environmentalists can join effective altruism to use their vast experience, numbers, and social capital to more readily achieve common goals for increasing well-being
The goal of environmentalism is to preserve the natural order, not to increase well-being. This is definitely not a common goal.
I tend to think of social movements as giant System 1′s made of many people. To ascribe to them a single rational goal which they optimized pursuit for is to model them in unrealistic ways. Environmentalism isn’t a bunch of people with a common goal, but people with different goals taking a similar approach. That approach may be preserving the natural order. However, as I said, the motivation for pursuing the natural order is to preserve the moral value of human and non-human life, in general and as an aggregate of all the individual moral patients, including future generations. There is lots of common ground there with effective altruism.
He just said that there are goals to be worked on together, not that they all have a full and exact overlap. And fortuitously there are certainly some interests that can be worked on together including catastrophe prevention. If there are people working to create ecological catastrophes, then if the movement grows to a sufficient size, people will become obligated to disavow that support, sever institutional ties and suppress those elements of the movement (as with extremism in all social movements), and although it’s not going to take a trivial effort to split, it’s only going to be more painful to do it later.
The goal of environmentalism is to preserve the natural order, not to increase well-being. This is definitely not a common goal.
I tend to think of social movements as giant System 1′s made of many people. To ascribe to them a single rational goal which they optimized pursuit for is to model them in unrealistic ways. Environmentalism isn’t a bunch of people with a common goal, but people with different goals taking a similar approach. That approach may be preserving the natural order. However, as I said, the motivation for pursuing the natural order is to preserve the moral value of human and non-human life, in general and as an aggregate of all the individual moral patients, including future generations. There is lots of common ground there with effective altruism.
He just said that there are goals to be worked on together, not that they all have a full and exact overlap. And fortuitously there are certainly some interests that can be worked on together including catastrophe prevention. If there are people working to create ecological catastrophes, then if the movement grows to a sufficient size, people will become obligated to disavow that support, sever institutional ties and suppress those elements of the movement (as with extremism in all social movements), and although it’s not going to take a trivial effort to split, it’s only going to be more painful to do it later.