What’s the upshot of this? Do you see this as informing relative prioritization between the two causes?
jackva
Karma: 4,039
This is a great post!
I wish there was more discussion like this and more appreciation for how challenging the current moment is, I think this would bring EA closer—in a good way—to where a lot of people concerned about the world are.
Yeah, I broadly agree with that.
I am worried that the public at large, not you, does massively under appreciate nuclear risk in the short term, this at least seems to be true in philanthropy (climate 100x larger than nuclear risk reduction).
Climate action is the most important thing, because it allows us to avoid the others.
(Working on climate)
Nuclear war seems by far the most consequential threat of those you mention here and the contribution of climate to nuclear war risk would need to be quite high to prioritize this over nuclear risk reduction (or climate and SAI together would need to be similarly important as nuclear war).
Do you think that climate change contributes more than, say, 10-20% to nuclear risk?
This aspect of EA is massively alienating to me in this moment and I would be curious how common this experience is.
Really great resource!
Lewis’s vivid descriptions of how neglected this space is and how that led to a lot of picking of low-hanging fruit of really high impact things to do seemed like a super useful general EA messaging resource to me.
Thanks for writing this! Have you considered sharing this with non-EA audiences?
Thanks for this, would be happy to have a call about it!
One question: how did you source materials for this? E.g. I notice that this does not include probably the most prominent paper skeptical of tipping point risks, so I am a bit worried that this is selecting on the studies that show most concern, rather than a balanced assessment of risk.
In that sense, the tipping point literature to me appears like the nuclear winter literature—huge uncertainties, huge disagreements, and a big resultant risk from over- or understating the risk when wanting to make a case for either high or low risk.
There’s obvious blaming to be done for some Democrats exaggerating the science of climate change rhetorically, but the intro here still strikes me as quite uncharitable.
In common discourse “existential” is often used in a very loose fashion and hyperbole is par for the course in political rhetoric.
I don’t think you are discounting here for the cap not being effectively binding (in the RGGI example) and also, last time I looked into this in depth (I used to work on RGGI at ICAP, which you cite), it was not true that additionality would always be 1.
It could easily happen that based on this video several millions are raised, just based on increasing salience and the framing being largely positive and this resonating with a couple of donors with significant capital.
Vote power should scale with karma
I was mostly objecting to your statement of “seeing no sign of authoritarian takeover”, I do agree and mentioned in my comment that Siebe’s statement was possibly too definite.
But I don’t think it is hyperbolic to say that there are many signs of Trump’s authoritarianism and signs consistent with an attempted authoritarian takeover and that this is qualitatively different than what we have seen from any other President in recent history, one has to go back to at least Nixon to get things in the same ballpark (and Nixon was arguably a lot more constrained by his own party than Trump is right now).
The examples you are citing “Presidents doing things that should be done through Congress” are not examples of authoritarian behavior and pretending that what Trump is doing is part of the regular testing of executive authority is also quite misleading.
Which other recent Administration was headed by someone denying a legitimate election result? Which other recent Administration had a VP flirting with the idea of not honoring Supreme Court rulings? Which other recent Administration was systematically invested in fighting against civil society institutions and law firms? Which other Administration has had so many people warning about authoritarian tendencies, both from their own party and from key senior staff from their own first administration?
The forum likes to catastrophize Trump but I need to point out a few things for the sake of accuracy since this is very misleading and highly upvoted.
The current administration has done many things that I find horrible, but I don’t see any evidence of an authoritarian takeover. Being hyperbolic isn’t helpful.
I think this statement is highly misleading. First, I think compared to most other fora and groups, this Forum is decidedly not catastrophizing Trump.
Second, if you don’t see “any evidence of an authoritarian takeover” then you are clearly not paying very much attention.
I think there is a fair debate to be had about how seriously to take various signs of authoritarianism on the part of the Administration, but “seeing no evidence of it” is not really consistent with the signals one does readily find when paying attention, such as:
- an attack on the independence of the judiciary and law firms, complaining about the fact that courts exercise their legitimate powers
- flirting with the idea of being in defiance of court orders
- talking about a third term
- praising Putin, Orban, and other authoritarians
- undermining due process
Interesting framing, but essentially the banks are just saying what has been clear for many years now—the thing that has changed is that the political context now makes it easy and advantageous to say it while this was different before.
This seems right.
What happens right now is Silicon Valley becoming extremely polarizing, with those voices in the Democratic coalition having the most reach campaigning strongly on an anti-Musk platform.
report link is wrong
This is a brave thing to publish in the current political climate and I am grateful you did!
I think we are misunderstanding each other a bit.
I am in no way trying to imply that you shouldn’t be mad about environmentalism’s failings—in fact, I am mad about them on a daily basis. I think if being mad about environmentalism’s failing is the main point than what Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are currently doing with Abundance is a good example of communicating many of your criticisms in a way optimized to land with those that need to hear it.
My point was merely that by framing the example in such extreme terms it will lose a lot of people despite being only very tangentially related to the main points you are trying to make. Maybe that’s okay, but it didn’t seem like your goal overall to make a point about environmentalism, so losing people on an example that is stated in such an extreme fashion did not seem worth it to me.
Thanks for the thorough reply!