The goal is to make this newsletter very accessible and useful both to anyone interested in policy (not just EAs) and get people thinking more about what the most impactful, influential policy really is.
Thanks for this work! Commenting on the climate section (the topic I know most about, not really expert in the other domains you cover), inferring importance and influentialness from the write-up seems hard—it looks like a round-up of interesting developments, but with little prioritization and assessment between them.
E.g. the American Jobs Plan is arguably the most important climate legislation right now, > 10x larger than the climate piece of the Recovery Act and quite a momentous shift in the willingness to invest in low-carbon infrastructure, but this is not clear from the write-up which gives similar weight to fairly marginal issues such as methane regulation for new oil and gas fields (short-lived pollutants in a subset of the economy, and only new installations) or state policies (Washington state having a target that is 10-15% more ambitious than what other Democratic-leaning states are doing seems fairly inconsequential).
I think this makes sense as a round-up, but I do think it does not meet the goal of focusing on the most impactful / influential developments. So I’d agree with Larks and Evelyn that a narrower, but deeper newsletter could be more accurate and more in line with the goal of highlighting particularly important developments.
Thanks for this work! Commenting on the climate section (the topic I know most about, not really expert in the other domains you cover), inferring importance and influentialness from the write-up seems hard—it looks like a round-up of interesting developments, but with little prioritization and assessment between them.
E.g. the American Jobs Plan is arguably the most important climate legislation right now, > 10x larger than the climate piece of the Recovery Act and quite a momentous shift in the willingness to invest in low-carbon infrastructure, but this is not clear from the write-up which gives similar weight to fairly marginal issues such as methane regulation for new oil and gas fields (short-lived pollutants in a subset of the economy, and only new installations) or state policies (Washington state having a target that is 10-15% more ambitious than what other Democratic-leaning states are doing seems fairly inconsequential).
I think this makes sense as a round-up, but I do think it does not meet the goal of focusing on the most impactful / influential developments. So I’d agree with Larks and Evelyn that a narrower, but deeper newsletter could be more accurate and more in line with the goal of highlighting particularly important developments.