Jonas V

Karma: 7,600

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.

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 V 4 Apr 2024 1:11 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Vote Pairing is a Cost-Effective Political Intervention
I wish this post’s summary was clearer on what, exactly, readers could/should do to help with vote pairing. I think this could be valuable during the 2024 election!
Vote pairing seems to be more cost-effective than making calls, going door to door, or other standard forms of changing election outcomes, provided you are in the very special circumstances which make it effective.
What are those circumstances?
Tens of thousands of people have participated in swaps
Do you have a source for this? How many of those were in swing states?

Jonas V 29 Feb 2024 23:11 UTC
9 points
5 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo’s comment on: Acting Wholesomely
I worry ‘wholesomeness’ overemphasizes doing what’s comfortable and convenient and feels good, rather than what makes the world better:
- As mentioned, wholesomeness could stifle visionaries, and this downside wasn’t discussed further.
- Fighting to abolish slavery wasn’t a particularly wholesome act, in fact it created a lot of unwholesome conflict. Protests aren’t wholesome. I expect a lot of important future work to look and feel unwholesome. (I’m aware you could fit it into the framework somehow, but it’s an awkward fit.)
- I worry it’ll make EA focus even more on creating a cushy environment for its own members (further expanding its parental leave policy and mental health benefits for the third time and running wonderful team retreats in fancy retreat centers), rather than on getting important things done in the world.
Things like virtues and integrity in my opinion do a better job at addressing the naïve consequentialist failure modes that wholesomeness is supposed to address.

Jonas V 1 Feb 2024 18:52 UTC
13 points
7 ∶ 1
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: EV investigation into Owen and Community Health
If someone else had written my comment, I would ask myself how good that person’s manipulation detection skills are. If I judge them to be strong, I would deem the comment to be significant evidence, and think it more likely that Owen has a flaw that he healed, and less likely that he’s a manipulator. If I judge them to be weak (or I simply don’t have enough information about the person writing the comment), I would not update.
If there are a lot of upvotes on my comment, that may indicate that readers are naïvely trusting me and making an error, or have good reason to trust my judgment, or have independently reached similar conclusions. I think it’s most likely a combination of all of these three factors.

Jonas V 31 Jan 2024 5:38 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: David Mathers’s comment on: EV investigation into Owen and Community Health
Yeah, I think there’s a lot more to be said about this topic, and I’m glad that your said some of it—thanks!

Jonas V 30 Jan 2024 1:14 UTC
85 points
41 ∶ 25
on: EV investigation into Owen and Community Health
Over the years, I’ve done a fair amount of community building, and had to deal with a pretty broad range of bad actors, toxic leadership, sexual misconduct, manipulation tactics and the like. Many of these cases were associated with a pattern of narcissism and dark triad spectrum traits, self-aggrandizing behavior, manipulative defense tactics, and unwillingness to learn from feedback. I think people with this pattern rarely learn and improve, and in most cases should be fired and banned from the community even if they are making useful contributions (and I have been involved with handling several such cases over the last decade). I think it’s important that more people learn to recognize this; I encourage you to read the two above-linked articles.
I feel worried that some readers of this Forum might think Owen matches that pattern. Knowing him professionally and to some degree personally, I think he clearly does not. I’ve collaborated and talked with him for hours in all kinds of settings, and based on my overall impression of his character, I understand his problematic behavior to have arisen from an inability to model others’ emotions, an inability to recognize that he was in a position of power and influence, and moral scrupulosity (obsession about whether he’s a bad person or not for inappropriately feeling attracted to someone).
This obviously doesn’t make his past behavior any less bad and doesn’t excuse any of it. But it makes it more likely that he makes a real effort to learn and improve, and based on some conversations I’ve had with Owen, I believe this learning has indeed happened. I think Owen is unlikely to repeat his mistakes, and his document seems honest and he’s not just trying to tell us what we want to hear (in fact, I think his moral scrupulosity makes him unusually honest in this situation).^[1]
Personally, I hope Owen can be involved in the community soon again. I think a temporary ban is important, both as an incentive against bad behavior and as a precaution so the harms don’t continue. That said, two years are a long time, and I hope other EA orgs won’t take his loss too lightly and will consider inviting him to participate again. I think we would benefit a lot from his participation, both in terms of ensuring the community is safe and welcoming for everyone (where I’ve seen him go out of his way in the past), and in terms of getting more of his contributions to the causes we all care about.
(This comment is intended as sharing my impression from knowing Owen personally, which I figured might be helpful context for some readers. I welcome others sharing different perspectives, especially if you disagree. By default I won’t engage in much discussion due to lack of time.)
1. ^
  I think a significant share of sexual misconduct or unwelcome sexual attention in EA is caused by the broad cluster of poor theory of mind and autism-spectrum / OCD-spectrum personality traits, as opposed to the more broadly publicized manipulative/sociopathic/narcissistic spectrum. The latter seems characterized by not caring sufficiently about the victim’s experience, whereas the former seems characterized by a lack of understanding of the effects of one’s actions, which makes it more tractable. I think Owen’s example could be instructive and hope it helps others avoid similar mistakes.
What links here?
- Emma Abele's comment on EV investigation into Owen and Community Health by EV US Board (30 Jan 2024 2:31 UTC; 75 points)

Jonas V 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 V 22 Nov 2023 1:49 UTC
0 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 V22 Nov 2023 1:45 UTC

27 points

0 comments2 min readEA link

Jonas V 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 V 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 V 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 V 7 Nov 2023 4:13 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jonas V’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 V 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 V 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 V 5 Sep 2023 16:37 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Jonas Vollmer’s Shortform
Yes, this.

Jonas V 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 V 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?
- Cause-Generality Is Hard If Some Causes Have Higher ROI by Ben_West (12 Jan 2024 18:27 UTC; 102 points)
- Lorenzo Buonanno's comment on Eliezer Yudkowsky Is Frequently, Confidently, Egregiously Wrong by Omnizoid (8 Sep 2023 16:57 UTC; 12 points)

Jonas V 21 Aug 2023 5:26 UTC
1 point
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 V 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 V 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.
What links here?
- Jonas V's comment on AGI and the EMH: markets are not expecting aligned or unaligned AI in the next 30 years by basil.halperin (4 Aug 2023 8:19 UTC; 4 points)

Jonas V

At­lantis: Berkeley event venue available for rent

Atlantis: Berkeley event venue available for rent