Michael Goff

Karma: 32

Michael Goff 2 Aug 2026 15:30 UTC
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in reply to: ruthgrace’s comment on: The Case for a Comprehensive Meat Tax
Thanks Ruth. I’m glad you found it valuable.

Michael Goff 10 Jul 2026 16:52 UTC
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on: most EAs should probably not be living in high cost-of-living (HCOL) areas most of the time
One thing that is notable, and to me still a bit puzzling, is that despite the advances in telecommunications over the last few decades, urban concentration is more important to the economy than ever. I wrote about it as part of my Scaling in Human Societies Living Literature Review over the last few weeks (see this and this).
It is an open question in my mind how the EA movement transforms culture and politics to a large degree. That requires influencing more than a handful of superstar cities. For that, it’s not just a matter of moving to mid-sized cities in middle income countries, but building a movement there, and that takes a special skill that a minority of us have.
A closely related problem is what you touched on regarding “elitism”. Yes, there is the perception, which is not entirely baseless, that the EA movement is primarily for 23 year old Ivy League graduates, and finding work in the field is difficult if you don’t fit into this narrow demographic. If the movement was more geographically dispersed, so would be the job opportunities, and there would be meaningful opportunities for people outside of the elite.

Michael Goff 27 Jun 2026 5:32 UTC
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on: Was Partisanship Good for the Environmental Movement?
An analogy that I’ve seen—and I apologize that I don’t remember where now—is that in the early years, environmental legislation tore through the body politic like a smallpox in the Americas just after contact. In time (around the 1980s), critics learned how to respond properly and thus they greatly slowed further legislation. This analogy is not to imply that environmental legislation has been a destructive force; it’s only for the dynamics.
Since the Republican Party has always been the business-oriented party since its founding, it makes sense that opposition to environmentalism would reside in the Republican Party. In recent years, climate change has emerged as a central organizing principle for Democratic politics, which culminated in the Inflation Reduction Act, although the climate movement has greatly declined since the 2024 election.
When I look at this, for one thing it is not entirely clear to me that partisanship is the reason for the decline in environmental legislation, but more than that, it seems like partisan polarization was largely inevitable. Certainly, there are some environmental activists for whom I get the impression that organizing for the Democratic Party is the main objective and environmental protection is secondary, but even then I see their behavior as a reaction to circumstances more than a cause.
There is another important aspect to the story. For people who are not familiar, it is difficult to appreciate how central the fear of overpopulation was to environmental politics of the 1960s and early 1970s, and thus how central population control was. The belief that there were too many people in the world was almost universally held among major figures. Several developments, most notably the rise of the pro-life movement after Roe v. Wade in 1973, turned the Republican Party against population control, which was a major factor in their turn away from environmentalism more broadly. I highly recommend Derek Hoff’s 2010 paper on the Nixon administration’s evolution on the subject with regard to the Rockefeller population commission report.
Today, the pro-life movement is a shadow of its former self, and opposition to immigration has emerged as a central point for right-wing parties all over the world. I recommend Nils Gilman’s article on the subject. The stage may be set for a return of population control and a bipartisan form of environmental politics, but this may be a case of being careful what you wish for.

Michael Goff 26 Jun 2026 15:44 UTC
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in reply to: abhi_kumar’s comment on: Good-tasting alt meat is a scientific problem we can solve: $10M RFP for Alternative Protein R&D
Those are all good points, and to be sure, I do expect that the development of non-animal protein that satisfies PTC will reduce meat consumption. By just how much, I agree that we can’t predict, as it depends on many other factors. I strongly support the development of good alt-meat.
But I think some other historical analogies are instructive. For example, with aquaculture and wild-catch fishing and with low-carbon energy and fossil fuels, there have been major rebound effects that made these substitutes much less effective as replacements than one might have predicted in advance. I expect a similar thing to happen with alt-meat.

Michael Goff 14 Jun 2026 10:58 UTC
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on: Good-tasting alt meat is a scientific problem we can solve: $10M RFP for Alternative Protein R&D
I am grateful for this project, and I do believe that developing good alt meats will help. However, some work such as Rethink Priorities’ review of the PTC (Price, Taste, Convenience) hypothesis suggests that developing alternatives that win on all three metrics will not have as great an impact as we might hope. I am wondering how you think about this issue.

Michael Goff 14 Jun 2026 8:04 UTC
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on: Experience of a ‘generalist’ transitioning into AI safety in 2026
Having been through some career transitions, but not into AI safety in particular, I have some thoughts on the subject.
First off, you have the right instinct in trying to do some pro bono projects. You’ll prove you’re dedication and ability, and you’ll get to know some people who might help you into a paid position. That is more or less how I got into doing environmental research.
However, there are two big caveats. First, everyone has the right to expect to be able to make a living. Unfortunately, in philanthropic spaces, many people, who incidentally themselves have secure careers or retirement wealth, will subtly make new people who insist on getting paid feel that they are being greedy and uncommitted to the cause. I’m not saying that you have fallen into that trap, but it is a trap to be wary of. You should never feel guilty because you insist upon a career.
Second, it simply is not true that AI safety or any EA cause area is bottlenecked on [whatever skill]. If that were true, it would be easy for people who possess that skill to find jobs. There have been many such false claims of labor shortages; see e.g. the supposed STEM shortage in the 2010s. False claims of a shortage are not only wrong, they are immoral because they are dishonest and because they induce people to expend large amount of unpaid labor in the false hope that they will be rewarded for doing so.
Sorry if this comes across as negative. Good luck, and I hope that you will find success.

Michael Goff 13 Jun 2026 10:31 UTC
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on: Faith In Humanity
Thanks for sharing. I think in particular about the environmental movement, where a kind of mistrust of humanity—which often crosses the line into misanthropy—holds the movement back from what it could achieve. There are systems of thought such as ecomodernism which try to present a pro-human environmentalism, but I don’t think anyone has really done it right yet, at least to my knowledge.

Michael Goff 10 Jun 2026 14:43 UTC
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in reply to: Rosa Brown ’s comment on: Open thread: 2026 Q2 (April—June)
Not many. We’d be thrilled to find more opportunities to work with advocates.

Michael Goff 9 Jun 2026 14:26 UTC
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in reply to: Rosa Brown ’s comment on: Open thread: 2026 Q2 (April—June)
Thanks Rosa. Our work is aimed firstly at environmental advocates, for whom we want to provide better information.

Michael Goff 6 Jun 2026 6:10 UTC
3 points
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on: animal welfare has an evidence problem
This is a very important post, and thank you for writing it. Coming from the environmental world, this parallels my frustration that huge amount of efforts go into projects for which the evidence is shockingly flimsy. A significant fraction, maybe even the majority, of environmental advocacy is for measures that are nearly useless or outright harmful.
If you will pardon a personal plug, I wrote a piece on my Substack blog recently that looks at the evidence at a high level, drawing heavily on the methodology of Rethink Priorities’ Moral Weigh Project. If we want to monetize animal welfare (in my piece, broiler chicken welfare), then estimates for the proper valuation span several orders of magnitude due to irresolvable philosophical differences. I am very grateful that the Moral Weight Project was done, but clearly we have a long way to go before we have reliable numbers that we can use.
I am particularly interested in your comments on alternative proteins, since it will be very relevant for a piece I am working on regarding meat taxation. A major focus will be to review that we know about the rebound effect and induced/latent demand to argue that, if they attain widespread market viability, alternative proteins will mostly augment the meat supply rather than replace it.

Michael Goff 15 May 2026 2:26 UTC
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on: 10 big projects for reducing bio x-risk
Looking at this list, it looks like the focus is on relatively low-cost interventions that will make a big difference, though not necessarily on the high-cost interventions that will be most important. Those would be things like insuring the industrial capacity for rapid vaccine/antibiotic development and deployment and better surveillance to catch risks early. And there is the question of how to deal with those political factions that work to undermine public health responses, as we saw with COVID-19.
Related is the possibility of massive crop failures caused by pathogens, whose spread might be aided by monoculture systems. We lost the gros michel banana due to a blight, and the Irish Potato Famine, which may have killed over a million people, was caused by a blight. There do exist crop blights that attack multiple crops. Perhaps a plant biologist can weight in as to what the worst case scenarios might be. For that, food storage is particularly relevant. A massive shift to indoor agriculture has such problems that it might not be realistic. It is not clear that these kinds of environments would themselves be safe from the blight, and they depend fully on an industrial base that would also be at risk.
That said, these sound like great projects that would deliver benefits orders of magnitude greater than their costs. Have you identified any needs in the Philippines in particular?

Michael Goff 10 May 2026 15:28 UTC
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on: The tables have turned on AI sceptics
Thanks for this analysis. I continue to be impressed with the advancements the industry has been making, which in the last five or so years in particular have been far beyond what I had expected. Nevertheless, I haven’t fully moved out of the skeptic camp for two reasons. One reason, regarding the hazards of extrapolating curves, has been discussed in some other comments.
The other reason is that, despite some attempts to make it rigorous, I still find the term “artificial general intelligence” to be vague, and I expect it to continue to be subject to a moving goalposts problem. There was a time when researchers reasoned that, since chess is a pinnacle of human cognition, AGI would be inherent in a system that can play chess better than any person. This view was revealed to be obviously false after Deep Blue in 1997.
I think a bold prognostication about the development of AI would be on firmer grounds if we avoided anthropomorphisms such as “human level”.

Michael Goff 3 May 2026 16:56 UTC
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on: Open thread: 2026 Q2 (April—June)
Good morning / afternoon / evening / night. I’m Michael. I currently work as a fab tech at a semiconductor fab, I am a researcher with a small environmental policy consultancy Urban Cruise Ship, and I conduct a Living Literature Review through Coefficient Giving, Scaling in Human Societies. I also maintain a mostly biweekly blog on mostly environmentalism and urbanism.
For a long time I’ve watched goings-on in EA as a mildly interested distant observer, but now I am trying to learn much more and get more involved.

Michael Goff 3 May 2026 14:35 UTC
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on: Forecasting is Way Overrated, and We Should Stop Funding It
A bit tangential to the main thrust of this post, but I have been wondering lately about some the regulatory aspects around prediction markets. Recently there was the scandal of a soldier who allegedly made $400,000 from insider information about the Maduro raid. There is particular interest in the US on banning sports betting, which is seen (accurately) as another form of gambling. Minnesota might ban prediction markets entirely.
Stepping back from the merits of this specific proposal, I see it as a part of a troubling broader anti-innovation trend. We have also seen various political factions (usually the same factions) find nothing but negativity in data centers, human spaceflight, and cryptocurrency and pursue whatever legislative avenues they can to restrict these things. At some point, a person has to identify the pattern.
As a “layperson” (I don’t put my own money into prediction markets, nor is my research specifically related to them), I do find prediction markets to be a helpful source of information in the way that commodity futures are a helpful source of information. But I dislike having to sift through a bunch of predictions on sports matches and short-term crypto movements. That, and my libertarian-ish fears about the heavy hand of government, make me reluctant to throw the baby out with the bathwater.