Thanks for sharing! This does seem like an area many people are interested in, so I’m glad to have more discussion.
I would suggest considering the opposite argument regarding neglectedness. If I had to steelman this, I would say something like: a small number of people (perhaps even a single PhD student) do solid research about existential risks from climate change → existential risks research becomes an accepted part of mainstream climate change work → because “mainstream climate change work” has so many resources, that small initial bit of research has been leveraged into a much larger amount.
(Note: I’m not sure how reasonable this argument is – I personally don’t find it that compelling. But it seems more compelling to me than arguing that climate change isn’t neglected, or that we should ignore neglectedness concerns.)
Yeah, I think there are various arguments one could make within the S/T/N framework that don’t depend on redefining neglectedness:
“Even though lots of work has gone into solving climate change, the problem is so vastly complex and multidimensional that there’s still lots of low-hanging fruit left unpicked, so tractability remains high (and scale is large, so the two together are sufficient for impact).”
“Although lots of work has gone into solving climate change, partial solutions aren’t very valuable: most of the impact comes from the last few % of solving the problem. Also [for some reason] we can’t expect future work to continue at the same rate as current work, so more marginal work now is especially valuable.”
“While lots of resources have already gone into solving climate change, the problem is actually getting bigger all the time! So even though neglectedness is low and falling, returns from scale are high and rising, so marginal work on the problem remains valuable.”
I have no idea how solid any of these are (critiques welcome), and I don’t think I’d find any of them all that compelling in the climate change case without strong evidence. But these are a few ways I could imagine circumventing neglectedness concerns (other than the obvious “the scale is really really big tho”, which doesn’t seem to have done the job in the climate change case).
Thanks for sharing! This does seem like an area many people are interested in, so I’m glad to have more discussion.
I would suggest considering the opposite argument regarding neglectedness. If I had to steelman this, I would say something like: a small number of people (perhaps even a single PhD student) do solid research about existential risks from climate change → existential risks research becomes an accepted part of mainstream climate change work → because “mainstream climate change work” has so many resources, that small initial bit of research has been leveraged into a much larger amount.
(Note: I’m not sure how reasonable this argument is – I personally don’t find it that compelling. But it seems more compelling to me than arguing that climate change isn’t neglected, or that we should ignore neglectedness concerns.)
Yeah, I think there are various arguments one could make within the S/T/N framework that don’t depend on redefining neglectedness:
“Even though lots of work has gone into solving climate change, the problem is so vastly complex and multidimensional that there’s still lots of low-hanging fruit left unpicked, so tractability remains high (and scale is large, so the two together are sufficient for impact).”
“Although lots of work has gone into solving climate change, partial solutions aren’t very valuable: most of the impact comes from the last few % of solving the problem. Also [for some reason] we can’t expect future work to continue at the same rate as current work, so more marginal work now is especially valuable.”
“While lots of resources have already gone into solving climate change, the problem is actually getting bigger all the time! So even though neglectedness is low and falling, returns from scale are high and rising, so marginal work on the problem remains valuable.”
I have no idea how solid any of these are (critiques welcome), and I don’t think I’d find any of them all that compelling in the climate change case without strong evidence. But these are a few ways I could imagine circumventing neglectedness concerns (other than the obvious “the scale is really really big tho”, which doesn’t seem to have done the job in the climate change case).