Jamie_Harris
Bio
Participation5
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.
Posts 39
Comments291
Topic Contributions1
Those additional unpublished-but-referenced results are v helpful comparisons, thank you!
I've noticed a fair few times when people (myself included, in this case) are gesturing or guessing about certain factors, and then you notice that and leave a detailed comment adding in relevant empirical data. I'm a big fan of that, so thank you for your contributions here and elsewhere!
I'll tone down the phrasing about Singer and Ted talks and make a couple of other wording tweaks.
Agree with your caveats!
(Meta thought, not sure who this should be addressed to)
Is it worth making a Forum tag to the effect of "X-risk without longtermism"? There are quite a few posts on the Forum to this effect now, and it'd be handy to be able to find or link to them all in one place!
FYI I was also confused by the probability metric, reading after your edits. I read it multiple times and couldn't get my head round it.
"Probability of event occurring given protests - Probability of event occurring without protests"
The former number should be higher than the latter (assuming you think that the protests increased the chance of it happening) and yet in every case, the first number you present is lower, e.g.:
"De-nuclearization in Kazakhstan in early 1990s (5-15%*)"
(Another reason it's confusing is that they read like ranges or confidence intervals or some such, and it's not until you get to the end of the list that you see a definition meaning something else.)
Ah yeah I think I wasn't counting organising costs.
I meant that if you measure cost-effectiveness in terms of impact per $, then EAGx looks way better , but if you measure cost-effectiveness in terms of impact per hour of (attendee) time, then EAGx looks similar. So there's a 'regression to the mean' type effect when you consider additional metrics.
But you're right I wasn't considering organiser time. Apologies for the "quick thought" comment ending up being confusing rather than helpful.
Appendix: EAGxVirtual is unusually cost-effective
Quick thought that I expect if you accounted for non-financial costs, especially the time spent by attendees that would otherwise have been spent on other impact-focused activities, then the cost-effectiveness would go down substantially.
A weekend at a virtual conference vs an in-person conference probably takes like 50% as much time per attendee? If that's right, by a measure of cost-effectiveness that more like "connections made per hour of work lost", EAGx virtual and EAGx would be roughly equally cost-effective?
Great work! I really like the conditional reasoning test idea; it's something I hadn't really thought about in this context. I haven't reviewed the questions in detail yet but any thoughts on whether they'd be suitable for an application process?
There's psychological research finding that both "extended contact" interventions and interventions that "encourage participants to rethink group boundaries or to prioritize common identities shared with specific outgroups" can reduce prejudice, so I can imagine the Clubhouse stuff working (and being cheap + scalable).
You're right that there are big differences. I'm inclined to agree that some asks should be an "easier sell" too. I'm wondering if you think that these differences notably affect the arguments of this post?
Hi Geoffrey! I did try a campaign with paid Meta ads for History to shape history, mostly on Instagram, and it went really quite poorly. But (1) this was partly due to technical issues with my account, and (2) I know that Non-Trivial and Atlas have had much more success with paid ads. (My suspicion is that having a financial incentive for programme participation is a big multiplier on the effectiveness of paid ad campaigns, at least for this age group.)
It sounds like you're asking more about broad outreach rather targeted promotion of specific programmes. I could share miscellaneous thoughts on this, but I don't think I really have any particular insight or evidence on this based on the work I've done.