It is worth noting that a lot of core EAs have pivoted from global poverty to X-risk, a major shift in priorities, without ever changing their position on climate change (something that a priori seems important from both perspectives). This isn’t necessarily wrong, but does seem a bit suspicious.
Given the fact that climate change is somewhat GCR/X-risky, it wouldn’t surprise me if it were more valuable on the margin than anti-malaria work. But both the X-risk people and the global poverty people seem sceptical about climate change work; that intersection is somewhat surprising, but I think is a major part of my own scepticism.
Like, if you have two groups of people, and one group says “we should definitely prioritise A and B, but not C or D, and probably not E either”, and the other group says “we should definitely prioritise C and D, but not A or B, and probably not E either”, it doesn’t seem like it’s looking good for E.
But I might be reading that all wrong, and everyone things that climate change is, like, the fourth best cause, and as a result it should get more points even though nobody thinks it’s top? This sounds like one of those moral uncertainty questions.
While I never considered poverty reduction a top cause, I do consider climate change work to be quite a bit more important than poverty reduction in terms of direct impact, because of GCR-ish concerns (though overall still very unimportant compared to more direct GCR-ish concerns). My guess is that this is also true of most people I work with who are also primarily concerned about GCR-type things, though the topic hasn’t come up very often, so I am not very confident about this.
I do actually think there is value on poverty-reduction like work, but that comes primarily from an epistemic perspective where poverty-reduction requires making many fewer long-chained inferences about the world, in a way that seems more robustly good to me than all the GCR perspectives, and also seems like it would allow better learning about how the world works than working on climate change. So broadly I think I am more excited about working with people who work on global poverty than people who work on climate change (since I think the epistemic effects dominate the actual impact calculation here).
This is perhaps a bit off-topic, but I have a question about this sentence:
I do actually think there is value on poverty-reduction like work
Would it be correct to say that poverty-reduction work isn’t less valuable in absolute terms in a longtermist worldview than it is in a near-termist worldview?
One reason that poverty-reduction is great is because returns to income seem roughly logarithmic. This applies to both worldviews. The difference in a longtermist worldview is that causes like x-risk reduction gain a lot in value. This makes poverty reduction seem less valuable relative to the best things we can do. But, since there’s no reason to think individual utility functions are different in long- and near-termist worldviews, in absolute terms the utility gain from transferring resources from high-income to low-income people is the same.
It is worth noting that a lot of core EAs have pivoted from global poverty to X-risk, a major shift in priorities, without ever changing their position on climate change (something that a priori seems important from both perspectives). This isn’t necessarily wrong, but does seem a bit suspicious.
Given the fact that climate change is somewhat GCR/X-risky, it wouldn’t surprise me if it were more valuable on the margin than anti-malaria work. But both the X-risk people and the global poverty people seem sceptical about climate change work; that intersection is somewhat surprising, but I think is a major part of my own scepticism.
Like, if you have two groups of people, and one group says “we should definitely prioritise A and B, but not C or D, and probably not E either”, and the other group says “we should definitely prioritise C and D, but not A or B, and probably not E either”, it doesn’t seem like it’s looking good for E.
But I might be reading that all wrong, and everyone things that climate change is, like, the fourth best cause, and as a result it should get more points even though nobody thinks it’s top? This sounds like one of those moral uncertainty questions.
While I never considered poverty reduction a top cause, I do consider climate change work to be quite a bit more important than poverty reduction in terms of direct impact, because of GCR-ish concerns (though overall still very unimportant compared to more direct GCR-ish concerns). My guess is that this is also true of most people I work with who are also primarily concerned about GCR-type things, though the topic hasn’t come up very often, so I am not very confident about this.
I do actually think there is value on poverty-reduction like work, but that comes primarily from an epistemic perspective where poverty-reduction requires making many fewer long-chained inferences about the world, in a way that seems more robustly good to me than all the GCR perspectives, and also seems like it would allow better learning about how the world works than working on climate change. So broadly I think I am more excited about working with people who work on global poverty than people who work on climate change (since I think the epistemic effects dominate the actual impact calculation here).
This is perhaps a bit off-topic, but I have a question about this sentence:
Would it be correct to say that poverty-reduction work isn’t less valuable in absolute terms in a longtermist worldview than it is in a near-termist worldview?
One reason that poverty-reduction is great is because returns to income seem roughly logarithmic. This applies to both worldviews. The difference in a longtermist worldview is that causes like x-risk reduction gain a lot in value. This makes poverty reduction seem less valuable relative to the best things we can do. But, since there’s no reason to think individual utility functions are different in long- and near-termist worldviews, in absolute terms the utility gain from transferring resources from high-income to low-income people is the same.