James Özden

Director of Philanthropy @ Mobius
4414 karmaJoined Oct 2020

Bio

Currently grantmaking in animal advocacy, at Mobius. I was previously doing social movement and protest-related research at Social Change Lab, an EA-aligned research organisation I've founded.

Previously, I completed the 2021 Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program. Before that, I was the Director & Strategy lead at Animal Rebellion + in the Strategy team at Extinction Rebellion UK, working on movement building for animal advocacy and climate change.

My blog (often EA related content)

Feel free to reach out on james.ozden [at] hotmail.com or see a bit more about me here

Comments
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No I didn't sadly - I started using Readwise instead to capture learnings from books & other mediums, as it's got better UX than Anki in my opinion. Still yet to make a good list of concepts/facts though so ideas welcome!

Oopsie, thanks for the flag Toby! Will change

Note: Deadline is in 2 days - Wednesday, Feb 7th! 

CellAg UK is hiring for a Program Associate, working one day per week, to build our community-building efforts for alternative proteins in the UK. This Program Associate will play a significant role in shaping and running our programs, such as incubating university alternative protein societies, community-building amongst early-career researchers via organising events, getting alternative proteins into UK university curricula and more. You can see additional information about the role here. If you’re interested, please apply via this form.

  • Application deadline: 7th of February, 23:59 BST. Candidates will be considered on a rolling basis so early applications are encouraged.
  • Contract: 1 year, working one day per week (approx. 8 hours per week). Please note that this contract would be on a self-employed/freelance basis.
  • Location: Remote, UK-based
  • Salary: £40,000 pro-rata

Great to see more advocacy and advocacy evaluation-related content on the EA Forum! Sharing a few things that might be of interest to you / others

  • Founders Pledge has a great document on evaluating policy organisations that puts forward some interesting considerations on evaluating the counterfactual impact of an org e.g.
    • "We gather evidence from independent referees and written sources to confirm or disconfirm the charity’s own account of their impact. Below is a hierarchy of testimony evidence, ranked from the most to least desirable. 
      •  1. Well-informed people with incentives to downplay the role played by the organisation (e.g. a rival organisation)
      •  2. Well-informed people with no incentive to mislead about the role played by the organisation  (e.g. Government bureaucrats or politicians who were directly involved in the policy change"
      • 3. Well-informed people who have incentives to mislead about the role played by the organisation (e.g. An organisation’s campaign partners.)
      • 4. People with less information on the role played by the organisation" [I made small edits to make this shorter]
  • I also recommend Hear This Idea's podcast with Steven Teles, a political scientist who wrote a great book about advocacy within the conservative legal movement and an article about the difficulty of evaluating advocacy.

I want to make some Anki cards to learn/reinforce some important concepts, research findings & facts related to animal advocacy. Any recommendations for key facts, research outputs or concepts to include? E.g. things like how many animals are killed in China, components of the BCC, etc etc

You might be interested to ask in this Facebook group (I would love to help and thinking similar things but know approximately nothing)

Thank you, I appreciate you engaging in a civil way too, as well as this comment!

I would be curious to hear more about the reasons behind your decision to focus specifically on getting folks into GCR-related careers, rather than other common EA cause areas, if you’re happy to share!

I disagree because at least one of the statements I quoted above is not “feelings” as you state, and they literally talk about what might be the downside of some political actions (e.g. closer to analysis on the conflict and potential resolutions).

Agreed! In that case, why not include both sides of the story to paint a fair picture, given the author thought it was fine to include more political / less-neutral statements?

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