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Thanks, Alex, for writing this important contribution up so clearly and thanks, Dan, for engaging constructively. It’s good to have a proper open exchange about this. Three cheers for discourse.

While I am also excited about the potential of GivingGreen, I do share almost all of Alex’s concerns (we disagree a bit on Climeworks, which I think is fairly good as far as offsets go -- not far) and think that his concerns mostly stand / are not really addressed by the replies. I state this as someone who has worked/built expertise on climate for the past decade and on climate and EA for the past four years (in varying capacities, now leading the climate work at FP) to help those that might find it hard to adjudicate this debate with less background.

Given that I will criticize the TSM recommendation, I should also state where I am coming from:
My climate journey started over 15 years ago as a progressive climate youth activist, being a lead organizer for Friends of the Earth in my home state, Rhineland Palatinate (in Germany). 
I am a person of the center-left and get goosebumps every time I hear Bernie Sanders speak about a better society. This is to say I have nothing against progressives and I did not grow up as a libertarian techno-optimist who would be naturally inclined to wanting to solve climate change through technological innovation. Indeed, it took me over a decade of study, work in climate policy, and examination to get to the positions I am holding now which are very far from what I used to believe.

I should also state upfront that my credence in CATF and other high-impact climate charities does not come primarily from the cost-effectiveness models, which are clearly wrong and also described as such, but by the careful reasoning that has gone into the FP climate recommendations. John spent nine months working on the original FP Climate Report (to which I advised), I spent the majority of the last year reviewing many charities -- including CATF, CfRN, CLC, ITIF, Carbon180 and TerraPraxis -- and recommending some of those as high impact. Do I literally believe any of John’s or mine or anyone else’s model of an advocacy charity? No, of course not. 

But the process of building these models and doing the research around them -- for each FP recommendation there is at least 20 pages worth of additional background research examining all kinds of concerns --  combined with years of expertise working in and studying climate policy, has served the purpose of clearly delineating the theory of value creation, as well as the risks and assumptions, in a way that a completely qualitative analysis that has a somewhat loose connection between evidence, arguments, and conclusions (recommendation) has not. 

The fundamental concern with Giving Green’s analysis that I, and I think (?) Alex, have is not the lack of quantitative modeling per se, but the unwillingness to make systematic arguments about relative goodness of things in a situation of uncertainty, rather treating each concern as equally weighted and taking an attitude of “when things are uncertain, everything goes and we don’t know anything”. The impression one gets from reading the Sunrise recommendation and its defense is that a grassroots activism recommendation was needed for organizational variety reasons (given Giving Green’s strategy to reach a wider audience of segmented donors). 

While one can have different opinions about the value of that given dilution concerns that Alex also mentioned, this is in principle not problematic with regards to the analysis. Where it becomes problematic is when pretending that the same rigor and reasoning that underlies a recommendation of CATF has been applied to the Sunrise analysis, which does not seem to be the case (while I lead the climate work at FP now, I should state here that John Halstead did the original analysis recommending CATF, so this is not quite as self-serving as it sounds).

While I am concerned about recommending offsetting in general and --as Alex mentions in his post -- think we should be very carefully modeling dilution effects before advertising offsets alongside high-impact options (or generally, before advertising low impact options), I did not read the offsetting recommendations in detail, so I will leave my comments to the TSM and TSM-CATF aspects in  this comment.

I think there are a bunch of ways in which CATF is wrongly portrayed here and, in addition, many additional reasons beyond Alex’s that should make one doubtful about the claim that “we dont know whether TSM or CATF donations are better at the margin”. 

While we do, of course, not know for certain, the evidence that we have points in a clear direction -- that donating to CATF and other similar charities (such as those featured in the FP Climate Fund) is much more impactful than donating to the Sunrise Movement Education fund (TSM in the following). Indeed, from the evidence we have, I would argue that there is a significant probability that donating to TSM at this point is net-harmful. Luckily, there is also a high probability that it is very low-impact at the margin.

Let me explain (after the summary).

SUMMARY

As I stated in my EAGx Virtual talk last year, I would like to understand the goodness of grassroots activism better. As such, I was quite excited to know Giving Green to be working on this and to read the analysis.

But reading the analysis, I don’t find myself having learned a lot about the expected goodness of the Sunrise movement because it appears more like an analysis of the positive case rather than a balanced all-things-considered-view.

As Alex has raised and I have expanded here, there are serious concerns both about (a) low marginal impact and (b) about the direction of that impact. These find no parallel in recommendations such as CATF.

While not impossible, it would be very surprising if something with (a) low marginal additionality and (b) severe uncertainty about the direction of marginal impact -- whether it is positive or not -- was the best thing we could fund in climate (or, undistinguishable from the best thing).

The main claim why we should expect that -- if I understand Giving Green correctly -- is the transformative nature of Sunrise, what they are doing just being that good. As I discuss below in the sections on “misconceptions about CATF” the claim that what Sunrise is doing is more transformative than what CATF is doing is -- at the very least -- controversial and not obviously true.

This leaves me in a situation where I would like to learn more about the goodness of the Sunrise movement from an all-things-considered analysis but where -- with the current information -- I don’t see strong reasons to think that Sunrise is anywhere close to the best things we can fund.

We are very confident that CATF and similar charities are an excellent translator of money into climate impact. We don’t know this for TSM and the weight of the evidence does not point in the direction of it being particularly likely that it is high-impact to donate to TSM at the margin.

SOME MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT CATF

Before diving into the detailed comparison between CATF and TSM it is worth noting some misconceptions about CATF that matter for this comparison.

 1. Is CATF “incrementalist”?

The dominant frame in Dan’s comment and in the Vox piece with regards to CATF v. TSM is that CATF is “incremental”, “moderate” vs. TSM being “radical” and more likely to lead to transformative change. That there is something essential that can only happen if Sunrise and other progressive climate activists have more success.

I think this framing, while discursively resonant in current American debates between progressive and moderate Democrats, misses the point.

This is because the challenge of climate change is one of global technological transformation, not national politics and, as such, this frame is a lot less applicable than in issues where this framing might be more helpful (such as, say, civil rights).

While it is true that what CATF is doing -- not focusing primarily on a national target for the US etc. or advocating for a symbolic Green New Deal -- looks moderate and incremental, it is not when we consider the nature of the climate challenge which is allowing 9 billion humans to live poverty-free lives without cooking the planet. Solving this challenge has one necessary and, almost sufficient, condition -- ensuring that across all use cases low-carbon energy/industrial products are preferable to high-carbon ones or are so minimally inferior that realistic climate policy can bridge the differential even in settings with low willingness-to-pay for climate.

Because the US energy innovation system is so powerful and because the leverage from cost reductions and improvements is so large (~85% of global energy is fossil, US has a declining share of emissions and is now around 15%, cost reductions are the main driver of lowering carbon intensity in electricity etc., technological spillovers are the best way to make progress in a low-coordination, low willingness-to-pay setting), stuff that looks incremental -- advocating for tax credits for neglected technologies etc here., for a clean energy standard that also includes nuclear and CCS there etc -- is indeed quite transformative.

A better frame to compare CATF and TSM, in my view, than “incremental” vs. “transformative” is to understand CATF as an organization mostly taking political realities as a given (though doing some coalition building) that is laser-focused on ways in which they can make important differences -- with “important” informed by their deep knowledge of the issues and their proto-EA focus on things that are overlooked by the mainstream but critical to the overall puzzle. This is a transformative proposition of thought leadership, of changing the conversation, changing policy and, ultimately, the underlying technological base that allows us to decarbonize.

Indeed, it is quite plausible that this type of “quiet” climate policy -- focused on accelerating globally neglected technologies -- is far more potent than a Green New Deal that would primarily be focused on solutions that are far down the learning curves, already popular, selected for co-benefits such a job creation, etc.

TSM’s proposition is also transformative, though in a different way -- trying to increase attention to climate far more than what it is and push ambitious climate policy, embedding it in priorities that Democrats already have. This is also a transformative proposition.

In other words, we should not let our perceptions of “incremental” vs. “transformative” be guided by partisan conceptions of those terms; if we look at the climate issue closely and understand the importance of technological change at the heart of achieving global net-zero emissions those meanings might very well switch. Even if it doesn’t switch then at least both what CATF and what TSM are doing is transformative.

 2. Is there a serious chance that CATF is negative?

There is also the assertion that CATF might be negative because, by heavily focusing on carbon capture and storage (CCS) and other technologies that help existing industries become close to carbon-neutral, they are giving a life line to fossil fuels or otherwise inhibiting climate progress.

While it is true that if we got CCS to work cheaply and efficiently, this would reduce the argument for transitioning away from fossil fuels for part of the energy mix, that’s a feature not a bug. The goal of climate policy is net-zero emissions, not 100% non-fossil fuels.

Leaving aside that OilPriceInternational is not exactly a neutral voice, let’s put their estimate into perspective. 

They estimate that the 45Q tax credit could lead to something like 50 million tons of additional US emissions per year in 2035 through enhanced oil recovery (EOR) emissions. (Given the trajectory of US climate policy, this seems implausible). At the same time, right now 45Q is the most important carbon capture incentive policy in the world and it is the median expert view that -- if we are to achieve climate targets -- different forms of carbon capture (all of which covered by 45Q) will be used at Gigaton scale and that government incentives will be essential to drive down the cost and increase adoption.

So, if 45Q only leads to moving forward CCS deployment by 1GT a year, this “cost” of also including enhanced oil recovery in the 45Q bill would be a 5% cost on what would still look like an amazingly good outcome for the climate. Sure, it would be better if there were no increased emissions, but in the grand scheme of things -- and given how policy works -- better to have that policy with that negative side effect rather than having no CCS incentive policy at all.

This kind of cost is not analogous in magnitude to the very real cost of risks around Sunrise, such as an additional increase in polarization gridlocking important incrementally looking but transformative (see above) climate policy progress. It appears like a case of false equivalence.

REASONS TO EXPECT LOW MARGINAL IMPACT WHEN DONATING TO TSM

 3. Grassroots activism might be good on balance, but still an implausible recommendation at the margin

This is an important point that is easily missed when discussing TSM as some of the discussion on TSM here and elsewhere is focused on non-marginal arguments, grassroots activism being generally useful as an outside-pressure force in an outsider -- insider model. 

I would probably agree with the argument that the rise of progressive climate activism over the past four years has been net-positive, though there are also important caveats to this such as increased polarization of the climate issue, increased focus on catastrophic framings that are not in line with climate science, overly focused on 100% renewables vs. technology-inclusive decarbonization visions etc. But I take it as a given for the remainder that “on the whole” the world is better with Sunrise than without.

However, this does not at all mean that we should donate to TSM at this point. I agree TSM could have been a great philanthropic bet 4 years ago.

 4. Grassroots activism might have been neglected ten years ago, but it is not neglected now

As Alex points out, the data for the neglect of grassroots activism are outdated -- and importantly so. Using data from 2011-2015 to evaluate the neglectedness of climate activism today is like using data from the nineties to say that the internet is not a big deal. Climate activism as a mass form of engagement has risen to the prominence with Greta Thunberg, with Extinction Rebellion, with Sunrise, with the Paris Agreement and the subsequent IPCC 1.5 degree report -- all of those happening at the earliest in late 2015 and many significantly later.

Luckily more current data on climate activism philanthropy are readily available. 

For example, the ClimateWorks Foundation published a report in September 2020 which shows that US-focused public engagement -- the category under which grassroots activism falls -- received about 100 million on average between 2015-2019, which is about 27% of total US-focused climate philanthropy by foundations, a lot more than what the 2011-2015 numbers that underlie the neglectedness analysis suggest. It is also the largest share of any item in the US and far larger than the total global philanthropic spending for key neglected technologies such as negative emissions tech (25 million) and CCS or advanced nuclear (not even having their own positions, buried under clean electricity, but this will be heavily focused on renewables).

Importantly, this does not even include individual giving -- the major component of climate philanthropy -- which is likely tilting more towards grassroots activism and mainstream green solutions than elite advocacy for unpopular but critical solutions such as CATF’s. We discuss this more and why this makes it unlikely that grassroots activism is neglected in our report, quote from here (quoting in full as this is from a long report no one reads, but contains lots of material relevant here):

“According to this analysis, in the 2015-2019 period, about 100 million have been spent on public engagement in the US per year, more than a quarter of the climate philanthropic spending by foundations in the US in total. What is more, Jeff Bezos -- now the largest climate philanthropist in the world -- has focused his first round of grants on well-known Big Green groups that have a long history of raising awareness of the climate challenge, probably making that “public engagement” bucket significantly larger in future iterations of the ClimateWorks report.

Beyond philanthropy, the largest environmental NGOs have hundreds of thousands of members and even relatively new grassroots movements, such as Sunrise, have volunteers in the 10,000s, making environmental NGOs and grassroots a major political force.

At the same time, global philanthropic support for decarbonising sectors that are usually considered among the hardest to decarbonise -- transport and industry -- is less than that USD $75 million.12 Carbon dioxide removal, the technology considered most in need of additional innovation policy support, received only USD $25 million in global philanthropic support. These numbers do not allow differentiating by type of philanthropy so only a subset of these overall numbers will be focused on advocacy increasing overall societal resource allocation to these approaches; in other words these numbers are an overestimate for the type of advocacy work we are interested in assessing.

We tend to think that this presents an imbalance, given the large value of improving the allocation of public funds towards neglected technologies providing a strong proposition for advocacy. But, of course, increasing the pie is also critical and the imbalance proposition is, ultimately, a fairly hard-to-test hypothesis and almost philosophical question (we will attempt to gain some traction on this in 2021).”

Note that, while this states some uncertainty about assessing neglect, this was published before I had a chance to look in detail at the trajectory of Sunrise and progressive climate activism -- given Alex’s numbers and analysis, I would be fairly confident (> 80%) at this point that grassroots activism right now is significantly less neglected than CATF-style work.

5. Neglect is only a proxy, but it informs a prior on the usefulness of funding margins for which the TSM analysis provides little update

As an EA working on climate, I am very sympathetic to the argument that neglectedness is a proxy and can lead astray.

But in Dan’s comment above this mostly reads like shifting goal-posts, the argument for neglect was justified with financing numbers that were outdated. Even if they are just a proxy, the fact that those numbers are importantly outdated and wrong should lead to changes in the analysis (an advantage of quantitative analysis).

While it is true that the funding for CATF has increased strongly over the last few years, it has not increased by orders of magnitude. More importantly, the reason it has increased has been -- to a large part -- because of the EA community starting with John’s 2018 report and, as such, is not reflective of a wider societal trend towards the CATF-style of advocacy leading us to expect everything of that style to be funded (And, CATF has increased its geographic reach thereby extending productive funding margins (because funding margins for advocacy are a function of the goodness of improving resource allocation / policy in a jurisdiction).

Indeed, it is more likely that the opposite is the case.

After the failure of cap-and-trade in 2010 it became conventional wisdom in climate philanthropy that more grassroots activism was needed, as also stated in Giving Green’s Deep Dive.

While it is not clear that this belief was true -- the failure of Waxman-Markey in 2010 was severely over-determined with lots of plausible interpretations -- this belief had causal force.

It is thus no accident that attention to public engagement funding has increased so strongly. In other words, in climate philanthropy, the grassroots wing has been winning rather than being most neglected.

In addition, Sunrise has emerged as an important flank of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and the Democrats having outraised Republicans on much smaller average donations (more grassroot-y) in the recent elections. 

As such, saying Sunrise is neglected is -- absent more current numbers that make the case -- similar to saying “Jon Ossoff’s Senate campaign is neglected” in late December after he raised more than 100 million USD. Sure, it is conceivable that there are things that Jon Ossoff would have funded with marginal donations that would have been highly effective, but we should be skeptical of such arguments precisely because a reasonably strategic actor that is not obviously funding-constrained will have a funding margin with relatively low-value activities.

In that way, neglectedness serves as a prior on the expected goodness of the funding margin. That prior can be updated by additional considerations that make something in a non-neglected field good, but this requires strong arguments. In a field that is financially well-resourced or easy to be well-resourced (when you have 10,000 volunteers and you have lots of high-value funding gaps at the margin, some more of those volunteers should focus on fundraising), it would be surprising if there are great marginal funding opportunities.

Of course there could be. 

Indeed, the argument that John Halstead, Hauke Hillebrandt, and myself have been making in various forms over the last years is that there are such opportunities within climate -- namely, around supporting (1) neglected technologies and (2) a neglected part of technology support, support for innovation, via (3) decision-maker focused advocacy that improves how the vast resources allocated to climate are better spent.

The long and short of it is that there are systematically neglected technologies and many ideological and other reasons for this neglect, that innovation is generally neglected for reasons of various market failures, as well as ideological factors, etc. In other words, there is a systematic argument for why the CATF/C180/ITIF/TP style of advocacy should be really high impact despite climate not being neglected overall.

But there is no parallel argument made -- to my knowledge -- for why in case of Sunrise we should move away from the prior that something that has increased 40x-fold in funding over the last years and has captured the public imagination and support of an entire wing of a major US political party, would have great room for funding left.


Dan’s response to this concern raised by Alex is this:
“I think that there is very little effective climate activism happening out there, and there’s huge room for effective growth.”

Essentially, the only argument for why it should be particularly high impact to give to TSM right now is a claim about the ineffectiveness of current climate activism and a proclaimed large effective growth potential, without any justification that spending more money on climate activism will lead to more effective climate activism.

With this level of unspecific justification, almost anything can be declared a highly effective funding margin to fill.

REASONS TO BE UNSURE ABOUT THE SIGN OF IMPACT

 
6. The positive marginal case is pretty unclear

It is not clear how we would evaluate success of the Sunrise Movement -- whether this would be passing the Green New Deal or whether it is just generally shifting the Overton window of climate policy. The more charitable interpretation is probably to say “Sunrise shifts the overton window of climate policy” given that the Green New Deal is mostly a symbolic policy without real prospects of passing.

This is the approach we took in our Biden report -- conceptualizing grassroots movements as “increasing the pie” (the opportunities, not only strictly budgets) and orgs such as CATF focused on improving how the pie is utilized for maximal decarbonization benefits. Quoting here (emphasis new):

“But, while it is difficult to make a statement about the relative balance [between pie-increasing and pie-improving], we think it is clear that now that we have a very climate-friendly administration -- likely under divided government, if not with razor-thin majority [this was published in November] -- the value of policy advocacy to improve how the attention to climate is spent strongly increases, easily by a factor of 4 or more (taking a conservative average from the advocacy value of the next four years, based on our timing analysis above) compared to a second Trump term.

At the same time, it is difficult to see how the value of funding advocacy focused on increasing the pie could have increased by the same amount based on the outcomes of the election.

Indeed, insofar as mass mobilization and climate grassroots activism are strongly tied to the Democratic party and making Democrats more ambitious on climate, it seems likely that the value of this advocacy has decreased due to the relative underperformance of Democrats in Congressional races and the likely less Democratic-leaning environment in the midterm elections.13

On balance, we think that the election directionally shifts the balance towards advocacy to improve resource allocation and policy rather than advocacy focused on increasing overall resource allocation (increasing the pie), so we feel more certain in the relative prioritisation of this kind of advocacy in our philanthropy.”

Now that we have more information with the Georgia win and the laser-thin Democratic majority we can say a bit more than this directional shift, about the marginal impact of Sunrise in this moment.

We are now in a situation where Biden has declared climate as one of his top four priorities, where the pivot in the Senate is Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, who really likes CCS and really doesn’t like the Green New Deal.

In this situation, any passage of bills requires support from very conservative Democrats and, if not all Democrats are on board, of some Republicans (even for reconciliation, filibuster-proof climate policy is out of the question anyway).

Unless Sunrise has a great way to influence fairly conservative Senators, which is not what they have focused on to do to date, it seems a bit unclear what good a marginally stronger TSM at this  moment accomplishes.

To be sure, the pressure of TSM and others is very valuable, in principle. But now that climate is on top of the agenda of things and we face a pretty thin majority situation for the party aligned with Sunrise, is it really plausible that making this movement marginally stronger is very important?

While one could make that case, e.g. that a stronger TSM is needed now because pressure on relatively progressive legislators is still a bottleneck, or because Biden will forget about climate if we do not further strengthen TSM, this does not seem very plausible.

While arguments have been made that TSM is sitting at the table with the Biden administration and that this is a reason to fund them, this kind of reasoning would require confidence that TSM directs Biden’s climate action in the best direction. 

TSM is a grassroots organization specialized in raising attention to climate, not in advising on effective climate policy. That is something that CATF et al. specialize in. Furthermore, funding the Sunrise Movement Education Fund would not directly influence the already existing representation of TSM at the table.

When stating confidently that giving to TSM right now is highly impactful, it would be good to clarify what the exact path to impact is. 

The broad description in the theory of change of “climate change becomes a government priority” and “climate bills that reduce emissions get passed” is not very clear, and -- in particular -- does not refer to a marginal case, that more is needed to make this as likely as TSM can make those outcomes. 

Just to be clear, I am not suggesting that the answer to all of these questions is negative for TSM. I am just pointing out questions that would need analysis to make claims of high impact more credible.

 
7. Ways in which Sunrise could be negative at the current margin

Indeed, there are many ways in which existing or additional support for TSM can contribute to negative outcomes:

• A stronger TSM could make it more likely that pressure on Democrats (fear of being primary-challenged etc.) leads to shifts towards the left that lead to losses in the House in 2022 and the loss of the trifecta.
• A stronger TSM could intensify pressure on Biden to prioritize executive orders over legislative politics, because this looks more appealing than more incrementally seeming legislative politics even though legislative politics would ultimately be more impactful and/or more robust over time.
• A stronger TSM could lead to an overemphasis on renewables at the cost of other clean technologies that need more support to be brought down the learning curves.

The list could go on.

Again, my point is not that these are all damning concerns but that these large uncertainties about the severity and probability of negative effects of marginal TSM donations pushes the estimate downwards.

 8. Ways in which Sunrise could be negative (in general)

More generally, beyond the current marginal case, there are other more general concerns.

Alex makes valuable points about how Sunrise could have negative impacts and I have mentioned some of them as well before (e.g. in my talk at EAGx Virtual last June) and in other contexts. Dan adds some additional ones. 

So, there are at least the following five pathways in which Sunrise could be negative:

A. Sunrise further polarizes the US climate debate thereby reducing the chance of useful climate legislation to become reality.

1. Via pressure on Democrats to pursue proposals that fail in the legislative process.
2. Via pressure on Democrats to pursue more executive action that is challenged in courts rather than pursue more incrementally seeming policies through Congress.
3. Via giving credence to the Republican straw man that Democrat climate action is about fundamental social transformation rather than addressing a problem that both Republicans and Democrats should be able to agree on exists.

B. Sunrise promotes a view of the climate challenge that reduces the support for effective solutions

1. Via pressure on Democrats to focus climate policy more on favorite solutions of progressives -- renewables etc. -- rather than a technology-inclusive vision that has more bipartisan support and is more in line with decarbonization priorities.
2. Via framing the climate challenge overly focused on 2030 US targets instead of global decarbonization -- and as a consequence under-prioritizing driving globally useful energy innovation (e.g. just phasing out coal in the US rather than getting CCS off the ground, for the US and -- more importantly -- the rest of the world).

From spending the last ten years studying and working in climate policy, I can say with confidence that both of those lines of concern are major considerations, major ways in which -- in the past -- climate activism has been harmful and major worries of very serious climate analysts about current grassroots climate activism.

These are serious concerns that warrant thorough investigation rather than a false equivalence reply claiming there is a similarly serious concern with CATF and similar orgs.

Of course these concerns are not all there is, there is a positive case, too. But those concerns need to be integrated when forming a view on TSM as a funding opportunity.

INTEGRATING CONCERNS

How does this all fit together?

Size of impact

The assumption in the TSM analysis is that there is something transformative / unique / high value in TSM that only TSM or grassroots activism can deliver. As I argued in the “Some misconceptions about CATF” section above, this claim does not seem well-supported because both technological change driven through incremental policies and climate laws could be transformative. There is no reason to assume that TSM > CATF on this at this point. One could try to model this.

Low marginal additionality (neglectedness)

Because of the explosion of attention to TSM and the increase in TSM and general grassroots funding, additional dollars change relatively little about TSM’s activities (relatively speaking), are more likely to not be counterfactually additional (if funding goals are just met in any case), and are likely to fill activities that are relatively far from the most valuable ones.

Sign of impact

If one does not study those concerns about direction in detail and convincingly shows that these are not applicable to marginal TSM funding, then what Alex states is totally justified -- there is uncertainty about the sign of the impact.

Crucially, that uncertainty is about the expected mean, not particular outcomes (something that, I think, Dan misunderstood in his reply to Alex). 

Even if that uncertainty does not move us into negative territory with regards to the mean, it pushes the expected value downwards. There are just many plausible futures where marginal TSM funding is negative and that pushes the expected value towards zero or into negative territory.
 

If one combines these three factors what emerges is a funding opportunity where we should expect a low expected value; whether we fund or not makes little difference and it is relatively unclear whether it will have a positive impact.

It would be pretty surprising if that was anywhere close in marginal impact than giving to CATF.

It could, of course, be the case, though. But to state that as likely would require a lot more research and, with current information, it does not seem warranted.

While I think the practice of sharing purchasing recommendations can be good (I love the concept of crowdsourcing research into great purchases!), I am concerned about some of the items that you've recommended here.

The diet books and health supplements you've listed are not items that I would personally endorse, and I don't believe that the EA community as a whole would uncritically endorse them either. While I'm comfortable with EA forum posts that argue for their effectiveness, I am not comfortable with EA posts that give the impression that these are not controversial recommendations.

Without intending to start a discussion into why these are controversial recommendations, I just wanted to flag that they are, since this post is presented as though the EA community should be already agreed upon their effectiveness.

However, the non-supplement recommendations you've listed here are pretty great! I'd like to especially shout out the saving money section as having several services that I use regularly.

Ops, thanks for pointing that out - should be fixed now!

Another organization working near this space: legacies.now

Hey, I agree something like that might be worth adding.

The way I was trying to handle it is to define 'common good' in such a way that different contributions are comparable (e.g. if common good = welfare). However, it's possible I should add something like "there don't exist other values that typically outweigh differences in the common good thus defined".

For instance, you might think that justice is incredibly intrinsically important, such that what you should do is mainly determined by which action is most just, even if there are also large differences in terms of the common good.

There are only a limited number of billionaires, so such an org could be very effective, or very detrimental, depending on whether it successfully attracts billionaires without putting off others permanently. At least three orgs are working near this space: Longview Philanthropy, Generation Pledge, and Founders Pledge. 

Hey Richard, I agree with this, and I like the framing.

I want to add though, that these are basically the reasons why we created EA in the first place, rather than promoting 'utilitarian charity'. The idea was that people with many ethical views can agree that the scale of effects on people's lives matters, and so it's a point of convergence that many can get behind, while also getting at a key empirical fact that's not widely appreciated (differences in scope are larger than people think).

So, I'd say scope sensitive ethics is a reinvention of EA. It's a regret of mine that we've not done a great job of communicating that so far. It's possible we need to try introducing the core idea in lots of ways to get it across, and this seems like a good one.

I agree with Denise's description and Max's, but I don't see how it follows that focusing on professionals is more useful than focusing on students. In fact, I think that Germans taking gap years, changing degrees, etc. makes it more plausible that student groups are a promising target audience, as this allows students to spend more time thinking about EA ideas and make relatively large changes to their careers.

Echoing what Vaidehi said, I think it's somewhat unusual for a wiki to be built into a tag system, so I'd like to advocate for seeing if there's a way to make it more intuitive and less confusing, ideally in a way that doesn't require explaining/tutorials but is immediately obvious to users. Perhaps the solution could be to simply to use the term "wiki" instead of "tags" in most places.

This new study finds that up to a fifth of adults have mental health problems in midlife.
Original Article:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychological-medicine/article/psychological-distress-from-early-adulthood-to-early-old-age-evidence-from-the-1946-1958-and-1970-british-birth-cohorts/1EBDDD9D82389023128700146CED6C8F

Abstract:

Background

Existing evidence on profiles of psychological distress across adulthood uses cross-sectional or longitudinal studies with short observation periods. The objective of this research was to study the profile of psychological distress within the same individuals from early adulthood to early old age across three British birth cohorts.

Methods

We used data from three British birth cohorts: born in 1946 (n = 3093), 1958 (n = 13 250) and 1970 (n = 12 019). The profile of psychological distress – expressed both as probability of being a clinical case or a count of symptoms based on comparable items within and across cohorts – was modelled using the multilevel regression framework.

Results

In both 1958 and 1970 cohorts, there was an initial drop in the probability of being a case between ages 23–26 and 33–34. Subsequently, the predicted probability of being a case increased from 12.5% at age 36 to 19.5% at age 53 in the 1946 cohort; from 8.0% at age 33 to 13.7% at age 42 in the 1958 cohort and from 15.7% at age 34 to 19.7% at age 42 in the 1970 cohort. In the 1946 cohort, there was a drop in the probability of caseness between ages 60–64 and 69 (19.5% v. 15.2%). Consistent results were obtained with the continuous version of the outcome.

Conclusions

Across three post-war British birth cohorts midlife appears to be a particularly vulnerable phase for experiencing psychological distress. Understanding the reasons for this will be important for the prevention and management of mental health problems.