This is the third in a sequence of posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?
Summary
Rising partisanship did not make environmentalism more popular or politically effective. Instead, it saw flat or falling overall public opinion, fewer major legislative achievements, and fluctuating executive actions.
Public Opinion...
This post presents the executive summary from Giving What We Can’s impact evaluation for 2025. At the end of this post we share links to more information, including the full report and...
Why building and backing Welfare Tech companies may be one of the most promising things we can do for billions of animals.
I used AI to assist in writing this post, but I’ve rewritten it extensively and endorse it.
* Announcing the launch of Spring Innovation Fund, a not-for-profit venture philanthropy studio and fund built specifical...
If you believe that:
- ASI might come fairly soon
- ASI will either fix most of the easy problems quickly, or wipe us out
- You have no plausible way of robustly shaping the outcome of the arrival of ASI for the better
does it follow that you should spend a lot more on near-term cause areas now? Are people doing this?
I see some people argue for increasing consumption now, but surely this would apply even more so to donations to near-term cause areas?
I think this conclusion does logically flow from those premises but I would question the premises themselves -- I think the first and second premise are pretty uncertain and the third premise is likely false for most people.
I think 'robustly' does enough work to make item 3 also pretty uncertain for at least a lot of people.
Right. I think being ambiguity and/or risk averse is a good reason to potentially prefer near-term cause areas, though they have their own issues with robustness as well.
I don't think you need to be ambiguity / risk averse to be worried about robustness of long-term causes. You could think that (1) the long term is extremely complex and (2) any paths to impact on such a complex system that humans right now can conceive of will be too brittle to model errors.
Yes, this was the reason I chose the word robustly! I wholeheartedly agree that all three premises are certainly debatable. The reason I'm wondering is primarily because I think quite a few EAs might in fact have these views, wether correct or not. I'm therefore a little surprised that I have not seen anyone act on them.
That is, I have not seen anyone say that they have substantially increased their near-termist donations (although I have not gone looking either).
My suspicion is that a lot of the people holding these views might be more "grassroots" or in the periphery. Not the type of EA on a podcast or writing on the forum, but perhaps a city group member, student, earning to give etc.
Do you mean that most people do indeed have plausible ways of shaping the outcome of the arrival of ASI? I'd be curious what paths are open to most people in this conception/framing.
I've always sort of thought people can only influence this if they have a few very specific circumstances (such as a specialized computer programmer skillset, or government policy experience, or specific positions in a handful of companies, or maybe enough clout to publish a book that gets a lot of press). Thus, only a tiny fraction of people are able to affect AI outcomes, and the rest of us are merely onlookers.
I think nearly every person could engage productively on AI issues by (in no particular order):
Donating to organizations you think do good work on these issues.
Contacting your representatives in government and letting them know how you feel about these issues and that it affects how you vote.
Commenting publicly (e.g., on Twitter) how you feel about these issues.
Participating in demonstrations (e.g., PauseAI) as you feel like they align with your interests and values.
I think so.
I was quite focused on building career capital, and now I'm focused on reducing near-term animal suffering, partly because of this reasoning.
Hi Håkon! I personally believe that, depending on what country you live in, virtually anyone can have a positive impact simply by spending 30 minutes a day writing emails to politicians and then meeting with them.