Jamie is Managing Director at Leaf, an independent nonprofit that supports exceptional teenagers to explore how they can best save lives, help others, or change the course of history.
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
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This is quite an old post, but if anyone comes across it now, they might find the following two links useful:
1) My review of EA Global London, largely intended as an insight into whether you’d want to attend future EA Global conferences https://butcantheysuffer.wordpress.com/2017/11/12/effective-altruism-global-london-3rd-to-5th-november-2017/
2) The videos of the talks from EA Global London https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEfASxwPxzsHlG5Rf1-4K9w
Is there a community / FB group for people with backgrounds or research interests in History within EA? There have been quite a few times when this has come up and it might be good to share ideas and collaborate.
Examples: I’m thinking primarily within Effective Animal Advocacy (Sentience Institute’s study of the British antislavery movement; ACE discontinuing their social studies project; technology adoption being considered as a precedent for clean meat e.g. by Sentience Institute and Paul Shapiro) but this would also apply to other fields. The systematic approach described in the post above seems to correlate more closely with the approach Holden and others took at OPP than it does the studies done in the Effective Animal Advocacy sphere.
All points make sense. I find that when introducing the idea, however, people seem slightly confused by the idea of “doing as much good as possible” (I tend to use nearly identical phrasing). I think the idea seems too abstract to them, and I feel compelled to give some kind of more concrete example to help explain. Although I haven’t really tried it out as an alternative, the idea of EA aiming to “benefit others” seems that it might be slightly clearer / more imaginable?
If you agree, this then raises the question of whether we should distinguish a definition of EA for “academic” and “outreach” / explanatory purposes. I’d argue that we should probably avoid separating a definition out for different contexts, so might need to keep thinking about how to word a definition which is clear, but also allows for nuance?
Maybe “confusing” was the wrong word. But I tend to get the sense that people just have no idea what the concept means in practice when I say that, because its so vague / abstract. I’m guessing that people are thinking along the lines “what does he mean by ‘doing good’? Surely he means something else / something more specific?” But I might just be misreading people slightly too.
A useful exploration, thank you. I hadn’t really thought of the cost effectiveness estimates not taking account for previous efforts, so this is useful. It reinforces the importance of really thinking carefully about how different organisations interrelate before we make judgements about comparative effectiveness—and especially before we make important decisions (either as a movement, or as individuals, developing career paths etc) in the light of these judgements. This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about since reading Harish Sethu’s post for The Humane League Labs on a similar topic. [1]
In line with Hauke Hillebrandt’s comment about nagging related worries about the campaigns, I feel it’s worth re-emphasising the real uncertainty about the long-term implications of these campaigns, summarised by Sentience Institute [2] (and expressed by many upset abolitionists, whenever welfare campaigns or organisations are mentioned): will they lengthen the existence of factory farming by encouragin humanewashing?
Combined with information suggesting that “cage free” isn’t actually much of a real welfare improvement [3], it makes me sceptical of the overall value of welfare interventions. And now Hauke Hillebrandt’s comment has made me even more sceptical!
All these things combined might make considerations of cost efficiency of the intervention type fairly irrelevant—potentially these are even consideartions of the efficiency of increasing total animal suffering?
I’m possibly being overly negative here—but when THL is the only charity that ACE has recommended in all review periods, and has previously recommended MFA (who run similar programmes), it seems pretty fundamental to EAA.
Thanks for the question—I have wondered the same, as I also studied History at undergraduate level.
A slight detour from your question, but maybe of interest. There is currently is no community / FB group for people with backgrounds or research interests in History within EA that I know of. There have been quite a few times when discussions around the usefulness of historical studies has come up and it might be good to share ideas and collaborate.
I don’t have time to try and coordinate this at the moment, but it seems like trying to establish some sort of discussion forum (or organisation?) for using the study of history to advance our understanding of (and strategy towards) cause areas which are often prioritised within EA.
If this is something you (or anyone else seeing this) has an interest in me developing, it’s something to bear in mind? People should feel free to contact me at james_a_harris [at] hotmail.co.uk if you want to talk about it further.
Examples: I’m thinking primarily within Effective Animal Advocacy (Sentience Institute’s study of the British antislavery movement; ACE discontinuing their social studies project; technology adoption being considered as a precedent for clean meat e.g. by Sentience Institute and Paul Shapiro) but this would also apply to other fields. The systematic approach described in the post linked at [1] seems to correlate more closely with the approach Holden and others took at OPP than it does the studies done in the Effective Animal Advocacy sphere.
[1] http://effective-altruism.com/ea/1lz/why_we_should_be_doing_more_systematic_research/
Minor question, but when I tried downloading something from libgen.io my internet browser blocked it and didn’t give me any obvious options for allowing the download. I’m not exactly techy and so this sort of thing scares me—how confident are you that I can download things off the site without giving my laptop viruses etc?
If people use other sites to access free books I’d also be keen to know!
Finding this list very useful personally, so thanks for that!
I am also planning to use it to help create a discussion group on the topic. There is a shorter version from EAF, but here are the questions for discussion I’m thinking of discussing:
Suffering: a. Are we convinced that K-Selecting species have net negative lives? b. Are we convinced that R-Selecting species have net negative lives? c. Are we convinced that wild animals, in total, have net negative lives?
Prioritisation: How far should we prioritise work on reducing WAS compared to: a. farm animal advocacy, b. other EA cause areas?
Potential crucial considerations: a. Should we still focus on WAS if we believed that animals had net positive lives? i. Would this change how far we prioritise the cause over other cause areas? ii. What effect would this have on the actual interventions that we favoured? b. Should we still focus on WAS if a scientific consensus emerged that most insects were not sentient (but other r-selecting species, like many fish, small mammals or birds etc, still were)? i. Would this change how far we prioritise the cause over other cause areas? ii. What effect would this have on the actual interventions that we favoured?
How far should we prioritise each of the following steps: a. Spreading anti-speciesism and concern for all sentient beings, including those living in the wild. b. Raising awareness of the very bad situation in which wild animals are, and spreading the view that we should be prepared to intervene to aid them. c. Doing research regarding the situation in which these animals are and the ways in which the harms they suffer can be reduced, rather than increased. d. Supporting those interventions in nature that are feasible today and present them as examples of what could be done for the good of animals in the wild at a bigger scale.
What are the different actions and interventions we can take for each of the above steps: a. As a community? b. As individuals?
Can we come up with 1 single personal goal to do more in this space? Create a timeframe and feedback loop or commitment device for this?
Yes, you’re right, I got mixed up because I found it from the database of useful EA organisers’ resources. I’ve edited the comment!
This point about the cause is very important, since cause areas can have orders of magnitude difference in their impact.
However, at times, it may be possible to invest in companies in high priority cause areas. See OPP’s investment into Impossible Foods here
I’ve written about this topic elsewhere, to explore whether it would be worth EA Funds or another EA group setting up opportunities for smaller donors/investors to get involved in impact investing. I was focusing on clean meat and plant-based meat to reduce animal suffering, but briefly consider other cause areas in the piece. TLDR: there probably aren’t good opportunities for doing this at the moment, but if the landscape changes and some areas become more funding constrained, then it could be a really useful intervention.
Thanks for exploring this topic!
A few relevant links you might find useful, if you were unaware of any of them:
1) There’s an EA FB group on the topic, although unfortunately it’s quite inactive
2) Hauke Hillebrandt has written and spoken about EAs engagement with impact investing
3) My blog post exploring whether it would be worth EA Funds or another EA group setting up opportunities for smaller donors/investors to get involved in impact investing. I was focusing on clean meat and plant-based meat to reduce animal suffering, but briefly consider other cause areas in the piece. TLDR: there probably aren’t good opportunities for doing this at the moment, but if the landscape changes and some areas become more funding constrained, then it could be a really useful intervention.
General thoughts:
I think there are two main issues for EAs with regards to impact investing, if you come at it from a utilitarian perspective + want to maximise good.
1) Is the social impact greater in total for the same amount of “lost money” in many impact investment opportunities? Through impact investing, in theory at least, you will be losing ROI compared to the market rate. This is equivalent to a donation. Could you do more good by donating directly? If so, then EAs don’t need to consider impact investing.
2) The practical issues. How do we manage this? As you note, smaller donors/investors can’t invest themselves. Could we pool money together through an EA impact investing fund manager?
I explore both ideas in my blog post linked above. If you come at the issue from a non-utilitarian perspective, then you might still value Socially Responsible Investing.
Specific request / suggestion:
I like the look at a particular investment option above. But I’m not following your opinion on how impact investment there might compare to donation to Cool Earth. Since an issue for EAs is the comparison (in social “bang for your buck” terms) between a direct donation to a charity and an impact investment (which will lose you money since it will have a lower ROI than the top of the market investments), it might be helpful to have a detailed model of an individual case study, which covers estimates on impact for the same amount of lost money, and the timescales involved.
Do you follow a Getting Things Done framework? If so, how does this fit in? Do you end up duplicating yourself?
(Holly probably knows most of my story but writing about myself seems fun so I’m going to do it anyway… maybe it’ll be somehow useful for someone too)
When I was 5, I refused to eat meat for emotional reasons (something along the lines of “Mum, that thing you’re cutting up still looks like a real chicken and that is sad, I’m going to cry lots now”).
When I was about 16, my schoolfriend (also a vegetarian) bought me Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation for my birthday. Reading this turned my personal, emotional choice into something which felt like a moral imperative. Despite never having engaged with any philosophy before, Singer’s views felt almost like a manifesto of what I thought I believed in. I’ve been pretty staunchly utilitarian since (although I still haven’t engaged very deeply with much philosophy).
I knew that I wanted to contribute positively to the world through my career. Given that history was my favourite subject, it seemed like the best way to help the world was to become a history teacher. I fixed my career plans upon this, and didn’t really consider any alternatives to this for years to come...
When I went to university I had hoped to find an animal advocacy student society, but there was none, so I set one up within weeks, alongside a few other people.
It was at uni that I first heard of Effective Altruism. Max Dalton (now at CEA) was at my college at uni and so was in my (extended) friendship group. He was heavily involved in the Oxford GWWC society. I didn’t ever speak to Max about EA whilst I was at uni, but I’d guess that most undergrads in my college had heard of EA because of Max. I also went to hear Peter Singer gives talks twice while I was there, and I think one of the talks was about Effective Altruism (before I knew much about it); I don’t remember it well, so it obviously didn’t leave as much of an impression on me at the time as Animal Liberation had. I thought that EA sounded like a great idea, but that I couldn’t engage with it yet, because I wasn’t earning any money, and my understanding was that EA was about donating effectively. So I decided I would donate 10% of my income to effective charities once I started earning, but that there was nothing else I needed to do in the meantime.
After my degree and 1 year teacher training course, I began working as a teacher and immediately began donating 10% of my income. I also started tentatively looking for potential EA-related volunteering opportunities (e.g. ACE) but nothing came of this at the time.
I spoke to some uni friends who were at similar levels of support for EA as I was. They said they had taken the GWWC pledge. I decided to sign up, since I was already donating 10%.
After signing up, David Nash (EA London) sent me an email asking if I’d like to come to EA London events. I said yes and asked how else I could get involved; I ended up taking over the majority of the organising of the Effective Animal Altruism London sub-group which he had set up with Saulius (another EA based in London) but didn’t have much time to put into organising.
My responsibility for this group (and my general interest) led to a period of deepening involvement in EA; trying to read as much as I could that came out relating to EA and animals and volunteering for several EAA organisations. At some point I decided that I wanted to change my career to have a greater positive impact; this was why I had chosen teaching in the first place anyway, I just hadn’t thought the implications of this through. After several months of agonising, speaking to various people and an 80K coaching call, I decided to work towards working directly in the Effective Animal Advocacy community (as opposed to focusing on building more flexible career capital). So I started an EAA blog, contiued to focus on reading into the area and my volunteering.
A few months later, I have just started working full time as a researcher at Sentience Institute.
Thanks very much for posting this reply. And thanks a lot for all the work ACE does in general. Some clarifications were useful to have, e.g. “The Relationship Between our Intervention Research and our Charity Reviews”—I had felt confused about this when I first looked through the reviews in depth.
Here are some specific comments:
Reviews of existing literature
I agree that the new intervention reports are much better on this front. I’m especially keen on the clear tables summarising existing literature in the protest report. I suspect that there’s still room for more depth here, especially since the articles summarized are probably just the most relevant parts of much wider debates within the social movement studies literature. For example, I notice a couple of items by S.A. Soule; although I haven’t read the book and analysis you (or whoever wrote the protest report) cite, I have read another article of her’s which was partially directed at considering the importance of the “political mediation” and “political opportunity structure” theories for assessing the impact of social movement organizations, and suspect that some of the works you cite might consider similar issues. I think the protest report goes into an appropriate amount of depth, given limited time and resources etc, but I’ve recently gained the impression that a literature review of social movement impact theory in a broad sense, or more systematic reviews of some of the more specific sub-areas, is a high priority in EAA research. I’d be keen to hear views about how useful this would be, and I’m happy to share more specific thoughts if that would help.
Unclear sources of figures
With some older intervention reports I agree with John Halstead that there are some confusing, unexplained numbers, although I think he exaggerates the extent of this (perhaps unintentionally), since some of the figures are explained. I don’t think this needs further comment since, as noted, the new intervention report style is much clearer. My impression was that the Guesstimate models from more recent charity evaluations also had some slightly unexplained figures on there. E.g. THL guesstimate model – “Rough estimate of number of farmed animals spared per dollar THL spent on campaigns” is −52 to 340. Tracking this back through the model takes you to a box which notes “THL did not provide estimates for the number of animals affected by cage-free campaigns they were involved with. We have roughly based this estimate on estimates from other groups active in promoting cage-free policies and have attempted to take into account the greater amount of resources THL dedicates towards this program area.” I feel like some explanation of this (perhaps a link to an external Google sheet) might have been helpful? I don’t think this is a big issue though. There’s also a chance I’ve just missed something / don’t fully understand Guesstimate yet.
General comment on use of CEEs
ACE does make very clear that it only sees CEEs as one part of a charity evaluation. I’d just suggest that, in spite of these warnings, individuals looking at the reports will naturally gravitate towards the CEEs as one of the more tangible/concrete/easily quotable areas of the report. E.g. when I’ve organised events and created resources for Effective Animal Altruism London, I’ve quoted some of the CEEs for charities (and pretty much nothing else from the report) to make broad points about the rough ballpark for cost effectiveness of different groups. Given this, it still makes sense to treat the CEEs as more important than some other parts of the report, and to try and be especially rigorous in these sections. So doing things like using a single disputed paper by De Mol et al (2016) (although this example is from the old corporate campaigns intervention report) as a key part of a cost effectiveness analysis seems inadvisable, if it is avoidable.
Thanks for the reply. Just wanted to note that I agree with ACE’s breadth over depth strategy, and that ACE might not be best-placed for a fuller review of social movement impact literature. It’s something I’m considering prioritizing doing personally in my work for Sentience Institute.
I wanted to echo all of Saulius’ points (including the thanks for doing this!).
To clarify your response here: all of the rankings are essentially subjective judgements, based on whatever evidence you have available in that category? So in the example above, if those cortisol tests were somehow your only evidence in the “index of biological markers” category, you would just decide a score that you felt represented the appropriate level of badness for the wild rat “index of biological markers” score?
I’m also wondering if you’re going to use the method to compare humans to non-human animals? Some of the biological measures we could use fall down when we think about how humans fit in, e.g. neuron count. Including humans in comparative measures seems valuable for reflecting on/testing intuitions we might otherwise have about cross-species comparisons.
Michael, apologies for this. I just came back to check this post. I didn’t ever receive the email because the formatting of the EA forum removed the underscore from my email, and I didn’t notice at the time. If you can find the email that you sent from your sent box in April, and could forward it to me at jamie@sentienceinstitute.org that would be great!
Given some of the issues raised on this thread, I suggest that either 80K should broaden its role and hire (lots) more staff to make this possible, or that new organisations should be set up to fill the gaps.
I’m glad to see the discussion of the “two visions.” I would guess that there is a discrepancy between how 80K thinks of its role (the second vision, focusing on key bottlenecks) and how most people, especially people newer to the EA community or not involved in EA meta orgs, think of 80K’s role (the first vision, focusing on broader social impact career advice).
When I come across someone who cares about making the world a better place / maximising their impact who is looking for career advice, I either point them towards 80K or discuss ideas with them that have almost entirely come from 80K. It may well be that 80K doesn’t see some of those people that I have conversations with as their intended target audience, but since 80K is the only EA org focusing on careers advice, I default to those recommendations. I would guess that many other people do the same.
A crude summary of some of the ideas here would be that increasing “inclination” is more important than increasing awareness from a long-term perspective. But if 80K is demoralising people new to the movement because it focuses on the second vision of its role over the first vision, then this probably decreases inclination quite a lot and so has negative long-term implications (even if in the short-term, it has higher impact).
Although I haven’t thoroughly looked at impact or cost-effectiveness metrics for 80K and other meta orgs, there are several factors that make me think that the EA community should prioritise devoting more resources to filling the gaps in the area of career advice:
1) Conversations about career decisions happen pretty regularly. Even if the most impactful thing for the handful of individuals working at 80K is indeed to focus on the narrower vision of their role, it seems important that other individuals work on the broader conception, so that these regular conversations that are happening anyway can be relatively informed.
2) Given that 80K focuses on the narrower vision, there is probably quite a lot of work that could be done relatively easily and be quite impactful if people were working on the broader vision (i.e. low hanging fruit)
3) We talk about EA movement-building not being funding constrained. If that’s the case, then presumably it’d be possible to create more roles, be that at 80K or at new organisations.
4) If I remember correctly, the EA survey suggests that 80K is an important entry point for lots of people into EA. It’s also a high-fidelity form of communication about EA ideas/research.
5) Generally there are loads of opportunities for impact that I can think of that a much larger 80K (or additional organisations also working on the intersection of EA and careers advice/decision making) could work on, that seem like they would plausibly have higher impact than some other ways that funds have been used for EA movement building that I can think of:
Research/website like 80K’s current career profile reviews, but including less competitive career paths (perhaps this would need to focus on quantity over quality and “breadth” over depth)
Career coaching calls (available all year round, for anyone focusing on any of the higher priority EA cause areas)
Regular career workshops, perhaps run through additional employees at local groups who are trained in how to run them, or perhaps as a single international organisation. This seems like a high fidelity method of EA outreach; if marketed well, I suspect these would get a lot of take-up. Targeted marketing to groups which are demographically under-represented in EA might also be a good way to start addressing diversity/inclusion/elitism concerns.
Research/webite/podcasts etc like 80K’s current work, but focusing on specific cause areas (e.g. animal advocacy broadly, including both farmed animals and wild animals)
Research/webite/podcasts etc like 80K’s current work, but focused on high school age students, before they’ve made choices which significantly narrow down their options (like choosing their degree).
In short, 80K does some amazing and important work, but there seems to be lots of space for the EA community to do more in the broad area of the intersection of EA and careers advice or decision-making. So it seems to me that either 80K should prioritise hiring more people to take up some of these opportunities, or EA as a movement should prioritise creating new organisations to take them up.
Thanks for the detailed reply. I agree with most of your comments/additions on my comments! Here are some further comments on your comments on my comments:
<< Unfortunately lack of funding constraints doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s easy to build new teams. For instance, the community is very constrained by managers, which makes it hard to both hire junior people and set up new organisations… [local workshops ] are already being experimented with by local effective altruism groups… [but are] also quite challenging to run well—often someone able to do this independently can get a full-time job at an existing organisation.”
Do I take these two comments combined to mean that you believe someone needs managerial experience, or extensive experience to set these up? I feel there might be a half way house here, where those at 80K who are more experienced in running career workshops spent the days/weeks/months required to set up some clear training resources and infrastructure to make these more easily/systematically run at a local level. At this point, it wouldn’t require managers or hugely experienced people to run these. For example, I would imagine that anyone with teaching experience who spent a few weeks (paid?) making sure that they were sufficiently up to speed on key EA and career-relevant knowledge could then run workshops like this very successfully. In short, I suspect we have different opinions about a) the resources required to set up the initial infrastructure to make these sessions workable, and b) the level of experience and skill needed to run them locally. Intuitively I feel quite strongly about this but I also have a tendency to underestimate the effort/time required for large projects like this.
<< One-on-one calls seem safer, and funding someone to work independently doing calls all day seems like a reasonable use of funding to me, provided they couldn’t / wouldn’t get a more senior job >>
Similarly to the above point, my current impression is that the EA community has more people who are sufficiently talented to do a role like this sufficiently well than it has jobs like this for them to fill. This seems like it would be a fairly generalist role, which could be done well by quite a range of people. Again, I think I might have a lower bar for the calibre of applicant that I would see as sufficient to make it worth funding someone to work on this full time though.
<< Note that we have tried this in the past (e.g. allied health, web design, executive search), but they took a long time to write, never got much attention, and as far as we’re aware haven’t caused any plan changes. >>
Fair enough. However, these metrics assess their usefulness within the context of the current audience and demographics of the EA community / 80K. Part of my understanding of the broader vision of 80K’s role (or for other new organisations to step in) assumes a broader / changing audience for the EA community.
<<This seems pretty similar to SHIC: https://shicschools.org/ >>
To my knowledge, SHIC don’t spend much time on careers advice. I am aware that SHIC are working on different programmes / forms of delivery at the moment, but the “core curriculum” only includes one session on careers advice, which was mostly a selection of ideas from 80K.
More broadly, this probably fits into an issue that I think EA might have (understandably, given how new it is) of having 1 organisation working on 1 key area. E.g. 80K for careers, SHIC for students. Even ACE for evaluating animal charities/interventions… or Sentience Institute for doing social movement research for animal organisations. But none of those organisations do all possible work in those areas (although you could argue that they take up the low hanging fruit) and they all have particular views about how they should do each of those things that others in the EA community might disagree with.
<< Unfortunately, we have very limited capacity to hire. It seems better that we focus our efforts on people who can help with our main organisational focus, which is the narrow vision. So, like I note, I think these would mainly have to be done by other organisations. >>
My guess would be that it would be worth diverting some time/resources from 80K to actively advocate for the setting up of new organisations, to assist with supporting or selecting the right candidates to fill those roles (e.g. if they applying for some form of grant), and to advise them, based on your own experiences. Or even offer grants to set up organisations to fill those gaps?
(P.S. feel free not to reply to these comments; I added them to try and explain/explore why we might disagree on some of these issues despite me accepting most of the points that you just made)
There are many important limitations to the direct impact of teaching, that 80,000 hours note in their teaching career review here https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/teaching/
However, after some reflection, I think that this review underestimates some of the potential for impact through teaching, especially in terms of providing opportunities to promote effective altruism.
I have created the document below (which is still a work-in-progress) primarily with the intention of using it to discuss ideas with other teachers, and potentially advise them on opportunities for high-impact activities that they can do. It is quite anecdotal and impressionistic, and is not intended (at least in its current format) to be comprehensive, but more to spark ideas about how to make your impact greatest within a teaching career.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JViIzFzBbepiaoO2x17ubIG0JTHB20HSHOVoSNDSogM/edit
To some extent, it’s useful to have being a teacher / social worker / doctor as good examples of where direct impact isn’t as important as it might seem, but I still think we need to be fully open and honest about the full range of possibilities that these career paths open.
I’d be grateful if people had a read through the list and share any thoughts / give feedback! Do people agree with the basic premise that teaching and education might be more promising career areas for having a positive impact than have previously been suggested by 80K (and in Doing Good Better etc), especially when used as a platform for EA community building and advocacy? Are there any specifics that people would challenge, or add to?
The goal of this post and discussion is that a) if people here agree, 80K might slightly adjust their advice to reflect these ideas, b) although I don’t see it as a priority for my own time, for those who are determined to focus their careers and efforts on education, it might be useful to flesh and out and develop this document with greater evidence, analysis and examples.
Personal background: as a UK-based history teacher who only started reading very much about EA ideas in January 2017 (after completing my PGCE course and teaching professionally for about half a year), reading 80k advice has had a massive effect on how I think about and plan my own career. I am now seeking to work directly for effective animal advocacy organisations. Nevertheless, I believe that working in education has potential for higher impact than has been assumed.