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This is a brave thing to publish in the current political climate and I am grateful you did!

I think we are misunderstanding each other a bit.

I am in no way trying to imply that you shouldn't be mad about environmentalism's failings -- in fact, I am mad about them on a daily basis. I think if being mad about environmentalism's failing is the main point than what Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are currently doing with Abundance is a good example of communicating many of your criticisms in a way optimized to land with those that need to hear it.

My point was merely that by framing the example in such extreme terms it will lose a lot of people despite being only very tangentially related to the main points you are trying to make. Maybe that's okay, but it didn't seem like your goal overall to make a point about environmentalism, so losing people on an example that is stated in such an extreme fashion did not seem worth it to me.

I find it pretty difficult to see how to get broad engagement on this when being so obviously polemical / unbalanced in the examples.

As someone who is publicly quite critical of mainstream environmentalism, I still find the description here so extreme that it is hard to take seriously as more than a deeply partisan talking point.

The "Environmental Protection Act" doesn't exist, do you mean the "National Environmental Policy Act" (NEPA)?

Neither is it true that environmentalists are single-handedly responsible for nuclear declining and clearly modern environmentalism has done a huge amount of good by reducing water and air pollution.

I think your basic point -- that environmentalism had a lot more negative effects than commonly realized and that we should expect similar degrees of unintended negative effects for other issues -- is probably true (I certainly believe it).

But this point can be made with nuance and attention to detail that makes it something that people with different ideological priors can read and engage with constructively. I think the current framing comes across as "owning the libs" or "owning the enviros" in a way that makes it very difficult for those arguments to get uptake anywhere that is not quite right-coded.

It would be great if there was a better prediction market version of this question, unfortunately others I found are even worse.

Yet, I don't think it's worth dismissing entirely.

If criteria are stricter now, this should mean that an increase in the probability between November and today is underestimated by this question.

Thanks for clarifying this!

I think ultimately we seem to have quite different intuitions on the trade-offs, but that seems unresolvable. Most of my intuitions there come from advising non-EA HNWs (and from spending time around advisors specialized in advising these), so this is quite different from mostly advising EAs.

Have Wikipedia policies changed recently, though? The key thing here is the time trend so unless Wikipedia policies have changed, it seems reasonable to interpret the change over time as reflecting the underlying substantive interest.

Clearly one needs some media source to define resolution criteria for a question like this.

Thanks for laying out your view in such detail, Patrick!

I find it hard to grasp how the EA Forum can be so narrow -- given there are no Fora / equivalents for the other brands you mention.

E.g. I still expect the EA Forum is widely perceived as the main place where community discussion happens beyond the narrow mandate you outline so which attentional priorities will be set here will be seen as a broader reflection of the movement than what I think you intend.

I think that's fine -- we just have different views on what a desirable size of the potential size of the movement would be.

To clarify -- my point is not so much that this discussion is outside the Overton Window, but that it is deeply inside-looking / insular. It was good to be early on AI risk and shrimp welfare and all of the other things we have been early on as a community, but I do think these issues have a higher tractability in mobilizing larger movements / having an impact outside our community than this debate week has.

This comment really makes me appreciate the nuanced way to give feedback with disagree and karma -- I think it is quite useful to incentivize critical feedback that the two can be, and are, distinguished.