In a Nov 2023 speech Harris mentioned she’s concerned about x-risk and risks from cyber & bio. She has generally put more emphasis on current harms but so far without dismissing the longer-term threats.
This seems like a very generous interpretation of her speech to me. I feel like you are seeing what you want to see.
For context, this was a speech given when she came to the UK for the AI Safety Summit, which was explicitly about existential safety. She didn’t really have a choice but to mention them unless she wanted to give a major snub to an important US ally, so she did:
But just as AI has the potential to do profound good, it also has the potential to cause profound harm. From AI-enabled cyberattacks at a scale beyond anything we have seen before to AI-formulated bio-weapons that could endanger the lives of millions, these threats are often referred to as the “existential threats of AI” because, of course, they could endanger the very existence of humanity. (Pause)
These threats, without question, are profound, and they demand global action.
… and that’s it. That’s all she said about existential risks. She then immediately derails the conversation by offering a series of non-sequiturs:
But let us be clear. There are additional threats that also demand our action — threats that are currently causing harm and which, to many people, also feel existential.
Consider, for example: When a senior is kicked off his healthcare plan because of a faulty AI algorithm, is that not existential for him?
When a woman is threatened by an abusive partner with explicit, deep-fake photographs, is that not existential for her?
When a young father is wrongfully imprisoned because of biased AI facial recognition, is that not existential for his family?
I think it’s pretty clear that these are not the sorts of things you say if you are actually concerned about existential risks. No-one genuinely motivated by fear of the deaths of every human on earth, and all future generation, goes around saying “oh yeah and a single person’s health insurance admin problems, that is basically the same thing”.
I won’t quote the speech in full, but I think it is worth looking at. She repeatedly returns to potential harms of AI, but never—once the bare necessities of diplomatic politeness have been met—does she bother to return to catastrophic risks. Instead we have:
… make sure that the benefits of AI are shared equitably and to address predictable threats, including deep fakes, data privacy violations, and algorithmic discrimination.
and
… establish a national safety reporting program on the unsafe use of AI in hospitals and medical facilities. Tech companies will create new tools to help consumers discern if audio and visual content is AI-generated. And AI developers will be required to submit the results of AI safety testing to the United States government for review.
and
… protect workers’ rights, advanced transparency, prevent discrimination, drive innovation in the public interest, and help build international rules and norms for the responsible use of AI.
and
the wellbeing of their customers, the safety of our communities, and the stability of our democracies.
and
… the principles of privacy, transparency, accountability, and consumer protection.
My interpretation here, that she is basically rejecting AI safety, is not unusual. You can see for example Politico here calling it a ‘rebuke’ to Sunak and the focus on existential risks, and making clear that it was very deliberate.
Overall this actually makes me more pessimistic about Kamala. You clearly wrote this post in a soldier mind and looked for the best evidence you could find to show that Kamala cared about existential risks, so if this speech, which I think basically suggests the opposite, is the best you could find then that seems like a pretty big negative update. In particular it seems worse than Trump, who gave a fairly clear explanation of one casual risk pathway—deepfakes causing a war—and he did this without being explicitly asked about existential risks and without a teleprompter. Are there any examples of Kamala, unprompted, bringing up in an interview the risk of AI causing a nuclear war, or taking over the human race?
I agree with your point that the record of the Biden Administration seems fairly good here, and she might continue out of status quo bias, continuity of staff, and so on. But in terms of her specific views she seems significantly less well aligned than Biden or Rishi were, and maybe less than Trump.
I agree with the criticism. The quotes provided aren’t good evidence that she is personally concerned about x-risk. We just don’t have much information about her views on catastrophic risks. I’ve updated the text to reflect this and tried to encompass more of what Trump has said about AI as well. Also edited a few other parts of the piece.
I’ve pasted the new text for Harris below:
Harris tends to focus on present harms, but has expressed some concern about existential risk.
Harris has generally put more emphasis on current harms, highlighting that local/personal harms feel existential to individuals (and implicitly deprioritizing globally existential threats posed by AI) in a November 2023 speech. That said, in the same speech, she acknowledged that AI might “endanger the very existence of humanity”, citing “AI-formulated bioweapons” and “AI-enabled cyberattacks” as particular concerns.
In general, it seems reasonable to expect that Harris will at least not reverse the Biden-Harris administration’s previous actions on AI safety. The Biden administration has made impressive progress on AI safety policy, including the establishment of the US AI Safety Institute, securing voluntary commitments on AI safety from many companies, and the 2023 AI Executive Order.
The Vice President’s trip to the United Kingdom builds on her long record of leadership to confront the challenges and seize the opportunities of advanced technology. In May, she convened the CEOs of companies at the forefront of AI innovation, resulting in voluntary commitments from 15 leading AI companies to help move toward safe, secure, and transparent development of AI technology. In July, the Vice President convened consumer protection, labor, and civil rights leaders to discuss the risks related to AI and to underscore that it is a false choice to suggest America can either advance innovation or protect consumers’ rights.
As part of her visit to the United Kingdom, the Vice President is announcing the following initiatives.
The United States AI Safety Institute: The Biden-Harris Administration, through the Department of Commerce, is establishing the United States AI Safety Institute (US AISI) inside NIST. …
You have a point, I think you’re right that we cannot be sure what Harris’s beliefs about AI and AI Safety truly are deep down. I myself am skeptical she deeply believes AI is a true existential risk. However, her personal views matter less than one might think. Politicians are constantly triangulating between their various political needs (their constituents, donors, domestic political allies, international allies, etc) and what they think is the best policy. Personal views often matter less than you might think, and typically only do so only on the margin.
When public officials issue statements on policy, this is the narrow window we get into their political views, and what we think they’ll do. This is how the world of politics and policy works. For example, the US government listens when Chinese officials make diplomatic statements on various issues at the UN or elsewhere. Voters listen to the campaign’s message. Politicians do lie and break promises, but they do so at some political cost. Actions speak much louder than words, but when it comes to the future, words are all we have.
Yes, she spoke at the AI Safety Summit, but she chose to speak there. She could have spoken at any number of events on other topics, whether it be trade, security, climate change, etc. The choice of venue demonstrates her (and the US’s) commitment to that issue. Additionally, she could have not mentioned existential risk, and I agree it would’ve been weird, but hardly an international snub.
I agree with you that I think the quote is pretty weak evidence. And her focus on other AI issues outside of existence risk is sub-optimal, but ultimately I’m favor of regulating other issues like AI discrimination and AI bias, even if I think it’s substantially less important. And is it really a negative? If she’s really pro regulation on ‘near-term’ AI issues like AI bias, on the margin wouldn’t that push her to be pro-regulation on AI? I do think it’s mostly irrelevant.
I think the much stronger evidence to support Harris on the basis of AI policy is Biden’s record on the issue. Unless explicitly stated otherwise, I think that most Dem presidencies will continue policy making in a similar direction as previous Dem admins. I also think that we can trust a Dem admin to defer to experts on policy making
I also think the fact that the RNC platform explicitly states to roll back Biden’s EO as strong evidence. See below:
We will repeal Joe Biden’s dangerous Executive Order that hinders AI Innovation, and imposes Radical Leftwing ideas on the development of this technology. In its place, Republicans support AI Development rooted in Free Speech and Human Flourishing. (link)
Am I worried that Harris will cease to continue Biden approach? Yes. But I think the evidence is pretty clear that Harris is better than Trump on AI policy.
(This comment focuses on meta-level issues; I left another comment with object-level disagreements.)
The EA case for Trump was heavily downvoted, with commenters arguing that e.g. “a lot of your arguments are extremely one-sided in that they ignore very obvious counterarguments and fail to make the relevant comparisons on the same issue.”
This post is effectively an EA case for Kamala, but less even-handed—e.g. because it:
Is framed it not just as a case for Kamala, but as a case for action (which, I think, requires a significantly higher bar than just believing that it’d be better on net if Kamala won).
Doesn’t address the biggest concerns with another Democrat administration (some of which I lay out here).
Generally feels like it’s primarily talking to an audience who already agrees that Trump is bad, and just needs to be persuaded about how bad he is (e.g. with headings like “A second Trump term would likely be far more damaging for liberal democracy than the last”).
And yet it has been heavily upvoted. Very disappointing lack of consistency here, which suggests that the criticisms of the previous post, while framed as criticisms of the post itself, were actually about the side chosen.
This matters both on epistemic grounds and because one of the most harmful things that can be done for AI safety is to heavily politicize it. By default, we should expect that a lot more people will end up getting on the AI safety train over time; the main blocker to that is if they’re so entrenched in their positions that they fail to update even in the face of overwhelming evidence. We’re already heading towards entrenchment; efforts like this will make it worse. (My impression is that political motivations were also a significant contributor to Good Ventures decoupling itself from the rationalist community—e.g. see this comment about fringe opinion holders. It’s easy to imagine this process spiraling further.)
Generally feels like it’s primarily talking to an audience who already agrees that Trump is bad, and just needs to be persuaded about how bad he is
This is true to some extent. I did not write this thinking it would be ‘the EA case for Kamala’ in response to Hammond’s piece. I also was wary about adding length to an already too-long piece so didn’t go into detail on various counterpoints to Kamala.
Is framed it not just as a case for Kamala, but as a case for action (which, I think, requires a significantly higher bar than just believing that it’d be better on net if Kamala won).
I personally see Trump’s anti-democratic behavior and demonstrably bad values as very-nearly disqualifying on their own (similar to, e.g., Scott Aaronson’s case against Trump). That’s why I focus so much on likely damage to liberal democracy. In my view these are crucial enough considerations that I would require some strong and clearly positive data points in Trump’s favor to override his obvious flaws. I am not aware of clear and strong positives on Trump’s side, only some points which seem closer to ‘maybe he would do this good thing. He hasn’t talked about it, but it seems more likely he’d do it than that Harris would’.
Except where business-as-usual decisions would affect catastrophic risk scenarios I think they generally wash out when compared to Trump’s flaws.
Doesn’t address the biggest concerns with another Democrat administration (some of which I lay out here).
I address a good chunk of those concerns here. Agree that I could have talked about this more (though again, the piece was already very long).
And yet it has been heavily upvoted. Very disappointing lack of consistency here, which essentially demonstrates that the criticisms of the previous post, while framed as criticisms of the post itself, were actually about the side chosen.
I don’t see why this follows from the above. The claim seems to be that the only reason that post could have been downvoted and this post upvoted is because of bias. You’ve argued that there’s some content I didn’t address, and that it’s written for a Harris-leaning audience, but haven’t put forward a critique of the positions put forward in the post. It also seems clear that I’ve, on each cause area at least, attempted to present both sides of the argument. I’m curious why you see it as inconsistent? People disagree on object-level politics – and many people on here seem to strongly disagree with you – but one side is generally right, on net. Two posts advocating for different sides of an issue shouldn’t be treated the same just because it’s about politics. Also, this post has received its fair share of criticism (e.g. Larks’ comment, which I thought was useful and led me to update the post).
one of the most harmful things that can be done for AI safety is to heavily politicize it
Agreed, I don’t want to politicize AI safety. I really hope that, should Trump be elected, he’ll have good advisors and make good decisions on AI policy. I suspect he won’t, but I really hope he does.
Here’s my thoughts on why it seems fine to post this:
There’s been pro-Trump content on the Forum already but virtually no pro-Harris content AFAIK.
This post doesn’t show up on the front page because it’s politics (at least that’s my understanding, I didn’t see it there personally despite the upvotes).
We’re not spreading this publicly in any ways that non-EAs are likely to see.
This kind of post seems like a drop in the bucket. Lots of EAs identify as Democrat, many as Republican. Having debates about who to elect seems perfectly reasonable. I’m glad there’s not a ton of posts like this on the forum, if there were I probably wouldn’t have written it. Adding one on the margin doesn’t seem like a big deal to me.
This post talks about AI safety fairly little and, what content there is, is mainly in the appendix.
By default, we should expect that a lot more people will end up getting on the AI safety train over time; the main blocker to that is if they’re so entrenched in their positions that they fail to update even in the face of overwhelming evidence. We’re already heading towards entrenchment; efforts like this will make it worse.
Not sure I fully understand this point but will attempt to answer. Again, I do not think this post or any of my other efforts are contributing meaningfully to politicizing/polarizing AI safety or “entrenching” positions about it, and I really hope a Trump administration will make good decisions on AI policy in case he is elected (and I’ll support efforts to this end). However, this is fully compatible with believing that a Harris administration would be far better – or far less bad – in expectation for AI policy. I give several important reasons for believing this in the post, e.g.: Trump has vowed to repeal Biden’s executive order on AI on day 1; Trump generally favors non-regulation and plans to abolish various agencies (Vance favors tech non-regulation in particular); and the demographics and professions that make up the AI safety/governance movement seem to have a far better chance at getting close to and influencing a Democratic administration than a MAGA administration, for several reasons.
Very disappointing lack of consistency here, which essentially demonstrates that the criticisms of the previous post, while framed as criticisms of the post itself, were actually about the side chosen.
A few observations on that from someone who did not vote on the Trump post or this one:
This seems to rely on an assumption that the commenters on the prior post had the same motivations as one might assign to the broader voter pool. It’s certainly possible, but hardly certain.
It’s impossible to completely divorce oneself from object-level views when deciding whether a post has failed to address or acknowledge sufficiently important considerations in the opposite direction. Yet such a failure is (and I think, has to be) a valid reason to downvote. It’s reasonable to me that a voter would find the missing issues in the Trump piece sufficiently important, and the issues you identify for Harris as having much less significance for a number of reasons.
Partisan political posts are disfavored for various reasons, including some your comment mentions. I think it’s fine for voters to maintain higher voting standards for such posts. Moreover, it feels easier for those posts to be net-negative because they are closer to zero-sum in nature; John’s candidate winning the election means Jane’s candidate losing. “It would be better for this post not to be on the Forum” is a plausible reason to downvote. Those factors make downvoting for strong disagreement more plausible than on non-political posts. This is especially true insofar as the voter thinks the resulting discussion will sound like ten thousand other political debates and contribute little if at all to finding truth.
Finally, there are good reasons for people to be less willing to leave object-level comments on posts like this one or the Trump one. First, arguing about politics is exhausting and usually unfruitful. Two, it risks derailing the Forum into a discussion of topics rather removed from effective altruism (e.g., were the various criminal charges against Trump and lawsuits against Musk legit? how biased in the mainstream US media?)
Setting aside the substantive issues about how accurate this post is vs. the other one, I’ll admit I’m very uncertain on how much we should avoid talking about partisan politics in AI forums, how much it politicizes the debate vs. clarifies the stakes in ways that help us act more strategically
Everyone should read the fine print about disclosure before making any political donation. It seems hard to donate to a political campaign nowadays without going through a conduit like ActBlue or WinRed, and those conduits have to disclose everything publicly (even if under $200). Some other stuff has to be disclosed if $200+. Some stuff doesn’t have to be publicly disclosed at all. There’s a pending lawsuit about the conduit disclosures, but I wouldn’t assume it will succeed.
I generally like transparency in political donations, but one might reasonably value not being on a public list for various reasons, and does the public really have any legitimate need to know that I gave $5 to John Doe for Congress?
Do people in the EA (and maybe rationalist) community have any particular levers we could pull or superpowers that could persuade key influencers and voters?
E.g., Joe Rogan might be able to tip this election. He shows some signs of thoughtfulness and reasoning (at time). Does anyone “here” have a way of reaching out to him?
(This comment focuses on object-level arguments about Trump vs Kamala; I left another comment focused on meta-level considerations.)
Three broad arguments for why it’s plausibly better if Trump wins than if Kamala does:
I basically see this election as a choice between a man who’s willing to subvert democracy, and a party that is willing to subvert democracy—e.g. via massively biased media coverage, lawfare against opponents, and coordinated social media censorship (I’ve seen particularly egregious examples on Reddit, but I expect that Facebook and Instagram are just as bad). RFK Jr, a lifelong Democrat (and a Kennedy to boot), has now endorsed Trump because he considers Democrat behavior too undemocratic. Heck, even Jill Stein has make this same critique. It’s reasonable to think that the risk Trump poses outweighs that, but it’s also reasonable to lean the other way, especially if you think (like I do) that the neutrality + independence of many US institutions is at a low point (e.g. see the Biden administration’s regulatory harassment of Musk on some pretty ridiculous grounds).
On foreign policy: it seems like Trump was surprisingly prescient about several major geopolitical issues (e.g. his 2016 positions that the US should be more worried about China, and that the US should push European countries to contribute much more to NATO, were heavily criticized at the time, but now are mainstream). The Abraham Accords also seem pretty significant. And I think the fact that the Ukraine war and the Gaza war both broke out under Biden not Trump should make us update in Trump’s favor (though I’m open to arguments on how much we should update).
On AI and pandemics: I don’t like his object-level policies but I do think he’ll bring in some very competent people (like Musk and Ramaswamy), and as I argued in this post I think the EA community tends to err towards favoring people who agree with our current beliefs, and should update towards prioritizing competence. (Of course there are also some very competent people on the Democrat side on these issues, but I expect them to be more beholden to the status quo. So if e.g. you think that FDA reform is important for biosecurity, that’s probably easier under Trump than Harris.)
[This is part 1, I will get to foreign policy and AI-specific questions hopefully soon]
I don’t think it’s fair to put an attempt to overthrow an election on par with biased media coverage (seems like both sides do this about equally, maybe conservative media is worse?) or dumping on opposition candidates (not great but also typical of both parties for many decades AFAIK). Scott Aaronson lays out some general concerns well here.
Trump incited a violent coup/insurrection attempt to prevent the 2020 election from being certified as well as other extremely norm-violating and likely illegal behavior to overturn the 2020 election (see long list here). The Republican party and supporting infrastructure (committees, media, influencers, fans, etc.) have since agreed to support his re-election attempt, punished members of the party for holding Trump accountable, and are touting January 6th insurrectionists as heroes.
Lawfare seems more concerning (though also far from new or specific to Dems) - curious what examples you’re worried about here. FWIW, I think the Supreme Court’s Trump immunity ruling is far and away worse than anything Dems have done in the past several years.
RFK Jr, a lifelong Democrat (and a Kennedy to boot), has now endorsed Trump because he considers Democrat behavior too undemocratic
As far as comments from Stein or RFK Jr., don’t third party candidates always hate their mainstream counterparts? The Democratic party, like the GOP, is going to act in ways which help get their candidate elected. Boosting third party candidates who take votes from them is not something an American party will ever do. Maybe that’s not great but it’s more a systemic issue than an issue with the party itself.
One thing I’ll acknowledge in this vein is the Dems failure to run a real primary this year. I think that was a big mistake. There’s nothing illegal about this though, parties are private entities and can do whatever they want to select a candidate. I consider it more of a strategic mistake than an outright betrayal of Democratic principles. To be clear, I think the DNC is kinda incompetent (probably the RNC too though, Trump’s daughter-in-law is leading it now).
coordinated social media censorship
I don’t think the link you provided on Reddit censorship demonstrates censorship? What I saw was mostly people expressing political views in a space where most people disagree with them getting downvoted as well as posts from subreddits with lots of very lefty people where very lefty posts get lots of upvotes. Non-lefty posts and comments get downvotes there. It’s not great epistemics, sure, but it’s extremely typical of both sides. There are very similar conservative spaces where Dem posters don’t even exist (e.g. patriots.win). Am I missing something on this? (I haven’t read the other link you posted which seems more substantial but very long, might read another time).
Arguably Musk is doing something worse with Twitter right now (though I haven’t looked into it). FB is the go-to place for conservatives and conspiracy groups, I really don’t think it’s a haven for liberal censorship.
From the linked comment:
The strongest case for Trump is that the Democrat establishment is systematically deceiving the American people (e.g. via the years-long cover-up of Biden’s mental state
I think it’s really bad that top Dems covered up Biden’s mental state (which is why I pushed hard to get him to step down) and it reduces my trust in the party. I think this pales in comparison to Trump’s willingness to silence critics (e.g. via hush money and threats).
generally growing the power of unaccountable bureaucracies over all aspects of life
To be honest, I’m sympathetic to this concern and I’d be happy to have a reasonable Republican (if we get one) take a swing at reducing over-regulation in 2028. To the extent this is a cost of electing Harris, I will happily pay it.
I think this pales in comparison to Trump’s willingness to silence critics (e.g. via hush money and threats).
If you believe that Trump has done a bunch of things wrong, the Democrats have done very little wrong, and the people prosecuting Trump are just following normal process in doing so, then yes these threats are worrying.
But if you believe that the charges against Trump were in fact trumped-up, e.g. because Democrats have done similarly bad things without being charged, then most of Trump’s statements look reasonable. E.g. this testimony about Biden seems pretty concerning—and given that context, saying “appoint a Special Counsel to investigate Joe Biden who hates Biden as much as Jack Smith hates me” seems totally proportional.
Also, assuming the “hush money” thing is a reference to Stormy Daniels, I think that case reflects much worse on the Democrats than it does on Trump—the “crime” involved is marginal or perhaps not even a crime at all. (tl;dr: Paying hush money is totally legal, so the actual accusation they used was “falsifying business records”. But this by itself would only be a misdemeanor, unless it was done to cover up another crime, and even the prosecution wasn’t clear on what the other crime actually was.) Even if it technically stands up, you can imagine the reaction if Clinton was prosecuted on such flimsy grounds while Trump was president.
The Democratic party, like the GOP, is going to act in ways which help get their candidate elected. … There’s nothing illegal about [not hosting a primary] though, parties are private entities and can do whatever they want to select a candidate.
If that includes suing other candidates to get them off the ballots, then I’m happy to call that unusually undemocratic. More generally, democracy is constituted not just by a set of laws, but by a set of traditions and norms. Not hosting a primary, ousting Biden, Kamala refusing interviews, etc, all undermine democratic norms.
Now, I do think Trump undermines a lot of democratic norms too. So it’s really more of a question of who will do more damage. I think that many US institutions (including the media, various three-letter agencies, etc) push back strongly against Trump’s norm-breaking, but overlook or even enable Democrat norm-breaking—for instance, keeping Biden’s mental state secret for several years. Because of this I am roughly equally worried about both.
Scott Aaronson lays out some general concerns well here.
I don’t really see much substance here. E.g. Aaronson says “Trump’s values, such as they are, would seem to be “America First,” protectionism, vengeance, humiliation of enemies, winning at all costs, authoritarianism, the veneration of foreign autocrats, and the veneration of himself.” I think America First is a very reasonable value for an American president to have (and one which is necessary for the “American-led peaceful world order” that Scott wants). Re protectionism, seems probably bad in economic terms, but much less bad than many Democrat policies (e.g. taxing unrealized capital gains, anti-nuclear, etc). Re “vengeance, humiliation of enemies, winning at all costs, authoritarianism”: these are precisely the things I’m concerned about from the Democrats. Re “the veneration of foreign autocrats”: see my comments on Trump’s foreign policy.
I don’t think the link you provided on Reddit censorship demonstrates censorship
Sorry, I’d linked it on memory since I’ve seen a bunch of censorship examples from them, but I’d forgotten that they also post a bunch of other non-censorship stuff. Will dig out some of the specific examples I’m thinking about later.
Re Facebook, here’s Zuckerberg’s admission that the Biden administration “repeatedly pressured our teams for months” to censor covid-related content (he also mentions an FBI warning about Russian disinformation in relation to censorship of the Hunter Biden story, though the specific link is unclear).
One more point: in Scott’s blog post he talks about the “big lie” of Trump: that the election was stolen. I do worry that this is a key point of polarization, where either you fully believe that the election was stolen and the Democrats are evil, or you fully believe that Trump was trying to seize dictatorial power.
But reality is often much more complicated. My current best guess is that there wasn’t any centrally-coordinated plan to steal the election, but that the central Democrat party:
Systematically turned a blind eye to thousands of people who shouldn’t have been voting (like illegal immigrants) actually voting (in some cases because Democrat voter registration pushes deliberately didn’t track this distinction).
Blocked reasonable election integrity measures that would have prevented this (like voter ID), primarily in a cynical + self-interested way.
On priors I think this probably didn’t swing the election, but given how small the winning margins were in swing states, it wouldn’t be crazy if it did. From this perspective I think it reflects badly on Trump that he tried to do unconstitutional things to stay in power, but not nearly as badly as most Democrats think.
(Some intuitions informing this position: I think if there had been clear smoking guns of centrally-coordinated election fraud, then Trump would have won some of his legal challenges, and we’d have found out about it since then. But it does seem like a bunch of non-citizens are registered to vote in various states (e.g. here, here), and I don’t think this is a coincidence given that it’s so beneficial for Dems + Dems have so consistently blocked voter ID laws. Conversely, I do also expect that red states are being overzealous in removing people from voter rolls for things like changing their address. Basically it all seems like a shitshow, and not one which looks great for Trump, but not disqualifying either IMO, especially because in general I expect to update away from the mainstream media line over time as information they’ve suppressed comes to light.)
Without expressing any views on which allegations against the two major sides are true, it’s clear to me that relatively few people in the US are particularly interested in what we might call nonpartisan electoral truthseeking: making it easy, convenient, and secure for all those (and only those) legally eligible to vote, without unlawful foreign interference or illegal disinformation (like false robocalls about poll location).
I think it’s plausible that Dems turned a blind eye to some of this and that led to a few thousand extra votes here and there. US elections (and elections in general) always have issues like this and AFAIK there’s no reason to believe they played any larger or more important role in 2020 than any other election. In fact, given the amount of highly-motivated scrutiny applied to the 2020 election, I suspect it was cleaner than most previous elections.
Even had Trump received any credible evidence of unusual tampering (you’d think he’d have laid it out by now if he had), his actions were beyond the pale. His own Attorney General refused to recognize any signs of fraud. He tried to cajole anyone he could into not certifying the results in any state or district he could despite no real evidence of wrong-doing. His scheme to create alternate slates of electors was an out-and-out attempt at election fraud. There’s no world in which that was intended to be representative of ground-truth.
This article spells out a bunch of Trump’s actions around the 2020 election. I’m curious what you think of it.
To be fair (kinda) to Trump, I think he really may have thought the election was stolen. He seems extremely capable of deluding himself about things like that. E.g. he just said that, if Jesus were counting the vote, he would win California easily. My hot take is that having a president who is actively trying to delude himself and his followers into believing 2020 was stolen (and that 2024 will be stolen) is bad, that it displays a weakness of character & epistemics that should be disqualifying. It should, e.g., make us question his ability to act reasonably in a crisis situation or when presented with a complicated new risk like AI.
I basically see this election as a choice between a man who’s willing to subvert democracy, and a party that is willing to subvert democracy [...] It’s reasonable to think that the risk Trump poses outweighs that, but it’s also reasonable to lean the other way
Which things that Democrats have done are as bad as the following actions from the GOP ticket?
It’s plausible to worry that if Trump wins in 2024, and then a Democrat wins the 2028 election, Vance will simply not certify the election results until states send illegitimate Republican electors, which Republican members of the House would then have the opportunity of choosing.[1] This isn’t a conspiracy theory, it’s what Vance said on TV that he would’ve done in 2020.
So we could be in a situation in 4 years in which only one party is allowed to win major elections. I believe the technical term for this is “dictatorship.”
I believe the examples of undemocratic activity by Democrats that you’ve listed in your comment pale in comparison to those actions and statements. But even if they don’t, it’s unclear why they’re relevant to your argument, when Republicans have done approximately all of the things you listed. For example:
massively biased media coverage
Have you read Breitbart or watched One America News Network? Can you name one media company whose staff is largely right-wing which produces better and less biased content than the NYT? If not, why does “massively biased media coverage” count against Democrats but not Republicans?
lawfare against opponents
Do you actually expect Trump to be better on that front? As the WP reported, “In public, Trump has vowed to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” President Biden and his family. [...] In private, Trump has told advisers and friends in recent months that he wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office. [...] To facilitate Trump’s ability to direct Justice Department actions, his associates have been drafting plans to dispense with 50 years of policy and practice intended to shield criminal prosecutions from political considerations.”
coordinated social media censorship (I’ve seen particularly egregious examples on Reddit, but I expect that Facebook and Instagram are just as bad)
Trump has called for “a Senate investigation into news outlets for publishing unflattering stories about him” and for journalists to be jailed.
I also wanted to address this sentence from your comment:
RFK Jr, a lifelong Democrat (and a Kennedy to boot), has now endorsed Trump because he considers Democrat behavior too undemocratic.
Secondly, the Democratic Party has evolved a lot over time. And a meaningful change that occurred in the last few decades is that conspiracy theorists are much less common in the party now. Both Richard Hanania and Matthew Yglesias recently wrote about how, whereas conspiracy theorists used to be roughly equally divided between the two major parties just a few decades ago, educational polarization booted Democratic conspiracy theorists into the GOP. RFK Jr is an example of this phenomenon.
This could happen even if Democrats control the House, since the Constitution says that each state should count equally were such vote to be held:
The Person having the greatest Number of Votes shall be the President, if such Number be a Majority of the whole Number of Electors appointed; and if there be more than one who have such Majority, and have an equal Number of Votes, then the House of Representatives shall immediately chuse by Ballot one of them for President; and if no Person have a Majority, then from the five highest on the List the said House shall in like Manner chuse the President. But in chusing the President, the Votes shall be taken by States, the Representation from each State having one Vote
You’re framing the situation as a choice between ‘Trump, who is willing to subvert democracy’ and ‘the Democratic Party, who is willing to subvert democracy’. This framing implicitly acknowledges that Harris is not (especially) willing to subvert democracy.
It’s very plausible to believe that both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are roughly equally willing to subvert democracy, especially given the significant influence Trump has on the Republican Party.
It then becomes a choice between:
Trump and the Republican Party, who are both willing to subvert democracy
vs.
The Democratic Party, who are willing to subvert democracy, and Harris, who is not.
In this comparison, Harris’s apparent commitment to democratic norms becomes the deciding factor in how you evaluate the overall democraticness of the choices.
I accept that I should talk about “Trump and the Republican party”. But conversely, when we talk about the Democratic party, we should also include the institutions over which it has disproportionate influence—including most mainstream media outlets, the FBI (which pushed for censorship of one of the biggest anti-Biden stories in the lead-up to the 2020 election—EDIT: I no longer endorse this phrasing, it seems like the FBI’s conversations with tech companies were fairly vague on this matter), the teams responsible for censorship at most major tech companies, the wide range of agencies that started regulatory harassment of Elon under the Biden administration, etc.
If Trump had anywhere near the level of influence over elite institutions that the Democrats do, then I’d agree that he’d be clearly more dangerous.
You probably know much more about U.S. politics than I do, so I can’t engage deeply on whether these things are really happening or how unusual they might be.
However, I suspect that much of what you’re attributing to the Democratic party is actually due to a broader trend of U.S. elites becoming more left-leaning and Democrat-voting. Even if I agreed that this shift was bad for democracy, I’m not sure how voting for Trump would fix it in the long run. A Trump presidency would likely push elites even further toward left-leaning politics.
May I suggest the part of the executive summary about donation opportunities also includes the links to those pages? I bet it would up the conversion rate a bunch :)
Underlining this part / otherwise making it more prominent could also be a good idea—I’d imagine that’s where you’d want most people’s attention.
For foreigners, you have to be much more careful about how you send money to influence a US election (do NOT donate directly to a candidate)—however, you are allowed to volunteer your time (source: personal experience).
(It might be worth adding that to the post, as this feels a bit US-centric at the moment)
This is what ActBlue, the official Dem donation platform states: “International donors can give to nonprofits, including both 501c(3)s and 501c(4)s, through ActBlue Charities and ActBlue Civics, both part of the ActBlue family of organizations. Only U.S. citizens and permanent residents can give to political groups and candidates on ActBlue, per FEC guidelines.”
The FEC says this, but some of those terms may not necessarily mean what the reader assumes they mean. My understanding is that there are some legal means of indirect influence for non-U.S. persons, but there are also significant limitations.
I think CEA should take this post down, and generally not permit discussion of particular candidates for political office. There are several reasons for this: (1) a lot of what is said about Trump here is a very, um, partisan narrative, which half the country completely rejects. That half of the country includes many people who could contribute a lot to EA, and who we should want to feel welcome in EA. Having posts like this makes such people feel decidedly unwelcome. (2) There is a roughly 50% chance Trump will be president for the next four years. If we want his administration to give any consideration to EA ideas, this is not a good foot to start off on. If EA becomes aligned with one political party, then EA ideas will be categorically rejected by the other without regard to their merits. And since each party will be in power roughly half the time, that is giving up half the potential impact of EA policy ideas. That effect makes posts like this significantly negative in expectation for our ability to influence policy. (3) If CEA is perceived as endorsing candidates for political office, that could raise questions about their tax exempt status.
To be fair, there is at least one pro-Trump post up on the Forum. Neither this nor that post will go to front page AFAIK because it’s politics, but there are at least points on both sides.
This seems like a very generous interpretation of her speech to me. I feel like you are seeing what you want to see.
For context, this was a speech given when she came to the UK for the AI Safety Summit, which was explicitly about existential safety. She didn’t really have a choice but to mention them unless she wanted to give a major snub to an important US ally, so she did:
… and that’s it. That’s all she said about existential risks. She then immediately derails the conversation by offering a series of non-sequiturs:
I think it’s pretty clear that these are not the sorts of things you say if you are actually concerned about existential risks. No-one genuinely motivated by fear of the deaths of every human on earth, and all future generation, goes around saying “oh yeah and a single person’s health insurance admin problems, that is basically the same thing”.
I won’t quote the speech in full, but I think it is worth looking at. She repeatedly returns to potential harms of AI, but never—once the bare necessities of diplomatic politeness have been met—does she bother to return to catastrophic risks. Instead we have:
and
and
and
and
My interpretation here, that she is basically rejecting AI safety, is not unusual. You can see for example Politico here calling it a ‘rebuke’ to Sunak and the focus on existential risks, and making clear that it was very deliberate.
Overall this actually makes me more pessimistic about Kamala. You clearly wrote this post in a soldier mind and looked for the best evidence you could find to show that Kamala cared about existential risks, so if this speech, which I think basically suggests the opposite, is the best you could find then that seems like a pretty big negative update. In particular it seems worse than Trump, who gave a fairly clear explanation of one casual risk pathway—deepfakes causing a war—and he did this without being explicitly asked about existential risks and without a teleprompter. Are there any examples of Kamala, unprompted, bringing up in an interview the risk of AI causing a nuclear war, or taking over the human race?
I agree with your point that the record of the Biden Administration seems fairly good here, and she might continue out of status quo bias, continuity of staff, and so on. But in terms of her specific views she seems significantly less well aligned than Biden or Rishi were, and maybe less than Trump.
(I previously wrote about this here)
I agree with the criticism. The quotes provided aren’t good evidence that she is personally concerned about x-risk. We just don’t have much information about her views on catastrophic risks. I’ve updated the text to reflect this and tried to encompass more of what Trump has said about AI as well. Also edited a few other parts of the piece.
I’ve pasted the new text for Harris below:
Harris tends to focus on present harms, but has expressed some concern about existential risk.
Harris has generally put more emphasis on current harms, highlighting that local/personal harms feel existential to individuals (and implicitly deprioritizing globally existential threats posed by AI) in a November 2023 speech. That said, in the same speech, she acknowledged that AI might “endanger the very existence of humanity”, citing “AI-formulated bioweapons” and “AI-enabled cyberattacks” as particular concerns. In general, it seems reasonable to expect that Harris will at least not reverse the Biden-Harris administration’s previous actions on AI safety. The Biden administration has made impressive progress on AI safety policy, including the establishment of the US AI Safety Institute, securing voluntary commitments on AI safety from many companies, and the 2023 AI Executive Order.
Harris was the one personally behind the voluntary AI safety commitments of July 2023. Here’s a press release from the White House:
See also Foreign Policy’s piece Kamala Harris’s Record as the Biden Administration’s AI Czar
You have a point, I think you’re right that we cannot be sure what Harris’s beliefs about AI and AI Safety truly are deep down. I myself am skeptical she deeply believes AI is a true existential risk. However, her personal views matter less than one might think. Politicians are constantly triangulating between their various political needs (their constituents, donors, domestic political allies, international allies, etc) and what they think is the best policy. Personal views often matter less than you might think, and typically only do so only on the margin.
When public officials issue statements on policy, this is the narrow window we get into their political views, and what we think they’ll do. This is how the world of politics and policy works. For example, the US government listens when Chinese officials make diplomatic statements on various issues at the UN or elsewhere. Voters listen to the campaign’s message. Politicians do lie and break promises, but they do so at some political cost. Actions speak much louder than words, but when it comes to the future, words are all we have.
Yes, she spoke at the AI Safety Summit, but she chose to speak there. She could have spoken at any number of events on other topics, whether it be trade, security, climate change, etc. The choice of venue demonstrates her (and the US’s) commitment to that issue. Additionally, she could have not mentioned existential risk, and I agree it would’ve been weird, but hardly an international snub.
I agree with you that I think the quote is pretty weak evidence. And her focus on other AI issues outside of existence risk is sub-optimal, but ultimately I’m favor of regulating other issues like AI discrimination and AI bias, even if I think it’s substantially less important. And is it really a negative? If she’s really pro regulation on ‘near-term’ AI issues like AI bias, on the margin wouldn’t that push her to be pro-regulation on AI? I do think it’s mostly irrelevant.
I think the much stronger evidence to support Harris on the basis of AI policy is Biden’s record on the issue. Unless explicitly stated otherwise, I think that most Dem presidencies will continue policy making in a similar direction as previous Dem admins. I also think that we can trust a Dem admin to defer to experts on policy making
I also think the fact that the RNC platform explicitly states to roll back Biden’s EO as strong evidence. See below:
Am I worried that Harris will cease to continue Biden approach? Yes. But I think the evidence is pretty clear that Harris is better than Trump on AI policy.
(This comment focuses on meta-level issues; I left another comment with object-level disagreements.)
The EA case for Trump was heavily downvoted, with commenters arguing that e.g. “a lot of your arguments are extremely one-sided in that they ignore very obvious counterarguments and fail to make the relevant comparisons on the same issue.”
This post is effectively an EA case for Kamala, but less even-handed—e.g. because it:
Is framed it not just as a case for Kamala, but as a case for action (which, I think, requires a significantly higher bar than just believing that it’d be better on net if Kamala won).
Doesn’t address the biggest concerns with another Democrat administration (some of which I lay out here).
Generally feels like it’s primarily talking to an audience who already agrees that Trump is bad, and just needs to be persuaded about how bad he is (e.g. with headings like “A second Trump term would likely be far more damaging for liberal democracy than the last”).
And yet it has been heavily upvoted. Very disappointing lack of consistency here, which suggests that the criticisms of the previous post, while framed as criticisms of the post itself, were actually about the side chosen.
This matters both on epistemic grounds and because one of the most harmful things that can be done for AI safety is to heavily politicize it. By default, we should expect that a lot more people will end up getting on the AI safety train over time; the main blocker to that is if they’re so entrenched in their positions that they fail to update even in the face of overwhelming evidence. We’re already heading towards entrenchment; efforts like this will make it worse. (My impression is that political motivations were also a significant contributor to Good Ventures decoupling itself from the rationalist community—e.g. see this comment about fringe opinion holders. It’s easy to imagine this process spiraling further.)
This is true to some extent. I did not write this thinking it would be ‘the EA case for Kamala’ in response to Hammond’s piece. I also was wary about adding length to an already too-long piece so didn’t go into detail on various counterpoints to Kamala.
I personally see Trump’s anti-democratic behavior and demonstrably bad values as very-nearly disqualifying on their own (similar to, e.g., Scott Aaronson’s case against Trump). That’s why I focus so much on likely damage to liberal democracy. In my view these are crucial enough considerations that I would require some strong and clearly positive data points in Trump’s favor to override his obvious flaws. I am not aware of clear and strong positives on Trump’s side, only some points which seem closer to ‘maybe he would do this good thing. He hasn’t talked about it, but it seems more likely he’d do it than that Harris would’.
Except where business-as-usual decisions would affect catastrophic risk scenarios I think they generally wash out when compared to Trump’s flaws.
I address a good chunk of those concerns here. Agree that I could have talked about this more (though again, the piece was already very long).
I don’t see why this follows from the above. The claim seems to be that the only reason that post could have been downvoted and this post upvoted is because of bias. You’ve argued that there’s some content I didn’t address, and that it’s written for a Harris-leaning audience, but haven’t put forward a critique of the positions put forward in the post. It also seems clear that I’ve, on each cause area at least, attempted to present both sides of the argument. I’m curious why you see it as inconsistent? People disagree on object-level politics – and many people on here seem to strongly disagree with you – but one side is generally right, on net. Two posts advocating for different sides of an issue shouldn’t be treated the same just because it’s about politics. Also, this post has received its fair share of criticism (e.g. Larks’ comment, which I thought was useful and led me to update the post).
Agreed, I don’t want to politicize AI safety. I really hope that, should Trump be elected, he’ll have good advisors and make good decisions on AI policy. I suspect he won’t, but I really hope he does.
Here’s my thoughts on why it seems fine to post this:
There’s been pro-Trump content on the Forum already but virtually no pro-Harris content AFAIK.
This post doesn’t show up on the front page because it’s politics (at least that’s my understanding, I didn’t see it there personally despite the upvotes).
We’re not spreading this publicly in any ways that non-EAs are likely to see.
This kind of post seems like a drop in the bucket. Lots of EAs identify as Democrat, many as Republican. Having debates about who to elect seems perfectly reasonable. I’m glad there’s not a ton of posts like this on the forum, if there were I probably wouldn’t have written it. Adding one on the margin doesn’t seem like a big deal to me.
This post talks about AI safety fairly little and, what content there is, is mainly in the appendix.
Not sure I fully understand this point but will attempt to answer. Again, I do not think this post or any of my other efforts are contributing meaningfully to politicizing/polarizing AI safety or “entrenching” positions about it, and I really hope a Trump administration will make good decisions on AI policy in case he is elected (and I’ll support efforts to this end). However, this is fully compatible with believing that a Harris administration would be far better – or far less bad – in expectation for AI policy. I give several important reasons for believing this in the post, e.g.: Trump has vowed to repeal Biden’s executive order on AI on day 1; Trump generally favors non-regulation and plans to abolish various agencies (Vance favors tech non-regulation in particular); and the demographics and professions that make up the AI safety/governance movement seem to have a far better chance at getting close to and influencing a Democratic administration than a MAGA administration, for several reasons.
A few observations on that from someone who did not vote on the Trump post or this one:
This seems to rely on an assumption that the commenters on the prior post had the same motivations as one might assign to the broader voter pool. It’s certainly possible, but hardly certain.
It’s impossible to completely divorce oneself from object-level views when deciding whether a post has failed to address or acknowledge sufficiently important considerations in the opposite direction. Yet such a failure is (and I think, has to be) a valid reason to downvote. It’s reasonable to me that a voter would find the missing issues in the Trump piece sufficiently important, and the issues you identify for Harris as having much less significance for a number of reasons.
Partisan political posts are disfavored for various reasons, including some your comment mentions. I think it’s fine for voters to maintain higher voting standards for such posts. Moreover, it feels easier for those posts to be net-negative because they are closer to zero-sum in nature; John’s candidate winning the election means Jane’s candidate losing. “It would be better for this post not to be on the Forum” is a plausible reason to downvote. Those factors make downvoting for strong disagreement more plausible than on non-political posts. This is especially true insofar as the voter thinks the resulting discussion will sound like ten thousand other political debates and contribute little if at all to finding truth.
Finally, there are good reasons for people to be less willing to leave object-level comments on posts like this one or the Trump one. First, arguing about politics is exhausting and usually unfruitful. Two, it risks derailing the Forum into a discussion of topics rather removed from effective altruism (e.g., were the various criminal charges against Trump and lawsuits against Musk legit? how biased in the mainstream US media?)
Setting aside the substantive issues about how accurate this post is vs. the other one, I’ll admit I’m very uncertain on how much we should avoid talking about partisan politics in AI forums, how much it politicizes the debate vs. clarifies the stakes in ways that help us act more strategically
I think this post might benefit from some commentary, caveats and warnings about how to engage in politics sensibly e.g.
Campaign finance rules
How non-Americans can and can’t engage
PR risks to EA from doing this sort of thing
I don’t have any expertise here, but I don’t think this community will handle this all sensibly by default (see err 2022).
This post by my colleague Catherine Low might have some helpful advice in this direction: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/TtdxpaJ4Cr9pQfbYt/advice-for-ea-org-staff-and-ea-group-organisers-interacting
Everyone should read the fine print about disclosure before making any political donation. It seems hard to donate to a political campaign nowadays without going through a conduit like ActBlue or WinRed, and those conduits have to disclose everything publicly (even if under $200). Some other stuff has to be disclosed if $200+. Some stuff doesn’t have to be publicly disclosed at all. There’s a pending lawsuit about the conduit disclosures, but I wouldn’t assume it will succeed.
I generally like transparency in political donations, but one might reasonably value not being on a public list for various reasons, and does the public really have any legitimate need to know that I gave $5 to John Doe for Congress?
Do people in the EA (and maybe rationalist) community have any particular levers we could pull or superpowers that could persuade key influencers and voters?
E.g., Joe Rogan might be able to tip this election. He shows some signs of thoughtfulness and reasoning (at time). Does anyone “here” have a way of reaching out to him?
(This comment focuses on object-level arguments about Trump vs Kamala; I left another comment focused on meta-level considerations.)
Three broad arguments for why it’s plausibly better if Trump wins than if Kamala does:
I basically see this election as a choice between a man who’s willing to subvert democracy, and a party that is willing to subvert democracy—e.g. via massively biased media coverage, lawfare against opponents, and coordinated social media censorship (I’ve seen particularly egregious examples on Reddit, but I expect that Facebook and Instagram are just as bad). RFK Jr, a lifelong Democrat (and a Kennedy to boot), has now endorsed Trump because he considers Democrat behavior too undemocratic. Heck, even Jill Stein has make this same critique. It’s reasonable to think that the risk Trump poses outweighs that, but it’s also reasonable to lean the other way, especially if you think (like I do) that the neutrality + independence of many US institutions is at a low point (e.g. see the Biden administration’s regulatory harassment of Musk on some pretty ridiculous grounds).
On foreign policy: it seems like Trump was surprisingly prescient about several major geopolitical issues (e.g. his 2016 positions that the US should be more worried about China, and that the US should push European countries to contribute much more to NATO, were heavily criticized at the time, but now are mainstream). The Abraham Accords also seem pretty significant. And I think the fact that the Ukraine war and the Gaza war both broke out under Biden not Trump should make us update in Trump’s favor (though I’m open to arguments on how much we should update).
On AI and pandemics: I don’t like his object-level policies but I do think he’ll bring in some very competent people (like Musk and Ramaswamy), and as I argued in this post I think the EA community tends to err towards favoring people who agree with our current beliefs, and should update towards prioritizing competence. (Of course there are also some very competent people on the Democrat side on these issues, but I expect them to be more beholden to the status quo. So if e.g. you think that FDA reform is important for biosecurity, that’s probably easier under Trump than Harris.)
[This is part 1, I will get to foreign policy and AI-specific questions hopefully soon]
I don’t think it’s fair to put an attempt to overthrow an election on par with biased media coverage (seems like both sides do this about equally, maybe conservative media is worse?) or dumping on opposition candidates (not great but also typical of both parties for many decades AFAIK). Scott Aaronson lays out some general concerns well here.
Trump incited a violent coup/insurrection attempt to prevent the 2020 election from being certified as well as other extremely norm-violating and likely illegal behavior to overturn the 2020 election (see long list here). The Republican party and supporting infrastructure (committees, media, influencers, fans, etc.) have since agreed to support his re-election attempt, punished members of the party for holding Trump accountable, and are touting January 6th insurrectionists as heroes.
Lawfare seems more concerning (though also far from new or specific to Dems) - curious what examples you’re worried about here. FWIW, I think the Supreme Court’s Trump immunity ruling is far and away worse than anything Dems have done in the past several years.
As far as comments from Stein or RFK Jr., don’t third party candidates always hate their mainstream counterparts? The Democratic party, like the GOP, is going to act in ways which help get their candidate elected. Boosting third party candidates who take votes from them is not something an American party will ever do. Maybe that’s not great but it’s more a systemic issue than an issue with the party itself.
One thing I’ll acknowledge in this vein is the Dems failure to run a real primary this year. I think that was a big mistake. There’s nothing illegal about this though, parties are private entities and can do whatever they want to select a candidate. I consider it more of a strategic mistake than an outright betrayal of Democratic principles. To be clear, I think the DNC is kinda incompetent (probably the RNC too though, Trump’s daughter-in-law is leading it now).
I don’t think the link you provided on Reddit censorship demonstrates censorship? What I saw was mostly people expressing political views in a space where most people disagree with them getting downvoted as well as posts from subreddits with lots of very lefty people where very lefty posts get lots of upvotes. Non-lefty posts and comments get downvotes there. It’s not great epistemics, sure, but it’s extremely typical of both sides. There are very similar conservative spaces where Dem posters don’t even exist (e.g. patriots.win). Am I missing something on this? (I haven’t read the other link you posted which seems more substantial but very long, might read another time).
Arguably Musk is doing something worse with Twitter right now (though I haven’t looked into it). FB is the go-to place for conservatives and conspiracy groups, I really don’t think it’s a haven for liberal censorship.
From the linked comment:
I think it’s really bad that top Dems covered up Biden’s mental state (which is why I pushed hard to get him to step down) and it reduces my trust in the party. I think this pales in comparison to Trump’s willingness to silence critics (e.g. via hush money and threats).
To be honest, I’m sympathetic to this concern and I’d be happy to have a reasonable Republican (if we get one) take a swing at reducing over-regulation in 2028. To the extent this is a cost of electing Harris, I will happily pay it.
If you believe that Trump has done a bunch of things wrong, the Democrats have done very little wrong, and the people prosecuting Trump are just following normal process in doing so, then yes these threats are worrying.
But if you believe that the charges against Trump were in fact trumped-up, e.g. because Democrats have done similarly bad things without being charged, then most of Trump’s statements look reasonable. E.g. this testimony about Biden seems pretty concerning—and given that context, saying “appoint a Special Counsel to investigate Joe Biden who hates Biden as much as Jack Smith hates me” seems totally proportional.
Also, assuming the “hush money” thing is a reference to Stormy Daniels, I think that case reflects much worse on the Democrats than it does on Trump—the “crime” involved is marginal or perhaps not even a crime at all. (tl;dr: Paying hush money is totally legal, so the actual accusation they used was “falsifying business records”. But this by itself would only be a misdemeanor, unless it was done to cover up another crime, and even the prosecution wasn’t clear on what the other crime actually was.) Even if it technically stands up, you can imagine the reaction if Clinton was prosecuted on such flimsy grounds while Trump was president.
If that includes suing other candidates to get them off the ballots, then I’m happy to call that unusually undemocratic. More generally, democracy is constituted not just by a set of laws, but by a set of traditions and norms. Not hosting a primary, ousting Biden, Kamala refusing interviews, etc, all undermine democratic norms.
Now, I do think Trump undermines a lot of democratic norms too. So it’s really more of a question of who will do more damage. I think that many US institutions (including the media, various three-letter agencies, etc) push back strongly against Trump’s norm-breaking, but overlook or even enable Democrat norm-breaking—for instance, keeping Biden’s mental state secret for several years. Because of this I am roughly equally worried about both.
I don’t really see much substance here. E.g. Aaronson says “Trump’s values, such as they are, would seem to be “America First,” protectionism, vengeance, humiliation of enemies, winning at all costs, authoritarianism, the veneration of foreign autocrats, and the veneration of himself.” I think America First is a very reasonable value for an American president to have (and one which is necessary for the “American-led peaceful world order” that Scott wants). Re protectionism, seems probably bad in economic terms, but much less bad than many Democrat policies (e.g. taxing unrealized capital gains, anti-nuclear, etc). Re “vengeance, humiliation of enemies, winning at all costs, authoritarianism”: these are precisely the things I’m concerned about from the Democrats. Re “the veneration of foreign autocrats”: see my comments on Trump’s foreign policy.
Sorry, I’d linked it on memory since I’ve seen a bunch of censorship examples from them, but I’d forgotten that they also post a bunch of other non-censorship stuff. Will dig out some of the specific examples I’m thinking about later.
Re Facebook, here’s Zuckerberg’s admission that the Biden administration “repeatedly pressured our teams for months” to censor covid-related content (he also mentions an FBI warning about Russian disinformation in relation to censorship of the Hunter Biden story, though the specific link is unclear).
One more point: in Scott’s blog post he talks about the “big lie” of Trump: that the election was stolen. I do worry that this is a key point of polarization, where either you fully believe that the election was stolen and the Democrats are evil, or you fully believe that Trump was trying to seize dictatorial power.
But reality is often much more complicated. My current best guess is that there wasn’t any centrally-coordinated plan to steal the election, but that the central Democrat party:
Systematically turned a blind eye to thousands of people who shouldn’t have been voting (like illegal immigrants) actually voting (in some cases because Democrat voter registration pushes deliberately didn’t track this distinction).
Blocked reasonable election integrity measures that would have prevented this (like voter ID), primarily in a cynical + self-interested way.
On priors I think this probably didn’t swing the election, but given how small the winning margins were in swing states, it wouldn’t be crazy if it did. From this perspective I think it reflects badly on Trump that he tried to do unconstitutional things to stay in power, but not nearly as badly as most Democrats think.
(Some intuitions informing this position: I think if there had been clear smoking guns of centrally-coordinated election fraud, then Trump would have won some of his legal challenges, and we’d have found out about it since then. But it does seem like a bunch of non-citizens are registered to vote in various states (e.g. here, here), and I don’t think this is a coincidence given that it’s so beneficial for Dems + Dems have so consistently blocked voter ID laws. Conversely, I do also expect that red states are being overzealous in removing people from voter rolls for things like changing their address. Basically it all seems like a shitshow, and not one which looks great for Trump, but not disqualifying either IMO, especially because in general I expect to update away from the mainstream media line over time as information they’ve suppressed comes to light.)
Without expressing any views on which allegations against the two major sides are true, it’s clear to me that relatively few people in the US are particularly interested in what we might call nonpartisan electoral truthseeking: making it easy, convenient, and secure for all those (and only those) legally eligible to vote, without unlawful foreign interference or illegal disinformation (like false robocalls about poll location).
I think it’s plausible that Dems turned a blind eye to some of this and that led to a few thousand extra votes here and there. US elections (and elections in general) always have issues like this and AFAIK there’s no reason to believe they played any larger or more important role in 2020 than any other election. In fact, given the amount of highly-motivated scrutiny applied to the 2020 election, I suspect it was cleaner than most previous elections.
Even had Trump received any credible evidence of unusual tampering (you’d think he’d have laid it out by now if he had), his actions were beyond the pale. His own Attorney General refused to recognize any signs of fraud. He tried to cajole anyone he could into not certifying the results in any state or district he could despite no real evidence of wrong-doing. His scheme to create alternate slates of electors was an out-and-out attempt at election fraud. There’s no world in which that was intended to be representative of ground-truth.
This article spells out a bunch of Trump’s actions around the 2020 election. I’m curious what you think of it.
To be fair (kinda) to Trump, I think he really may have thought the election was stolen. He seems extremely capable of deluding himself about things like that. E.g. he just said that, if Jesus were counting the vote, he would win California easily. My hot take is that having a president who is actively trying to delude himself and his followers into believing 2020 was stolen (and that 2024 will be stolen) is bad, that it displays a weakness of character & epistemics that should be disqualifying. It should, e.g., make us question his ability to act reasonably in a crisis situation or when presented with a complicated new risk like AI.
Which things that Democrats have done are as bad as the following actions from the GOP ticket?
Calling for the Constitution to be suspended
Saying the President should ignore the Supreme Court
Saying that Pence shouldn’t have certified the 2020 election results
Planning to use the military for domestic law enforcement
Calling for journalists to be jailed
Ending a 220-year tradition of peaceful transfers of power and spending considerable and relentless effort attempting to overturn an election
It’s plausible to worry that if Trump wins in 2024, and then a Democrat wins the 2028 election, Vance will simply not certify the election results until states send illegitimate Republican electors, which Republican members of the House would then have the opportunity of choosing.[1] This isn’t a conspiracy theory, it’s what Vance said on TV that he would’ve done in 2020.
So we could be in a situation in 4 years in which only one party is allowed to win major elections. I believe the technical term for this is “dictatorship.”
I believe the examples of undemocratic activity by Democrats that you’ve listed in your comment pale in comparison to those actions and statements. But even if they don’t, it’s unclear why they’re relevant to your argument, when Republicans have done approximately all of the things you listed. For example:
Have you read Breitbart or watched One America News Network? Can you name one media company whose staff is largely right-wing which produces better and less biased content than the NYT? If not, why does “massively biased media coverage” count against Democrats but not Republicans?
Do you actually expect Trump to be better on that front? As the WP reported, “In public, Trump has vowed to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” President Biden and his family. [...] In private, Trump has told advisers and friends in recent months that he wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office. [...] To facilitate Trump’s ability to direct Justice Department actions, his associates have been drafting plans to dispense with 50 years of policy and practice intended to shield criminal prosecutions from political considerations.”
Trump has called for “a Senate investigation into news outlets for publishing unflattering stories about him” and for journalists to be jailed.
I also wanted to address this sentence from your comment:
This isn’t good evidence of issues with the Democratic Party. First of all, RFK Jr is a prolific, long-time conspiracy theorist. He claimed that the 2004 election was stolen, that vaccines cause autism, that it’s not conclusive that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS, that hydroxychloroquine is an effective COVID-19 treatment, that the COVID-19 vaccines are not safe, that secret unidentified participants were involved in both JFK’s and RFK’s assassinations, and so on. I wouldn’t rely on his opinion about which party is better for democracy.
Secondly, the Democratic Party has evolved a lot over time. And a meaningful change that occurred in the last few decades is that conspiracy theorists are much less common in the party now. Both Richard Hanania and Matthew Yglesias recently wrote about how, whereas conspiracy theorists used to be roughly equally divided between the two major parties just a few decades ago, educational polarization booted Democratic conspiracy theorists into the GOP. RFK Jr is an example of this phenomenon.
This could happen even if Democrats control the House, since the Constitution says that each state should count equally were such vote to be held:
Regarding point 1.
You’re framing the situation as a choice between ‘Trump, who is willing to subvert democracy’ and ‘the Democratic Party, who is willing to subvert democracy’. This framing implicitly acknowledges that Harris is not (especially) willing to subvert democracy.
It’s very plausible to believe that both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are roughly equally willing to subvert democracy, especially given the significant influence Trump has on the Republican Party.
It then becomes a choice between:
Trump and the Republican Party, who are both willing to subvert democracy
vs.
The Democratic Party, who are willing to subvert democracy, and Harris, who is not.
In this comparison, Harris’s apparent commitment to democratic norms becomes the deciding factor in how you evaluate the overall democraticness of the choices.
I accept that I should talk about “Trump and the Republican party”. But conversely, when we talk about the Democratic party, we should also include the institutions over which it has disproportionate influence—including most mainstream media outlets, the FBI (which pushed for censorship of one of the biggest anti-Biden stories in the lead-up to the 2020 election—EDIT: I no longer endorse this phrasing, it seems like the FBI’s conversations with tech companies were fairly vague on this matter), the teams responsible for censorship at most major tech companies, the wide range of agencies that started regulatory harassment of Elon under the Biden administration, etc.
If Trump had anywhere near the level of influence over elite institutions that the Democrats do, then I’d agree that he’d be clearly more dangerous.
You probably know much more about U.S. politics than I do, so I can’t engage deeply on whether these things are really happening or how unusual they might be.
However, I suspect that much of what you’re attributing to the Democratic party is actually due to a broader trend of U.S. elites becoming more left-leaning and Democrat-voting. Even if I agreed that this shift was bad for democracy, I’m not sure how voting for Trump would fix it in the long run. A Trump presidency would likely push elites even further toward left-leaning politics.
May I suggest the part of the executive summary about donation opportunities also includes the links to those pages? I bet it would up the conversion rate a bunch :)
Underlining this part / otherwise making it more prominent could also be a good idea—I’d imagine that’s where you’d want most people’s attention.
For foreigners, you have to be much more careful about how you send money to influence a US election (do NOT donate directly to a candidate)—however, you are allowed to volunteer your time (source: personal experience).
(It might be worth adding that to the post, as this feels a bit US-centric at the moment)
EDIT: Clarified language, see below for more
This is what ActBlue, the official Dem donation platform states: “International donors can give to nonprofits, including both 501c(3)s and 501c(4)s, through ActBlue Charities and ActBlue Civics, both part of the ActBlue family of organizations. Only U.S. citizens and permanent residents can give to political groups and candidates on ActBlue, per FEC guidelines.”
The FEC says this, but some of those terms may not necessarily mean what the reader assumes they mean. My understanding is that there are some legal means of indirect influence for non-U.S. persons, but there are also significant limitations.
This is the best Forum post I’ve read the entire year
I think CEA should take this post down, and generally not permit discussion of particular candidates for political office. There are several reasons for this:
(1) a lot of what is said about Trump here is a very, um, partisan narrative, which half the country completely rejects. That half of the country includes many people who could contribute a lot to EA, and who we should want to feel welcome in EA. Having posts like this makes such people feel decidedly unwelcome.
(2) There is a roughly 50% chance Trump will be president for the next four years. If we want his administration to give any consideration to EA ideas, this is not a good foot to start off on. If EA becomes aligned with one political party, then EA ideas will be categorically rejected by the other without regard to their merits. And since each party will be in power roughly half the time, that is giving up half the potential impact of EA policy ideas. That effect makes posts like this significantly negative in expectation for our ability to influence policy.
(3) If CEA is perceived as endorsing candidates for political office, that could raise questions about their tax exempt status.
To be fair, there is at least one pro-Trump post up on the Forum. Neither this nor that post will go to front page AFAIK because it’s politics, but there are at least points on both sides.