It’s very difficult to communicate to someone that you think their life’s work is misguided
Just emphasizing the value of prudence and nuance, I think that this^ is a bad and possibly false way to formulate things. Being the “marginal best thing to work on for most EA people with flexible career capital” is a high bar to scale, that most people are not aiming towards, and work to prevent climate change still seems like a good thing to do if the counterfactual is to do nothing. I’d only be tempted to call work on climate change “misguided” if the person in question believes that the risks from climate change are significantly bigger than they in fact are, and wouldn’t be working on climate change if they knew better. While this is true for a lot of people, I (perhaps naively) think that people who’ve spent their life fighting climate change know a bit more. And indeed, someone who have spent their life fighting climate change probably has career capital that’s pretty specialized towards that, so it might be correct for them to keep working on it.
I’m still happy to inform people (with extreme prudence, as noted) that other causes might be better, but I think that “X is super important, possibly even more important than Y” is a better way to do this than “work on Y is misguided, so maybe you want to check out X instead”.
Yeah I think that’s fair. I think in practice most people who get convinced to work on eg, biorisk or AI Safety issues instead of climate change often do so for neglectedness or personal fit reasons.
Feel free to suggest a different wording on my point above.
EDIT: I changed “misguided”->”necessarily the best thing to do with limited resources”
I also think we have some different interpretations of the connotations of “misguided.” Like I probably mean it in a weaker sense than you’re taking it as. Eg, I also think selfishness is misguided because closed individualism isn’t philosophically sound, and that my younger self was misguided for not being a longtermist.
Just emphasizing the value of prudence and nuance, I think that this^ is a bad and possibly false way to formulate things. Being the “marginal best thing to work on for most EA people with flexible career capital” is a high bar to scale, that most people are not aiming towards, and work to prevent climate change still seems like a good thing to do if the counterfactual is to do nothing. I’d only be tempted to call work on climate change “misguided” if the person in question believes that the risks from climate change are significantly bigger than they in fact are, and wouldn’t be working on climate change if they knew better. While this is true for a lot of people, I (perhaps naively) think that people who’ve spent their life fighting climate change know a bit more. And indeed, someone who have spent their life fighting climate change probably has career capital that’s pretty specialized towards that, so it might be correct for them to keep working on it.
I’m still happy to inform people (with extreme prudence, as noted) that other causes might be better, but I think that “X is super important, possibly even more important than Y” is a better way to do this than “work on Y is misguided, so maybe you want to check out X instead”.
Yeah I think that’s fair. I think in practice most people who get convinced to work on eg, biorisk or AI Safety issues instead of climate change often do so for neglectedness or personal fit reasons.
Feel free to suggest a different wording on my point above.
EDIT: I changed “misguided”->”necessarily the best thing to do with limited resources”
I also think we have some different interpretations of the connotations of “misguided.” Like I probably mean it in a weaker sense than you’re taking it as. Eg, I also think selfishness is misguided because closed individualism isn’t philosophically sound, and that my younger self was misguided for not being a longtermist.