jackva

Karma: 4,004

jackva Jul 23, 2024, 6:52 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Toby_Ord’s comment on: The Precipice Revisited
Sorry for the delay!
Here is a good summary of whether or not the recent warming should make us worried more: https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-why-the-recent-acceleration-in-global-warming-is-what-scientists-expect/
It is nuanced, but I think the TLDR is that recent observations are within the expected range (the trend observed since 2009 is within the range expected by climate models, though the observations are noisy and uncertain, as are the models).

jackva Jul 23, 2024, 6:46 PM
6 points
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in reply to: ClimateDoc’s comment on: The Precipice Revisited
It is true that this is not true for the long-form summary of the science.
What I mean is that this graphic is out of the “Summary for Policymakers”, which is approved by policymakers and a fairly political document.

Less formalistically, all of the infographics in the Summary for Policymakers are carefully chosen and one goal of the Summary for Policymakers is clearly to give ammunition for action (e.g. the infographic right above the cited one displays impacts in scenarios without any additional adaptation by end of century, which seems like a very implausible assumption as a default and one that makes a lot more sense when the goal is to display gravity of climate impacts rather than making a best guess of climate impacts).

jackva Jul 12, 2024, 2:50 PM
49 points
2 ∶ 0
on: The Precipice Revisited
Thanks for this!
I think one important caveat to the climate picture is that part of the third of the three factors—climate impacts at given levels of warming—has also changed and that this change runs in the other direction.

Below is the graphic on this from the recent IPCC Synthesis Report (p. 18), which shows on the right hand side how the expected occurrence of reasons for concern has moved downwards between AR 5 (2014) and AR6 (2022). In other words, there is an evidential change that moves higher impacts towards lower temperatures and could potentially compensate the effect of lower expected temperature (eyeballing this, for some of the global reasons for concern it moves down by a degree).

I think one should treat the IPCC graphic with some skepticism—it is a bit suspicious that all the impact estimates move to lower temperatures at the same time as higher temperatures become less likely and IPCC reports are famously politicized documents—but it is still a data point worth taking into account.

I haven’t done the math on this, but I would expect that the effect of a lowered distribution of warming will still dominate, but it is something that moderates the picture and I think is worth including when giving complete accounts to avoid coming across as cherry-picking only the positive updates.

jackva Jul 10, 2024, 7:23 PM
6 points
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on: A breakdown of OpenAI’s revenue
We looked into OpenAI’s revenue because financial information should be a strong indicator of the business decisions they make in the coming months, and hence an indicator of their research priorities

Is this really true? I am quite surprised by this given how much of the expected financial value of OpenAI (and valuation of AI companies more generally) is not in the next couple of months, but based on being at the frontier of a technology with enormous future potential.

jackva Jun 28, 2024, 8:58 AM
11 points
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in reply to: JamesÖz 🔸’s comment on: “Denmark will be first to impose CO2 tax on farms, government says”
Sure! Here is the unpacked version (trying real hard to sound like an LLM):

There are lots of complementarities (or also just similar effects applied to beef and chicken) that I think complicate a picture focused on short-term marginal consumption shifts:
- (1) I think investor confidence / durable public support is the single-most important predictor of most “easy” technological transformations (APs aren’t like fusion, there isn’t really a world where APs fail for lack of technical feasibility, APs are modular technologies that can be made reliably cheaper and better if invested in).
- (2) APs and climate regulation are not exactly having a great year and an ambitious carbon tax covering agriculture is a signal bucking this trend (if indeed passed), something that could give investors more confidence to continue investing in APs. Historically, Nordic carbon taxes have been a leading indicator and inspiration to ambitious climate jurisdiction so I also do not see this primarily as a Danish thing but as a broader signal where the ambitious climate policy coalition will move.
- (3) If one believes the basic AP theory of victory – APs get cheap and competitive and this makes norm changes and regulatory policy feasible in the long run (and there is a mutually reinforcing dynamic or near-competitive technology and changing political feasibility as we are seeing with other forms of clean tech) – then I find it pretty hard to imagine that we end up in a world where we say “the Danish carbon tax increased suffering on net” based on short-term marginal dynamics. I find it pretty implausible that people at scale will say “I will eat AP beef, but this does not affect my view of animal suffering at all and I will continue to eat animal chicken”. I am generally pretty skeptical based on such arguments based on current techno-economic dynamics since I think getting serious about investing into technologies usually unveils lots of new opportunities to make things cheaper and easier.
- (4) One should also not forget that there is a strong signal here for chicken as well, there is a clear signal that “yes, we will get more seriously about regulating animal agriculture”.
- (5) By close analogy, the most important short-term effect of a carbon tax on electricity is usually to make natural gas more competitive than coal. But I think it would be mistaken to conclude that ambitious carbon taxes are good for the natural gas industry in the long run.
I haven’t done the math on this. My original comment was mostly motivated by the prior discussion being what I found too focused on short-term marginal changes that I think are likely to miss the big picture here. So, I mostly wanted to provide an alternative take and considerations not reflected here before.

jackva Jun 27, 2024, 12:59 PM
4 points
2 ∶ 0
on: “Denmark will be first to impose CO2 tax on farms, government says”
I would expect the main effect of stronger regulation of agriculture to be the innovation signal for alternative proteins.

If passed, this would be a pretty strong carbon tax and a pretty clear signal that at least some countries will get serious about decarbonizing agriculture, so even if it leads to suffering-increasing short-term changes I would expect the long run effect for animals to be positive (essentially, it seems to me the complementarities for AP-innovation between chicken and beef seem larger than the short-term shifts one would expect—we do not get AP beef without ever getting AP chicken).

jackva Jun 26, 2024, 11:53 AM
4 points
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on: How much do solutions to social problems differ in their effectiveness? by Benjamin Todd [Linkpost]
This has already been posted and discussed on the forum: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/seFH9jcH3saXHJqin/data-on-how-much-solutions-differ-in-effectiveness

jackva May 29, 2024, 5:33 PM
17 points
5 ∶ 1
on: The US Presidential Election is Tractable, Very Important, and Urgent
There is still low-hanging fruit. Estimates for how effectively top RCT-tested interventions to generate net swing-state votes this election range from a few hundred to several thousand dollars per vote. Top non-RCT-able interventions are likely even better. Many potentially useful strategies have not been sufficiently explored.
This seems quite surprising given the sums and stakes involved.
Do you have sources for this?

jackva May 14, 2024, 11:36 AM
1 point
1 ∶ 0
on: Environmentalism in the United States Is Unusually Partisan
Thanks for this, fascinating stuff!

I am wondering from many of the data that you present and also anecdotally: Isn’t it more that “climate change” is so strongly partisan, not environmental issues more broadly? And because climate change has become the dominant political environmentalist issue, “climate” and “environmentalism” become somewhat synonymous despite the underlying politics of other environmental issues being somewhat different?

jackva May 6, 2024, 7:33 PM
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in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Founders Pledge’s Climate Change Fund might be more cost-effective than GiveWell’s top charities, but it is much less cost-effective than corporate campaigns for chicken welfare?
Thanks, this updates me, I had cached something more skeptical on chicken welfare campaigns.

Do you have a sense of what “advocacy multiplier” this implies? Is this >1000x of helping animals directly?

I have the suspicion that the relative results between causes are—to a significant degree—not driven by cause-differences but by comfort with risk and the kind of multipliers that are expected to be feasible.

FWIW, I also do believe that marginal donations to help farmed animals will do more good than marginal climate donations.

jackva May 6, 2024, 6:31 PM
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: MatthewDahlhausen’s comment on: Founders Pledge’s Climate Change Fund might be more cost-effective than GiveWell’s top charities, but it is much less cost-effective than corporate campaigns for chicken welfare?
While I think it is a mistake to motivate this estimate with a 2017 BOTEC (here we agree!), it is also mistaken to claim that such a range – spanning more than two OOMs and high and fairly low cost-effectiveness – is implausible as a quite uncertain best guess.
As discussed many times, CCF grantmaking does not rely on 2017 BOTECs and neither does my best guess on cost-effectiveness (Vasco operationalized it one specific way I am not going to defend here, I am just defending a view that expected cost-effectiveness is roughly in the 0.1 USD/t to to 10 USD/t range).
Why an estimate in this range seems plausible
This seems plausible for many reasons, none of which depending on the specific BOTEC:

I. Outside-view multiplier reasoning
- (1) It is clearly possible to reduce tons of CO2eq for USD 100/t through direct and high-certainty action.
- (2) If you only assumed a conventional advocacy multiplier – of the form that many EA orgs assume when modeling policy work (e.g. OP) and that is well-substantiated by empirical political science research and many studies on successes in philanthropy – you would assume a 10x multiplier.
- (3) You now “only” need another 10x multiplier to get to USD 1/t and there seem many plausible mechanisms to get there – e.g. focusing on actions with transformative potential such as innovation, avoiding carbon lock-in etc. or – more meta – driving in additional funding from other donors / foundations when supporting early-stage organizations.
- (4) Obviously, one also needs to discount for things like funding additionality, execution risk. Etc.
- (5) This will result in a very uncertain range, but it is well-approximated by what Vasco has chosen to model this.
Note that these are overall quite weak assumptions and, crucially, if you do not buy them you should probably also not buy the cost-effectiveness analyses on corporate campaigns for chicken welfare.

II. Observations of grants and inside-view modeling
- (1) While I generally put less stock in them than in comparative analysis, we also do more inside-view cost-effectiveness analyses that often have a range close to USD 0.1-USD 10t/CO2e.
- (2) While the CCF does not exist long enough to be confident in long-run emissions outcomes – we generally invest in theories of change that need time – there is a lot of reason to expect that some of those bets will pay off at the very high cost-effectiveness:
  - (a) Many of the charities supported – such as TerraPraxis, Future Cleantech Architects etc. – have crowded in multiples of the funding we allocated to them often as a direct result of our recommendation and/or organizational development we enabled with early grants.
  - (b) While hard to disentangle, they also play key roles in many policy changes – e.g. Carbon180 was a leading advocacy org on carbon removal in the IRA/IIJA window, two of our grantees are pushing a conversation on repowering with advanced heat sources (nuclear or geothermal) and one of our grantees (FCA) had several policy wins in the EU (not all they can talk about).
  - (c) More nascent work is focused electricity market liberalization to advance renewables in emerging economies (Energy for Growth), a stronger climate civil society on the right (DEPLOY/US), as well as geothermal innovation in Canada (Cascade).
  - (d) This is a diversified sets of bets that leverages different mechanisms, with the uniting theme of leveraging advocacy, the focus on actions / spaces that are neglected, that have the potential to change trajectories, and that have a risk-reducing quality (hedging).
III. Learning from other areas of philanthropy
Most areas of philanthropy seem structured such that, when being alright with risk neutrality and leveraged theories of change, one can get significant multiplier.
For example, I am quite confident that the implied multiplier for the case of chicken welfare campaigns compared to direct action is likely similarly large for what we are assuming for the case of Climate Fund. I also do not think any nuclear risk grant-maker would find it implausible that they could reduce nuclear risk 100x more cost-effectively (in expectation) than whatever the direct action equivalent would be. Or a global health grant-maker that would expect that their grants are 100x more cost-effective by influencing advocacy to have government invest in vaccine RD&D rather than buying equipment for their local hospital.

Bottom line: This cost-effectiveness range as a risk-neutral best guess does not depend on a 2017 BOTEC, but rather can be motivated via different streams of reasoning and evidence.
(I also think the critique of the 2017 BOTEC is way over-confident but this would be a separate comment)

jackva Apr 23, 2024, 12:44 PM
18 points
10 ∶ 3
in reply to: Matthew Rendall’s comment on: If You’re Going To Eat Animals, Eat Beef and Dairy
@Vasco Grillo would be well-placed to do the math here, but I have the strong intuition that under most views giving some weight to animal welfare the marginal climate damage from additional beef consumption will be outweighed by animal suffering reduction by a large margin.

jackva Apr 12, 2024, 4:31 PM
7 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Increasing risks of GCRs due to climate change
My sense is that it is not a big priority.
However, I would also caution against the view that expected climate risk has increased over the past years.

Even if impacts are faster than predicted, most GCR-climate risk does probably not come from developments in the 2020s, but on emissions paths over this century.

And the big story there is that the expected cumulative emissions have much decreased (see e.g. here).

As far as I know no one has done the math on this, but I would expect that the decrease in likelihood of high warming futures dominates somewhat higher-than-anticipated warming at lower level of emissions.

jackva Apr 4, 2024, 7:44 PM
16 points
0 ∶ 2
on: Let’s Fund: Impact of our $1M crowdfunded grant to the Center for Clean Energy Innovation
Even if one is skeptical of the detailed numbers of a cost effectiveness analysis like this (as I am), I think it is nonetheless pretty clear that this 1M spent was a pretty great bet:
1. When I talked to ITIF in 2020, they were pretty clear how transformative the Let’s Funds campaign had been for their fundraising.
2. Given the amount of innovation-related decision making that occurred in the run-up to and early Biden administration—what became the IIJA, CHIPS, and IRA, probably the largest expansion of energy innovation activity in decades—significantly strengthening one of the most respected voices on energy innovation seemed clearly very good.
3. ITIF literally co-authored the most detailed blueprint for the Biden energy innovation agenda (Energizing America) and had clear ties into the White House so, conditional on them being funding-constrained (which they perceived themselves to be, see (1)) it seems hard to think there wasn’t a pretty useful way to spend this additional funding.
4. Even if one thinks ITIF shifted zero dollars towards innovation (from other areas), just marginally improving a single decision would quickly make this a great investment.
5. We have lots of evidence from other areas that this kind of philanthropy works and often has large impacts via legislative subsidy and other mechanisms.
6. 2000 smallish donors would not have spent their money better otherwise given how most small climate donors allocate their funds (Big Green etc).
I think there’s a failure mode of looking at a cost-effectiveness model like this and rightly thinking—this is really crude and unbelievable! -- while, in this case, wrongly concluding that this wasn’t a great bet even though it is hard to put into a credible BOTEC.

jackva Apr 1, 2024, 12:57 PM
10 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Illuminatea—A Proposal for EA Reform
“Pyramid scheme” has a new meaning.

jackva Mar 29, 2024, 7:26 PM
5 points
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in reply to: Zershaaneh Qureshi’s comment on: Timelines to Transformative AI: an investigation
I am also just beginning to think about this more, but some initial thoughts:
- Path dependency from self-ampliying processes—Thinking about model generations as forks where significant changes in the trajectory become possible (e.g. crowding in a lot more investment, as has happened with ChatGPT/GPT4, but also, as has also happened, a changed Overton window). I think overall this introduces a dynamic where the extremes of the scenario space become more likely, with social dynamics such as strong increase in investment or, on the other side, stricter regulation after a warning shot, having self-amplifying dynamics. As the sums get larger and the public and policy makers pay way more attention, I think the development process will become a lot more contingent (my sense is that you are already thinking about these things at Convergence).
- Modeling domestic and geopolitics—e.g. the Biden and Trump AI policies probably look quite different, as does the outlook for race dynamics (essentially all mentions of artificial intelligence by Project 2025, a Heritage-backed attempt to define priorities for an incoming Republican administration, are about science dominance and/or competition with China, there is no discussion of safety at all).
- Modeling more direct AI progress > AI politics > AI policy > AI progress feedback loops, i.e. based on what we know from past examples or theory, what kind of labor displacement would one need to see to expect serious backlash? what kind of warning shots would likely lead to serious regulation? and similar questions.

jackva Mar 28, 2024, 9:46 AM
17 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: MatthewDahlhausen’s comment on: [Linkpost] Leif Wenar’s The Deaths of Effective Altruism
I agree with you that the 2018 report should not have been used as primary evidence for CATF cost-effectiveness for WWOTF (and, IIRC, I advised against it and recommended an argument more based on landdscaping considerations with leverage from advocacy and induced technological change). But this comment is quite misleading with regards to FP’s work as we have discussed before:
1. I am not quite sure what is meant with “referencing it”, but this comment from 2022 in response to one of your earlier claims already discusses that we (FP) have not been using that estimate for anything since at least 2020. This was also discussed in other places before 2022.
2. As discussed in my comment on the Rethink report you cite, correcting the mistakes in the REDD+ analysis was one of the first things I did when joining FP in 2019 and we stopped recommending REDD+ based interventions in 2020. Indeed, I have been publicly arguing against treating REDD+ as cost-effective ever since and the thrust of my comment on the RP report is that they were still too optimistic.

jackva Mar 27, 2024, 5:32 PM
7 points
0 ∶ 0
on: An Overview of the AI Safety Funding Situation
It seems like that this number will increase by 50% once FLI (Foundation) fully comes online as a grantmaker (assuming they spend 10%/year of their USD 500M+ gift)

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/25/a-665m-crypto-war-chest-roils-ai-safety-fight-00148621

jackva Mar 26, 2024, 10:11 PM
4 points
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in reply to: Arepo’s comment on: EA “Worldviews” Need Rethinking
Interesting, thanks for clarifying!

Just to fully understand—where does that intuition come from? Is it that there is a common structure to high impact? (e.g. if you think APs are good for animals you also think they might be good for climate, because some of the goodness comes from the evidence of modular scalable technologies getting cheap and gaining market share?)

jackva Mar 26, 2024, 7:56 PM
10 points
2 ∶ 1
in reply to: Arepo’s comment on: EA “Worldviews” Need Rethinking
I don’t think these examples illustrate that “bewaring of suspicious convergence” is wrong.
For the two examples I can evaluate (the climate ones), there are co-benefits, but there isn’t full convergence with regards to optimality.

On air pollution, the most effective intervention for climate are not the most effective intervention for air pollution even though decarbonization is good for both.
See e.g. here (where the best intervention for air pollution would be one that has low climate benefits, reducing sulfur in diesel; and I think if that chart were fully scope-sensitive and not made with the intention to showcase co-benefits, the distinctions would probably be larger, e.g. moving from coal to gas is a 15x improvement on air pollution while only a 2x on emissions):

And the reason is that different target metrics (carbon emissions, reduced air pollution mortality) are correlated, but do not map onto each other perfectly and optimizing for one does not maximize the other.

Same thing with alternative proteins, where a strategy focused on reducing animal suffering would likely (depending on moral weights) prioritize APs for chicken, whereas a climate-focused strategy would clearly prioritize APs for beef.
(There’s a separate question here whether alternative proteins are an optimal climate strategy, which I think is not really established).

I think what these examples show is that we often have interventions with correlated benefits and it is worth asking whether one should optimize for both metrics jointly (given that there isn’t really an inherent reason to separate, say, lives lost from climate from lives lost from air pollution it could make sense to prioritize interventions which do not optimize either dimension), but if one decides to optimize for a single dimension not expecting to also accidentally optimize the other dimension (i.e. “bewaring of suspicious convergence”) continues to be good advice (or, more narrowly, is at least not discredited by these examples).