All: I’ve noticed that this post is attracting a lot of strong downvotes. I care about this community and it’s important to me that my contributions to the forum be constructive. So I’m going to make those who downvoted an offer. If at least three of you either comment here or write me privately and say:
What concerns the post raised for you
What it would take to change your mind about those concerns
Then I will take the post down. In addition, if I find any of your arguments for why the post shouldn’t have been made compelling, I will take it down even if fewer than three people participate.
Have you considered that you might be falling prey to the unilateralist curse?
I’ve briefly looked at the evolution of past social movements, and I don’t get the sense that doing this kind of thing leads to a social movement being very long lived. One of the long lived movements I’ve studied cultivated (though perhaps not consciously) the skill of having members on both sides of any political conflict. If I imagine EA being very long lived, which seems somewhat valuable, playing politics is not a thing I picture happening in that scenario. See also the intersection between politics and movement collapse scenarios
You lampshade this, but really, there is no attempt to quantify the impact of a donation to Theresa Greenfield. For example, what amount of money would one expect to move the election by how much, and how does that compare to donating that money to GiveWell. More trickily, if you donate x millions, would you expect a random Republican billionaire to match them?
Relatedly, I have the impression that bounded rationality and politics play really badly with each other. Consider that EA may only have the capacity to deal with so many headaches at a time, and that politics has the potential to bring too many headaches. It also seems plausible that playing politics might have a one time fixed positive gain in exchange for a longer tail of negative outcomes (rather than the opposite). See also Wei Dai’s comment above.
Rules/Schelling points are important. “Don’t do politics, ever”, seems much more robust as a rule than “don’t do politics when you think it’s important”. If I’m thinking of the rules I want a long-lived movement to have, the first one seems vastly superior.
All: I’ve noticed that this post is attracting a lot of strong downvotes. I care about this community and it’s important to me that my contributions to the forum be constructive. So I’m going to make those who downvoted an offer. If at least three of you either comment here or write me privately and say:
What concerns the post raised for you
What it would take to change your mind about those concerns
Then I will take the post down. In addition, if I find any of your arguments for why the post shouldn’t have been made compelling, I will take it down even if fewer than three people participate.
Epistemic status: Adversarial collaboration.
Have you considered that you might be falling prey to the unilateralist curse?
I’ve briefly looked at the evolution of past social movements, and I don’t get the sense that doing this kind of thing leads to a social movement being very long lived. One of the long lived movements I’ve studied cultivated (though perhaps not consciously) the skill of having members on both sides of any political conflict. If I imagine EA being very long lived, which seems somewhat valuable, playing politics is not a thing I picture happening in that scenario. See also the intersection between politics and movement collapse scenarios
You lampshade this, but really, there is no attempt to quantify the impact of a donation to Theresa Greenfield. For example, what amount of money would one expect to move the election by how much, and how does that compare to donating that money to GiveWell. More trickily, if you donate x millions, would you expect a random Republican billionaire to match them?
Relatedly, I have the impression that bounded rationality and politics play really badly with each other. Consider that EA may only have the capacity to deal with so many headaches at a time, and that politics has the potential to bring too many headaches. It also seems plausible that playing politics might have a one time fixed positive gain in exchange for a longer tail of negative outcomes (rather than the opposite). See also Wei Dai’s comment above.
Rules/Schelling points are important. “Don’t do politics, ever”, seems much more robust as a rule than “don’t do politics when you think it’s important”. If I’m thinking of the rules I want a long-lived movement to have, the first one seems vastly superior.