Jamie_Harris

Managing Director @ Leaf
2232 karmaJoined Sep 2017Working (6-15 years)Archway, London N19, UK

Bio

Participation
5

Jamie is Managing Director at Leaf, an independent nonprofit that supports exceptional teenagers to explore how they can best save lives, help others, or change the course of history.

Jamie previously worked as a teacher, as a researcher at the think tank Sentience Institute, and as co-founder and researcher at Animal Advocacy Careers, which helps people to maximise their positive impact for animals.
 

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301

Topic contributions
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Not a criticism of your post or any specific commenter, but I think it's a shame (for epistemics related reasons) when discussions end up more about "how EA is X" as opposed to "how true is X? How useful is X, and for what?".

Side comment / nitpick: Animal Advocacy Careers has 13k LinkedIn followers (we prioritised it relatively highly when I was working there) https://www.linkedin.com/company/animal-advocacy-careers/

I was funded with long delays. I wouldn't have said "straightforwardly unprofessional" communication in my case.

It was a fairly stressful experience, but seemed consistent with "overworked people dealing with a tough legal situation", both for EVF in general and my specific grant.

I did suggest on their feedback form that misleading language about timeframes on the application form be removed. It looks like they've done that now, although I have no idea when the change was made. (In my case this was essentially the only issue; the turnaround wasn't necessarily super slow in itself -- a few months doesn't seem unreasonable -- it's just that it was much slower than the form suggested it should be.)

I do not know if anything like this.

I agree that "Luke Muehlhauser's work on early-movement growth and field-building comes closest." Animal Ethics' case studies are also helpful for academic fields https://www.animal-ethics.org/establishing-new-field-natural-sciences/

My impression of the academic social movement studies is that a decent chunk is interested in how movements mobilise their resources, recruit, etc, but often more from a theoretical perspective (e.g. why do people do this, given rational choice theory) rather than statistical/empirical. I don't have a comprehensive knowledge by any means though, so could be wrong.

(I generally think that if you have specific questions in mind like this, you have to either draw qualitative, indirect insights from case studies and adjacent materials, or design a systematic/comparative methodology and do the research!)

From a quick skim, the fellowship seems promising!

(Basing this mostly just off (1) solid application numbers given a launch late last year and (2) positive testimonials.)

Less anecdotal but only indirectly relevant and also hard to distinguish causation from correlation:

Ctrl+f for "Individuals who participate in consumer action are more likely to participate in other forms of activism" here

https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/fair-trade#consumer-action-and-individual-behavioral-change

"It now feels to me like the systematic, weighted-factor-model approach we used for project research wasn't the best choice. I think that something more focused on getting and really understanding the views of central AI x-risk people would have been better."

I'd be interested in a bit more detail about this if you don't mind sharing? Why did you conclude that it wasn't a great approach, and why would better understanding the views of central AI x-risk people help?

I think this probably just saved me 0.2-2 hours over the course of the next few weeks (plus some stress / 'urch' feelings). Thanks!

This post was from over a year ago (sorry to comment so late) but came across it via the imposter syndrome tag, and just wanted to highlight that a recent 80k after hours podcast discussed this somewhat; especially segment from 16:42.

Thank you! That's a kind offer and I may take you up on it some time.

(I had been meaning to edit this post with a note that ChatGPT has a new feature that's better set up for doing this with a little more effort than what I proposed here.)

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