Jamie_Harris

Karma: 2,777

Jamie is a Program Associate at Polaris Ventures, doing grantmaking to support projects and people aiming to build a future guided by wisdom and compassion for all. Polaris’ focus areas include AI governance, digital sentience, plus reducing risks from fanatical ideologies and malevolent actors.

He also spend a few hours a week as a Fund Manager at the Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund, which aims to increase the impact of projects that use the principles of effective altruism, by increasing their access to talent, capital, and knowledge.

Lastly, Jamie is President of Leaf, an independent nonprofit that supports exceptional teenagers to explore how they can best save lives, help others, or change the course of history. (Most of the hard work is being done by the wonderful Jonah Boucher though!)

Jamie previously worked as a teacher, as a researcher at the think tank Sentience Institute, and as co-founder and researcher at Animal Advocacy Careers, which helps people to maximise their positive impact for animals.

Jamie_Harris 16 Dec 2024 15:29 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Jacob Watts🔸’s comment on: Ideas EAIF is excited to receive applications for
I didn’t write that wording originally (I just copied it over from this post), so I can’t speak exactly to their original thinking.
But I think the phrasing includes the EA community, it just uses the plural to avoid excluding others.
Some examples that jump to mind:
- EA
- Rationality, x-risk, s-risk, AI Safety, wild animal welfare, etc to varying degrees
- Org-specific communities, e.g. the fellows and follow-up opportunities on various fellowship programmes.
I would like to more clearly understand what the canonical “stewards of the EA brand” in CEA and the EAIF have in mind for the future of EA groups and the movement as a whole?
I think this suggests more of a sense of unity/agreement than I expect is true in practice. These are complex things and individuals have different views and ideas!
Thanks for thinking this stuff through and coming up with ideas!

Jamie_Harris 16 Dec 2024 15:24 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Daniel Abiliba’s comment on: Ideas EAIF is excited to receive applications for
Hi Daniel! I don’t have a lot to elaborate on here; I haven’t really thought much about the practicalities, I was just flagging that proposals and ideas relating to regranting seem like a plausible way to help with funding diversification.
Also, just FYI, on the specific intervention idea, which could be promising, that would fall in the remit of EA Funds’ Animal Welfare Fund (which I do not work at), not the Infrastructure Fund (which I work at). I didn’t check with fund managers there if they endorse things I’ve written here or not.

Jamie_Harris 15 Dec 2024 9:50 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: VictorW’s comment on: Ideas EAIF is excited to receive applications for
Based on this information alone, EAIF would likely prefer an application later (e.g. if there is some event affecting the uncertainty that would pass) to avoid us wasting our time.

But I don’t think this would particularly affect your chances of application success. And maybe there are good reasons to want to apply sooner?

And I wouldn’t leave it too long anyway, since sometimes apps take e.g. 2 months to be approved. Usually less, and very occasionally more.

Jamie_Harris 12 Dec 2024 15:46 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: OllieBase’s comment on: Ideas EAIF is excited to receive applications for
I think fairly standard EA retreats / fellowships are quite good at this
Maybe. To take cause prio as an example, my impression is that the framing is often a bit more like: ‘here are lots of cause areas EAs think are high impact! Also, cause prioritisation might be v important.’ (That’s basically how I interpret the vibe and emphasis of the EA Handbook / EAVP.) Not so much ‘cause prio is really important. Let’s actually try and do that and think carefully about how to do this well, without just deferring to existing people’s views.’
So there’s a direct ^ version like that that I’d be excited about.
Although perhaps contradictorily I’m also envisaging something even more indirect than the retreats/fellowships you mention as a possibility, where the impact comes through generally developing skills that enable people to be top contributors to EA thinking, top cause areas, etc.
I don’t know much about LW/ESPR/SPARC but I suspect a lot of their impact flows through convincing people of important ideas and/or the social aspect rather than their impact on community epistemics/integrity?
Yeah I think this is part of it. But I also think that they help by getting people to think carefully and arrive at sensible and better processes/opinions.

Jamie_Harris 12 Dec 2024 10:46 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Rockwell’s comment on: Ideas EAIF is excited to receive applications for
Seems fair. I do work there, I promise this post isn’t an elaborate scheme to falsely bulk out my CV.

Jamie_Harris 12 Dec 2024 10:45 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: OllieBase’s comment on: Ideas EAIF is excited to receive applications for
Mm they don’t necessarily need to be small! (Ofc, big projects often start small, and our funding is more likely to look like early/seed funding in these instances.) E.g. I’m thinking of LessWrong or something like that. A concrete example of a smaller project would be ESPR/SPARC, which have a substantial (albeit not sole) focus on epistemics and rationality, that have had some good evidence of positive effects, e.g. on Open Phil’s longtermism survey.
But I do think the impacts might be more diffuse than other grants. E.g. we won’t necessarily be able to count participants, look at quality, and compare to other programmes we’ve funded.
Some of the sorts of outcomes I have in mind are just things like altered cause prioritisation, different projects getting funded, generally better decision-making.

I expect we would in practice judge whether these seemed on track to be useful by a combination of (1) case studies/stories of specific users and the changes they made (2) statistics about usage.

(I do like your questions/pushback though; it’s making me realise that this is all a bit vague and maybe when push comes to shove with certain applications that fit into this category, I could end up confused about the theory of change and not wanting to fund.)

Jamie_Harris 11 Dec 2024 18:18 UTC
10 points
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in reply to: toonalfrink’s comment on: Ideas EAIF is excited to receive applications for
Thanks! Sorry to hear the epistemics stuff was so frustrating for you and caused you to leave EA.
Yes, very plausible that the example interventions don’t really get to the core of the issue—I didn’t spend long creating those and they’re more meant to be examples to help spark ideas rather than confident recommendations on the best interventions or some such. Perhaps I should have flagged this in the post.
Re “centralized control and disbursion of funds”: I agree that my example ideas in the epistemics section wouldn’t help with this much. Would the “funding diversification” suggestions below help here?
And I’m intrigued if you’re up for elaborating why you don’t think the sorts of “What could be done?” suggestions would help with the other two problems you highlight. (They’re not optimising for addressing those two specific concerns of course, but insofar as they all relate back to bad/weird epistemic practices, then things like epistemics training programmes might help?) No worries if you don’t want to or don’t have time though.
Thanks again!

Jamie_Harris 11 Dec 2024 16:01 UTC
50 points
13 ∶ 1
on: Jamie_Harris’s Shortform
I’ve been working a few hours per week at the Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund as a Fund Manager since Summer this year.
EA’s reputation is at a bit of a low point. I’ve even heard EA described as the ‘boogeyman’ in certain well-meaning circles. So why do I feel inclined to double down on effective altruism rather than move onto other endeavours? Some shower thoughts:
- I generally endorse aiming directly for the thing you actually care about. It seems higher integrity, and usually more efficient. I want to do the most good possible, and this goal already has a name and community attached to it; EA.
- I find the core, underlying principles very compelling. The Centre for Effective Altruism highlights scope sensitivity, impartiality, recognition of tradeoffs, and the Scout Mindset. I endorse all of these!
- Seems to me that EA has a good track record of important insights on otherwise neglected topics. Existential risk, risks of astronomical suffering, AI safety, wild animal suffering; I attribute a lot of success in these nascent fields to the insights of people with a shared commitment to EA principles and goals.
- Of course, there’s been a lot of progress on slightly less neglected cause areas too. The mind boggles at the sheer number of human lives saved and the vast amount of animal suffering reduced by organisations funded by Open Philanthropy, for example.
- I have personally benefited massively in achieving my own goals. Beyond some of the above insights, I attribute many improvements in my productivity and epistemics to discussions and recommendations that arose out of the pursuit of EA.
- In other roles or projects I’m considering, when I think of questions like “who will actually realistically consider acting on this idea I think is great? Giving up their time or money to make this happen?” the most obvious and easiest answer often looks like some subset of the EA community. Obviously there are some echo chamber-y and bias-related reasons that might feed into this, but I think there are some real and powerful ones too.
Written quickly (15-20 mins), not neatly/well (originally to post on LinkedIn rather than here). There are better takes on this topic (e.g.).
There are some pragmatic, career-focused reasons too of course. I’m better networked inside EA than outside of it. I have long thought grantmaking is a career direction I’d like to try my hand at, and this seemed like a good specific opportunity for me.
Further caveats I didn’t have space to make on LinkedIn: I wrote this quick take as an individual, not for EAIF or my other projects etc; I haven’t checked this with colleagues. There are also identity-related and bias reasons that draw me to stay involved with EA. Seems clear that EA has had a lot of negative impact too. And of course we have deep empirical and moral uncertainty about what’s actually good and useful in the long-run after accounting for indirect effects. I haven’t attempted any sort of overall quantitative analysis of the overall effects.
But in any case, I still expect that overall EA has been and will be a positive force for good. And I’m excited to be contributing to EAIF’s mission. I just wrote a post about Ideas EAIF is excited to receive applications for; please consider checking that out if any of this resonates and/or you have ideas about how to improve EA and the impact of projects making use of EA principles!

Jamie_Harris 6 Dec 2024 12:04 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Joey🔸’s comment on: Joey ’s Quick takes
You highlight a couple of downsides. Far from all of the downsides of course, but none of the advantages either.
I feel a bit sad to read this since I’ve worked on something related^[1] to what you post about for years myself. And a bit confused why you posted this; do you think that you think EAs are underrating these two downsides? (If not, it just feels a bit unnecessarily disparaging to people trying their best to do good in the world.)
Appreciate you highlighting your personal experience though; that’s a useful anecdote.
1. ^
  “Targeting of really young people” is certainly not the framing I would use; there’s genuine demand for the services that we offer, as demonstrated by the tens of thousands of applications received across Leaf, Non-Trivial, Atlas, Pivotal, and SPARC/ESPR. But it’s of course accurate in the sense that our target audience consists of (subsets of) young people.

Jamie_Harris 2 Dec 2024 14:06 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Jamie_Harris’s comment on: Fund Causes Open Phil Underfunds (Instead of Your Most Preferred Causes)
Another consideration I just encountered in a grantmaking decision:
Other decision-makers in EA might be those views we are most inclined to defer to or cooperate with. So upon noticing that an opportunity is underfunded in EA specifically but not the world at large, arguably I should update away from wanting to fund it upon considering Open Phil and EA donations specifically as opposed to donations in the world more broadly. Whereas I think the thrust of your post implies the opposite.
(@Ariel Simnegar 🔸, although again no need to reply. Possibly I’m getting in an unnecessary tangle by considering this ‘EA spending vs world spending’ lens)

Jamie_Harris 30 Nov 2024 19:41 UTC
4 points
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on: Funding Diversification is a Tradeoff
<<Would AIM produce more than one times our current impact at four times our budget? Sure, almost definitely, but it would be way less than four times the impact, and I think this is true for many organizations. Thus AIM made a deliberate call to stay at a smaller level of scale than the highest amounts offered to us.>>

Couldn’t you just take (some of) the funding and regrant?

(This could be discretionary rather than through application processes and presumably wouldn’t take you much time, given that you have lots of informed views about different orgs’ needs and potential anyway. E.g. could mostly be to incubatees. Although I imagine maybe there are some dynamics you’d prefer to avoid there in terms of your relationship with them.)

Jamie_Harris 30 Nov 2024 19:07 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: Ariel Simnegar 🔸’s comment on: Fund Causes Open Phil Underfunds (Instead of Your Most Preferred Causes)
Yeah it might be more tractable.

Focusing solely in EAs has a bunch of weird effects though.

E.g. I’ve been thinking about some ‘safeguarding democracy’ type interventions for longtermist reasons. If I looked at EA funding I’d presumably conclude that the area was massively underfunded—almost no one working on this. Whereas looking in a global sense the initial impression is that it’s a very large, well-funded area. (Maybe it’s still a useful heuristic though because explicitly longtermist funding and effort might focus on quite different subcomponents of the broad topic?)

And another one is just that how liberal you are in your definitions of what’s EA or not can make quite a big difference. E.g. plausibly by a factor of 2 in the case of animal advocacy.

(No need to reply, I’m just musing.)

Thanks!

Jamie_Harris 28 Nov 2024 8:24 UTC
19 points
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on: Has your organisation lost funding due to the Good Ventures funding shift? Have you managed to replace it?
Open Philanthropy instituted a policy of no longer funding community-building grants focused on high-school students or minors. The org I have run for several years, Leaf, is currently funding constrained partly due to this. I don’t know of funders who have ‘stepped in’ so to speak (leads welcome!), although I also work a few hours a week at the EA Infrastructure Fund which is happy to make grants in this area.

Jamie_Harris 26 Nov 2024 19:56 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Luke Moore 🔸’s comment on: Consider donating to whoever helped you
I had a related concern that (if this funding model became more widespread) it could lead to overinvestment in more legible/obvious contributions relative to more behind-the-scenes ones. E.g. 80k gets lots of donations but Effective Ventures doesn’t; a local group gets donations but the orgs who created the resources they reused and adapted (BlueDot, CEA, etc) doesn’t.

(I still think on net I agree that it’d be cool to shift somewhat in this direction though. And I think more community building services should consider charging or making donations an opt-out rather than opt-in default.)

Jamie_Harris 26 Nov 2024 19:35 UTC
13 points
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on: Fund Causes Open Phil Underfunds (Instead of Your Most Preferred Causes)
I initially found myself nodding in agreement but then I realised a confusion I have:

Why should a donor/grantmaker limit their consideration of what is most underfunded to the EA community?

After all, the EA community is a nebulous community with porous boundaries. E.g. we count Open Phil, but what about The Navigation Fund? Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation? And even if we can define the boundaries, what do we actually gain by focusing on this specific subset of donors?

If you instead focus on ‘what is most underfunded at the global level’ then the question returns to the same broad question of cause prioritisation (“your value system’s most preferred causes”).

Jamie_Harris 18 Nov 2024 9:08 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Weighted Factor Models: Consider using the geometric mean instead of the arithmetic mean
Yeah I agree in principle it “might be for good reason”, though I still have some sense that it seems desirable to reduce overdependence on your ratings for one or two criteria. Similar to the reasoning for sequence thinking vs. cluster thinking

Jamie_Harris 17 Nov 2024 17:16 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Weighted Factor Models: Consider using the geometric mean instead of the arithmetic mean
I sometimes do this, but I wonder if it defeats one of the key benefits of a WFM—that it accounts for multiple criteria and prevents any single consideration dominating.

(With BOTECs, sometimes the final ranking/conclusion is very dependent on one or two very uncertain or arbitrary criteria.)

Jamie_Harris 28 Oct 2024 19:10 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: John Salter’s comment on: What should EAIF Fund?
Also just copying unedited a related rough note to self I made on my own list of potential entrepreneurial projects (but which I’m very unlikely to ever actually work on myself)
Impact-focused red-teaming, consultancy, and feedback marketplace
Problem I faced as a founder: Often making decisions where I would have loved external input but felt reluctant because I didn’t want to ask people for favours, and didn’t necessarily know who I could ask other than my personal network.
Solution: a platform like Fiverr or similar where people willing to give feedback and advice are listed with a description of their interests/background, their hourly rate, plus a bunch of tags (e.g. cause area, experience type) so that people can filter by types of role.
Probably take a % cut of the fees. E.g. Fiverr system: “Service fees are 5.5% of the purchase amount. For purchases under $100, an additional $3.00 small order fee will be applied.” Maybe also add some minimum amount, in case people want to list their services for free, e.g. we always charge minimum $1 per hour of service performed. (I think maybe we could get away with charging a lot higher rates than Fiverr though, like 10% or 20%. E.g. if someone is willing to pay $50 for 2 hours of review from someone, they’re probably willing to pay $60
Later could potentially expand into a broader freelancing type platform.
Misc idea: crowdsource ratings of how well the job was done by a bunch of different criteria, and encourage ACCURACY in the ratings. Batch the ratings in groups of 5 to help anonymise the source of the rating and thereby reduce embarassment for not giving wholly positive ratings.
Downside: Probably pretty small volumes of money. E.g. a person read-teaming a doc for 2 hours might only charge ~$50, of which we would get ~$5. So we’d need to achieve a really high usage volume for it to become financially self-sustaining and justify the time on the setup.
[I’m sharing partly because my “Misc idea” seems like it could help with the problem you highlight.]

Jamie_Harris 28 Oct 2024 19:07 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: John Salter’s comment on: What should EAIF Fund?
Interesting! Could you share one or two examples of the “Templates [that] already exist on-line for this exact type of marketplace”?
Since you’ve thought about it a bit already, I’d be interested if you have any thoughts on how long something like this would take to setup on technical/operational side to a high standard, excluding time spent “finding enough early adopters”.
(Also, I’m guessing this isn’t something you’re interested in doing yourself?)

Jamie_Harris 25 Oct 2024 13:15 UTC
7 points
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on: The cost of (not) taking marketing seriously
Hey James! I’ve heard the claim a couple of times that EA orgs systematically underinvest in marketing. I was wondering if you are able to share (here or privately) any direct evidence that EA orgs are indeed doing that?
I appreciate the broad point that ‘marketing can have benefits’ (a crude summary of the takeaway from the “5 key pieces of research here”), but is there evidence that EA orgs are (consistently) spending less time and money on marketing that would be optimal?
E.g. skimming this post I didn’t really see evidence for the claim in the first sentence:
By not properly addressing the role of marketing in the effective altruism movement, there is substantial impact being forfeited
A separate but somewhat related question that happens to be relevant to something else I’m thinking about at the moment: do you have a rough take on how much EA meta orgs should be ‘willing to pay’ for newsletter subscribers, vs how much they are WTP? Again, might be easier to discuss with reference to specific orgs, potentially not publicly on the Forum.
Thanks!