Environmental risk postdoctoral research position at CSER.

Thanks for the feedback Stefan! Was responding to an initial downvote; wanted to make sure this wasn't seen as inappropriate for EA forum.

Oh, no need to apologize at all! I didn't think you were overlooking my work at all; I already assumed, as you said, that you hadn't noticed it. I'm also aware you're extremely busy. Environmental risks are only just becoming a concern for effective altruism, some things holding us back thus far, as I'm sure you know:

• effective altruism's limited size as a community, up until now, limiting its ability to be a substantial actor by any measure in the crowded area of climate change and environmental problem mitigation.

• up until now, the lack of identifying the most important, neglected, and tractable problems resulting from climate change, and other human interference into the environment, such that effective altruism will intersect with the climate activism and environmental movements for interventions that may currently be atypical of those movements.

I think why there is a lot of fruitful ground to be found here is that effective altruism can leverage its edge in identifying the best interventions, and scale them up on the back of these other, much larger social movements to their fullest potential. This seems an eminent possibility as what motivates effective altruists and environmentalists to due as much good as they can are concerns for three reference classes of beneficiaries: currently living humans (in terms of individual well-being, and in general); non-human animals; and future generations (in terms of GCRs/x-risks). The theory behind all this is laid out here, by Michelle Hutchinson of Giving What We Can. I guess environmentalism also cares about the intrinsic value of 'life', in terms of whole ecosystems, and biodiversity, more than the same is emphasized in effective altruism.

This is an exciting time because all of us right now are contributing to the precipitation of climate-related concerns as a stalwart cause in effective altruism. Of course, there is an environmentalism movement aside and older than the current spate of climate activism in the last decade or so, which is concerned with more problems than just climate change itself. I have reservations about the opportunity or ability for effective altruism to collaborate with the sentiment of the broader environmentalist movement, as opposed to its subsection of climate activism, which seems more similar to effective altruism itself. However, I'll save that explanation for another time.