Does making impact justify a careless attitude about harming the planet?
So, everyone loves EA for impact. However, I often see well-known EA orgs who clearly behave in harmful ways. Read this :
‘We choose to live in sunny, warm places all year long in an endless summer. This year we’ll be staying the winter in the Caribbean then going to EA hubs (Bay Area and London) in the summer time.’, from a famous EA org (that I won’t name and shame, but you can ask me in private if you want to avoid them). This is from a job add to receive funds to create your own EA hiring agency. Moreover, Bay Area and London are very costly and living there clearly increases your carbon footprint. If you have a choice of where to live, shouldn’t you think about this?
It is often that I see EA taking the plane for long distances and not caring a tad about their carbon footprint. These are rich, mobile people who like to travel from conferences to conferences but...for which impact? Does saving a child from malaria allows you to pollute? These things aren’t compatible in my mind.
I wish this community was more sensible to these ideas. It’s not because we don’t deem climate change a priority that we should not bat an eye regarding these behaviours. It is absurd to me. There seem to be little room between fully ascets EA people who live for impact and don’t allow themselves any personal pleasure, and such people who don’t even think about their carbon footprint. Should we follow data and encourage people to include their carbon footprint in their daily thinking? I wish we did better.
Bay Area and London are very costly and living there clearly increases your carbon footprint
I’m not going to dispute that those places have very high costs of living, but for carbon footprint, are you sure? I thought that the general trend was that cities (or any dense population area) tend to have lower carbon footprints due to more public transportation, more walking, and the general consolidation of everything. Am I mis-remembering this?
What you write strikes me as true: there does seem to be a tendency for EAs to focus on their particular cause area and to neglect/ignore other areas of ethical behavior. Here is my very rough typology, off the top of my head:
Sometimes these things look bad, but actually make sense. I’ve sure we’ve all heard stories about people who pay someone to clean their house or to wash their dishes, and that looks really weird to me. But if you are actually producing something of great value in the 10 minutes it would take you to wash your dishes, then I can see how it kind of makes sense to pay someone else a modest amount of money to wash your dishes for you. Paying money for a taxi rather than taking the city bus seems wasteful to me, but if you can actually get 30 minutes of work done in the taxi that you wouldn’t be able to do on the bus, then I can understand the logic of it. Team retreats might fall into this category: a dozen people getting together at a tropical Airbnb using donor money is bad optics, but if we measure the gains comes out net positive I don’t really have many complaints about it.
Sometimes there is simply ethical fading in one area because of such a large focus in another area. My best guess is that flights, consumption, and carbon footprint mostly fall into this category. Think of the people work on X-risk who eat dead animals. Or think about me when I didn’t think about my carbon footprint while flying to a new city to meet EA people and talk about impact; I was thinking about networking rather than about climate.
And sometimes people just make silly or bad decisions. Person_A slept with Person_B, even though they work at the same small organization. Was that a great decision? No, they made a mistake. John_Doe_Org_Leader spoke dismissively and unkindly to a volunteer at an event. Not ideal, but a fumble rather than a travesty.
I do think that we should try harder, but at the same time I don’t feel thrilled about asking someone who is dedicating so much energy to dedicate even more.
I think there are good arguments for thinking that personal consumption choices have relatively insignificant impact when compared to the impact you can have with more targeted work.
However, I also think there’s likely to be some counter-countersignalling going on. If you mostly hang out with people who don’t care about the world, you can’t signal uniqueness by living high. But when your peers are already very considerate, choosing to refrain from refraining makes you look like you grok the arguments in the previous paragraph—you’re not one of those naive altruists who don’t seem to care about 2nd, 3rd, and nth-level arguments.
Fwiw, I just personally want the EA movement to (continue to) embrace a frugal aesthetic, irrespective of the arguments re effectiveness. It doesn’t have to be viewed as a tragic sacrifice and hinder your productivity. And I do think it has significant positives on culture & mindset.
I think this is a useful question and I’m glad to be discussing this.
I agree with many of your concerns—and would love to see a more culturally-unified EA on the axis of how conscious we are of our own impact—but I also think you’re failing to acknowledge something crucial: As much as EA is about altruism, it is also about focus on what’s important, and your post doesn’t acknowledge this as a potential trade-off for the folks you’re discussing.
You’ll find a lot of EA folks perceive climate change as a real problem but also perceive marginal carbon costs as not a thing worth focusing on given all the other problems in the world and the fact that carbon is offsetable. You are reading this as a “careless attitude” but I don’t think this is a fair characterization. There are real tradeoffs to be made here about how to use marginal attention; they may be offsetting and just not talking about it, or deciding that it’s not going to make enough difference in the short run, but regardless I think you have insufficient evidence to conclude that their attitude is wrong.
(I personally offset all my CO2 with Wren and think for at least 5 minutes about each plane flight I decide to take to decide if it is worth it; but have never written about this till now, and would have no reason to bother writing it down.)
And yet I highly doubt that most EA do that. You say that carbon is offsetable but it’s still a vigorous debate. The measures we take to offset the said carbone often won’t remove carbon before years, if not centuries.
For someone who goes to a conference, how can they really measure the trade-offs? meeting one person who helps them get a EA job with 10 other persons from other contexts? It sounds hypocritical. Truth is, it’s hard to calculate truthfully the impact you’re having at these conferences because the results take years; however, the carbon is spent. Here. Now. And seeing global warming as a ‘marginal’ is a grave error to make IMO.
These folks justify their highly carbonate cost of living by saying they make impact elsewhere,but they can’t really calculate it.
All this doesn’t make my post less relevant : 1) we need to talk about it more and have some kind of pledge/be transparent about it 2) we need to do something about this carelesness because of lack of accountability.
Here, “marginal” means “on the margin”—would it be better for me to have spent a certain amount of attention on this issue or a different issue? The word can mean something “of little importance” in other contexts, though.
I share your general skepticism about offsets—it is possible, but you have to be really careful the offset is actually counterfactual (e.g., that it results in the creation of a good thing that wouldn’t have happened but for you paying the offset). Don’t know about Wren specifically.
I don’t have lots of context about that team/org, but from what I’ve seen online I do think there might be some issues with that particular team of people that are not representative of the issues within EA more broadly.
I do hope they are not representative. I’m really hoping that we’ll get statistics about EAs behaviour when it comes to carbon footprint. I know there’s a big silent mass of EAs in low-income countries whose carbon footprint is close to null compared to wealthy notherners. I just wonder what is the part of wealthy notherners in EA—since we hear from them most.
Does making impact justify a careless attitude about harming the planet?
So, everyone loves EA for impact. However, I often see well-known EA orgs who clearly behave in harmful ways. Read this :
‘We choose to live in sunny, warm places all year long in an endless summer. This year we’ll be staying the winter in the Caribbean then going to EA hubs (Bay Area and London) in the summer time.’, from a famous EA org (that I won’t name and shame, but you can ask me in private if you want to avoid them). This is from a job add to receive funds to create your own EA hiring agency. Moreover, Bay Area and London are very costly and living there clearly increases your carbon footprint. If you have a choice of where to live, shouldn’t you think about this?
It is often that I see EA taking the plane for long distances and not caring a tad about their carbon footprint. These are rich, mobile people who like to travel from conferences to conferences but...for which impact? Does saving a child from malaria allows you to pollute? These things aren’t compatible in my mind.
I wish this community was more sensible to these ideas. It’s not because we don’t deem climate change a priority that we should not bat an eye regarding these behaviours. It is absurd to me. There seem to be little room between fully ascets EA people who live for impact and don’t allow themselves any personal pleasure, and such people who don’t even think about their carbon footprint. Should we follow data and encourage people to include their carbon footprint in their daily thinking? I wish we did better.
I’m not going to dispute that those places have very high costs of living, but for carbon footprint, are you sure? I thought that the general trend was that cities (or any dense population area) tend to have lower carbon footprints due to more public transportation, more walking, and the general consolidation of everything. Am I mis-remembering this?
What you write strikes me as true: there does seem to be a tendency for EAs to focus on their particular cause area and to neglect/ignore other areas of ethical behavior. Here is my very rough typology, off the top of my head:
Sometimes these things look bad, but actually make sense. I’ve sure we’ve all heard stories about people who pay someone to clean their house or to wash their dishes, and that looks really weird to me. But if you are actually producing something of great value in the 10 minutes it would take you to wash your dishes, then I can see how it kind of makes sense to pay someone else a modest amount of money to wash your dishes for you. Paying money for a taxi rather than taking the city bus seems wasteful to me, but if you can actually get 30 minutes of work done in the taxi that you wouldn’t be able to do on the bus, then I can understand the logic of it. Team retreats might fall into this category: a dozen people getting together at a tropical Airbnb using donor money is bad optics, but if we measure the gains comes out net positive I don’t really have many complaints about it.
Sometimes there is simply ethical fading in one area because of such a large focus in another area. My best guess is that flights, consumption, and carbon footprint mostly fall into this category. Think of the people work on X-risk who eat dead animals. Or think about me when I didn’t think about my carbon footprint while flying to a new city to meet EA people and talk about impact; I was thinking about networking rather than about climate.
And sometimes people just make silly or bad decisions. Person_A slept with Person_B, even though they work at the same small organization. Was that a great decision? No, they made a mistake. John_Doe_Org_Leader spoke dismissively and unkindly to a volunteer at an event. Not ideal, but a fumble rather than a travesty.
I do think that we should try harder, but at the same time I don’t feel thrilled about asking someone who is dedicating so much energy to dedicate even more.
I think there are good arguments for thinking that personal consumption choices have relatively insignificant impact when compared to the impact you can have with more targeted work.
However, I also think there’s likely to be some counter-countersignalling going on. If you mostly hang out with people who don’t care about the world, you can’t signal uniqueness by living high. But when your peers are already very considerate, choosing to refrain from refraining makes you look like you grok the arguments in the previous paragraph—you’re not one of those naive altruists who don’t seem to care about 2nd, 3rd, and nth-level arguments.
Fwiw, I just personally want the EA movement to (continue to) embrace a frugal aesthetic, irrespective of the arguments re effectiveness. It doesn’t have to be viewed as a tragic sacrifice and hinder your productivity. And I do think it has significant positives on culture & mindset.
I think this is a useful question and I’m glad to be discussing this.
I agree with many of your concerns—and would love to see a more culturally-unified EA on the axis of how conscious we are of our own impact—but I also think you’re failing to acknowledge something crucial: As much as EA is about altruism, it is also about focus on what’s important, and your post doesn’t acknowledge this as a potential trade-off for the folks you’re discussing.
You’ll find a lot of EA folks perceive climate change as a real problem but also perceive marginal carbon costs as not a thing worth focusing on given all the other problems in the world and the fact that carbon is offsetable. You are reading this as a “careless attitude” but I don’t think this is a fair characterization. There are real tradeoffs to be made here about how to use marginal attention; they may be offsetting and just not talking about it, or deciding that it’s not going to make enough difference in the short run, but regardless I think you have insufficient evidence to conclude that their attitude is wrong.
(I personally offset all my CO2 with Wren and think for at least 5 minutes about each plane flight I decide to take to decide if it is worth it; but have never written about this till now, and would have no reason to bother writing it down.)
I personally offset all my CO2 with Wren
And yet I highly doubt that most EA do that. You say that carbon is offsetable but it’s still a vigorous debate. The measures we take to offset the said carbone often won’t remove carbon before years, if not centuries.
For someone who goes to a conference, how can they really measure the trade-offs? meeting one person who helps them get a EA job with 10 other persons from other contexts? It sounds hypocritical. Truth is, it’s hard to calculate truthfully the impact you’re having at these conferences because the results take years; however, the carbon is spent. Here. Now. And seeing global warming as a ‘marginal’ is a grave error to make IMO.
These folks justify their highly carbonate cost of living by saying they make impact elsewhere,but they can’t really calculate it.
All this doesn’t make my post less relevant : 1) we need to talk about it more and have some kind of pledge/be transparent about it 2) we need to do something about this carelesness because of lack of accountability.
Here, “marginal” means “on the margin”—would it be better for me to have spent a certain amount of attention on this issue or a different issue? The word can mean something “of little importance” in other contexts, though.
I share your general skepticism about offsets—it is possible, but you have to be really careful the offset is actually counterfactual (e.g., that it results in the creation of a good thing that wouldn’t have happened but for you paying the offset). Don’t know about Wren specifically.
It’s not at all obvious to me that marginal carbon actually cashes out as bad even in expectation.
I don’t have lots of context about that team/org, but from what I’ve seen online I do think there might be some issues with that particular team of people that are not representative of the issues within EA more broadly.
I do hope they are not representative. I’m really hoping that we’ll get statistics about EAs behaviour when it comes to carbon footprint. I know there’s a big silent mass of EAs in low-income countries whose carbon footprint is close to null compared to wealthy notherners. I just wonder what is the part of wealthy notherners in EA—since we hear from them most.