When I first joined the forum early last year, I was also surprised that politics seems neglected in EA circles. Though I still think the current geopolitical situation is an incredibly important issue (perhaps the most important due to how many other issues it affects), I unfortunately don’t think it’s very tractable. Maybe I’m missing something, but I really don’t see anything a niche community can do to improve the complex situation that is the current political climate. I imagine most EAs think the same.
I think the problem here is that novel approaches are substantially more likely to be failures due to being untested and unproven. This isn’t a big deal in areas where you can try lots of stuff out and sift through them with results, but in something like an election you only get feedback like once a year or so. Worse, the feedback is extremely murky, so you don’t know if it was your intervention or something else that resulted in the outcome you care about.
Also failures trying to do really outlandish things like bribing Congresspeople to endorse Jim Mattis as a centrist candidate in the 2024 US Presidential Election are likely to backfire in more spectacular ways than (say) providing malaria nets for a region with falling malaria or losing a court case against a factory farming conglomerate. That said, this criticism does apply to some other things EAs are interested in, particularly actions purportedly addressing x-risks.
If each election is a rare and special opportunity to collect a bit of data, that makes it even more important to use that data-collection opportunity effectively.
Since we are looking for approaches which are unusually tractable, if effectiveness looks extremely murky, that’s probably not what we wanted.
When I first joined the forum early last year, I was also surprised that politics seems neglected in EA circles. Though I still think the current geopolitical situation is an incredibly important issue (perhaps the most important due to how many other issues it affects), I unfortunately don’t think it’s very tractable. Maybe I’m missing something, but I really don’t see anything a niche community can do to improve the complex situation that is the current political climate. I imagine most EAs think the same.
I expect that very novel approaches, like as described in my old post Using game theory to elect a centrist in the 2024 US Presidential Election, could be more tractable.
I think the problem here is that novel approaches are substantially more likely to be failures due to being untested and unproven. This isn’t a big deal in areas where you can try lots of stuff out and sift through them with results, but in something like an election you only get feedback like once a year or so. Worse, the feedback is extremely murky, so you don’t know if it was your intervention or something else that resulted in the outcome you care about.
Also failures trying to do really outlandish things like bribing Congresspeople to endorse Jim Mattis as a centrist candidate in the 2024 US Presidential Election are likely to backfire in more spectacular ways than (say) providing malaria nets for a region with falling malaria or losing a court case against a factory farming conglomerate. That said, this criticism does apply to some other things EAs are interested in, particularly actions purportedly addressing x-risks.
If each election is a rare and special opportunity to collect a bit of data, that makes it even more important to use that data-collection opportunity effectively.
Since we are looking for approaches which are unusually tractable, if effectiveness looks extremely murky, that’s probably not what we wanted.