Though Iām not entirely sure the comparison is fair. The kind of global poverty interventions that EAs favour (for better or for worse) tend to be near-term, low-risk, with a quick payoff. Climate change interventions are much less certain, higher-variance, and with a long payoff.
Henry Stanley šø
Karma: 1,777
A huge amount is already spent on global health and development, and yet the EA community is clearly happy to try and find particularly effective global health and development interventions. There are definitely areas within the hugely broad field of climate change action which are genuinely neglected.
This is true. To steelman your point (and do some shameless self-promotion) - at Letās Fund we think funding advocacy for clean energy R&D funding is one such intervention, so they do exist.
Thoughtful post!
I donāt agree with your analysis in (3) - neglectedness to me is asking not āis enough being doneā but āis this the thing that can generate the most benefit on the marginā.
For climate change it seems most likely not; hundreds of billions of dollars (and likely millions of work-years) are already spent every year on climate change mitigation (research, advocacy, or energy subsidies). The whole EA movement might move, what, a few hundred million dollars per year? Given the relatively scarce resources we have, both in time and money, it seems like there are places where we could do more good (the whole of the AI safety field has only a couple hundred people IIRC).
Gotcha. I actually meant to reply to Hauke (who thought the poster was talking about diversity of any kind, rather than racial diversity).
Agreedāthough many of the more successful diversity efforts are really just efforts to make companies nicer and more collaborative places to work (e.g. cross-functional teams, mentoring). My personal preference is to focus on making companies welcoming to all rather than specifically targeting racial minorities.
Iām also a little sceptical of the huge gains the HBR article suggestsādo diversity task forces really increase the number of Asian men in management by a third? It suggests looking at Google as an example of āa company thatās made big bets on [diversity] accountabilityā¦ We should know in a few years if that moves the needle for themāāit didnāt.
How do you think cohorts like the self-identified conservatives in western democracies or the US intelligence community would view ideas coming from that hypothetical think tank?
I suggest this is a bad example; I imagine theyād be sceptical but more because of the involvement of a Chinese state actor (see e.g. concerns over Chinese government influence over Huawei) than because of their race.
Promote formal diversity and inclusion programs
Iām sceptical; diversity programs often donāt work (Google spent $300m+ on diversity programs and didnāt move the needle) and in many cases reduce diversity.
Larksā view that they ādo not place any value on diversity.ā
I assume Larks means āracial diversityā in the context of this thread (and based on their comment, which talks about increasing diverse viewpoints through other means).
Iāve not attempted to consolidate other wikisāI think the LessWrong and Cause Prioritisation wikis are best kept separate. Concepts also hasnāt been touched in a long time as far as I can see. My hope is that simply by not going offline or being unavailable this wiki will be the default Schelling point!
I also think the fact that this is run on MediaWiki (the same platform as Wikipedia) makes it more familiar/āeasier to get started, but I could be wrong.
Your point about reputation is very rightāneed to think more about ways I can surface peopleās contributions.
Bored at home? ConĀtribute to the EA Wiki!
InterestingāI would definitely not pick the 50 months as a pig on a factory farm.
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Your claim that 1 year of human life is equivalent to 1,000 years of factory farming for chickens (or 100,000 years for fish) seems extraordinary. You donāt provide a justification for this in the piece, despite the whole argument hinging on this numberādo you have one?
(I also downvoted the postāI think itās lazily argued and doesnāt add much to the debate. As abrahamrowe says, you could assign an arbitrary weight to anything, like a year of life for a person in the developing world being āworthā 1/ā100th of a year of life for a Westerner, and call it done.)
I included the āI think thereās a very large chance they donāt matter at all, and that thereās just no one inside to sufferā out of transparency. The post doesnāt depend on it at all
I donāt see how that can be true. Surely the weightings you give would be radically different if you thought there was āsomeone inside to sufferā?
Hello! I started eawiki.org just a few weeks ago to try to reinvigorate the conceptāwill do a proper launch sometime soon.
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Working link for the Economist article: https://āāwww.economist.com/āāinternational/āā2018/āā06/āā02/āācan-effective-altruism-maximise-the-bang-for-each-charitable-buck
This is fantasticāgreat to see someone do this, and the branding you came up with is super nice (especially around ādo orders of magnitude more goodā). In my experience people tend to keep quiet about EA while at work; good to see that trend being bucked as this seems like an obviously underutilised way to get folks interested the movement.
This is wonderful. Thanks for writing it!
I could be wrong but arenāt leveraged ETFs intended to be held only for short periods of time (because the ETF is reindexed daily)?