Jonas Vollmer(Jonas Vollmer)

Karma: 4,654

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 1 Dec 2021 23:29 UTC
4 points
in reply to: michaelchen’s comment on: Announcing EffectiveCrypto.org, powered by EA Funds
Out of all the suggestions, this seemed the least bad one. If you have a better suggestion, we might rename it!

Jonas Vollmer 25 Nov 2021 9:58 UTC
13 points
in reply to: AppliedDivinityStudies’s comment on: A Red-Team Against the Impact of Small Donations
Though is that case, is the upshot that I should donate to EA Funds, or that I should tell EA Funds to refer weird grant applicants to me?
If you’re a <$500k/y donor, donate to EA Funds; otherwise tell EA Funds to refer weird grant applications to you (especially if you’re neartermist – I don’t think we’re currently constrained by longtermist/meta donors who are open to weird ideas).
Regarding Charter Cities, I don’t think EA Funds would be worried about funding them. However, I haven’t yet encountered human-centric (as opposed to animal-inclusive) neartermist (as opposed to longtermist) large private donors who are open to weird ideas, and fund managers haven’t been particularly excited about charter cities.

Jonas Vollmer 25 Nov 2021 9:50 UTC
11 points
in reply to: NunoSempere’s comment on: A Red-Team Against the Impact of Small Donations
This doesn’t seem like it is common knowledge.
To me, it feels like I (and other grantmakers) have been saying this over and over again (on the Forum, on Facebook, in Dank EA Memes, etc.), and yet people keep believing it’s hard to fund weird things. I’m confused by this.
Also, “weird things that make sense” does kind of screen off a bunch of ideas which make sense to potential applicants, but not to fund managers.
Sure, but that argument applies to individual donors in the same way. (You might say that having more diverse decision-makers helps, but I’m pretty skeptical and think this will instead just lower the bar for funding.)

Jonas Vollmer 25 Nov 2021 9:44 UTC
4 points
in reply to: AppliedDivinityStudies’s comment on: A Red-Team Against the Impact of Small Donations
Yeah, I agree. (Also, I think it’s a lot harder / near-impossible to sustain such high returns on a $100b portfolio than on a $1b portfolio.)

Jonas Vollmer 25 Nov 2021 9:42 UTC
11 points
in reply to: RichardYannow’s comment on: A Red-Team Against the Impact of Small Donations
Markets are made efficient by really smart people with deep expertise. Many EAs fit that description, and have historically achieved such returns doing trades/investments with a solid argument and without taking crazy risks.
Examples include: crypto arbitrage opportunities like these (without exposure to crypto markets), the Covid short, early crypto investments (high-risk, but returns were often >100x, implying very favorable risk-adjusted returns), prediction markets, meat alternatives.
Overall, most EA funders outperformed the market over the last 10 years, and they typically had pretty good arguments for their trades.
But I get your skepticism and also find it hard to believe (and would also be skeptical of such claims without further justification).
Also note that returns will get a lot lower once more capital is allocated in this way. It’s easy to make such returns on $100 million, but really
(Made some edits)

Jonas Vollmer 24 Nov 2021 21:58 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Luke Eure’s comment on: A Red-Team Against the Impact of Small Donations
Strong upvote, I think the “GiveDirectly of longtermism” is investing* the money and deploying it to CEPI-like (but more impactful) opportunities later on.
* Donors should invest it in ways that return ≥15% annually (and plausibly 30-100% on smaller amounts, with current crypto arbitrage opportunities). If you don’t know how to do this yourself, funging with a large EA donor may achieve this.
(Made a minor edit)

Jonas Vollmer 24 Nov 2021 21:55 UTC
39 points
on: A Red-Team Against the Impact of Small Donations
I want to mildly push back on the “fund weird things” idea. I’m not aware of EA Funds grants having been rejected due to being weird. I think EA Funds is excited about funding weird things that make sense, and we find it easy to refer them to private donors. It’s possible that there are good weird ideas that never cross our desk, but that’s again an informational reason rather than weirdness.
Edit: The above applies primarily to longtermism and meta. If you’re a large (>$500k/y) neartermist donor who is interested in funding weird things, please reach out to us (though note that we have had few to none weird grant ideas in these areas).

Jonas Vollmer 13 Nov 2021 17:37 UTC
11 points
on: Disentangling “Improving Institutional Decision-Making”
I’ve been skeptical of much of the IIDM work I’ve seen to date. By contrast, from a quick skim, this piece seemed pretty good to me because it has more detailed models of how IIDM may or may not be useful, and is opinionated in a few non-obvious but correct-seeming ways. I liked this a lot – thanks for publishing!
Like, if anyone feels like handing out prizes for good content, I’d recommend that this piece of work should receive a $10k prize (though perhaps I’d want to read it in full before fully recommending).

Public reports are now optional for EA Funds grantees

abergal13 Nov 2021 0:37 UTC

62 points

0 comments1 min readEA link

Jonas Vollmer 10 Nov 2021 14:58 UTC
17 points
in reply to: willbradshaw’s comment on: Should EA Global London 2021 have been expanded?
With that sentence, I only meant to suggest that I wouldn’t want CEA to become more risk-averse due to this post (or similar future posts). I didn’t mean to implicitly discourage thoughtful critiques like this one. Sorry if my comment read that way! I also agree with you that CEA should avoid repeating any mistakes that were made.
I’ve edited the previous comment to clarify.

Jonas Vollmer 9 Nov 2021 17:46 UTC
109 points
on: Should EA Global London 2021 have been expanded?
I think it’s great that CEA increased the event size on short notice. It’s hard to anticipate everything in advance for complex projects like this one, and I think it’s very cool that when CEA realized the potential mistake, it fixed the issue and expanded capacity in time.
I’d much rather have a CEA that gets important things broadly right and acts swiftly to fix any issues in time, than a CEA that overall gets less done due to risk aversion resulting from pushback from posts like this one*, or one that stubbornly sticks to early commitments rather than flexibly adjusting its plans.
I also feel like the decision not to worry too much about Covid seems correct given the most up-to-date risk estimates, similar to how conference organizers usually don’t worry too much about the risk of flu/norovirus outbreaks.
(Edit—disclosure: From a legal perspective, I am employed by CEA, but my project (EA Funds) operates independently (meaning I don’t report to CEA staff), and I wasn’t involved in any decisions related to EA Global.)
* Edit: I don’t mean to discourage thoughtful critiques like this post. I just don’t want CEA to become more risk-averse because of them.

Jonas Vollmer 22 Oct 2021 15:11 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Max_Daniel’s comment on: RyanCarey’s Shortform
PPP-adjusted GDP seems less geopolitically relevant than nominal GDP, here’s a nominal GDP table based on the same 2017 PwC report (source), the results are broadly similar:

Jonas Vollmer 22 Oct 2021 11:39 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Owen_Cotton-Barratt’s comment on: Truthful AI
(Unimportant: Why is falsity raised to the fourth power?)

Jonas Vollmer 20 Oct 2021 17:14 UTC
7 points
in reply to: MaxDalton’s comment on: MaxDalton’s Shortform
I agree with those examples!
(Maybe I feel somewhat skeptical about ‘move slowly with high quality’ ever being a good choice – it seems to me that the quality/speed tradeoff is often overstated, and there’s actually not that much of a tradeoff.)

Jonas Vollmer 20 Oct 2021 17:11 UTC
27 points
in reply to: Kat Woods’s comment on: Listen to more EA content with The Nonlinear Library
If someone deletes their original post, do you auto-remove it from the podcast as well? That would seem important to me.

Jonas Vollmer 20 Oct 2021 17:09 UTC
3 points
in reply to: willbradshaw’s comment on: Listen to more EA content with The Nonlinear Library
- Once something is up on the internet, it’s up forever. Taking it down post-facto doesn’t actually undo the damage.
I think this isn’t actually correct – I think it depends a lot on the type of content, how likely it is to get mirrored, the data format, etc. E.g. the old Leverage Research website is basically unavailable now (except for the front page I think), despite being text (which gets mirrored a lot more).
- You only need one person to sue you for things to go quite badly wrong.
Whether it actually goes ‘badly wrong’ depends on the type of lawsuit, the severity of the violation, the PR effects, etc. It’s probably good to err on the side of not violating any laws, and worth looking into it a bit before doing it.
I otherwise agree with your points!

Jonas Vollmer 18 Oct 2021 18:27 UTC
6 points
in reply to: MaxDalton’s comment on: MaxDalton’s Shortform
Interesting. Could you say more why you believe that there are clusters of traits that go well together?
The main example that comes to my mind is that people have different personalities and preferences, so if your team clusters around a set of certain personality traits and preferences, that implies that some specific organizational design choices work better than others.
But I’d feel more reluctant to say things like “move fast and break things works well with hiring quickly”; I find it hard to see any obvious hills based on the variables you mentioned.
I would have said something more like: Which strategy is best will depend on the specifics of what you’re trying to do (market, product, goals).

Jonas Vollmer 1 Oct 2021 22:24 UTC
6 points
in reply to: arvomm’s comment on: You can talk to EA Funds before applying
I’ve updated that post.

Jonas Vollmer 1 Oct 2021 22:24 UTC
9 points
in reply to: Anonymous 9’s comment on: Apply to EA Funds now
These dates are now out of date, you can now apply anytime. Please refer to our website for up-to-date information.

Jonas Vollmer 27 Sep 2021 7:21 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Benjamin_Todd’s comment on: How are resources in EA allocated across issues?
Thanks, agreed!

Jonas Vollmer(Jonas Vollmer)

Public re­ports are now op­tional for EA Funds grantees

Public reports are now optional for EA Funds grantees