Thanks for your comments and for linking to that podcast.
And while you may be right that it’s a bit naive to just count all climate-related funding in the world when considering the neglectedness of this issue, I suspect that even if you just considered “useful” climate funding, e.g. advocacy for carbon taxes or funding for clean energy, the total would still dwarf the funding for some of the other major risks.
In my post I am arguing for an output metric rather than an input metric. In my opinion, climate change will stop being a neglected topic when we actually manage to start flattening the emissions curve. Until that actually happens, humanity is on course for a much darker future. Do you disagree? Are you arguing that it is better to focus on an input metric (level of funding) and use that to determine whether an area has “enough” attention?
It seems to me that this conception of neglectedness doesn’t help much with cause prioritization. Every problem EAs think about is probably neglected in some global sense. As a civilization we should absolutely do more to fight climate change. I think working on effective climate change solutions is a great career choice; better than, like, 98% of other possible options. But a lot of other factors bear on what the absolute best use of marginal resources is.
In my post I am arguing for an output metric rather than an input metric.
But this doesn’t make any sense. It suggests that if a problem is (a) severe and (b) insuperable, we should pour all our effort into it forever, achieving nothing in the process.
The impact equation in Owen Cotton-Barratt’s Prospecting for Gold might be helpful here. Note that his term for neglectedness (what he calls uncrowdedness) depends only on the amount of (useful) work that has already been done, not the value of a solution or the elasticity of progress with work (i.e. tractability). (We can generalise from “work done” to “resources spent”, where effort is one resource you can spend on a problem.)
Now, you can get into the weeds here with exactly what kinds of work count for the purposes of determining crowdedness (presumably you need to downweight in inverse proportion to how well-directed the work is), but I think even under the strictest reasonable definitions the amount of work that has gone into attacking climate change is “a very great deal”.
I can think of some other arguments you might make, around the shape and scale of the first two terms in Owen’s equation, to argue that marginal work put into climate change is still valuable, but none of them depend on redefining neglectedness.
Thanks for clarifying! I understand the intuition behind calling this “neglectedness”, but it pushes in the opposite direction of how EA’s usually use the term. I might suggest choosing a different term for this, as it confused me (and, I think, others).
To clarify what I mean by “the opposite direction”: the original motivation behind caring about “neglectedness” was that it’s a heuristic for whether low hanging fruit in the field exists. If no one has looked into something, then it’s more likely that there is low hanging fruit, so we should probably prefer domains that are less established . (All other things being equal.)
The fact that many people have looked into climate change but we still have not “flattened the emissions curve” indicates that there is not low hanging fruit remaining. So an argument that climate change is “neglected” in the sense you are using the term is actually an argument that it is not neglected in the usual sense of the term. Hence the confusion from me and others.
Thanks for your comments and for linking to that podcast.
In my post I am arguing for an output metric rather than an input metric. In my opinion, climate change will stop being a neglected topic when we actually manage to start flattening the emissions curve. Until that actually happens, humanity is on course for a much darker future. Do you disagree? Are you arguing that it is better to focus on an input metric (level of funding) and use that to determine whether an area has “enough” attention?
It seems to me that this conception of neglectedness doesn’t help much with cause prioritization. Every problem EAs think about is probably neglected in some global sense. As a civilization we should absolutely do more to fight climate change. I think working on effective climate change solutions is a great career choice; better than, like, 98% of other possible options. But a lot of other factors bear on what the absolute best use of marginal resources is.
But this doesn’t make any sense. It suggests that if a problem is (a) severe and (b) insuperable, we should pour all our effort into it forever, achieving nothing in the process.
The impact equation in Owen Cotton-Barratt’s Prospecting for Gold might be helpful here. Note that his term for neglectedness (what he calls uncrowdedness) depends only on the amount of (useful) work that has already been done, not the value of a solution or the elasticity of progress with work (i.e. tractability). (We can generalise from “work done” to “resources spent”, where effort is one resource you can spend on a problem.)
Now, you can get into the weeds here with exactly what kinds of work count for the purposes of determining crowdedness (presumably you need to downweight in inverse proportion to how well-directed the work is), but I think even under the strictest reasonable definitions the amount of work that has gone into attacking climate change is “a very great deal”.
I can think of some other arguments you might make, around the shape and scale of the first two terms in Owen’s equation, to argue that marginal work put into climate change is still valuable, but none of them depend on redefining neglectedness.
Thanks for clarifying! I understand the intuition behind calling this “neglectedness”, but it pushes in the opposite direction of how EA’s usually use the term. I might suggest choosing a different term for this, as it confused me (and, I think, others).
To clarify what I mean by “the opposite direction”: the original motivation behind caring about “neglectedness” was that it’s a heuristic for whether low hanging fruit in the field exists. If no one has looked into something, then it’s more likely that there is low hanging fruit, so we should probably prefer domains that are less established . (All other things being equal.)
The fact that many people have looked into climate change but we still have not “flattened the emissions curve” indicates that there is not low hanging fruit remaining. So an argument that climate change is “neglected” in the sense you are using the term is actually an argument that it is not neglected in the usual sense of the term. Hence the confusion from me and others.