Would it be correct to say that university groups that were quite strongly and repeatedly encouraged to bulk-buy the book by central EA orgs (which MacAskill either works for, is a director of, or serves on the board of)?
I must say that I am also not convinced by the argument that the only or best way of preventing supply-chain issues is having a book bulk-ordered by affiliated organisations, but this is a weaker-held perspective.
A.C.Skraeling
(Edit: it seems my fears were right, lol)
Thanks for posting this Gideon, I shared similar issues to you but didn’t make a reply because I feared the it would would be dismissed or ignored. It is gratifying to see that John has replied, but epistemically concerning that your entirely reasonable criticisms are being so heavily downvoted: at present you average 1 point from 13 votes.
These are critiques you would expect anyone with a background in climate risk to make and I don’t see any good reason for them to have been dismissed by so many fellow EAs. Could any of the downvoters explain their decision?
I think this strongly contributes to groupthink.
People will subconsciously adapt their views to match the majority to some extent, and assume that a post or comment has the rating it does for a reason. This is exacerbated by the [issues around hierarchy and hero-worship EA sometimes has.](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DxfpGi9hwvwLCf5iQ/objections-to-value-alignment-between-effective-altruists)
In all cases perhaps, but it is strange to see objections that would be super obvious top-of-the-head stuff in climate circles dismissed out of hand here.
(Also can someone who knows more about the Forum than me explain how this reply has 51 points from 13 votes? Even if strong-upvotes count as double this is extremely inflated. Are the totals extremified or something? Is it multiplicative?)
(I have a few thoughts on this but it’s being marked as spam for some reason, possibly length. I’m going to post this as a short response and then edit in the content. Please let me know if you can see it.)
Hi John, thanks for the post!
I’ll leave an in-depth response to Gideon, but I have a few points that I think would be helpful to share. In short, your response worries me. I have tried to keep the prose below inoffensive in tone, but there is a trade-off between offensive directness and condescending obfuscation. I hope I have traced the line accurately.
You may not think significant discussion of cascading risks would change the fundamental conclusions of your report, but many researchers, often those with considerably more experience and expertise in climate risk (e.g. the IPCC), do: strongly so. Surely in a book-length report there is room for a few pages?
If you have refuted arguments, is it not academic best practice to cite the papers you respond to? In any case, if you know of and have read the papers, are we to understand that you believe many (if not most) peer-reviewed papers on Global Catastrophic and Existential climate risk are not worth mentioning anywhere in 437 pages of discussion?
This response causes me the most concern. That is simply not what complex systems theory is. Either you are aware that this characterisation is highly inaccurate and unfair, or you are not. If the former, I am disappointed by your (apparent) dismissiveness and willingness to mischaracterise. If the latter, I wonder how you could have done anything close to sufficient research into one of the foundational components of many studies of climate risks.
It is true that there are many conceptual frameworks for climate risk, and in a study of any topic you are generally expected to state, explain, and justify your conceptual framework. This is especially true when the framework you use (i.e. that of the Techno-Utopian Approach) has been strongly critiqued, for instance in Democratising Risk (Cremer and Kemp, 2021), another highly consequential paper you do not appear to have engaged with or cited. The dichotomy of ‘direct’ and indirect’ risks may be exhaustive, but this is not the only criterion for an adequate theoretical framework. To be somewhat, but logically coherently glib, we could make the same argument for categorising phenomena according to whether their names contained an odd or even number of letters.
I also disagree with this point, especially the final sentence, but there is little to engage with: simply assertions. Let us agree to disagree.
Beard et al. and Kemp et al. are each less than 5% of the length of your piece. Of course they cover less ground. There is a difference between a 10- or 20-page paper not mentioning every single caveat in every single work they cite, and one (1) failing to substantively engage with or even cite almost all GCR-specific climate research, (2) not explicitly stating nor justifying one’s methodology in the face of strong critique, and (3) disregarding (in complex systems studies) a massive component of studies of climate risk, wider GCR (e.g. Fisher and Sandberg 2022), and the studies of Earth-system dynamics in general without explanation or justification.
Do you expect to subject this work to peer-review, and if not, why?
What would you call it?
I suppose all I have to say is that I often see very reasonable critiques downvoted through the floor without explanation worryingly often.
I haven’t theorised very much about the cause, but the phenomenon correlates suspiciously well with substantive or strong criticism of prominent figures within EA.If this perception is accurate, it does not seem like good epistemic practice.
(This one has 14 points from 3 votes? Do three strong-upvotes produce 14 overall karma? Why?)
(Case in point for my comment about downvoting, community hierarchy, and groupthink, below)
I meant ‘I’ll leave the in-depth response to Gideon’. What you say speaks for itself: if Halstead presented this at a climate science org these would be some of the first questions asked and I’m puzzled (+ a bit weirded out, to be frank) as to why they’re getting such a hostile response.
I can see where you’re coming from here but I don’t think the specifics really apply in this case.
There are many questions to raise about this google doc, and it seems fair to the reader to ask them all in one place rather than drip-feeding throughout a tree of replies and reply-replies. If responding to them all would take up too much of Halstead’s time, he can say so, no?
There’s not usually very much to elaborate when it comes to questions of omission: x is an important aspect of climate risk, Halstead has not mentioned x.
I suppose you could add the implicit points (studies of topics should include or at least mention the important aspects of those topics, space wasn’t a constraint, Halstead knows what the terms mean, etc.) but that’s unnecessary in 99% of conversations and not a standard we expect anywhere else.
To be fair a ‘comprehensive’ response would include even more questions, so I’m not confident there’s any way to win here.
Yes I am also very worried about the orthodoxy point; EA is often a closed citation loop, where a small number of people and organisations cross-cite one another and ignore outside (‘non-value aligned’) work. Most reading lists are absolutely dominated by ~5 names, sometimes a few more.
Halstead, as a semi-big name at a prominent organisation (and, for better or worse, the movement’s de facto authority on climate change) is extremely likely to have his work accepted into the canon without significant challenge from climate experts (with training in climate science and policy, rather than philosophy...).
Thus, a fresh crop of undergraduates on will be told that climate is no big deal compared to sexier and more EA-friendly stuff like AI without ever being aware of all the climate-related GCR work Halstead doesn’t engage with (or even mention). I suspect, perhaps uncharitably, that this is because most of it disagrees with him. This in turn is partially because it has to be peer-reviewed by people selected on the basis of their expertise in climate risk, rather than EA value-alignment.
This lack of internal critique is probably because EA talks down climate so much (not least due to the influence of Halstead) that there simply aren’t very many climate-focused people around, and those that are around know the kind of response they get when they speak out of turn (see above haha).
I love so much of EA but for a community so focused on epistemics we really are bad at accepting criticism, especially when it’s directed at the big boys.
I was worried about the harshness aspect but to be frank there are only so many ways to say that someone in a position of power and influence has acted with negligence.
Perhaps these could also be useful things to do (thought given the afore-mentioned herd-downvoting I doubt that (a) would receive sufficient good-faith engagement to be worth writing.
(b) could be useful for facilitating small-scale discussion, but I haven’t seen any indication that there are people who want to or are trying to do that, e.g. with a comment saying ‘On point #4...’
In any case, I have seen far longer comments than mine and comments with more questions and less elaboration than Gideon’s get dozens of upvotes before.
These criticisms (and I’m discussing both your response and Karthik’s here, as well as a more general pattern) appear to only be brought up when the EA big boys are being criticised: I doubt if Gideon had asked five complimentary questions he would have received anything close to such a negative reaction.
This does remind me of a lot of the response to Democratising Risk: Carla and Luke were told that the paper was at once too broad and too narrow, too harsh and yet not direct enough: anything to dismiss critique while being able to rationalise it as a mere technical application of discursive norms.
This is good, though offering comments on various sections of a google doc is of course a very different exercise to full and blind peer-review.
Did any of the reviewers notice that you had not mentioned (almost?) any climate-related GCR papers? If so, what was your response to them?
As per your comments about complex systems above, please do not dismissively mischaracterise the views of your critics. This is the kind of thing an average forum user would get hammered for, please do not try to get away with it just because you know you can.
If you discuss their arguments, why didn’t you cite them? If the X-risk climate corpus takes an ‘extreme’ stance by and large, is that not the kind of thing you would expect to see discussed in a >400 page report on climate change X-risk?
Even to the extent that this report is within the IPCC mainstream, notwithstanding, for instance:
The complete absence of systems perspectives (even just to justify your rejection, something I, to be frank, would expect in an undergraduate dissertation)
Lack of consideration of vulnerability, exposure, or cascading disasters
Silent disregard for Reisinger et al.’s discussion of the concept of risk
...it is well-known that the IPCC must moderate its conclusions and focus on better-case scenarios for political reasons, i.e. so as to not be written off as alarmist. You know this, because it is mentioned in Climate Endgame and discussed at length by Jehn et al.
This is another rather important issue in climate risk scholarship you would expect to see mentioned in a work this long.
You may think this, but (some) people on the Forum clearly do not.
I presume that you are assuming I am Zoe Cremer here. I am not Zoe (Carla? Which is her actual first name?) and I have never met her, but feel free to assume only one person has issues with EA norms if you want. That post has 200 upvotes: some people must have agreed with her, even if you didn’t.
Based on Cremer’s recent statements in and around the MacAskill profile in the New Yorker she seems to be completely worn out by EA and has largely lost interest: presumably not someone who would dedicate very much time to getting into EA Forum comment wars?
This isn’t just an issue with the karma system (though artificially magnifying the ratings of somewhat popular comments so that 7 votes can produce a rating of over 25 is definitely an odd choice) it’s a cultural issue. Why did you ignore these aspects and focus the most technical issue?
What are you even talking about?
I am not Cremer and it seems like an odd act of ego-defence to assume that there is only one person that could disagree with you.
I have no idea what you mean about Phil Torres: he clearly needs to take a chill pill but ‘harassment’ seems strong. Perhaps I’ve missed something. ‘Frustrated his career aims’?
In any case, Torres wasn’t a co-author of Democratising Risk, though I agree that he would probably agree with a lot of it.
Even if all of your implicit points were true, why on Earth would co-authorship with someone who had defamed you be grounds to offer reams of contradictory critiques to critical works while making none of the same critiques to comparable [EA Forum comments, but whatever] written pieces that do not substantially disagree with the canon.
For those who haven’t read the full comments section, Halstead has decided that I am Carla Zoe Cremer.
Democratising Risk is a preprint, no?
Democratising Risk is not primarily about climate change, but it is about X-risk methodology. You have written a piece about X-risk. Scholarly works generally require a methodology section, and scholars are expected to justify their methodology, especially when it is a controversial one. This is advice I would give to any undergraduate I supervised.
It is true that Kemp et al. 2022 has not been published for long, so you can be excused for not discussing it at length. It seems odd to have not mentioned it at all though: two weeks is not a huge amount of time, but enough to at least mention by far the most prominent work of climate GCR work to date.
If you discuss Beard’s and Richards’ points, why don’t you cite them? In any case, justification for the lack of substantive engagement seems like something you need to offer, rather than me.
In any case, the lack of mention of most climate-specific GCR work is not the only thing you have been criticised for: please scroll up to see Gideon’s original comment if you like.
Jehn et al., do not say that climate science literature ignores warming of more than 3C, they say that it is heavily under-represented.
Again, please stop lazily mischaracterising the views of your critics.
I don’t know if this repeated strawman-ing is accidental or not: if accidental, please improve your epistemics, if not, please try to engage in good faith.
This is an interesting point of view, that you should have mentioned and justified, as any student would be expected to in an essay, rather than simply pretending that criticisms do not exist
That is a rather odd assumption to make given that two of the issues under discussion were X-risk methodology and EA discourse norms in response to criticism.
Also I think it’s worth noting that you have once again ignored most of the criticism presented and moved to the safer rhetorical ground of vague insinuations about people you don’t like.
‘Never Play Defense’, anyone?
META: This + additional comments below from Halstead are strongly suggestive of bad-faith engagement: lazy dismissal without substantive engagement, repeated strawman-ing, Never Play Defense-ing, and accusing his critics of secretly being sockpuppet accounts of known heretics so their views can be ignored.
On the basis of Brandolini’s Law I am going to try to keep my replies as short as I can. If they seem insubstantial, it is likely because I have already responded to the point under discussion elsewhere, or because they are responding to attempts to move the conversation away from the original points of criticism.
I have specific criticisms to make, and I would like to see them addressed rather than ignored, dismissed, or answered only on the condition that I make a whole new set of criticisms for Halstead to also not engage with.
I suggest the reader read Halstead’s response before going back to Gideon’s and my comments. It was useful for me.
Climatic tipping points, cascading risks, and systemic risk are different things and you (hopefully) know it.
If you have refuted arguments made by relevant papers, why didn’t you cite them?
I’m not sure I understand your argument here: you are not under any obligation to discuss opposing perspectives on climate risk because a different paper on climate risk did not explicitly refute an argument that you would go on to make in the future?
In any case, this is not at all what Gideon or I said Your lazy and factually inaccurate dismissal of complex systems theory remains lazy and factually inaccurate. I am not sure where this point about Richards et al. comes into it.
You would have evaluated biorisk if the only possible use of a methodology was making sure you had a comprehensive categorisation system, which (as I hope you know) is not at all true.
I don’t really see how I have not made any arguments here. I suppose I could ask someone if it’s possible to write ‘Please cite your sources.’ in first-order logic.
I would like to hear your justification for how Beard et al, Richards et al, and Kemp et al all lean heavily on the idea of planetary boundaries, and how, if this was true, it would be relevant.
However, I doubt this would go anywhere. I suspect this is simply yet another way of ignoring people who disagree with you without thinking too hard, and relying on the combination of your name-recognition and the average EA’s ignorance of climate change to buy you the ‘Seems like he knows what he’s talking about!’-ness you want.
Yes and no in my opinion haha but I see your point
Wow! Do we have any data on how much of this is a consequence of EA organisations mass-ordering the book to for instance hand out for free?
Especially, how much is a consequence of the bulk-buying by organisations that MacAskill is affiliated with, or the orgs funded by them (I’m thinking student groups)?