Jamie_Harris

Karma: 1,631

Jamie Harris is a researcher at Animal Advocacy Careers, a charity that he co-founded which seeks to address the career and talent bottlenecks in the animal advocacy movement, and at Sentience Institute, a social science think tank focused on social and technological change, especially the expansion of humanity’s moral circle.

As well as hosting The Sentience Institute Podcast, Jamie does a number of small projects and tasks to help grow and support the effective animal advocacy community more widely. He works on whatever he thinks are the best opportunities for him to improve the expected value of the long-term future.

Give Jamie anonymous advice / feedback here https://forms.gle/t5unVMRci1e1pAxD9

Jamie_Harris 11 Jan 2022 23:48 UTC
10 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.

Jamie_Harris 26 Dec 2021 21:22 UTC
2 points
in reply to: kierangreig’s comment on: World’s First Octopus Farm—Linkpost
Some of your thinking and estimates here seem reasonable and useful! I just want to pick up on one small subsection that surprised me:

“As in, say a country like Spain outlaws the practice of farming octopus (which in itself may be pretty unlikely), then I think a big multinational company like Nueva Pescanova (the company claiming to start the first commercial octopus farm) perhaps just goes to some other country they work in (and they are present in 20ish). ”

Why did this surprise me / why are our intuitions different?

I think there might be some difference in optimism about the value of legislation.

I expect that preventative action is much more tractable than retrospective action to abolish an industry that has already been developed. E.g. see “It is probably easier to abolish a practice through legislation if that practice is not in regular use” here: https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/death-penalty#the-causes-of-legislative-change . So challenging the first example of an unusually negative (and/or unusually unpopular) practice seems especially important. If fighting this specific company encourages a battle that spirals across several countries and results in legislation in several places but fails to stop this specific company farming octopus _somewhere then I imagine I would consider that to be a major victory.

Relatedly, I have in my head a model where anti octopus farming legislation in one country makes anti octopus farming legislation in another. E.g. see “Once influential international bodies adopt a value, they may exert pressure on institutions in other parts of the world to adopt the same value” at the same link as above.

Alternatively, maybe it’s because you’re focusing on helping the octopuses in question in this specific farm. Whereas my concern is not: “(how) can we prevent Nueva Pescanova farming and selling 3,000 tons of farmed octopus per year,” but “(how) can we prevent (octopus) farming?”

Jamie_Harris 26 Dec 2021 18:07 UTC
2 points
on: EA outreach to high school competitors
Glad to see discussion and suggestions for ways to reach out to people currently still at school! Thanks for the contribution.

“I want to discuss a possible modification to the strategy of high school outreach—specifically targeting high-level STEM (+logic, philosophy, and debate) competitors. It seems that this narrowing down would select for people who would be more likely to act on EA ideas.”

My sense is that this slightly misrepresents the current landscape. I think that, when it comes to school outreach, there are many possible combinations of the following variables:

(1) age of target audience, e.g. 11-15 years old, 16-18 years old, 18 years old only, etc. (2) outreach methods and proxies that you use as indicators of promisingness, e.g. high performing schools, olympiad participants, performance on an application process, recommendation from teachers, etc. (3) format, e.g. written online advice, an online course, a summer camp, an after school club, integrated into assemblies, etc. (4) focus cause/intervention area, e.g. all of EA, longtermism, extinction risk reduction, AI safety, rationality, etc. (5) “ask” and key metrics you, e.g. changing degree programmes, signing up for a newsletter, reading X resources, joining an EA group once they reach university, etc. (6) marketing strategy, e.g. career benefits, help you land a place at uni, impactful in itself, intrinsically interesting, etc.

I think that very few of the possible permutations have been tried. So your post proposes something specific within the second variable category I offered. That seems good, and I’d be keen to see more exploration. But I don’t think that there’s a very extensive current “strategy of high school outreach.” Given that the EA movement currently has quite a lot of funding and there are a decent number of people interested in EA movement building, I think the focus should be more on adding to the current portfolio of efforts than redirecting it.

It’s possible we already agree here and I was just reading too much into your exact phrasing.

One even more nitpicky comment:

“It seems that university outreach is more effective than high school outreach according to current metrics, and that one of the main factors making high school outreach ineffective is a lack of selection.”

I think I’ve read all the posts in the Forum’s “effective altruism outreach in schools” tag, and neither of the two clauses in this summary sentence fitted well with my memory/impression. I’d be interested in elaboration, clarification, or supporting links/evidence if you’re happy to provide it!

Thanks for your engagement with this important topic.

Jamie_Harris 26 Dec 2021 17:12 UTC
2 points
on: Biosecurity needs engineers and materials scientists
An interesting post! It seems like the post is doing several things:

(1) positing some potential problems and gaps in current efforts in biosecurity. (2) suggesting some possible steps that could be taken to address them. (3) suggesting or arguing that engineers and materials scientists would be well-placed to undertake or contribute to these steps.

Your comments on all three seem plausible to me (a non-expert). But you seem to provide more links and evidence for (2) than (1) or (3).

Since (2) and (3) are dependent upon (1) being correct, I’d be interested in what sorts of evidence you have for it. E.g. what has led you to make the following claims?
- The whole of “the problem” section, especially “Unfortunately, people with these backgrounds are currently severely lacking in biosecurity.”
- “PPE that was highly effective, easy to use, and cheap to distribute… is currently laughably neglected.”
- “relatively little time and money have gone into either implementing these technologies or identifying promising alternatives.”
Regarding (3), I have similar but lower priority questions. That case seems more intuitive to me.

Jamie_Harris 26 Dec 2021 12:43 UTC
4 points
on: My Overview of the AI Alignment Landscape: A Bird’s Eye View
This seems very useful to me. I’ve read books by Russel, Christiansen, and Bostrom, plus a load of other misc EA content (EA Forum, EAG, 80k, etc) about AI Alignment but wouldn’t have been able to distinguish these separate strands. So for me at least, this seems like very helpful de-confusion.

A couple of questions, if you’ve got time:

1 In your ~30 conversations with and feedback from others, did you get much of a sense that others disagreed with your general categorisations here? That is, I’m sure that there are various ways that one could conceptually carve up the space, but did you get much feedback suggesting that yours might be wrong in some substantial way? I’m trying to get a sense if this post represents a reasonable but controversial interpretation of the landscape or if it would be widely accepted.

2 You helpfully list some existing resources for each approach. Do you have a sense of roughly how resources (e.g. number of researchers / research hours; philanthropic $s) are currently divided between these different approaches?

(3) (I’d also be interested in how you or others would see the ideal distribution of resources, but I infer from your post that there might be a lot of disagreement about that.)

Jamie_Harris 15 Dec 2021 23:24 UTC
7 points
on: Aiming for the minimum of self-care is dangerous
I agree with some of the key ideas of your post, such as that working more than what is sustainable would be counterproductive. I also think that this is a message that some people need to be reminded of.

However, regarding your stated goal:

“My goal in this post is to convince you that trying to spend as little time as possible on fun socializing, frivolous hobbies, or other leisure is a dangerous impulse.”

As I was reading the post, I thought that the lesson from some of the ideas and examples you give is not that you shouldn’t aim to minimize these leisure activities. But rather that you should build in some leeway in case you have overestimated the levels of work that you can sustainably work at and underestimated the levels of leisure activities that you need.

We sometimes talk about making sure you have enough “financial runway” where, once you’re over a certain threshold this enables you to take a much lower paying role than you might ordinarily take (if you weren’t motivated to maximise your impact).

Maybe there’s some comparable metaphor of something like “motivational runway” where, once you’re over a certain threshold this enables you to work much longer/harder than you might ordinarily take (if you weren’t motivated to maximise your impact).

Jamie_Harris 15 Dec 2021 23:10 UTC
20 points
in reply to: John G. Halstead’s comment on: Aiming for the minimum of self-care is dangerous
I also have the impression that some of the most productive people I know (within the EA community specifically) work very long hours.

Jamie_Harris 15 Dec 2021 22:08 UTC
2 points
on: Retrospective on the Summer 2021 AGI Safety Fundamentals
I’m very grateful you wrote up this detailed report, complete with various numbers and with lists of uncertainties.

As you know, I’ve been thinking through some partly overlapping uncertainties for some programmes I’m involved in, so feel free to reach out if you want to talk anything over.

Jamie_Harris 14 Dec 2021 22:44 UTC
2 points
in reply to: acristia’s comment on: Coaching: An under-appreciated strategy among effective altruists
No major change in thoughts I don’t think. I reached out to Lynette and it didn’t seem like a great fit. I’ve also reached out to another coaching service mentioned on the Forum and have an introductory call soon. But I haven’t been pursuing this very proactively, and haven’t actually had any coaching yet so there hasn’t been anything that would lead me to change my views much.

Jamie_Harris 8 Dec 2021 23:05 UTC
9 points
in reply to: aogara’s comment on: Creating Individual Connections via the Forum
Somewhat related to the above comments so I’m putting it here:

I wonder if there’s a way to automatically show users’ interest in specific areas via the tagging system, e.g. by showing how many (or how much karma) they have for (1) posts with particular tags, (2) comments on posts with particular tags.

This would mean people don’t have to manually update some sort of interests list.

Downsides include that
- maybe it would make people more conscious about where they comment or post, in case it affects their stats and forum identity.
- I would guess that lots of features like this sound good in theory but then few people end up using them
What links here?
- Charles He's comment on Open Thread: Winter 2021 by Aaron Gertler (2 Jan 2022 0:16 UTC; 1 point)

Jamie_Harris 7 Dec 2021 23:54 UTC
3 points
in reply to: rosehadshar’s comment on: A case for nonviolent protest
I think I agree with every point Rose made here.

I’ll also emphasise though that I think that the post has lots of (1) cool ideas and possibilities worth digging into and (2) snippets of useful empirical evidence.

Jamie_Harris 4 Dec 2021 13:04 UTC
8 points
on: Summary of history (empowerment and well-being lens)
History through this lens seems very different from the history presented in e.g. textbooks. For example: Many wars and power struggles barely matter. My summary doesn’t so much as mention Charlemagne or William of Orange, and the fall of the Roman Empire doesn’t seem like a clearly watershed event.
I think this is a useful way of thinking about history: what are the key outcomes within particular domains, and when did they happen? I think that doing this ends up highlighting certain outcomes as being especially important, and leads to some surprising reflections on how things developed at different times and in different places. You’ve highlighted a lot of cool stuff in this post, and I like the summary table a lot.
But I think that the approach tends to strip out much sense of causation, especially but not solely indirect causes of important outcomes.
For instance, it seems unclear to me what the counterfactual impact of various enlightenment ideas (highlighted in bold green on your timeline) would have been were it not for the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars (included in the “other” category), which I am under the impression did quite a lot to forcibly spread Enlightenment ideals around Europe. Perhaps, under less favourable socio-political conditions, some of the thinkers and ideals we now think of as very important and influential would never have attained the reach that they did, and ended up more as curious asides along the lines of...
Porphyry, the Greek vegetarian. Did you know that there was an ancient Greek who was (according to Wikipedia) “an advocate of vegetarianism on spiritual and ethical grounds … He wrote the On Abstinence from Animal Food (Περὶ ἀποχῆς ἐμψύχων; De Abstinentia ab Esu Animalium), advocating against the consumption of animals, and he is cited with approval in vegetarian literature up to the present day.”
Political events, changes in social and economic organisation, etc can all affect the domains and outcomes you/we care about, sometimes in difficult to perceive ways.
As another example, among the various social movements focused on some form of moral circle expansion that have been driven by allies rather than the intended beneficiaries themselves, many seem to have picked up substantially (in terms of resources and attention dedicated to them, if not also success) from the ~1960s onwards:
- The environmental movement
- The anti-death penalty movement
- The anti-abortion movement
- The children’s rights movement
- The animal rights movement
- The Fair Trade movement (and probably other efforts to help people in the Global South)
I haven’t fully got my head around what’s going on there, but I suspect there are some important underlying social/economic forces that don’t get picked up by studying each “Moral progress and human/civil rights” outcome as a discrete category.
(Some overlap with SammyDMartin’s point, but they phrased it in terms of “ideas on empowerment and well-being down the line”, whereas my point is about causation more broadly.)

Jamie_Harris 1 Dec 2021 14:38 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Pablo’s comment on: Jamie_Harris’s Shortform
Oh, nice, thanks very much for sharing that. I’ve cited Moravec in the same research report that led me to the Bostrom link I just shared, but hadn’t seen that article and didn’t read Mind Children fully enough to catch that particular idea.

Jamie_Harris 29 Nov 2021 10:55 UTC
2 points
in reply to: PeterMcIntyre’s comment on: TobiasH’s Shortform
Yep, you can.
(I thought you could do it on the unpaid version too but I just checked and can’t see it. I specifically remember having the functionality to use specific search filters restricted to only people within certain groups when I had recruiter Lite though.)

Jamie_Harris 29 Nov 2021 10:51 UTC
9 points
on: Jamie_Harris’s Shortform
How did Nick Bostrom come up with the “Simulation argument”*?
Below is an answer Bostrom gave in 2008. (Though note, Pablo shares a comment below that Bostrom might be misremembering this, and he may have taken the idea from Hans Moravec.)
“In my doctoral work, I had studied so-called self-locating beliefs and developed the first mathematical theory of observation selection effects, which affects such beliefs. I had also for many years been thinking a lot about future technological capabilities and their possible impacts on humanity. If one combines these two areas – observation selection theory and the study of future technological capacities – then the simulation argument is only one small inferential step away.
Before the idea was developed in its final form, I had for a couple of years been running a rudimentary version of it past colleagues at coffee breaks during conferences. Typically, the response would be “yeah, that is kind of interesting” and then the conversation would drift to other topics without anything having been resolved.
I was on my way to the gym one evening and was again pondering the argument when it dawned on me that it was more than just coffee-break material and that it could be developed in a more rigorous form. By the time I had finished the physical workout, I had also worked out the essential structure of the argument (which is actually very simple). I went to my office and wrote it up.
(Are there any lessons in this? That new ideas often spring from the combining of two different areas or cognitive structures, which one has previously mastered at sufficiently a deep level, is a commonplace. But an additional possible moral, which may not be as widely appreciated, is that even when we do vaguely realize something, the breakthrough often eludes us because we fail to take the idea seriously enough.)”
Context for this post:
- I’m doing some research on “A History of Robot Rights Research,” which includes digging into some early transhumanist / proto-EA type content. I stumbled across this.
- I tend to think of researchers as contributing either more through being detail oriented—digging into sources or generating new empirical data—or being really inventive and creative. I definitely fall into the former camp, and am often amazed/confused by the process of how people in the latter camp do what they do. Having found this example, it seemed worth sharing quickly.
*Definition of the simulation argument: “The simulation argument was set forth in a paper published in 2003. A draft of that paper had previously been circulated for a couple of years. The argument shows that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed. The argument has attracted a considerable amount of attention, among scientists and philosophers as well as in the media.”

Jamie_Harris 29 Nov 2021 9:29 UTC
5 points
in reply to: MichaelA’s comment on: Risks from Atomically Precise Manufacturing
That’s interesting. As far as I can tell, Eric Drexler was basically the person who kicked off interest + concern about this tech in the 1980s onwards.* His publications on the topic have accrued tens of thousands of citations. But Drexler’s work at FHI now focuses on AI.
(I came to this year-old post because some of the early transhumanist / proto-EA content (e.g. Bostrom and Kurzweil) seems to mention nanotech very prominently, sometimes preceding discussion of superintelligent AI, and I wanted to see if any aspiring EAs were still talking about it.)
*General impression from some of the transhumanist stuff I’ve been reading. The Wikipedia page on nanotechnology says:
The term “nano-technology” was first used by Norio Taniguchi in 1974, though it was not widely known. Inspired by Feynman’s concepts, K. Eric Drexler used the term “nanotechnology” in his 1986 book Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology, which proposed the idea of a nanoscale “assembler” which would be able to build a copy of itself and of other items of arbitrary complexity with atomic control. Also in 1986, Drexler co-founded The Foresight Institute (with which he is no longer affiliated) to help increase public awareness and understanding of nanotechnology concepts and implications. The emergence of nanotechnology as a field in the 1980s occurred through convergence of Drexler’s theoretical and public work, which developed and popularized a conceptual framework for nanotechnology, and high-visibility experimental advances that drew additional wide-scale attention to the prospects of atomic control of matter.

Jamie_Harris 26 Nov 2021 8:51 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Question Mark’s comment on: What would you do if you had half a million dollars?
Would you mind linking some posts or articles assessing the expected value of the long-term future?
The most direct (positive) answer to this question I remember reading is here.
Toby Ord discusses it briefly in chapter 2 of The Precipice.
Some brief podcast discussion here.
I suspect that many of the writings by people associated with the Future of Humanity Institute address this in some form or other. One reading of any and everything by transhumanists / Humanity+ people (Bostrom included) is that the value of the future seems pretty likely to be positive. Similarly, I expect that a lot of the interviewees other than just Christiano on the 80k (and Future of Life?) podcast express this view in some form or other and defend it at least a little bit, but I don’t remember specific references other than the Christiano one.
And there’s suffering-focused stuff too, but it seemed like you were looking for arguments pointing in the opposite direction.

Jamie_Harris 19 Nov 2021 7:48 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Ben_West’s comment on: Effective strategies for changing public opinion: A literature review
Yeah I’m also a little confused about why they’re using r without digging back into it in detail. But if I read it correctly, then their correlation coefficient there somehow pools together pretty weak proxies for behaviour (“attitude toward the product, attitude toward the brand,” potentially also “purchase intention”) with actual behaviour (“product choice”).
I definitely don’t think that we should pay too much attention to the findings of that particular meta-analysis when thinking about how to change attitudes or behaviour in the context of the farmed animal movement or other EA-adjacent cause areas. But it is still weakly relevant evidence and it would have been disingenuous of me not to include it, I think. (My prior was that using humour and sex appeals are both usually pretty bad ideas for serious social movements, especially the latter.)

Jamie_Harris 18 Nov 2021 20:03 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Daniel Kestenholz’s comment on: How to decide which productivity coach to try?
<<I lack survey design and data evaluation skills. I’d be interested in talking to people who have those skills and would be excited about applying them in a coaching context.>>

I don’t have formal/academic experience in this but have some experience thinking about it an applied M&E for EA meta work sense. Feel free to message or email me if you’d like feedback on draft things or would like to discuss sometime!