Agreed that it’s a weird mood, but perhaps inevitable.
In terms of the inequality between running PR campaigns but “not interesting cooprating with other people’s altruistic PR campaigns”: insofar as attention is ultimately a fixed resource, it’s an intrinsically adversarial situation between different attempts to capture peoples’ attention. (Although there are senses in which this is not true—many causes are often bundled together in a political alliance. And there could even be a broader cultural shift towards people caring more about behaving ethically, which would perhaps “lift all boats” in the do-gooder PR-campaign space!) Nevertheless, given the mostly fixed supply of attention, it certainly seems fine to steal eyeballs for thoughtful, highly-effective causes that would otherwise be watching Tiktok, and it seems similarly fine to steal eyeballs for good causes that would otherwise have gone to dumb, counterproductive causes (like the great paper-straw crusade). After that, it seems increasingly lamentable to steal eyeballs from increasingly reasonably-worthy causes, until you get to the level of counterproductive infighting among people who are all trying hard to make the world a better place. Of course, this is complicated by the fact that everyone naturally thinks their own cause is worthier than others. Nevertheless, I think some causes are worthier than others, and fighting to direct attention towards the worthiest causes is a virtuous thing to do—perhaps even doing one’s civic duty as a participant in the “marketplace of ideas”.
In terms of the inequality between organizers (who are being high-impact only because others are low impact) vs consumers whose behavior is affected:
This is omnipresent everywhere in EA, right? Mitigating x-risks is only high-impact because the rest of the world is neglecting it so badly!
Are we cruelly “stealing their impact”? I mean, maybe?? But this doesn’t seem so bad, because other people don’t care as much about impact. Conversely, some causes are much better than EA at going viral and raising lots of shallow mass awareness—but this isn’t so terrible from EA’s perspective, because EA doesn’t care as much about going viral.
But talk of “stealing impact” is weird and inverted… Imagine if everyone turned EA and tried to do the most high-impact thing. In this world, it might harder to have very high impact, but this would hardly be cause for despair, because the actual world would be immensely better off! It seems perverse to care about imagined “impact-stealing” rather than the actual state of the world.
It also seems like a fair deal insofar as the organizers have thought carefully and worked hard (a big effort), while it’s not like the consumers are being coerced into doing menial low-impact gruntwork for long hours and low pay; they’re instead making a tiny, nearly unconscious choice between two very similar options. In a way, the consumers are doing marginal charity, so their impact is higher than it seems. But asking people to go beyond marginal charity and make costlier sacrifices (ie, join a formal boycott, or consciously keep track of long lists of which companies are good versus bad) seems like more of an imposition.
Re: Nestle in particular, I get the spirit of what you’re saying, although see my recent long comment where I try to think through the chocolate issue in more detail. As far as I can tell, the labor-exploitation problems are common to the entire industry, so switching from Nestle to another brand wouldn’t do anything to help?? (If anything, possibly you should be switching TOWARDS nestle, and away from companies like Hershey’s that get a much higher % of their total revenue from chocolate?)
I think this spot-check about Nestle vs cocoa child labor (and about Nestle vs drought, and so forth) illustrates my point that there are a lot of seemingly-altruistic PR campaigns that actually don’t do much good. Perhaps those PR campaigns should feel bad for recruiting so much attention only to waste it on a poorly-thought-out theory of impact!
I don’t think that the analogy between X-risk work and this kind of protest makes sense.
The reason X-risk work is so impactful is that very few people are working on X-risk at all. As you say, if more people worked on X-risk, the (marginal) impact of each one would be lower, but that’s a good thing because more work would be getting done.
The claim being made about the animal welfare activists is that the mechanism of change relies on both the “high-impact” organizers, as well as the “low-impact” responsive consumers who will change their behavior in response to the protests. I think Jason’s point is that:
(a) it doesn’t make sense to call the organizers “high-impact” and the responsive consumers “low-impact”, if both of these groups are necessary for the protest to have impact at all,
(b) if we, as EAs, take the “organizer” role in our campaigns, we’re expecting a bunch of people to take the “responsive consumer” role, even if they don’t care as much about the issue as we do. So the cooperative thing to do would be to ourselves take the “responsive consumer” role in campaigns that others are organizing, even if we don’t care as much about the issue as those organizers do.
--
I do, however, think that (b) only applies to cases where there is an organized protest. If there was a prominent group of anti-Nestle protesters who had specific demands of Nestle that had a reasonable chance of being adopted and that would lead to positive impact, and they were protesting because Nestle didn’t do those, then maybe this argument would counsel that we should support them if it doesn’t cost too much. But I don’t really think this applies to the OP, who seemed to be suggesting that we should do a bunch of one-person “personal boycotts”, which I don’t think will have much impact.
The boycott of Nestlé isn’t solely an individual action; there are others who also avoid Nestlé, Amazon, and similar companies. That said, these efforts remain relatively small in scale and don’t constitute a large, coordinated movement.
Re: Nestle in particular, I get the spirit of what you’re saying, although see my recent long comment where I try to think through the chocolate issue in more detail. As far as I can tell, the labor-exploitation problems are common to the entire industry, so switching from Nestle to another brand wouldn’t do anything to help??
That could be correct. But I think the flip side of my individual chocolate purchasing decisions aren’t very impactful is that maybe we should defer under some circumstances to the people who have thought a lot about these kinds of issues, even if we think their modeling isn’t particularly good. Weak modeling is probably better, in expectancy, than no modeling at all—and developing our own models may not be an impactful use of our time. Or stated differently, I would expect the boycott targets identified by weak modeling to be more problematic actors in expectancy than if we chose our chocolate brands by picking a brand out of a hat.[1] (This doesn’t necessarily apply to boycotts that are not premised on each additional unit of production causing marginal harms.)
Agreed that it’s a weird mood, but perhaps inevitable.
In terms of the inequality between running PR campaigns but “not interesting cooprating with other people’s altruistic PR campaigns”: insofar as attention is ultimately a fixed resource, it’s an intrinsically adversarial situation between different attempts to capture peoples’ attention. (Although there are senses in which this is not true—many causes are often bundled together in a political alliance. And there could even be a broader cultural shift towards people caring more about behaving ethically, which would perhaps “lift all boats” in the do-gooder PR-campaign space!) Nevertheless, given the mostly fixed supply of attention, it certainly seems fine to steal eyeballs for thoughtful, highly-effective causes that would otherwise be watching Tiktok, and it seems similarly fine to steal eyeballs for good causes that would otherwise have gone to dumb, counterproductive causes (like the great paper-straw crusade). After that, it seems increasingly lamentable to steal eyeballs from increasingly reasonably-worthy causes, until you get to the level of counterproductive infighting among people who are all trying hard to make the world a better place. Of course, this is complicated by the fact that everyone naturally thinks their own cause is worthier than others. Nevertheless, I think some causes are worthier than others, and fighting to direct attention towards the worthiest causes is a virtuous thing to do—perhaps even doing one’s civic duty as a participant in the “marketplace of ideas”.
In terms of the inequality between organizers (who are being high-impact only because others are low impact) vs consumers whose behavior is affected:
This is omnipresent everywhere in EA, right? Mitigating x-risks is only high-impact because the rest of the world is neglecting it so badly!
Are we cruelly “stealing their impact”? I mean, maybe?? But this doesn’t seem so bad, because other people don’t care as much about impact. Conversely, some causes are much better than EA at going viral and raising lots of shallow mass awareness—but this isn’t so terrible from EA’s perspective, because EA doesn’t care as much about going viral.
But talk of “stealing impact” is weird and inverted… Imagine if everyone turned EA and tried to do the most high-impact thing. In this world, it might harder to have very high impact, but this would hardly be cause for despair, because the actual world would be immensely better off! It seems perverse to care about imagined “impact-stealing” rather than the actual state of the world.
It also seems like a fair deal insofar as the organizers have thought carefully and worked hard (a big effort), while it’s not like the consumers are being coerced into doing menial low-impact gruntwork for long hours and low pay; they’re instead making a tiny, nearly unconscious choice between two very similar options. In a way, the consumers are doing marginal charity, so their impact is higher than it seems. But asking people to go beyond marginal charity and make costlier sacrifices (ie, join a formal boycott, or consciously keep track of long lists of which companies are good versus bad) seems like more of an imposition.
Re: Nestle in particular, I get the spirit of what you’re saying, although see my recent long comment where I try to think through the chocolate issue in more detail. As far as I can tell, the labor-exploitation problems are common to the entire industry, so switching from Nestle to another brand wouldn’t do anything to help?? (If anything, possibly you should be switching TOWARDS nestle, and away from companies like Hershey’s that get a much higher % of their total revenue from chocolate?)
I think this spot-check about Nestle vs cocoa child labor (and about Nestle vs drought, and so forth) illustrates my point that there are a lot of seemingly-altruistic PR campaigns that actually don’t do much good. Perhaps those PR campaigns should feel bad for recruiting so much attention only to waste it on a poorly-thought-out theory of impact!
I don’t think that the analogy between X-risk work and this kind of protest makes sense.
The reason X-risk work is so impactful is that very few people are working on X-risk at all. As you say, if more people worked on X-risk, the (marginal) impact of each one would be lower, but that’s a good thing because more work would be getting done.
The claim being made about the animal welfare activists is that the mechanism of change relies on both the “high-impact” organizers, as well as the “low-impact” responsive consumers who will change their behavior in response to the protests. I think Jason’s point is that:
(a) it doesn’t make sense to call the organizers “high-impact” and the responsive consumers “low-impact”, if both of these groups are necessary for the protest to have impact at all,
(b) if we, as EAs, take the “organizer” role in our campaigns, we’re expecting a bunch of people to take the “responsive consumer” role, even if they don’t care as much about the issue as we do. So the cooperative thing to do would be to ourselves take the “responsive consumer” role in campaigns that others are organizing, even if we don’t care as much about the issue as those organizers do.
--
I do, however, think that (b) only applies to cases where there is an organized protest. If there was a prominent group of anti-Nestle protesters who had specific demands of Nestle that had a reasonable chance of being adopted and that would lead to positive impact, and they were protesting because Nestle didn’t do those, then maybe this argument would counsel that we should support them if it doesn’t cost too much. But I don’t really think this applies to the OP, who seemed to be suggesting that we should do a bunch of one-person “personal boycotts”, which I don’t think will have much impact.
The boycott of Nestlé isn’t solely an individual action; there are others who also avoid Nestlé, Amazon, and similar companies. That said, these efforts remain relatively small in scale and don’t constitute a large, coordinated movement.
That could be correct. But I think the flip side of my individual chocolate purchasing decisions aren’t very impactful is that maybe we should defer under some circumstances to the people who have thought a lot about these kinds of issues, even if we think their modeling isn’t particularly good. Weak modeling is probably better, in expectancy, than no modeling at all—and developing our own models may not be an impactful use of our time. Or stated differently, I would expect the boycott targets identified by weak modeling to be more problematic actors in expectancy than if we chose our chocolate brands by picking a brand out of a hat.[1] (This doesn’t necessarily apply to boycotts that are not premised on each additional unit of production causing marginal harms.)
Of course, we may not be picking a brand at random—we may be responding to price and quality differences.