I think that these are good lessons learned, but regarding the last point, I want to highlight a comment by Oliver Habryka;
It seems obvious to me that anyone saying anything bad right now about Carrick would be pretty severely socially punished by various community leaders, and I expected the community leadership to avoid saying so many effusively positive things in a context where it’s really hard for people to provide counterevidence, especially when it comes with an ask for substantial career shifts and funding.
This seems really important, and while I’m not sure that politics is the mind-killer, I think that the forum and EA in general needs to be really, really careful about the community dynamics. I think that the principal problem pointed out by the recent “Bad Omens” post was peer pressure towards conformity in ways that lead to people acting like jerks, and I think that we’re seeing that play out here as well, but involving central people in EA orgs pushing the dynamics, rather than local EA groups. And that seems far more worrying.
So yes, I think there are lots of important lessons learned about politics, but those matter narrowly. And I think that the biggest risk of failing to tread carefully here isn’t about wasting money on political campaigns, it’s undermining the ability to make trustworthy claims far more generally. We need to do our best to exhibit epistemic standards that are not just better than anyone else in politics—a bar too low to be worth noticing, much less aiming for—but ones that actually should engender trust among both EAs, and the rapidly growing set of people who are watching. And because politics operates at high simulacra levels, I’m concerned that in our rush to focus on various legitimate concerns and lessons while “doing politics” at the object level, we aren’t learning those lessons.
I’ve been thinking about this too. I was really struck by the contrast between the high level of explicit support for “one of our own” running for office vs. the usual resistance to political activism or campaigning otherwise. Personally, I’m strongly in favor of good-faith political campaigning on EA grounds, but from my perspective explicit ties to the EA community shouldn’t matter so much in that calculus—rather, what matters is our expectations of what the candidates would do to advance or block EA-aligned priorities, whether the candidates are branded as EA or not.
In 2020 I suggested that it might be a good idea to set up an entity to vet and endorse candidates for office on EA grounds. While I’m sure such an entity would have still supported Carrick in retrospect, I think one benefit of having a resource like this is that it would allow us to identify, support, and develop relationships with other politicians around the US and in the rest of the world who would be really helpful to have in office while not facing some of the disadvantages of being a newcomer/outsider that Carrick faced.
There are a variety of reasons that having people who are both aligned with our goals, and ALSO willing to listen to pitches on specific policy suggestions, is far more impactful than having people who we are just aligned with in general—but if you look at the list of candidates that Guarding Against Pandemics is supporting, it’s definitely inclusive of many people who are aligned with our goals and not aware or not particularly engaged with EA, but have more background in politics. And while we’re focused on longtermist policy, rather than EA more generally1, we are doing much of what you suggest in terms of finding and vetting candidates—and doing more to actually engage and develop relationships.
I think that among the majority of EAs, we haven’t been as clear as we should be that Carrick’s campaign was part of a larger set of things that GAP is doing, and there are lots of specific political campaigns we still encourage donations towards—in addition to being happy for people to donate directly to the “hard money” PAC, which is capped at $5,000 per donor.
We’re supportive of other EA policy ideas and goals, but we both have limited capacity, and are not currently supporting or opposing anyone on that basis.
I think that the principal problem pointed out by the recent “Bad Omens” post was peer pressure towards conformity in ways that lead to people acting like jerks, and I think that we’re seeing that play out here as well, but involving central people in EA orgs pushing the dynamics, rather than local EA groups. And that seems far more worrying.
What are examples of “pressure toward conformity” or “acting like jerks” that you saw among “central people in EA orgs”? Are you counting the people running the campaign as “central”? (I do agree with some of Matthew’s points there.)
I guess you could say that public support for Carrick felt like “pressure”. But there are many things in EA that have lots of support and also lots of pushback (e.g. community-building strategies, 80K career advice). Lots of people are excited about higher funding levels in EA; lots of people are worried about it; vigorous discussion follows.
Did something about the campaign make it feel different?
*****
Habryka expressed concern that negative evidence on the campaign would be “systematically filtered out”. This kind of claim is really hard to disprove. If you don’t see strong criticism of X from an EA perspective, this could mean any of:
People are critical, but self-censor for the sake of their reputation or “the greater good”
People are critical, but no one took the time to write up a strong critical case
People aren’t critical because they defer too much to non-critical people
People aren’t critical because they thought carefully about X and found the pro-X arguments compelling
I think that (2) and (4) are more common, and (1) less common, than many other people seem to think. I do think that (3) is common, and I wish it were less so, but I don’t see that as “pressure”.
If someone had published a post over the last few months titled “The case against donating to the Flynn campaign”, and it was reasonably well-written, I think it would have gotten a ton of karma and positive comments — just like this post or this post or this post.
Why did no one write this?
Well, the author would need (a) the time to write a post, (b) good arguments against donating, (c) a motive (improving community epistemics, preventing low-impact donations, getting karma), and (d) comfort with publishing the post (that is, not enough self-censorship to override (c)).
I read Habryka as believing that there are (many?) people who fulfill (a), (b), and (c) but are stopped by (d). My best guess is that for many issues, including the Flynn campaign, no one fulfilled all of (a), (b), and (c), which left (d) irrelevant.
I’m not sure how to figure out which of us is closer to the truth. But I will note that writing a pseudonymous post mostly gets around (d), and lots of criticism is published that way.
(If you are someone who was stopped by (d), let me know! That’s really important evidence. I’m also curious why you didn’t write your post under a pseudonym.)*
I also hope the red-teaming contest will help us figure this out, by providing more people with a reason to conduct and publish critical research. If some major topic gets no entries, that seems like evidence for (b) or (d), though with the election over I don’t expect anyone to write about the Flynn campaign anyway.
*I’ve now heard from one person who said that (d) was one factor in why they didn’t leave comments — a mix of not wanting to make other commenters angry and not wanting to create community drama (the drama would happen even with a pseudonym).
Given that this response came in soon after I made my comment, I’ve updated moderately toward the importance of (d), though I’m still unsure what fraction of (d) is about actual Forum comments vs. the author’s reputation/relationships outside of the Forum.
Overall, I agree with Habryka’s comment that “negative evidence on the campaign would be ‘systematically filtered out’”. Although I maxed out donations to the primary campaign and phone banked a bit for the campaign, I had a number of concerns about the campaign that I never saw mentioned in EA spaces. However, I didn’t want to raise these concerns for fear that this would negatively affect Carrick’s chances of winning the election.
Now that Carrick’s campaign is over, I feel more free to write my concerns. These included:
The post claims “The race seems to be quite tight. According to this poll, Carrick is in second place among likely Democratic voters by 4% (14% of voters favor Flynn, 18% favor Salinas), with a margin of error of +/- 4 percentage points.” However, it declines to mention that “26 percent of the district’s voters holding an unfavorable opinion of him, compared to only 7 percent for Salinas” (The Hill).
At the time the post was written, a significant fraction of voters already had already voted. The claim “the campaign is especially impactful right now” seems misleading when it would have been better to help earlier on.
The campaign already has plenty of TV ads from the Protect the Future PAC, and there are lots of internet comments complaining about receiving mailers every other day and seeing Carrick ads all the time. (Though later I learned that PAC ads aren’t able to show Carrick speaking, and I’ve read a few internet comments complaining about how they’ve never heard Carrick speak despite seeing all those ads. So campaign donations could be valuable for ads which do show him speaking.)
Having a lot of people coming out-of-state to volunteer could further the impression among voters that Carrick doesn’t have much support from Oregonians.
If you can speak enthusiastically and knowledgeably about the campaign, you can do a better job of phone banking or door-knocking than the average person. However, the campaign already spent $847,000 for door-knockers. While volunteering for the campaign might have been high in expected value, the fact that other people could do door-knocking raises questions about whether it’s in out-of-state EAs’ comparative advantage to do so.
I’d recommend cross-posting your critiques of the “especially useful” post onto that post — will make it easier for anyone who studies this campaign later (I expect many people will) to learn from you.
I’m curious about your fear that these comments would negatively affect Carrick’s chances. What was the mechanism you expected? The possibility of reduced donations/volunteering from people on the Forum? The media picking up on critical comments?
If “reduced donations” were a factor, would you also be concerned about posting criticism of other causes you thought were important for the same reason? I’m still working out what makes this campaign different from other causes (or maybe there really are similar issues across a bunch of causes).
One thing that comes to mind is time-sensitivity: if you rethink your views on a different cause later, you can encourage more donations to make up for a previous reduction. If you rethink views on a political campaign after Election Day, it’s too late.
If that played a role, I can think of other situations that might exert the same pressure — for example, organizations running out of runway having a strong fundraising advantage if people are worried about dooming them. Not sure what to do about that, and would love to hear ideas (from anyone, this isn’t specifically aimed at Michael).
I think I was primarily concerned that negative information about the campaign could get picked up by the media. Thinking it over now though, that motivation doesn’t make sense for not posting about highly visible negative news coverage (which the media would have already been aware of) or not posting concerns on a less publicly visible EA platform, such as Slack. Other factors for why I didn’t write up my concerns about Carrick’s chances of being elected might have been that:
no other EAs seemed to be posting much negative information about the campaign, and I thought there might have been a good reason for that
aside from the posting of “Why Helping the Flynn Campaign is especially useful right now”, there weren’t any events that triggered me to consider writing up my concerns
the negative media coverage was obvious enough that I thought anyone considering volunteering would already know about it, and it had to already have been priced into the election odds estimates on Metaculus and PredictIt, so drawing attention to it might not have been valuable
time-sensitivity, as you mentioned
public critiques might have to be quite well-reasoned, and I might want to check-in with the campaign to make sure that I didn’t misunderstand anything, etc. That could be a decent amount of effort on my part and their part and also somewhat awkward given that I was also volunteering for the campaign.
However, if someone privately asked me for my thoughts on how likely the campaign was to succeed or how valuable helping with it was, I would have been happy to share my honest opinion, including any concerns.
The only EA who’s ever been an asshole to me was an asshole because I supported Flynn, so I don’t think there was some hidden anti-donations-to-Flynn movement that self-censored. EAs who opposed the idea were quite loud about it.
Just because some people loudly opposed it, doesn’t mean most people who opposed it were loud.
(I imagine there were also a lot of people like me who simply chose not to investigate whether or not they thought this race was competitive with donations elsewhere—in my case because I’m not American so couldn’t donate either way.)
I think that these are good lessons learned, but regarding the last point, I want to highlight a comment by Oliver Habryka;
This seems really important, and while I’m not sure that politics is the mind-killer, I think that the forum and EA in general needs to be really, really careful about the community dynamics. I think that the principal problem pointed out by the recent “Bad Omens” post was peer pressure towards conformity in ways that lead to people acting like jerks, and I think that we’re seeing that play out here as well, but involving central people in EA orgs pushing the dynamics, rather than local EA groups. And that seems far more worrying.
So yes, I think there are lots of important lessons learned about politics, but those matter narrowly. And I think that the biggest risk of failing to tread carefully here isn’t about wasting money on political campaigns, it’s undermining the ability to make trustworthy claims far more generally. We need to do our best to exhibit epistemic standards that are not just better than anyone else in politics—a bar too low to be worth noticing, much less aiming for—but ones that actually should engender trust among both EAs, and the rapidly growing set of people who are watching. And because politics operates at high simulacra levels, I’m concerned that in our rush to focus on various legitimate concerns and lessons while “doing politics” at the object level, we aren’t learning those lessons.
I’ve been thinking about this too. I was really struck by the contrast between the high level of explicit support for “one of our own” running for office vs. the usual resistance to political activism or campaigning otherwise. Personally, I’m strongly in favor of good-faith political campaigning on EA grounds, but from my perspective explicit ties to the EA community shouldn’t matter so much in that calculus—rather, what matters is our expectations of what the candidates would do to advance or block EA-aligned priorities, whether the candidates are branded as EA or not.
In 2020 I suggested that it might be a good idea to set up an entity to vet and endorse candidates for office on EA grounds. While I’m sure such an entity would have still supported Carrick in retrospect, I think one benefit of having a resource like this is that it would allow us to identify, support, and develop relationships with other politicians around the US and in the rest of the world who would be really helpful to have in office while not facing some of the disadvantages of being a newcomer/outsider that Carrick faced.
There are a variety of reasons that having people who are both aligned with our goals, and ALSO willing to listen to pitches on specific policy suggestions, is far more impactful than having people who we are just aligned with in general—but if you look at the list of candidates that Guarding Against Pandemics is supporting, it’s definitely inclusive of many people who are aligned with our goals and not aware or not particularly engaged with EA, but have more background in politics. And while we’re focused on longtermist policy, rather than EA more generally1, we are doing much of what you suggest in terms of finding and vetting candidates—and doing more to actually engage and develop relationships.
I think that among the majority of EAs, we haven’t been as clear as we should be that Carrick’s campaign was part of a larger set of things that GAP is doing, and there are lots of specific political campaigns we still encourage donations towards—in addition to being happy for people to donate directly to the “hard money” PAC, which is capped at $5,000 per donor.
We’re supportive of other EA policy ideas and goals, but we both have limited capacity, and are not currently supporting or opposing anyone on that basis.
What are examples of “pressure toward conformity” or “acting like jerks” that you saw among “central people in EA orgs”? Are you counting the people running the campaign as “central”? (I do agree with some of Matthew’s points there.)
I guess you could say that public support for Carrick felt like “pressure”. But there are many things in EA that have lots of support and also lots of pushback (e.g. community-building strategies, 80K career advice). Lots of people are excited about higher funding levels in EA; lots of people are worried about it; vigorous discussion follows.
Did something about the campaign make it feel different?
*****
Habryka expressed concern that negative evidence on the campaign would be “systematically filtered out”. This kind of claim is really hard to disprove. If you don’t see strong criticism of X from an EA perspective, this could mean any of:
People are critical, but self-censor for the sake of their reputation or “the greater good”
People are critical, but no one took the time to write up a strong critical case
People aren’t critical because they defer too much to non-critical people
People aren’t critical because they thought carefully about X and found the pro-X arguments compelling
I think that (2) and (4) are more common, and (1) less common, than many other people seem to think. I do think that (3) is common, and I wish it were less so, but I don’t see that as “pressure”.
If someone had published a post over the last few months titled “The case against donating to the Flynn campaign”, and it was reasonably well-written, I think it would have gotten a ton of karma and positive comments — just like this post or this post or this post.
Why did no one write this?
Well, the author would need (a) the time to write a post, (b) good arguments against donating, (c) a motive (improving community epistemics, preventing low-impact donations, getting karma), and (d) comfort with publishing the post (that is, not enough self-censorship to override (c)).
I read Habryka as believing that there are (many?) people who fulfill (a), (b), and (c) but are stopped by (d). My best guess is that for many issues, including the Flynn campaign, no one fulfilled all of (a), (b), and (c), which left (d) irrelevant.
I’m not sure how to figure out which of us is closer to the truth. But I will note that writing a pseudonymous post mostly gets around (d), and lots of criticism is published that way.
(If you are someone who was stopped by (d), let me know! That’s really important evidence. I’m also curious why you didn’t write your post under a pseudonym.)*
I also hope the red-teaming contest will help us figure this out, by providing more people with a reason to conduct and publish critical research. If some major topic gets no entries, that seems like evidence for (b) or (d), though with the election over I don’t expect anyone to write about the Flynn campaign anyway.
*I’ve now heard from one person who said that (d) was one factor in why they didn’t leave comments — a mix of not wanting to make other commenters angry and not wanting to create community drama (the drama would happen even with a pseudonym).
Given that this response came in soon after I made my comment, I’ve updated moderately toward the importance of (d), though I’m still unsure what fraction of (d) is about actual Forum comments vs. the author’s reputation/relationships outside of the Forum.
Overall, I agree with Habryka’s comment that “negative evidence on the campaign would be ‘systematically filtered out’”. Although I maxed out donations to the primary campaign and phone banked a bit for the campaign, I had a number of concerns about the campaign that I never saw mentioned in EA spaces. However, I didn’t want to raise these concerns for fear that this would negatively affect Carrick’s chances of winning the election.
Now that Carrick’s campaign is over, I feel more free to write my concerns. These included:
The vast majority of media coverage was negative from the start. If voters made even a cursory Google of Carrick Flynn’s name, they would be met with plenty of negative headlines like “Carrick Flynn, Crypto-Backed Candidate in New Congressional District, Has Rarely Voted in Oregon” or “Environmental Groups Condemn Congressional Candidate Carrick Flynn’s Comments on Spotted Owls and Timber Unity”.
The vast majority of comments on Oregon subreddits were also negative.
The campaign seemed to have quite few non-EA donors or volunteers, suggesting a lack of local support.
The campaign seemed to have few volunteers until about a week ago, after Why Helping the Flynn Campaign is especially useful right now was posted.
Even putting aside the issue of crypto funding, Carrick had a notable amount of other controversies such as his comments on spotted owl conservation, the fact that only 2.5% of donations were from Oregon, and that he only voted twice in the past 20 years.
I also have some critiques of the post Why Helping the Flynn Campaign is especially useful right now but I declined to write a comment. These include:
The post claims “The race seems to be quite tight. According to this poll, Carrick is in second place among likely Democratic voters by 4% (14% of voters favor Flynn, 18% favor Salinas), with a margin of error of +/- 4 percentage points.” However, it declines to mention that “26 percent of the district’s voters holding an unfavorable opinion of him, compared to only 7 percent for Salinas” (The Hill).
At the time the post was written, a significant fraction of voters already had already voted. The claim “the campaign is especially impactful right now” seems misleading when it would have been better to help earlier on.
The campaign already has plenty of TV ads from the Protect the Future PAC, and there are lots of internet comments complaining about receiving mailers every other day and seeing Carrick ads all the time. (Though later I learned that PAC ads aren’t able to show Carrick speaking, and I’ve read a few internet comments complaining about how they’ve never heard Carrick speak despite seeing all those ads. So campaign donations could be valuable for ads which do show him speaking.)
Having a lot of people coming out-of-state to volunteer could further the impression among voters that Carrick doesn’t have much support from Oregonians.
If you can speak enthusiastically and knowledgeably about the campaign, you can do a better job of phone banking or door-knocking than the average person. However, the campaign already spent $847,000 for door-knockers. While volunteering for the campaign might have been high in expected value, the fact that other people could do door-knocking raises questions about whether it’s in out-of-state EAs’ comparative advantage to do so.
I’d recommend cross-posting your critiques of the “especially useful” post onto that post — will make it easier for anyone who studies this campaign later (I expect many people will) to learn from you.
Thanks for the suggestion, just copied the critiques of the “especially useful” post over!
Thanks for sharing all of this!
I’m curious about your fear that these comments would negatively affect Carrick’s chances. What was the mechanism you expected? The possibility of reduced donations/volunteering from people on the Forum? The media picking up on critical comments?
If “reduced donations” were a factor, would you also be concerned about posting criticism of other causes you thought were important for the same reason? I’m still working out what makes this campaign different from other causes (or maybe there really are similar issues across a bunch of causes).
One thing that comes to mind is time-sensitivity: if you rethink your views on a different cause later, you can encourage more donations to make up for a previous reduction. If you rethink views on a political campaign after Election Day, it’s too late.
If that played a role, I can think of other situations that might exert the same pressure — for example, organizations running out of runway having a strong fundraising advantage if people are worried about dooming them. Not sure what to do about that, and would love to hear ideas (from anyone, this isn’t specifically aimed at Michael).
I think I was primarily concerned that negative information about the campaign could get picked up by the media. Thinking it over now though, that motivation doesn’t make sense for not posting about highly visible negative news coverage (which the media would have already been aware of) or not posting concerns on a less publicly visible EA platform, such as Slack. Other factors for why I didn’t write up my concerns about Carrick’s chances of being elected might have been that:
no other EAs seemed to be posting much negative information about the campaign, and I thought there might have been a good reason for that
aside from the posting of “Why Helping the Flynn Campaign is especially useful right now”, there weren’t any events that triggered me to consider writing up my concerns
the negative media coverage was obvious enough that I thought anyone considering volunteering would already know about it, and it had to already have been priced into the election odds estimates on Metaculus and PredictIt, so drawing attention to it might not have been valuable
time-sensitivity, as you mentioned
public critiques might have to be quite well-reasoned, and I might want to check-in with the campaign to make sure that I didn’t misunderstand anything, etc. That could be a decent amount of effort on my part and their part and also somewhat awkward given that I was also volunteering for the campaign.
However, if someone privately asked me for my thoughts on how likely the campaign was to succeed or how valuable helping with it was, I would have been happy to share my honest opinion, including any concerns.
The only EA who’s ever been an asshole to me was an asshole because I supported Flynn, so I don’t think there was some hidden anti-donations-to-Flynn movement that self-censored. EAs who opposed the idea were quite loud about it.
Just because some people loudly opposed it, doesn’t mean most people who opposed it were loud.
(I imagine there were also a lot of people like me who simply chose not to investigate whether or not they thought this race was competitive with donations elsewhere—in my case because I’m not American so couldn’t donate either way.)
I’m sorry someone was an ass to you.