Many kudos for doing this, I’ve been impressed seeing this work progress.
I think it could well be the case that EAs have a decent comparative advantage in prioritization itself. I could imagine a world where the community does help prioritize a large range of globally important issues. This could work especially well if these people could influence the spending and talent of other people. Things that are poorly neglected present opportunity for significant leverage through prioritization and leadership.
On politics, my impression is that the community is going to get more involved on many different fronts. It seems like the kind of thing that can go very poorly if done wrong, but the potential benefits are too big to ignore.
As Carl Shulman previously said, one interesting aspect about politics is the potential to absorb a deep amount of money and talent. so I imagine one of the most valuable things about doing this can work is producing information value to inform us if and how to scale it later.
Thanks, Ozzie! I agree with you that prioritization is both necessary and a way in which the EA community can add unique value. Compared to charitable donations, political giving seems to be a “flatter” market in that we haven’t found that many opportunities that are more than an order of magnitude more impactful than the “naive” benchmark of donating to the Biden campaign. For me at least, though, one important insight from this work has been confirmation that there are impactful things to do at all, which was not something I took for granted at the beginning. Personally, it’s been quite reassuring and motivating to know that there is a robust evidence base for different political engagement techniques that lends itself well to cost-effectiveness estimation and prioritization efforts.
Many kudos for doing this, I’ve been impressed seeing this work progress.
I think it could well be the case that EAs have a decent comparative advantage in prioritization itself. I could imagine a world where the community does help prioritize a large range of globally important issues. This could work especially well if these people could influence the spending and talent of other people. Things that are poorly neglected present opportunity for significant leverage through prioritization and leadership.
On politics, my impression is that the community is going to get more involved on many different fronts. It seems like the kind of thing that can go very poorly if done wrong, but the potential benefits are too big to ignore.
As Carl Shulman previously said, one interesting aspect about politics is the potential to absorb a deep amount of money and talent. so I imagine one of the most valuable things about doing this can work is producing information value to inform us if and how to scale it later.
Thanks, Ozzie! I agree with you that prioritization is both necessary and a way in which the EA community can add unique value. Compared to charitable donations, political giving seems to be a “flatter” market in that we haven’t found that many opportunities that are more than an order of magnitude more impactful than the “naive” benchmark of donating to the Biden campaign. For me at least, though, one important insight from this work has been confirmation that there are impactful things to do at all, which was not something I took for granted at the beginning. Personally, it’s been quite reassuring and motivating to know that there is a robust evidence base for different political engagement techniques that lends itself well to cost-effectiveness estimation and prioritization efforts.