All of ole_koksvik's Comments + Replies

Yes, the old adage: "I don't have time to write short texts."

Thank you for your replies.

[Warning: musings ahead.]

Re your reply on 2, I found it interesting that overall you seem focused on working with *insiders8 --- people already quite involved and invested in the political system --- rather than aiming for uptake in the population at large, and then to use that as leverage on politicians (which is what I had been musing about when thinking about how to cause political change). I wonder whether there's data on the effectiveness on the two different approaches. Most likely it's too dependent on context and question.

0
MarkusAnderljung
6y
Yeah, I agree that we've gone for quite a top-down rather than bottom-up approach. Though less so than in the UK case. There, my understanding is that the APPG was started only after having arranged 1-on-1 meetings with the relevant MPs. My intuition is that it will be difficult to cause change in this area by driving popular opinion, but you might need some public opinion behind it to make it stick. To be crass, I would expect politicians to be able to wrangle very few votes by spear-heading initiatives such as these.

This was a really good, clear write-up; I found it very interesting. Thank you.

I have a couple of questions. If you want to reply by just telling me to read the full write-up: fair enough.

  1. There seems to be some potential overlap between A, B, and D. Could the Future Commission, or the Ombudsman, be used for oversight on other parliamentary committees, i.e. that part of their remit be to check that other committees discharged their responsibility to take future generations into account?

  2. Do you have thoughts on how you would go about pushing for a Future

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1
MarkusAnderljung
6y
Thanks, Ole! 1. Yep, I would say there is definitely overlap. At the very least between the Ombudsman and the Future Commission. They would both serve as checks. I think (and am not sure whether the others in the project would agree with this), we do not need to think about all of these as a package. If I could wave a magic wand and implement a set of institutional changes, I would likely be in favour of a different package. Instead, we've recommended things that fit well together where we would be incredibly pleased if one or two would be implemented. 2. One of the main things we're doing now is thinking about how to get to implementation of these recommendations. My view is that we need to keep building a coalition with other organisations (e.g. environment-focused think tanks). On top of this, we need to keep finding allies among the MPs. 3. I think that's a great idea! We'll likely spend the next few months taking a step back and deciding on how we're gonna be pushing for our recommendations. One really simple communications tactic would likely be to do some polling.

Evan, thank you for these comments here. I just wanted to register, in case it's at all useful, that I find it a bit difficult to understand your posts sometimes. It struck me that shorter and simpler sentences would probably make this easier for me. But I may be totally ideosyncratic here (English isn't my first language), so do ignore this if it doesn't strike you as useful.

-6
Evan_Gaensbauer
6y

One may be able to have counterfactual impact by accepting below market returns

I think this is an important possibility. Some invested funds cannot be turned into donations, but there may be a chance of getting them invested in something with a social payoff.

I agree with this concern.

  • Even with some weighting for 'long-timers', 16x seems excessive.
  • The concern seems exacerbated by the idea of more active modeation
  • I'm not convinced that a forum being having diverse viewpoints already represented suffices to counteract this.
  • The distinction between modearting based on content and procedure ('good discussion') might be hard to uphold: disagreement on what constitutes a good argument is also important, for example.
  • The concern seems also exacerbated by a worry (which I tried to articulate elsewhere) of people e
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Re the community fund: I find the decision to not review applications for new, small, projects both surprising and troubling.

  1. That established organisations which by the grant-maker's own assessment are not significantly funding constrained would make better marginal use of funds than a new organisation might seems very unlikely.

  2. It is also unlikely that donating to established organisations will do more to grow the movement than helping new organisations start up would.

  3. Echoing what has already been noted, the rationale given does not stand in a reason

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