I’m willing to defend the wedge argument a bit. Let’s consider those thousands of scientists who worked on solar electricity generation. Clearly, as you say, what they did wasn’t useless—they did produce a technology that does a useful thing. So the question, again as you say, is opportunity costs. What should those scientists have done instead of working on solar electricity generation?
Perhaps they should have gone into hydraulic fracking. But: 1. Presumably these are mostly experts in things like semiconductor physics, the material-science properties of silicon, etc. They’d not be that much use to the frackers. 2. A lot of their work happened before (so far as I know) there was good reason to think that horizontal drilling and fracking would be both effective and politically acceptable. So what’s the actual principle these people could and should have followed, that would have led them to do something more effective? I suspect there isn’t one.
(Also … I have the impression, though it’s far from an expert one and may be mostly a product of dishonest propaganda, that fracking has a bunch of bad environmental consequences that aren’t captured by that graph showing carbon emissions. Unless the only thing we care about is carbon emissions, you can’t just go from “biggest reduction in carbon emissions is from fracking” to “fracking should dominate our attempts to reduce carbon emissions” without some consideration of the other effects of fracking and other carbon-emissions-reducing activities.)
The first objection is particularly interesting, and I’ve been mulling another post on it. As a general question: if you want to have high impact on something, how much decision-making weight should you put on leveraging your existing skill set, versus targeting whatever the main bottleneck is regardless of your current skills? I would guess that very-near-zero weight on current skillset is optimal, because people generally aren’t very strategic about which skills they acquire. So e.g. people in semiconductor physics etc probably didn’t do much research in clean energy bottlenecks before choosing that field—their skillset is mostly just a sunk cost, and trying to stick to it is mostly sunk cost fallacy (to the extent that they’re actually interested in reducing carbon emissions). Anyway, still mulling this.
Totally agree with the second objection. That said, there are technologies which have been around as long as PV which look at-least-as-promising-and-probably-more-so but receive far less research attention—solar thermal and thorium were the two which sprang to mind, but I’m sure there’s more. From an outside view, we should expect this to be the case, because academics usually don’t choose their research to maximize impact—they choose it based on what they know how to study. Which brings us back to the first point.
I’m willing to defend the wedge argument a bit. Let’s consider those thousands of scientists who worked on solar electricity generation. Clearly, as you say, what they did wasn’t useless—they did produce a technology that does a useful thing. So the question, again as you say, is opportunity costs. What should those scientists have done instead of working on solar electricity generation?
Perhaps they should have gone into hydraulic fracking. But: 1. Presumably these are mostly experts in things like semiconductor physics, the material-science properties of silicon, etc. They’d not be that much use to the frackers. 2. A lot of their work happened before (so far as I know) there was good reason to think that horizontal drilling and fracking would be both effective and politically acceptable. So what’s the actual principle these people could and should have followed, that would have led them to do something more effective? I suspect there isn’t one.
(Also … I have the impression, though it’s far from an expert one and may be mostly a product of dishonest propaganda, that fracking has a bunch of bad environmental consequences that aren’t captured by that graph showing carbon emissions. Unless the only thing we care about is carbon emissions, you can’t just go from “biggest reduction in carbon emissions is from fracking” to “fracking should dominate our attempts to reduce carbon emissions” without some consideration of the other effects of fracking and other carbon-emissions-reducing activities.)
The first objection is particularly interesting, and I’ve been mulling another post on it. As a general question: if you want to have high impact on something, how much decision-making weight should you put on leveraging your existing skill set, versus targeting whatever the main bottleneck is regardless of your current skills? I would guess that very-near-zero weight on current skillset is optimal, because people generally aren’t very strategic about which skills they acquire. So e.g. people in semiconductor physics etc probably didn’t do much research in clean energy bottlenecks before choosing that field—their skillset is mostly just a sunk cost, and trying to stick to it is mostly sunk cost fallacy (to the extent that they’re actually interested in reducing carbon emissions). Anyway, still mulling this.
Totally agree with the second objection. That said, there are technologies which have been around as long as PV which look at-least-as-promising-and-probably-more-so but receive far less research attention—solar thermal and thorium were the two which sprang to mind, but I’m sure there’s more. From an outside view, we should expect this to be the case, because academics usually don’t choose their research to maximize impact—they choose it based on what they know how to study. Which brings us back to the first point.