Giving Green should recommend donating to a portfolio of promising policy change and activism organizations.
As jackva points out, there is a thin line between effective advocacy for policy change (e.g. Clean Air Task Force) and the kind of activism that prevents conservative politicians from touching the climate file with a ten-foot pole, because their base sees it as a “leftist agenda” issue.
Anecdotally, I have met with the staffers of several deep-red, lukewarmist/denialist Republican senators to lobby for revenue-neutral carbon taxes (CCL is a great organization to volunteer with!). Surprisingly, they all privately agreed with the urgency of the climate crisis, but the only thing they really cared about during those meetings was evidence—like the Yale Climate Opinion Maps, hand-written letters from constituents, etc.—that supporting climate legislation wouldn’t get them primaried.
In light of that experience, and the razor-thin margins held by Democrats, I can only agree with jackva that amplifying TSM/XR/Standing Rock/etc. may well be counterproductive in some places. I’m glad Keystone XL won’t happen, but I would sleep better if clean tech and carbon pricing had killed its viability instead.
Hi Mike, I really enjoy your and Andrés’s work, including STV, and I have to say I’m disappointed by how the ideas are presented here, and entirely unsurprised at the reaction they’ve elicited.
There’s a world of a difference between saying “nobody knows what valence is made out of, so we’re trying to see if we can find correlations with symmetries in imaging data” (weird but fascinating) and “There is an identity relationship between suffering and disharmony” (time cube). I know you’re not time cube man, because I’ve read lots of other QRI output over the years, but most folks here will lack that context. This topic is fringe enough that I’d expect everything to be extra-delicately phrased and very well seasoned with ifs and buts.
Again, I’m a big fan of QRI’s mission, but I’d be worried about donating I if I got the sense that the organization viewed STV not as something to test, but as something to prove. Statistically speaking, it’s not likely that STV will turn out to be the correct mechanistic grand theory of valence, simply because it’s the first one (of hopefully many to come). I would like to know:
When do you expect to be able to share the first set of empirical results, and what kinds of conclusions do you expect we will be able to draw from them, depending on how they turn out? Tiny studies with limited statistical power are ok; “oh it’s promising so far but we can’t share details” isn’t.
I hope QRI’s fate isn’t tied to STV – if STV can’t be reconciled with the data, then what alternative ideas would you test next?