My position is similar to that of 80000 hours: it seems like a super high impact cause, vying for the top with AI risk, pandemic risk, global poverty, and maybe 1 or 2 others. But is far more widely recognized and worked-on than those other causes. Enough so that it doesn’t seem like the marginal thing I can do is interesting compared to other problems I could work on.
My models for how to work on it if I did decide to work on it: 1) technology—we should have technology that solves the problem if widely enough deployed. I think we are basically there with nuclear and solar PV+energy storage, so I would probably only spend 10% or so of time getting up to speed on the technology before focusing on
Policy—we need to convince people to deploy the technology. This seems bigger and harder than the technology one, because of two reasons: a) society’s nuclear blind spot and b) the short-term interests of oil companies and the like who are powerful opposition to any policy which would hurt them in the short run regardless of long term societal outcome.
I don’t have a clear policy agenda but it seems like some combination of carbon tax, investment in PV, and nuclear is the right way to go. I currently would expect that work on the nuclear blind spot would be the most leveraged thing. The reason we have a blind spot seems to be the work of environmentalists from the 70s. As long as we could get them to flip, that could propagate through society in a useful way.
I completely agree, and would like to add that I personally draw a clear line between “the importance of climate change” and “the importance of me working on/worrying about climate change”. All the arguments and evidence I’ve seen so far suggest solutions that are technological, social(/legal), or some combination of both. I have very little influence on any of these, and they are certainly not my comparative advantage.
If OP has a scheme where my time can be leveraged to have a large (or, at least, more than likely cost-effective) impact on climate change then this scheme would instantly be near the top of my priorities. But as it stands my main options are mostly symbolic.
As an aside, and also to engage with lincoln’s points, I am highly sceptical of proposed solutions that require overhauls in policy and public attitude. These may or may not be the way forward, but my personal ability to tip the scales on these matters are slim to none. Wishing for societal change to suit any plans is just that, a wish.
I’m trying to reply as little as possible to the comments of this post to avoid influencing the future replies I’ll get, but in this case I felt that it was better to do so, since this point is likely an important one to determine the interest users will have for this subject, and consequently to determine how many replies I’ll have.
I’m aware that it wouldn’t be very useful to make a post exclusively aimed at making the users of this site feel more worried about climate change.
What the individual users of this site can do about it, considering the cost-effectiveness of the possible actions, will be treated extensively in the post I’m planning on the subject. I’d rather not try to summarise them here because I couldn’t explain them effectively.
If anyone reading this comment has the same opinions of Major, please write them so anyway.
Regarding one’s ability to effect social change: It seems like the standard arguments about small-probability, high-impact paths apply. I think a lot of STEM types tend to default to shy away from policy change, not because of comparative advantage (which would often be a good reason) but because of some blind spot in the way technologists talk about how to get things done in society. I think for historical reasons (the way the rationality community has grown) we tend to be biased towards technical solutions and away from policy ones.
I definitely agree that there is a bias in this community for technological solutions over policy solutions. However, I don’t think that this bias is the deciding factor for judging ‘trying to induce policy solutions on climate change’ to not be cost-effective. You (and others) already said it best: climate change is far more widely recognised than other topics, with a lot of people already contributing. This topic is quite heavily politicized, and it is very difficult to distinguish “I think this policy would, despite the high costs, be a great benefit to humanity as a whole” from “Go go climate change team! This is a serious issue! Look at me being serious!”.
Which reminds me: I think the standard counter-argument to applying the “low probability, high impact” argument to political situations applies: how can you be sure that you’re backing the right side, or that your call to action won’t be met with an equal call to opposite action by your political opponents? I’m not that eager to have an in-depth discussion on this in the comments here (especially since we don’t actually have a policy proposal or a method to implement it), but one of the main reasons I am hesitant about policy proposals is the significant chance for large negative externalities, and the strong motivation of the proposers to downplay those.
Emiya said cost-effectiveness will be treated extensively, and I am extremely eager to read the full post. As I said above, if there is a cost-effective way for me to combat climate change this would jump to (near) the top of my priorities instantly.
My position is similar to that of 80000 hours: it seems like a super high impact cause, vying for the top with AI risk, pandemic risk, global poverty, and maybe 1 or 2 others. But is far more widely recognized and worked-on than those other causes. Enough so that it doesn’t seem like the marginal thing I can do is interesting compared to other problems I could work on.
My models for how to work on it if I did decide to work on it: 1) technology—we should have technology that solves the problem if widely enough deployed. I think we are basically there with nuclear and solar PV+energy storage, so I would probably only spend 10% or so of time getting up to speed on the technology before focusing on
Policy—we need to convince people to deploy the technology. This seems bigger and harder than the technology one, because of two reasons: a) society’s nuclear blind spot and b) the short-term interests of oil companies and the like who are powerful opposition to any policy which would hurt them in the short run regardless of long term societal outcome.
I don’t have a clear policy agenda but it seems like some combination of carbon tax, investment in PV, and nuclear is the right way to go. I currently would expect that work on the nuclear blind spot would be the most leveraged thing. The reason we have a blind spot seems to be the work of environmentalists from the 70s. As long as we could get them to flip, that could propagate through society in a useful way.
I completely agree, and would like to add that I personally draw a clear line between “the importance of climate change” and “the importance of me working on/worrying about climate change”. All the arguments and evidence I’ve seen so far suggest solutions that are technological, social(/legal), or some combination of both. I have very little influence on any of these, and they are certainly not my comparative advantage.
If OP has a scheme where my time can be leveraged to have a large (or, at least, more than likely cost-effective) impact on climate change then this scheme would instantly be near the top of my priorities. But as it stands my main options are mostly symbolic.
As an aside, and also to engage with lincoln’s points, I am highly sceptical of proposed solutions that require overhauls in policy and public attitude. These may or may not be the way forward, but my personal ability to tip the scales on these matters are slim to none. Wishing for societal change to suit any plans is just that, a wish.
I’m trying to reply as little as possible to the comments of this post to avoid influencing the future replies I’ll get, but in this case I felt that it was better to do so, since this point is likely an important one to determine the interest users will have for this subject, and consequently to determine how many replies I’ll have.
I’m aware that it wouldn’t be very useful to make a post exclusively aimed at making the users of this site feel more worried about climate change.
What the individual users of this site can do about it, considering the cost-effectiveness of the possible actions, will be treated extensively in the post I’m planning on the subject. I’d rather not try to summarise them here because I couldn’t explain them effectively.
If anyone reading this comment has the same opinions of Major, please write them so anyway.
Regarding one’s ability to effect social change: It seems like the standard arguments about small-probability, high-impact paths apply. I think a lot of STEM types tend to default to shy away from policy change, not because of comparative advantage (which would often be a good reason) but because of some blind spot in the way technologists talk about how to get things done in society. I think for historical reasons (the way the rationality community has grown) we tend to be biased towards technical solutions and away from policy ones.
I definitely agree that there is a bias in this community for technological solutions over policy solutions. However, I don’t think that this bias is the deciding factor for judging ‘trying to induce policy solutions on climate change’ to not be cost-effective. You (and others) already said it best: climate change is far more widely recognised than other topics, with a lot of people already contributing. This topic is quite heavily politicized, and it is very difficult to distinguish “I think this policy would, despite the high costs, be a great benefit to humanity as a whole” from “Go go climate change team! This is a serious issue! Look at me being serious!”.
Which reminds me: I think the standard counter-argument to applying the “low probability, high impact” argument to political situations applies: how can you be sure that you’re backing the right side, or that your call to action won’t be met with an equal call to opposite action by your political opponents? I’m not that eager to have an in-depth discussion on this in the comments here (especially since we don’t actually have a policy proposal or a method to implement it), but one of the main reasons I am hesitant about policy proposals is the significant chance for large negative externalities, and the strong motivation of the proposers to downplay those.
Emiya said cost-effectiveness will be treated extensively, and I am extremely eager to read the full post. As I said above, if there is a cost-effective way for me to combat climate change this would jump to (near) the top of my priorities instantly.