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
“Group differences in IQ is right around the corner, and if you’re going to maintain any kind of commitment to rationalism you’re going to have to either stop yourself before getting on that train or take it to its logical destination.”
Yikes.
Eugenics or “human biodiversity” isn’t a new idea and is incredibly toxic to most people. It has no place in the EA movement. If you let it anywhere near the movement, the only people that will remain are contrarian right-wingers that care more about being edgy and provocative than helping people or other animals. And also those who enjoy hanging around contrarian right-wingers (maybe they find them endearing or something? idk).
Speaking as a group leader for a local EA group, if someone tried to start a conversation on HBD and its assumed “logical destination” at a group meetup, I would immediately and permanently ban them from the group. It is incredibly hard to bring in different perspectives that lead to good decisions and better normative ethics. One conversation like that is enough to permanently lose many people I want in my group. If banning a few disagreeable right-wing “rationalists” who like to talk about HBD means lots of other people stay, I’ll gladly take that trade-off.
For those who think a ban is too harsh: go read the article linked to in this post, read several other top posts from the author, and read the comments from the blogs followers.
There are plenty of contributions right-wing ideas and disagreeable rationalists can make to the EA movement. Many of the movements best ideas come from those who identify that way. Just not the kind demonstrated in this post.
[EDIT] I’m puzzled by the disagreement votes, so adding some more context: In the linked blog post, Richard Hanania writes “A free market in ideas is like a free market in any other good or service. It ends up with Asian and white men on top who are there because they’re simply better than everyone else. Movements uncomfortable with this naturally get swallowed by wokeness.”
I think it’s pretty clear that what Richard Hanania and the post author mean when they say “anti-woke” is that they think EA should entertain operationalized racism and sexism. Anti-racism and anti-sexism are commitments wildly shared by EA community builders. If being anti-racist and anti-sexist is “woke”, the majority of EA has been “woke” for a long time and does better because of it.
To re-frame this:
best: high-trust / good actors
good: low-trust / good actors
manageable: low-trust / bad actors
devastating: high-trust / bad actors
High-trust assumes both good motivations and competence. High trust is nice because it makes things go smoother. But if there are any badly motivated or incompetent actors, insisting on high trust creates conditions for repeated devastating impacts. To further insist on high trust after significant shocks means people who no longer trust good motivations and competence leave.
FTX was a high-trust/bad actor shock event. The movement probably needs to operate for a bit in a low-trust environment to earn back the conditions that allow high-trust. Or, the movement can insist on high-trust at the expense of losing members who no longer feel comfortable or safe trusting others completely.
- 6 Feb 2023 19:54 UTC; 15 points) 's comment on Should EVF consider appointing new board members? by (
That comment isn’t really an answer. It’s just saying “CEA got a grant to purchase a venue dedicated to fancy retreats”. The post is asking for an explanation as to why CEA thought this was necessary, useful, and why did they pick such an expensive venue in particular. The comment doesn’t answer that.
I watched the video and then downvoted this post. The video is a criticism of EA and philanthropy, but there isn’t anything new, thoughtful, or useful. I would have upvoted if I thought the criticism was insightful. We’ve had much better left-wing criticism of EA before on the forum.
Adam and Amy make basic mistakes. For example at 15:30, Adam says that GiveWell recommends funding AI alignment work, and that caused him to become critical because they weren’t also recommending climate change mitigation. Adam treats GiveWell, SBF, and the entire EA movement as the same entity. Amy claims that EA is entirely about saving human lives. Neither demonstrated they were aware of the intense debate on saving vs. improving lives, or the concern for animals.
Among Amy’s examples of good philanthropy are a billion dollars for the Amazon strike fund, and purchasing lots in NYC to make them community gardens instead of housing. Adam comes away from the conversation thinking that his philanthropic dollars that he gave to the Against Malaria Foundation would have better been spent on the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC or a local community garden (60:00). Both celebrate scope neglect, nepotism, and a worldview that the root of problems is political. They mock trolley problems and other philosophy thought problems as a masturbatory, navel-gazing effort, with no real world implications. All they have to offer in support of their preferred charities is an onslaught of left-wing buzzwords.
The key actors involved in FTX were extremely close to the EA community. SBF became involved after a 1:1? conversation with Will MacAskill, worked at CEA for a short while, held prime speaking slots at EAG, and set up and funded a key organization (FTX fund). Caroline held an officer position in her university EA group. It’s fair to say the people at the center of the fraud were embedded and more tightly aligned with the EA movement than most people connected with EA. It’s a classic example of high-trust / bad actors—it only takes a few of them to cause serious damage.
Is this just a black swan event? Perhaps. Are there more bad actors in the EA community? Perhaps.
You are certainly welcome to keeping treating EA as high-trust community, but others have good reason not to.
Vox’s most recent Future Perfect newsletter linked to this piece of investigative journalism by the Intercept on the use of VSD: https://theintercept.com/2022/04/14/killing-chickens-bird-flu-vsd/ [EDIT: warning that the article includes a video that shows a chicken suffering as it dies]
I came away with the same impression when I read it. Thanks for taking the time to highlight specific examples of misinterpretation and lack of nuance. And for running it by the original study authors.
After reading quite a bit of climate doomer literature like Six Degrees, I’ve become less interested in the extent of exaggeration and portrayed helplessness and more interested in why people are telling the climate story this way. It seems counter-productive. It gives fodder to opponents of action to say the problem is exaggerated. And for the scrupulous it creates noise and the possibility for over-correction or over-reaction. I’m worried the EA movement will develop a well-founded bias to dismiss or ignore studies of potentially serious climate impacts because of the extent of media exaggeration of scientific studies. Looking forward to your climate risk report which I hope will mitigate some of the effects of bad climate science writing.
Thank you for laying out your thinking on how Giving Green (GG) and Founders Pledge (FP) think about the problem differently.
I’ve got several comments on the strategy, but I wanted to highlight one major instance where I think CATF is likely to cause more emissions than would otherwise be emitted. CATF is a top recommendation by Giving Green and Founders Pledge, and is the top recipient of Founders Pledge climate fund grants.
It concerns CATF’s support for the 45Q tax credit as mentioned in the post:
”CATF – Using a conservative and backward-looking back-of-the-envelope calculation, Founders Pledge estimates that CATF’s work on passing the 45Q tax credits for carbon sequestration reduces CO2e at the cost of $0.11 per metric ton in expectation. Founders Pledge estimates that CATF’s work in the US removes CO2e at roughly $0.30 per metric ton in expectation. (Giving Green is currently undertaking our own CEA for CATF.)”Some factual background:
- The 45Q tax credit provides a financial incentive for carbon capture and sequestration. It is described by the congressional research service here: https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/IF11455.pdf. Extension and expansion is part of the climate provisions in the Build Back Better bill that is currently stalled in congress.- CATF is supportive of the use of 45Q for the power sector. John Thompson is their team lead on this, and they’ve laid out their reasoning for why they support it in this report: https://www.catf.us/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/CATF_CCS_United_States_Power_Sector.pdf
- Founders Pledge agrees with the form and structure of this analysis, but does assume 50% less savings to be conservative: “Note that we are not taking this study at face value, we are assigning a 50% probability that 45Q has zero effect.” (Founder’s Pledge recent report, https://founderspledge.com/stories/changing-landscape, footnote 35 page 117). They do not entertain the possibility that 45Q could increase emissions.
- Last year 45Q lobbying support was a substantial part of CATF’s lobbying agenda:
https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/bills?cycle=2021&id=D000049290. They were alone (as far as I can tell) among environmental groups lobbying to increase and extend the 45Q tax credit, joining a mix of coal, fossil fuel, and utility companies. 45Q was the primary lobbying objective of coal companies last cycle.- CATF’s lobbying efforts have been both to increase the size of the tax credit and to remove the requirement that a 45Q recipient must capture at least 75% of its carbon emissions to qualify https://www.eenews.net/articles/big-payout-more-co2-greens-split-over-dems-ccs-plan/. CATF advocates for increasing the credit from ~$30/ton to ~$85/ton https://www.catf.us/2022/01/gao-report-highlights-importance-doe-carbon-capture-and-storage-demonstration-funding/.
- Coal CCS projects do not capture 100% of their carbon emissions. The CATF report assumes 80% capture. As noted above, the industry is seeking to qualify projects that capture any carbon, regardless of the percentage of emissions it represents.
- Captured CO2 is primarily sold for enhanced oil recovery. To account for this increase in fossil production and monetary benefit to the CO2 producer, the 45Q gives a lower tax credit for EOR projects versus saline storage projects.
- The only currently operating coal CCS project has had equipment issues and is only capturing 44% of its targeted 90% capture rate https://www.eenews.net/articles/ccs-red-flag-worlds-sole-coal-project-hits-snag/.
- The U.S. does not have a successful coal CCS plant operating, but that is not without trying. A bit over a decade ago, as part of the ARRA funding, the U.S. government gave $684 million to eight coal projects to build out coal CCS. None of them succeeded, and the financial waste was so bad that the government accountability office wrote a report about it. https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/carbon-capture/us-government-squandered-hundreds-of-millions-on-clean-coal-pipedream. John Thompson of CATF has responded to the GAO report defending the funding, saying that the ~$400 million that went to industrial projects was successful and that the 45Q tax credit should be increased to $85/ton to make coal CCS viable https://www.catf.us/2022/01/gao-report-highlights-importance-doe-carbon-capture-and-storage-demonstration-funding/.
Now the analysis:
If the competition for coal CCS were coal plants without CCS, then a tax credit would make sense to offset the cost of capture. But this is not the case. The primary competition for coal CCS is cheaper efficiency, wind, and solar. They aren’t just cheaper, they are much cheaper: new wind and solar costs are cheaper than the operating costs of existing coal plants: https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-levelized-cost-of-storage-and-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen/. This, along with cheap gas, has been the main driver of coal plant retirements in the U.S..In this context, the 45Q tax credit, if large enough, is a financial lifeline to coal plants that keeps them from retiring sooner. This is a key point made by Jeremy Fisher of the Sierra Club and others https://www.eenews.net/articles/big-payout-more-co2-greens-split-over-dems-ccs-plan/. In this context, the appropriate comparison is between wind or solar at zero emissions and a coal plant at 20% emissions (comparable to gas), assuming it runs perfectly.
This was evidenced in a front-page article in the Washington Post today (18 Jan 2022) regarding the Coal Creek Power plant in North Dakota.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/01/17/coal-creek-station-power-plant/. The plant was going to retire and be replaced with wind, but the Republican government worked hard to keep the coal plant open. The new developer plans to keep it running, calling “the several billion dollars in tax credits the federal government offers for carbon sequestration “essential” for making that happen.”, despite having no experience with coal CCS, and no successful projects evidenced in the U.S.
I cannot emphasize enough how mindbogglingly stupid it is to keep a coal plant running instead of replacing it with wind in a region that has among the best wind quality resources in the world: https://windexchange.energy.gov/maps-data/77.The CATF study supporting coal and gas CCS suggests that most projects are likely to occur in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, and Arkansas, as these are among the only places that have a suitable geologic reservoir to sequester CO2. Again, this part of the country has among the best wind resources in the world: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/wind/where-wind-power-is-harnessed.php. The CATF study mentions that “carbon-controlled fossil generation does not displace generation from renewable sources,” meaning a 45Q tax credit doesn’t displace renewables, primarily because renewables are cheaper even with the tax credit support for coal. They do not consider it the other way around—that without the tax credit, renewables (namely wind) would completely obviate the need for any coal CCS by being cheaper. This is baffling to me, and highlights that one of Founders Pledge’s “conservative” assumptions is not conservative at all; a “conservative” assumption would be that 45Q prevents cheaper, zero-emission wind and solar generation from coming online and that support of 45Q in the U.S. is in fact negative emissions reductions per ton.
Founder’s Pledge then goes on to estimate that 45Q will kick off a learning curve in coal CCS of ~10% cost reduction per year that can be applied globally.
A few things wrong with this:
First, learning curves do not apply to every technology. Solar PV is small and scalable, coal CCS is a mega infrastructure project. Solar PV realizes its learning curves by having many dozens of plants from dozens of different manufacturers distributed globally cranking out hundreds of gigawatts per year. Coal CCS has a few specialized mega engineering firms with many unique considerations per project doing 1 GW a decade so far. Mega infrastructure projects do not have as good of learning curves as smaller, scalable tech. Some technologies, like nuclear, have negative learning curves. So Founder’s Pledge again falsely assumes that their learning curve estimate is conservative: “Even if one assumes a modest learning rate of 10% per doubling of capacity – for reference, solar is approximately 30%, so this is a fairly conservative estimate” (FP report, p.117). Relatedly, it’s not clear that learning rates for large infrastructure projects in the U.S. are transferable to other parts of the globe, again because of the mega infrastructure nature of coal CCS and unique project characteristics depending on the geologic sink is paired with.Secondly, and more importantly, the same market competition with renewables applies. Coal CCS globally will need substantial government support to retrofit and operate coal plants at a price comparable to just replacing them with new renewables. Founder’s Pledge says that coal CCS may be critical in retrofitting coal plants that are “locked in”, but again new renewables are cheaper. RMI did a big report on that this year https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/rmi_how_to_retire_early.pdf. I broadly agree with RMI’s arguments here, and I think their forecasting accuracy is better than most in the energy space.
Founder’s Pledge main goal here is to fund technologies in case the main ones don’t work out. But in the case of coal CCS, two things must happen for that reality to pan out:
1) governments are willing to spend vast sums of money to keep their coal industries alive by preventing renewables from replacing coal and 2) in that scenario they still care enough about climate that the are willing to pay even more to reduce emissions of the coal plants by like ~80% at best. I don’t think that is a plausible reality, and it also still entails substantial emissions.Third, renewables are being installed at hundreds of GW annually and are quickly stranding coal and even gas plants globally. Coal CCS, even if governments want to save their few thousand coal miner jobs at the cost of millions of dollars per job, are not going to be able to build coal CCS at a rate even within an order of magnitude of the present rate renewables are being installed. Coal CCS projects are massive and take years to build. I’d bet we will have a mostly decarbonized the power sector by the time we see even 20 GW of coal CCS built or retrofitted globally, if we ever do. (20 GW is ~1% of global coal capacity).
In summary, I think CATF’s report on carbon reductions from coal CCS is irredeemably flawed. Given that, CATF’s support for expanding the 45Q tax credit and reducing it’s capture requirements is unjustified and will likely increase emissions (see: North Dakota example). Regardless the support is non-additional given the amount of lobbying dollars that are being spent to support it anyways by the fossil fuel industry and utilities. If you find yourself the lone environmental group lobbying alongside Peabody, Arch coal, and FirstEnergy and against the Sierra Club (who has been THE leader in coal plant retirements with their Beyond Coal campaign), that should send a red flag that maybe you should reconsider your analysis. Founder’s Pledge compounds this error by making “conservative” assumptions that aren’t actually conservative at all because they fail to red-team the structure of the analysis and entertain reasonable counterarguments. And then they scale up the assumptions globally, assuming that what is learned doing mega infrastructure coal CCS in the U.S. is directly transferable anywhere. All while disregarding the reality that renewables are driving retirement of coal plants in the U.S., and out-competing coal for new generation globally. Founder’s Pledge would benefit by hiring someone with a different perspective to red-team their reports and catch these sort of mistakes.
My general advice from this is that if you do give to CATF, you should target your donation to just their Super Pollutants program. Their coal CCS program is likely damaging. Their other programs are likely neutral, but I’ll save that comment/post for another day.
[EDIT: enabled links and fixed some typos]
- 7 Jun 2022 17:01 UTC; 15 points) 's comment on Deference Culture in EA by (
While I appreciate the investment thoughts in this post, I strongly downvoted it because I don’t think the EA forum is an appropriate place to advertise specific financial products.
Perhaps I’m reading into it too much, but the implication in the title is that the indoor air at EAG was somehow unsafe.
I don’t want people to get that impression, or in the worst case, avoid EAG because they think the air is unsafe.
Venues that have hosted EAG have commercial ventilation. These spaces provide at least a continuous 20 cfm per person of filtered, conditioned air, and the committee that sets those standards is acutely aware of the tradeoff between energy use from higher ventilation rates and health.
There is far greater risk from indoor house after-parties, as older residential homes don’t have ventilation and even if they do they were never designed to handle that many people.
We could ask the venue to make sure the filters on the air handlers were changed recently. And/or sprinkle in-room air cleaners throughout the meeting areas. People that have a much lower risk tolerance should just wear masks.
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.
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.
You can track health impacts with HAPIT, the Household Air Pollution Intervention Tool . Use that directly instead of the assuming clean cookstoves eliminate the disease burden, which is far from the truth.
Clean cookstoves have a really high bar to clear to reduce the disease burden for several reasons:
1) Exposure is non-linear. The relative risk of dropping from 400 ug/m3 to 175 ug/m3 PM exposure is the same as going from 100 ug/m3 to 50 ug/m3. To reduce the disease burden to <1.5 requires exposure <50 PM ug/m3, which is very difficult for any biomass stove to accomplish.
2) For the disease burden to be reduced, nearly all stoves in a locality need to be replaced, otherwise the outdoor air will still be above the exposure threshold.
3) Stoves need to be used, used correctly, and maintained. The education and cultural habits to do this are very difficult to embed in a population.
For these reasons, clean cookstoves have historically been largely unsuccessful at reducing the disease burden. They are improving. See the “2019 Climate Action and Clean Cooking Co-benefits workshop presentations and discussions” presentation by the Clean Cooking Alliance. This group is setting standards and tiers for clean cookstoves to rank them on performance and targeting intervention locations based on many factors to determine where cookstoves will be most successful.
Even with optimistic assumptions of stove performance and uptake from HAPIT, it is likely that cookstoves will remain at least an order of magnitude more expensive than the best GiveWell recommended interventions for some time.[Edit: fixed some spelling errors]
- EA Forum Prize: Winners for February 2020 by 2 Apr 2020 0:22 UTC; 14 points) (
- 21 Jan 2023 16:50 UTC; 5 points) 's comment on Clean Energy by (
Here’s a prediction: In the not-too-distant future, someone who calls themselves an effective altruist is going to purchase a private plane or helicopter and justify it saying the time it saves and the amount of extra good they can do with that saved time is worth the expense. The community is going to have a large population that disagrees and sees it as a wasteful extravagance, and a smaller but vocal population that will agree with the purchase as a worthwhile tradeoff, especially if that person is part of a sub-community within EA that is ok with more speculative expected value calculations. Instead of there being a clear, coordinated response disavowing the purchase as extravagant, the community is going to hesitate and argue about the extent to which it is good to feed utility monsters and be muted in its outward response. But that’s not going to stop the wider media picking up the story. A small fraction of the population will then henceforth liken EAs to the pastors at megachurches with private jets who use do-gooder justifications for selfish purposes. And yes, you could construct some sort of hypothetical where someone needs a helicopter to more quickly fly between trolley levers to save a bunch of people. But the much more likely scenario is that someone wants a helicopter and is fine using an iffy, cursory justification for it and the trolley brakes are working just fine.
I’ve noticed this too, in two ways.
First, is that the EA community tends to prefer information from “EA-aligned” people on a topic, rather than from academic experts in that topic. I’ve noticed this in climate change mitigation, air quality, and aerosol-based disease transmission (topics I’m an expert in). I presume that same issue is in other cause areas as well.
Second, the EA shift from global health and animal causes towards longtermism-focused efforts has corresponded with less reliance on RCTs and provable statements towards unprovable claims from argument. Longtermism arguments by necessity can’t be tested. But it also means that uncontested beliefs / worldviews heavily influence what arguments are seen as robust/valid. It’s a matter of personal perception whether the SBF fraud and FTX collapse was an inevitable consequence of longtermist beliefs and worldviews, or a separate, perturbed version of it. Either way, the consequence is the same: For many, EA is now a low-trust environment, rather than the high-trust environment it was in the beginning.
I’m increasingly relying on sources outside EA to inform my EA-related giving (important exceptions—I think GiveWell and Rethink Priorities are excellent, reliable sources in the EA community).
Thanks for detailing this aspect of EA. I think much of the deference culture is driven by early EA orgs like GiveWell, as you mention. There is a tendency to map the strong deference that GiveWell merits in global health onto other cause areas where it may not apply. For instance, GWWC recommends giving to several funds in different cause areas. The presentation suggests that funds are roughly equal in quality for their respective cause areas. GiveWell has about ~5x more staff than Animal Charity Evaluators, ~10x+ more staff compared to the EA Infrastructure Fund, and ~10x+ more staff compared to Founders Pledge’s climate team. To the extent that a larger team size means more research hours and more research hours means better funding decisions, there is a significant difference in funding quality among the different fund recommendations. This difference isn’t communicated in public-facing EA media like the GWWC webpage and videos.
As someone who is an expert in a cause area where the EA fund has comparatively little analytical capacity (climate change mitigation), I find the deference and marketing of the climate fund as the most effective giving option a continual source of frustration. I’ve written about that here and here. I’m also worried about people mapping weak deference onto causes where they should have greater deference: many people early in their EA engagement care about climate change as a cause area. If they have some level of expertise, they may find the climate fund recommendations underwhelming and then incorrectly assume funds in other causes areas have similarly low levels of research behind them. There may be some attrition in getting more people more involved in EA because of this, though it is a tiny niche. I don’t think the answer to the comparative deference problem is to do something like delist fund options from the GWWC page. But we do need some way to communicate the differential level of rigor.
Can you elaborate?
I expected this critique when I wrote that claim. I think I understand why someone would see the other candidate as being insignificant. Let me know if I’m presuming the wrong reasons here:
It seemed that the Flynn campaign message was all about pandemic preparedness. At least that’s how it was marketed in EA spaces. And it’s mostly true that there isn’t anybody in congress championing pandemic preparedness. If you are a single-issue voter on pandemic preparedness or AGI, I can see how the opposing candidate doesn’t matter to you; your candidate will do more for the cause than any other candidate, regardless of party, who likely doesn’t care or have an opinion on it. It’s more of a binary. If you care more about existential risks much more than anything else, this reasoning make sense.
But if you care about other causes like animal welfare, local or global poverty, climate change, democracy health, etc., chances are the other candidate does have views on it. If they are a progressive democratic candidate like Andrea Salinas, EA-aligned poverty alleviation, climate change action, and voting reform are significant parts of their platform. Also, one of the key issues in the U.S. presently is whether we are going to retain a semblance of a democracy or if elections are going to be decided by super PACs and gerrymandered state legislators. There is a significant party divide on support for EA-aligned voting reform and bans on alternative voting methods. If you care about being able to influence elections through public appeals, maintaining a functioning democracy matters even if you are a single-issue voter. There is a clear partisan divide. Given an equal chance of winning, would you rather the EA candidate run opposed to someone like Andrea Salinas or Madison Cawthorn?
Excellent production quality and explanations as usual. I liked the embedded links to the other videos as you reference them.
My feedback is that the donation recommendations don’t necessarily represent what I think to be the current best advice in the effective environmentalism (EE) community.
I’ve been a part of the EE community for 7 years now and have been closely following the development of climate change research and giving recommendations from Founders Pledge and Giving Green (EE orgs). I still don’t suggest their recommendations to friends looking to donate to climate change. Let me explain by way of analogy...
Looking with hindsight, if it was 2007, would you have given money to GiveWell’s top recommendation Population Services International? Or would you wait, knowing that in just a few years their analysis capacity would expand 10-fold and they would produce much better recommendations such as AMF or SCI?
Founders Pledge and Giving Green are similar to GiveWell circa 2007 in terms of number of employees, money moved, and research depth. The depth and breadth of their analysis is limited. There are whole economic sectors and angles to the climate problem they have not yet investigated—the demand side of the energy equation, alternative proteins, adaptation, and natural feedbacks are examples. In hindsight, during GiveWell’s early years, I’d say organizations like the Gates Foundation or JPAL would have given as good or better recommendations if asked. I think the same is true with the current state of climate philanthropy—places like the ClimateWorks Foundation have dozens of experts in a wide range of fields. Their teams on specific interventions are larger than the sum of climate researchers at Founders Pledge and Giving Green. ClimateWorks has considered a wider breadth of interventions and at greater depth than the EE orgs and I think they’re covering some of the most impactful interventions (e.g. the cooling collaborative). And that’s just one major climate foundation. If I were looking to donate, I’d start there, and I think donating to one of their grantees is likely to do about as much good as following an EE org recommendation.
The EE orgs are a bit different in that they are optimizing to minimize $/ton CO2e avoided (Giving Green) or trying to reduce climate damage with technology back-stops (Founders Pledge) source. GivingGreen has a ClimateWorks Foundation employee on their board, and they are actively trying to see how their work can be complementary rather than repetitive. Given the early stage of these EE orgs, I’d be much more inclined to fund Giving Green directly to hire another researcher than to give money per their recommendations.
Another piece of feedback is that I don’t think finding the lowest marginal $/ton CO2e mitigation opportunities is necessarily the right angle. Climate change is characteristically different from other problems like extreme poverty. GiveWell is still oriented towards finding the best health and poverty interventions. And this works because the scale of the problem is so large compared to the funding. But their recommendations would likely change if they had 100-1000x more money and were aiming to eradicate extreme poverty entirely. Climate change is a problem we (humanity) are trying to solve in its entirety, no just at the margin. Several governments have drastic emission reduction targets, and there are massive, established markets to trade offsets. Climate mitigation is valued in a way that helping the poorest isn’t. If you find a cheap offset, there is a good chance that funding it isn’t fully additional—someone else may come along and fund it anyways. And if you are for sure going to offset, it may make sense to fund higher priced offsets instead to scale them and bring down their costs to the rest of the market. See the discussion and markets around RECs vs. hourly RECs for example. Even then, offset funding isn’t really a limitation—there is currently a multi-year backlog for many of the highest priced robust offsets such as direct air capture with mineralization.
Given the offset market, EE orgs are pushed to more speculative mitigation opportunities such as policy change and technology innovation advocacy that can’t be as easily calculated or monetized. Pretty much all EE funding to date has gone to one of these two interventions. Once you are in speculative land, there is a different value proposition—similar to how GiveWell’s maximum impact fund and the EA Global Health and Development Fund are different. Two things are important in speculative land. First, it no longer makes sense to focus on a specific $/ton CO2e number. It’s all about distributions and hits-based giving. And second, the distributions are highly subject to the biases and assumptions that go into making them. Median $/ton CO2e estimates from two different researchers for the same intervention can easily be orders of magnitude apart. Worse, if two researchers share assumptions and biases, the distribution is likely to be too narrow, probably wrong, and possibly even wrong directionally. This is the problem with only 1 or 2 people with similar biases doing the calculations and is the case in the current EE orgs. People donating on advice from the EE orgs now are putting a lot of faith in a few speculative expected value calculations done by just one or two people. I think that faith is unwarranted given the reasons above. And I think the mantles of “recommendations” or a “fund” masks how uncertain and unreliable these donations are compared to other recommendation organizations and cause-area funds in the EA community that easily have 10-100x more research hours put into them as well as greater thought diversity. To me, “A rough conservative estimate of the cost of avoiding one tonne of CO2 by donating to the Clean Air Task Force is just one dollar” is too much like “save a life by buying bednets for just $25″. I don’t find the particular calculation referenced in the script to be conservative at all—the values and the structure of the analysis are wildly optimistic from my perspective.
I think a more accurate assessment of the best advice from the (EE) community for climate mitigation is “we don’t know what the best philanthropic opportunities are; give us money to help find them”. I realize that is underwhelming—we want to give concrete recommendations now. But I don’t think we can confidently claim that the current EE orgs represent the “biggest impact per dollar donated”. At least not yet. My concrete advice for those who only want to give to climate change interventions and only to the “best” interventions at that is to wait. Or fund intervention analyses.
- 7 Jun 2022 17:01 UTC; 15 points) 's comment on Deference Culture in EA by (
“This bravado carries over into the blunt advice that MacAskill gives throughout the book. For instance, are you concerned about the environment? Recycling or changing your diet should not be your priority, he says; you can be “radically more impactful.” By giving $3,000 to a lobbying group called Clean Air Task Force (CATF), MacAskill declares, you can reduce carbon emissions by a massive 3,000 metric tons per year. That sounds great.
Friends, here’s where those numbers come from. MacAskill cites one of Ord’s research assistants—a recent PhD with no obvious experience in climate, energy, or policy—who wrote a report on climate charities. The assistant chose the controversial “carbon capture and storage” technology as his top climate intervention and found that CATF had lobbied for it. The research assistant asked folks at CATF, some of their funders, and some unnamed sources how successful they thought CATF’s best lobbying campaigns had been. He combined these interviews with lots of “best guesses” and “back of the envelope” calculations, using a method he was “not completely confident” in, to come up with dollar figures for emissions reductions. That’s it.
Strong hyping of precise numbers based on weak evidence and lots of hedging and fudging. EAs appoint themselves experts on everything based on a sophomore’s understanding of rationality and the world. And the way they test their reasoning—debating other EAs via blog posts and chatboards—often makes it worse. Here, the basic laws of sociology kick in. With so little feedback from outside, the views that prevail in-group are typically the views that are stated the most confidently by the EA with higher status. EAs rediscovered groupthink.”
Yeah, MacAskill and EA deserve the roasting on this one. FP’s report from 6 years ago was a terrible basis for the $1/ton figure. MacAskill should have never used it in WWOTF. The REDD+ section proved to be widely inaccurate; it underestimates cost by at least 10x, 200x if you account for permanence. The nuclear power advocacy BOTEC was even worse. And FP and GG still reference it!
I’m glad to see EAs running for political office explicitly as EAs. But I hope that the attitude and approach by the EA community towards the Flynn campaign doesn’t become the norm. I felt that the campaign was intrusive and pushy, and the standard of care was much lower than what we expect for other causes/interventions.
Some points:
I got direct campaign emails from the Flynn campaign, even though I never signed up for campaign emails. Presumably some EA organization gave the Flynn campaign a list of emails or they scraped it off some EA website. I would prefer EA organizations to keep contact information private and adopt an “opt-in” policy for sharing emails. I don’t want to get spammed by people asking money for causes or campaigns, especially if EA political campaigns become more frequent.
One of my local group co-organizers got a personal appeal from the Flynn campaign in the final days of the election asking them to fly to Oregon to do door-knocking for the campaign saying how it was high expected value. Not only is it a troubling sign that the campaign did not already have a large, local population of door-knockers, but the campaign didn’t seem to consider the terrible optics of having people getting paid to fly in from out-of-state to do door-knocking for a few days. This seems anti-democratic.
This primary was flooded with billionaire Super PAC money. This is part of an ongoing trend of billionaires buying political power and is detested within the progressive community. It’s undemocratic, and we should be cautious about engaging in politics through billionaire money, even if it is ‘our’ billionaire, and especially if the EA candidate is running in a progressive democratic primary. Even if you think democracy is just an instrumental good you should be worried about the capacity for billionaires to heavily influence elections.
The campaign language and EA posts about it, including this one, center entirely around Flynn and not the winner Andrea Salinas, who is also an excellent candidate. The values and views of other candidates the EA candidate is displacing should be a significant consideration in whether to support the campaign. It may be more successful to make EA a constituency for lawmakers, rather than just supporting EA candidates running against progressives.
Furthermore, I’m not sure the information value alone was worth the millions spent on this campaign by the EA community. The ‘lessons learned’ listed in this forum post seem obvious. I googled “tips for running for congress” and in 10 minutes read through several resources that gave most of these same lessons learned. I expect a 30 min call with a Democrat strategist, of which there are several in the EA movement, would have also given the same lessons learned, and probably would have given a more accurate prediction on the election outcome than the prediction markets cited in this post. Flynn got ~half the vote of the leading candidate, which is more of a blowout than as suggested by the prediction markets. I frequently see parts of the EA community think they’ve found some new fascinating insight (EA movement learns about ‘X’) when in fact they are just columbusing knowledge from other communities. It’s as if some piece of knowledge must be blessed or learned directly by a well-known EA before it’s accepted by the community at large. A little less hubris and a little more humility towards other knowledge domains would save quite a bit effort and resources when learning about things like running for congress.