Jonas V

Karma: 7,887

I’ve helped set up the Atlas Fellowship, a program that researches talent search and scholarships for exceptional students.

Previously, I ran EA Funds and the Center on Long-Term Risk. My background is in medicine (BMed) and economics (MSc). See my LinkedIn.

You can best reach me at jonas@atlasfellowship.org.

I appreciate honest and direct feedback.

Unless explicitly stated otherwise, opinions are my own, not my employer’s. (I think this is generally how everyone uses the EA Forum; others who don’t have such a disclaimer likely think about it similarly.)

Jonas V 21 Jan 2015 8:40 UTC
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on: EA housemates: a good idea? Plus how to find them
Personal experience: Most considerate housemates ever, and not at all cultish … though it depends a lot on the people :)

I personally think it’s not that helpful to have an additional system for EA housing since it’s not so hard to just get in touch via a local group / chapter and look for other interested people there.

Jonas V 12 Feb 2015 21:47 UTC
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in reply to: Ben Kuhn’s comment on: [Error communicating with LW2 server]
Agree with Owen’s PR concerns, and with Ben about being especially virtuous. GiveWell have written about this as well, they call it a donor illusion.

That said, I think matching challenges are almost always fake, and maybe they’re a useful tool we should be using. But we can at least try to make it less fake and less obvious.

Ben Kuhn has summarised the evidence on matching challenges:

No studies found strong, generalizable negative effects of donation matching. However, several found worrying hints: Meier 2006 found that may have decreased net long-run donations, Eckel and Grossman 2008 found that it decreased response rate among some donors (probably due to the study’s unfamiliar-looking fundraising appeal), and there’s weak evidence that higher matching levels can actually crowd out some donations.

Jonas V 12 Feb 2015 22:26 UTC
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in reply to: tomstocker’s comment on: EA housemates: a good idea? Plus how to find them
Form and list.

Jonas V 26 Feb 2015 13:18 UTC
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in reply to: AlexMennen’s comment on: $10k of Experimental EA Funding
Maybe a link to that post should be included at the top of this article.

Jonas V 9 Mar 2015 9:24 UTC
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in reply to: Jess_Riedel’s comment on: Can we set up a system for international donation trading?
From the discussion I gather that we’re facing the following challenges:
- Trust
- Handling amounts that can’t be traded
- Maybe some technical challenges – once the number of trades, charities and countries increases, overview and coordination might become more difficult
- Also, the charities will want to know who the actual donors are, and thank them
These challenges could be resolved by a global network of EA organisations who offer donation trading (and, if possible in their legislation, donation regranting). Trust and professional communications and management seems easier to achieve with organisations who stick around longer-term than with individuals.

At GBS Switzerland, we already have some of the technical and legal components needed for this (we’re tax-deductible in several countries, can regrant donations, have a significant amount of donors who don’t pay taxes, and have some nice spreadsheets). Making progress in this direction is not a top priority for us at the moment, but if you’re interested in one of the things I’ve mentioned, please get in touch with me (and also Tom Ash, as he mentions below).

Jonas V 11 Jun 2015 17:05 UTC
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in reply to: Ben Kuhn’s comment on: Spreading EA messages to friends—including giving the hard sell
I had essentially the exact same experience.

Jonas V 28 Oct 2015 13:24 UTC
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on: Working at EA organizations series: Effective Altruism Foundation
We’ve recently published an up-to-date list of the positions available (in German): http://www.ea-stiftung.org/blog/blog/stellenangebote-herbst-2015

More on the REG position (in English): http://www.ea-stiftung.org/blog/blog/reg-director-of-growth

Jonas V 27 May 2016 9:53 UTC
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in reply to: Johannes_Treutlein’s comment on: GiveWell’s Charity Recommendations Require Taking a Controversial Stance on Population Ethics
One thing that seems noteworthy is the fact that the population effect actually brings people closer together than they were before: Ignoring population effects, AMF has high impact from a CU perspective but low impact from a suffering-focussed perspective; accounting for population effects, the difference almost vanishes. Another way of looking at it: In situations where the population remains constant, population ethics becomes irrelevant.

So accounting for population effects mainly gives us these two updates:
1. Population-ethical views become less relevant for prioritisation between various GiveWell charities (and not more relevant, as some seemed to suggest (possibly with the exception of the negative preference view)).
2. AMF might be less effective than deworming charities according to most population-ethical views (but still more effective than cash transfers due to developmental effects of malaria prevention).

Political initiative: Fundamental rights for primates

Jonas V4 Aug 2016 19:35 UTC

12 points

3 comments3 min readEA link

Jonas V 15 Aug 2016 7:04 UTC
3 points
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on: Effective Altruists really love EA: Evidence from EA Global
The title of this post sounds a bit cultish. :-)

Fundraiser: Political initiative raising an expected USD 30 million for effective charities

Jonas V13 Sep 2016 11:25 UTC

36 points

9 comments3 min readEA link

Jonas V 13 Sep 2016 18:20 UTC
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in reply to: Stefan_Schubert’s comment on: Fundraiser: Political initiative raising an expected USD 30 million for effective charities
It happens regularly that ballot initiatives are accepted (or rejected) by surprise, despite surveys and media predicting otherwise, so the base rate should be at least somewhat informative. But I agree that the outside view should be adjusted using all the data points we have. Here’s a brief overview of our thinking:
- According to representative government-funded surveys, 68% of the Swiss population want to increase aid, and 83% want it to remain unchanged or to increase it whilst greatly overestimating the current amount of aid given. Note that this is on the national level.
- Zurich is one of the most leftist cities in Switzerland, as can be seen from the strong leftist majority in its parliament and government (IIRC the 2nd most leftist out of the ~12 biggest cities according to this measure – and cities also tend to be more leftist than rural areas).
- The canton of Geneva already has a similar law and donates 0.7% of its budget to development charities, so it seems like this is something progressive cities should be able to get behind.
- However, Zurich’s budget already seems to be under a lot of pressure, and tax raises are generally unpopular. Even though Zurich’s tax rate is currently rather low compared to Switzerland’s other big cities, I expect this to be a major problem for the initiative.
- When collecting signatures for the initiative, our experience was that many people seemed to be at least somewhat skeptical. We don’t have detailed statistics (would be hard to implement with volunteers), but a bit more than half of all people who stopped and talked to us went on to sign the initiative. This is not that good: From experience we can tell that for unsuccessful non-EA initiatives, more people tended to be willing to sign.
- Many ballot initiatives that succeeded were rather populist (against immigrants, etc.). This suggests a lower success probability for our initiative. But this seems to apply mostly on the national level, and not so much on the city level.
- In general, foreign aid doesn’t seem to be a favorite topic of most citizens, and many seem to believe that it’s ineffective. It’s not clear yet whether our effectiveness requirements will be sufficient to dispel those doubts (moral psychology suggests it probably won’t).
- Getting representative samples for polls is difficult, and suboptimal polls provide little additional insight beyond the above data points and considerations, so we decided against this.
- Additional evidence will be gathered by gaining official support from charities, politicians and parties (or failing to do so – the latter would be the bigger update). Media reporting will also be informative.
Overall, I think we shouldn’t update that much from the base rate of 11%. But maybe something in the area of 8% would be more accurate than 11%.

We’ve considered going for lower budget percentages, e.g. just 0.7% as in Geneva’s case, or even lower. We think this would have relatively little influence on the success probability: Relative to the current development budget of CHF 3 million (€3 million), the increase will always be significant, and in absolute terms, the amount will always be pretty small, and voters are unlikely to be quantitative thinkers anyway. :-) “1%” sounds catchy and might make it more salient that the amount will be small overall, so we went with that.

Note that much (more than half?) of the initiative’s impact doesn’t depend on whether the vote passes: EA movement building, influence on policy-making, putting evidence-based methods on charities’ radar, improved reputation for the EA movement because it’s not seen as “unpolitical” anymore, etc. are all benefits that will occur in any case.

EDIT: Thanks for asking this question! This seems to be a crucial point that was left unanswered in the above post.

Jonas V 13 Sep 2016 19:55 UTC
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in reply to: Stefan_Schubert’s comment on: Fundraiser: Political initiative raising an expected USD 30 million for effective charities
1) I think the idea was to start with the outside view, and then gradually adjust based on additional evidence. I think this is best practice for such estimates. But of course you’re right that most initiatives tend to be quite different from our proposal.

2) Hm, I’m skeptical of this point, at least in the case of such a small initiative. Most popular initiatives seem to be launched without such polling (but there will be exceptions on the national level). The vote outcome will not only depend on individual opinion, but also a lot on the official recommendations by parliament and government (and the media). Direct conversations with politicians and charities seem similarly helpful for informing framings/communications at much lower cost.

3) I agree that a positive outcome would give the movement building / public debate effects a significant boost, but I think even if the initiative is rejected, the result will still be very good. ~75% of all media reporting and public debate will happen before the vote result is out: There will be 2 years of time to report on the initiative with multiple salient milestones (handing in the initiative, official statement by government and parliament, the voting day getting closer, etc.), but only 1-2 weeks after the vote. And if the initiative is rejected, this won’t be deemed a “defeat” (at least not as long as >25% of voters approve, which seems decently likely).

Jonas V 15 Sep 2016 19:03 UTC
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on: Should donors make commitments about future donations?
Based on our experience at Stiftung für Effektiven Altruismus (EAS), I fully agree with this post – thanks a lot for writing it!

Jonas V 14 Oct 2016 19:45 UTC
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in reply to: Josh Jacobson’s comment on: Fundraiser: Political initiative raising an expected USD 30 million for effective charities
This is very valuable input, thanks! In particular, I might have overestimated the cost of such polls. We’ll definitely look into this further and will strongly consider doing such polls.

As a result of this thread, we’re also in the process of obtaining data from a votematch tool. It’s not representative but contains demographic data, so we will be able to extrapolate.

Why should this matter? That ballots succeed without measuring their potential and optimizing against it doesn’t mean anything.

It does mean something, but I’m now 1) less confident in the belief that people don’t do such polling, and 2) think that we have more reason to update away from that prior (how well-informed is it, really?).

Direct conversations with politicians and charities seem similarly helpful for informing framings/communications at much lower cost.

How so? As a charity worker and former political staffer I think I’d have minimal information on a ballot initiative for something like this that I hadn’t done polling on. Why would their expertise be helpful? What information do they have that you don’t? Campaigners would only know about issues on which they’ve researched voting behavior.

I think polls are mostly helpful for strategic decisions such as how many resources to invest into the vote campaign. For refining our communication strategy, observing the media coverage and updating our strategy based on that will be more useful. Politicians also have intuitions for how people will react to various points, e.g. for the kinds of arguments opponents will bring up, or whether a particular party will support the initiative. They might be able to give us recommendations for how to make sure the parliament recommends accepting the initiative. This is especially true in the frequently-debated question of foreign aid. It’s not clear what a poll result like “45% plan to vote YES” means for the communication strategy.

I don’t think the last point is decisive though, we should simply do both.

Jonas V 8 Dec 2016 13:01 UTC
0 points
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on: Donor lotteries: demonstration and FAQ
(If EAs end up committing a significant proportion of the $100k (or even all of it), will Paul reduce his ‘haircut’ or not?)

Jonas V 6 Feb 2017 12:31 UTC
4 points
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on: EAs are not perfect utilitarians
Given the diversity of ethical views in the EA movement, I think “EAs are not entirely altruistic” would be a more appropriate title than “EAs are not perfect utilitarians”.

Jonas V 6 Feb 2017 13:11 UTC
4 points
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on: EA should invest more in exploration
GiveWell has made several big research-related grants, e.g. a $2M grant to IDinsight, part of which funds impact evaluations (which probably includes RCTs): http://www.givewell.org/charities/IDinsight/june-2016-grant

Jonas V 21 Apr 2017 10:05 UTC
7 points
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on: Update on Effective Altruism Funds
What percentage of funds was raised from people who are part of the EA community / identify as EAs, and what percentage of funds from people outside the community (e.g. Hacker News)?

(The launch post said that you’ll be “seeing how the concept is received outside of the EA community” so it would be nice to learn about that, too.)

Jonas V 25 Apr 2017 7:13 UTC
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in reply to: Peter Wildeford’s comment on: Effective altruism is self-recommending
Some of those charities are developed-world charities and would likely be seen as ineffective by most EAs. However, he might not give to those charities if he was running an EA Fund (similar to how many GiveWell staff are donating to charities not recommended by GiveWell), or maybe multiple people could run the fund together.

One thing I like about Blattman’s work is that he has done a lot of research on armed conflict and violence and how to prevent it (with high-quality RCTs). This area seems to be very neglected in EA:

http://www.poverty-action.org/study/peace-education-rural-liberia

http://www.poverty-action.org/study/ex-combatant-reintegration-liberia

EAs seem to focus on health most of the time (e.g. Charity Entrepreneurship almost exclusively evaluated health programs). There are lots of good reasons for focusing on health, and maybe the goal of EA is not to find all the best charities/programs but only some of them such that there’s enough RFMF for the EA community as a whole. However, I’m skeptical and still think non-health approaches are very neglected in EA because:

1) There has been hardly any analysis of other program areas (e.g. so far I haven’t seen any kind of back-of-the-envelope analysis focusing on peace and security, nor any kind of “fact post” on the EA forum, nor anything similar),

2) there might be a lot of additional funding available for such alternative approaches (by donors who tend to be more skeptical of GiveWell’s health focus, or by donors whose funds are restricted in some way),

3) it would demonstrate to the outside world that EAs are really doing their homework instead of being easily satisfied with some easy-to-measure approaches, and this might accelerate EA movement growth and strengthen its impact and credibility in society at large (which could also increase total funding for top charities).

For these reasons, I would very much like someone like Chris Blattman to be involved with the EA Funds in some way (maybe not as a fund manager). Or some external review of GiveWell’s work by someone like Blattman.

EDIT: Actually Open Phil wrote a bit about aid in fragile contexts: http://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/cause-reports/fragile-states

Jonas V

Poli­ti­cal ini­ti­a­tive: Fun­da­men­tal rights for primates

Fundraiser: Poli­ti­cal ini­ti­a­tive rais­ing an ex­pected USD 30 mil­lion for effec­tive charities

Political initiative: Fundamental rights for primates

Fundraiser: Political initiative raising an expected USD 30 million for effective charities