Jamie_Harris
Bio
Participation5
Jamie is a Program Associate at Macroscopic Ventures, doing grantmaking focused on s-risks (suffering). In particular, reducing catastrophic AI misuse by malevolent or fanatical actors (e.g., via compute governance or infosec), conflict (e.g., cooperative AI) and improving AI welfare. Polaris' focus areas include AI governance, digital sentience, plus reducing risks from fanatical ideologies and malevolent actors.
He also spend a few hours a week as a Fund Manager at the Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund, which aims to increase the impact of projects that use the principles of effective altruism, by increasing their access to talent, capital, and knowledge.
Lastly, Jamie is President of Leaf, an independent nonprofit that supports exceptional teenagers to explore how they can best save lives, help others, or change the course of history. (Most of the hard work is being done by the wonderful Jonah Boucher though!)
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 43
Comments369
Topic contributions2
From a quick glance this seems like some really cool and promising outcomes! I'd have been interested to know more detail about the "Intended Actions of Respondents" (e.g.s of specific promising things people are doing as a result) and what the costs were after accounting for organiser remuneration as well.
I was pretty surprised how many accepted attendees you had for such low online advertising costs. That suggests there's some real low-hanging fruit of potentially interested people. I'd also be interested in whether (m)any of the people who applied and attended through this method ended up being strong participants in the event and/or taking follow-up actions.
Apologies, missed this comment!
EA outreach is still in-scope, it just wasn't an area we highlighted in this post. That's partly because we tend to get quite a few applications of this sort anyway. (I'm not sure but my vague impression is that the average quality of such applications is lower, too.)
Hey! Does Canopy Retreats still exist in any form? I see the website is down but not sure if that's because it migrated, got absorbed into a larger org, or everyone just moved onto other things. Thanks!
(In the meantime, for anyone else coming back across this post, I stumbled across "Skylark": "We plan and facilitate transformative events. We help you shape a bold vision for your community, manage every operational detail, and lead workshops". Seemingly run by EAs with testimonials all by EAs.)
I really appreciate you reasoning independently, working through to try to overcome scope insensitivity (and communicate clearly/graphically to others!), and make important prioritisation decisions that affect how you can best help others. Interesting to see your thought process; thanks for sharing!
Great idea! Seems good to try out and I imagine that a bunch of the infrastructure and expertise CEA has already built up will easily transfer over.
I'm intrigued about the summary costs (total, per attendee average); $, CEA staff time, local organiser staff time etc. I think the linked posts at the top contained some but not all of this. Intrigued to hear how it goes going forward.
In case you and @David Michelson haven't seen them, I and some colleagues did a bunch of research into social movement case studies a few years ago.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ATpxEPwCQWQAFf4XX/key-lessons-from-social-movement-history
Not to suggest that more wouldn't be useful, just an FYI in case you didn't know and would find them helpful!
ank you for this post—it looks very interesting. I’ve given it a quick skim but wanted to check in on a concern/critique I have before engaging more closely with the recommendations.
Most of the post seems dedicated to explaining why the Fabians were so successful.
However, I’m not yet convinced that they actually caused meaningful change. You begin by listing some of their goals and then highlight how many of those goals came to fruition, but that doesn’t establish their causal role in making those changes happen.
It looks like you provide two main forms of evidence for their influence:
1. Noting that they had influential members or supporters in many countries.
2. Quoting a particular supporter of the Fabians.
Unfortunately, both of these seem like weak evidence to me. The first point is fairly common—many people sign up for societies and pay lip service to their supposed importance without necessarily contributing to their impact. For example, PlayPumps (a classic Effective Altruist case of an ineffective and even counterproductive yet widely endorsed charity) had many influential supporters, but that didn’t make it effective or significant.
As for the Margaret Cole quote, it doesn’t provide much evidence either—it’s essentially just an endorsement, asserting that the Fabians were important without substantiating that claim?
To be clear, I’m not saying you’re wrong about the Fabians being influential. Rather, I think the post hasn’t yet provided strong evidence for that claim. If you were to include more comprehensive or compelling evidence, this could be a really valuable post.
Thanks a lot for your work here!
(Apologies if this seems pedantic. I think these methodological considerations are important for the effort to learn useful lessons from history though. See these posts I wrote for some related thoughts)
https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/blog/what-can-the-farmed-animal-movement-learn-from-history
https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/blog/social-movement-case-studies-methodology )
There are some related resources and discussion in my quick take here
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MNxFL6Lry7w5nQaaH/jamie_harris-s-shortform?commentId=HGqprJnfE3xBiHHeX
(Apologies if this is too late!)