Jonas Vollmer

Karma: 7,503

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: https://admonymous.co/vollmer

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 2 Dec 2023 23:12 UTC
14 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Tobias Häberli’s comment on: TobiasH’s Shortform
I’ve talked to some people who are involved with OpenAI secondary markets, and they’ve broadly corroborated this.

One source told me that after a specific year (didn’t say when), the cap can increase 20% per year, and the company can further adjust the cap as they fundraise.

Jonas Vollmer 22 Nov 2023 1:49 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: The Lighthaven Campus is open for bookings
If you’re running an event and Lighthaven isn’t an option for some reason, you may be interested in Atlantis: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ya5Aqf4kFXLjoJeFk/atlantis-berkeley-event-venue-available-for-rent

Atlantis: Berkeley event venue available for rent

Jonas Vollmer22 Nov 2023 1:45 UTC

27 points

0 comments2 min readEA link

Jonas Vollmer 21 Nov 2023 22:52 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: Habryka’s Quick takes
(FYI, Atlas won’t be ending up with a budget shortfall as a result of this.)

Jonas Vollmer 18 Nov 2023 17:58 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 1
in reply to: Minh Nguyen’s comment on: Sam Altman fired from OpenAI
This seems ~~the most plausible~~ speculation so far, though probably also wrong: https://twitter.com/dzhng/status/1725637133883547705

Jonas Vollmer 18 Nov 2023 0:34 UTC
17 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jackson Wagner’s comment on: Sam Altman fired from OpenAI
Regarding the second question, I made this prediction market: https://manifold.markets/JonasVollmer/in-a-year-will-we-think-that-sam-al?r=Sm9uYXNWb2xsbWVy

Jonas Vollmer 7 Nov 2023 4:13 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jonas Vollmer’s comment on: AGI and the EMH: markets are not expecting aligned or unaligned AI in the next 30 years
(Shorting TLT seems a reasonably affordable way to implement this strategy I guess, though you’re only going short nominal interest rates.)

Jonas Vollmer 2 Oct 2023 18:01 UTC
25 points
6 ∶ 1
in reply to: aprilsun’s comment on: The Lighthaven Campus is open for bookings
The really important question that I suspect everyone is secretly wondering about: If you book the venue, will you be able to have the famous $2,000 coffee table as a centerpiece for your conversations? I imagine that after all the discourse about it, many readers may feel compelled to book Lighthaven to see the table in action!

Jonas Vollmer 17 Sep 2023 7:42 UTC
3 points
3 ∶ 2
in reply to: James Özden’s comment on: Announcing the Meta Coordination Forum 2023
I think there aren’t really any attendees who are doing meta work for a single cause. Instead, it seems to be mostly people who are doing meta work for multiple areas.
(I also know of many people doing AI safety meta work who were not invited.)

Jonas Vollmer 5 Sep 2023 16:37 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Jonas Vollmer’s Shortform
Yes, this.

Jonas Vollmer 5 Sep 2023 16:36 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: trevor1’s comment on: Jonas Vollmer’s Shortform
Yeah, I disagree with this on my inside view—I think “come up with your own guess of how bad and how likely future pandemics could be, with the input of others’ arguments” is a really useful exercise, and seems more useful to me than having a good probability estimate of how likely it is. I know that a lot of people find the latter more helpful though, and I can see some plausible arguments for it, so all things considered, I still think there’s some merit to that.

Jonas Vollmer 28 Aug 2023 19:01 UTC
111 points
36 ∶ 4
on: Jonas Vollmer’s Shortform
How to fix EA “community building”
Today, I mentioned to someone that I tend to disagree with others on some aspects of EA community building, and they asked me to elaborate further. Here’s what I sent them, very quickly written and only lightly edited:
Hard to summarize quickly, but here’s some loose gesturing in the direction:
- We should stop thinking about “community building” and instead think about “talent development”. While building a community/culture is important and useful, the wording overall sounds too much like we’re inward-focused as opposed to trying to get important things done in the world.
- We should focus on the object level (what’s the probability of an extinction-level pandemic this century?) over social reality (what does Toby Ord think is the probability of an extinction-level pandemic this century?).
- We should talk about AI alignment, but also broaden our horizon to not-traditionally-core-EA causes to sharpen our reasoning skills and resist insularity. Example topics I think should be more present in talent development programs are optimal taxation, cybersecurity, global migration and open borders, 1DaySooner, etc.
- Useful test: Does your talent development program make sense if EA didn’t exist? (I.e., is it helping people grow and do useful things, or is it just funnelling people according to shallow metrics?)
- Based on personal experience and observations of others’ development, the same person can have a much higher or much lower impact depending on the cultural environment they’re embedded in, and the incentives they perceive to affect them. Much of EA talent development should be about transmitting a particular culture that has produced impressive results in the past (and avoiding cultural pitfalls that are responsible for some of the biggest fuckups of the last decade). Shaping culture is really important, and hard to measure, and will systematically be neglected by talent metrics, and avoiding this pitfall requires constantly reminding yourself of that.
- Much of the culture is shaped by incentives (such as funding, karma, event admissions, etc.). We should be really deliberate in how we set these incentives.
What links here?
- Lorenzo Buonanno's comment on Eliezer Yudkowsky Is Frequently, Confidently, Egregiously Wrong by Omnizoid (8 Sep 2023 16:57 UTC; 12 points)

Jonas Vollmer 21 Aug 2023 5:26 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Elizabeth’s Quick takes
Feeling a bit tired to type a more detailed response, but I think I mostly agree with what you say here.

Jonas Vollmer 13 Aug 2023 23:45 UTC
8 points
4 ∶ 1
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Elizabeth’s Quick takes
Hmm, I personally think “discover more skills than they knew. feel great, accomplish great things, learn a lot” applies a fair amount to my past experiences, and I think aiming too low was one of the biggest issues in my past, and I think EA culture is also messing up by discouraging aiming high, or something.

I think the main thing to avoid is something like “blind ambition”, where your plan involves multiple miracles and the details are all unclear. This seems also a fairly frequent phenomenon.

Jonas Vollmer 4 Aug 2023 8:20 UTC
16 points
4 ∶ 2
on: AGI and the EMH: markets are not expecting aligned or unaligned AI in the next 30 years
If there’s no strategy to profitably bet on long-term real interest rates increasing, you can’t infer timelines from real interest rates. I think the investment strategies outlined in this post don’t work, and I don’t know if there’s a strategy that works.
I want to caution against the specific trading strategies suggested in this post:
- Shorting LTPZ will cost you 7% per year in borrow fees.
- The short ETFs TBF, TBT, and TTT have 1% fees. In addition, short or levered ETFs rebalance frequently, and are known to have large hidden fees of 1-4% per year. Short ETFs are not suitable for long-term holding unless you’re excited about contributing towards Jane Street salaries.
Even without these fees, the investments would not be a slam dunk compared to buying stocks, as pointed out here. But the fees really make this look very unattractive.

Jonas Vollmer 4 Aug 2023 8:19 UTC
4 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Habryka’s comment on: AGI and the EMH: markets are not expecting aligned or unaligned AI in the next 30 years
Accounting for fees, it’s actually a lot worse than you wrote, see here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8c7LycgtkypkgYjZx/agi-and-the-emh-markets-are-not-expecting-aligned-or?commentId=LmJ6inhSESoJGyWjQ

Jonas Vollmer 5 Apr 2023 16:38 UTC
8 points
3 ∶ 1
in reply to: I_machinegun_Kelly’s comment on: GAP Leadership Probably Participated in an Illegal Straw Donor Scheme
I wouldn’t be too surprised if someone on the GAP leadership team had indeed participated in an illegal straw donor scheme, given media reports and general impressions of how recklessly some of the SBF-adjacent politics stuff was carried out. But, I do think the specific title allegation is worded too strongly and sweepingly given the lack of clear evidence, and will probably turn out to be wrong.

Jonas Vollmer 5 Apr 2023 6:03 UTC
27 points
5 ∶ 4
in reply to: I_machinegun_Kelly’s comment on: GAP Leadership Probably Participated in an Illegal Straw Donor Scheme
I think both the original post and this comment don’t do a great job at capturing the nuance of what’s going on. I think the original post makes many valid points and isn’t “90% just a confusion”, and I suspect in fact may end up looking like it was correct about some of its key claims. But, I also suspect it’ll be wrong on a lot of the details/specifics, and in particular it seems problematic to me that it makes fairly severe accusations without clear caveats on what we know and what we don’t know at this point.
(I downvoted both this comment and the OP.)

Jonas Vollmer 5 Apr 2023 6:00 UTC
14 points
5 ∶ 0
on: GAP Leadership Probably Participated in an Illegal Straw Donor Scheme
At least 300 political contributions are suspected by the investigation to have been made with straw donors
This claim is false; the source says that they “were made in the name of a straw donor or paid for with corporate funds”. Which is frustrating, as the former would be much more surprising and interesting than the latter.

Jonas Vollmer 2 Apr 2023 6:12 UTC
34 points
15 ∶ 1
on: Saving drowning children in light of perilous maximisation
I think this was the maximally best April Fool’s post.

Jonas Vollmer

At­lantis: Berkeley event venue available for rent

Atlantis: Berkeley event venue available for rent