Jonas Vollmer(Jonas Vollmer)

Karma: 4,206

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 27 Jul 2021 12:54 UTC
8 points
in reply to: MichaelDickens’s comment on: A generalized strategy of ‘mission hedging’: investing in ‘evil’ to do more good
Yeah, in my model, I just assumed lower returns for simplicity. I don’t think this is a crazy assumption – e.g., even if the AI portfolio has higher risk, you might keep your Sharpe ratio constant by reducing your equity exposure. Modelling an increase in risk would have been a bit more complicated, and would have resulted in a similar bottom line.
I don’t really understand your model, but if it’s correct, presumably the optimal exposure to the AI portfolio would be at least slightly greater than zero. (Though perhaps clearly lower than 100%.)

Jonas Vollmer 22 Jul 2021 11:19 UTC
8 points
in reply to: jackmalde’s comment on: What would you do if you had half a million dollars?
I think deciding between capital allocators is a great use of the donor lottery, even as a Plan A. You might say something like: “I would probably give to the Long-Term Future Fund, but I’m not totally sure whether they’re better than the EA Infrastructure Fund or Longview or something I might come up with myself. So I’ll participate in the donor lottery so if I win, I can take more time to read their reports and see which of them seems best.” I think this would be a great decision.
I’d be pretty unhappy if such a donor then felt forced to instead do their own grantmaking despite not having a comparative advantage for doing so (possibly underperforming Open Phil’s last dollar), or didn’t participate in the donor lottery in the first place. I think the above use case is one of the most central one that I hope to address.
I tentatively agree that further diversification of funding sources might be good, but I don’t think the donor lottery is the right tool for that.

Jonas Vollmer 22 Jul 2021 11:11 UTC
3 points
in reply to: jackmalde’s comment on: What would you do if you had half a million dollars?
I really liked this comment. Three additions:
- I would take a close look at who the grantmakers are and whether their reasoning seems good to you. Because there is significant fungibility and many of these funding pools have broad scopes, I personally expect the competence of the grantmakers to matter at least as much as the specific missions of the funds.
- I don’t think it’s quite as clear that the LTFF is better than the EA Infrastructure Fund; I agree with your argument but think this could be counterbalanced by the EA Infrastructure Fund’s greater focus on talent recruitment, or other factors.
- I don’t know to what degree it is hard for Longview to get fully unrestricted funding, but if that’s hard for Longview, giving it unrestricted funding may be a great idea. They may run across promising opportunities that aren’t palatable to their donors, and handing them over to EA Funds or Open Philanthropy may not be straightforwardly easy in some cases.
(Disclosure: I run EA Funds, which hosts the LTFF and EA Infrastructure Fund. Opinions my own, as always.)

Jonas Vollmer 22 Jul 2021 10:36 UTC
23 points
on: Metaculus Questions Suggest Money Will Do More Good in the Future
It’s worth pointing out that these questions apply specifically to global health and development, but could be very different in other cause areas.
I don’t think question 1 provides evidence that money will do more good in the future. It might even suggest the opposite: As you point out, malaria prevention and deworming might run out of room for more funding, and to me this seems more likely than the discovery of a more cost-effective option that is also highly scalable (beyond >$30 million per year).

Jonas Vollmer 9 Jul 2021 9:49 UTC
14 points
on: A generalized strategy of ‘mission hedging’: investing in ‘evil’ to do more good
I took your spreadsheet and made a quick estimate for an AI mission hedging portfolio. You can access it here.
The model assumes:
- AI companies return 20% annually over the next 10 years in a short-timelines world, but less than the global market portfolio in a long-timelines world,
- AI companies have equal or lower expected returns than the global market portfolio (otherwise we’re just making a bet on AI),
- money is 10x more useful in a short-timelines world than in a long-timelines world,
- logarithmic utility.
In the model, the extra utility from the AI portfolio is equivalent to an extra 2% annual return.
My guess is that this is less than the extra returns one might expect if one believes the market doesn’t price in short AI timelines sufficiently, but it makes the case for investing in an AI portfolio more robust.
Caveat: I did this quickly. I haven’t thought very carefully about the choice of parameters, haven’t done sensitivity analyses, etc.

Jonas Vollmer 6 Jul 2021 17:03 UTC
4 points
on: EA Infrastructure Fund: Ask us anything!
Update: Max Daniel is now the EA Infrastructure Fund’s chairperson. See here.

Jonas Vollmer 6 Jul 2021 17:03 UTC
2 points
on: You can now apply to EA Funds anytime! (LTFF & EAIF only)
Update: Max Daniel is now the EA Infrastructure Fund’s chairperson. See here.

Jonas Vollmer 6 Jul 2021 17:02 UTC
6 points
on: EA Infrastructure Fund: May 2021 grant recommendations
Update: Max Daniel is now the EA Infrastructure Fund’s chairperson. See here.

Jonas Vollmer 6 Jul 2021 16:59 UTC
14 points
on: EA Funds has appointed new fund managers
I am very excited to announce that we have appointed Max Daniel as the chairperson at the EA Infrastructure Fund. We have been impressed with the high quality of his grant evaluations, public communications, and proactive thinking on the EAIF’s future strategy. I look forward to having Max in this new role!

Jonas Vollmer 6 Jul 2021 9:05 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Buck’s comment on: EA Infrastructure Fund: Ask us anything!
I’m also in favor of EA Funds doing generous back payments for successful projects. In general, I feel interested in setting up prize programs at EA Funds (though it’s not a top priority).
One issue is that it’s harder to demonstrate to regulators that back payments serve a charitable purpose. However, I’m confident that we can find workarounds for that.

Jonas Vollmer 5 Jul 2021 11:45 UTC
9 points
in reply to: Buck’s comment on: EA Infrastructure Fund: Ask us anything!
> Do you disagree with the EAIF grants that were focused on causing more effective giving (e.g., through direct fundraising or through research on the psychology and promotion of effective giving)?
Yes, I basically think of this as an almost complete waste of time and money from a longtermist perspective (and probably neartermist perspectives too).
Just wanted to flag briefly that I personally disagree with this:
- I think that fundraising projects can be mildly helpful from a longtermist perspective if they are unusually good at directing the money really well (i.e., match or beat Open Phil’s last dollar), and are truly increasing overall resources*. I think that there’s a high chance that more financial resources won’t be helpful at all, but some small chance that they will be, so the EV is still weakly positive.
- I think that fundraising projects can be moderately helpful from a neartermist perspective if they are truly increasing overall resources*.
* Some models/calculations that I’ve seen don’t do a great job of modelling the overall ROI from fundraising. They need to take into account not just the financial cost but also the talent cost of the project (which should often be valued at rates vastly higher than are common in the private sector), the counterfactual donations / Shapley value (the fundraising organization often doesn’t deserve 100% of the credit for the money raised – some of the credit goes to the donor!), and a ~10-15% annual discount rate (this is the return I expect for smart, low-risk financial investments).
I still somewhat share Buck’s overall sentiment: I think fundraising runs the risk of being a bit of a distraction. I personally regret co-running a fundraising organization and writing a thesis paper about donation behavior. I’d rather have spent my time learning about AI policy (or, if I was a neartermist, I might say e.g. charter cities, growth diagnostics in development economics, NTD eradication programs, or factory farming in developing countries). I would love if EAs generally spent less time worrying about money and more about recruiting talent, improving the trajectory of the community, and solving the problems on the object level.
Overall, I want to continue funding good fundraising organizations.

Jonas Vollmer 1 Jul 2021 19:52 UTC
4 points
in reply to: James Smith’s comment on: You can now apply to EA Funds anytime! (LTFF & EAIF only)
(Also agree with Max. Long lead times in academia definitely qualify as a “convincing reason” in my view)

Jonas Vollmer 29 Jun 2021 13:55 UTC
2 points
in reply to: James Smith’s comment on: You can now apply to EA Funds anytime! (LTFF & EAIF only)
~~I wouldn’t rule it out, but~~ typically we might say something like: We are interested in principle, but would like to wait for another 6-12 months to see how your project/career/organization develops in the meantime before committing the funding (unless there’s a convincing reason for why you need the funding immediately).

Jonas Vollmer 28 Jun 2021 15:15 UTC
25 points
on: Refining improving institutional decision-making as a cause area: results from a scoping survey
I’m excited that there’s now more work happening on Effective Institutions / IIDM!
Some questions and constructive criticism that’s hopefully useful:
The aim was to gauge the diversity of perspectives in the EA community on what “counts″ as IIDM. This helps us understand what the community thinks is important and has the most potential for impact. We hope that the results will shape the rest of our work as a working group and provide a helpful starting point for others as well.
It seems that you’re starting out with the assumption that IIDM is a useful category/area, and that figuring out its scope is helpful for determining what’s the most impactful. Was there a particular reason for taking the intermediate step via the scope/definition of IIDM? I personally would be curious to learn which kinds of activities people find most promising in this area, and why so. In comparison, the scope question might just track a ‘verbal dispute’ rather than opinions on ground truths. (Edit: Looks like EdoArad pointed out something similar above.)
Relatedly, the survey gives a picture of what some people interested in IIDM believe about some high-level abstract categories. I wonder if the survey also gave you any insight into the types of activities that people think we should work on. E.g., what specific things do people have in mind when they talk about “Institutional design / governance”, and why exactly do they think it’s important? Does their reasoning hold up on closer inspection? I personally would feel very excited to see more object-level discussion of that kind. Perhaps a small number of people who have thought about IIDM carefully and systematically could share their object-level arguments on which approaches seem the most promising to them.

Jonas Vollmer 26 Jun 2021 16:17 UTC
14 points
in reply to: MichaelA’s comment on: Shallow evaluations of longtermist organizations
I actually think it would be cool to have more posts that explicitly discuss which organizations people should go work at (and what might make it a good personal fit for them).

Jonas Vollmer 24 Jun 2021 10:11 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Ben_West’s comment on: EA Infrastructure Fund: Ask us anything!
If you have to pay fairly (i.e., if you pay one employee $200k/y, you have to pay everyone else with a similar skill level a similar amount), the marginal cost of an employee who earns $200k/y can be >$1m/y. That may still be worth it, but less clearly so.
FWIW, I also don’t really share the experience that labor supply is elastic above $100k/y, at least when taking into account whether staff have a good attitude, fit into the culture of the organization, etc. I’d be keen to hear more about that.

Jonas Vollmer 21 Jun 2021 8:07 UTC
11 points
in reply to: velutvulpes’s comment on: 2018-2019 Long Term Future Fund Grantees: How did they do?
I’d be pretty excited about financially incentivizing people to do more such evaluations. Not sure how to set the incentives optimally, though – I really want to avoid any incentives that make it more likely that people say what we want to hear (or that lead others to think that this is what happened, even when didn’t), but I also care a lot about such evaluations being high-quality and and having sufficient depth, so don’t want to hand out money for any kind of evaluation.
Perhaps one way is to pay $2,000 for any evaluation or review that receives >120 Karma on the EA Forum (periodically adjusted for Karma inflation), regardless of what it finds? Of course, this is somewhat gameable, but perhaps it’s good enough.

Jonas Vollmer 19 Jun 2021 9:28 UTC
10 points
in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: You can now apply to EA Funds anytime! (LTFF & EAIF only)
Yeah, I plan to keep sending the form around in the coming months. Using the EA Forum question feature is a great idea, too. Thank you!

Jonas Vollmer 18 Jun 2021 16:38 UTC
49 points
on: 2018-2019 Long Term Future Fund Grantees: How did they do?
Thanks a lot for doing this evaluation! I haven’t read it in full yet, but I would like to encourage more people to review and critique EA Funds. As the EA Funds ED, I really appreciate it if others take the time to engage with our work and help us improve.

Jonas Vollmer 18 Jun 2021 16:34 UTC
19 points
in reply to: xccf’s comment on: You can now apply to EA Funds anytime! (LTFF & EAIF only)
“It’s hard to find great grants” seems different than “It’s hard to find grants we really like”.
I would expect that most grantmakers (including ones with different perspectives) would agree with this and would find it hard to spend money in useful ways (e.g., I suspect that Nuño might say something similar if he were running the LTFF, though not sure). So while I think your framing is overall slightly more accurate, I feel like it’s okay to phrase it the way I did.
that they’re skeptical of funding independent researchers
I don’t think this characterization is accurate. I think we’re funding a lot of independent researchers, and often think that’s great use of money. In fact, the (I think) LTFF’s highest-rated grant ever was an independent research grant. I think the LTFF managers are saying something more like “doing independent research is really hard (psychologically and intellectually)”, and we want to avoid funding people for independent research when they might do much better in an organization.
Similarly, a poll of Fast Grants recipients found that almost 80% would make major changes to their research program if funders relaxed constraints on what their grants could be used for, suggesting that the preferences of grantmakers can diverge wildly from the preferences of researchers applying for grants.
The context of that (NIH grants) seems very different; I don’t think this supports the thesis “EA Funds grantmakers have different preferences from EA Funds grantseekers”.
I haven’t read Nuño’s post yet (just discovered it now through your comment).