Jonas Vollmer

• Jonas Vollmer 29 Jul 2019 14:21 UTC

  11 points

  on: Re­think Grants: an eval­u­a­tion of Dona­tional’s Cor­po­rate Am­bas­sador Program

  I’d be in­ter­ested in more elab­o­ra­tion on what kinds of grants you may eval­u­ate in the fu­ture and more gen­er­ally your place and com­par­a­tive ad­van­tage in the EA grant­mak­ing ecosys­tem. E.g., should peo­ple with ideas get in touch with you? How could you see your­self col­lab­o­rat­ing with other grant­mak­ers? How did you de­cide to look into Dona­tional?

• Jonas Vollmer 29 Jul 2019 14:16 UTC

  5 points

  on: Re­think Grants: an eval­u­a­tion of Dona­tional’s Cor­po­rate Am­bas­sador Program

  Thanks for putting this to­gether, I think this is an ex­cit­ing re­port and pro­ject.

  I mostly agree with Habryka’s points.

  I have an­other minor point:

  We think there is a small-to-mod­er­ate chance that CAP would gen­er­ate sev­eral very im­pact­ful in­di­rect benefits. For ex­am­ple, the ad­di­tional dona­tions go­ing to an­i­mal-fo­cused char­i­ties may re­duce the risk of global pan­demics caused by an­tibiotic re­sis­tance, and the pro­gram may help cre­ate a broader cul­ture of effec­tive giv­ing at US work­places.

  I feel like it’s odd to cat­e­go­rize the former ex­am­ple as “in­di­rect benefits”. I think a cost-effec­tive­ness model should aim to cap­ture the over­all ex­pected im­pact of all the char­i­ties by ap­ply­ing some “im­pact-ad­justed money moved” met­ric. (If you’re eval­u­at­ing from a long-ter­mist per­spec­tive, this would mean a long-ter­mist per­spec­tive on all sup­ported char­i­ties.) Other­wise, any pro­ject that in­volves some amount of lev­er­age on var­i­ous other or­ga­ni­za­tions will always have high in­di­rect benefits and harms, which makes the over­all rat­ing non-in­for­ma­tive.

  I agree that “help cre­ate a broader cul­ture of effec­tive giv­ing at US work­places” is a good ex­am­ple of an in­di­rect benefit.

  For in­stance, char­i­ties that re­duce poverty and dis­ease may cause eco­nomic growth, which is likely to in­crease the num­ber of an­i­mals raised in fac­tory farms and could con­tribute to cli­mate change and ex­is­ten­tial risks.

  Again, the same points seem to hold here; I think this should already be fac­tored into the cost-effec­tive­ness es­ti­mates.

  (I re­al­ize my ex­pla­na­tion of my view is a bit vague; I have a pretty strong in­tu­ition here and it would take me more time to think about it more and re­ally ex­plain it in depth.)

• Jonas Vollmer 10 Jul 2019 16:32 UTC

  13 points

  in reply to: jpaddison's comment on: I find this fo­rum in­creas­ingly difficult to navigate

  It would be great if the AllPosts page dis­played the first ~100 posts in­stead of just the first ~16. Every few months, I find my­self spend­ing sev­eral min­utes re­peat­edly click­ing the “Load More Days” but­ton.

• Jonas Vollmer 10 Jul 2019 11:19 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: alexherwix's comment on: An­nounc­ing plans for a Ger­man Effec­tive Altru­ism Net­work fo­cused on Com­mu­nity Building

  We would love to have a more di­verse team and if you have in­ter­ested peo­ple in mind, please di­rect them to the sur­vey or our cur­rent email address

  I’ve sent you a PM with some sug­ges­tions! I haven’t been in touch with them lately, so please reach out to them di­rectly.

• Jonas Vollmer 4 Jul 2019 15:20 UTC

  17 points

  on: An­nounc­ing plans for a Ger­man Effec­tive Altru­ism Net­work fo­cused on Com­mu­nity Building

  Thanks for this de­tailed write-up! I ap­pre­ci­ate that you’re tak­ing the ini­ti­a­tive, es­pe­cially con­sid­er­ing that EAF has with­drawn from this area.

  A few ques­tions /​ in­puts:

  1. Have you con­sid­ered try­ing to re­cruit a more de­mo­graph­i­cally di­verse team? To my knowl­edge, there are sev­eral women who would make ex­cel­lent con­tri­bu­tions and might be in­ter­ested.

  2. What are your plans for co­or­di­nat­ing with the in­ter­na­tional EA com­mu­nity, es­pe­cially CEA, and stay­ing up to date with their in­puts for com­mu­nity build­ing strat­egy? My ex­pe­rience has been that im­por­tant strate­gic up­date are of­ten only prop­a­gated slowly to na­tional/​lo­cal groups, so hav­ing a very de­liber­ate plan for do­ing that seems de­sir­able (edit: you also write this in your post – sorry for the ini­tial over­sight). (As far as I know, there hasn’t been an at­tempt to co­or­di­nate with EAF yet, which IMO could also be use­ful. Feel free to reach out if you haven’t yet! – Edit: I stand cor­rected – there has ac­tu­ally been some co­or­di­na­tion in the early stages, so thanks!)

  3. I ap­pre­ci­ate that you listed con­crete met­rics to eval­u­ate your im­pact. Some of the met­rics seem much more suit­able to me than oth­ers – ca­reer changes, for ex­am­ple, seem re­ally valuable and im­pact­ful, pledges taken seems use­ful, but money donated by stu­dents is un­likely to be sig­nifi­cant and can be used as a way of get­ting peo­ple in­volved and en­gaged rather than as an out­come met­ric. Similarly, I’d recom­mend a stronger effort to track the qual­ity of lo­cal groups and lo­cal group mem­bers rather than the quan­tities/​num­bers. Th­ese things have been elab­o­rated on in sev­eral lo­cal group guides.

• Jonas Vollmer 3 Jul 2019 4:28 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: kcudding's comment on: Life his­tory clas­sifi­ca­tion

  Thanks for the re­sponse!

• Jonas Vollmer 18 Jun 2019 13:58 UTC

  6 points

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

  Strong-up­voted the post, es­pe­cially be­cause it seems very nu­anced.

  For ex­am­ple, Wild An­i­mal Suffer­ing Re­search was pre­vi­ously a pro­ject of EAF, though I am not sure of the cur­rent re­la­tion­ship be­tween EAF and Wild An­i­mal Ini­ti­a­tive, which has re­placed WASR.

  At this point, WAI is an in­de­pe­dent US non-profit (see here).

  Through Rais­ing for Effec­tive Giv­ing, EAF con­tinues to fundraise >$1m an­nu­ally for an­i­mal char­i­ties.

• Jonas Vollmer 18 Jun 2019 13:50 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: kcudding's comment on: Life his­tory clas­sifi­ca­tion

  I still don’t un­der­stand which claim you’re mak­ing, ex­actly.

  Are you say­ing:

  1) “most an­i­mals don’t have as many offspring as was pre­vi­ously stated (mis­tak­enly, based on the r-/​K-se­lec­tion model), and there­fore we can’t be as sure that most an­i­mals live short and grue­some lives,”

  or 2) “most an­i­mals don’t have as short a life span as was pre­vi­ously stated (mis­tak­enly, based on the r-/​K-se­lec­tion model), and there­fore we can’t be as sure that most an­i­mals live short and grue­some lives,”

  or 3) some­thing else?

  I thought the claim about r-/​K-se­lec­tion was always about num­ber of offspring and lifes­pan, rather than other as­pects of the model (com­pe­ti­tion, body size, etc.), and your ar­ti­cle doesn’t seem to sug­gest that these are very differ­ent from what was pre­vi­ously ar­gued.

• Jonas Vollmer 18 Jun 2019 13:30 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Habryka's comment on: You Should Write a Fo­rum Bio

  I’d guess that peo­ple would write more de­tailed bios if the in­put field was larger.

• Jonas Vollmer 18 Jun 2019 13:27 UTC

  8 points

  on: In­ver­te­brate Sen­tience: Sum­mary of find­ings, Part 2

  Ex­cel­lent ar­ti­cle!

• Jonas Vollmer 17 Jun 2019 14:34 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: John_Maxwell_IV's comment on: Open Thread #44

  Here’s an­other ex­am­ple: https://​​www.google.com/​​search?q=%22SHOW%3A+A+frame­work+for+shap­ing+your+tal­ent+for+di­rect+work%22

• Jonas Vollmer 10 Jun 2019 8:48 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: Gregory_Lewis's comment on: A Frame­work for Think­ing about the EA La­bor Market

  I’d add that I think there’s some­thing to be said in fa­vor of a needs-based model in the early stages of a startup. For as long as you’re heav­ily fund­ing-con­strained, it al­lows you to hire a greater num­ber of peo­ple at a given cost. (This is es­sen­tially first-de­gree price dis­crim­i­na­tion; max­i­miz­ing pro­ducer’s sur­plus (≈ al­tru­is­tic util­ity) can IMO be a good idea un­der some cir­cum­stances.) One could ar­gue that even then, promis­ing EA star­tups should (and will) be paid bet­ter, but I’m not sure this always works out in prac­tice.

  Other than that, I agree.

• Jonas Vollmer 10 Jun 2019 8:30 UTC

  9 points

  on: In­ver­te­brate Sen­tience: A Use­ful Em­piri­cal Resource

  Ex­cel­lent ar­ti­cle!

• Jonas Vollmer 8 Jun 2019 16:00 UTC

  4 points

  on: Eth­i­cal offset­ting is an­ti­thet­i­cal to EA

  One thing I like about offset­ting is that it cre­ates a more co­op­er­a­tive and in­clu­sive EA com­mu­nity. I.e., an­i­mal ad­vo­cates might be put off less by meat-eat­ing EAs if they learn they offset their con­sump­tion, or poverty re­duc­ers might be less con­cerned about long-ter­mists mak­ing policy recom­men­da­tions that (per­haps as a side effect) slow down AI progress (and thereby the es­cape from global poverty) if they also sup­port some poverty in­ter­ven­tions (es­pe­cially when do­ing so is par­tic­u­larly cheap for them). In gen­eral, there seem to be sig­nifi­cant gains from co­op­er­a­tion, and given re­peated in­ter­ac­tion, it’s fairly easy to ac­tu­ally move to­wards such out­comes, in­clud­ing by start­ing to co­op­er­ate unilat­er­ally.

  Of course, this is best achieved not through offset­ting, but by think­ing about who we will want to co­op­er­ate with and try­ing to help their val­ues as cost-effec­tively as pos­si­ble.

• Jonas Vollmer 8 Jun 2019 14:12 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: michaelchen's comment on: There’s Lots More To Do

  This piece does a good job at mak­ing this point: https://​​www.giv­ing­whatwe­can.org/​​post/​​2015/​​06/​​cost-fight­ing-malaria-malnu­tri­tion-ne­glected-trop­i­cal-dis­eases-and-hivaids-and/​​

• Jonas Vollmer 5 Jun 2019 7:29 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: Peter_Hurford's comment on: Re­view of Fundrais­ing Ac­tivi­ties of EAF in 2018

  It has! It was suc­cess­ful, both in terms of par­ti­ci­pant satis­fac­tion and our own as­sess­ment of re­search progress/​ideas.

• Jonas Vollmer 23 May 2019 8:17 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Khorton's comment on: Why do EA events at­tract more men than women? Fo­cus group data

  Haha, in­ter­est­ing, thanks! :)

• Jonas Vollmer 22 May 2019 16:26 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Khorton's comment on: Why do EA events at­tract more men than women? Fo­cus group data

  Thanks!

  What you’re say­ing matches my per­sonal ex­pe­rience.

  I was won­der­ing whether there might be a dis­crep­ancy among those who stop at­tend­ing – any thoughts on that?

  ETA: This seems more plau­si­ble to me than a gen­eral ten­dency be­cause women and men in EA have already self-se­lected based on be­ing in­ter­ested in these ideas. Though maybe some­thing similar could be said of peo­ple who at­tended once but stopped.

• Jonas Vollmer 20 May 2019 13:46 UTC

  11 points

  on: Why do EA events at­tract more men than women? Fo­cus group data

  Thanks a lot for this ex­cel­lent piece, re­ally ap­pre­ci­ate it.

  I’ve been won­der­ing for some time whether differ­ences in in­ter­ests (if they ex­ist) might con­tribute to the gen­der im­bal­ance in EA, and if so, what les­sons we might draw from that. Maybe fo­cus groups (es­pe­cially with women and men who stopped at­tend­ing events) could con­tribute to an­swer­ing this ques­tion.

• Jonas Vollmer 17 May 2019 16:00 UTC

  2 points

  on: Top Char­ity Ideas 2019 - Char­ity Entrepreneurship

  For poverty-ori­ented in­ter­ven­tions, have you con­sid­ered less mea­surable, more hits-based, more growth-fo­cused ideas? I’m think­ing of op­por­tu­ni­ties that might have a chance of repli­cat­ing some­thing like China’s es­cape from ex­treme poverty in other coun­tries.

  A few ideas for where you might start if you tried to look into this more:

  • https://​​fo­rum.effec­tivealtru­ism.org/​​posts/​​ZfD4cZgAcgQc5oRNN/​​hit-based-giv­ing-for-global-development

  • http://​​www.econ­talk.org/​​lant-pritch­ett-on-poverty-growth-and-ex­per­i­ments/​​

  • https://​​con­cepts.effec­tivealtru­ism.org/​​con­cepts/​​im­mi­gra­tion-re­form/​​

  • https://​​blog.givewell.org/​​2019/​​02/​​07/​​how-givewells-re­search-is-evolv­ing/​​

  • https://​​80000hours.org/​​pod­cast/​​epi­sodes/​​lut­ter-and-win­ter-chater-cities-in­no­va­tive-gov­er­nance/​​

  (Please let me know if you found this in­ter­est­ing /​ helpful – I might write a brief EA fo­rum post about this at some point.)