Jamie_Harris

• Jamie_Harris 23 Nov 2020 20:45 UTC

  1 point

  on: Learn­ings about liter­a­ture re­view strat­egy from re­search prac­tice sessions

  “Search­ing smartly is of­ten more effec­tive than go­ing down the cita­tion trail” I’d love more de­tail /​ clar­ifi­ca­tion on this if you’re happy to share? I think I pretty much ex­clu­sively go down the cita­tion trail.

  Re­lat­edly, what’s the benefit of hav­ing “a pile of pa­pers ready to look at” be­fore you start read­ing them? Un­less you’re try­ing to be sys­tem­atic and com­pre­hen­sive (in which case you might as wel gather them all first), it seems to me that read­ing through pa­pers as you go helps you re­al­ise if you need to ad­just your search terms or add new ones, or if you’re just hit­ting diminish­ing re­turns on the re­view gen­er­ally. I pretty much just Google Scholar search and start read­ing the first item that comes up.

• Jamie_Harris 19 Nov 2020 19:37 UTC

  1 point

  on: Please Take the 2020 EA Survey

  Look­ing for­ward to see­ing the re­sults!

  Minor com­ment: there was a ques­tion that asked for “up to 1” re­sponse in each column, where I wasn’t sure if this was a typo (and should have said row); I couldn’t re­ally make sense of it ei­ther way, with the two columns that were available.

An­i­mal product al­ter­na­tives for-profit roles spot-check

• Jamie_Harris 24 Oct 2020 7:27 UTC

  5 points

  on: List of EA-re­lated organisations

  Cool list! I’m sur­prised there aren’t more or­gani­sa­tions on this list that meet at least one of your three crite­ria.

  Some com­ments be­low and fur­ther ex­am­ples that fo­cus mostly on an­i­mal ad­vo­cacy, be­cause it’s the area I’m most knowl­edge­able about, but could prob­a­bly be ap­plied similarly to other cause ar­eas. I’m partly shar­ing these com­ments be­cause we use similar crite­ria to work out which or­gani­sa­tions to fo­cus An­i­mal Ad­vo­cacy Ca­reers’ re­search on (e.g. our spot-check of non­profit roles, and we have a sur­vey we’re go­ing to send out in the next few weeks), and I’m in­ter­ested in feed­back.

  I don’t think this is a use­ful or even pos­si­ble dis­tinc­tion to make, since many or­gani­sa­tions lie on a con­tinuum of com­mit­ment to EA val­ues.

  Agreed. It get’s pretty messy, whichever crite­ria you use, be­cause all are sub­jec­tive. I tend to think of the two main crite­ria as:

  (1) Ex­plicit iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and al­ign­ment with the goals and prin­ci­ples of effec­tive al­tru­ism.

  (2) High cost-effec­tive­ness.

  Are cur­rently recom­mended by GiveWell or An­i­mal Char­ity Evaluators

  This is one group’s judge­ment on goal (2). For An­i­mal Ad­vo­cacy Ca­reers, I’ve been us­ing the slightly looser defi­ni­tion of any or­gani­sa­tions that are cur­rently or formerly “Top Char­i­ties” or “Stand­out char­i­ties.” This would add quite a few to your list.

  • An­i­mal Equality

  • Com­pas­sion in World Farm­ing USA

  • Fed­er­a­tion of In­dian An­i­mal Pro­tec­tion Organisations

  • Hu­mane So­ciety of the United States Farm An­i­mal Pro­tec­tion Campaign

  • L214

  • Mercy For Animals

  • New Harvest

  • Non­hu­man Rights Project

  • ProVeg International

  • Sin­er­gia Animal

  • So­ciedade Vege­tar­i­ana Brasileira

  • Ve­gan Outreach

  If you wanted to broaden/​loosen the crite­ria a bit fur­ther (but still use eval­u­a­tions by ex­ter­nal groups, rather than your own judge­ment), the next steps might be:

  • In­clud­ing any groups that have re­ceived grants by Open Philan­thropy (we’re plan­ning to in­clude this crite­rion for our sur­vey, notwith­stand­ing a cou­ple of other ex­clu­sion crite­ria)

  • In­clud­ing any groups that have re­ceived grants by other highly EA-al­igned grant-mak­ing bod­ies, e.g. ACE, EA Funds (we’re not us­ing this crite­rion, in part be­cause both of these groups tend to make more spec­u­la­tive bets, in­clud­ing to smaller or­gani­sa­tions, and in part just be­cause it would prob­a­bly give us a re­ally long list of or­gani­sa­tions to con­tact for the sur­vey)

  • Some­thing we umm and arr about is whether to in­clude any/​all groups who par­ti­ci­pate in the (The Hu­mane League-co­or­di­nated) Open Wing Alli­ance. (Not in­clud­ing in our forth­com­ing sur­vey.)

  Have ex­plic­itly al­igned them­selves with EA

  Similar to my (1) but your defi­ni­tion is a bit nar­rower, I think. I think that there are a large num­ber of or­gani­sa­tions that would fit this crite­rion to some ex­tent. Groups from your list who fit this, in my opinion:

  • Veganuary

  • Sen­tience Politics

  • Global Food Partners

  • Aquatic Life Institute

  • 50by40

  • Cre­dence Institute

  • Farmed An­i­mal Funders

  But also, most of the or­gani­sa­tions on the list above of ACE cur­rent or former top or stand­out char­i­ties (per­haps es­pe­cially Mercy For An­i­mals, An­i­mal Equal­ity, and ProVeg). Again, many of the orgs in the Open Wing Alli­ance ar­guably fit this crite­rion.

  Were in­cu­bated by Char­ity Entrepreneurship

  In­ter­est­ing. I guess this is a proxy for both my (1) and (2)? Cre­dence In­sti­tute fit this crite­rion.

  Have en­gaged with the EA com­mu­nity (e.g. by post­ing on the EA Fo­rum or at­tend­ing EA Global)

  This seems veeeery broad and I imag­ine there are lots that would be added by this crite­rion. Per­son­ally I wouldn’t use it. Some that I can re­mem­ber off the top of my head that fit this:

  • Pour l’Égal­ité Animale

  • Com­pas­sion in World Farming

  • Ve­gan­uary (again)

  But I’m sure there are many more, I just haven’t been track­ing it.

  Lower im­por­tance com­ment: Given that both 80,000 Hours and An­i­mal Char­ity Eval­u­a­tors are in “In­fras­truc­ture,” I’d put An­i­mal Ad­vo­cacy Ca­reers in that cat­e­gory too. Maybe also WANBAM and CEEALAR. I’d also re­clas­sify Sen­tience In­sti­tute as “Far fu­ture” since that is our fo­cus, even if our work to date has mostly fo­cused on an­i­mal ad­vo­cacy(e.g.s of two ex­cep­tions); we have forth­com­ing work on ar­tifi­cial sen­tience, for ex­am­ple.

• Jamie_Harris 22 Oct 2020 21:34 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Mauricio’s comment on: What Helped the Voice­less? His­tor­i­cal Case Studies

  Seems like we agree on a lot! I don’t think I wrote my sum­maries and your re-phras­ings seem to me to be very similar to what I in­tended.

  I agree that look­ing at causes and fac­tors in­fluenc­ing “benefi­cial out­comes” is in­ter­est­ing and use­ful, just a slightly differ­ent pur­pose from look­ing at the causes and fac­tors in­fluenc­ing the suc­cesses of ally-based move­ments.

  <<I’d also love to hear other con­struc­tive feed­back/​ad­vice for do­ing bet­ter his­tor­i­cal work in the fu­ture, if you have any off the top of your head.>>

  I’m no ex­pert and am hop­ing to start do­ing some more syn­the­sis /​ com­par­i­son of our case stud­ies so far soon, which is where some of these method­olog­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tions will come into play. Ive writ­ten about some of the method­olog­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tions here in some depth. https://​​www.sen­tien­ce­in­sti­tute.org/​​blog/​​what-can-the-farmed-an­i­mal-move­ment-learn-from-history

  Some more “prac­ti­cal” tips which may or may not be use­ful and may or may not be ob­vi­ous:

  • a few times I’ve come across nu­mer­ous peo­ple as­sert­ing that a par­tic­u­lar change was highly in­fluen­tial or that that X led to Y, but the cita­tions trace back to in­fer­ence from chronolog­i­cal or­der of events and maybe one or two sup­port­ing anec­do­tal com­ments. I’m gen­er­ally pretty hes­i­tant to make strong causal claims or to re­peat causal claims made by oth­ers.

  • typ­ing in the name of the move­ment you’re look­ing at plus the word “his­tory” into Google Scholar and then go­ing through the re­sults seems to be a de­cent way to start.

  • I think you’ll of­ten hit pretty rapidly diminish­ing re­turns on time in­vested af­ter the first 2-5 books/​ar­ti­cles you read on a par­tic­u­lar topic, but you’ll keep find­ing use­ful in­for­ma­tion (of strate­gic im­por­tance) and oc­ca­sion­ally chang­ing your view on some­thing you were quite con­fi­dent about ear­lier for quite a long time af­ter that.

  • some­times re­search gets a lit­tle siloed by dis­ci­pline, but his­to­ri­ans, le­gal schol­ars, so­ciol­o­gists, poli­ti­cal sci­en­tists, and economists of­ten each have some­thing to add to the un­der­stand­ing of a par­tic­u­lar move­ment or case study.

• Jamie_Harris 20 Oct 2020 20:01 UTC

  13 points

  on: What Helped the Voice­less? His­tor­i­cal Case Studies

  Thanks very much for do­ing this work. I’m glad to see other peo­ple tak­ing an in­ter­est in his­tor­i­cal ev­i­dence to in­form ques­tions about global pri­ori­ties and to in­form strate­gies for moral cir­cle ex­pan­sion.

  I think this is an Im­pres­sive overview to have cre­ated in a short pe­riod of time. And I like the efforts to ex­plic­itly as­sess cau­sa­tion, re­sist­ing the ever-pre­sent temp­ta­tion to tell a chronolog­i­cal nar­ra­tive and as­sume causal re­la­tion­ships where there is lit­tle ev­i­dence to sug­gest them.

  Most of Sen­tience In­sti­tute’s case stud­ies to date have fo­cused pri­mar­ily on one coun­try, or a com­par­i­son be­tween two coun­tries. I found the big pic­ture, in­ter­na­tional con­sid­er­a­tion in­ter­est­ing. In gen­eral, I’m up­dat­ing slightly to­wards the im­por­tance of in­ter­na­tional pres­sure in caus­ing fur­ther change and a strat­egy of, as you sug­gest, con­cen­trat­ing re­sources in par­tic­u­lar promis­ing lo­ca­tions so that rep­re­sen­ta­tives of those coun­tries might sooner be­come in­ter­na­tional ad­vo­cates. I was find­ing ten­ta­tive ev­i­dence for similar claims in my case study of the US anti-death penalty move­ment, which in­cludes some com­par­i­son to Europe (and briefer com­par­i­son to the wider in­ter­na­tional situ­a­tion). If you haven’t read that, you may find that in­ter­est­ing.

  One other thing I was quite ex­cited about is the fol­low­ing com­ment:

  Poli­ti­cal short-ter­mism usu­ally works against fu­ture gen­er­a­tions, but it can work for fu­ture gen­er­a­tions if poli­ti­ci­ans’ and lob­by­ists’ con­cern with the short term keeps them from strongly op­pos­ing com­mit­ments to one day care about fu­ture gen­er­a­tions… For fu­ture gen­er­a­tions, this might look like ad­vo­cat­ing for poli­cies, such as com­mit­tees or funds for fu­ture gen­er­a­tions, that will not be im­ple­mented for a decade or more.

  I wasn’t quite sure how this fol­lowed from the his­tor­i­cal ev­i­dence that you ex­am­ine, but I thought it was a cool ar­gu­ment, and some­thing I hadn’t thought about ex­plic­itly in terms of how longter­mist moral cir­cle ex­pan­sion efforts might look differ­ent from neart­er­mist work on an­i­mal ad­vo­cacy or other cause ar­eas that re­late to MCE. If we care about, say, max­imis­ing the chances that fac­tory farm­ing ends, rather than helping an­i­mals as much as pos­si­ble within the next 10 (or 100) years, then we might be able to effec­tively trade im­me­di­acy for in­creased rad­i­cal­ism (or dura­bil­ity or some other key pri­or­ity).

  ————

  Of course, with a post of this size, there are a lot of nit­picks and com­ments it’s tempt­ing to offer. But I’ll avoid those and fo­cus on what I think is my most sub­stan­tial con­cern. Also, I’ll note that I read this post spread over sev­eral evenings, so if this is a lit­tle in­co­her­ent or in­ac­cu­rate at times, I apol­o­gise!

  It seems like you’re pur­su­ing two sep­a­rate goals in this re­search:

  1. Iden­ti­fy­ing/​as­sess­ing fac­tors in­fluenc­ing the suc­cess of ally-based so­cial move­ments (i.e. so­cial move­ments whose in­tended benefi­cia­ries are not the same as the ad­vo­cates) in or­der to draw strate­gic im­pli­ca­tions for ad­vo­cacy for fu­ture gen­er­a­tions, which is an ally-based so­cial move­ment,

  2. Iden­ti­fy­ing/​as­sess­ing fac­tors that af­fect the in­ter­ests of fu­ture gen­er­a­tions.

  Ideally, I don’t think you would mix these, e.g. in the in­clu­sion crite­ria (i.e. the se­lec­tion of the case stud­ies), e.g. in cre­at­ing a sin­gle model that blurs the two goals.

  In line with goal (1), you have in­cluded sev­eral ally-based so­cial move­ments: anti-slav­ery (mostly free peo­ple ad­vo­cat­ing for /​ de­cid­ing on the fate of slaves) and en­vi­ron­men­tal­ism (pre­sent-day hu­mans ad­vo­cat­ing for /​ de­cid­ing on the fate of the en­vi­ron­ment). How­ever, you also in­clude move­ments that are not ally-based — op­pressed peo­ples seek­ing to em­power them­selves through democrati­sa­tion and peo­ple ad­vo­cat­ing for reg­u­la­tions on ge­netic en­g­ineer­ing in or­der to pro­tect them­selves and hu­man so­ciety more broadly. Since no jus­tifi­ca­tion was pro­vided for the in­clu­sion of democrati­sa­tion, I was ini­tially con­fused by this choice, but some clar­ity was offered by the jus­tifi­ca­tion for the in­clu­sion of ge­netic en­g­ineer­ing:

  The gov­er­nance of ge­netic en­g­ineer­ing has re­duced a sig­nifi­cant threat to fu­ture gen­er­a­tions: cer­tain en­g­ineered pathogens could bring about hu­man ex­tinc­tion, keep­ing fu­ture gen­er­a­tions from ex­ist­ing.

  Hence, I in­fer that goal (2) in­fluenced the case study se­lec­tion. This is sup­ported by the jus­tifi­ca­tion for the in­clu­sion of the en­vi­ron­men­tal­ism move­ment, which seems to mix (1) and (2):

  en­vi­ron­men­tal ad­vo­cates have achieved sig­nifi­cant suc­cesses for fu­ture gen­er­a­tions, as well as other en­tities that have no di­rect poli­ti­cal power: ecosys­tems.

  I think this cri­tique of the method­ol­ogy is quite im­por­tant, be­cause it di­rectly bears on one of the main ar­gu­ments you ad­vance in this re­search: “in­clu­sive val­ues” were not that im­por­tant in driv­ing change, which sug­gests that fur­ther MCE is not as likely as a sim­ple ex­trap­o­la­tion from the trend to­wards ex­panded moral cir­cles in the past few cen­turies might im­ply.

  In­clud­ing a fo­cus on move­ments that have only ac­ci­den­tally benefited fu­ture gen­er­a­tions and then not­ing that the changes oc­curred mainly be­cause they benefited pow­er­ful groups (pre­sent hu­mans) rather than be­cause peo­ple in­tended to help fu­ture gen­er­a­tions seems tau­tolog­i­cal. (I think this might be a pretty un­char­i­ta­ble in­ter­pre­ta­tion of your in­ten­tions; apolo­gies if so, but hope­fully it helps to make the point.) Hence, I think it’s more valuable to eval­u­ate move­ments by their own goals, or at least by their effects on their in­tended benefi­cia­ries (e.g. the en­vi­ron­ment rather than fu­ture gen­er­a­tions for the en­vi­ron­men­tal­ism move­ment, e.g. pre­sent gen­er­a­tions for ge­netic en­g­ineer­ing).

  By com­par­i­son, in se­lect­ing Sen­tience In­sti­tute’s case stud­ies, we have fo­cused on ally-based move­ments (with a sec­ondary im­por­tant con­sid­er­a­tion be­ing chronolog­i­cal prox­im­ity). Hence, our case stud­ies have been: An­tis­lav­ery, anti-abor­tion, anti-death penalty, and pris­on­ers’ rights (though the lat­ter turned out to be less “ally-based” than I was ex­pect­ing). I’ve also got one on the Fair Trade move­ment un­der­way. Th­ese were cho­sen prin­ci­pally for com­pa­ra­bil­ity with the farmed an­i­mal move­ment but are similarly if not equally ap­pli­ca­ble to ad­vo­cacy for fu­ture gen­er­a­tions.

  Although I see this con­cern as weak­en­ing the case that you put for­ward, I do think weak ev­i­dence is use­ful, and I’ve still up­dated my views a lit­tle away from the tractabil­ity of chang­ing the course of his­tory and like­li­hood of fur­ther MCE.

  Thanks again for this very cool re­search!

• Jamie_Harris 17 Oct 2020 10:57 UTC

  1 point

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

  Have you iden­ti­fied the key differ­ence(s) be­tween your calcu­la­tion and John’s calcu­la­tion that leads to the differ­ent re­sult? It might be helpful to call this out

  No, I haven’t gone through and done that. Ac­tu­ally, John’s calcu­la­tions still come out in favour of buy­ing from a fi­nan­cial per­spec­tive, albeit by a much smaller mar­gin than in my calcu­la­tions; I think he was put off for other rea­sons.

  Pretty minor point, but the 3.5% dis­count rate should de­cline over time and it doesn’t seem you’ve fac­tored this in (it shouldn’t re­ally change much though as you’re not look­ing over a very long time scale)

  I’m prob­a­bly do­ing the maths com­pletely wrong on that bit… sug­ges­tions for cor­rect for­mula to use are wel­come. Com­ment­ing on the sheet is cur­rently on if you want to com­ment on di­rectly.

  It could ac­tu­ally be higher or lower de­pend­ing on an in­di­vi­d­ual’s preferred cause area/​un­der­ly­ing eth­i­cal views. The gen­eral point that you’re mak­ing that buy­ing a house only pro­vides ac­cess to money when older, and there­fore that this be­comes sub­ject to dis­count­ing is a very use­ful one though

  Yeah I haven’t got my head very thor­oughly round the var­i­ous ar­gu­ments on this, so thanks for shar­ing. My im­pres­sion was also that us­ing 3.5% didn’t make much sense and should prob­a­bly ei­ther go lower than that (for “pa­tient” rea­sons) or much higher (if you think op­por­tu­ni­ties for cost-effec­tive giv­ing will diminish rapidly for var­i­ous rea­sons.

  
  

  Some rele­vant con­text I prob­a­bly should have added to the post was that I did this calcu­la­tion be­cause I was very sur­prised at John’s over­all con­clu­sion and wanted to check it, and, de­spite this not be­ing very thor­ough or any­where near my re­search “ex­per­tise”, I thought other peo­ple might benefit from these rough and ready efforts, so de­cided to share.

• Jamie_Harris 17 Oct 2020 10:50 UTC

  1 point

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

  No, I didn’t list the “other” pros and cons, this is just the fi­nan­cial per­spec­tive.

  I don’t have a good sense of how difficult it is to move houses. But my guess is that a de­ci­sion to move for work or not wouldn’t be that de­pen­dent on sel­l­ing a house. E.g. you ei­ther want to stay, come what may, be­cause of rea­sons like friends, fam­ily, part­ners etc, or you’re per­son­ally happy to move, and wouldn’t mind sel­l­ing then rent­ing?

• Jamie_Harris 17 Oct 2020 7:00 UTC

  6 points

  on: Jamie_Har­ris’s Shortform

  Buy­ing a house will prob­a­bly save you lots of money, which you can later donate, but it might not make much differ­ence (and may work out as nega­tive) in terms of your abil­ity to do good.

  It seems like com­mon sense that buy­ing a house saves you from wast­ing money on rent and works out bet­ter, fi­nan­cially, in the long term. But ear­lier this year, John Halstead wrote a blog­post pro­vid­ing a bunch of rea­sons not to buy a house.

  I had an­other look at John’s calcu­la­tions. I kept the ba­sic calcu­la­tions the same, but added a few con­sid­er­a­tions and re-checked the ap­pro­pri­ate num­bers for Lon­don (where I live). I also added var­i­ous differ­ent tabs of the spread­sheet to com­pare things like vari­a­tions in in­ter­est rates, prop­erty prices, timeframes for buy­ing and sel­l­ing, and other costs. In ev­ery sce­nario, un­less there’s a hous­ing crash shortly af­ter you buy, it looks like buy­ing comes out as far, far bet­ter, from a fi­nan­cial per­spec­tive. In the best guess, re­al­is­tic sce­nario, buy­ing came out as about £550,000 bet­ter af­ter 10 years. John has also had an­other look at his calcu­la­tions since his post and seems more op­ti­mistic about buy­ing. I haven’t looked at figures and costs for coun­tries other than the UK, but the differ­ences are so large that I’d quite sur­prised if in­vest­ing and rent­ing came out as more favourable in (m)any coun­tries.

  This doesn’t ad­dress the con­cerns about buy­ing in John’s blog post (e.g. that you will only be able ac­cess the money when you’re older). But if you’re in­ter­ested in pa­tient philan­thropy, and are happy to donate more ac­cu­mu­lated wealth in sev­eral decades’ time (when you down­size or die) rather than hav­ing a strong prefer­ence for donat­ing less sooner, then buy­ing a house looks bet­ter. (For dis­cus­sion, see “Giv­ing now vs giv­ing later” and “How be­com­ing a ‘pa­tient philan­thropist’ could al­low you to do far more good”)

  De­spite the large raw differ­ence be­tween buy­ing vs. rent­ing and in­vest­ing, these differ­ences might mean sur­pris­ingly lit­tle, in terms of abil­ity to do good in the world, if you ap­ply a dis­count to the value of fu­ture money to calcu­late its net pre­sent value. If you ap­ply a high dis­count rate, then the gains are prac­ti­cally zero. In­deed, some EA orgs ex­press a strong prefer­ence for money sooner rather than later. I haven’t worked this bit out prop­erly, but if you take these num­bers liter­ally (and re­ject pa­tient philan­thropy) it might be bet­ter to just donate sooner rather than to save up for a de­posit.

Jamie_Har­ris’s Shortform

• Jamie_Harris 10 Oct 2020 11:21 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Sanjay’s comment on: Get­ting money out of poli­tics and into charity

  You (the OP) could also think of col­lab­o­rat­ing with an ex­ist­ing plat­form as a lower cost test of the idea. If it works well in that situ­a­tion and you later re­al­ise that the lack of a tai­lored plat­form is a bar­rier to scal­ing up, you could seek to cre­ate one at that point.

  Another thought on the lower cost test idea: try to get buy-in from Repub­li­cans be­fore spend­ing as much time on out­reach to Democrats. If you’re failing to get in­ter­est from Repub­li­cans, the idea might not work.

  (Also, like San­jay, I re­ally like the idea in prin­ci­ple.)

• Jamie_Harris 7 Oct 2020 20:58 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: 96758’s comment on: A Brief Overview of Re­cruit­ment and Re­ten­tion Research

  Thanks very much! The seem­ingly low im­por­tance of salary to re­cruit­ment and re­ten­tion was one of my main up­dates from tbis pro­ject. I don’t have a lot to add be­yond that and what’s in the post (If you’re in­ter­ested, I’d en­courage read­ing the sum­maries of the rele­vant stud­ies on the spread­sheet and maybe read­ing the full stud­ies.)

A Brief Overview of Re­cruit­ment and Re­ten­tion Research

• Jamie_Harris 27 Sep 2020 20:47 UTC

  11 points

  on: What ac­tu­ally is the ar­gu­ment for effec­tive al­tru­ism?

  “The greater the de­gree of spread, the more you’re giv­ing up by not search­ing.” This makes sense. But I don’t think you have to agree with the “big” part of premise 1 to sup­port and en­gage with the pro­ject of effec­tive al­tru­ism, e.g. you could think that there are small differ­ences but those differ­ences are worth pur­su­ing any­way. The “big” part seems like a com­mon claim within effec­tive al­tru­ism but not nec­es­sar­ily a core com­po­nent?

  (You didn’t claim ex­plic­itly in the post above that you have to agree with the “big” part but I think it’s im­plied? I also haven’t listened to the epi­sode yet.)

• Jamie_Harris 19 Sep 2020 20:36 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Ben_West’s comment on: How have you be­come more (or less) en­gaged with EA in the last year?

  Ex­actly the same for me, minus the bit about peo­ple mov­ing away.

Ca­reers ad­vis­ing calls and an on­line course about im­pact-fo­cused an­i­mal advocacy

• Jamie_Harris 5 Sep 2020 13:40 UTC

  19 points

  on: Ask­ing for advice

  +1 for writ­ing a con­cise doc­u­ment out­lin­ing your needs. +1 for per­son­ally lik­ing know­ing some­one is tak­ing notes on what you’re say­ing.

  I find it’s helpful to be es­pe­cially clear about the stage of com­ple­tion that some­thing is. E.g. I’ve given de­tailed feed­back on draft doc­u­ments be­fore­hand, only to re­al­ise by the end that the doc­u­ment was in­tended more as an in­com­plete brain­storm than a finished product. And I’ve failed to make that clear to oth­ers be­fore and re­ceived un­nec­es­sar­ily spe­cific feed­back.

Ca­reers (to help an­i­mals) in poli­tics, policy, and lobbying

• Jamie_Harris 28 Aug 2020 22:54 UTC

  1 point

  on: Cause/​char­ity se­lec­tion tradeoffs

  Here is a bunch of trade­offs that af­fect an­i­mal ad­vo­cacy. This post pro­vides oth­ers in EA more widely. (Apolo­gies, this is kind of the op­po­site to what you asked for, but I thought it was worth leav­ing them here any­way just in case it was helpful.)

• Jamie_Harris 17 Aug 2020 7:49 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: jackva’s comment on: In­for­ma­tional Lob­by­ing: The­ory and Effectiveness

  It also seems that the re­port some­what un­der-em­pha­sizes the idea of lob­by­ing equil­ibria where marginal in­creases by one side would be quickly coun­tered, which would make it look like ad­di­tional money could be effec­tive when in effect it is not.

  Thanks for shar­ing this. I’d be in­ter­ested if you’re aware of em­piri­cal ev­i­dence of this effect/​re­ac­tion hap­pen­ing? Or is this largely a the­o­ret­i­cal con­cern?