I do think you might have put too much energy into thinking about the CCC though, haha. Maybe I should apologise for having mentioned them, without mentioning that I knew they’d taken money from dirty energy and I never got good epistemic vibes from them.
When I saw that stuff, I just read that as one of the many things we’d expect to see if MCB was legit, like, there would be a think-tank funded by dirty energy singing its praises, and even if that thinktank were earnest, I would still expect anyone who actually gave a shit about solving the problem to take the dirty money, because this kind of research ought to be rateable on the basis of whether or not it is true, rather than who paid for it, an extravagantly costly purity allegiance signal such as rejecting money from the richest people who benefit from your research should not carry a lot of discursive weight (and I’m still fairly sure it wouldn’t have).
What set off alarm bells for me was when I realised just how much the individuals in the CCC were taking in salary for the kind of work they’re doing. It would seem to me that genuine activists never get paid like that. I’m still not sure what that means, though. They live in world I don’t know much about.
I suppose part of the reason I mentioned them is that they seemed to be gathering a lot of interesting heresies that our friends might like to know about, not just MCB. Did you find that was the case?
Thanks! This all sounds right. “CCC has interesting heresies”—was there stuff other than MCB and global poverty? It’s an interesting parallel to EA—that they have interesting heresies, but are ultimately wrong about some key assumptions (that there’s room for more funding/that MCB is sufficient to stop all climate change, respectively. And they both have a fetish for working within systems rather than trying to change them at all.)
Kinda a shame that leftists are mostlynot coming to the “how can we change systems that will undo any progress we make” thing with an effectiveness mindset, though at least these people are.
Thank you for looking into this! <3
I do think you might have put too much energy into thinking about the CCC though, haha. Maybe I should apologise for having mentioned them, without mentioning that I knew they’d taken money from dirty energy and I never got good epistemic vibes from them.
When I saw that stuff, I just read that as one of the many things we’d expect to see if MCB was legit, like, there would be a think-tank funded by dirty energy singing its praises, and even if that thinktank were earnest, I would still expect anyone who actually gave a shit about solving the problem to take the dirty money, because this kind of research ought to be rateable on the basis of whether or not it is true, rather than who paid for it, an extravagantly costly purity allegiance signal such as rejecting money from the richest people who benefit from your research should not carry a lot of discursive weight (and I’m still fairly sure it wouldn’t have).
What set off alarm bells for me was when I realised just how much the individuals in the CCC were taking in salary for the kind of work they’re doing. It would seem to me that genuine activists never get paid like that. I’m still not sure what that means, though. They live in world I don’t know much about.
I suppose part of the reason I mentioned them is that they seemed to be gathering a lot of interesting heresies that our friends might like to know about, not just MCB. Did you find that was the case?
Thanks! This all sounds right. “CCC has interesting heresies”—was there stuff other than MCB and global poverty? It’s an interesting parallel to EA—that they have interesting heresies, but are ultimately wrong about some key assumptions (that there’s room for more funding/that MCB is sufficient to stop all climate change, respectively. And they both have a fetish for working within systems rather than trying to change them at all.)
Kinda a shame that leftists are mostly not coming to the “how can we change systems that will undo any progress we make” thing with an effectiveness mindset, though at least these people are.