paid commissions.)

  • commissions don’t always come at convenient times so sometimes there are bursts of too much work to do /​ too many requests, compared to some quieter periods where researchers have to focus more on their own independently generated projects.

  • you have both the research talent and the funding, it’s just that there’s a time delay for hiring, onboarding etc before you can convert both components into increased capacity.

  Clarification on which of these, if any, seems closest to RP’s situation would be welcome. Thanks!

• Jamie_Harris 16 Jul 2022 9:02 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Jacy’s comment on: The Fu­ture Might Not Be So Great.

  I also put my intuitive scores into a copy of your spreadsheet.

  In my head, I’ve tended to simplify the picture into essentially the “Value Through Intent” argument vs the “Historical Harms” argument, since these seem liked the strongest arguments in either direction to me. In that framing, I lean towards the future being weakly positive.

  But this post is a helpful reminder that there are various other arguments pointing in either direction (which, in my case, overall push me towards a less optimistic view). My overall view still seems pretty close to zero at the moment though.

  Also interesting how wildly different each of our scores are. Partly I think this might be because I was quite confused/​worried about double-counting. Also maybe just not fully grasping some of the points listed in the post.

• Jamie_Harris 16 Jul 2022 6:59 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Jackson Wagner’s comment on: Why I’m skep­ti­cal of moral cir­cle ex­pan­sion as a cause area

  Ah okay, thanks for explaining. Sounds like by “pushing for moral circle expansion as a cause area”, you meant “pushing for moral circle expansion via direct advocacy” or something more specific like that. When I and others have talked about “moral circle expansion” as something that we should aim for, we’re usually including all sorts of more or less direct approaches to achieving those goals.

  (For what it’s worth, I do think that the direct moral advocacy is an important component, but it doesn’t have to be the only or even main one for you to think moral circle expansion is a promising cause area.)

• Jamie_Harris 14 Jul 2022 22:26 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Jackson Wagner’s comment on: Why I’m skep­ti­cal of moral cir­cle ex­pan­sion as a cause area

  “I think there are a lot of problems with the idea of directly pushing for moral circle expansion as a cause area—for starters, moral philosophy might not play a large role in actually driving moral progress. ”

  Could you please explain to me why, in your view, this is a “problem” with moral circle expansion as a cause area? Thanks!

• Jamie_Harris 14 Jul 2022 22:24 UTC

  2 points

  on: Why I’m skep­ti­cal of moral cir­cle ex­pan­sion as a cause area

  The middle point is pretty interesting! (I think questions of sustainability/​inevitability have mixed implications for aspiring effective altruists, because they might update your views on size/​importance and tractability in the opposite directions)

7 es­says on Build­ing a Bet­ter Future

• Jamie_Harris 18 Jun 2022 9:50 UTC

  17 points

  on: Me­gapro­jects for animals

  I enjoyed this post. And I appreciated some of the explanation in the intro. E.g. I can imagine this list being inspiring for donors (and hadn’t thought about it like that before).

  But is it much different from a list of (non-mega) project ideas?

  E.g. see this comment:

  “Rethink Priorities’ first incubated charity, Insect Welfare Project (provisional name) might be an example of launching something that eventually could absorb $100M when it finds an effective intervention and scales it. The Shrimp Welfare Project might be another example.”

  You could apply this logic to almost any animal charity that’s trying to find interventions that are both cost-effective and scalable.

  Once you adopt this perspective, the question could be switched from “which megaproject ideas can we think of?” to “how rapidly will we get diminishing returns on further investment in various plausibly cost-effective project ideas?”

• Jamie_Harris 11 Jun 2022 20:36 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Peter Wildeford’s comment on: Em­pha­size Vege­tar­ian Retention

  This is cool. What makes these polls “a better collection” in your view?

• Jamie_Harris 10 Jun 2022 8:31 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: BrownHairedEevee’s comment on: An­i­mal welfare orgs: what are your soft­ware and data anal­y­sis needs?

  I agree it’s “weird” in the sense of “unusual”, but it you mean “weird” in the sense of “unhelpful”, I’d be very grateful if you’re happy to elaborate why you’d prefer it the other way around!

• Jamie_Harris 4 Jun 2022 16:00 UTC

  14 points

  on: “Big tent” effec­tive al­tru­ism is very im­por­tant (par­tic­u­larly right now)

  I initially found myself nodding along with this post, but I then realised I didn’t really understand what point you were trying to make. Here are some things I think you argue for:

  • theoretically, EA could be either big tent or small tent

  • to the extent there is a meaningful distinction, it seems better in general for EA to aim to be big tent

  • Now is a particularly important time to aim for EA to be big tent

  • Here are some things that we could do help make EA more big tent.

  Am I right in thinking these are the core arguments?

  A more important concern of mine with this post is that I don’t really see any evidence or arguments presented for any of these four things. I think your writing style is nice, but I’m not sure why (apart from something to do with social norms or deference) community builders should update their views in the directions you’re advocating for?

• Jamie_Harris 2 Jun 2022 15:44 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: JasperGeh’s comment on: Guided by the Beauty of One’s Philoso­phies: Why Aes­thet­ics Matter

  I have a similar sense. Very interesting post and food for thought.

  But how would better aesthetics lead to positive impact? The mechanism I’m seeing is essentially “compliance” with views commonly held within the effective altruism community, or some other form of persuasion that doesn’t require understanding or agreement. There are exceptions where this would be helpful, but I expect this sort of persuasion to be net negative for effective altruism overall. (Low confidence.) As well as the post JasperGeh links to, here’s a recent one making some relevant points: https://​​forum.effectivealtruism.org/​​posts/​​xomFCNXwNBeXtLq53/​​bad-omens-in-current-community-building

  Additionally, when I tried the OP’s exercise of closing my eyes and imagining aesthetics for liberalism, I couldn’t think of any. I asked my friend (not involved in EA but very intelligent, well-read, politically involved) to do the same and they couldn’t think of anything either. The movements/​ideologies that do have strong aesthetics that jump to mind seem to rely heavily on compliance rather than truth seeking, e.g. religions, communism, fascism.

New study on whether an­i­mal welfare re­forms af­fect wider at­ti­tudes to­wards animals

• Jamie_Harris 30 Apr 2022 14:01 UTC

  4 points

  on: Is­sues with cen­tral­ised grantmaking

  I agree that centralised grant-making might mean that some promising projects are missed. But we’re not solely interested in this? We’re overall interested in:

  Average cost-effectiveness per $ granted * Number of $ we’re able to grant

  My intuition would be that the more decentralised the grant-making process, the more $ we’re able to grant.

  But this also requires us to invest more talent in grant-making, which means, in practice, fewer promising people applying for grants themselves, which might non-negligibly reduce average cost-effectiveness per $ granted.

  Beyond the above consideration, it seems unclear whether decentralised grant-making would overall increase of decrease the average cost-effectiveness. Sure, fewer projects above the current average cost-effectiveness would slip through the net, but so too fewer projects below the current average cost-effectiveness would slip through the net. So I’d expect these things to balance each other out roughly UNLESS we’re making a separate claim that the current grantmakers are making poor /​ miscalibrated decisions. But at that point, this is not an argument in favour of decentralising grant-making, but an argument in favour of replacing (or competing with) the current grantmakers.

  So maybe overall, decentralising grant-making would trade an increase in $ we’re able to grant for a small decrease in average cost-effectiveness of granted $.

  (I felt pretty confused writing these comments and suspect I’ve missed many relevant considerations, but thought I’d flesh out and share my intuitive concerns with the central argument of this post, rather than just sit on them.)

• Jamie_Harris 2 Apr 2022 9:09 UTC

  3 points

  on: Short­en­ing & en­light­en­ing dark ages as a sub-area of catas­trophic risk reduction

  This seems like a cool initial exploration of a potentially important area. Thank you + well done!

  The device idea seems intuitively promising.

  In a talk at EAGx Oxford, someone (I forget who—maybe Anders Sandberg) mentioned the idea that the internet archive is a tiny org with not much investment. If that whole infrastructure could be backed up somewhere and stored in a way that would survive loss of electricity/​other major systems above ground and also this location publicly known /​ easily accessible somehow, would that achieve the same purpose?

  (I have no technical knowledge about these things and for all I know, this already exists. I’m just spitballing.)

• Jamie_Harris 26 Mar 2022 8:18 UTC

  7 points

  on: Bibliog­ra­phy of EA writ­ings about fields and move­ments of in­ter­est to EA

  Cool list! I wrote a few other social movement case studies not on this list when I was working at Sentience Institute.

  (I think they’re more relevant to the farmed animal movement than to the effective altruism community but if this was an intentional rather than accidental exclusion, I would be interested to hear reasons why SI’s anti-slavery and Fair Trade case studies merit inclusion here but the others don’t.)

  Anti abortion movement: https://​​www.sentienceinstitute.org/​​anti-abortion

  Anti death penalty movement: https://​​www.sentienceinstitute.org/​​death-penalty

  Prisoners rights movement (less relevant, IMO): https://​​www.sentienceinstitute.org/​​prisoners-rights

  Additionally, you highlighted the anti-nuclear movement as worthy of further study. The focus was on the proliferation of nuclear power, but J (another former SI researcher) wrote a cool case study report which includes some interesting info about the anti-nuclear movement: https://​​www.sentienceinstitute.org/​​nuclear-power-clean-meat

• Jamie_Harris 12 Mar 2022 8:49 UTC

  2 points

  on: We Ran a “Next Steps” Re­treat for In­tro Fellows

  Do you have plans for follow-up on this retreat? Actually, since I’m reading this a month after it was posted; have you done any follow-up with these people already?

  (Context for the question: I’m running an in person retreat and think that the question of what follow-up to do afterwards /​ whether we can encourage longer-term engagement is one of my biggest uncertainties.)

• Jamie_Harris 12 Feb 2022 11:29 UTC

  4 points

  on: Which EA orgs provide feed­back on test tasks?

  Animal Advocacy Careers: with each of our hiring rounds so far (three), when we send emails to people who were invited to submit test tasks or interviews but who we’re not moving forward with their applications, we say that we can provide personalised feedback if they’d like.

  A surprisingly low proportion of people seem to ask for it. (Maybe half?)

  When we send out these emails, we also try to give a quick sense of the common strengths of our top candidates, plus the number of people who applied or made it to the stage they made it to, in case that context helps.

• Jamie_Harris 11 Jan 2022 23:48 UTC

  11 points

  on: Row­ing and Steer­ing the Effec­tive Altru­ism Movement

  <<I also know about a handful of people who have ‘jumped ship’; who, after spending many hundreds of hours working on effective altruism causes, have concluded that they are too disillusioned with the ship’s direction to stay on board and no longer wish to associate with the movement. These are not people who were never going to become highly engaged in the community in the first place. They are people who have contributed enormously to the effective altruism project and could have continued if they had been more confident in its ability to move in the right direction.>>

  I’d love to hear more about this. What were these people’s concerns? What sorts of things are they doing now that seem better? These questions seem relevant both to rowing and steering.

  (For context, I don’t know people like this. Maybe they know about important arguments I don’t. Should I jump ship too?)

• Jamie_Harris 29 Dec 2021 10:21 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Pablo’s comment on: Jamie_Har­ris’s Shortform

  I haven’t read Moravec’s book very thoroughly, but I ctrl+f’d for “simulation” and couldn’t see anything very explicitly discussing the idea that we might be living in a simulation. There are a number of instances where Moravec talks about running very detailed simulations (and implying that these would be functionally similar to humans). It’s possible (quite likely?) Bostrom didn’t ever see the 1995 article where Moravec “shrugs and waves his hand as if the idea is too obvious.”

  Either way, it seems true that (1) the idea itself predates Bostrom’s discussion in his 2003 article, (2) Bostrom’s discussion of this specific idea is more detailed than Moravec’s.

  Bostrom (2003) cited Moravec (1988), but not for this specific idea—it’s only for the idea that “One estimate, based on how computationally expensive it is to replicate the functionality of a piece of nervous tissue that we have already understood and whose functionality has been replicated in silico, contrast enhancement in the retina, yields a figure of ~10^14 operations per second for the entire human brain.”

  But yeah, his answer to the question “How did you come up with this?” in the 2008 article I linked to in the original post seems misleading, because he doesn’t mention Moravec at all and implies that he came up with the idea himself.