I am a member of DXE and have interacted with Wayne. I think if you care about animals the amount of QALYs gained would be massive. In general Wayne has always seemed like a careful, if overly optimistic, thinker to me. He always tries to follow good leadership practices. Even if you are not concerned with animal welfare I think Wayne would be very effective at advancing good policies.
Wayne being mayor would result in huge improvements for climate change policy. Having a city with a genuine green policy is worth a lot of QALYs. My only real complaint about Wayne is that he is too optimistic but that isn’t the most serious issue for a Mayor.
I haven’t checked the claims myself, but “follow good leadership practices” seems to be a heavily disputed claim. Some people claim DxE is a cult, see e.g. here.
I think it’s possible to use good leadership practices and bad leadership practices. I think the success of DxE has shown that he can do some things quite well.
I’ve met Wayne before. I get the impression is he quite intelligent and has definitely been familiar with EA for some time. At the same time, DXE has used much more intense / controversial practices in general than many EA orgs, many practices others would be very uncomfortable with. Very arguably this contributed to their successes and failures.
Sometimes I’m the most scared of the people who are the most capable.
I really don’t know much about Wayne, all things considered. I could imagine a significant amount of investigation concluding that he’d either be really great or fairly bad.
“really great or fairly bad” sounds like you’re ruling out “really bad”, but I think the worst outcomes are produced by combining very good with very bad leadership practices. If you’re bad at everything, you’re unlikely to have much of a negative impact because nobody will pay attention to you. So I would have said “really great or really bad”. I agree with you otherwise.
This answer would be strengthened by one or two examples of his careful thinking, or especially by a counterpoint to the claim that DxE uses psychological manipulation techniques on its members.
I am a member of DXE and have interacted with Wayne. I think if you care about animals the amount of QALYs gained would be massive. In general Wayne has always seemed like a careful, if overly optimistic, thinker to me. He always tries to follow good leadership practices. Even if you are not concerned with animal welfare I think Wayne would be very effective at advancing good policies.
Wayne being mayor would result in huge improvements for climate change policy. Having a city with a genuine green policy is worth a lot of QALYs. My only real complaint about Wayne is that he is too optimistic but that isn’t the most serious issue for a Mayor.
I haven’t checked the claims myself, but “follow good leadership practices” seems to be a heavily disputed claim. Some people claim DxE is a cult, see e.g. here.
I think it’s possible to use good leadership practices and bad leadership practices. I think the success of DxE has shown that he can do some things quite well.
I’ve met Wayne before. I get the impression is he quite intelligent and has definitely been familiar with EA for some time. At the same time, DXE has used much more intense / controversial practices in general than many EA orgs, many practices others would be very uncomfortable with. Very arguably this contributed to their successes and failures.
Sometimes I’m the most scared of the people who are the most capable.
I really don’t know much about Wayne, all things considered. I could imagine a significant amount of investigation concluding that he’d either be really great or fairly bad.
“really great or fairly bad” sounds like you’re ruling out “really bad”, but I think the worst outcomes are produced by combining very good with very bad leadership practices. If you’re bad at everything, you’re unlikely to have much of a negative impact because nobody will pay attention to you. So I would have said “really great or really bad”. I agree with you otherwise.
This answer would be strengthened by one or two examples of his careful thinking, or especially by a counterpoint to the claim that DxE uses psychological manipulation techniques on its members.