I proposed the Nonlinear Emergency Fund and Superlinear as Nonlinear Intern.[1]
I co-founded Singapore’s Fridays For Future (featured on Al Jazeera and BBC). After arrests + 1 year of campaigning, Singapore adopted all our demands (Net Zero 2050, $80 Carbon Tax and fossil fuel divestment).
I developed a student forum with >300k active users and a study site with >25k users. I founded an education reform campaign with the Singapore Ministry of Education.
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I proposed both ideas at the same time as the Nonlinear team, so we worked on these together.
I think it’s an epistemic issue inherent to impacts caused by influencing decision making.
For example, let’s say I present a very specific, well-documented question: “Did dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki save more lives than it took?”
The costs here are specific: Mainly deaths caused by the atomic bombs (roughly 200k people)
The lives saved are also established: Deaths caused by each day the Japanese forces continued fighting, projections of deaths caused by the planned invasion of mainland Japan and famines caused the naval blockade of Japan.
There are detailed records of the entire decision making process at both a personal and macro level. In fact, a lot of the key decision makers were alive post-war to give their opinions. However, the question remains controversial in public discourse because it’s hard to pin a number to factors influencing policy decisions. Could you argue that since the Soviet declaring war was the trigger for surrender, mayyyybe the surrender would have happened without the bombs?
Activism is way more nebulous and multivariate, so even significant impacts would be hard to quantify in an EA framework. Personally, I do see the case for underweighing activism within EA. So many other movement already prioritise activism, and in my experience it’s super difficult to make quantitative arguments when a culture centres around advocacy. However, I would really like to see some exploration, if only so I don’t have to switch gears between my diff friend groups.