Good post—not least because I think this gives me insight into what the skeptics of EA-in-politics are thinking. I have a few responses:
It seems to me that two things are being conflated here: EAs individually running for office, and EA as a movement exercising political power. The latter, I agree, sounds like a terrible idea, for all the reasons you point out. But most of the arguments you bring up don’t apply to the former. My model of EA in electoral politics looks a lot more like individual EAs (who are themselves pre-selected for being unusually charismatic, well connected, or otherwise well-fit for politics) behaving as basically conventional politicians, being team players, but making EA issues their top priorities on the rare occasions when they come up. That’s perfectly consistent with pulling the rope sideways.
There’s a lot of middle ground between making EA as a movement a faction of the Democratic party and limiting EA involvement in politics to lobbying (though I think we should of course also be doing lobbying.)
As far as I know, advocates for EAs running for political office are much more excited for EAs to run as Republicans than as Democrats, for precisely the reasons you outline (and several others).
Finally, I want to comment that things like the Flynn campaign were always longshots, and that’s fine; this is a numbers game and is largely going to be paying off over decades, not years.
I think it’s fair to characterize the Flynn campaign, the actually existing case, as an example of EA as a movement trying to win a political office; it was portrayed that way in the national press. The takeaways I linked on the EA forum also seemed supportive of EA as a movement trying to win political office, and I haven’t seen anybody suggest that this would be harmful.
Good post—not least because I think this gives me insight into what the skeptics of EA-in-politics are thinking. I have a few responses:
It seems to me that two things are being conflated here: EAs individually running for office, and EA as a movement exercising political power. The latter, I agree, sounds like a terrible idea, for all the reasons you point out. But most of the arguments you bring up don’t apply to the former. My model of EA in electoral politics looks a lot more like individual EAs (who are themselves pre-selected for being unusually charismatic, well connected, or otherwise well-fit for politics) behaving as basically conventional politicians, being team players, but making EA issues their top priorities on the rare occasions when they come up. That’s perfectly consistent with pulling the rope sideways.
There’s a lot of middle ground between making EA as a movement a faction of the Democratic party and limiting EA involvement in politics to lobbying (though I think we should of course also be doing lobbying.)
As far as I know, advocates for EAs running for political office are much more excited for EAs to run as Republicans than as Democrats, for precisely the reasons you outline (and several others).
Finally, I want to comment that things like the Flynn campaign were always longshots, and that’s fine; this is a numbers game and is largely going to be paying off over decades, not years.
I think it’s fair to characterize the Flynn campaign, the actually existing case, as an example of EA as a movement trying to win a political office; it was portrayed that way in the national press. The takeaways I linked on the EA forum also seemed supportive of EA as a movement trying to win political office, and I haven’t seen anybody suggest that this would be harmful.