[exdsq]

Energy is a very important problem but also one that is heavily funded and researched. It makes more sense to focus on underfunded issues that offer a high reward. I argue that energy should be more funded for what it's worth, but climate change and renewable energy sources aren't that popular in effective altruism circles.

[coldpie]

> but climate change and renewable energy sources aren't that popular in effective altruism circles

What.

[exdsq]

Check out some of the fund breakdowns and look at how much is spent on climate change and renewable energy

https://funds.effectivealtruism.org

https://www.givewell.org/maximum-impact-fund

The common argument is that the best way to try and make an impact on climate change is to fund lobbyists to make change at governmental levels https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2021/12/most...

[gault8121]

Hi there exdsq, I run a nonprofit, Quill.org, that serves five million students in the United States, and I am building an educational tool that is very similar to the "cognitive aid" goal listed as a project idea. I'm hoping to get some feedback from someone who is familiar with this space, and I was wondering if you had a moment to scan over our application before we send it? If you're interested in taking a look, it'd be a huge help if you could reach out to me at peter (at) quill (dot) org! I'd be really grateful for your input. -- The learning tool we are building now maps to this project idea from the FTX Fund: "AI-based cognitive aids - One of the great hopes for advanced AI systems is that they might enhance human reason—allowing people to explore lines of argument more carefully and efficiently, and to detect important errors in their reasoning. We’d like to kickstart this work, so that it keeps up with AI progress as much as possible. For example, could a fine-tuned version of GPT-3 be trained to identify misleading statements, and provide the best arguments and counterarguments for different views? We’d love to see products with this sort of technology that people will actually want to use."

[Shindi]

Maybe it's wrong to place less emphasis on renewable energy but one of the arguments I hear in EA circles is that renewable energy/climate activism is already popular and gaining support. It's not a neglected cause area.

However causes like malaria prevention are pretty unsexy and don't get much love even though it's cheap, easily preventable.

Also, not talked about != not a worthy cause area to pursue.

[pmichaud]

One of the basic metrics that EA people track is "neglect," so if there's a way to make a big impact that actually seems possible to do, but also there's already a lot of people and money doing it (ie., it's not "neglected"), then EA people will mostly just let the other people do it.

The idea is to spend each marginal dollar in a high impact way, and a marginal dollar into a cause area that is already flush with cash won't make a big difference.

Getting more talent (instead of money) into the field is a different kind of intervention, but the energy field fails a different metric here which is "tractability," in the sense that EA people don't have any particular expertise or advantage in recruiting or training game-changing talent for the field, so it's not "tractable" even though it would hypothetically be nice if more top talent were in the field.