Answering the question of whether a candidate is “good,” might well (at least on certain EA world views) be sufficient to answer the question of whether donating to the candidate would be (sufficiently) cost-effective (given evidence that 1) donations matter for getting elected, and 2) getting elected allows one to influence policy). Consider the case of a candidate running on a longtermist platform. My impression is that when longtermist grantmakers evaluate giving opportunities in existential risk mitigation, their decision process is much closer to “determine whether the opportunity in question has a reasonable chance of improving humanity’s longterm trajectory within a range of broadly acceptable costs” than to “conduct a thorough, systematic, GiveWell-style cost-effectiveness analysis.” I would think that roughly the same principles that apply to donations to organizations that lobby Congress for better biosecurity policy apply to donations to candidates for Congress who strongly favor better biosecurity policy. This seems to be the thinking behind OP’s post. The back-of-the-envelope intuition here is pretty straightforward; insisting on a GiveWell-style CEA in its place reads like an isolated demand for rigor.
If you can point out where I asked for “a Givewell style CEA” I might agree that it was an isolated demand for rigor.
I didn’t do that, however. Instead, I asked for an attempt to make the case that it could be better than GiveDirectly—I didn’t specify how one might make the case or any level of rigor at all.
What I was imagining was a basic back of the envelope sketch of how this intervention might be cost effective, which I don’t think OP provided.
The supposed motivation for the post was EA having a funding overhang—in that context asking how it compares to another intervention which can potentially absorb near limitless amounts of money without diminishing returns seems totally reasonable to me.
Answering the question of whether a candidate is “good,” might well (at least on certain EA world views) be sufficient to answer the question of whether donating to the candidate would be (sufficiently) cost-effective (given evidence that 1) donations matter for getting elected, and 2) getting elected allows one to influence policy). Consider the case of a candidate running on a longtermist platform. My impression is that when longtermist grantmakers evaluate giving opportunities in existential risk mitigation, their decision process is much closer to “determine whether the opportunity in question has a reasonable chance of improving humanity’s longterm trajectory within a range of broadly acceptable costs” than to “conduct a thorough, systematic, GiveWell-style cost-effectiveness analysis.” I would think that roughly the same principles that apply to donations to organizations that lobby Congress for better biosecurity policy apply to donations to candidates for Congress who strongly favor better biosecurity policy. This seems to be the thinking behind OP’s post. The back-of-the-envelope intuition here is pretty straightforward; insisting on a GiveWell-style CEA in its place reads like an isolated demand for rigor.
If you can point out where I asked for “a Givewell style CEA” I might agree that it was an isolated demand for rigor.
I didn’t do that, however. Instead, I asked for an attempt to make the case that it could be better than GiveDirectly—I didn’t specify how one might make the case or any level of rigor at all.
What I was imagining was a basic back of the envelope sketch of how this intervention might be cost effective, which I don’t think OP provided.
The supposed motivation for the post was EA having a funding overhang—in that context asking how it compares to another intervention which can potentially absorb near limitless amounts of money without diminishing returns seems totally reasonable to me.