Jamie_Harris

• Jamie_Harris 12 Aug 2019 21:32 UTC

  5 points

  on: Are there other events in the UK be­fore/​af­ter EAG Lon­don?

  Danielle Duffield and I will be run­ning an event for peo­ple in­ter­ested in an­i­mal ad­vo­cacy the evening be­fore, similar to the one I ran last year (https://​​www.eventbrite.co.uk/​​e/​​pre-eag-an­i­mal-ad­vo­cate-short-talks-tick­ets-51187206312?fb­clid=IwAR1cOY9tr8PZUQz1MBxUaeJ4omUO_8KZOwdJ-aXltB8lV2l7D5upzX2Ejoo)

• Jamie_Harris 6 Aug 2019 22:14 UTC

  5 points

  on: What book(s) would you want a gifted teenager to come across?

  I’d recom­mend The End of An­i­mal Farm­ing for any­one in­ter­ested in an­i­mal ad­vo­cacy. Here’s my short re­view. httpss://​but­can­they­suffer.word­press.com/​​2018/​​12/​​13/​​book-re­view-jacy-reese-2018-the-end-of-an­i­mal-farm­ing-bea­con-press-boston-ma/​​

  Per­son­ally I found An­i­mal Liber­a­tion by Peter Singer very in­spiring as a teenager (changed me from a pas­sive veg­e­tar­ian to some­one de­ter­mined to make a change for an­i­mals through some form of ad­vo­cacy) but I haven’t looked back at it in years.

• Jamie_Harris 27 Jul 2019 10:23 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Jamie_Harris's comment on: Effec­tive an­i­mal ad­vo­cacy move­ment build­ing: a ne­glected op­por­tu­nity?

  See Lau­ren’s com­ment above on a new EAA ca­reers/​tal­ent org.

• Jamie_Harris 20 Jul 2019 8:56 UTC

  1 point

  on: Cor­po­rate cam­paigns af­fect 9 to 120 years of chicken life per dol­lar spent

  I’m a big fan of this re­port and will prob­a­bly recom­mend it to in­ter­ested peo­ple as the best of the cost-effec­tive­ness mod­els I have seen on cor­po­rate welfare com­mit­ments.

  I’m very glad for the”Ways this es­ti­mate could be mis­lead­ing” sec­tion. I think its very im­por­tant to make these wider con­sid­er­a­tions clear; they have not been so clear in pre­vi­ous cost-effec­tive­ness es­ti­mates. I also like that you make it clear how you think that these con­sid­er­a­tions weigh up with the pluses and minuses sys­tem.

  It’s great that this in­for­ma­tion on var­i­ous un­cer­tain­ties is in­cluded and yet you are still able to provide a use­able es­ti­mate of cost-effec­tive­ness (that ex­cludes these in­di­rect effects). I would prob­a­bly lean to­wards mak­ing this re­sult less promi­nent in the write-up, e.g. not in­clud­ing it in the ti­tle. I do think that, de­spite your clar­ity on the un­cer­tain­ties, it is easy for read­ers to pick up and fo­cus on the fi­nal es­ti­mate and then dis­re­gard the rest of the post.
  
  

• Jamie_Harris 7 Jul 2019 0:06 UTC

  4 points

  on: Should we talk about al­tru­ism or talk about jus­tice?

  Is “al­tru­ism” the al­ter­na­tive to “jus­tice” or is “wellbe­ing/​suffer­ing” the al­ter­na­tive to “jus­tice”? I feel like the lat­ter is some­thing that we could aim to max­imise, and that this would be con­sis­tent with EA, but not with what the ma­jor­ity of as­piring EAs aim to max­imise. Jus­tice seems less rele­vant to util­i­tar­i­anism and more rele­vant to virtues ethics or similar (apolo­gies, I don’t know much about philos­o­phy).

  To the ex­tent that we con­sider jus­tice as a mes­sag­ing strat­egy, rather than some­thing sub­stan­tial that rep­re­sents goals/​ide­ol­ogy, my guess is that as­piring effec­tive al­tru­ists should aim for non-par­ti­san­ship. My guess is that al­ign­ment with es­tab­lished poli­ti­cal ide­olo­gies (in­clud­ing “the left”, or the Democrats over the Repub­li­cans in the US) en­courages in­creased poli­ti­cal salience in the short term but stag­na­tion longer term. This guess is based mostly on in­tu­ition and my re­search on the anti-abor­tion move­ment.

  But I would agree with Zach G that, in­tu­itively, jus­tice mes­sag­ing will have wider reach/​viral­ity than al­tru­ism mes­sag­ing.

• Jamie_Harris 29 Jun 2019 11:43 UTC

  4 points

  on: Effec­tive Altru­ism is an Ide­ol­ogy, not (just) a Question

  Very big fan of this post. It is one of the best, sub­stan­tial cri­tiques of EA as it cur­rently is that I’ve read/​heard in a while. There are lots of parts that I’d love to delve into more but I’ll fo­cus on one here, which seems to be one of the most im­por­tant claims:

  The three key as­pects of this ar­gu­ment are ex­pert be­lief in plau­si­bil­ity of the prob­lem, very large im­pact of the prob­lem if it does oc­cur, and the prob­lem be­ing sub­stan­tively ne­glected. My ar­gu­ment is that we can adapt this ar­gu­ment to make par­allel ar­gu­ments for other cause ar­eas.

  Sure, but this seems to miss out the tractabil­ity con­sid­er­a­tion. Your post barely men­tions tractabil­ity or cost-effec­tive­ness and the INT frame­work is re­ally just a way of think­ing about the ex­pected value /​ cost-effec­tive­ness of par­tic­u­lar ac­tions. I’d guess that some of the ar­eas you list have been ig­nored or re­jected by many as­piring EAs be­cause they just seem less tractable at first glance.

  I do think it’s im­por­tant that the EA com­mu­nity ex­plores plau­si­bly high-im­pact cause ar­eas, even if only a hand­ful of in­di­vi­d­u­als ever fo­cus on them. So I’d be pleased if peo­ple took this post as an en­courage­ment to ex­plore the tractabil­ity of con­tri­bu­tions to var­i­ous ar­eas that have been ne­glected by the EA com­mu­nity so far.

• Jamie_Harris 25 Jun 2019 16:15 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: M_Allcock's comment on: Effec­tive an­i­mal ad­vo­cacy move­ment build­ing: a ne­glected op­por­tu­nity?

  Could do! Not sure what sort of en­gage­ment an on­line course would get? I think Peter Singer had an EA on­line course and GFI has made one for pro­duc­tion meth­ods of cel­lu­lar agri­cul­ture and/​or plant-based foods I be­lieve. Could be in­ter­est­ing to see what sort of take up those got, if they’ve led to many peo­ple be­come ac­tively/​deeply en­gaged, how long they took to cre­ate, and how much they cost.

• Jamie_Harris 21 Jun 2019 20:54 UTC

  2 points

  on: Be­com­ing the per­son who would start a project

  In­ter­ested if you are aware of many ex­am­ples other than Michael Plant?

• Jamie_Harris 21 Jun 2019 20:28 UTC

  1 point

  on: Might the EA com­mu­nity be un­der­valu­ing “meta-re­search on how to make progress on causes?”

  I’d guess that there are some low-hang­ing fruit re­search pro­jects that could help lots of or­gani­sa­tions and in­di­vi­d­u­als try­ing to max­imise their pos­i­tive im­pact across mul­ti­ple cause ar­eas (not con­fi­dent on this be­cause there are some groups whose work I am un­fa­mil­iar with).

  Ex­am­ples of ex­ist­ing re­search that fits this cat­e­gory are the re­cent post on “In­gre­di­ents for cre­at­ing dis­rup­tive re­search teams” and Open Philan­thropy Pro­ject’s re­search on the his­tory of philan­thropy.

  It’s pos­si­ble that hav­ing a small or­gani­sa­tion ex­plic­itly fo­cused on these sort of op­por­tu­ni­ties could be worth­while. Other­wise, if some­one tried more thor­oughly list and pri­ori­tise pro­jects, in­di­vi­d­u­als could po­ten­tially work on this (and get fund­ing through EA Grants?)

• Jamie_Harris 21 Jun 2019 20:07 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Jason Schukraft's comment on: In­ver­te­brate Sen­tience Table

  Agree with the risks of pre­sent­ing such a score. Agree that scores would be very spec­u­la­tive and your cred­i­bil­ity in­ter­vals would be very wide. But I’d also guess that with­out this sort of score/​sum­mary mea­sure, then it’s very hard to use this re­search in prac­ti­cal ap­pli­ca­tions?

  Per­haps a com­pro­mise is to com­pile these sorts of sum­mary scores, but then to only share them with ad­vo­cates or re­searchers that have spe­cific pur­poses in mind for those figures? This way, if some­one wanted to use the sum­mary score to in­form an es­ti­mate, or make some de­ci­sion based off of your re­search here, they could do so and it would only take them a few min­utes to send you an email, rather than sev­eral hours try­ing to come up with an equiv­a­lent es­ti­mate, us­ing your re­search as a start­ing point.

  It’s still pos­si­ble that the figures would be­come more widely known if peo­ple find the num­bers in­di­rectly, e.g. in cita­tions. But this seems un­likely to af­fect many peo­ple (un­for­tu­nately, I don’t imag­ine this re­search go­ing viral).

  PS thanks very much for this very thor­ough seem­ing re­search on this difficult topic!

• Jamie_Harris 21 Jun 2019 19:40 UTC

  1 point

  on: Melbourne Univer­sity Effec­tive Altru­ism Study

  En­joyed tak­ing part. Will you post the re­sults on the Fo­rum? I look for­ward to see­ing them.

  Quick thoughts/​warn­ings:

  1) some of the ques­tions referred to “per­sons” or similar words, im­ply­ing hu­mans. Other ques­tions referred to “oth­ers” which I in­ter­preted as in­clud­ing an­i­mals. In­ter­pret­ing as hu­mans as op­posed to hu­mans and other an­i­mals (or vice versa) af­fected my an­swers in some cases. (Not sure if the word­ing was cho­sen for con­sis­tency with ex­ist­ing psy­cholog­i­cal scales)

  2) you may get some se­lec­tion effects from donat­ing to AMF, rather than offer­ing EAs the op­tion to choose from differ­ent op­tions (e.g. can pick whichever EA Fund they’d pre­fer)

  3) Here you said you’d donate to AMF and then I got told at the end it would go to GiveDirectly

• Jamie_Harris 15 Jun 2019 8:58 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: zdgroff's comment on: Effec­tive an­i­mal ad­vo­cacy move­ment build­ing: a ne­glected op­por­tu­nity?

  Sure! I’d guess it de­pends on the pro­ject. I doubt that nar­rowly sup­port­ing effec­tive­ness-fo­cused in­di­vi­d­u­als or or­gani­sa­tions would always be the best use of re­sources, but I’d guess that it would be in most cases (say, 70% of marginal EAA move­ment build­ing re­sources over the next 5 years?)

  Offer­ing move­ment build­ing ser­vices to some or­gani­sa­tions might be a lower pri­or­ity if you think that those or­gani­sa­tions don’t have a par­tic­u­larly pos­i­tive im­pact any­way.

  There are also costs of broad­en­ing the scope of some shared re­sources/​ser­vices; it makes co­or­di­na­tion harder and mu­tual sup­port less use­ful. An in­tu­itive (though pos­si­bly slightly un­fair) com­par­i­son is be­tween the EAA Face­book dis­cus­sion group to var­i­ous AR or ve­gan groups. If some­one only had time to cre­ate/​man­age one of those two re­sources, I’d much pre­fer the former. I think my cur­rent view on this is similar to CEA’s (e.g. see the sec­tion on “pre­serv­ing value” here).

  PS I’m not wor­ried about the to­tal scale be­ing low, if there are op­por­tu­ni­ties that would likely be cost-effec­tive (see this re­lated post, if in­ter­ested).

• Jamie_Harris 12 Jun 2019 17:02 UTC

  13 points

  on: Effec­tive an­i­mal ad­vo­cacy move­ment build­ing: a ne­glected op­por­tu­nity?

  If you are in­tend­ing to look into or start one of the pro­jects listed in the post above, please com­ment on this thread. This may help with co­or­di­na­tion and mu­tual sup­port.

  (E.g., as noted above) I’m cur­rently plan­ning to start an EAA pod­cast in the next few months. Com­ment be­low or con­tact me at james_a_har­ris@hot­mail.co.uk if you would like to share ideas or con­cerns (both are wel­come!)

Effec­tive an­i­mal ad­vo­cacy move­ment build­ing: a ne­glected op­por­tu­nity?

• Jamie_Harris 27 May 2019 21:23 UTC

  1 point

  on: In­gre­di­ents for cre­at­ing dis­rup­tive re­search teams

  This was very in­ter­est­ing. There were sev­eral as­pects I found sur­pris­ing, such as the ap­par­ent im­por­tance of col­lab­o­ra­tion and shared phys­i­cal space. Thanks for writ­ing and shar­ing this.

  I’m in­ter­ested in the method­ol­ogy, since I’ve also been work­ing on both 1) case stud­ies, which I hope to able to com­pare be­tween at a later point and 2) a liter­a­ture re­view.

  How long do you es­ti­mate that you spent look­ing at each of the case stud­ies?

  It seems that most are based on a small num­ber of sources. Did you find that read­ing ad­di­tional sources changed your views about a par­tic­u­lar re­search team com­pared to the first source or two that you read? Do you ex­pect steeply diminish­ing re­turns from in­vest­ing more time into dig­ging fur­ther into par­tic­u­lar case stud­ies?

How tractable is chang­ing the course of his­tory?

• Jamie_Harris 19 May 2019 7:52 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Nathan Young's comment on: Benefits of EA en­gag­ing with main­stream (ad­dressed) cause areas

  “I won­der if there could be a kind of “trip ad­vi­sor” type badge to recom­mend how well char­i­ties/​in­ter­ven­tions are do­ing in such a way as to en­courage them to im­prove.”

  Not quite the same, but you might be in­ter­ested in https://​​so­give.org/​​

• Jamie_Harris 19 May 2019 7:21 UTC

  7 points

  on: What are good rea­sons for or against work­ing on pro­tect­ing bio­di­ver­sity and ecosys­tem ser­vices?

  It’s of­ten as­sumed in work on wild an­i­mal welfare/​suffer­ing that bio­di­ver­sity and ecosys­tem pro­tec­tion are poor heuris­tics for rep­re­sent­ing the best in­ter­ests of in­di­vi­d­ual an­i­mals. Just be­cause a sys­tem is di­verse doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily mean the in­di­vi­d­u­als are suffer­ing more or less.

  Many rele­vant es­says by Brian To­masik on his site. Here’s one ex­am­ple https://​​re­duc­ing-suffer­ing.org/​​medicine-vs-deep-ecol­ogy/​​

• Jamie_Harris 28 Apr 2019 10:49 UTC

  2 points

  on: Why an­i­mal char­i­ties are much more effec­tive than hu­man ones

  Ad­di­tional con­sid­er­a­tion to the cross-species com­par­i­son con­sid­er­a­tion:

  In com­par­ing hu­man to an­i­mal char­i­ties, we’re of­ten com­par­ing hu­man years lost (with DALYs or QALYs) to im­prove­ments in qual­ity or years of nega­tive life pre­vented. There’s lots of scope for dis­agree­ment in mak­ing these com­par­i­sons.

  E.g. is a year on a fac­tory farm worse than a year of an av­er­age hu­man’s life is good? If so, by how many or­ders of mag­ni­tude? I’d guess it is worse, per­haps by an or­der of mag­ni­tude or more.

  See here for more dis­cus­sion (though it’s quite an old post and Kelly has told me she would change /​ up­date sec­tions of it, given the time).

• Jamie_Harris 28 Apr 2019 10:18 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Michelle_Hutchinson's comment on: Why an­i­mal char­i­ties are much more effec­tive than hu­man ones

  Thanks for this, hadn’t seen that link be­fore.

  One point made there is that “likely in­ter­ven­tions in hu­man welfare, as well as be­ing im­me­di­ately effec­tive to re­lieve suffer­ing and im­prove lives, also tend to have a sig­nifi­cant long-term im­pact… By con­trast, no analo­gous mechanism en­sures that an im­prove­ment in the welfare of one an­i­mal re­sults in the im­prove­ments in the welfare of other an­i­mals.” An im­por­tant long-term con­sid­er­a­tion for the effects of welfare re­forms is whether they gen­er­ate more mo­men­tum for fur­ther re­forms for an­i­mals and for ex­pan­sion of the moral cir­cle, or whether they gen­er­ate com­pla­cency. I’m cur­rently very un­cer­tain on this, though lean slightly to­wards mo­men­tum. See here for rele­vant con­sid­er­a­tions and ev­i­dence.

  Some other posts re­lated to con­sid­er­ing the long-term effects of an­i­mal ad­vo­cacy in­ter­ven­tions:

  1) Jacy Reese, “Why I pri­ori­tize moral cir­cle ex­pan­sion over ar­tifi­cial in­tel­li­gence al­ign­ment”

  2) Me, “How tractable is chang­ing the course of his­tory?” (see es­pe­cially some of the con­sid­er­a­tions in “How tractable are tra­jec­tory changes to­wards moral cir­cle ex­pan­sion?”)

  3) Brian To­masik, “Char­ity Cost-Effec­tive­ness in an Uncer­tain World” (not nec­es­sar­ily spe­cific to an­i­mal is­sues, but I think there is some v use­ful the­o­ret­i­cal dis­cus­sion)