EA Forum Reader

I suppose an example would be that increasing economic growth in a country doesn't matter if the country later gets blown up or something.

Some related posts on LessWrong:

• The EMH Aten't Dead [LW · GW], especially section Modern Edges are Completely Ridiculous and the discussion of value investing and Buffett's success there. The author writes this here, though:

This might be a good time to confess that I’m currently testing a momentum (trend-following) strategy with a small part of my portfolio, which, uh… flies in the face of all of the above. It’s performed almost comically badly through the COVID-19 crash, which ought to have been a delicious punishment for my hypocrisy and hubris, except that I just so happened to over-rule the crucial decision (i.e, I got lucky). I’m also tracking the counterfactual where I stuck with the experiment: if momentum really does turn out to be a persistent anomaly in otherwise efficient markets, then that would be fascinating—either way, I’ll try to write up a review some time later this year.

• Review of "Lifecycle Investing" [LW · GW]

It seems to me that this conception of neglectedness doesn't help much with cause prioritization. Every problem EAs think about is probably neglected in some global sense. As a civilization we should absolutely do more to fight climate change. I think working on effective climate change solutions is a great career choice; better than, like, 98% of other possible options. But a lot of other factors bear on what the absolute best use of marginal resources is.

We didn't get a vaccine for SARS-1 in time to be useful, and we don't have one for the 4 endemic coronaviruses, and it seems very likely that covid19 will become endemic/seasonal, so it is quite likely that all money spent on a vaccine will be mostly wasted.

So if you really have that money available, it may be better to spend it on

# improving treatment and prophylaxis

# protecting doctors, health staff and family members better (eg. negative pressure rooms)

# improving your health system or nutrition for all-causes mortality

#better preparedness for the next pandemic, which may have far higher mortality, including rapid testing/isolation ramp up capacity

# low dose effect Challenge Trials, as proposed by Prof Robin Hanson, especially for humanitarian/relief workers and young Navy teams

Personal Contacts (14%), LessWrong (9.6%) and 80,000 Hours (9.6%) are still the main ways most people have heard of EA over time.

Shouldn’t Peter Singer be on this list? He showed up in 203 of the open ended responses (9.5% of 2137 total responses), and that doesn’t count any open ended comments that didn’t mention him by name or non-open ended responses that he’s associated with (e.g. the people who answered they heard about EA through TLYCS the organization, which I work for in the interest of disclosure).

Thank you for conducting and sharing this analysis!

My guess is that people should probably say what they believe, which for many EAs (including me) is that climate change work is both far less impactful and far less neglected than other priority cause areas, and that many people interested in having an impact can do far more good elsewhere.

Rather than "many EAs", I would say "some EAs" believe that climate change work is both far less impactful and far less neglected than other priority cause areas.

I am not one of those people. I am currently in the process of shifting my career to work on climate change. Effective Altruism is a Big Tent [EA · GW].

That's a fair point. As per the facebook event description, I was originally asked to discuss two posts:

• Louis Dixon - Does climate change deserve more attention within EA? [EA · GW]
• Me - Updated Climate Change Problem Profile [EA · GW]

I ended up proposing that I could write a new post, this post. The event was created with a title of "Is climate change neglected within EA?" and I originally intended to give this post the same title. However, I realized that I really wanted to argue a particular side of this question and so I posted this article under a more appropriate title.

You are correct to call out that I haven't actually offered a balanced argument. Climate change is not ignore by EA. As is clear in Appendix A, there have been quite a few posts about climate change in recent years. The purpose of this post was to draw out some particular trends about how I see climate change being discussed by EA.

Thanks for your comments and for linking to that podcast.

And while you may be right that it's a bit naive to just count all climate-related funding in the world when considering the neglectedness of this issue, I suspect that even if you just considered "useful" climate funding, e.g. advocacy for carbon taxes or funding for clean energy, the total would still dwarf the funding for some of the other major risks.

In my post I am arguing for an output metric rather than an input metric. In my opinion, climate change will stop being a neglected topic when we actually manage to start flattening the emissions curve. Until that actually happens, humanity is on course for a much darker future. Do you disagree? Are you arguing that it is better to focus on an input metric (level of funding) and use that to determine whether an area has "enough" attention?

Thanks for your feedback.

Framing climate change as the default problem, and working on other cause areas as defecting from the co-ordination needed to solve it, impedes the essential work of cause-impartial prioritisation that is fundamental to doing good in a world like ours.

I think it's worth emphasizing that the title of this post is "Climate Change Is Neglected By EA", rather than "Climate Change Is Ignored By EA", or "Climate Change Is the Single Most Important Cause Above All Others". I am strongly in favor of cause-impartial prioritisation.

In "Updated Climate Change Problem Profile [EA · GW]" I argued that Climate Change should receive an overall score of 24 rather than 20. That's a fairly modest increase.

This post itself argues that EA is losing potential members by not focusing on climate change. But this claim is in direct tension with claims that climate change is neglected. If there are droves of potential EAs who only want to talk about climate change, then there are droves of new people eager to contribute to the climate change movement. The same can hardly be said for AI safety, wild animal welfare, or (until this year, perhaps) pandemic prevention.

I don't agree with this "direct tension". I'm arguing that (A) Climate Change really is more important than EA often makes it out to be, and that (B) EA would benefit from engaging with people about climate change from an EA perspective. Perhaps as part of this engagement you can encourage them to also consider other causes. However, starting out from an EA position which downplays climate change is both factually wrong and alienating to potential EA community members.

The Effective Environmentalism group maintains a document of recommended resources.