Yeah. It’s kinda difficult for me to present a knockdown argument against explicitly EA politicians, when everybody agrees that the benefits would be illegible the public and difficult to predict.
Your analysis of the limited influence of individual elected officials focuses on the House of Representatives. These arguments are grounded in the House’s unique features (e.g., influence of leadership, limits on members’ ability to propose amendments), so it doesn’t make sense to generalize their conclusions to the Senate.
This is true, and I think my essay suffered somewhat from being both an argument specifically about Carrick Flynn and an argument about politics more generally.
I think that the focus on the House, beyond just Flynn, was somewhat reasonable though; I think that EA is just incapable of getting an EA elected to the Senate in the near term, so there’s not much point in considering the benefits. I can elaborate on this if you disagree.
Concluding one of your sections, you write, “they inevitably will end up campaigning on, and dealing with, primarily non-EA topics. This means that most opposition that EA politicians would face isn’t due to their EA stances.” So? I’m not seeing how this is an argument for your main claim.
Two reasons this is bad:
As I discussed in the next section, creating opposition to EA could be harmful to EA itself.
It means that most of the EA effort in elections would go, not to arguing for EA causes specifically, but to arguing for and fighting over other issues. For example, in OR-06, significant sums of EA money was spent attacking Andrea Salinas as a drug lobbyist, which is not an EA focus. It also means that EA might lose elections even where nobody really disagrees or opposes the EA cause areas; OR-06 is again an example.
Is the idea that there isn’t already opposition to EA stances, so creating it is extra bad?
Bringing into existence new opposition is bad. Not sure to what extent there’s currently no opposition; but there’s no opposition of the sort that EA’s would face. (I’m pretty sure there are no professional oppo researchers targeting EA or individual EA’s right now, for example. Similarly, existing politicians have no reason to dislike EA. Similarly, I’m pretty sure that there’s never been a publicly running advertisement attacking effective altruism.)
(I think it’s pretty likely that there attack ads would be if EA keeps running candidates. Maybe you’re skeptical now, but that’s based on a positive view of EA from the inside; not based on what a motivated opposition researcher who’s being paid to find reasons to criticize an EA would either find or twist to criticize. The term “political hatchet job” exists for a reason.)
obscurity of these cause areas also reduces cause-area-motivated opponents
I’m not really sure what you mean by that?
Is the idea that nobody would oppose EA candidates because of EA ideology? That’s true, they would oppose EA candidates for non-EA ideological reasons, and also because electoral seats are a scarce resource.
Yeah. It’s kinda difficult for me to present a knockdown argument against explicitly EA politicians, when everybody agrees that the benefits would be illegible the public and difficult to predict.
This is true, and I think my essay suffered somewhat from being both an argument specifically about Carrick Flynn and an argument about politics more generally.
I think that the focus on the House, beyond just Flynn, was somewhat reasonable though; I think that EA is just incapable of getting an EA elected to the Senate in the near term, so there’s not much point in considering the benefits. I can elaborate on this if you disagree.
Two reasons this is bad:
As I discussed in the next section, creating opposition to EA could be harmful to EA itself.
It means that most of the EA effort in elections would go, not to arguing for EA causes specifically, but to arguing for and fighting over other issues. For example, in OR-06, significant sums of EA money was spent attacking Andrea Salinas as a drug lobbyist, which is not an EA focus. It also means that EA might lose elections even where nobody really disagrees or opposes the EA cause areas; OR-06 is again an example.
Is the idea that there isn’t already opposition to EA stances, so creating it is extra bad?
On the flip side of one point, obscurity of these cause areas also reduces cause-area-motivated opponents.
Bringing into existence new opposition is bad. Not sure to what extent there’s currently no opposition; but there’s no opposition of the sort that EA’s would face. (I’m pretty sure there are no professional oppo researchers targeting EA or individual EA’s right now, for example. Similarly, existing politicians have no reason to dislike EA. Similarly, I’m pretty sure that there’s never been a publicly running advertisement attacking effective altruism.)
(I think it’s pretty likely that there attack ads would be if EA keeps running candidates. Maybe you’re skeptical now, but that’s based on a positive view of EA from the inside; not based on what a motivated opposition researcher who’s being paid to find reasons to criticize an EA would either find or twist to criticize. The term “political hatchet job” exists for a reason.)
I’m not really sure what you mean by that?
Is the idea that nobody would oppose EA candidates because of EA ideology? That’s true, they would oppose EA candidates for non-EA ideological reasons, and also because electoral seats are a scarce resource.