I’m glad to see EAs running for political office explicitly as EAs. But I hope that the attitude and approach by the EA community towards the Flynn campaign doesn’t become the norm. I felt that the campaign was intrusive and pushy, and the standard of care was much lower than what we expect for other causes/interventions.
Some points:
I got direct campaign emails from the Flynn campaign, even though I never signed up for campaign emails. Presumably some EA organization gave the Flynn campaign a list of emails or they scraped it off some EA website. I would prefer EA organizations to keep contact information private and adopt an “opt-in” policy for sharing emails. I don’t want to get spammed by people asking money for causes or campaigns, especially if EA political campaigns become more frequent.
One of my local group co-organizers got a personal appeal from the Flynn campaign in the final days of the election asking them to fly to Oregon to do door-knocking for the campaign saying how it was high expected value. Not only is it a troubling sign that the campaign did not already have a large, local population of door-knockers, but the campaign didn’t seem to consider the terrible optics of having people getting paid to fly in from out-of-state to do door-knocking for a few days. This seems anti-democratic.
This primary was flooded with billionaire Super PAC money. This is part of an ongoing trend of billionaires buying political power and is detested within the progressive community. It’s undemocratic, and we should be cautious about engaging in politics through billionaire money, even if it is ‘our’ billionaire, and especially if the EA candidate is running in a progressive democratic primary. Even if you think democracy is just an instrumental good you should be worried about the capacity for billionaires to heavily influence elections.
The campaign language and EA posts about it, including this one, center entirely around Flynn and not the winner Andrea Salinas, who is also an excellent candidate. The values and views of other candidates the EA candidate is displacing should be a significant consideration in whether to support the campaign. It may be more successful to make EA a constituency for lawmakers, rather than just supporting EA candidates running against progressives.
Furthermore, I’m not sure the information value alone was worth the millions spent on this campaign by the EA community. The ‘lessons learned’ listed in this forum post seem obvious. I googled “tips for running for congress” and in 10 minutes read through several resources that gave most of these same lessons learned. I expect a 30 min call with a Democrat strategist, of which there are several in the EA movement, would have also given the same lessons learned, and probably would have given a more accurate prediction on the election outcome than the prediction markets cited in this post. Flynn got ~half the vote of the leading candidate, which is more of a blowout than as suggested by the prediction markets. I frequently see parts of the EA community think they’ve found some new fascinating insight (EA movement learns about ‘X’) when in fact they are just columbusing knowledge from other communities. It’s as if some piece of knowledge must be blessed or learned directly by a well-known EA before it’s accepted by the community at large. A little less hubris and a little more humility towards other knowledge domains would save quite a bit effort and resources when learning about things like running for congress.
re: your second bullet point, I volunteered for door-knocking, and none of the other volunteers I knew/met (which was basically all of them) were either asked to come doorknock or offered travel subsidies by the campaign team. Some volunteers did reach out to their friends to encourage them to come help out (though the campaign didn’t ask people to do this). I would guess that’s what happened with the message your friend got.
That said, I really appreciate how carefully you’re trying to think through this. I wish we saw more in-depth red-teaming and criticism of popular ideas floating around in the community.
Edit: I checked with the campaign and they explicitly said that they didn’t pay for anyones flight nor offer to pay for anyones flight
The values and views of other candidates the EA candidate is displacing should be a significant consideration in whether to support the campaign
This seems like a very surprising claim to me fwiw. Like it sounds reasonable and rational on the face of it, but if I think about it for even 15 seconds, it breaks down under (my current and potentially very flawed) understanding of the world.
I expected this critique when I wrote that claim. I think I understand why someone would see the other candidate as being insignificant. Let me know if I’m presuming the wrong reasons here:
It seemed that the Flynn campaign message was all about pandemic preparedness. At least that’s how it was marketed in EA spaces. And it’s mostly true that there isn’t anybody in congress championing pandemic preparedness. If you are a single-issue voter on pandemic preparedness or AGI, I can see how the opposing candidate doesn’t matter to you; your candidate will do more for the cause than any other candidate, regardless of party, who likely doesn’t care or have an opinion on it. It’s more of a binary. If you care more about existential risks much more than anything else, this reasoning make sense.
But if you care about other causes like animal welfare, local or global poverty, climate change, democracy health, etc., chances are the other candidate does have views on it. If they are a progressive democratic candidate like Andrea Salinas, EA-aligned poverty alleviation, climate change action, and voting reform are significant parts of their platform. Also, one of the key issues in the U.S. presently is whether we are going to retain a semblance of a democracy or if elections are going to be decided by super PACs and gerrymandered state legislators. There is a significant party divide on support for EA-aligned voting reform and bans on alternative voting methods. If you care about being able to influence elections through public appeals, maintaining a functioning democracy matters even if you are a single-issue voter. There is a clear partisan divide. Given an equal chance of winning, would you rather the EA candidate run opposed to someone like Andrea Salinas or Madison Cawthorn?
It’s very much not obvious to me that EAs should generally prefer progressive democratic candidates in general, or Salinas in particular.
Speaking personally, I am generally not excited about Democratic progressives gaining more power in the party relative to centrists, and I’m pretty confident I’m not alone here in that[1].
I also think it’s false to claim that Salinas’s platform as linked gives much reason to think she will be a force for good on global poverty, animal welfare, or meaningful voting reform. (I’d obviously change my mind on this if there are other Salinas quotes that pertain more directly to these issues.)
There are also various parts of her platform that make me think there’s a decent chance that her time in office will turn out to be bad for the world by my lights (not just relative to Carrick). I obviously don’t expect everyone here to agree with me on that, and I’m certainly not confident about it, but I also don’t want broad claims that progressives are better by EA values to stand uncontested, because I personally don’t think that’s true.
To be clear, I think this is very contestable within an EA framework, and am not trying to claim that my political preferences here are necessarily implied by EA.
I think your paraphrase is roughly right. But this is not exactly how I’d frame it. Instead, I’d frame it as:
I think improving the long-term future significantly is quite hard. So you need either a pretty targeted theory of change, or the type of mindset that has an implicitly very strong ToC that lets you spot great opportunities along the implicit ToC and execute on it.
Some people do manage to accidentally improve the long-term future significantly (e.g. there’s an argument for Petrov’s grandmother), but this is very much not the default, and we should not rely on them being successful at this, especially ex ante.
Thanks for clarifying. I agree with you that if the main reason you are supporting a candidate is their potential impact on long-term future oriented policy then the opposing candidate doesn’t matter much beyond a simple estimate of their electoral chances vs. your candidate.
I guess I’m also not convinced if you care about typical neartermist EA causes that the math checks out. Like, I don’t think typical progressive democrats are very good at e.g. increasing foreign aid or phasing out factory farming, though at least this seems more plausible. *
I did look briefly at Salinas’ platform and I didn’t see anything about (e.g.) increasing global health spending.
(EDIT: I do think the “functioning democracy” angle may be a reasonably strong contender for the type of crucial consideration that could flip my conclusion, though I’m currently at <10% here. I think it’s great that you brought this up).
* Obviously there are more exceptions for specific Democrat candidates on non-LT issues, e.g. I was (and am) a Cory Booker shill.
I don’t understand why you keep presenting this as a long-term vs near-term issue. I would have been thrilled to support a candidate who advocated for comprehensive and unprecedented welfare reform for farmed animals, or for massive increases in well-targeted global health spending. Support for such issues is so rare in American politics, and could be so disproportionately impactful, that it makes perfect sense to focus exclusively on the exceptional candidate who decides to make them a top priority.
I don’t understand why you keep presenting this as a long-term vs near-term issue.
I probably framed my first reply to Matthew in a way that was unhelpfully focused only on LT stuff, which I’d guess partially led to the presentation in his response.
Yes, it was one thing to say the money was worth it because of the (small) chance of Carrick winning, but saying it was worth it for the information value alone really stings when you think about how far that money could go if donated elsewhere.
Furthermore, I’m not sure the information value alone was worth the millions spent on this campaign by the EA community. The ‘lessons learned’ listed in this forum post seem obvious.
The post author doesn’t say anything about having a special connection to the campaign. I assume the “value of information” argument is that campaign staff/insiders gained knowledge they couldn’t have gotten otherwise, and I’m not sure this post would shed much light on that argument either way.
As a relatively trivial example of learning not available from a Google search: the campaign presumably learned things like how many people would show up to make calls, how much money they could raise, etc.
The ‘lessons learned’ listed in this forum post seem obvious. I googled “tips for running for congress” and in 10 minutes read through several resources that gave most of these same lessons learned. I expect a 30 min call with a Democrat strategist, of which there are several in the EA movement, would have also given the same lessons learned, and probably would have given a more accurate prediction on the election outcome than the prediction markets cited in this post.
People who worked on the campaign can speak to this better than I can, but I would give them more credit for doing reasonable due diligence. I have a strong expectation that:
There were lots of Democratic strategists involved
There were lots of attempts at polling / predicting the race
I also think there can be a meaningful difference between knowing on paper that “having connections in the district is important” and “spending money can help you win” and “having a voting record is helpful”, and seeing how those factors actually play out in practice. That said, I hope (and expect) that there was more “know-how” generated by the race than just the lessons reflected in this post.
I’m glad to see EAs running for political office explicitly as EAs. But I hope that the attitude and approach by the EA community towards the Flynn campaign doesn’t become the norm. I felt that the campaign was intrusive and pushy, and the standard of care was much lower than what we expect for other causes/interventions.
Some points:
I got direct campaign emails from the Flynn campaign, even though I never signed up for campaign emails. Presumably some EA organization gave the Flynn campaign a list of emails or they scraped it off some EA website. I would prefer EA organizations to keep contact information private and adopt an “opt-in” policy for sharing emails. I don’t want to get spammed by people asking money for causes or campaigns, especially if EA political campaigns become more frequent.
One of my local group co-organizers got a personal appeal from the Flynn campaign in the final days of the election asking them to fly to Oregon to do door-knocking for the campaign saying how it was high expected value. Not only is it a troubling sign that the campaign did not already have a large, local population of door-knockers, but the campaign didn’t seem to consider the terrible optics of having people getting paid to fly in from out-of-state to do door-knocking for a few days. This seems anti-democratic.
This primary was flooded with billionaire Super PAC money. This is part of an ongoing trend of billionaires buying political power and is detested within the progressive community. It’s undemocratic, and we should be cautious about engaging in politics through billionaire money, even if it is ‘our’ billionaire, and especially if the EA candidate is running in a progressive democratic primary. Even if you think democracy is just an instrumental good you should be worried about the capacity for billionaires to heavily influence elections.
The campaign language and EA posts about it, including this one, center entirely around Flynn and not the winner Andrea Salinas, who is also an excellent candidate. The values and views of other candidates the EA candidate is displacing should be a significant consideration in whether to support the campaign. It may be more successful to make EA a constituency for lawmakers, rather than just supporting EA candidates running against progressives.
Furthermore, I’m not sure the information value alone was worth the millions spent on this campaign by the EA community. The ‘lessons learned’ listed in this forum post seem obvious. I googled “tips for running for congress” and in 10 minutes read through several resources that gave most of these same lessons learned. I expect a 30 min call with a Democrat strategist, of which there are several in the EA movement, would have also given the same lessons learned, and probably would have given a more accurate prediction on the election outcome than the prediction markets cited in this post. Flynn got ~half the vote of the leading candidate, which is more of a blowout than as suggested by the prediction markets. I frequently see parts of the EA community think they’ve found some new fascinating insight (EA movement learns about ‘X’) when in fact they are just columbusing knowledge from other communities. It’s as if some piece of knowledge must be blessed or learned directly by a well-known EA before it’s accepted by the community at large. A little less hubris and a little more humility towards other knowledge domains would save quite a bit effort and resources when learning about things like running for congress.
re: your second bullet point, I volunteered for door-knocking, and none of the other volunteers I knew/met (which was basically all of them) were either asked to come doorknock or offered travel subsidies by the campaign team. Some volunteers did reach out to their friends to encourage them to come help out (though the campaign didn’t ask people to do this). I would guess that’s what happened with the message your friend got.
That said, I really appreciate how carefully you’re trying to think through this. I wish we saw more in-depth red-teaming and criticism of popular ideas floating around in the community.
Edit: I checked with the campaign and they explicitly said that they didn’t pay for anyones flight nor offer to pay for anyones flight
This seems like a very surprising claim to me fwiw. Like it sounds reasonable and rational on the face of it, but if I think about it for even 15 seconds, it breaks down under (my current and potentially very flawed) understanding of the world.
Can you elaborate?
I expected this critique when I wrote that claim. I think I understand why someone would see the other candidate as being insignificant. Let me know if I’m presuming the wrong reasons here:
It seemed that the Flynn campaign message was all about pandemic preparedness. At least that’s how it was marketed in EA spaces. And it’s mostly true that there isn’t anybody in congress championing pandemic preparedness. If you are a single-issue voter on pandemic preparedness or AGI, I can see how the opposing candidate doesn’t matter to you; your candidate will do more for the cause than any other candidate, regardless of party, who likely doesn’t care or have an opinion on it. It’s more of a binary. If you care more about existential risks much more than anything else, this reasoning make sense.
But if you care about other causes like animal welfare, local or global poverty, climate change, democracy health, etc., chances are the other candidate does have views on it. If they are a progressive democratic candidate like Andrea Salinas, EA-aligned poverty alleviation, climate change action, and voting reform are significant parts of their platform. Also, one of the key issues in the U.S. presently is whether we are going to retain a semblance of a democracy or if elections are going to be decided by super PACs and gerrymandered state legislators. There is a significant party divide on support for EA-aligned voting reform and bans on alternative voting methods. If you care about being able to influence elections through public appeals, maintaining a functioning democracy matters even if you are a single-issue voter. There is a clear partisan divide. Given an equal chance of winning, would you rather the EA candidate run opposed to someone like Andrea Salinas or Madison Cawthorn?
It’s very much not obvious to me that EAs should generally prefer progressive democratic candidates in general, or Salinas in particular.
Speaking personally, I am generally not excited about Democratic progressives gaining more power in the party relative to centrists, and I’m pretty confident I’m not alone here in that[1].
I also think it’s false to claim that Salinas’s platform as linked gives much reason to think she will be a force for good on global poverty, animal welfare, or meaningful voting reform. (I’d obviously change my mind on this if there are other Salinas quotes that pertain more directly to these issues.)
There are also various parts of her platform that make me think there’s a decent chance that her time in office will turn out to be bad for the world by my lights (not just relative to Carrick). I obviously don’t expect everyone here to agree with me on that, and I’m certainly not confident about it, but I also don’t want broad claims that progressives are better by EA values to stand uncontested, because I personally don’t think that’s true.
To be clear, I think this is very contestable within an EA framework, and am not trying to claim that my political preferences here are necessarily implied by EA.
I think your paraphrase is roughly right. But this is not exactly how I’d frame it. Instead, I’d frame it as:
I think improving the long-term future significantly is quite hard. So you need either a pretty targeted theory of change, or the type of mindset that has an implicitly very strong ToC that lets you spot great opportunities along the implicit ToC and execute on it.
Some people do manage to accidentally improve the long-term future significantly (e.g. there’s an argument for Petrov’s grandmother), but this is very much not the default, and we should not rely on them being successful at this, especially ex ante.
Thanks for clarifying. I agree with you that if the main reason you are supporting a candidate is their potential impact on long-term future oriented policy then the opposing candidate doesn’t matter much beyond a simple estimate of their electoral chances vs. your candidate.
I guess I’m also not convinced if you care about typical neartermist EA causes that the math checks out. Like, I don’t think typical progressive democrats are very good at e.g. increasing foreign aid or phasing out factory farming, though at least this seems more plausible. *
I did look briefly at Salinas’ platform and I didn’t see anything about (e.g.) increasing global health spending.
(EDIT: I do think the “functioning democracy” angle may be a reasonably strong contender for the type of crucial consideration that could flip my conclusion, though I’m currently at <10% here. I think it’s great that you brought this up).
* Obviously there are more exceptions for specific Democrat candidates on non-LT issues, e.g. I was (and am) a Cory Booker shill.
I don’t understand why you keep presenting this as a long-term vs near-term issue. I would have been thrilled to support a candidate who advocated for comprehensive and unprecedented welfare reform for farmed animals, or for massive increases in well-targeted global health spending. Support for such issues is so rare in American politics, and could be so disproportionately impactful, that it makes perfect sense to focus exclusively on the exceptional candidate who decides to make them a top priority.
I probably framed my first reply to Matthew in a way that was unhelpfully focused only on LT stuff, which I’d guess partially led to the presentation in his response.
Yes, it was one thing to say the money was worth it because of the (small) chance of Carrick winning, but saying it was worth it for the information value alone really stings when you think about how far that money could go if donated elsewhere.
The post author doesn’t say anything about having a special connection to the campaign. I assume the “value of information” argument is that campaign staff/insiders gained knowledge they couldn’t have gotten otherwise, and I’m not sure this post would shed much light on that argument either way.
As a relatively trivial example of learning not available from a Google search: the campaign presumably learned things like how many people would show up to make calls, how much money they could raise, etc.
People who worked on the campaign can speak to this better than I can, but I would give them more credit for doing reasonable due diligence. I have a strong expectation that:
There were lots of Democratic strategists involved
There were lots of attempts at polling / predicting the race
I also think there can be a meaningful difference between knowing on paper that “having connections in the district is important” and “spending money can help you win” and “having a voting record is helpful”, and seeing how those factors actually play out in practice. That said, I hope (and expect) that there was more “know-how” generated by the race than just the lessons reflected in this post.