Thanks, this is useful. You mentioned above that you’re planning to list more roles looking at biosecurity and climate change. What are 80K’s current thoughts and potential plans, if any, in relation to climate change?
We classify it as one of our second highest-priority areas:
For the overall allocation of effort:
We also aim to put ~30% of our effort into other ways of addressing our priority problems (AI, biorisk, global priorities research, building EA, nuclear security, improving institutional decision-making, extreme climate risks) or potential priority problems , some of which we might class as priority paths in the future.
More concretely, this will probably involve: (i) adding more jobs to the job boards (ii) updating our problem profile (iii) having some other podcasts or articles about it (plus cross-cutting content useful to everyone).
Thanks for the reply Ben. It’s great to hear that you’re looking at producing more content and doing more engagement in this area!
Looking at the old cause selection list from 2017-18 (link) I notice that climate change was ranked #9, below factory farming and improving global health. From your more recent cause prio from 2019 (link), it seems that it’s now somewhere in the top seven. Can I ask what’s changed to cause 80K to update their cause prioritisation?
The very short answer for why we prioritise it is that I think tail risks from climate change have a stronger claim to be in the longtermist portfolio than global health and factory farming (e.g. see The Precipice). I’d need to think more about what exactly has changed since 2017-2018.
Thanks, this is useful. You mentioned above that you’re planning to list more roles looking at biosecurity and climate change. What are 80K’s current thoughts and potential plans, if any, in relation to climate change?
Hi Louis,
We classify it as one of our second highest-priority areas:
For the overall allocation of effort:
More concretely, this will probably involve: (i) adding more jobs to the job boards (ii) updating our problem profile (iii) having some other podcasts or articles about it (plus cross-cutting content useful to everyone).
Thanks for the reply Ben. It’s great to hear that you’re looking at producing more content and doing more engagement in this area!
Looking at the old cause selection list from 2017-18 (link) I notice that climate change was ranked #9, below factory farming and improving global health. From your more recent cause prio from 2019 (link), it seems that it’s now somewhere in the top seven. Can I ask what’s changed to cause 80K to update their cause prioritisation?
The very short answer for why we prioritise it is that I think tail risks from climate change have a stronger claim to be in the longtermist portfolio than global health and factory farming (e.g. see The Precipice). I’d need to think more about what exactly has changed since 2017-2018.