What a fantastic post. Thank you! Your frustration resonates strongly with me. I think the dismissive attitude towards climate issues may well be an enormous waste of goodwill towards EA concepts.
How many young/wealthy people stumble upon 80k/GiveWell/etc. with heartfelt enthusiasm for solving climate, The Big Issue Of Our Time, only to be snubbed? How many of them could significantly improve their career/giving plans if they received earnest help with climate-related cause prioritization, instead of ivory-tower lecturing about weirdo x-risks?
Can’t we save that stuff for later? “If you like working on climate, you might also be interested in …”?
This isn’t to say that EA’s marginal-impact priorities are wrong; I myself work mainly on AI safety right now. But a career in nuclear energy is still more useful than one in recyclable plastic straw R&D (or perhaps it isn’t?), and that’s worth researching and talking about.
I’ve spent a good bit of time in the environmental movement and if anyone could use a heavy dose of rationality and numeracy, it’s climate activists. I consider drawdown.org a massive accomplishment and step in the right direction. It’s sometimes dismissed on this forum for being too narrow-minded, and that’s probably fair, but then what’s EA’s answer, besides a few uncertain charity recommendations? Where’s our GiveWell for climate?
Given that people’s concern about climate change is only going up, I hope that this important conversation is here to stay. Thanks again for posting!
I am sympathetic to the PR angle (ditto for global poverty): lots of EAs, including me, got to longtermism via more conventional cause areas, and I’m nervous about pulling up that drawbridge. I’m not sure I’d be an EA today if I hadn’t been able to get where I am in small steps.
The problem is that putting more emphasis on climate change requires people to spend a large fraction of their time on a cause area they believe is much less effective than something else they could be working on, and to be at least somewhat dishonest about why they’re doing it. To me, that sounds both profoundly self-alienating and fairly questionable impact-wise.
My guess is that people should probably say what they believe, which for many EAs (including me) is that climate change work is both far less impactful and far less neglected than other priority cause areas, and that many people interested in having an impact can do far more good elsewhere.
I wonder how much of the assessment that climate change work is far less impactful than other work relies on the logic of “low probability, high impact”, which seems to be the most compelling argument for x-risk. Personally, I generally agree with this line of reasoning, but it leads to conclusions so far away from common sense and intuition, that I am a bit worried something is wrong with it. It wouldn’t be the first time people failed to recognize the limits of human rationality and were led astray. That error is no big deal as long as it does not have a high cost, but climate change, even if temperatures only rise by 1.5 degrees, is going to create a lot of suffering in this world.
In an 80,000 hours podcast with Peter Singer the question was raised whether EA should split into 2 movements: present welfare and longtermism. If we assume that concern with climate issues can grow the movement, that might be a good way to account for our long term bias, while continuing the work on x-risk at current and even higher levels.
That sounds right to me. (And Will, your drawbridge metaphor is wonderful.)
My impression is that there already is some grumbling about EA being too elitist/out-of-touch/non-diverse/arrogant/navel-gazing/etc., and discussions in the community about what can be done to fix that perception. Add to that Toby Ord’s realization (in his well-marketed book) that hey, perhaps climate change is a bigger x-risk (if indirectly) than he had previously thought, and I think we have fertile ground for posts like this one. EA’s attitude has already shifted once (away from earning-to-give); perhaps the next shift is an embrace of issues that are already in the public consciousness, if only to attract more diversity into the broader community.
I’ve had smart and very morally-conscious friends laugh off the entirety of EA as “the paperclip people”, and others refer to Peter Singer as “that animal guy”. And I think that’s really sad, because they could be very valuable members of the community if we had been more conscious to avoid such alienation. Many STEM-type EAs think of PR considerations as distractions from the real issues, but that might mean leaving huge amounts of low-hanging utility fruit unpicked.
Explicitly putting present-welfare and longtermism on equal footing seems like a good first step to me.
My guess is that people should probably say what they believe, which for many EAs (including me) is that climate change work is both far less impactful and far less neglected than other priority cause areas, and that many people interested in having an impact can do far more good elsewhere.
Rather than “many EAs”, I would say “some EAs” believe that climate change work is both far less impactful and far less neglected than other priority cause areas.
I am not one of those people. I am currently in the process of shifting my career to work on climate change. Effective Altruism is a Big Tent.
“Some EAs” conveys very little information. The claim I’m making is stronger.
On the other hand, “many people [...] could do far more good elsewhere” is not the same as “all people”. Probably some EA-minded people can have their greatest impact working on climate change. Perhaps you are one of those people.
There’s a pretty important distinction between what your own best career path is and what the broader community should prioritise. I’m going to try to write more about this separately because it’s important, but: if you think that working on climate change is the most impactful thing you can do, there are lots of good and bad reasons that could be, and short of a deep personal conversation or an explicit call for advice I’m not going to argue with you. I wish you all the best in your quest for impact.
But this post is a general call to change how the community as a whole regards and prioritises climate change work, and as such needs to be evaluated on a different level. I can disagree with these arguments without having an opinion on what the best thing for you to do is.
(Not that you said I couldn’t do that. I just think it’s important for that distinction to be explicitly there.)
What a fantastic post. Thank you! Your frustration resonates strongly with me. I think the dismissive attitude towards climate issues may well be an enormous waste of goodwill towards EA concepts.
How many young/wealthy people stumble upon 80k/GiveWell/etc. with heartfelt enthusiasm for solving climate, The Big Issue Of Our Time, only to be snubbed? How many of them could significantly improve their career/giving plans if they received earnest help with climate-related cause prioritization, instead of ivory-tower lecturing about weirdo x-risks?
Can’t we save that stuff for later? “If you like working on climate, you might also be interested in …”?
This isn’t to say that EA’s marginal-impact priorities are wrong; I myself work mainly on AI safety right now. But a career in nuclear energy is still more useful than one in recyclable plastic straw R&D (or perhaps it isn’t?), and that’s worth researching and talking about.
I’ve spent a good bit of time in the environmental movement and if anyone could use a heavy dose of rationality and numeracy, it’s climate activists. I consider drawdown.org a massive accomplishment and step in the right direction. It’s sometimes dismissed on this forum for being too narrow-minded, and that’s probably fair, but then what’s EA’s answer, besides a few uncertain charity recommendations? Where’s our GiveWell for climate?
Given that people’s concern about climate change is only going up, I hope that this important conversation is here to stay. Thanks again for posting!
I am sympathetic to the PR angle (ditto for global poverty): lots of EAs, including me, got to longtermism via more conventional cause areas, and I’m nervous about pulling up that drawbridge. I’m not sure I’d be an EA today if I hadn’t been able to get where I am in small steps.
The problem is that putting more emphasis on climate change requires people to spend a large fraction of their time on a cause area they believe is much less effective than something else they could be working on, and to be at least somewhat dishonest about why they’re doing it. To me, that sounds both profoundly self-alienating and fairly questionable impact-wise.
My guess is that people should probably say what they believe, which for many EAs (including me) is that climate change work is both far less impactful and far less neglected than other priority cause areas, and that many people interested in having an impact can do far more good elsewhere.
I wonder how much of the assessment that climate change work is far less impactful than other work relies on the logic of “low probability, high impact”, which seems to be the most compelling argument for x-risk. Personally, I generally agree with this line of reasoning, but it leads to conclusions so far away from common sense and intuition, that I am a bit worried something is wrong with it. It wouldn’t be the first time people failed to recognize the limits of human rationality and were led astray. That error is no big deal as long as it does not have a high cost, but climate change, even if temperatures only rise by 1.5 degrees, is going to create a lot of suffering in this world.
In an 80,000 hours podcast with Peter Singer the question was raised whether EA should split into 2 movements: present welfare and longtermism. If we assume that concern with climate issues can grow the movement, that might be a good way to account for our long term bias, while continuing the work on x-risk at current and even higher levels.
That sounds right to me. (And Will, your drawbridge metaphor is wonderful.)
My impression is that there already is some grumbling about EA being too elitist/out-of-touch/non-diverse/arrogant/navel-gazing/etc., and discussions in the community about what can be done to fix that perception. Add to that Toby Ord’s realization (in his well-marketed book) that hey, perhaps climate change is a bigger x-risk (if indirectly) than he had previously thought, and I think we have fertile ground for posts like this one. EA’s attitude has already shifted once (away from earning-to-give); perhaps the next shift is an embrace of issues that are already in the public consciousness, if only to attract more diversity into the broader community.
I’ve had smart and very morally-conscious friends laugh off the entirety of EA as “the paperclip people”, and others refer to Peter Singer as “that animal guy”. And I think that’s really sad, because they could be very valuable members of the community if we had been more conscious to avoid such alienation. Many STEM-type EAs think of PR considerations as distractions from the real issues, but that might mean leaving huge amounts of low-hanging utility fruit unpicked.
Explicitly putting present-welfare and longtermism on equal footing seems like a good first step to me.
Rather than “many EAs”, I would say “some EAs” believe that climate change work is both far less impactful and far less neglected than other priority cause areas.
I am not one of those people. I am currently in the process of shifting my career to work on climate change. Effective Altruism is a Big Tent.
“Some EAs” conveys very little information. The claim I’m making is stronger.
On the other hand, “many people [...] could do far more good elsewhere” is not the same as “all people”. Probably some EA-minded people can have their greatest impact working on climate change. Perhaps you are one of those people.
There’s a pretty important distinction between what your own best career path is and what the broader community should prioritise. I’m going to try to write more about this separately because it’s important, but: if you think that working on climate change is the most impactful thing you can do, there are lots of good and bad reasons that could be, and short of a deep personal conversation or an explicit call for advice I’m not going to argue with you. I wish you all the best in your quest for impact.
But this post is a general call to change how the community as a whole regards and prioritises climate change work, and as such needs to be evaluated on a different level. I can disagree with these arguments without having an opinion on what the best thing for you to do is.
(Not that you said I couldn’t do that. I just think it’s important for that distinction to be explicitly there.)