As someone who had previously made news for a “radical climate protest” in my country back in 2020, I agree with this finding!
I’d like to share my own application of this phenomenon:
Case study: Climate protesting in Singapore
In 2019, the wave of global youth climate activism inspired by Greta Thunberg had spread to Singapore. Broadly speaking, Asian countries are generally underrepresented in climate activism, even in developed countries. [1]Consequently, the inaugural SG Climate Rally was relatively small at ~2,000 participants. I helped organise this rally.
There’s a few things to note here:
Singapore is known for very strict laws restricting protests. Under the Public Order Act introduced in 2008, any person assembling in a public place expressing support for or against a cause must register with the police for a permit. Long story short, even a solo protest must be pre-approved by the police. And the police don’t approve topics deemed controversial … yeah.
Singaporeans have a very negative opinion of protesting. It’s a chicken-and-egg thing, but essentially in Singapore protesting carries a social taboo. Protests generally considered “moderate” in other countries would be considered “radical” in Singapore.
Singaporean climate advocacy organisations were all “moderate”. There was no “radical wing” of climate activism in Singapore. In the Singaporean context, standing in the street alone for 15 minutes to protest for climate action would be “radical”. Our Overton Window is very different.
Singapore had very insufficient climate commitments. In early 2020, after the SG Climate Rally, Singapore announced climate goals that included net zero timelines beyond 2050 “some time in the later half of this century” (i.e. no actual timeline), and a carbon tax of $5.
Decision Matrix
If I continued with “Moderate Groups”, it seemed high-probability that commitments would remain insufficient.
If I branched off into “Radical Tactics”, then policymakers have to deal with both “Moderate Groups” and “Radical Tactics”. Following the same logic as outlined in this post, this suggested a probability of improved climate commitments.
From an x-risk prevention POV, the idea was to increase the probability of climate action by creating the threat of radical protests to supplement/increase support for moderate advocacy. Basically, I did not think Radical > Moderate, but rather Radical+Moderate > Moderate Only.
EV calculations of “Radical” Climate Protests
I calculated the rough Expected Value (EV) of my climate protest as follows:
Assuming 1% chance of counterfactually affecting climate discourse (favourable due to lack of protests in SG increasing marginal benefit of 1 individual protest)
Excess deaths from 4.0C vs 1.5C: 4 million/year
Singapore’s contribution to excess death: 1/1000 = 4,000/year
EV: 40 excess deaths/year = ~1,000/25 yrs
Risk: Major tail risk of 1-2 year’s jail, criminal record, 5% chance of exile
So, with about 2-3 orders of magnitude margin of error, I figured it was high-EV. After a big controversy and a year of organising, Singapore released climate goals that included a net zero goal by 2050, and a $80 carbon tax.
Further thoughts
I think a lot of people misinterpret advocacy, or at least climate advocacy.
In general, people don’t like activism/protesting. More broadly, people are extra skeptical of ideas requiring high commitment that imply moral judgement. You can see this with EA, veganism, protesting, donating etc. People just don’t respond well to the implicit premise that “Because I haven’t been doing this, therefore I am immoral”, and instead it’s more comfortable to go with “I really want to believe this person is wrong and misguided.”. This applies even between activities: for example, EAs feeling awkward discussing veganism/donations/protests with other EAs, regardless of the actual EV of the actions. There’s a very valid discussion to be had with regards to the efficacy of advocacy/protest campaigns, but I’m usually wary of the extra skepticism I get just by virtue of being a climate activist and the negative connotations people have surrounding that.
Critics often ignore “moderate” groundwork, and then criticise a lack of moderate groundwork. A common criticism I hear to this day is “Why don’t you do [X] instead of [Y]”. X is usually implied as something vaguely less radical. However, in my experience, people who do “radical” advocacy often have years of experience in “moderate” advocacy, even simultaneously doing both. I’d say 99% of my work involved normal stuff like outreach to policymakers, organising petitions and lobbying. I think people just assume “radicals” dismiss “moderates”, when in fact radicals often respect and work closely alongside the moderates who have always comprised 99% of the climate movement, but aren’t reported on.
People just assume activists are attention-seeking. This one, I don’t fully get. Nowadays, there’s countless ways to optimise for attention that have no downside risk. In fact, I messaged the most attention-seeking people I knew and asked them to join, but none of them did. Instead, it was usually people who were extremely anxious about climate risk+had a very high justice sensitivity. Interestingly, all of them were either LGBTQ+ or were neurodivergent.
Anyway, just sharing my (hopefully relevant) experience. I did do a lot of social movement research literature review while organising climate protests, so even this is a very small fraction of my thoughts on the topic. People seem to assume that activists are impulsive and have poorly-crafted theories of change, so it’s hard to elaborate on reasoning when a critic just asserts that you’re dumb.
Happy to engage with other discussions on this topic! Nowadays I work at Nonlinear mainly on AI Safety/meta stuff, so climate activism doesn’t come up super often other than cross-applying x-risk theories of change.
As someone who had previously made news for a “radical climate protest” in my country back in 2020, I agree with this finding!
I’d like to share my own application of this phenomenon:
Case study: Climate protesting in Singapore
In 2019, the wave of global youth climate activism inspired by Greta Thunberg had spread to Singapore. Broadly speaking, Asian countries are generally underrepresented in climate activism, even in developed countries. [1]Consequently, the inaugural SG Climate Rally was relatively small at ~2,000 participants. I helped organise this rally.
There’s a few things to note here:
Singapore is known for very strict laws restricting protests. Under the Public Order Act introduced in 2008, any person assembling in a public place expressing support for or against a cause must register with the police for a permit. Long story short, even a solo protest must be pre-approved by the police. And the police don’t approve topics deemed controversial … yeah.
Singaporeans have a very negative opinion of protesting. It’s a chicken-and-egg thing, but essentially in Singapore protesting carries a social taboo. Protests generally considered “moderate” in other countries would be considered “radical” in Singapore.
Singaporean climate advocacy organisations were all “moderate”. There was no “radical wing” of climate activism in Singapore. In the Singaporean context, standing in the street alone for 15 minutes to protest for climate action would be “radical”. Our Overton Window is very different.
Singapore had very insufficient climate commitments. In early 2020, after the SG Climate Rally, Singapore announced climate goals that included net zero timelines beyond 2050 “some time in the later half of this century” (i.e. no actual timeline), and a carbon tax of $5.
Decision Matrix
If I continued with “Moderate Groups”, it seemed high-probability that commitments would remain insufficient.
If I branched off into “Radical Tactics”, then policymakers have to deal with both “Moderate Groups” and “Radical Tactics”. Following the same logic as outlined in this post, this suggested a probability of improved climate commitments.
From an x-risk prevention POV, the idea was to increase the probability of climate action by creating the threat of radical protests to supplement/increase support for moderate advocacy.
Basically, I did not think Radical > Moderate, but rather Radical+Moderate > Moderate Only.
EV calculations of “Radical” Climate Protests
I calculated the rough Expected Value (EV) of my climate protest as follows:
Assuming 1% chance of counterfactually affecting climate discourse (favourable due to lack of protests in SG increasing marginal benefit of 1 individual protest)
Excess deaths from 4.0C vs 1.5C: 4 million/year
Singapore’s contribution to excess death: 1/1000 = 4,000/year
EV: 40 excess deaths/year = ~1,000/25 yrs
Risk: Major tail risk of 1-2 year’s jail, criminal record, 5% chance of exile
So, with about 2-3 orders of magnitude margin of error, I figured it was high-EV. After a big controversy and a year of organising, Singapore released climate goals that included a net zero goal by 2050, and a $80 carbon tax.
Further thoughts
I think a lot of people misinterpret advocacy, or at least climate advocacy.
In general, people don’t like activism/protesting. More broadly, people are extra skeptical of ideas requiring high commitment that imply moral judgement. You can see this with EA, veganism, protesting, donating etc. People just don’t respond well to the implicit premise that “Because I haven’t been doing this, therefore I am immoral”, and instead it’s more comfortable to go with “I really want to believe this person is wrong and misguided.”. This applies even between activities: for example, EAs feeling awkward discussing veganism/donations/protests with other EAs, regardless of the actual EV of the actions. There’s a very valid discussion to be had with regards to the efficacy of advocacy/protest campaigns, but I’m usually wary of the extra skepticism I get just by virtue of being a climate activist and the negative connotations people have surrounding that.
Critics often ignore “moderate” groundwork, and then criticise a lack of moderate groundwork. A common criticism I hear to this day is “Why don’t you do [X] instead of [Y]”. X is usually implied as something vaguely less radical. However, in my experience, people who do “radical” advocacy often have years of experience in “moderate” advocacy, even simultaneously doing both. I’d say 99% of my work involved normal stuff like outreach to policymakers, organising petitions and lobbying. I think people just assume “radicals” dismiss “moderates”, when in fact radicals often respect and work closely alongside the moderates who have always comprised 99% of the climate movement, but aren’t reported on.
People just assume activists are attention-seeking. This one, I don’t fully get. Nowadays, there’s countless ways to optimise for attention that have no downside risk. In fact, I messaged the most attention-seeking people I knew and asked them to join, but none of them did. Instead, it was usually people who were extremely anxious about climate risk+had a very high justice sensitivity. Interestingly, all of them were either LGBTQ+ or were neurodivergent.
Anyway, just sharing my (hopefully relevant) experience. I did do a lot of social movement research literature review while organising climate protests, so even this is a very small fraction of my thoughts on the topic. People seem to assume that activists are impulsive and have poorly-crafted theories of change, so it’s hard to elaborate on reasoning when a critic just asserts that you’re dumb.
Happy to engage with other discussions on this topic! Nowadays I work at Nonlinear mainly on AI Safety/meta stuff, so climate activism doesn’t come up super often other than cross-applying x-risk theories of change.
The reason why is worthy of its own research/thread.