With that in mind, here are seven thought experiments related to happiness and suffering that might make you see your intrinsic values a bit differently:

— we don’t necessarily know our values —

Unfortunately, our deepest values are not something we automatically know about ourselves. The conscious side of our mind doesn’t have direct access to the rest of our mind. And much of what we care about lies in the subconscious, meaning that our explicit beliefs about our values may not be comprehensive or even accurate. So this at least opens the possibility that we might subconsciously value increasing strangers’ well-being more than we realize.

— our values are affected by our beliefs —

Some of what we value hinges on our beliefs about what’s true. And so if some of our relevant beliefs are false, or we haven’t fully explored all the implications of those beliefs (e.g., two things we believe imply a third thing but we haven’t realized that), then what we think we value may be, in a certain sense, “wrong”. So this at least opens the possibility that we might hold beliefs that are false or that contradict each other, such that, once they are corrected or the contradictions are resolved, we may end up caring more about increasing the well-being of strangers than we think we do now.

— our understanding of our values evolves —

We figure out our own values over time as we carefully introspect, discuss our values with others, compare options, notice and resolve contradictions, refine our understanding of the truth, flesh out the implications of what we already think is true, and infer things about ourselves from our own reactions. Hence, it is not that strange to think that our understanding of our values may change as we engage in reflection.

— a growing ember of classical utilitarianism —

So we may not fully understand what we value.

And I am proposing that through thought experiments about values, if carefully considered and reflected upon, quite a lot of people may realize that they care more about working to increase happiness or reduce suffering than they had originally thought. That many people are *partly* classical utilitarians in their values, even if they haven’t realized it, and that thought experiments can expose this.

— the thought experiments —

Warning: references to intense suffering and very difficult tradeoffs

(1) Suffering is bad, and not just for me

Remember that time when you felt really intense physical suffering (e.g., maybe you had a really nasty stomach flu)? Don’t dwell on that time, because I don’t want you to suffer now, but remember it just for a moment. Remember how much that suffering sucked?

Now take a few seconds to imagine a stranger. Someone you’ve never met and never will meet, but perhaps you passed them on the street at some point in your life. Take a moment to picture their face.

Now, suppose that right now this stranger is suffering in that same exact way that you recalled yourself suffering a moment ago. Assume this person is not someone who has done something terrible to deserve that suffering.

How do you feel about a state of the world where this stranger is suffering? Contrast it to a state of the world where that person is happy. I bet you think the latter world is better than the former.

I ran a survey asking people about their intrinsic values, that is, those things they value that they would continue to value even if no other consequences occurred as a result of that thing. In it, 49% of people (from the general U.S. mechanical Turk population that seemed to understand the question) reported that “people I don’t know suffer less than they do normally” is an intrinsic value, and 50% reported that “people I don’t know feel happy” is an intrinsic value.

It’s tough to measure people’s intrinsic values, and this is not a population that is fully representative of the U.S. population, so the exact numbers should be taken with a grain of salt. But these results suggest to me that many people do care about the suffering of strangers.

But now, the next question is, what properties should your caring about strangers have?

—

(2) Your friends care about the suffering of their friends

You presumably want the world to contain more of what your friends value (and less of what they disvalue) insofar as these values don’t conflict with your own.

Well, there’s a very good chance that one of the things your friends value is that their friends don’t suffer. Another thing your friends probably value is that their own friends get the things they value too, which presumably includes not wanting the friends of their friends (who are the friends of your friends’ friends) to suffer.

In other words, just by caring about the values of your friends, you may also care about the suffering of a whole host of other strangers. Not necessarily all strangers, but a lot of people you will never meet.

—

(3) More suffering is worse (a.k.a. scope sensitivity)

Suppose that 1 innocent person experiences a painful electric shock for one hour. How bad do you feel that is? Now suppose that, instead of that, 100 innocent people each experience the same electric shock for one hour. How much worse does that seem to you? Take a moment to consider it.

Now 10,000 people. How bad is that? Now 1,000,000 people. How bad is that?

At first, you may feel on a raw gut level that the 1,000,000 suffering is not that much worse than 1 person suffering. But are you really taking into account how many people 1,000,000 is? That’s about the entire population of San Francisco.

Notice how, when you really think about it, and you really try to get the enormity of the large numbers, 1,000,000 innocent people each experiencing a painful electric shock for one hour is way, way, way worse than 1 person experiencing it. Not just, say, twice as bad. But MUCH worse.

That implies that, for instance, eradicating a common and horribly debilitating disease that ten million people would otherwise get is not just a little bit more valuable than helping, say, 1000 people live slightly easier lives. It’s way, way, way more valuable!

I’m not saying you necessarily value a reduction in 1 million units of suffering as being 1 million times more valuable than a reduction in one unit of suffering, just that you probably do think it’s MUCH more valuable.

—

(4) Selfishness does not dominate

What’s the thing you value most in the world? Your life, maybe? Or your happiness? Or maybe something involving another person? My guess is that no matter how much you value this, there is an amount of suffering you’d be willing to give this up to alleviate.

For instance, if you had to give up your life to prevent all future suffering on earth, I bet you would do it, as terrible and unfair a choice as it would be to make.

—

(5) We should help suffering strangers when it is easy (a version of the famous drowning child thought experiment that Peter Singer has popularized)

Suppose a stranger you’re walking behind suddenly teeters and then collapses in front of you. The person is now lying on the ground, clearly in tremendous pain. You are the only person nearby.

I think most of us feel that even though we didn’t cause this person to be ill, we still have a moral obligation to try to help them. That is, (a) not being the cause of suffering doesn’t make us totally off the hook with regard to trying to relieve that suffering.

Furthermore, suppose that it would be a small inconvenience for us to help this person (e.g., we might have to show up 15 minutes late to a fairly important work meeting). I think most of us would still help this person (and would feel that it is the right thing to do). If true, that suggests that (b), if the size of the potential reduction of suffering to another person is much greater than our own loss by our helping them, we probably should help.

Finally, suppose that instead of this being a stranger right in front of us, we imagine that this is a stranger who we happened to have accidentally just Skype called by accident (by entering our friend’s user ID incorrectly). Assuming we don’t believe the person on the other end is faking, shouldn’t we still try to figure out some way to help this person (assuming it is feasible), even though they are far away? Of course, if we have no way to help them, obviously, we have no obligation to help. But suppose we can think of an easy way to help, shouldn’t we do it? This suggests that (c) our obligation to help doesn’t depend on how far away someone is, only on our ability to help that person.

We must then remember, of course, that there are people we could help around the world at little inconvenience to ourselves.

Even if you agree with (a), (b), and (c), that doesn’t mean that you think you should devote all your time and money to helping people who are suffering. But if you do agree with those points, then I suspect your value system tells you that you should expend at least some of your resources helping reduce suffering in others, if you have the means to do so without too much sacrifice.

—

(6) Other values may seem to diminish when happiness is even slightly reduced as a consequence of them

Suppose that you happen to have found out that (through no action on your part) certain people have a false belief about a certain topic. Furthermore, you know they would believe you if you corrected this belief.

The problem is that these people would all be slightly less happy if they knew the truth about this thing, and in fact, nobody would benefit in any way from this truth being known.

Would you tell these people? Well, you may think truth is important (I do too), but you may feel that it substantially takes the wind out of the sails of truth if all people involved are less happy because of it, and nobody benefits. I think in this case, some people will say, “What is the point of the truth if everyone suffers slightly more because of it?” In other words, they might feel the value of truth is reduced to almost nothing.

This isn’t just about truth. For instance, you can do a version of this thought experiment about equality (what if, in a particular group of people, you could make the group more equal in some dimension, but every single member of the group would be slightly less happy as a result). Or you can do it for almost any other value.

My guess is that these other values seem quite a bit less valuable (and perhaps to some not even valuable at all) when everyone is slightly less happy as a consequence, highlighting the potential importance of happiness in your value system.

Note that you may not necessarily feel this property is symmetrical with other values. For instance, suppose that someone reduces suffering a significant amount, but in doing so causes the people involved in the situation to have slightly less accurate beliefs. You may not feel that the slight reduction in accurate beliefs makes the reduction in suffering itself any less valuable.

—

(7) We can at least agree on suffering

Some people like apples and others like oranges. Some want to spread atheism, and others want to spread theism. Some people think you should obey authorities, while others value freedom of thought. But one of the few dimensions we are just about all similar on is that we don’t want to suffer ourselves, and we don’t want the people we love to suffer.

Some people are perhaps exceptions (e.g., Christopher Hitchens claimed Mother Teresa believed suffering to be at least sometimes good, quoting her as saying “I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people.”) I’m not sure what she meant by that or whether she would apply that to her own suffering or that of her loved ones, but it’s a possible exception.

That being said, though, disagreement on the badness of suffering seems really rare. Nearly everyone seems to find suffering bad, at least when it happens to themselves or their loved ones.

So if we all had to work as a species to reduce one thing, suffering seems like a pretty good contender. It’s hard to think of another thing we all dislike more.

— final thoughts —

Taken together, these thought experiments suggest (insofar as you buy into them) that you may believe:

(1) Suffering is bad when it happens to strangers

(2) You at least somewhat care about the suffering of many strangers by virtue of caring about the values of those people you care about

(3) More suffering of strangers is worse than less, and way, way more suffering is much worse still

(4) Your own self-interest is not more valuable than the potential for reducing all the suffering in the world

(5) We should put at least a little effort into reducing the suffering of strangers if it’s not too costly for us to do so, and we should not care whether those strangers are far away or near

(6) Most other values don’t seem as great if the result of producing them is to cause everyone involved to suffer slightly more, with no one benefiting, and these other values may even seem to lose their value in these cases

(7) We can all at least agree that suffering is bad and work together to reduce it

These points are not the same as classic utilitarianism, but they point in roughly the same direction as it does, I think. And anecdotally, some people seem to be quite impacted in their ethical views by thought experiments like these (though of course we can’t be sure it’s because they are revealing their deeper values as opposed to actually reshaping those values).

I don’t think that increasing the happiness of and/or reducing the suffering of conscious beings is the ONLY thing you care about. Nor do I think you SHOULD only care about those things.

But perhaps these thought experiments will make you realize that you care more about them than you thought you did, or that you’re more of a classic utilitarian than you realized.

This piece was first written on June 2, 2018, and first appeared on my website on December 2, 2025.

Note: here, I use the term “success” merely in terms of achievement, career success, or high levels of expertise, NOT in terms of happiness, living a good life, morality, having strong social bonds, etc. There is nothing wrong with not wanting to be successful in the way this post focuses on. But if you DO want “success” in the sense in which it is used in this post (or you are interested in being able to predict it in others), you may find some of the models here useful.

I’m also interested to know: which model (below) do you find most useful for thinking about success, and which one of these factors (used in the models) do you think is currently most limiting your success?

1. Noise theory:

success = luck

2. Genetic determinism:

success = (innate) aptitude + luck

Note: whenever I use “luck,” I mean random factors not already accounted for in the other factors in the model. So in the case above, “luck” means luck other than the random chance of what your aptitude is.

3. Traditional right:

success = aptitude + surrounding culture + hard work

4. Social justice left:

success = privilege + luck

5. Economic left:

success = social/economic class you’re born into + luck

6. Cynical theory:

success = some combination of self-promotion, bullshitting, social skills, good-lookingness, starting resources, and luck

7. Gladwell: 

success = whoever practiced for 10,000 hours + luck

8. Dweck: 

success = aptitude + growth mindset + luck

9. Duckworth: 

success = aptitude + growth mindset + grit + luck

10. Seligman: 

success = skill * effort * self-promotion * luck

11. Psychometrics: 

success = IQ + conscientiousness + low neuroticism + luck

12. Ericsson: 

success = luck + hours spent doing “deliberate practice” (i.e., with specific goals and tight performance feedback loops, while analyzing mistakes and dividing skills into micro-skills that can be practiced independently, ideally all done under the supervision of expert coaches)

13. My mega model:

success at a fixed goal = luck^a

* (resources+opportunities)^b

* (community/collaborator quality and supportiveness)^c

* (innate aptitude at relevant skills)^d

* intelligence^e

* rationality^f

* (creativity and resourcefulness)^g

* (social skills)^h

* (hours of deliberate practice)^i

* (unitary or obsessive focus on the goal)^j

* (conscientiousness and self-control)^k

* (physical or mental health)^l

* confidence^m

* (ambition and agency/self-directedness)^n

* (self-promotion skill and effort)^o

* courage^p

* (goal/task-specific factors)^q

* (efficiency and prioritization)^r

Each exponent a, b, c, …, r is a different number from 0 to 1. Note that each of these traits is selected because I believe, on average, having more of them improves the chance of success – that’s why I exclude negative exponents. Furthermore, I’m claiming that these factors, on average, each have diminishing marginal returns. That’s why the exponents are each less than 1 (making a concave function).

The values of the exponents vary depending on the field and type of skill. For instance, in some areas, courage is a minor factor (in which case the courage exponent, n, would be close to 0, and in other fields, courage is essential, in which case n would be close to 1). So, in other words: success is a PRODUCT of roughly 18 factors, and how much each factor matters depends on what you’re trying to do.

Note that this is designed so that if you have literally 0 of any factor, then the level of success is automatically 0 (since 0 times any number is 0). For instance, if you have literally no physical health, you are, presumably, dead, and if you have literally no ambition, presumably you just sit around all day or do the minimum you need to eat.

It’s worth noting that the factors above are not completely statistically or causally independent in reality (becoming higher in one may make you higher in another, on average). But I think the enormous extra complexity of trying to account for these dependencies probably is not worth it in practice.

How do you improve your odds of success?

A lot of times, when people are extremely successful, I think it’s because they avoid being TOO low in any of the factors, and they have one or two factors where they are exceptionally high. Many factors are “bounded” ones: for instance, you can’t work more than 24 hours per day. So it’s impossible to work more than 3x the amount the average person does. But there are some “unbounded” factors where you can potentially be WAY higher than the average person (e.g., “creativity”), which can drive the success score very high (as long as no other factor is close enough to zero to drag it back down). Hence, this model leads to an approach for thinking about how to be more successful (if that’s something you care about).

Put simply, success often flows from not being TOO weak on really important factors and having one or two really strong (and relevant) strengths.

Getting into more detail, here is a process you might use to consider how to increase your odds of great success:

1. For the goal/task you’re trying to succeed at, figure out which of the above factors matter substantially (which maps onto trying to – very roughly – figure out the exponents for each factor).

2. If your strong/weak factors are not a good fit for the goal, consider changing the goal to better play to your strengths, or consider teaming up with someone (e.g., a co-founder) to compensate for your weaknesses.

3. Once you have settled on a goal, identify any especially low factors (relevant to that goal) that are driving your potential for success down, and think about how you can improve at those. Due to multiplicative effects, very low factors can really drag down your potential for success. For instance, if you have severe mental health challenges that interfere with your day-to-day tasks, working on that first can be a great idea (even if you’re just optimizing for success).

4. Identify your strongest factors (that are relevant to that goal) and think about how you might improve at them or hone them to get them VERY high. You can also figure out how to make even more use of these great strengths of yours to achieve good outcomes. Often, one of the most effective things we can focus on is leaning into our greatest strengths (for instance, by designing a path towards our goals that leverages them or working to enhance them even more). This is especially the case once we’ve gotten barriers to success out of the way (i.e., we’ve worked on improving our especially low factors).

A question for you: right now, which of the factors listed above is the one that is most significantly limiting your success?

This piece was first written on September 12, 2021 and first appeared on this site on March 25, 2022.

Here are a number of reasons why altruism is often rational:

I. People can value altruism for its own sake:

1. Intrinsic values: as a psychological fact, most humans intrinsically value at least some things as ends (not merely as means to other ends) that are not about their own gain. For instance: people may value the reduction of suffering around the world or the flourishing of the people in their country. 

2. Warm glow: most humans find that it gives them happiness to do altruistic acts. I call this “the Lucky Fact” about human nature. It’s both important and very lucky (i.e., it didn’t necessarily have to be this way if our evolution had taken a different path). We feel good to see positive feelings in the people we like, and we feel good about ourselves when we cause good feelings.

II. Genuine altruism is also instrumentally useful:

3. Evolution: there are multiple reasons evolution programmed most of us with genuine altruism, even though it optimizes for gene spread.

Altruism is rewarded in settings of:

i) raising children

ii) iterated games

iii) tribal loyalty, with punishment of defectors

iv) deception detection

4. Relationships: altruistic people tend to have stronger, happier, more goal-aligned, and mutually beneficial relationships. Although, in theory, a purely selfish person can have highly beneficial relationships, it is much harder to make these expedient tit-for-tat relationships work.

5. Pre-commitment: suppose that there was a world of highly rational, purely selfish beings. If they were able, they might pre-commit (jointly, as a group) to become partially altruistic as a way to help solve difficult collective action problems. By uniting goals, they mutually gain.

This piece was first written on December 27, 2020, and was first released on this site on February 25, 2022.

(A) Collective Action Problems, where many individuals or groups are currently better off taking action X, even though they’d be better off in the long-term if everyone agreed not to take action X.

Some of the big challenges with Collective Actions Problems are (i) getting people or groups to agree to stop the behavior in the first place, and then (ii) creating a very strong commitment mechanism so that the parties don’t just later defect against the agreement.

(B) Incentive Misalignment Problems, where many individuals or groups are currently better off taking action X, even though such actions harm the rest of society broadly.

The big challenge with an Incentive Misalignment Problem is finding some way to align the incentives of individuals and groups with the incentives of society as a whole.

Unfortunately, we humans seem to be quite bad at solving these kinds of problems on a society-wide scale much of the time (we are better at solving them on smaller scales, such as within companies and within families).

I think that figuring out how to better solve Collective Action Problems and Incentive Misalignment Problems is extremely important for the future of humanity.

Here’s my list of some of the major unsolved problems in the world right now that are of these types:

(A) Collective Action Problems

1. The development of nuclear weapons (e.g., North Korea developed them pretty recently, Iran may still develop them, the U.S. and China may still develop more of them, etc.). We would all be safer if countries could somehow credibly commit to getting rid of their nuclear weapons and never making trying to make them again.

2. Arms race dynamics in the development of advanced A.I. (e.g., where players feel rushed by competition instead of proceeding cautiously and cooperating on the numerous safety challenges).

(B) Incentive Misalignment Problems

3. Publication of risky forms of “gain-of-function” research (where researchers find ways to make viruses more infectious or more deadly to humans) and other forms of bioresearch that might threaten our species.

4. Products being optimized to generate craving, immediate hyper-stimulation, and/or addiction at the expense of long-term consumer benefit (e.g., junk food, some social media, clickbait, some video games, etc.).

5. The creation of animal products involving what seems to be vast amounts of suffering (e.g., keeping an animal in a tiny cage its whole life so that a human can spend 30 mins enjoying eating it).

7. The incentive that many groups and individuals have to spread false, misleading, and/or politically biased information; this bad information sometimes overwhelms the spread of true information on the same topics (leading to bad decisions, misinformed voters, and polarization).

8. Over-focus on the short-term welfare of society at the expense of the long term (including our own lives in 10-20 years’ time and future generations).

(C) Hybrid Collective Action Problems + Incentive Misalignment Problems

9. Running a highly risky environmental experiment with the stupendous quantity of greenhouse gases we dump into our atmosphere. If we could cooperate on taking the most cost-effective actions that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we could greatly reduce the risk. But this is not strictly a collective action problem, as there are some companies and people who would be individually better off continuing to pollute tremendous amounts (and the personal benefits to them would likely offset the projected negative impacts of global warming on them).

10. The disturbingly high levels of false results that seem to be present in various branches of science (e.g., ~40% of claims from social science papers in top journals appear not to replicate, and an even higher percentage fail to replicate in preclinical cancer biology). Even those who want to change their practices often find themselves stuck in a system that rewards shoddy practices that produce compelling-seeming results.

This piece was first written on November 16, 2020, and first appeared on this site on May 13, 2022.

Climate Strategy 1: Government Collaboration

If we collaborated, China, the U.S., India, and Europe could engage in substantial climate emission regulation (e.g., by taxing carbon, using cap-and-trade systems, setting deadlines by which certain industries must be carbon neutral, building cleaner power generation facilities, putting carbon-capturing methods in place, etc.).

A large percent of pollution comes from these regions (more than 55%, it seems; see here and here).  That’s why getting these four regions on board is so critical.

Ideally, these four regions would work closely with each other, all jointly agreeing to the measures that need to be taken (maximizing climate benefit per unit of implementation cost) and holding each other accountable. If climate change is likely to get worse, all four of these regions really do have a substantial incentive to prevent it, but there is a collective action problem where each may want to defect while getting the others to take measures to prevent it. That’s why a close collaboration is ideal, and the more enforceable, the better.

If that doesn’t happen, perhaps one or more of these regions could pressure the others into compliance. For instance, perhaps Europe could create pressure on other regions that are less motivated to take effective action (a hat tip to Justus Arnd for getting me to think about this strategy).

Climate Strategy 2: Technology

If we get really lucky, then without further intervention, technology might just advance fast enough that the problem ends up solving itself; new tech could make it in people’s own selfish interest to stop polluting so much.

I don’t think it’s at all wise to hope that we get lucky in this way, though. So a potentially viable strategy would be large (smart) investments in green tech. These could be in the form of huge prizes for key innovations that are on a critical path to reducing climate change. Or if someone can create tech that meets a certain specification, the government could guarantee it would buy a pre-specified (large) amount of it.

Or it could be that technology is accelerated by giving many grants and then making larger investments in the most promising areas. But these would have to be given out smartly – not just investing in any green tech. Such a strategy would probably involve taking many “smart risks” by putting money into new technologies that could cause large improvements if they pan out.

There are a lot of different potentially relevant technologies, from cleaner/more efficient/cheaper energy generation, to better battery technology, to carbon-capturing tech, etc. Government and non-profit funding is most valuable in those areas where tech could cause large societal benefits where the natural market reward mechanisms aren’t incentivizing sufficient action.

If all else fails, we may be able to use geoengineering-based tech strategies to solve the problem. While these could potentially be very promising, they would need to be used with enormous care to help avoid potentially catastrophic side effects or second-order consequences – and should ideally be done in careful collaboration (rather than being undertaken unilaterally).

Climate Strategy 3: Pressuring Megacorps

A surprisingly large proportion of greenhouse gases is emitted by just a few hundred companies (see here). If these companies could be effectively pressured to reduce their pollution, perhaps that could have a big impact. I’d like to give a big shout-out to Cassandra Xia, who made me aware of this very interesting approach.

How might this approach of influencing large companies work? One strategy is to combine votes from large institutional equity holders (e.g., mutual funds, colleges, sovereign wealth funds, etc.) so that they can influence these large companies to have more impact. Another strategy is to try to get consumers to demand change (and shame large companies) until they feel it is in their own financial interest to implement better practices. Of course, this has the danger that they make changes that look good from the outside without actually improving the situation.

Here’s some interesting info about this strategy: “the Climate Action 100+ initiative has an extremely specific, action-oriented agenda to pressure major corporations into cleaning up their carbon footprint. The initiative created a list of 161 focus companies – that together account for over 80% of global corporate greenhouse gas emissions – to target their efforts towards. Many of these are the sort of oil & gas majors that you’d expect, such as Exxon Mobil, BP, and Royal Dutch Shell, but they also include companies from transportation such as Ford, Toyota, and Boeing, consumer goods such as Nestle and Procter & Gamble, industrial goods manufacturers such as Dow and Caterpillar, and many others including 32 major electric utilities. For each industry, the initiative lays out a set of agenda items it wants its target companies to improve upon and a strategy for investors to get companies to comply, including by “voting for the removal of directors who have failed in their accountability of climate change risk.” (Source; hat tip Alyssa Vance)

Important note: There is a question here of direct vs. indirect creation of greenhouse gases. For instance, large energy companies provide energy to end consumers (such as small businesses and individuals who heat their homes and put gas in their cars). Do we count the greenhouse gases produced in that way as being attributable to the large energy company or to the end users of that energy? Depending on how we do that math, we may come to quite different conclusions about the extent to which greenhouse gases are attributable to large companies.

Meta-strategies

I’ll point out that I think there are a number of effective “meta” strategies that can help support the three big strategies mentioned above.

For instance:

(A) Groups like Work on Climate (https://workonclimate.org), co-founded by Cassandra Xia, are trying to mobilize more talented people to go into the climate space and help them find good projects to work on.

(B) Groups like the Future Matters Project (https://futuremattersproject.org/), co-founded by Justus Baumann, are exploring ways to effectively strengthen and grow social movements to help support the big strategies above. They are also helping to train other groups and people already working on climate change in approaches that can enhance their effectiveness.

If you are looking for projects to support, consider supporting (A) or (B).

If you are interested in how to take a more “effectiveness-minded” approach to helping the world, you may find our free, interactive module useful: “Leave your Mark on The World“.

It is not climate-specific, but its lessons are applicable to the climate space.

Why I Find the Topic of Improving Climate Change Depressing

One thing that makes me depressed about climate change, as a cause area, is that I believe a huge number of good people with good intentions are applying strategies that won’t ultimately work to move the needle. And not in the “we have to try lots of strategies to figure out what works” way, more like “we have abundant evidence to see that this strategy doesn’t work, yet we continue to throw massive amounts of money and effort into it.” For instance, I’m skeptical of approaches that are mainly based on asking people to self-sacrifice in order to pollute less because they have been tried to a tremendous degree already, with very limited success. I don’t believe they will move the needle on pollution enough to make a substantial dent in the problem.

I would love to see a climate movement that is more focused on effectiveness, and more specifically, on strategies that might actually get the world to a much better place climate-wise.

I wish we lived in a world where just being a good person who invests a lot of time and effort into trying to work on a problem was enough. In fact, we live in a world where most strategies to solve big problems will fail, and to find better strategies, we have to be highly strategic in our approaches.

Truly small potatoes initiatives (like plastic straw bans) give us warm-and-fuzzy feelings while distracting us from doing things that might actually substantially help. It sometimes even feels like elements of the movement prefer environmental aesthetics over environmental change.

Maybe I’m Wrong

I’m far from an expert in climate, and I certainly could be very wrong about it in my thoughts above. And others have spent way more time thinking about this than I have. That’s why I’m asking you to change my mind.

So: what did I get wrong? What do you disagree with me on and why?

Are there other big strategies (beyond the big three mentioned above) that really could get us to a good place with the climate in the next 40 years? If so, I’d love to know about them.

It’s also possible I’m wrong about climate change being a big issue. I hope I am wrong, and the whole thing is overblown or a hoax. However, I don’t think that is true. While I do think that there is more uncertainty around the issue than is generally acknowledged, I don’t think that’s actually cause to dismiss it. A possible threat to civilization needs to be taken very seriously, even if it has only a 10% chance of happening, and I think significant climage change has a higher chance than that.

Currently, I’m most concerned that warming will not only hit the average of what climate models estimate but will exceed it. I believe the negative consequences are non-linear (i.e., 8 degrees of warming is way worse than 4 degrees, which is way worse than 2 degrees of warming, which is way worse than 1 degree). If that’s true, then the biggest risks from climate change are the tail risks (i.e., that temperatures are even worse than predicted). The scariest scenarios I’m aware of are “runaway” feedback loop scenarios, where, after a tipping point, climate spirals out of control (or huge new negative consequences come into effect). That’s why model uncertainty doesn’t make me feel better but instead makes me feel much worse – because they increase the tail risk!

This piece was first written on September 14, 2020, and first appeared on this site on December 10, 2021.

Here are the materials, in case you want to run an event like this or just learn about the format:

Part 1: Brief presentation about why disagreements are so often unproductive

1. You want to “win” more than you want to figure out what’s true (e.g., seeing disagreement as a competition)

Example: you want to one-up the other person, the other person is a rival

2. It’s really about your group identity, not about the content of the disagreement per se (i.e., what the argument is really about is whether my group is better than your group)

Example: Republicans vs. Democrats, Yankees vs. Mets

3. Others are watching and you think backing down would lower your social status or lose you respect (e.g., you think it would look bad to back down)

Example: dinner party disagreements, public debates

4. You have emotional discomfort with finding out you are wrong on this topic (e.g., cognitive dissonance, feeling dumb for being wrong, realizing that you did something immoral in the past)

Example: you’ve already said you are “certain” you are right, so think you would look really dumb now being wrong

5. There would be real-world negative consequences to believing the truth about this, which your subconscious detects, and so you fight against learning the truth (e.g., social rejection, feeling that you’d need to abandon your current lifestyle)

Example: religion, eating animals, addiction

6. You feel pressure to back down in the disagreement or that it would be inappropriate to mention flaws in the other person’s argument [H/T: Divia]

Example: disagreement with your boss, or in an especially polite social context, or with a person who you think would react negatively to be being challenged

7. The conversation drifts, so at first it was about your disagreement over X, but now it is about your disagreement over Y, so you can’t make progress on X

Example: pointing out whenever the other person says something you disagree with, even if it is tangential to the main point

Part 2: Tips for having productive disagreements that both parties learn more from (for attendees to keep in mind during the interactive portion of the event):

Tip 1: Remember that you are here to learn from the other person, not to “win” an argument

Tip 2: Work from the assumption that the other person has good intentions and is not a bad person, even if you think they believe something harmful

Tip 3: If the other person changes your mind about anything (even something small), tell them so and thank them for helping you have a more accurate perspective, changing your mind means you’re doing this right!

Tip 4: Carefully clarify definitions, since words are ambiguous and people often mean different things by the same word (once you do this you may realize that you don’t actually disagree at all)

Tip 5: Try to discover WHY the other person believes what they do, not merely just WHAT they believe

Tip 6: Remember that some of your beliefs are inevitably going to be wrong, it’s better for you to find that out now and start believing the truth as soon as possible rather than to hold tight to those wrong beliefs indefinitely

Tip 7: Remember that even if the other person IS wrong, you can still gain a more accurate view on the issue by understanding any valid points they are making

Tip 8: Remember that most controversial topics have at least some reasonable points on both sides, and you should know the best of what the other side can offer

Tip 9: Remember that even if your goal in the end is really just to persuade the other person, it still helps to ask lots of questions so that you deeply understand why they believe what they believe before trying to persuade them

Tip 10: Remember that we shouldn’t be 100% confident in any of our beliefs, so it’s better to think of your beliefs in terms of confidence levels (“I’m reasonably confident in this belief”) rather than in terms of things being either all true or all false, and talking to someone who disagrees with you can help you make your confidence level more appropriate even if you don’t end up concluding they are correct (e.g., after the discussion you might change your mind from being “very” confident to only being “moderately” confident)

Tip 11: Stay on topic, and hone in on the core of the disagreement, don’t get distracted by side disagreements or let the conversation drift away from the most important parts or you will inevitably not make progress, and if the other person says something you disagree with that is not that relevant to the topic, just let it go

Part 3: The interactive portion of the event

Handout 1

A spreadsheet of 59 controversial topics (print one out for each attendee): everyone will fill this out. If a person doesn’t want to discuss a certain topic, they should mark it as “unsure” or just leave it blank.

Important note: while this might sound like a huge number of controversial topics, it seems that a large number of topics is actually needed since many items people will not have an opinion on, or will agree with most other group members on (due to meeting groups often having similar views in many domains), or will find too ambiguous. If you write your own controversial topics, I don’t recommend using less than 50.

Here is another spreadsheet of 59 controversial topics adapted for people in the effective altruism community.

Handout 2

Step by step instructions for the interactive portion of the event (print one out for each attendee):

Step 1.

Find a random person to be your partner, preferably someone you don’t already know.

Step 2.

Compare your sheet with your partner (overlaying them after folding the right edge of one sheet works well) to find a topic where one of you selected “agree” and the other selected “disagree.”

Don’t select a topic that either of you marked as “unsure” or that either of you left blank; those topics are off-limits.

Step 3.

(i) Pick who will start as Person 1 (the explainer) and who will start as Person 2 (the asker).

(ii) Person 1 then explains why they marked that they agree or disagree.

(iii) During this time, Person 2 asks clarifying questions, with Person 2’s only goal being to try to TRULY understand Person 1’s perspective.

Good questions for Person 2 to ask include, among other things:

A. What do you mean by the word X? (i.e., clarifying a definition)

B. Could you give me an example of that?

C. Could you explain why you think that’s true?

(iv) Person 2 then tries to repeat back to Person 1 the reasons that Person 1 said they agree or disagree with the original statement, until they can do so in a way that Person 1 confirms is an accurate characterization of Person 1’s view. Being able to state someone’s perspective back to them is a great way to confirm you’ve really understood it.

Step 4.

Now switch who is Person 1 and who is Person 2 and repeat exactly what you did in Step 3.

Step 5.

Spend a final few minutes discussing the topic with the goal of pinpointing exactly why you disagree.

(i) Is it just a semantic disagreement, where once you agree on the meaning of words and definitions you actually agree with each other? This happens surprisingly often!

(2) Is it a disagreement of values (e.g., one of you simply values autonomy more than the other)?

(ii) Is it a disagreement about empirical facts that one could check (e.g., there might be studies out there that would settle the disagreement)?

(iii) Or is it a disagreement about intuition (e.g., you have different intuitions about a topic but can’t really explain why)?

Your goal should be to discover the “core” of the disagreement, the ultimate explanation for why you have different perspectives.

Step 6.

Now you’ll rotate to another person and repeat the whole process over again.

This piece was first written on June 25, 2017. Grammatical edits were made and an EA-adapted version of Handout 1 was shared on June 27, 2018. This editing note was added on December 23, 2022.