Jonas Vollmer(Jonas Vollmer)

Karma: 3,876

I appreciate honest and direct feedback: https://admonymous.co/vollmer

I’m the Executive Director at EA Funds, based in Oxford. You can best reach me at jonas.vollmer@centreforeffectivealtruism.org.

Previously, I was a co-founder and co-executive director at the London-based Center on Long-Term Risk, a research group and grantmaker focused on preventing s-risks from AI.

My background is in medicine (BMed) and economics (MSc). See my LinkedIn.

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 Vollmer 16 Apr 2021 17:25 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Manuel_Allgaier’s comment on: [Coronavirus] Is it a good idea to meet people indoors if everyone’s rapid antigen test came back negative?
Sensitivity is relative to PCR tests, and tends to be reported quite incorrectly. So unlike I suggested in the OP, I think the adjustment should probably be ~4x and not ~12x.

Jonas Vollmer 10 Apr 2021 12:35 UTC
7 points
on: Announcing “Naming What We Can”!
If someone writes another book about EA, it should be titled How to Be Great at Doing The Most Good You Can Do Better

Jonas Vollmer 6 Apr 2021 18:29 UTC
2 points
in reply to: MichaelDickens’s comment on: A Comparison of Donor-Advised Fund Providers
You said it in the “My process” section, but not earlier.

Jonas Vollmer 6 Apr 2021 10:52 UTC
8 points
in reply to: Jonas Vollmer’s comment on: A Comparison of Donor-Advised Fund Providers
Also, if anyone is up for it, I think a resource for DAF providers in other countries would seem useful as well

Jonas Vollmer 6 Apr 2021 10:52 UTC
14 points
on: A Comparison of Donor-Advised Fund Providers
Does this apply to US only? If so, could be good to say at the very top.
(I haven’t read the post, but I’m very excited that such a resource exists!)

Jonas Vollmer 30 Mar 2021 15:22 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Owen_Cotton-Barratt’s comment on: Why I prefer “Effective Altruism” to “Global Priorities”
Thanks, that makes sense!

Jonas Vollmer 30 Mar 2021 13:50 UTC
16 points
in reply to: jackmalde’s comment on: The Long-Term Future Fund has room for more funding, right now
I don’t really think there’s a difference between the two:
- The LTFF can encourage anyone to apply. Several of the grants of the current round are a result of proactive outreach to specific individuals. (This still involves filling in the application form, but that’s just because it’s slightly lower-effort than exchanging the same information via email.)
- A donor lottery winner can only grant to individuals who submit due diligence materials to CEA, which also involves filling in some forms.

Jonas Vollmer 30 Mar 2021 13:45 UTC
3 points
in reply to: kdbscott’s comment on: Some quick notes on “effective altruism”
I specifically wrote:
Perhaps partly because of this, at the Leaders Forum 2019, around half of the participants (including key figures in EA) said that they don’t self-identify as “effective altruists”, despite self-identifying, e.g., as feminists, utilitarians, or atheists.
For further clarification, see also the comment I just left here.

Jonas Vollmer 30 Mar 2021 13:42 UTC
3 points
in reply to: ofer’s comment on: EA Funds has appointed new fund managers
Not yet, but I hope to publish it soon. (Sometime this year, ideally within the next few weeks.)

Jonas Vollmer 30 Mar 2021 13:41 UTC
30 points
on: What are your main reservations about identifying as an effective altruist?
It’s worth mentioning that during that session, we realized that some people want to keep their identity small as a general rule. For this reason, someone specifically asked the following question (paraphrased): “Who 1) has some labels (‘-isms’) they identify with (e.g. atheist, feminist, utilitarian) and 2) does NOT identify as ‘effective altruist’?” And in response to that particular question, around half of people raised their hands. (I didn’t count them – might also have been just 30% or so, but definitely a significant percentage. You might think “okay, probably those were the participants who were mainly into AI safety or rationality rather than EA” but that wasn’t the case.)

Jonas Vollmer 29 Mar 2021 16:44 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Denise_Melchin’s comment on: Some quick notes on “effective altruism”
Thanks for clarifying – I basically agree with all of this. I particularly agree that the “government job” idea needs a lot more careful thinking and may not turn out to be as great as one might think.
I think our main disagreement might be that I think that donating large amounts effectively requires an understanding of EA ideas and altruistic dedication that only a small number of people are ever likely to develop, so I don’t see the “impact through donations” route as an unusually strong argument for doing EA messaging in a particular direction or having a very large movement. And I consider the fact that some people can have very impactful careers a pretty strong argument for emphasizing the careers angle a bit more than the donation angle (though we should keep communicating both).
(Disclaimer: Written very quickly.)
I also edited my original comment (added a paragraph at the top) to make this clearer; I think my previous comment kind of missed the point.

Jonas Vollmer 29 Mar 2021 16:30 UTC
8 points
in reply to: Max_Daniel’s comment on: Some quick notes on “effective altruism”
Yeah, these are great points. I agree that with enough structure, larger-scale growth seems possible. Basically, I agree with everything you said. I’d perhaps add that in such a world, “EA” would have a quite different meaning from how we use the term now. I also don’t quite buy the point about Ramanujan – I think “spreading the ideas widely” is different from “making the community huge”.
(Small meta nitpick: I find it confusing to call a community of 2 million people “small” – really wish we were using “very large” for 2 million and “insanely huge” for 1% of the population, or similar. Like, if someone said “Jonas wants to keep EA small”, I would feel like they were misrepresenting my opinion.)

Jonas Vollmer 29 Mar 2021 16:29 UTC
9 points
in reply to: jackmalde’s comment on: The Long-Term Future Fund has room for more funding, right now
We also did a lot more promotion and encouraged more people to submit promising applications, and this plausibly also caused more people to apply – so it may be faster-than-organic growth.

Jonas Vollmer 29 Mar 2021 16:28 UTC
10 points
in reply to: David_Moss’s comment on: The Long-Term Future Fund has room for more funding, right now
I wonder whether this alters the calculus for whether to give to donor lotteries (as opposed to EA Funds)?
I personally think it doesn’t change it much. As you previously mentioned, there’s a risk of donors being biased against giving to funds and instead wanting to do their “own thing”; I hope that donor lottery winners will be able to overcome that.
It seemed at the time that the response was fairly sanguine about the possibility that individual donors (e.g. lottery winners) might make better allocations than the fund managers.
It’s worth noting that I only believe this under the assumption that the individual donors know about some specific opportunities that the fund managers are unaware of, or perhaps have significant worldview differences with the fund managers.

Jonas Vollmer 29 Mar 2021 10:16 UTC
12 points
in reply to: Denise_Melchin’s comment on: Some quick notes on “effective altruism”
Edit: I think my below comment kind of misses the point – my main response is simply: Some people could probably do a huge amount of good by, e.g., helping increase meat alternatives R&D budgets, this seems a much bigger opportunity than increasing donations and similarly tractable, so we should focus more on that (while continuing to also increase donations).
--
Some quick thoughts:
- I personally think the EA community could plausibly grow 1000-fold compared to its current size, i.e. to 2 million people, which would correspond to ~0.1% of the Western population. I think EA is unlikely to be able to attract >1% of the (Western and non-Western) population primarily because understanding EA ideas (and being into them) typically requires a scientific and prosocial/altruistic mindset, advanced education, and the right age (no younger than ~16, not old enough to be too busy with lots of other life goals). Trying to attract >1% of the population would in my view likely lead to a harmful dilution of the EA community. We should decide whether we want to grow more than 1000-fold once we’ve grown 100-fold and have more information.
- Low donation rates indeed feel concerning. To me, the lack of discussion of “how can we best make ODA budgets more effective” and similar questions feels even more concerning, as the latter seems a much bigger missed opportunity.
- I think lots of people can get government jobs where you can have a significant positive impact in a relevant area at some point of your career, or otherwise contribute to making governments more effective. I tentatively agree that personal donations seem more impactful than the career impact in many cases, but I don’t think it’s clear that we should overall aim to maximize donations. It could be worth doing some more research into this.
- I would feel excited about a project that tries to find out why donation rates are low (lack of money? lack of room for more funding? saving to give later and make donations more well-reasoned by giving lump sums? a false perception that money won’t do much good anymore? something else?) and how we might increase them. (What’s your guess for the reasons? I’d be very interested in more discussion about this, it might be worth a separate EA Forum post if that doesn’t exist already.)
- As you suggest, if the EA community doesn’t have the expertise to have a positive impact on developing-world policy, perhaps it should develop more of it. I don’t really know, but some of these jobs might not be very competitive or difficult but disproportionately impactful. Even if you just try help discontinue funding programs that don’t work, prevent budget cuts for the ones that do, and generally encourage better resource prioritization, that could be very helpful.

Jonas Vollmer 26 Mar 2021 11:06 UTC
24 points
in reply to: MichaelA’s comment on: Why I prefer “Effective Altruism” to “Global Priorities”
Jonas Vollmer and others have a good argument that we should change the name of our movement from EA to Global Priorities.
Ugh, I really want to strongly object to that characterization of my post! I was mostly trying to share some concerns that I wasn’t sure what to make of, and my key recommendation was that we “might want to consider de-emphasizing the EA brand”. Rebranding the EA community was more of a tentative personal opinion, and “global priorities” was just a very tentative example for what the name could be in such a case.
I would appreciate if you could edit the post to make this clearer. I only discovered your post a day after it was posted, and am worried that people will now read my piece as saying something that I tried to avoid saying.
Otherwise, I think these are great points, and I agree with them. A lot ultimately comes down to empirical testing.

Jonas Vollmer 26 Mar 2021 11:05 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Jonas Vollmer’s comment on: Why I prefer “Effective Altruism” to “Global Priorities”
(moved comment elsewhere)

Jonas Vollmer 26 Mar 2021 10:56 UTC
0 points
on: Why I prefer “Effective Altruism” to “Global Priorities”
(moved comment elsewhere)

Jonas Vollmer 26 Mar 2021 10:52 UTC
18 points
in reply to: Owen_Cotton-Barratt’s comment on: Why I prefer “Effective Altruism” to “Global Priorities”
I think it’s almost certainly possible to change the name of the movement if we want to – I think this would take an organization taking ownership of the project, hosting a well-organized Coordination Forum for the main stakeholders, and some good naming suggestions that lots of people can get behind. Doing something ambitious like this might also generally improve the EA community’s ability to coordinate around larger projects, which generally seems a useful capacity to develop.
That said, it would be a very effortful project, and should be carefully traded off against other priorities that might have a better benefit/cost ratio. It seems pretty likely to me that other priorities should be higher up on the list. This is why I also emphasized the “use of different labels in different contexts” more than the suggestion that we should rebrand EA in my original post.
(Perhaps that’s what you meant with “not an option on the table”? I felt sad when reading that because I understood it as pessimism about EA’s ability to coordinate, which I think hasn’t really been attempted very well yet.)

Jonas Vollmer 26 Mar 2021 10:21 UTC
13 points
on: Some quick notes on “effective altruism”
New post that’s related to this (just discovered it now): https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/o5ChDMcooDFG8cfPJ/why-i-prefer-effective-altruism-to-global-priorities