I develop software tools for the building energy efficiency industry. My background is in architectural and mechanical engineering (MS Penn State, PhD University of Maryland). I know quite a bit about indoor air quality and indoor infectious disease transfer, and closely follow all things related to climate change and the energy transition. I co-organize the local EA group in Denver, Colorado.
MatthewDahlhausen
Karma: 1,069
Thanks for re-emphasizing these norms.
For those who disagree with these norms, these sources help explain why they are important:
The sub-population that disagrees with these norms has substantial overlap with the sub-population that would most benefit from them.
I suspect that there is significant geographic concentration in the bay area as well, because of a culmination of factors including housing prices pushing people to group homes, gender ratios, tech/startup culture, and the co-existence of the rat community.
I don’t think the situation will get better, despite the attempt at norm setting, until the locus of EA money and power isn’t as concentrated in the bay area.
6Sept2023 Update: An opinion piece in Utility Dive “DOE’s error-ridden analysis on coal CCS project threatens climate and engagement goals” and journal article by Emily Grubert shows the likely increase in emissions from 45Q.
There are real coal plants that are adding CCS and extending their life, which is only possible with 45Q. They would have otherwise retired and been replaced with renewable energy.
I suggest you consult with a licensed professional mechanical engineer who specializes in air quality testing. I can’t make any recommendations without knowing the specifics of the system and the building occupancy, which a consultant can analyze.
Thanks for this list! Thanks for this! Great list.
Here’s some additional lessons I’ve learned in my group:
Have a plan for disruptive people. You will encounter zoom bombers, aggressive contrarians, and people that dominate conversations. Have a plan for handling them so you don’t freeze in the moment and have it ruin an event.
Space matters. Some people are not comfortable attending events at a person’s house or apartment complex. Some people are physically limited and can’t meet outside. Is the event space accessible to those who drive and those who take transit? If it’s outside, is there a plan for bad weather?
Variety is inclusive. Online / in-person, weekday / weekend, general / specific, city center / city outskirts, cause A / cause B, social / learning, active / passive. People have widely varying preferences. If you want an inclusive group, have many different kinds of events.
Online events are much better if you give people things to do. Breakout rooms with group tasks is a go-to that keeps people engaged
You don’t have to be active in a local group to be involved in EA.
This recent post from Dave, a university EA group leader, is quite relevant.
Happy to message or chat 1:1; I don’t want to dispute specific LTFF grants in the comment section.
I think EAIF vastly overstates the effectiveness difference between paid vs. unpaid organizers, and dismisses the reputational risks of having paid organizers. Many college groups thrive without paid organizers, and EAIF-level of funding paid organizers only start being necessary once groups sizes reach 100. I don’t think there are any EA college groups that large, and they can fund-raise for it. I think the reputational harm—that EA is for self-serving grifters—causes far more damage than the marginal benefit from paid recruitment. It completely undercuts the message of using resources effectively.
Thanks for linking to that! I appreciate the transparency in the write-up, and thanks for responding well to criticism. I don’t have the knowledge to evaluate the quality of the AI-related LTFF grants on AI. But I do have some experience in pandemic / aerosol disease transmission, and I’ve been pretty stunned by the lack of EA expertise in the space despite the attention. Others experts have told me they share the concern. It seems there is a strong bias in EA to source knowledge from “value-aligned” people that brand themselves as EAs, even if they aren’t the main experts in the field. That can result in a tendency to fund EA friends or friends-of-friends, or people they see as “value-aligned”, rather than proactively seeking out expertise. I’ve seen a few examples of it in EA funds and in other EA domains, but I don’t have a clear picture of how widespread the issue is. I also know EA funds doesn’t really have infrastructure set up to prevent such conflicts of interests. I don’t think the AWF and GHDF have as much of an issue because they have a much stronger evidence basis and therefore it is harder to argue funding friends is the most effective use of funds.
I think most grants to university, city, or national groups fund work that would have been done just as effectively by volunteers. Some of the university grants are particularly egregious, given how nearly all other college clubs exist just fine without paid organizers. “We are a student group interested in the most effective causes, and oh by the way funding us to organize this group for a semester is of similar levels of effectiveness as preventing 3 kids dying from malaria in poor countries.” I can think of few things more effective at turning people away from EA than college students learning the EA organizer is paid lots of money for it.
EAIF and LTFF will continue to struggle for individual donor funding until they can provide as good a value proposition as AWF and GHDF. As a longtime EA donor, my sticky impression of EAIF and LTFF is that it is a slush fund for OPP/EVF to dole out to their friends with questionable impact. Hopefully the separation will help change that impression and make better grants.
[EDIT: This impression may not be entirely accurate—it could be outdated, or I may be unfairly lumping the LTFF in with EAIF (I’m skeptical of longtermism and wish it was less prominent in EA). Regardless, the value proposition for individual donors is different from Open Phil/EVF, who seem happy and willing to pay tens of millions for fancy retreat centers. I’ve often cringed at EAIF grants given what the money could have done if in the AWF or GHDF fund instead.]
UVC biological vs. chemical risk tradeoffs
I’m curious to compare the growth in funding to the growth in EA group size (uni, local, & regional/national groups). I suspect there was a lot of money put into community development with relatively muted response in growth.
It seems a lot of the community growth dollars went to students to organize on campuses or fly them to EA conferences. The students would have otherwise organized voluntarily and raised necessary funds through fundraisers, like most other university student groups. Many university groups have and continue to thrive without central EA funding support.
My local group got grant funding to pay for an organizer (not me) for roughly a year. We ran a few more events, but I haven’t see an appreciably difference in growth or attendance a year later. We have several volunteer organizers that do the job just fine.
I’m skeptical that paid organizers are necessary for any (uni, local, & regional/national) group until the group size reliably reaches 50-100+ at events, which nearly all groups don’t meet except in a few of the largest cities (NYC, London).
The community funding, particularly university groups and fellowships, is where a lot of the criticism of profligate spending in EA comes from. I suspect the harm in reputation is comparable or greater than the benefit from the funding. In hindsight it seems that those community growth dollars would have been much better spent on actual EA causes.
The alternatives also include people packing their own lunch, or having people pay for the lunches they buy on site (a small cafe for example). If the worksite is in a downtown area, there are excellent options within a few minutes walk, and people can pick exactly what food they want. If people are worried about the loss of a few minutes walking, or they are are far away from food, they can order food delivery. Free work lunches are not a necessary perk, and people can easily pay for it if they think it’s worthwhile. The exception I’d make is someplace like a K-12 school where they are already giving kids (free) lunch, and marginal costs are minimal to extend the benefit to adults. Or if the work is in the food industry.
Thanks for writing this out and distinguishing between workplace perks and personal spending.
This movement is always going to have a cultural clash between the social pressures of class status and the demandingness of charity as explained by philosophers like Parfit, Singer, and Unger. Lifestyle creep is pernicious, and EAs are excellent at rationalizing luxury spending. SBF’s billionaire lifestyle is an extreme example.
It seems that many EA orgs are modeling themselves after bay area tech companies which are peculiar elite workplaces with massive compensation packages that tend to wrap around and cater to the employee’s entire life. That is not the norm in other high productivity analogous workplaces, like in academia, labs, or non-profits.
I like the proposal of having employees pay for any perks they enjoy beyond what is strictly necessary for job function (computer, workspace, healthcare/retirement in the U.S.). Maybe occasional lunches and a coffee machine. If people think an expensive perk makes them more productive—great! Buy it yourself, and if it really does make you more productive, you’ll get rewarded for it at your performance review. It’s not hard to have people pay for on site perks.
It’s hard to think of an industry that has a larger gap between best practice and what is typical than HVAC. Thanks for highlighting this.
Liz Specht at the Good Food Institute wrote this response in the NewScientist:
*”Scientists developing cultivated meat agree that R&D-scale methods won’t work for large-scale production. The non-peer-reviewed environmental impact study you reported on assumed commercial production of cultivated meat would rely on pharmaceutical-grade media to feed the cells – which food manufacturers won’t need to use (13 May, p 11).
Its findings deviate from other published research and don’t reflect current or anticipated practices. Recent peer-reviewed data demonstrates that food-grade ingredients can support animal cell growth, and producers are actively developing the supply chain for these ingredients.
A peer-reviewed study in The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, based on input from many cultivated meat companies and media suppliers, showed that producing cultivated meat at scale using renewable energy could lower climate emissions by 92 per cent and use 90 per cent less land than conventional beef.
Just as we wouldn’t assess the environmental impact of solar panels based on 1980s prototype production methods, we shouldn’t assess cultivated meat’s potential impact using R&D-scale processes. To deliver on cultivated meat’s potential to help satisfy growing demand for meat, reduce climate impacts and create space for more sustainable farming, governments must develop sustainable, large-scale production.”*
Possibly cheaper, and less ozone production.
This article hasn’t been peer-reviewed, so don’t read into the results too much. The CO2e/kg estimates are 10-100x higher than previous studies. And while the author doesn’t claim a conflict of interest, all the authors are at UC Davis in the same college as the Clear Center, a beef-industry funded advocacy organization. I don’t think academic work should be dismissed outright for an apparent unstated conflict of interest, but it does warrant extra scrutiny. I’d be much less skeptical if this came out of another university.
Here’s a related comment from last year: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nopFhTtoiyGX8Bs7G/uvc-air-purifier-design-and-testing-strategy?commentId=ZywtAzPB2Ci5PLfPC
UV systems have been around for ~100 years. They work great in some specific applications. Newer UV-C technology is a marginal improvement, but doesn’t significantly address the cost, design expertise, and maintenance challenges that have kept UV systems from widespread use. Air filters are generally better for most applications. I do expect we will see more UV-C systems in particular applications, but it is far from the one-technology-to-rule-them-all solution that the EA community seems to think it is. This follows a historic pattern of the EA community generally over-hyping singular technology solutions to major problems in other cause areas, probably because of the techno-optimist worldview that many EAs have.
See ASHRAE’s guidance on filtration and air cleaning technologies for more details and comparisons: https://www.ashrae.org/technical-resources/filtration-disinfection
Besides two fully remote roles, all the job listings are in either the SF Bay or London/Oxford. Are EA organizations this heavily geographically concentrated? Or is this update newsletter simply not capturing job listings from EA organizations based in other places?