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I’ve lately helped Giving What We Can extend their charity evaluation to climate change mitigation charities. This is a less abridged draft of a more polished post up on their blog.

Suppose you wanted to prevent climate change. What methods would get you the most emissions reduction for your money?

GWWC research has recently tried to answer this question, with a preliminary investigation of a number of climate change mitigation charities. Another time, I’ll discuss our investigation and its results in more detail. This time I’m going to tell you about some of the high level arguments and considerations we encountered for focusing on some kinds of mitigation methods over others.

The binding budget consideration

The world’s nations have been trying to negotiate agreements, limiting their future emissions in concert. The emissions targets chosen in such agreements are intended to sum up to meet a level deemed ‘safe’. Suppose some day such agreements are achieved. It seems then that any emissions you have reduced in advance will just be extra that someone will be allowed to emit after that agreement.

This argument implies political strategies are better than more direct means of reducing emissions. In particular, political strategies directed at causing such an agreement to come about.

This argument may sound plausible, but note that it relies on the following assumptions:

1. the probability of such an agreement being formed is not substantially altered by prior emissions reductions

2. the emissions targets set in such an agreement are not sensitive to the cost of achieving them

3. such targets will be met, or we will fail to meet them by a similar margin regardless of how far we begin from them.

None of these is very plausible. Agreement seems more likely if it will be cheaper for the parties to uphold, or if it is more expensive to have no agreement. These are both altered by prior emissions reductions. There is no threshold of danger at which targets will automatically be set; more expensive targets are presumably less likely to be chosen. Two degrees is especially likely due to past discussions, however as it becomes harder to meet it becomes less likely to be retained as the goal. The further we begin from the targets we set, the less likely we are to attain them. Overall, it seems unclear whether reducing emissions by a tonne yourself will encourage more or less abatement through future large scale agreements. Either way, it is probably not a large effect. Consequently no adjustment is made for this consideration in our analysis.

Correcting feedback adjustments

Suppose you protect a hectare of rainforest from being felled. The people who would have bought the wood still want wood though, so the price of wood increases a little. This encourages others to fell their forests a little more, canceling some of your gains.

This is how prices work in general: when you buy something, the world makes a bit more of that thing, but not as much as you bought. If you buy a barrel of oil and bury it, you reduce the total oil to be burned, but by less than one barrel. Others respond to the higher price of oil after you buy some by drilling for more.

These considerations are real, and well known by economists. The big question is, how much do these feedbacks reduce the effect of your efforts?

This depends on what are known as the ‘price elasticity of supply’ and the ‘price elasticity of demand’. These measure how much more wood is harvested if the price of wood goes up by one percent, and how much more wood is wanted if the price goes down by one percent. Let’s call these ES and ED. If you ‘buy’ one unit of forest and keep it from being logged, the reduction in logged forest is ED/(ED + ES). Supply and demand elasticities are known for many items. If we can’t find these figures however, we may estimate ES and ED to be roughly equal, so estimate the real effect of reducing logging to be half of what it first seems.

Many other kinds of correcting feedbacks work in a similar way. If you reduce carbon emissions by a tonne, everyone else will be a tiny bit less concerned about climate change in expectation, and make a tiny bit less effort to prevent it. If you put an extra tonne of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, plants and the oceans will absorb carbon dioxide a tiny bit faster, so the total added to the atmosphere will be less than a tonne.

The selfish tech concern

New technologies could greatly aid climate change mitigation. Unlike many other approaches however, private businesses have large economic incentives to pursue innovation projects. This is often seen as reason to avoid paying for technological progress: if you didn’t donate, businesses would do it anyway. Plus they have probably already taken the good opportunities.

The truth appears to be quite the opposite. Suppose we break projects up into two categories: those that have attracted some private investment, and those that have not. A random project from the first category is actually likely to be better than a project from the second category.

Self-interested companies will invest in clean energy research until the costs exceed the private benefits (the gains that return to them, instead of everyone else). This means at the point that they stop, you know that the costs and the private gains are about equal. If you buy more at this point, to get public gains, on the margin this is close to free for you because private gains almost cancel the costs.

For a random project without private investment, you just know that the private gains are somewhere below the costs. Probably they are far below, so it is substantially more expensive. This could be made up for if it had larger public benefits, but there seems little reason to expect this. In particular, if private and public gains are correlated, you would not expect this. In general, funding extra work on self-interested projects will be more effective than funding projects that only altruists ever cared for.

The worthless tonne concern

What if you can only reduce carbon emissions by a single puny tonne? Or if you have a project to reduce emissions, but it can’t get to the ‘heart of the problem’, merely make a small dent cheaply then run out of steam?

Many people feel that with since climate change is a very big problem, contributing a small amount to its solution is not worth much, compared to completely solving a proportionally smaller problem, such as one person’s illness. If you contribute a tiny bit, other people may not contribute the rest of what is needed to solve the problem. Or China might increase its emissions so much as to dwarf reduction efforts in your country. A common sense is that your efforts have then been wasted.

This would be true if the amount of carbon in the atmosphere didn’t make much difference except at a threshold. That is, if ‘solving climate change’ was worth a lot, while ‘almost solving climate change’ was worth little.

This is not the situation we are in. Firstly, as far as we know the costs from climate change don’t come at big thresholds like that – each extra bit of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere makes climate change a bit worse. ‘Safety’ targets such as two degrees do not signify steep changes in harm. They are lines chosen to represent costs ‘too large’ by some agreed standards, to focus mitigation efforts.

Secondly, even if there were steep thresholds, we don’t know where they are. Which makes reducing emissions on the margin as good in expectation as if there weren’t thresholds, though more chancy. Often your effort will do nothing, while sometimes it does everything. This is similar to running for a bus which leaves at an unknown time – at many times your running won’t help, but sometimes it will make all the difference. Overall, if you run a bit more you’re a bit more likely to catch the bus.

So a tonne of reduced emissions is worth about as much whether it is the only tonne you contribute, or one of millions.

Hidden help complications

Suppose a charity tries to shut down coal plants, and coal plants are indeed shut down. This is not strong evidence that the charity has achieved anything. Other charities may also have been trying to shut down coal plants, and coal plants close for many reasons. On the other hand, the charity may have made many other power plants more likely to close, which you don’t see because they in fact stayed open. How can you say how much good this charity has done?

There is not a simple answer. You will want to find a way to estimate what would have happened otherwise. You will need to decide whether to credit a charity with the difference in probability of outcomes they seem to have caused, or with what actually happened. The former avoids extra randomness and better counts the effort that you want, while the latter is much easier to measure, and harder to manipulate. Another question is whether to credit charities with the marginal or average value of contributing to a project alongside other charities, or something else. For instance, if the first charity working on something makes a large difference, but each added charity helps less, do you divide the gains between them, credit each with almost nothing, or credit each successive one with less?

The unruly future consideration

Suppose you reduce emissions by stopping some forest from being logged. Even if you do a good job of this, it might be hard to protect it from being logged in fifty years. You have bought the people in the future the option of continuing to lock up the carbon, but circumstances and economic incentives will be different, and it’s not clear whether they will take it. If the forest is logged in fifty years, you will have basically delayed some climate change for fifty years, ignoring e.g. short term emissions exacerbating feedbacks and producing more emissions.

Thus protecting the forest reduces most of the harm it appears to in the short term, but an increasingly small fraction of harms moving into the future, as the cumulative probability that it will be logged rises. How much this is worth overall depends on where the harms are concentrated. Increasing costs to the climate moving further from what we are used to suggest costs will be concentrated in the further future. But wealth, technology progress and adaptation push hard in the other direction. Also, people are more likely to continue your mitigation in cases where climate change turns out to be worse in the future. I am not sure the overall effect. This consideration could erode a large fraction of the value of a mitigation project.

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These have been some of the issues considered in our quest to find the best organizations for turning dollars into reduced greenhouse emissions. If our analyses of them are adequate, next time we will bring you the finest climate change charities a brief investigation can find.

I’m sympathetic to the view that many human behaviors are for signaling. However so far it doesn’t seem like a very tight theory. We have a motley pile of actions labeled as ‘maybe signaling’, connected to a diverse range of characteristics one might want to signal. We have a story for why each would make sense, and also why lots of behaviors that don’t exist would make sense. However I don’t know why we would use the signals we do in particular, or why we would particularly signal the characteristics that we do. When I predict whether a middle class Tahitian man would want to appear to his work colleagues as if he was widely traveled, and whether he would do this by showing them photographs, my answers are entirely based on my intuitive picture of humans and holidays and so on; I don’t see how to derive them from my theory of signaling. Here are two more niggling puzzles:

Why would we use message-specific costly signals for some messages, when we use explicit language + social retribution for so many others?

Much of the time when you speak to others, your values diverge from theirs at least a little. Often they would forward their own interests best by deceiving you, ignoring social costs and conscience. But even in situations where risks from their dishonesty are large, your usual mode of communication is probably spoken or written language.

This is still a kind of costly signaling, as long as if the person faces the right threats of social retribution. Which they usually do I think. If a person says to you that they have a swimming pool, or that they write for the Economist, or that your boyfriend said you should give his car keys to them, you will usually trust them. You are usually safe trusting such claims, because if someone made them dishonestly they could expect to be found out with some probability, and punished. In cases where this isn’t so – for instance if it is a stranger trying to borrow your boyfriend’s car – you will be much less trusting accordingly.

This mode of costly signaling seems very flexible – spoken language can represent any message you might want to send, and the same machinery of social sanctions can be used to guard many messages at once. And we do use this for a lot of our communication. So why do we use different one-off codes for some small class of messages? What sets that class apart?

The main obvious limitation of language + social sanctions is that it requires a threat of social retribution large enough to discourage lying. This might be hard to arrange, if for instance there are very large gains from lying, if lies are hard to find, or if the person who might lie doesn’t rely on good relationships with the people who might be offended by the lies. So maybe we use non-costly signaling in those cases?

In many of those cases we do use a kind of costly signal, yet a different variant again to the kind hypothesized to covertly pervade human interactions. This type of signal is the explicit credential. When a taxi-driver-to-be takes a driving test or has a background check, then displays his qualifications, this is a signaling display. Acquiring these documents is much cheaper for a person who can drive and has a clean background, and you (or the taxi company) know this and treat him differently if he makes these signals. I say this seems different from the social signaling we usually think of because it is explicitly intended as a signal, and everyone readily accepts that that is the goal, and is fine with it. Which almost brings me to the next puzzle. In conclusion, it’s not clear whether the signaling that we usually think of as such mostly occurs in situations where language and social sanctions are hard to use, but it is at least not the only thing used in such cases.

Why is signaling seen as bad? Why don’t we know about our own signaling?

It is often taken as given that signaling is bad. If a person comes to believe that a behavior they once partook in is for signaling, it is not unusual for them to give it up on those grounds alone, without even noticing the step of inference required between ‘is for signaling’ and ‘is bad’. A signaling theory is apparently a cynical theory.

This seems odd, as badness is not implied at all by the theoretical costly signaling model. There, signaling can be bad or good socially, depending on the costs of carrying it out. There are gains from assorting people well – it is better if the good people do the important jobs for instance – but no guarantee that the costs of the fight won’t overwhelm the gains.

Another related oddity is that people are supposed to be mostly unaware that they are signaling. Nobody bats an eyelid when a person claims to realize that they were doing a thing for signaling in the past. Talk of signaling is full of ‘Maybe I’m just doing this for signaling, but …’. Yet in the naive model of human psychology, it is at least a bit odd to be unaware of your motives in taking an action until months later. It’s true that people quite often don’t appear to have a good grasp of their own drives, yet in signaling this seems to be the normal expectation. And again, the theoretical model of costly signaling says nothing of this. It’s not obvious why you should expect this at all, given that model.

Another reason this seems strange is that we do have a lot of other explicit forms of signaling that we are aware of and ok with, as mentioned above (qualifying tests, ID cards, licenses). It is not that we have a problem with spending effort on almost-zero-sum games, or paying costs to look good.

An explanation

I’d like to suggest an explanation: costly signaling (of the message-specific unconscious variety) is largely used to communicate illicit messages. For instance, many messages about one’s own wealth, accomplishments, status, or sexual situation, and other messages about social maneuvering and judgement, seem to be illicit. Such things are also common targets of signaling theories, though my reasons for suggesting this explanation are mostly theoretical.

Illicit messages can’t be honestly transmitted using language and social norms, for a few reasons. Illicit things often shouldn’t be said explicitly, for plausible deniability, to avoid common knowledge, etc. This means you generally can’t use language to communicate illicit things, because language is explicit. This is one reason language + social retribution doesn’t work well for illicit messages. But also if you successfully have plausible deniability or prevent the message spreading far, both of these make social retribution hard to arrange. So implicit messages are quite hard to make honest through language + social retribution. Or through explicit verification for that matter, which is similar. Yet if such messages are to be listened to at all, they need some other guarantee, which other kinds of non-explicit costly signaling can provide. So this would explain the first puzzle.

If we had a set of signals just for illicit messages, it would be very silly to claim that we were aware of sending such things, and perhaps upsetting to believe that we were and to lie about it. So for the usual reasons that people are thought to be unaware of their less desirable tendencies, it wouldn’t be surprising if people were unaware of the signals they were sending. And if such signals were largely used for illicit messages, it would be unsurprising if we universally thought of signaling as an illicit activity. So this would explain the second puzzle.

Oftentimes, the correct response to an argument is ‘your argument appears after cursory investigation to make sense, however the fact that many smart people have never mentioned this to me suggests that there are good counterarguments, so I remain unconvinced’.

I basically never hear this response, which suggests that there are good counterarguments. Or alternatively that it is unappealing to respond accurately in such cases. The latter seems very plausible, because it suggests one cannot assess any argument at the drop of a hat.

If so, what do people actually say instead? My guess is the first argument they can think of that points in the direction that seems right. This seems unfortunate, as the ensuing discussion of that counterargument that nobody believes can’t possibly resolve the debate, nor is of much interest to anyone.

Effective altruism is all the rage. And as we all know, a highly effectively altruistic thing to do is bring about more effective altruism. However, the optimal mixture of activities for promoting effectiveness is not identical to that for promoting altruism. They are upheld by different norms, and require different efforts to expand and arguments to proliferate. Which brings us to a need for prioritization. So, which is better: effectiveness or altruism?

By this I mean, which is the better recipient of marginal promotion effort?

For background, I’m visiting the Oxford Effective Altruists at the moment. Conversations here made it salient to me that my implicit views on this question have changed a lot since I was a teenager, and also differ from others’ in the EA movement. So I thought I’d lay them out.

When I was younger, I thought altruism was about the most promising way to make the world better. There were extremely cheap figures around for the cost to save a human life, and people seemed to not care. So prima facie it seemed that the highly effective giving opportunities were well worked out, and the main problem was that people tended to give $2 to such causes occasionally, rather than giving every spare cent they had, that wasn’t already earmarked for something more valuable than human lives.

These days I am much more optimistic about improving effectiveness than altruism, and not just because I’m less naive about cost-effectiveness estimates. Here are some considerations:

Past success

So far, effectiveness has bought more than altruism for EAs, arguably. That is, giving an ordinary amount highly effectively will buy more good than giving a highly altruistic amount in an ordinary way. The difference between a normal amount of giving and a highly altruistic one is around 20x by my reckoning. I’m not sure what the mean charity is, but my impression is that it is less than 1/20th as useful as the best things we know of. Better data on this welcome.

Furthermore, perhaps the quest for producing altruistic value can learn from the more popular quest to produce selfish value. There have been efforts both to encourage people to be more selfish (see Ayn Rand) and to find cost-effective ways to direct selfish efforts. As far as I can tell, the former might even produce negative selfish value for people, whereas mankind has become reasonably good at finding selfishly valuable investments. But you might reasonably retort that the quest for selfish value has less to gain from changing values, given the ubiquity of selfishness. Also, selfish people have little reason to spread selfishness. The spread of useful understanding for prioritizing selfish actions is perhaps largely because information is reusable and hard to contain.

Neglect

Effectiveness is much rarer and altruism more common than I assumed when younger. Altruism is actually done to extremes reasonably often. Perhaps more importantly, pushing for effectiveness is much rarer than pushing for altruism. People are neither naturally very effective in their altruistic endeavors, nor driven to look for effectiveness and praise it in others. Altruism on the other hand is universally liked, and celebrated in others. It is searched for on first dates, and praised at funerals. Quite a lot of effort has been put into encouraging it.  

ROOM FOR MORE FUNDING (marginal value)

There appear to be high value ways to encourage effectiveness, such as by doing or funding the research others need to be effective, and making it appealing to use. For instance, it seems that producing trustworthy prioritization of high level causes (e.g. poverty alleviation vs. technological progress) could easily produce more value from redirecting others’ funds than one competent person’s lifetime of giving to AMF, and I think would take less than one competent person’s lifetime. So I think such prioritization is a better investment than AMF, which makes it a good investment.

In encouraging altruism, I don’t know of any particularly promising directions. The most effective I have seen is probably Peter Singer‘s method, of writing for a popular audience, encouraging readers to resolve their moral inconsistencies in favor of altruism. I’m not sure if you can do such a thing again however; the low hanging fruit may be eaten, and Singer may have been especially well equipped to pick them.

UPSIDE

There’s only so altruistic a person can be, and the limit is within about an order of magnitude of where a lot of people are. We know what this would look like: about ten times better than what a Giving What We Can member’s achievements looks like. It seems on the other hand that there are much higher reaches of good prioritization that we haven’t seen – it isn’t clear how good the best visible opportunities could be, if we could spot them.

Flow-through effects

Effectiveness probably leads to altruism more than the other way around

An intuitive story is that if a person really cared about helping, they would be naturally driven to find exceptionally good ways to do so. The fact that ‘effective altruism’ is a thing suggests this is not so, for whatever odd/cynical reason.

On the other hand, learning that one can can help others more cheaply than one thought, and having more confidence in the reliableness of the estimates producing this belief, seems to encourage altruism. People are moved by Peter Singer’s story of the child in the pond in a way they would arguably not be if the passerby had to make a very substantial sacrifice and was less confident about the outcome of his action. On the other hand, on the way to improving effectiveness, we often learn that things are less effective than we thought, which will presumably undermine altruism by this reasoning.

Economics of information

An abstract consideration in favor of expecting higher returns to encouraging effectiveness is that much progress on effectiveness is in the form of producing insights and other information, which can be shared, reused, and built upon.

Effectiveness is more valuable when applied broadly

My impression is that in every part of the world, not just in philanthropy, better systems for assessing opportunities and making good decisions promise great gains. Altruism is not the only place where where contemporary efforts are primitive. Progress in prioritizing altruistic endeavors should often be applicable to this larger worthy project. Progress in effectiveness often comes with the accumulation of insights and other information, and information can be shared, reused, and built upon in a way that a pile of altruists can’t be so well. If people weren’t altruistic at all, but were basically cooperative (for selfish reasons), and they could discern of good policies from bad as perfectly as publicly available information would allow, I think this would make the world much better.

Altruism too appears to have many benefits outside of philanthropy. If people were more considerate of one another in general, they would avoid many harms from externalities and failures to coordinate. My sense is that within the plausible ranges of change however, these gains are smaller.  If everyone was extremely well meaning but as just as uncertain about how best to act as we are today I would also expect things to go better but not nearly as much.

One thing that contributes to these intuitions is my impression that the difference in social effects between a person who is nice enough to have enjoyable relationships and one who is particularly kind at cost to themself is smaller than the difference in effect between a person who has a good sense of how to achieve what they want, and one who acts without regard to strategy.

This intuition also depends on one’s answer to the question of why things go wrong in the world. Some ills are intentional malice, some are unchecked side effects of selfishness, and some are from ignorance and error. Altruism makes a dent on malice and selfishness, whereas progress in effectiveness diminishes the costs from ignorance and error.

I’m inclined to think that ignorance and error make up a large part of the problem, though not obviously most. My guess is selfishness makes up most of the rest, and malice is small.

Naively, avoiding ignorance and error should be an easier sell: everyone wants their own choices to be better, whereas I’d expect more hesitance about increasing their willingness to sacrifice for others. However after effort has been put into both, this may not be true on the margin. Also, there are many ways to make people more altruistic in effect that don’t involve changing their values per se, e.g. arranging for them to feel better when they are being altruistic, or to have social support for it.

Measurement

Ironically, cost-effectiveness seems hard to measure. You can go by the current value for money estimate of your best cause, but this has a tendency to decrease as the quality of the estimate increases. This makes it a less good target for improvement, as it is harder to know when you are improving it, and easier for standards to decline without anyone noticing (this should go under the next section). On the other hand, there are relatively good (if imperfect) measures of altruism, such as ‘what fraction of your income do you give to charity?’.

Long term durability

One last consideration is how changes in altruism and changes in effectiveness will last. I am not optimistic about changes in values lasting well. At first glance, if it was easy enough for you to shift others’ values, you might expect them to shift again the next time someone pushes on them. Perhaps the situation is more complicated though. For instance, perhaps altruism is stickier than other values: it just inherently makes more sense, so once you have it you keep it. Or perhaps it spreads more easily: only altruists care about spreading their values to others. But in these kinds of situations, spreading altruism is still not as helpful as it looks, because everyone will end up there soon enough anyway.

The same goes for people valuing ‘being effective’ highly. However as I mentioned earlier, changes in effectiveness often involve insights that can accumulate. This makes it harder for progress to be completely reversed. Humans have come to not care much at all about hand-weaving, but still our accumulated insights on it mean that whenever anyone wants to weave stuff by hand, they can do it very effectively.

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In summary, I think effectiveness is relatively neglected, though it has a better track record of success, more room for funding, better upsides, and produces better flow-through effects.