I don’t think discussing authoritarian takeover is against Forum rules, though EA is not the ideal place for political resistance given its broad amount of causes for which it needs political tractability. However, it’s tricky because US political dynamics are currently extremely influential for EA cause areas, and I think we need to do better thinking through how various areas will be affected, and how policies might interact with the affect that the US administration is proto-authoritarian. We should not simply pretend the US administration is a normal one.
That said, in these discussion we should be careful to not descend into ‘mere partisanship’ though I don’t know where that line is. I wish the Forum team would give more guidance.
This is something we should think about more as a mod team- I’ll discuss it with them.
Our current politics policy is still this. But it arguably wasn’t designed with our current situation in mind. In my view, it’d be a bad thing if discussions on the Forum became too tied to the news cycle (It generally seems true that once something is on the news, you are at least several years too late to change it), our impact has historically not been had by working in the most politically salient areas (neglectedness isn’t a perfect proxy but it still matters). However, it’d also be wrong if the Forum couldn’t discuss politically salient issues while they are going on, and there is something readers could do to stop them.
FWIW in this particular situation (and I haven’t conferred with the mod team) I don’t see this thread as being against Forum rules, because the participants could reasonably believe (or for that matter, not believe) that preventing authoritarian takeover in the US is a relevant cause area to EA.
I don’t think discussing authoritarian takeover is against Forum rules, though EA is not the ideal place for political resistance given its broad amount of causes for which it needs political tractability. However, it’s tricky because US political dynamics are currently extremely influential for EA cause areas, and I think we need to do better thinking through how various areas will be affected, and how policies might interact with the affect that the US administration is proto-authoritarian. We should not simply pretend the US administration is a normal one.
That said, in these discussion we should be careful to not descend into ‘mere partisanship’ though I don’t know where that line is. I wish the Forum team would give more guidance.
This is something we should think about more as a mod team- I’ll discuss it with them.
Our current politics policy is still this. But it arguably wasn’t designed with our current situation in mind. In my view, it’d be a bad thing if discussions on the Forum became too tied to the news cycle (It generally seems true that once something is on the news, you are at least several years too late to change it), our impact has historically not been had by working in the most politically salient areas (neglectedness isn’t a perfect proxy but it still matters). However, it’d also be wrong if the Forum couldn’t discuss politically salient issues while they are going on, and there is something readers could do to stop them.
FWIW in this particular situation (and I haven’t conferred with the mod team) I don’t see this thread as being against Forum rules, because the participants could reasonably believe (or for that matter, not believe) that preventing authoritarian takeover in the US is a relevant cause area to EA.