I haven’t managed to read the full report yet unfortunately, but I have a few questions/criticisms already- sorry to move onto these so quickly, but nonetheless I do think its important. (I tried to write these in a more friendly way, but I keep on failing to do, so please don’t take the tone as too aggressive, I am really not intending it to be, it just keeps coming across that way ! Sorry (: ) :
There are no mentions of systemic or cascading risks in the report. Why is this?
You don’t seem to engage with much of the peer-reviewed literature already written on climate change and GCRs. For example: Beard et al 2021, Kemp et al 2022, Richards et al 2021. Don’t get me wrong, you might disagree or have strong arguments against these papers, but it seems to some degree like you have failed to engage with them
You don’t seem to engage with much of the more complex systems aspects of civilisation collapse/ existential risk theory. Why is this?
There are no mentions of existential vulnerabilities and exposures, and you seem to essentially buy into a broadly hazard based account. The subdivision into direct and indirect effects further seems to support this idea. In this way you seem to ignore complex risk analysis. Why is this?
You seem to broadly ignore the work that went on around “sexy vs unsexy risks” and “boring apocalypses” and the more expansive work done to diversify views of how X-Risks may come about. Why is this?
Thanks for the report, and I am sure I will have more questions the more I go through it. I guess my major concern with this sort of stuff is it is likely that this work will go down (unrelated to its quality, and I am not saying its bad) as a “canonical” work in EA, so I think you perhaps have a responsibility, even if you in the end reject some of this scholarship, to engage in a lot of this (peer reviewed) scholarship on GCRs and X-Risks that has occurred in the “third wave” research paradigm of Existential Risk Studies, and I am slightly concerned that you appear not to have engaged with this literature!
I don’t think explicit discussion of cascading risks would change the fundamental conclusions, and cascading risks are implicitly discussed at several points in the piece.
I have read the papers you mention. You will find (attempted) refutations of many of the points in those articles scattered across the report. In earlier drafts, I did have a direct response to those papers, but it is now all dealt with in different sections of the main report.
I don’t agree with the ‘everything is connected’ idea of society, such that society is incredibly sensitive to mild climatic changes. If that is what you mean by complex systems theory. And I defend that view at length in the report.
There are many many different ways of conceptually dividing up an analysis of climate risk. The direct/indirect way is conceptually exhaustive and so insofar as I have accurately covered the direct/indirect risks, I have accurately covered overall climate risk
True that I did ignore this, explicitly at least. I do not see how it would affect my conclusions. There is no indication from the climate literature that climate change would cause anything close to a boring apocalypse. Also, I think it is very obvious from study of sexy and unsexy risks that the sexy risks (bio, AI) are far far bigger than the unsexy risks.
I did engage a lot with that literature, I just don’t talk about it directly. One could also say that Beard et al and Kemp et al don’t engage with a lot of relevant literature, which I do discuss in my piece. eg Beard et al doesn’t engage with the literature suggesting that we are not going to run out of phosphorous and soil; Kemp et al doesn’t engage with the literature on assumptions about coal use in integrated assessment models.
(I have a few thoughts on this but it’s being marked as spam for some reason, possibly length. I’m going to post this as a short response and then edit in the content. Please let me know if you can see it.)
Hi John, thanks for the post!
I’ll leave an in-depth response to Gideon, but I have a few points that I think would be helpful to share. In short, your response worries me. I have tried to keep the prose below inoffensive in tone, but there is a trade-off between offensive directness and condescending obfuscation. I hope I have traced the line accurately.
You may not think significant discussion of cascading risks would change the fundamental conclusions of your report, but many researchers, often those with considerably more experience and expertise in climate risk (e.g. the IPCC), do: strongly so. Surely in a book-length report there is room for a few pages?
If you have refuted arguments, is it not academic best practice to cite the papers you respond to? In any case, if you know of and have read the papers, are we to understand that you believe many (if not most) peer-reviewed papers on Global Catastrophic and Existential climate risk are not worth mentioning anywhere in 437 pages of discussion?
This response causes me the most concern. That is simply not what complex systems theory is. Either you are aware that this characterisation is highly inaccurate and unfair, or you are not. If the former, I am disappointed by your (apparent) dismissiveness and willingness to mischaracterise. If the latter, I wonder how you could have done anything close to sufficient research into one of the foundational components of many studies of climate risks.
It is true that there are many conceptual frameworks for climate risk, and in a study of any topic you are generally expected to state, explain, and justify your conceptual framework. This is especially true when the framework you use (i.e. that of the Techno-Utopian Approach) has been strongly critiqued, for instance in Democratising Risk (Cremer and Kemp, 2021), another highly consequential paper you do not appear to have engaged with or cited. The dichotomy of ‘direct’ and indirect’ risks may be exhaustive, but this is not the only criterion for an adequate theoretical framework. To be somewhat, but logically coherently glib, we could make the same argument for categorising phenomena according to whether their names contained an odd or even number of letters.
I also disagree with this point, especially the final sentence, but there is little to engage with: simply assertions. Let us agree to disagree.
Beard et al. and Kemp et al. are each less than 5% of the length of your piece. Of course they cover less ground. There is a difference between a 10- or 20-page paper not mentioning every single caveat in every single work they cite, and one (1) failing to substantively engage with or even cite almost all GCR-specific climate research, (2) not explicitly stating nor justifying one’s methodology in the face of strong critique, and (3) disregarding (in complex systems studies) a massive component of studies of climate risk, wider GCR (e.g. Fisher and Sandberg 2022), and the studies of Earth-system dynamics in general without explanation or justification.
Do you expect to subject this work to peer-review, and if not, why?
The work was reviewed by experts, as I discuss in the other comment.
I do discuss tipping points at some length. I don’t see how the idea of cascading risks would change my substantive conclusions at all. If you want to argue that cascading risks would in fact affect my conclusions, I would be happy to have that debate.
In fairness to me, the Kemp et al paper was only published a couple of weeks ago, so I couldn’t include it in the report. I think much of that paper is incorrect, and the reasons for that are discussed at length in the report. The conclusions of the Beard et al and Richards et al paper are, in my view, refuted mostly in section 5 of my report. If you have a criticism of that section, which largely leans on the latest IPCC report, I would be happy to have that discussion
I have read the Richards et al complex systems paper. It contains the following diagram purporting to show how climate change could cause civilisational collapse
I am open to the possibility that my argument that climate change will not destroy the global food system is wrong. I am happy to discuss substantive criticisms of those arguments. I do not see one in the Richards paper, or in what you have said.
Your critique here seems to me to miss the mark, as illustrated by your own example. If I am assessing biorisk and categorise viruses according to whether they have an odd or even number of letters, then so long as I got my risk assessment right for the odd and even numbered letter viruses, I would have actually evaluated biorisk. I don’t know whether I am taking a ‘techno-utopian approach’ but I thought the Cremer and Kemp paper was not very good and I am not alone in thinking that (it’s also not peer reviewed, if that is the criterion we are using). As I have said, I seldom depart from the IPCC in the report. If you think I do, which of my arguments do you think are wrong?
It’s a bit weird to argue that a 400+ page report is radically incomplete without making any arguments and then to criticise my response as just making assertions. Which of my substantive arguments do you disagree with and why?
It is true that those papers are short but they also do not engage with literature that is inconsistent with most of their main claims. They lean heavily on the idea of planetary boundaries, which is extremely controversial and I argue against at length in the report.
Given the review process was not like normal peer review, would it be possible to have a public copy of all the reviewers comments like we get with the IPCC. This seems like it may br important for epistemic transparency
Indeed, knowing what I know of some of the reviewers Halstead named I am very curious to see what the review process was, what their comments were, and whether they recommended publishing the report as-is.
I’ve always been quite confused about attitudes to scholarly rigour in this community: if the decisions we’re making are so important, shouldn’t we have really robust ways of making sure they’re right?
Leaving aside the discussions on the specific value and/or variable used to measure a specific boundary -which the authors themselves caveat that may be temporal until finding better ones-, isn’t most of the controversy due to critiques conflating planetary boundaries and tipping points?
META: This + additional comments below from Halstead are strongly suggestive of bad-faith engagement: lazy dismissal without substantive engagement, repeated strawman-ing, Never Play Defense-ing, and accusing his critics of secretly being sockpuppet accounts of known heretics so their views can be ignored.
On the basis of Brandolini’s Law I am going to try to keep my replies as short as I can. If they seem insubstantial, it is likely because I have already responded to the point under discussion elsewhere, or because they are responding to attempts to move the conversation away from the original points of criticism.
I have specific criticisms to make, and I would like to see them addressed rather than ignored, dismissed, or answered only on the condition that I make a whole new set of criticisms for Halstead to also not engage with.
I suggest the reader read Halstead’s response before going back to Gideon’s and my comments. It was useful for me.
Climatic tipping points, cascading risks, and systemic risk are different things and you (hopefully) know it.
If you have refuted arguments made by relevant papers, why didn’t you cite them?
I’m not sure I understand your argument here: you are not under any obligation to discuss opposing perspectives on climate risk because a different paper on climate risk did not explicitly refute an argument that you would go on to make in the future?
In any case, this is not at all what Gideon or I said Your lazy and factually inaccurate dismissal of complex systems theory remains lazy and factually inaccurate. I am not sure where this point about Richards et al. comes into it.
You would have evaluated biorisk if the only possible use of a methodology was making sure you had a comprehensive categorisation system, which (as I hope you know) is not at all true.
I don’t really see how I have not made any arguments here. I suppose I could ask someone if it’s possible to write ‘Please cite your sources.’ in first-order logic.
I would like to hear your justification for how Beard et al, Richards et al, and Kemp et al all lean heavily on the idea of planetary boundaries, and how, if this was true, it would be relevant.
However, I doubt this would go anywhere. I suspect this is simply yet another way of ignoring people who disagree with you without thinking too hard, and relying on the combination of your name-recognition and the average EA’s ignorance of climate change to buy you the ‘Seems like he knows what he’s talking about!’-ness you want.
However, I doubt this would go anywhere. I suspect this is simply yet another way of ignoring people who disagree with you without thinking too hard, and relying on the combination of your name-recognition and the average EA’s ignorance of climate change to buy you the ‘Seems like he knows what he’s talking about!’-ness you want
The moderation team feels that this is unnecessarily hostile and rude, and violates Forum norms. This is a warning; please do better in the future.
Writing this as a moderator, but only expressing my own view.
Accusing someone of acting in bad faith on a public forum can be very damaging to the person, and it’s very easy to be mistaken about such a characterization. Even if the person is acting in bad faith, it might escalate things and make it hard to deal with the underlying problem well.
Instead, it would be better to go through the moderation and community health channels, which you can do by flagging comments/posts or by contacting us directly.
I respect this for being a substantive critique and have upvoted, even though it does read as pretty harsh to me.
I do think the way this comment is written might make it hard to respond to. I wonder if it would be easier to discuss if either (a) you made this comment a separate post that you linked to (it’s already long enough, I reckon) or (b) you split it into 3-4 individual comments with one important question or critique in each, so that people can discuss each separately? My preference would be for (a) personally, especially if you have the time to flesh out your concerns for a less expert audience!
I was worried about the harshness aspect but to be frank there are only so many ways to say that someone in a position of power and influence has acted with negligence.
Perhaps these could also be useful things to do (thought given the afore-mentioned herd-downvoting I doubt that (a) would receive sufficient good-faith engagement to be worth writing.
(b) could be useful for facilitating small-scale discussion, but I haven’t seen any indication that there are people who want to or are trying to do that, e.g. with a comment saying ‘On point #4...’
In any case, I have seen far longer comments than mine and comments with more questions and less elaboration than Gideon’s get dozens of upvotes before.
These criticisms (and I’m discussing both your response and Karthik’s here, as well as a more general pattern) appear to only be brought up when the EA big boys are being criticised: I doubt if Gideon had asked five complimentary questions he would have received anything close to such a negative reaction.
This does remind me of a lot of the response to Democratising Risk: Carla and Luke were told that the paper was at once too broad and too narrow, too harsh and yet not direct enough: anything to dismiss critique while being able to rationalise it as a mere technical application of discursive norms.
I think some of the criticism of your paper with Kemp was due to it being co-authored with Phil Torres, who has harassed and defamed many people (including me) because he thinks they have frustrated his career aims
Accusing anonymous or pseudonymous Forum accounts of being someone in particular (or doxing anyone) goes against Forum norms. We have reached out to John Halstead to ask that he refrain from doing so and that he refrain from commenting more on these threads.
My comment above was vague. Just a note to clarify: by “on these threads” we meant threads involving A.C.Skraeling. In our message to John Halstead, we wrote: “refrain from commenting on the existing threads with A.C.Skraeling.”
I am not Cremer and it seems like an odd act of ego-defence to assume that there is only one person that could disagree with you.
I have no idea what you mean about Phil Torres: he clearly needs to take a chill pill but ‘harassment’ seems strong. Perhaps I’ve missed something. ‘Frustrated his career aims’?
In any case, Torres wasn’t a co-author of Democratising Risk, though I agree that he would probably agree with a lot of it.
Even if all of your implicit points were true, why on Earth would co-authorship with someone who had defamed you be grounds to offer reams of contradictory critiques to critical works while making none of the same critiques to comparable [EA Forum comments, but whatever] written pieces that do not substantially disagree with the canon.
I just assumed you were Cremer because you kept citing all of her work when it didn’t seem very relevant.
Perhaps the authors of the paper would like to share how much Torres contributed that paper and how that might have influenced the reception of the paper
I generally think it’d be good to have a higher evidential bar for making these kinds of accusations on the forum. Partly, I think the downside of making an off-base socket-puppeting accusation (unfair reputation damage, distraction from object-level discussion, additional feeling of adversarialism) just tends to be larger than the upside of making a correct one.
Fwiw, in this case, I do trust that A.C. Skraeling isn’t Zoe. One point on this: Since she has a track record of being willing to go on record with comparatively blunter criticisms, using her own name, I think it would be a confusing choice to create a new pseudonym to post that initial comment.
I strongly agree—if someone has a question or concern about someone else’s identity, I think they should either handle it privately or speak to the Forum team about their concerns.
I think to some degree this level of accusations is problematic and to some degree derails an important conversation. Given the role a report like this may play in EA in the future, ad hominem and false attacks on critiques seem somewhat problematic
jumping in here briefly because someone alerted me to this post mentioning my name: I did not comment, I was not even aware of your forum post John, (sorry I don’t tend to read the EA forum), don’t tend to advertise previous works of mine in other peoples comments sections and if I’d comment anywhere it would certainly be under my own name
That is a rather odd assumption to make given that two of the issues under discussion were X-risk methodology and EA discourse norms in response to criticism.
Also I think it’s worth noting that you have once again ignored most of the criticism presented and moved to the safer rhetorical ground of vague insinuations about people you don’t like.
I meant ‘I’ll leave the in-depth response to Gideon’. What you say speaks for itself: if Halstead presented this at a climate science org these would be some of the first questions asked and I’m puzzled (+ a bit weirded out, to be frank) as to why they’re getting such a hostile response.
I strongly upvoted this because it was at −4 karma when I saw it and that seems way too low. That said, I understand the frustration people feel at a comment like this that would lead them to downvote. It raises far too many questions for the OP to answer all at once, and doesn’t elaborate on any of them enough for the OP to respond to the substance of any claim you make. This is the kind of comment that is very hard to answer, regardless of its merit.
Perhaps that’s fair, certainly the asking too many questions part. I am less sure that it doesn’t expand enough, because I would like to give John credit to suggest he knew what bits of the literature he was excluding.
More generally, I think my concern is a post like this may quickly establish itself as “orthodoxy” so I wanted to raise my concerns as early as possible, but perhaps I should have waited a bit of time to do a more comprehensive response. Perhaps I will learn for next time
To be fair a ‘comprehensive’ response would include even more questions, so I’m not confident there’s any way to win here.
Yes I am also very worried about the orthodoxy point; EA is often a closed citation loop, where a small number of people and organisations cross-cite one another and ignore outside (‘non-value aligned’) work. Most reading lists are absolutely dominated by ~5 names, sometimes a few more.
Halstead, as a semi-big name at a prominent organisation (and, for better or worse, the movement’s de facto authority on climate change) is extremely likely to have his work accepted into the canon without significant challenge from climate experts (with training in climate science and policy, rather than philosophy...).
Thus, a fresh crop of undergraduates on will be told that climate is no big deal compared to sexier and more EA-friendly stuff like AI without ever being aware of all the climate-related GCR work Halstead doesn’t engage with (or even mention). I suspect, perhaps uncharitably, that this is because most of it disagrees with him. This in turn is partially because it has to be peer-reviewed by people selected on the basis of their expertise in climate risk, rather than EA value-alignment.
This lack of internal critique is probably because EA talks down climate so much (not least due to the influence of Halstead) that there simply aren’t very many climate-focused people around, and those that are around know the kind of response they get when they speak out of turn (see above haha).
I love so much of EA but for a community so focused on epistemics we really are bad at accepting criticism, especially when it’s directed at the big boys.
The report was reviewed by various people with expertise in various different aspects of climate change. The reviewers are pasted at the bottom of this comment.
The criticism raised by GIdeon seems to be that it doesn’t cite some studies that take an extreme stance on climate risk relative to mainstream climate scientists and climate economists. I discuss many of the claims made in these papers at considerable length. If you disagree with some of my substantive claims, then I would be happy to discuss them.
I don’t think my report is outside the mainstream of IPCC science. I can’t think of any substantive claims that are inconsistent with the latest IPCC report, with the exception of my criticism of the Burke et al (2015) paper and the ecosystem collapse stuff.
The reviewers for the report are below, though they may not agree with everything I have written.
Matthew Huber, Professor, Dept. of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Purdue University
Dan Lunt, Professor of Climate Science, Bristol University
Jochen Hinkel, Head of Department of Adaptation and Social Learning at the Global Climate Forum
R. Daniel Bressler, PhD Candidate in Economics at Columbia
Cullen Hendrix, Professor at the Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver
Andrew Watson, Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Exeter
Peter Kareiva, Pritzker Distinguished Professor in Environment & Sustainability, UCLA
Christina Schädel, Assistant Research Professor Center for Ecosystem Sciences and Society, Department of Biological Sciences, Northern Arizona University
Joshua Horton, Research Director, Geoengineering, Keith Group, Harvard
Laura Jackson, UK Met Office
Keith Wiebe, Senior Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute
Matthew Burgess, Assistant Professor, Department of Environmental Studies, University of Colorado Boulder
David Denkenberger, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at University of Alaska Fairbanks
Peter Watson, Senior Research Fellow and Proleptic Senior Lecturer, School of Geographical Sciences, Cabot Institute for the Environment, University of Bristol
Goodwin Gibbins, Research Fellow, Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford
Linus Blomqvist, Senior Fellow at Breakthrough Institute, PhD candidate in Environmental Economics and Science at UC Santa Barbara
Luca Righetti, Research Fellow, Open Philanthropy Project
Johannes Ackva, Climate research lead, Founders Pledge
This is good, though offering comments on various sections of a google doc is of course a very different exercise to full and blind peer-review.
Did any of the reviewers notice that you had not mentioned (almost?) any climate-related GCR papers? If so, what was your response to them?
As per your comments about complex systems above, please do not dismissively mischaracterise the views of your critics. This is the kind of thing an average forum user would get hammered for, please do not try to get away with it just because you know you can.
If you discuss their arguments, why didn’t you cite them? If the X-risk climate corpus takes an ‘extreme’ stance by and large, is that not the kind of thing you would expect to see discussed in a >400 page report on climate change X-risk?
Even to the extent that this report is within the IPCC mainstream, notwithstanding, for instance:
The complete absence of systems perspectives (even just to justify your rejection, something I, to be frank, would expect in an undergraduate dissertation)
Lack of consideration of vulnerability, exposure, or cascading disasters
Silent disregard for Reisinger et al.’s discussion of the concept of risk
...it is well-known that the IPCC must moderate its conclusions and focus on better-case scenarios for political reasons, i.e. so as to not be written off as alarmist. You know this, because it is mentioned in Climate Endgame and discussed at length by Jehn et al.
This is another rather important issue in climate risk scholarship you would expect to see mentioned in a work this long.
“it is well-known that the IPCC must moderate its conclusions and focus on better-case scenarios for political reasons, i.e. so as to not be written off as alarmist”
As a climate scientist reading this, I just thought I’d pick up on that and say I have not got that impression from reading the reports or conversations with my colleagues who are IPCC authors. I’ve not seen any strong evidence presented that the IPCC systematically understates risks—there are a couple of examples where risks were perhaps not discussed (not clearly underestimated as far as I’ve seen), but I can also think of at least one example where it looked to me like IPCC authors put too much weight on predictions of large changes (sea ice in AR5). (This is distinct from the thought that the IPCC doesn’t do enough to discuss low-likelihood, high-impact possibilities, which I agree with.)
It might be good to zoom out here and get a sense of what the criticism is here. I am being criticised for not citing four papers. One of them is by you and Kemp, is not peer-reviewed and is not primarily about climate change. The other one is Kemp et al 2022 which was published two weeks before I published my report so I didn’t have time to include discussion of it. The other papers I am being criticised for not mentioning are Beard et al and Richards et al. If you want to explain to me why the points they raise are not addressed in my report, I would be happy to have that discussion.
The Jehn et al papers make claims which are wrong. It is blatantly not true to anyone who knows anything about climate change that the climate science literature ignores warming of more than 3ºC.
For those who haven’t read the full comments section, Halstead has decided that I am Carla Zoe Cremer.
Democratising Risk is a preprint, no?
Democratising Risk is not primarily about climate change, but it is about X-risk methodology. You have written a piece about X-risk. Scholarly works generally require a methodology section, and scholars are expected to justify their methodology, especially when it is a controversial one. This is advice I would give to any undergraduate I supervised.
It is true that Kemp et al. 2022 has not been published for long, so you can be excused for not discussing it at length. It seems odd to have not mentioned it at all though: two weeks is not a huge amount of time, but enough to at least mention by far the most prominent work of climate GCR work to date.
If you discuss Beard’s and Richards’ points, why don’t you cite them? In any case, justification for the lack of substantive engagement seems like something you need to offer, rather than me.
In any case, the lack of mention of most climate-specific GCR work is not the only thing you have been criticised for: please scroll up to see Gideon’s original comment if you like.
Jehn et al., do not say that climate science literature ignores warming of more than 3C, they say that it is heavily under-represented.
Again, please stop lazily mischaracterising the views of your critics.
I don’t know if this repeated strawman-ing is accidental or not: if accidental, please improve your epistemics, if not, please try to engage in good faith.
This is an interesting point of view, that you should have mentioned and justified, as any student would be expected to in an essay, rather than simply pretending that criticisms do not exist
I can see where you’re coming from here but I don’t think the specifics really apply in this case.
There are many questions to raise about this google doc, and it seems fair to the reader to ask them all in one place rather than drip-feeding throughout a tree of replies and reply-replies. If responding to them all would take up too much of Halstead’s time, he can say so, no?
There’s not usually very much to elaborate when it comes to questions of omission: x is an important aspect of climate risk, Halstead has not mentioned x.
I suppose you could add the implicit points (studies of topics should include or at least mention the important aspects of those topics, space wasn’t a constraint, Halstead knows what the terms mean, etc.) but that’s unnecessary in 99% of conversations and not a standard we expect anywhere else.
Thanks for posting this Gideon, I shared similar issues to you but didn’t make a reply because I feared the it would would be dismissed or ignored. It is gratifying to see that John has replied, but epistemically concerning that your entirely reasonable criticisms are being so heavily downvoted: at present you average 1 point from 13 votes.
These are critiques you would expect anyone with a background in climate risk to make and I don’t see any good reason for them to have been dismissed by so many fellow EAs. Could any of the downvoters explain their decision?
Yes, whatever the subject, whatever the thread, would down voters please explain their vote. How are authors supposed to respond to and maybe accommodate down voter’s concerns if down voting remains a secret anonymous procedure containing no useful information beyond “don’t like it”? If clicking on things and running is what works for someone, consider Facebook. Thanks.
I disagree with that. Downvotes are often valuable information, and requiring people to explain all downvotes would introduce too high a bar for downvoting.
In all cases perhaps, but it is strange to see objections that would be super obvious top-of-the-head stuff in climate circles dismissed out of hand here.
(Also can someone who knows more about the Forum than me explain how this reply has 51 points from 13 votes? Even if strong-upvotes count as double this is extremely inflated. Are the totals extremified or something? Is it multiplicative?)
I suppose all I have to say is that I often see very reasonable critiques downvoted through the floor without explanation worryingly often.
I haven’t theorised very much about the cause, but the phenomenon correlates suspiciously well with substantive or strong criticism of prominent figures within EA.
If this perception is accurate, it does not seem like good epistemic practice.
(This one has 14 points from 3 votes? Do three strong-upvotes produce 14 overall karma? Why?)
I’m flattered to be called a prominent figure in EA, but I think that is not really true. If people want to criticise the substantive claims in the report, I am happy to have that discussion and I think people on the Forum would appreciate it
I presume that you are assuming I am Zoe Cremer here. I am not Zoe (Carla? Which is her actual first name?) and I have never met her, but feel free to assume only one person has issues with EA norms if you want. That post has 200 upvotes: some people must have agreed with her, even if you didn’t.
Based on Cremer’s recent statements in and around the MacAskill profile in the New Yorker she seems to be completely worn out by EA and has largely lost interest: presumably not someone who would dedicate very much time to getting into EA Forum comment wars?
This isn’t just an issue with the karma system (though artificially magnifying the ratings of somewhat popular comments so that 7 votes can produce a rating of over 25 is definitely an odd choice) it’s a cultural issue. Why did you ignore these aspects and focus the most technical issue?
Thank you for doing this and congratulations!
I haven’t managed to read the full report yet unfortunately, but I have a few questions/criticisms already- sorry to move onto these so quickly, but nonetheless I do think its important. (I tried to write these in a more friendly way, but I keep on failing to do, so please don’t take the tone as too aggressive, I am really not intending it to be, it just keeps coming across that way ! Sorry (: ) :
There are no mentions of systemic or cascading risks in the report. Why is this?
You don’t seem to engage with much of the peer-reviewed literature already written on climate change and GCRs. For example: Beard et al 2021, Kemp et al 2022, Richards et al 2021. Don’t get me wrong, you might disagree or have strong arguments against these papers, but it seems to some degree like you have failed to engage with them
You don’t seem to engage with much of the more complex systems aspects of civilisation collapse/ existential risk theory. Why is this?
There are no mentions of existential vulnerabilities and exposures, and you seem to essentially buy into a broadly hazard based account. The subdivision into direct and indirect effects further seems to support this idea. In this way you seem to ignore complex risk analysis. Why is this?
You seem to broadly ignore the work that went on around “sexy vs unsexy risks” and “boring apocalypses” and the more expansive work done to diversify views of how X-Risks may come about. Why is this?
Thanks for the report, and I am sure I will have more questions the more I go through it. I guess my major concern with this sort of stuff is it is likely that this work will go down (unrelated to its quality, and I am not saying its bad) as a “canonical” work in EA, so I think you perhaps have a responsibility, even if you in the end reject some of this scholarship, to engage in a lot of this (peer reviewed) scholarship on GCRs and X-Risks that has occurred in the “third wave” research paradigm of Existential Risk Studies, and I am slightly concerned that you appear not to have engaged with this literature!
Hello Gideon
I don’t think explicit discussion of cascading risks would change the fundamental conclusions, and cascading risks are implicitly discussed at several points in the piece.
I have read the papers you mention. You will find (attempted) refutations of many of the points in those articles scattered across the report. In earlier drafts, I did have a direct response to those papers, but it is now all dealt with in different sections of the main report.
I don’t agree with the ‘everything is connected’ idea of society, such that society is incredibly sensitive to mild climatic changes. If that is what you mean by complex systems theory. And I defend that view at length in the report.
There are many many different ways of conceptually dividing up an analysis of climate risk. The direct/indirect way is conceptually exhaustive and so insofar as I have accurately covered the direct/indirect risks, I have accurately covered overall climate risk
True that I did ignore this, explicitly at least. I do not see how it would affect my conclusions. There is no indication from the climate literature that climate change would cause anything close to a boring apocalypse. Also, I think it is very obvious from study of sexy and unsexy risks that the sexy risks (bio, AI) are far far bigger than the unsexy risks.
I did engage a lot with that literature, I just don’t talk about it directly. One could also say that Beard et al and Kemp et al don’t engage with a lot of relevant literature, which I do discuss in my piece. eg Beard et al doesn’t engage with the literature suggesting that we are not going to run out of phosphorous and soil; Kemp et al doesn’t engage with the literature on assumptions about coal use in integrated assessment models.
(I have a few thoughts on this but it’s being marked as spam for some reason, possibly length. I’m going to post this as a short response and then edit in the content. Please let me know if you can see it.)
Hi John, thanks for the post!
I’ll leave an in-depth response to Gideon, but I have a few points that I think would be helpful to share. In short, your response worries me. I have tried to keep the prose below inoffensive in tone, but there is a trade-off between offensive directness and condescending obfuscation. I hope I have traced the line accurately.
You may not think significant discussion of cascading risks would change the fundamental conclusions of your report, but many researchers, often those with considerably more experience and expertise in climate risk (e.g. the IPCC), do: strongly so. Surely in a book-length report there is room for a few pages?
If you have refuted arguments, is it not academic best practice to cite the papers you respond to? In any case, if you know of and have read the papers, are we to understand that you believe many (if not most) peer-reviewed papers on Global Catastrophic and Existential climate risk are not worth mentioning anywhere in 437 pages of discussion?
This response causes me the most concern. That is simply not what complex systems theory is. Either you are aware that this characterisation is highly inaccurate and unfair, or you are not. If the former, I am disappointed by your (apparent) dismissiveness and willingness to mischaracterise. If the latter, I wonder how you could have done anything close to sufficient research into one of the foundational components of many studies of climate risks.
It is true that there are many conceptual frameworks for climate risk, and in a study of any topic you are generally expected to state, explain, and justify your conceptual framework. This is especially true when the framework you use (i.e. that of the Techno-Utopian Approach) has been strongly critiqued, for instance in Democratising Risk (Cremer and Kemp, 2021), another highly consequential paper you do not appear to have engaged with or cited. The dichotomy of ‘direct’ and indirect’ risks may be exhaustive, but this is not the only criterion for an adequate theoretical framework. To be somewhat, but logically coherently glib, we could make the same argument for categorising phenomena according to whether their names contained an odd or even number of letters.
I also disagree with this point, especially the final sentence, but there is little to engage with: simply assertions. Let us agree to disagree.
Beard et al. and Kemp et al. are each less than 5% of the length of your piece. Of course they cover less ground. There is a difference between a 10- or 20-page paper not mentioning every single caveat in every single work they cite, and one (1) failing to substantively engage with or even cite almost all GCR-specific climate research, (2) not explicitly stating nor justifying one’s methodology in the face of strong critique, and (3) disregarding (in complex systems studies) a massive component of studies of climate risk, wider GCR (e.g. Fisher and Sandberg 2022), and the studies of Earth-system dynamics in general without explanation or justification.
Do you expect to subject this work to peer-review, and if not, why?
The work was reviewed by experts, as I discuss in the other comment.
I do discuss tipping points at some length. I don’t see how the idea of cascading risks would change my substantive conclusions at all. If you want to argue that cascading risks would in fact affect my conclusions, I would be happy to have that debate.
In fairness to me, the Kemp et al paper was only published a couple of weeks ago, so I couldn’t include it in the report. I think much of that paper is incorrect, and the reasons for that are discussed at length in the report. The conclusions of the Beard et al and Richards et al paper are, in my view, refuted mostly in section 5 of my report. If you have a criticism of that section, which largely leans on the latest IPCC report, I would be happy to have that discussion
I have read the Richards et al complex systems paper. It contains the following diagram purporting to show how climate change could cause civilisational collapse
I am open to the possibility that my argument that climate change will not destroy the global food system is wrong. I am happy to discuss substantive criticisms of those arguments. I do not see one in the Richards paper, or in what you have said.
Your critique here seems to me to miss the mark, as illustrated by your own example. If I am assessing biorisk and categorise viruses according to whether they have an odd or even number of letters, then so long as I got my risk assessment right for the odd and even numbered letter viruses, I would have actually evaluated biorisk. I don’t know whether I am taking a ‘techno-utopian approach’ but I thought the Cremer and Kemp paper was not very good and I am not alone in thinking that (it’s also not peer reviewed, if that is the criterion we are using). As I have said, I seldom depart from the IPCC in the report. If you think I do, which of my arguments do you think are wrong?
It’s a bit weird to argue that a 400+ page report is radically incomplete without making any arguments and then to criticise my response as just making assertions. Which of my substantive arguments do you disagree with and why?
It is true that those papers are short but they also do not engage with literature that is inconsistent with most of their main claims. They lean heavily on the idea of planetary boundaries, which is extremely controversial and I argue against at length in the report.
Given the review process was not like normal peer review, would it be possible to have a public copy of all the reviewers comments like we get with the IPCC. This seems like it may br important for epistemic transparency
Indeed, knowing what I know of some of the reviewers Halstead named I am very curious to see what the review process was, what their comments were, and whether they recommended publishing the report as-is.
I’ve always been quite confused about attitudes to scholarly rigour in this community: if the decisions we’re making are so important, shouldn’t we have really robust ways of making sure they’re right?
About planetary boundaries:
Leaving aside the discussions on the specific value and/or variable used to measure a specific boundary -which the authors themselves caveat that may be temporal until finding better ones-, isn’t most of the controversy due to critiques conflating planetary boundaries and tipping points?
META: This + additional comments below from Halstead are strongly suggestive of bad-faith engagement: lazy dismissal without substantive engagement, repeated strawman-ing, Never Play Defense-ing, and accusing his critics of secretly being sockpuppet accounts of known heretics so their views can be ignored.
On the basis of Brandolini’s Law I am going to try to keep my replies as short as I can. If they seem insubstantial, it is likely because I have already responded to the point under discussion elsewhere, or because they are responding to attempts to move the conversation away from the original points of criticism.
I have specific criticisms to make, and I would like to see them addressed rather than ignored, dismissed, or answered only on the condition that I make a whole new set of criticisms for Halstead to also not engage with.
I suggest the reader read Halstead’s response before going back to Gideon’s and my comments. It was useful for me.
Climatic tipping points, cascading risks, and systemic risk are different things and you (hopefully) know it.
If you have refuted arguments made by relevant papers, why didn’t you cite them?
I’m not sure I understand your argument here: you are not under any obligation to discuss opposing perspectives on climate risk because a different paper on climate risk did not explicitly refute an argument that you would go on to make in the future?
In any case, this is not at all what Gideon or I said Your lazy and factually inaccurate dismissal of complex systems theory remains lazy and factually inaccurate. I am not sure where this point about Richards et al. comes into it.
You would have evaluated biorisk if the only possible use of a methodology was making sure you had a comprehensive categorisation system, which (as I hope you know) is not at all true.
I don’t really see how I have not made any arguments here. I suppose I could ask someone if it’s possible to write ‘Please cite your sources.’ in first-order logic.
I would like to hear your justification for how Beard et al, Richards et al, and Kemp et al all lean heavily on the idea of planetary boundaries, and how, if this was true, it would be relevant.
However, I doubt this would go anywhere. I suspect this is simply yet another way of ignoring people who disagree with you without thinking too hard, and relying on the combination of your name-recognition and the average EA’s ignorance of climate change to buy you the ‘Seems like he knows what he’s talking about!’-ness you want.
The moderation team feels that this is unnecessarily hostile and rude, and violates Forum norms. This is a warning; please do better in the future.
How would you prefer people to react when someone acts in bad faith?
What aspects of this comment fall outside those bounds?
Writing this as a moderator, but only expressing my own view.
Accusing someone of acting in bad faith on a public forum can be very damaging to the person, and it’s very easy to be mistaken about such a characterization. Even if the person is acting in bad faith, it might escalate things and make it hard to deal with the underlying problem well.
Instead, it would be better to go through the moderation and community health channels, which you can do by flagging comments/posts or by contacting us directly.
I respect this for being a substantive critique and have upvoted, even though it does read as pretty harsh to me.
I do think the way this comment is written might make it hard to respond to. I wonder if it would be easier to discuss if either (a) you made this comment a separate post that you linked to (it’s already long enough, I reckon) or (b) you split it into 3-4 individual comments with one important question or critique in each, so that people can discuss each separately? My preference would be for (a) personally, especially if you have the time to flesh out your concerns for a less expert audience!
I was worried about the harshness aspect but to be frank there are only so many ways to say that someone in a position of power and influence has acted with negligence.
Perhaps these could also be useful things to do (thought given the afore-mentioned herd-downvoting I doubt that (a) would receive sufficient good-faith engagement to be worth writing.
(b) could be useful for facilitating small-scale discussion, but I haven’t seen any indication that there are people who want to or are trying to do that, e.g. with a comment saying ‘On point #4...’
In any case, I have seen far longer comments than mine and comments with more questions and less elaboration than Gideon’s get dozens of upvotes before.
These criticisms (and I’m discussing both your response and Karthik’s here, as well as a more general pattern) appear to only be brought up when the EA big boys are being criticised: I doubt if Gideon had asked five complimentary questions he would have received anything close to such a negative reaction.
This does remind me of a lot of the response to Democratising Risk: Carla and Luke were told that the paper was at once too broad and too narrow, too harsh and yet not direct enough: anything to dismiss critique while being able to rationalise it as a mere technical application of discursive norms.
It seems like my concern was unwarranted anyways as John already responded directly to each of your points!
Yes and no in my opinion haha but I see your point
I think some of the criticism of your paper with Kemp was due to it being co-authored with Phil Torres, who has harassed and defamed many people (including me) because he thinks they have frustrated his career aims
Accusing anonymous or pseudonymous Forum accounts of being someone in particular (or doxing anyone) goes against Forum norms. We have reached out to John Halstead to ask that he refrain from doing so and that he refrain from commenting more on these threads.
My comment above was vague. Just a note to clarify: by “on these threads” we meant threads involving A.C.Skraeling. In our message to John Halstead, we wrote: “refrain from commenting on the existing threads with A.C.Skraeling.”
What are you even talking about?
I am not Cremer and it seems like an odd act of ego-defence to assume that there is only one person that could disagree with you.
I have no idea what you mean about Phil Torres: he clearly needs to take a chill pill but ‘harassment’ seems strong. Perhaps I’ve missed something. ‘Frustrated his career aims’?
In any case, Torres wasn’t a co-author of Democratising Risk, though I agree that he would probably agree with a lot of it.
Even if all of your implicit points were true, why on Earth would co-authorship with someone who had defamed you be grounds to offer reams of contradictory critiques to critical works while making none of the same critiques to comparable [EA Forum comments, but whatever] written pieces that do not substantially disagree with the canon.
I just assumed you were Cremer because you kept citing all of her work when it didn’t seem very relevant.
Perhaps the authors of the paper would like to share how much Torres contributed that paper and how that might have influenced the reception of the paper
I generally think it’d be good to have a higher evidential bar for making these kinds of accusations on the forum. Partly, I think the downside of making an off-base socket-puppeting accusation (unfair reputation damage, distraction from object-level discussion, additional feeling of adversarialism) just tends to be larger than the upside of making a correct one.
Fwiw, in this case, I do trust that A.C. Skraeling isn’t Zoe. One point on this: Since she has a track record of being willing to go on record with comparatively blunter criticisms, using her own name, I think it would be a confusing choice to create a new pseudonym to post that initial comment.
I think this is fair. I shouldn’t have done it and am sorry for doing so
I strongly agree—if someone has a question or concern about someone else’s identity, I think they should either handle it privately or speak to the Forum team about their concerns.
I think to some degree this level of accusations is problematic and to some degree derails an important conversation. Given the role a report like this may play in EA in the future, ad hominem and false attacks on critiques seem somewhat problematic
jumping in here briefly because someone alerted me to this post mentioning my name: I did not comment, I was not even aware of your forum post John, (sorry I don’t tend to read the EA forum), don’t tend to advertise previous works of mine in other peoples comments sections and if I’d comment anywhere it would certainly be under my own name
That is a rather odd assumption to make given that two of the issues under discussion were X-risk methodology and EA discourse norms in response to criticism.
Also I think it’s worth noting that you have once again ignored most of the criticism presented and moved to the safer rhetorical ground of vague insinuations about people you don’t like.
‘Never Play Defense’, anyone?
I’m interested to see your in depth response to me
I meant ‘I’ll leave the in-depth response to Gideon’. What you say speaks for itself: if Halstead presented this at a climate science org these would be some of the first questions asked and I’m puzzled (+ a bit weirded out, to be frank) as to why they’re getting such a hostile response.
(Case in point for my comment about downvoting, community hierarchy, and groupthink, below)
I strongly upvoted this because it was at −4 karma when I saw it and that seems way too low. That said, I understand the frustration people feel at a comment like this that would lead them to downvote. It raises far too many questions for the OP to answer all at once, and doesn’t elaborate on any of them enough for the OP to respond to the substance of any claim you make. This is the kind of comment that is very hard to answer, regardless of its merit.
Perhaps that’s fair, certainly the asking too many questions part. I am less sure that it doesn’t expand enough, because I would like to give John credit to suggest he knew what bits of the literature he was excluding. More generally, I think my concern is a post like this may quickly establish itself as “orthodoxy” so I wanted to raise my concerns as early as possible, but perhaps I should have waited a bit of time to do a more comprehensive response. Perhaps I will learn for next time
To be fair a ‘comprehensive’ response would include even more questions, so I’m not confident there’s any way to win here.
Yes I am also very worried about the orthodoxy point; EA is often a closed citation loop, where a small number of people and organisations cross-cite one another and ignore outside (‘non-value aligned’) work. Most reading lists are absolutely dominated by ~5 names, sometimes a few more.
Halstead, as a semi-big name at a prominent organisation (and, for better or worse, the movement’s de facto authority on climate change) is extremely likely to have his work accepted into the canon without significant challenge from climate experts (with training in climate science and policy, rather than philosophy...).
Thus, a fresh crop of undergraduates on will be told that climate is no big deal compared to sexier and more EA-friendly stuff like AI without ever being aware of all the climate-related GCR work Halstead doesn’t engage with (or even mention). I suspect, perhaps uncharitably, that this is because most of it disagrees with him. This in turn is partially because it has to be peer-reviewed by people selected on the basis of their expertise in climate risk, rather than EA value-alignment.
This lack of internal critique is probably because EA talks down climate so much (not least due to the influence of Halstead) that there simply aren’t very many climate-focused people around, and those that are around know the kind of response they get when they speak out of turn (see above haha).
I love so much of EA but for a community so focused on epistemics we really are bad at accepting criticism, especially when it’s directed at the big boys.
The report was reviewed by various people with expertise in various different aspects of climate change. The reviewers are pasted at the bottom of this comment.
The criticism raised by GIdeon seems to be that it doesn’t cite some studies that take an extreme stance on climate risk relative to mainstream climate scientists and climate economists. I discuss many of the claims made in these papers at considerable length. If you disagree with some of my substantive claims, then I would be happy to discuss them.
I don’t think my report is outside the mainstream of IPCC science. I can’t think of any substantive claims that are inconsistent with the latest IPCC report, with the exception of my criticism of the Burke et al (2015) paper and the ecosystem collapse stuff.
The reviewers for the report are below, though they may not agree with everything I have written.
Matthew Huber, Professor, Dept. of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Purdue University
Dan Lunt, Professor of Climate Science, Bristol University
Jochen Hinkel, Head of Department of Adaptation and Social Learning at the Global Climate Forum
R. Daniel Bressler, PhD Candidate in Economics at Columbia
Cullen Hendrix, Professor at the Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver
Andrew Watson, Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Exeter
Peter Kareiva, Pritzker Distinguished Professor in Environment & Sustainability, UCLA
Christina Schädel, Assistant Research Professor Center for Ecosystem Sciences and Society, Department of Biological Sciences, Northern Arizona University
Joshua Horton, Research Director, Geoengineering, Keith Group, Harvard
Laura Jackson, UK Met Office
Keith Wiebe, Senior Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute
Matthew Burgess, Assistant Professor, Department of Environmental Studies, University of Colorado Boulder
David Denkenberger, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at University of Alaska Fairbanks
Peter Watson, Senior Research Fellow and Proleptic Senior Lecturer, School of Geographical Sciences, Cabot Institute for the Environment, University of Bristol
Goodwin Gibbins, Research Fellow, Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford
Linus Blomqvist, Senior Fellow at Breakthrough Institute, PhD candidate in Environmental Economics and Science at UC Santa Barbara
Luca Righetti, Research Fellow, Open Philanthropy Project
Johannes Ackva, Climate research lead, Founders Pledge
James Ozden, Extinction Rebellion
This is good, though offering comments on various sections of a google doc is of course a very different exercise to full and blind peer-review.
Did any of the reviewers notice that you had not mentioned (almost?) any climate-related GCR papers? If so, what was your response to them?
As per your comments about complex systems above, please do not dismissively mischaracterise the views of your critics. This is the kind of thing an average forum user would get hammered for, please do not try to get away with it just because you know you can.
If you discuss their arguments, why didn’t you cite them? If the X-risk climate corpus takes an ‘extreme’ stance by and large, is that not the kind of thing you would expect to see discussed in a >400 page report on climate change X-risk?
Even to the extent that this report is within the IPCC mainstream, notwithstanding, for instance:
The complete absence of systems perspectives (even just to justify your rejection, something I, to be frank, would expect in an undergraduate dissertation)
Lack of consideration of vulnerability, exposure, or cascading disasters
Silent disregard for Reisinger et al.’s discussion of the concept of risk
...it is well-known that the IPCC must moderate its conclusions and focus on better-case scenarios for political reasons, i.e. so as to not be written off as alarmist. You know this, because it is mentioned in Climate Endgame and discussed at length by Jehn et al.
This is another rather important issue in climate risk scholarship you would expect to see mentioned in a work this long.
“it is well-known that the IPCC must moderate its conclusions and focus on better-case scenarios for political reasons, i.e. so as to not be written off as alarmist”
As a climate scientist reading this, I just thought I’d pick up on that and say I have not got that impression from reading the reports or conversations with my colleagues who are IPCC authors. I’ve not seen any strong evidence presented that the IPCC systematically understates risks—there are a couple of examples where risks were perhaps not discussed (not clearly underestimated as far as I’ve seen), but I can also think of at least one example where it looked to me like IPCC authors put too much weight on predictions of large changes (sea ice in AR5). (This is distinct from the thought that the IPCC doesn’t do enough to discuss low-likelihood, high-impact possibilities, which I agree with.)
It might be good to zoom out here and get a sense of what the criticism is here. I am being criticised for not citing four papers. One of them is by you and Kemp, is not peer-reviewed and is not primarily about climate change. The other one is Kemp et al 2022 which was published two weeks before I published my report so I didn’t have time to include discussion of it. The other papers I am being criticised for not mentioning are Beard et al and Richards et al. If you want to explain to me why the points they raise are not addressed in my report, I would be happy to have that discussion.
The Jehn et al papers make claims which are wrong. It is blatantly not true to anyone who knows anything about climate change that the climate science literature ignores warming of more than 3ºC.
For those who haven’t read the full comments section, Halstead has decided that I am Carla Zoe Cremer.
Democratising Risk is a preprint, no?
Democratising Risk is not primarily about climate change, but it is about X-risk methodology. You have written a piece about X-risk. Scholarly works generally require a methodology section, and scholars are expected to justify their methodology, especially when it is a controversial one. This is advice I would give to any undergraduate I supervised.
It is true that Kemp et al. 2022 has not been published for long, so you can be excused for not discussing it at length. It seems odd to have not mentioned it at all though: two weeks is not a huge amount of time, but enough to at least mention by far the most prominent work of climate GCR work to date.
If you discuss Beard’s and Richards’ points, why don’t you cite them? In any case, justification for the lack of substantive engagement seems like something you need to offer, rather than me.
In any case, the lack of mention of most climate-specific GCR work is not the only thing you have been criticised for: please scroll up to see Gideon’s original comment if you like.
Jehn et al., do not say that climate science literature ignores warming of more than 3C, they say that it is heavily under-represented.
Again, please stop lazily mischaracterising the views of your critics.
I don’t know if this repeated strawman-ing is accidental or not: if accidental, please improve your epistemics, if not, please try to engage in good faith.
This is an interesting point of view, that you should have mentioned and justified, as any student would be expected to in an essay, rather than simply pretending that criticisms do not exist
I can see where you’re coming from here but I don’t think the specifics really apply in this case.
There are many questions to raise about this google doc, and it seems fair to the reader to ask them all in one place rather than drip-feeding throughout a tree of replies and reply-replies. If responding to them all would take up too much of Halstead’s time, he can say so, no?
There’s not usually very much to elaborate when it comes to questions of omission: x is an important aspect of climate risk, Halstead has not mentioned x.
I suppose you could add the implicit points (studies of topics should include or at least mention the important aspects of those topics, space wasn’t a constraint, Halstead knows what the terms mean, etc.) but that’s unnecessary in 99% of conversations and not a standard we expect anywhere else.
(Edit: it seems my fears were right, lol)
Thanks for posting this Gideon, I shared similar issues to you but didn’t make a reply because I feared the it would would be dismissed or ignored. It is gratifying to see that John has replied, but epistemically concerning that your entirely reasonable criticisms are being so heavily downvoted: at present you average 1 point from 13 votes.
These are critiques you would expect anyone with a background in climate risk to make and I don’t see any good reason for them to have been dismissed by so many fellow EAs. Could any of the downvoters explain their decision?
Yes, whatever the subject, whatever the thread, would down voters please explain their vote. How are authors supposed to respond to and maybe accommodate down voter’s concerns if down voting remains a secret anonymous procedure containing no useful information beyond “don’t like it”? If clicking on things and running is what works for someone, consider Facebook. Thanks.
I disagree with that. Downvotes are often valuable information, and requiring people to explain all downvotes would introduce too high a bar for downvoting.
In all cases perhaps, but it is strange to see objections that would be super obvious top-of-the-head stuff in climate circles dismissed out of hand here.
(Also can someone who knows more about the Forum than me explain how this reply has 51 points from 13 votes? Even if strong-upvotes count as double this is extremely inflated. Are the totals extremified or something? Is it multiplicative?)
I wouldn’t characterise it as dismissing out of hand.
What would you call it?
I suppose all I have to say is that I often see very reasonable critiques downvoted through the floor without explanation worryingly often.
I haven’t theorised very much about the cause, but the phenomenon correlates suspiciously well with substantive or strong criticism of prominent figures within EA.
If this perception is accurate, it does not seem like good epistemic practice.
(This one has 14 points from 3 votes? Do three strong-upvotes produce 14 overall karma? Why?)
I’m flattered to be called a prominent figure in EA, but I think that is not really true. If people want to criticise the substantive claims in the report, I am happy to have that discussion and I think people on the Forum would appreciate it
You may think this, but (some) people on the Forum clearly do not.
I think this strongly contributes to groupthink.
People will subconsciously adapt their views to match the majority to some extent, and assume that a post or comment has the rating it does for a reason. This is exacerbated by the [issues around hierarchy and hero-worship EA sometimes has.](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DxfpGi9hwvwLCf5iQ/objections-to-value-alignment-between-effective-altruists)
Hi Zoe, what is your proposed alternative to a karma system?
I presume that you are assuming I am Zoe Cremer here. I am not Zoe (Carla? Which is her actual first name?) and I have never met her, but feel free to assume only one person has issues with EA norms if you want. That post has 200 upvotes: some people must have agreed with her, even if you didn’t.
Based on Cremer’s recent statements in and around the MacAskill profile in the New Yorker she seems to be completely worn out by EA and has largely lost interest: presumably not someone who would dedicate very much time to getting into EA Forum comment wars?
This isn’t just an issue with the karma system (though artificially magnifying the ratings of somewhat popular comments so that 7 votes can produce a rating of over 25 is definitely an odd choice) it’s a cultural issue. Why did you ignore these aspects and focus the most technical issue?