I appreciate a kind of article like this, because as you say most EAs may be culturally or otherwise biased against Trump. e.g., he clearly is not “my” people[1], and makes strong efforts to signal this. But such cultural signaling probably has minimal direct impact on the things that actually matter, so it’s good to guard against such biases.
I also think a bunch of humility is necessary here. Politics is very hard to get right on consequentialist grounds, the long-term future is very hard to reliably get the sign of, and the combination of the two is probably quite gnarly. So while many people (myself included) may intuitively strongly believe that Trump is a worse candidate, and/or have fairly solid arguments and/or calculations to justify this, our confidence levels that our arguments and/or conclusions are actually correct should be very low.
I will likely write a very critical object-level comment later.
On a meta-level,
I appreciate a kind of article like this, because as you say most EAs may be culturally or otherwise biased against Trump. e.g., he clearly is not “my” people[1], and makes strong efforts to signal this. But such cultural signaling probably has minimal direct impact on the things that actually matter, so it’s good to guard against such biases.
I also think a bunch of humility is necessary here. Politics is very hard to get right on consequentialist grounds, the long-term future is very hard to reliably get the sign of, and the combination of the two is probably quite gnarly. So while many people (myself included) may intuitively strongly believe that Trump is a worse candidate, and/or have fairly solid arguments and/or calculations to justify this, our confidence levels that our arguments and/or conclusions are actually correct should be very low.
I will likely write a very critical object-level comment later.
In some ways quite literally, e.g. due to demographics.