“This bravado carries over into the blunt advice that MacAskill gives throughout the book. For instance, are you concerned about the environment? Recycling or changing your diet should not be your priority, he says; you can be “radically more impactful.” By giving $3,000 to a lobbying group called Clean Air Task Force (CATF), MacAskill declares, you can reduce carbon emissions by a massive 3,000 metric tons per year. That sounds great.
Friends, here’s where those numbers come from. MacAskill cites one of Ord’s research assistants—a recent PhD with no obvious experience in climate, energy, or policy—who wrote a report on climate charities. The assistant chose the controversial “carbon capture and storage” technology as his top climate intervention and found that CATF had lobbied for it. The research assistant asked folks at CATF, some of their funders, and some unnamed sources how successful they thought CATF’s best lobbying campaigns had been. He combined these interviews with lots of “best guesses” and “back of the envelope” calculations, using a method he was “not completely confident” in, to come up with dollar figures for emissions reductions. That’s it.
Strong hyping of precise numbers based on weak evidence and lots of hedging and fudging. EAs appoint themselves experts on everything based on a sophomore’s understanding of rationality and the world. And the way they test their reasoning—debating other EAs via blog posts and chatboards—often makes it worse. Here, the basic laws of sociology kick in. With so little feedback from outside, the views that prevail in-group are typically the views that are stated the most confidently by the EA with higher status. EAs rediscovered groupthink.”
Yeah, MacAskill and EA deserve the roasting on this one. FP’s report from 6 years ago was a terrible basis for the $1/ton figure. MacAskill should have never used it in WWOTF. The REDD+ section proved to be widely inaccurate; it underestimates cost by at least 10x, 200x if you account for permanence. The nuclear power advocacy BOTEC was even worse. And FP and GG still reference it!
I agree with you that the 2018 report should not have been used as primary evidence for CATF cost-effectiveness for WWOTF (and, IIRC, I advised against it and recommended an argument more based on landdscaping considerations with leverage from advocacy and induced technological change). But this comment is quite misleading with regards to FP’s workas we have discussed before:
I am not quite sure what is meant with “referencing it”, but this comment from 2022 in response to one of your earlier claims already discusses that we (FP) have not been using that estimate for anything since at least 2020. This was also discussed in other places before 2022.
As discussed in my comment on the Rethink report you cite, correcting the mistakes in the REDD+ analysis was one of the first things I did when joining FP in 2019 and we stopped recommending REDD+ based interventions in 2020. Indeed, I have been publicly arguing against treating REDD+ as cost-effective ever since and the thrust of my comment on the RP report is that they were still too optimistic.
(For those in the comments, you can track prior versions of these conversations in EA Anywhere’s cause-climate-change channel).
Last time I checked, GG’s still linked to FP’s CATF BOTEC on nuclear advocacy. Yes, I understand FP no longer uses that estimate. In fact, FP no longer publishes any of its BOTECs publicly. However, that hasn’t stopped you from continuing to assert that FP hits around $1/ton cost-effectiveness, heavily implying CATF is one such org, and its nuclear work being the likely example of it. The BOTEC remains in FP’s control, and it has yet to include a disclaimer. Please stop saying you can hit $1/ton based on high speculative EV calcs with numbers pulled out of thin air. It is not credible and is embarrassing to those of us who work on climate in EA.
I never intended to assert that FP still endorses REDD+. Merely to point out that the 2018 FP analysis of REDD+ (along with CCS and nuclear advocacy) was a terrible basis for Will to use in WWOTF for the $1/ton figure. While FP no longer endorses REDD+, FP’s recent reports contain all the same process errors that Lief points out about the 2018 report—lack of experience, over-reliance on orgs they fund, best guesses, speculation.
“This bravado carries over into the blunt advice that MacAskill gives throughout the book. For instance, are you concerned about the environment? Recycling or changing your diet should not be your priority, he says; you can be “radically more impactful.” By giving $3,000 to a lobbying group called Clean Air Task Force (CATF), MacAskill declares, you can reduce carbon emissions by a massive 3,000 metric tons per year. That sounds great.
Friends, here’s where those numbers come from. MacAskill cites one of Ord’s research assistants—a recent PhD with no obvious experience in climate, energy, or policy—who wrote a report on climate charities. The assistant chose the controversial “carbon capture and storage” technology as his top climate intervention and found that CATF had lobbied for it. The research assistant asked folks at CATF, some of their funders, and some unnamed sources how successful they thought CATF’s best lobbying campaigns had been. He combined these interviews with lots of “best guesses” and “back of the envelope” calculations, using a method he was “not completely confident” in, to come up with dollar figures for emissions reductions. That’s it.
Strong hyping of precise numbers based on weak evidence and lots of hedging and fudging. EAs appoint themselves experts on everything based on a sophomore’s understanding of rationality and the world. And the way they test their reasoning—debating other EAs via blog posts and chatboards—often makes it worse. Here, the basic laws of sociology kick in. With so little feedback from outside, the views that prevail in-group are typically the views that are stated the most confidently by the EA with higher status. EAs rediscovered groupthink.”
Yeah, MacAskill and EA deserve the roasting on this one. FP’s report from 6 years ago was a terrible basis for the $1/ton figure. MacAskill should have never used it in WWOTF. The REDD+ section proved to be widely inaccurate; it underestimates cost by at least 10x, 200x if you account for permanence. The nuclear power advocacy BOTEC was even worse. And FP and GG still reference it!
I agree with you that the 2018 report should not have been used as primary evidence for CATF cost-effectiveness for WWOTF (and, IIRC, I advised against it and recommended an argument more based on landdscaping considerations with leverage from advocacy and induced technological change). But this comment is quite misleading with regards to FP’s work as we have discussed before:
I am not quite sure what is meant with “referencing it”, but this comment from 2022 in response to one of your earlier claims already discusses that we (FP) have not been using that estimate for anything since at least 2020. This was also discussed in other places before 2022.
As discussed in my comment on the Rethink report you cite, correcting the mistakes in the REDD+ analysis was one of the first things I did when joining FP in 2019 and we stopped recommending REDD+ based interventions in 2020. Indeed, I have been publicly arguing against treating REDD+ as cost-effective ever since and the thrust of my comment on the RP report is that they were still too optimistic.
(For those in the comments, you can track prior versions of these conversations in EA Anywhere’s cause-climate-change channel).
Last time I checked, GG’s still linked to FP’s CATF BOTEC on nuclear advocacy. Yes, I understand FP no longer uses that estimate. In fact, FP no longer publishes any of its BOTECs publicly. However, that hasn’t stopped you from continuing to assert that FP hits around $1/ton cost-effectiveness, heavily implying CATF is one such org, and its nuclear work being the likely example of it. The BOTEC remains in FP’s control, and it has yet to include a disclaimer. Please stop saying you can hit $1/ton based on high speculative EV calcs with numbers pulled out of thin air. It is not credible and is embarrassing to those of us who work on climate in EA.
I never intended to assert that FP still endorses REDD+. Merely to point out that the 2018 FP analysis of REDD+ (along with CCS and nuclear advocacy) was a terrible basis for Will to use in WWOTF for the $1/ton figure. While FP no longer endorses REDD+, FP’s recent reports contain all the same process errors that Lief points out about the 2018 report—lack of experience, over-reliance on orgs they fund, best guesses, speculation.