Hi Alex, let me clarify my thoughts on the “unsure of sign” argument. Let’s say for a given charity, you are considering the sign of impact on some outcome given an increase in donations. Given inherent uncertainly, you might think of a having a probability distribution reflecting your belief on the effect of a donation on this outcome. In almost any case, you would have to believe that there is some non-zero portion of the probability mass of this distribution below zero (because we’ve seen good intentions backfire so many times.) This is my point: the sign of impact is always unknown, technically.
To make recommendation, one must use gathered evidence and judgment to determine the distribution of impacts, and whether this estimated distribution merits a recommendation. Based on our judgement, the distribution of potential impacts of Sunrise (including the mass of probability that is below zero) merits it a recommendation. You and others certainly can disagree with the estimated distribution of impacts or our judgement or whether it merits recommendation. This stuff isn’t easy. But the fact that there is some probability mass on negative impact is not disqualifying, nor should it be.
As for your first comment, it’s important to note that the local chapters of Sunrise can take policy positions at odds with the centralized movement. I agree that sometimes these are unsavory. But when you make a donation, you make it to the centralized org. Critics trying to take down Sunrise frequently pull out the most radical quote they can find from one of the local chapters and use it to disqualify the whole organization, but I don’t really think that’s valid.
Hello everyone. Well, this forum has blown up, and we (GG) have taken some punches. I want to list a few take-aways on my end:
One thing we’re hearing loud and clear is that there is a lot of worry among this group that having recommendations in categories that are not the most cost-effective will do more harm than good. I think this is worth considering, though I don’t totally agree. What I do agree with is that our site could be designed to lead people to the most cost-effective recommendations, and make deviations from this ideal more obvious. Based on this feedback, we’ve made some changes already to the site, changing ordering and adding text to be clear that we believe policy is the most effective donation category. We would like to make deeper changes in the future.
One argument in this thread that particularly resonated with me is that there would really be a lot of value for conducting some more rigorous cost-benefit analysis for the offset recommendations. While we still believe at this moment that our offset recommendations are solid, I think there is value in performing more explicit cost-effectiveness analysis and using this to re-evaluate our choices. This is something we intend to do in the near term.
There’s clearly a lot of disagreement over activism and our recommendation of the Sunrise Movement Education Fund (TSM) in particular. I’m still on the side of defending this recommendation, but hear and respect the arguments put forth and believe they deserve consideration. At the very least, we need to re-work our materials from this recommendation to lay out our assumptions and arguments better. I’ll write briefly more about activism and TSM a bit below.
Do you want to help? We’re currently at a place of limited funding, so we are not actively conducting research at the moment. That makes it hard to do all the improvements we’d like (and have promised above). Our plan was to spend the next couple of months fundraising before turning back to research, but this thread is making us reconsider that a bit. We’d be interested in taking on a volunteer or short term contract from the EA community to help put some of the legwork in shoring up our existing research (and looking at a couple of new things.) Interested? Have some experience in climate issues and thinking through cost-effectiveness in an EA framework? Reach out at givinggreen@idinsight.org
One thing that I’d like to make clear: our mission at Giving Green is to create the most social impact we can through our recommendations. This, notably, does not necessarily mean that we just find the most cost-effective charity and recommend it solely. I truly believe that by offering ‘best in class’ recommendations in different categories, we can reach a wider audience and increase the pie of money that we can influence. That’s why we do offsets. That is (partially) why we felt it important to search for donation options outside of the narrow mechanism of action advocated by Founder’s Pledge (“(i) advocates (ii) focused on accelerating (iii) neglected yet critical decarbonisation and carbon removal technologies” in the US). While we find FP’s arguments clear and compelling, I don’t share the confidence that this is the mechanism of action with the highest expected value of donations (more later on this). This lack of confidence plus the ability to widen the pool of donors we influence is why we think there is a lot of value in exploring other donation categories. I do understand the concern about dilution from the most cost-effective places, but believe this can be mitigated through clear (better than now) design and information on the website.
Now, just a little bit more on the meat of the disagreement, which is the TSM recommendation. If I understand Johannes’ argument, he agrees with the importance of activism for making policy, both for putting electoral pressure on legislators as well as agenda-setting for current legislators. But, if I were to summarize, there are two main arguments against activism: timing, neglectedness, and one more argument against TSM in particular: strategy.
First timing: Johannes declares “Biden has declared climate as one of his top four priorities,” as an argument that activist energy is no longer important in the current situation. First, I think it’s pretty clear the TSM can take huge credit for this being the case. They flexed their political muscles in the last election, won a seat at the Bernie-Biden task force, heavily influenced Biden’s climate strategy, and succeeded in putting it at the top of the agenda. While I understand the argument that this victory is now in place, I don’t think we should take this climate priority as a given and assume that it will stay in place without further activist pressure. Yes Biden has taken some executive actions on climate already, but there’s no concerted push (as far as I can tell yet) for concerted legislation. At one point Johannes asked what success looks like for TSM. My answer: It’s ensuring climate policy is a priority (in executive and regulatory action, as well as legislation), and indeed shifting the Overton window of climate policy. (Agree with Johannes that the “Green New Deal” is not a realistic piece of legislation.) And for that you need continued pressure.
Second, Neglectedness: Ok, we hear you that some of those numbers in our report on activism spending are out of date. Sorry. The late 2020 numbers from the ClimateWorks Foundation helps, but it appears that the quoted category of “Public engagement” spans a lot more than policy-focused activism, so I’m not sure this is so helpful either. We should probably do some work to get some better numbers, but overall I’m not so convinced that the amount of money spent tells us all that much about the marginal benefit of the extra dollar. For TSM in particular, their budget really ballooned in 2020 (financial reports aren’t out but we heard almost $10 million), so that’s a reason to give some pause. That being said, I don’t see a compelling case for diminishing returns at this level of funding, especially since activism relies on sheer numbers to be effective. But yes, I hear this argument and I think it’s something we should consider more closely.
Finally, strategy: A lot of the previous arguments have revolved around TSM potentially having a negative effect due to its polarization of the climate policy. I really think strategy (ie polarization vs compromise) is a deeply difficult issue that is the subject of many debates within US politics. It’s important to realize that this is a feature, not a bug. TSM has chosen to take a “radical” position and linked with other progressive priorities as a way of building a strong and cohesive political movement. It’s a strategy that has historical precedent, and has borne dividends at numerous other times in US History (civil rights movement, tea party). Does that mean it will work this time? Unclear. Is it risky? Sure. But to argue that you need a bipartisan strategy to influence policy in DC I believe ignores political realities. I agree that sometimes the solutions put forth by TSM (no CCS, etc.) are not ideal, but again this is part of the strategy to build a fired-up coalition. Like Johannes said, Sunrise are not going to be the ones at the table hammering out policy anyway. It’s just their job to get people to the table, and put power in the hands of the climate negotiators.
Our recommendation of TSM also stems on our philosophy of supporting multiple theories of change. There are lots of different ways that political change happens, and I think that the best way to enact the desired change is to accept this, be humble about deciding ex-ante which theory is right, and support multiple avenues.
All of this doesn’t really address Johannes’ main concern, which is that one needs to make the case not just for TSM to be “Good”, but to really be better than CATF at the margin. Based on our approach of providing recommendations in multiple categories and subscribing to multiple theories of change, I don’t think we need to show perfectly that TSM is better or equal to CATF. But we should be able to provide a compelling argument that impact is in the same ballpark. Johannes thinks it is not. I think it is. But also I think we need to do a better job of crafting this argument in our documents. That’s something we are going to work on.
Finally, one more thing. I think that there is a little bit of risk as an EA community of over-committing to a single method of action (“(i) advocates (ii) focused on accelerating (iii) neglected yet critical decarbonisation and carbon removal technologies” in the US) and very small set of organizations dedicated to this method. Like I said, I find FP’s arguments compelling and think their central recommendation of CATF is very solid. But I would be careful about overconfidence here. In our research, we interviewed 50+ experts from various sectors of the climate space. At some point in the conversation we always asked “If you could allocate money in the most cost-effective matter to fight climate change, what would you do?” we got a lot of different answers, but notably no one said CATF unprompted. We usually followed up and asked about CATF directly. When prompted, some people said “Oh yeah, they are great.” But others didn’t agree, and pointed out various issues with their approach or influence. I know this is not a scientific approach and don’t want to put too much weight on it, but I do just think it’s important for EAs as a community to approach this space with humility.