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.
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.