Can you give information on the “source” of these matching funds? Is this a grantmaker, external funder or arms-length donor to you?
Partial Identification
Karma: −43
In the last 12 months, James Ozden’s work on social change appears almost entirely designed to lobby and obtain EA resources for his “social movement work”.
Ozden’s “non-profit” Social Change Lab is a website with his content, and has no registration and little activity besides this meta EA work.
Ozden took 40K of EA infrastructure funding, which he then used to produce extremely long articles, whose length conceals that these are self-reviews on the promisingness of his own project. He also used this as a springboard to network and publicize his associations with EA funders.
Ozden does a variety of activity online, which invariably aggrandizes or promotes his own projects, and his work is often low effort or quality, and competes with others.
Ozden is not an EA, because he has set upon his goals on the outset, does not update or acknowledge new information, and his activity has not been demonstrated as promising as a cost effective intervention. If successful, the resources and status he would obtain from EA would give him great status and power in his external community, which is almost certainly his main goal. This would also give him further incentives for his meta EA work.
This was extremely disappointing to some of us which supported him and looked forward to interesting and promising work on social change. This is not only bad because it is not truth seeking, but takes up space for deep analysis of social change.
Ozden has instincts for managing appearance and navigating social movements. His attempts to position himself in “meta” EA or meta animal welfare is problematic.
(Bumping so this is seen).
I point out that in addition to the challenge of opposing the content, as a volunteer, against people whose full-time job are influencers who colonized the space and take EA money to do so, it is wrong to downvote because you do not like the content.
The issue is that this behavior will entrench itself, and is one critical root cause of why online EA space is low quality.