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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...
This post presents the executive summary from Giving What We Can’s impact evaluation for 2025. At the end of this post we share links to more information, including the full report and...
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Hey Stijn, a few critical points on this.
I'm worried about claiming any specific petitions are "easily thousands of times more effective than most other petitions", for reasons similar to this post.
I'm unsure how you're judging 'tractability' here, but I'm doubtful about the tractable routes to change for some of these. For example, the shrimp change.org petition made for a class project with ~400 signatures. Even if this petition got 10x or 100x the signatures, I don't understand the Theory of Change that results in any person/group/organisation making meaningful change. (For some petitions, like UK Parliament ones, there is a clearer route to impact, but it still requires lots more work and luck for the debate to become actual change).
Even if some petitions are super impactful compared to others, petitions might not be impactful compared to other interventions. This is somewhat offset by petitions being really 'cheap' (low time, non-fungible time, low/no funding costs). However, if you're recommending people sign petitions they don't know much about, they might reasonably want to spent time researching the issues, which increases time from ~10-15 sec to ~10-15 mins, which is a non-trivial amount of time.
Regardless, I made this really simple website to visualise your 10 recommended petitions more clearly (like 2-30 mins with ChatGPT). Would be open to working on this more, depending on yours and other's thoughts/responses to the concerns above!
These are valid points. I wanted to see how much time it will take me to find 10 promising, high-impact petitions. I could easily find 7 very good petitions, but the final 3 were harder to find. Overall it took me a few hours.
I partially agree with your concern about the shrimp petition lacking a ToC, although that petition still contains a clear, feasible and well-targeted ask in my opinion. But it could be that such change.org or class project petitions lack credibility and hence are less effective.
If people spend more time researching the issues, I consider that as a positive side effect. People learn about the causes. I bet people learned about AI safety by seeing me recommending those petitions. It might result in people supporting those causes in other ways in the future, for example by donating money. Especially if the petition comes from a highly effective charity. Any way, I still consider signing petitions as the cheapest altruistic thing that one can do, especially if you have a platform that offers you the most effective petitions so you don't have to look for them yourself.
Nice that you've made that website. I also had in mind a website or online platform that regularly offers you a few top-effective petitions to sign (and perhaps a newsletter that informs people when new petitions are available). The most difficult part may be regularly looking for and selecting those petitions. As I said, quickly finding 10 petitions was already a challenge, and I don't think I can easily find 10 other petitions next month. But looking for a few petitions every few months should be feasible for me in my spare time. And if more and more EA-aligned people and organizations inform me/us about new petitions, it becomes even more feasible. And if you and other effective altruists also contribute to this website by looking for effective petitions, we may have something fruitful.
As petitions are such a low bar in terms of altruistic engagement, I also don't think it is worthwhile to have a team of (professional) effective altruists spending much time assessing petitions. It's not such a big deal, in my opinion, that a weakly tractable petition such as that shrimp petition gets selected. More problematic would be if we miss a highly effective petition. False negatives (not recommending top effective petitions) are more problematic than false positives (recommending weakly effective petitions), because signing a petition doesn't take much time and there are not many top effective petitions. There are petitions that are counterproductive and are negatively effective, but I think we are able to quickly recognize and not select those.