Proposal: kill the TSA. It makes people miserable, eats time, reduces travel, and take people to accept government intrusion. It’s relatively low hanging fruit because the baptists part of the baptist and bootlegger coalition (anti-terrorism) is so weak and the bootleggers so cartoonishly evil. It is a matter of financial competition with the TSA union and equipment manufacturers, neither of which has that much money.
Benefits of success include the object level ones, building up lobbying expertise for something harder, and a visible reversal of the reduction of liberty inside the US.
Increasing air travel means increasing carbon emissions.
It’s good for people to accept government intrusion, because a light global surveillance state (PRISM type stuff) will be desirable in the face of x-risks brought by nanotechnology, biotechnology, or other future developments. (We may as well leverage terrorist threats to get this light global surveillance state implemented, since the nanotech/biotech justifications are too weird to ever be accepted by the mainstream.)
If a successful terrorist attack involving planes is later conducted, the EA brand will suffer mightily (people are really irrational when it comes to terrorist attacks). This is related to my theory for why Obama is so drone-happy: if there is a major terrorist attack on US soil, power will go to the Republicans in the next election, so Democrats have a stronger incentive to actually prevent terrorist attacks. Obama also has less of a disincentive to take harsh measures against potential terrorists since liberals will go easy on him; see also Nixon goes to China. (I’m curious how far this argument can be generalized—does one always want to elect the politician who states the opposite of the foreign policy one wants to see implemented?) (Note: I don’t think protecting our brand should be paramount over all other considerations, but I do think we should risk reputational capital wisely.)
Aligning the EA movement politically runs the risk of alienating potential EAs who are polarized against whoever we align ourselves with.
Proposal: kill the TSA. It makes people miserable, eats time, reduces travel, and take people to accept government intrusion. It’s relatively low hanging fruit because the baptists part of the baptist and bootlegger coalition (anti-terrorism) is so weak and the bootleggers so cartoonishly evil. It is a matter of financial competition with the TSA union and equipment manufacturers, neither of which has that much money.
Benefits of success include the object level ones, building up lobbying expertise for something harder, and a visible reversal of the reduction of liberty inside the US.
Devil’s advocacy for this proposal:
Increasing air travel means increasing carbon emissions.
It’s good for people to accept government intrusion, because a light global surveillance state (PRISM type stuff) will be desirable in the face of x-risks brought by nanotechnology, biotechnology, or other future developments. (We may as well leverage terrorist threats to get this light global surveillance state implemented, since the nanotech/biotech justifications are too weird to ever be accepted by the mainstream.)
If a successful terrorist attack involving planes is later conducted, the EA brand will suffer mightily (people are really irrational when it comes to terrorist attacks). This is related to my theory for why Obama is so drone-happy: if there is a major terrorist attack on US soil, power will go to the Republicans in the next election, so Democrats have a stronger incentive to actually prevent terrorist attacks. Obama also has less of a disincentive to take harsh measures against potential terrorists since liberals will go easy on him; see also Nixon goes to China. (I’m curious how far this argument can be generalized—does one always want to elect the politician who states the opposite of the foreign policy one wants to see implemented?) (Note: I don’t think protecting our brand should be paramount over all other considerations, but I do think we should risk reputational capital wisely.)
Aligning the EA movement politically runs the risk of alienating potential EAs who are polarized against whoever we align ourselves with.