Jamie_Harris
Bio
Participation5
Jamie is the Courses Project Lead at the Centre for Effective Altruism, leading a team running online programmes that inspire and empower talented people to explore the best ways that they can help others. These courses and fellowships provide structured guidance, information, and support to help people take tailored next steps that set them up for high impact.
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, as co-founder and researcher at Animal Advocacy Careers (which helps people to maximise their positive impact for animals), and as a Program Associate at Macroscopic Ventures (grantmaking focused on s-risks).
Posts 46
Comments393
Topic contributions5
I built an interactive chicken welfare experience - try it and let me know what you think
Ever wondered what "cage-free" actually means versus "free-range"? I just launched A Chicken's World - a 5-minute interactive game where you experience four different farming systems from an egg-laying hen's perspective, then guess which one you just lived through and how common that system is.
Reading "67 square inches per hen" is one thing, but actually trying to move around in that space is another. My hope is that the interactive format makes welfare conditions visceral in a way that statistics don't capture.
The experience includes:
- Walking through battery cage, cage-free, free-range, and pasture-raised systems
- Cost-effectiveness data based on Rethink Priorities' research on corporate campaigns
- A willingness-to-pay element leading to an optional donation to THL via Farmkind
I'd welcome feedback:
- Any factual errors I should correct? (The comparative advantage of early adopters here! Most of the fact-finding and red-teaming was done by LLMs.)
- What would make it more useful to you personally? (You'll probably give me more useful feedback this way than if you try to model other users.)
- What would make it work better as an outreach tool? (I built this with non-EA audiences in mind.)
Try it: https://achickens.world/. (Backup link here if that doesn't work.)
PS thanks Claude for the code, plus THL, RP, Farmkind for doing the actual important work; I'm just making a fun tool. This was a misc personal project, nothing to do with my employer.
Very cool! No reply needed/expected, just sharing a few misc reflections:
I didn't follow the reason for excluding Dwarkesh; you already have quality adjustments multipliers so you can just include him and apply the adjustments. (Id be interested to see, since I think it's relevant, he has an influential audience, and he has solid revenue, which I think will lead to high cost-effectiveness in your model.)
In the other direction: I'm not sure if your goal was to compare most cost-effective opportunities among current/established YouTubers, but if you're trying to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of the overall intervention instead/as well, then you'll of course need to account for efforts that started but collapsed or didn't gain much traction.
Cool to see this analysis here though, and will likely be a useful reference/comparison for some apps that the EA Infrastructure Fund gets!
The brand new episode with Kyle Fish from Anthropic (released since you wrote this comment) discusses some reasons why AI Safety and AI welfare efforts might conflict or be mutually beneficial, if you're interested!
Make your high-impact career pivot: online bootcamp (apply by Sept 14)
Many accomplished professionals want to make a bigger difference with their career, but don’t always know how to turn their skills into real-world impact.
We (the Centre for Effective Altruism) have just launched a new, free, 4-day online career bootcamp designed to help with that.
How it works:
- Runs Sept 20–21 & 27–28 (weekends) or Oct 6–9 (weekdays)
- Online, 6–8 hours/day for 4 days
- For accomplished professionals (most participants mid-career, 5+ years’ experience, but not a hard requirement)
What you’ll get:
- Evaluate your options: identify high-impact career paths that match your skills and challenge blind spots
- Build your network: meet other experienced professionals pivoting into impact-focused roles
- Feedback on CVs: draft, get feedback, and iterate on applications
- Make real progress: send applications, make introductions, or scope projects during the bootcamp itself
“It’s short, intense, and gives you a focused burst of momentum. You’ll come away with practical tools to clarify your next steps and job search direction.” — Cibeles, pilot participant
Applications take ~30 mins and close Sept 14.
If you’re interested yourself, please do apply! And if anyone comes to mind — colleagues, university friends, or others who’ve built strong skills and might be open to higher-impact work — we’d be grateful if you shared this with them.
Thanks Karen! Interested if you have specific things in mind for implications of the economic angle? I can certainly see it playing into some of the "Predict how AI will change things, and try to make that go well for animals" predictions, or leading to more of an emphasis on "Shift towards all-inclusive AI safety".
Cool post!
Misc thought that this seems analogous to some of the points/ideas/arguments in https://www.forethought.org/research/ai-tools-for-existential-security (albeit for different tech and to primarily address different problems)
I think this is a great explanation of an important dynamic and opportunity. I feel confident that doing the sorts of things explained in this post has benefited my career a lot.
Appreciated the footnote about informal hiring having tradeoffs; it's not clearly good that hiring often operates this way. But the good news is that "just start really trying to do useful/impactful things" is not only helpful for the world, but helpful for people's high-impact job search. A win-win!
This is cool! Cost-effectiveness estimates would be great, but given that they're likely quite cheap per individual, my guess is that they work out as pretty cost-effective as long as we think that there is a real (average) long-term reduction in animal product consumption, and we don't see the small animal replacement problem rear it's head?
(E.g. IIRC one problem is just that we often have to rely on self-report and it's hard to rigorously assess what changes people really make, if any.)
On that note, I'd be interested if you have an impression of the quality of the studies, and whether you indeed expect this kind of effect?
(Also, could you explain what you mean by "retention rate"? Seems pretty important.)
Thank you for sharing Allegra! Welcome to the Forum, and congrats on writing and sharing this.
I think this is well written and engaging! I agree it seems a real shame for these people and for the world that the existing services have been cut. And I do think that your bullet point list suggests it's worth considering/evaluating.
I think a stronger case would delve into more detail on these claims, which aren't currently substantiated: "Sudan ranks extraordinarily high on scale, neglect, and tractability", and "Emergency networks, women's coalitions, and independent media have proven they can reach people effectively", then compare explicitly and quantitatively to other candidates for top cause areas and interventions. Is the problem area more promising than others? Are the available interventions more cost-effective? (Or in the same ballpark?)