Recently I read a Facebook post where someone asked what work they should do to mitigate climate change. This particular soul was advised to read about 20 different articles, advocate for around 10 different policy options and apply for a nice range of jobs. I felt for them, and it nudged me into trying to express why it is that choosing the optimal career for climate change is so darn difficult!
When writing this I realised there are a few ideas and strategies which could help. Though I see them as thought provokers rather than answers, I include them too - it seems rude to articulate the problem then leave readers hanging!
I will cover:
- The concept explore vs exploit
- Ideas for navigating complexity
- Learning
- Luck
- Thoughts on job options
This article expresses my beliefs right now, which are developing and should be taken with a huge grain of salt! Challenges are welcome.
Terms used:
Complex system = system made of lots of interacting parts. The more parts are interacting the more complex the system (eg: a pencil isn’t complex, a car is and the economy is very complex!)
Zero sum = When there’s a set amount of benefit or booty to be had, and however many people try to get it the amount being shared out stays the same
Expected value = the average expected payoff from an action (eg: if I flip 10 coins, and earn £1 for each head, my expected value is £5)
Explore vs exploit
The concept explore vs exploit captures the tradeoff between resources spent learning the environment and getting the most out of it. Applied to your career this means finding the balance
between effort spent searching for and doing good work, for maximum total impact.
How much time you should put into exploring will depend on your total time available. The longer you’re in the game, the more it’s worth exploring.
For global poverty, which is less complex an issue than climate change (see notes), 80,000 Hours gives good unambiguous advice on which jobs are high impact. They’ve done a lot of your exploring for you, so you can put more effort into exploiting (ending poverty). They're able to do this because poverty is more straightforward than climate change.
The greenhouse effect itself is simple. The decision systems used when deciding what to do or not do about it, and the effects of what is done on other aspects of society and nature, are complex.
Navigating complexity
With climate change, for now at least, it’s not immediately obvious what the best job many of us should go into is. So to maximise impact, you’re going to need to spend more time exploring. This means that you shouldn’t expect to the first result from your favourite search engine to be the answer. It will give you an answer, but it probably won’t be the best job for you.
Ways to explore complex systems:
- Read around the topic - books, podcasts, websites, academic papers
- Shadow others, do work experience or work with folks who know a lot about the topic, ask academics (there are some working on most facets of climate change)
- Use networks*: study groups*, common interest groups*, conferences*
- Share what you learn with others* (doesn’t help you so much, but helpful for the development of other high impact climate wannabes)
* increasingly effective as the system’s complexity increases
In complex systems there’s so much going on that you can’t expect to know it all yourself. As a rule of thumb, the more complex the system the more useful networks and connections with others are.
Expected value calculations for your options can be useful here. Deliberately defining your aim - optimising for tonnes of CO2 not being in the atmosphere (or your favourite greenhouse gas). - can be helpful. In complex systems the figures generated are best treated as a ballpark figure (eg: if one option comes out as x1.5 better than another then that doesn’t tell us much, but if it comes out as x150 better that’s more interesting!)
Learning
I think this deserves its own section: keep learning!
Why is learning so important? In my experience knowledge compounds, so it can become exponentially more useful over time so long as you keep adding to it (similar to compound interest).
Luck
Also deserving of its own section!
Luck seems to be an underrated contributor to success. In complex systems this seems to be doubly true: there’s so much happening that just being conventionally brainy can only take you so far.
Can luck be created? Yes!
What’s the no. 1 thing which creates luck? Talking to lots of people.
Thoughts on jobs
Because this is a system with lots of potential levers to pull, as you learn and improve, at some point you might spot an opportunity to pull a lever you that nobody else sees, or that you’re particularly well suited to operating. This requires an awareness of such levers, which could involve watching 80,000 hours, government, climate change organisations, and other jobs boards, or asking other people to keep their eyes open for you.
As climate change work is complex and harder to plan for, starting by taking a role where you’ll develop broadly applicable skills may be the best strategy. For example, in management roles the skill widely deemed most critical to success is rational decision making which is likely to be useful whatever your job turns out to be.
Coordination
Because there are already lots of people and resources mobilised for climate change, coordination strikes me as very important (and underrated). It seems it could be done far better and doing it well could be a high impact role (though you might have to create the job yourself!) So a talent for bringing about effective coordination of groups could be unusually useful for climate change, and worth cultivating.
Consulting
For skills development. As you develop you can keep your eyes on the areas of interest, which should become more apparent as you learn more about climate change, and when the opportunity comes you can make your move.
Government
Understanding government can be useful, though there may be a slower accumulation of career capital in government work. Being in government puts you closer to where big decisions are made, making more room for luck.
There are government positions with a lot of impact, however when you read job descriptions it can be hard to tell which. This is where networks are useful - someone on a Facebook group or similar might be able to help. You can also phone up, ask questions in the interview or even treat the job as part of your explore phase if it doesn’t work out (making sure others learn from this would make the experience more valuable, though it’s still a situation I think is better avoided!)
Technical jobs
There are organisations working on climate change in need of technical skills. However the counterfactual impact of you working there rather than someone else may be lower than the equivalent gap in policy, coordination or advocacy roles.
There is a large pool of technical folks working on climate change already, so I expect all other things being equal your marginal contribution would be less. In some cases your marginal contribution may be high though, especially if you have some niche technical brilliance - the system is complex and you know yourself better than the author!
Advocacy
I think that advocacy can be a good option, though you’d have to be sure you’re advocating for the right thing!.Due to the system’s complexity this might be harder than it looks.
A variety of climate change options are already being advocated for. Because of this, to have a positive impact you may need to be better at advocacy than most groups and advocate better strategies than most groups. Or join one of the better existing groups.
Advocacy strikes me as being like a zero sum game, as there are only so many people with decision making power and they have limited time to listen. With that in mind supporting an existing campaign may be preferable to starting your own.
Historically advocacy’s impact has varied. It can be effective, however I think a lot of it isn’t, due to bad tactics or promoting something comparatively minor (eg: plastic straws in the UK). It’s potential is high.
As with technical skills, advocacy could be a good fit for you - you know yourself better than the author!
What to do?
I’ve avoided prescribing specific things here because I don’t know you, my reader, so well. I can only see a tiny smidgen of all the things which could affect climate change and I suspect that any more opinions I have will only be true in too-specific cases. So, perhaps frustratingly, I’m going to leave this without a firm wrap-up. Let’s keep the conversation going!
Notes
1) Why do I think climate change is more complex than global poverty?
- Less certainty in outcomes: feedback for poverty reduction can be obtained relatively quickly (years vs decades), in multiple areas at once (vs a single planet at a time) and with control populations (there is no Planet B)
- Climate change is a longer timescale thing (likely be having an effect 200+ years from now)
- There are more variables to consider. Examples: climate change mitigation will probably require people to give up things they are used to (driving, flying), which is less true for poverty elimination. Developing countries can gain economically by being less stringent about emissions, whereas keeping people in poverty isn’t good for the economy
This seems to be a well thought out article though not the kind of thing I usually read . (I'm the type of person who can sort of read some mid-level academic literature (not quantum field theory or number theory, but not 'american studies' either --more like 'complexity theory' (though some of that is basically at the 'high end' of math) but i can't even type a resume , tax return , or fill out a college application without help.
I am looking for a job but don't know if this article will help me. (My #1 job qualification I would list as 'unemployable'. I am sort of planning to apply for a job I saw listed on 80,000 hours but instead of trying to put together a resume I am writing comments on articles like this one. I'd have to link to some 'google docs' i have written to include in my resume, but am too lazy or stupid to know how to do it. These are on foundations of physics, alternative economic systems, etc. ---written for essay contests and grant proposals, but were rejected due to poor formatting and missed deadlines.)
I see the options listed are government, advocacy, coordination, technical skills , and consultancy. Only thing i could possibly do is 'technical skills' (except my technical skills, if I have any, are not in the mainstream ---the mainstream is 'deep learning' and other very technical approaches to 'multiobjective optimization' (algorithms)).
I guess i could call my technical work 'consultancy'. (I'll tell people what to use their 'deep learning' algorithm to model--though i can't write the code.)
I mostly grew up in a government town (half the people worked for the government) so I'm allergic to that kind of beurocratic organization. I deal as little with the government as i can (and most of that is with either US mailperson and the local police, who i just say hello to. I did vote in 2016--for cannabis legalization and green party (my area was 85% democratic so i voted just to keep GP on the ballot--i didn't like the candidate, though i support GP principles--but i think GP helped Trump get elected).
I've participated in some 'environmental' and 'social justice' advocacy (activism --occassionaly for (low) pay ) --its like being a door to door salesperson and not my style or preference.
I've helped 'coordinate' some projects in the past (e.g. help put out little magazines (some online) on local environmental and social justice issues (though both of these have global aspects) but too often this is like crowd control so you are a bouncer. And my superiors were also bouncers who disciplined me so i dropped out. (As they said, while our project has a specific mission (usually involving science, ecology, and justice) since there was no way the people involved could agree on any specifics of what to do, they just decided we are not going to discuss that and simply let everyone do want they want and put it together into a product.
Since I was an exception, I was the only one who could not do what they wanted--i had to do what i was told to do, which included promoting the project i was in
Consultancy has similar issues---consultants are brought in to advise you not to worry about the content of your product---just explain how to get the product out from lab to market. (This can be seen in current legal cases involving the US 'opiate epidemic'. Consultants helped get the product to market, and are long gone--moved onto another consultancy. Others have to deal with the consequenceso of that product. Don't sweat the small stuff, or details.
Technical research is more difficult to judge--some is highly redundant, some very speculative . (I've known people who do field biology cataloging changes in species numbers over time--i've done some of that myself. This is often used to make the case that human induced climate change is an issue. My view is to an extent this is already known, so its almost like going to a battlefield, counting casualties, and then using this to say war is a problem.
(another possible technical problem is the question 'is climate change more complex than global poverty?' While the answer given above (yes) is reasonable, in a way its like asking if a human, or a society is more complex than a bacteria. Are voting patterns or economic time series (eg the stock market, or income distribution and social mobility ) more complex than time series for global temperature data or ones for biodiversity over millenia? Often the statistical signatures seem similar from what I've read.
I'd also say for a flip answer they are the same problem, and modeled by basically the same equations (lorentz equations, Lotka-Volterra , Navier Stokes....) . Turbulence everywhere; at the edge of chaos.
notes .
(I sort of dislike the term 'high impact career' ---- i view my life as my career even if i'm unemployed as I am--and 'high impact' sounds like being a 'rock star', major politician, or major scientist---i just want a low profile 'niche career'. (I also play 'non-commercial', 'niche' music ---it will never make it on the radio or charts, but can bring in a little money, and some such 'niche music' eventually turns out to be highly influential or impactful. The musicians who do get on the radio have often studied niche music; most silicon valley billionaires have not studied condensed matter physics, but those often unknown people indirectly had high impacts since they made silicon valley possible. you don't have to be a star to have some impact. a little asteroid might wipe out the earth. ) Since my background is partly in ecology, in that 'fairly complex' field while there are some plants and animals that are seen as 'high impact' or important (elephants, lions, polar bears, redwood trees...) there are many often unnoticed species which ecologically are just as important. )
The 4 things that struck me were
1) the essential point that there is a tradeoff between time/energy/effort /resources spent searching for the optimal 'high impact' career versus actually doing the work in a career.
This is similar to tradeoffs between searching for your 'perfect soulmate' versus deciding that the person you are with is 'good enough' or the best you can hope for (even if it wasn't the 'match made in heaven' you expected because you thought you deserved it).
Economist Herbert Simon called this 'satisficing'
This is also basically what EA is about---for example how much time do you devote to figuring out what causes or charities are worth supporting or donating to, versus just giving a donation so they can do the work. (One can easily envision a situation in which all donations are spent for research on figuring out what causes are worth donating to.)
Satisficing is a term I learned from a family member with a quite different view and approach to life than me--she learned it in an MBA program, which was paid for by her employer.
One of H Simon's last papers was on altruism. (Science, 1990 'a mechanism for social selection and succesful altruism') --economists and theoretical biologists--my area-- were basically working on same ideas though without much contact.
Since I was in the sciences and have always basically been an 'environmentalist' I didn't get along well with my relative who taught me that term. Her employer (a large company) was involved in some very environmentally destructive activities, and with others i protested against them. I also didn't have much respect for things like MBA or law degrees. I view those as 50% a mixture of social control theory and rhetoric--itself a form of social control, via hypnotization. (of course science is also somewhat like that).
I became an environmentalist basically because i couldn't compete in sports like normal boys , and was bullied, so i decided I to hang out by myself in the woods and allied my self with that 'tribe' and hence was sort of against sports and many businesses including the one my relative works for. I was in protests against construction of and using taxpayer funds to pay for new sports stadiums in my area (baseball, football, soccer) because some were built on what had been fairly pristine forests and ecosystems, and also because this area has alot of fairly extreme poverty (for USA) so there are continual drives to collect winter coats and school supplies for schoolkids, food donations and other support for seniors and disabled and other needy people, while the taxpayer subsidized sports stadiums make sports players and owners millionaires and billionaires. One of these multimillionaire sports team owners also cut alot of old trees down on National Park service land because they were obstructing his view. He got a 500$ fine.