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.
 

Comments
303

Topic contributions
1

I'm a big fan of these intervention reports. They're not directly relevant to anything I'm working on right now so I'm only skimming them but they seem high quality to me. I especially appreciate how you both draw on relevant social science external to the movement, and more anecdotal evidence and reasoning specific to animal advocacy.

When you summarise the studies, I'd find it more helpful if you summarised the key evidence rather than their all-things-considered views.

E.g. in the cost-effectiveness section you mention that costs are low, seeming to assume that the effects would be high enough to justify them. I assume this confidence depends on your reading of the external studies. But from what I see here, without clicking on links, my takeaway is currently something like: "oh so some social scientists think they can work", which doesn't fill me with much confidence given that I don't know what their methods were, how clear the findings were, etc.

Thanks! IIRC, we focused on it substantially because a lot of the sign ups for our programmes (e.g. online course) were coming from LinkedIn even when we hadn't put much effort into it. The number of sign ups and the proportion attributed to LinkedIn grew as we put more effort into it. This was mostly the work of our wonderful Marketing Manager, Ana. I don't have access to recent data or information about how it's gone to make much of a call on whether it was worth it, relative to other possible uses of our/Ana's time.

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!

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