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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...
I think right now EAs might be making a significant mistake by paying insufficient attention to the political realm. As EAs we tend to figure out what’s most impactful for us to work on and focus hard. That’s great! But there are various actions that are ‘non-delegatable’ - the extent to which an individual can do the action is limited (like voting, going to a protest, making hard money contributions to particular campaigns). It might be useful if we were all more in the habit of doing variou...
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A larger number of formidable people, in Paul Graham's sense of the word.
Here's some related recent discussion on LessWrong.
This is a great answer. I would have said something like "leadership" in that EA has leaders but few of them are people you would march into battle and die for. I feel like there's almost no one in EA proper and only a couple people on the edges (mostly because their cause area was taken up by EA, and they didn't come from within EA) who has demonstrated something like the 10x skill of leadership and motivation.
Put more colloquially, EA needs a Steve Jobs, an FDR, a Winston Churchill, an Oda Nobunaga.
I have a pretty averse reaction to all the people you named, expect I would feel similarly about someone in that mold in EA, and expect many other people in EA would feel similarly. I don't think charismatic leadership fits all that well with the other elements of EA in ways both important and incidental.
To what extent do you think people are born that way and to what extent do you think they become it? If they are more born that way, how do we get such people involved? And if they become it, how do we make that happen?
I have a bunch of thoughts about this that'd be easier to convey elsewhere. Shoot me an email? (here)