The Progressive Policy Institute and the Neoliberal Project are one example of an EA-adjacent political movement/organization/project. Can you list some others? Here is my own vague high-level list of some political groups that seem EA-adjacent (I don’t know much about individual think-tanks or anything):
Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein, co-founders of Vox, have both talked about EA / rationalism in some of their writing, and interviewed on EA / rationalist podcasts. And of course Vox hosts Future Perfect, an explicitly EA column (although the rest of Vox does not strike me as significantly more EA than other center-left publications).
The Progress Studies movement is small and more oriented towards history than politics, but it seems to align with Marginal Revolution and the idea of long-term economic growth as a cause area. Charter Cities stuff is kinda connected to this area.
Perhaps there is a cluster of “institution design” people (which also has overlap in the cryptocurrency world), including folks such as Vitalik Buterin, Robin Hanson, and Glen Weyl. These type of folks seem very relevant to the important but IMO underdeveloped “improving institutional decisionmaking” wing of the EA movement. EA is also connected to some groups promoting more incremental / shovel-ready institutional tweaks, like approval voting.
Naturally lots of individual issues feed into niche political advocacy groups. Climate change and nuclear power, nuclear disarmament, international aid, vegetarian/vegan stuff. Although sometimes in these cases it’s more like EA is just choosing the already-existing lobbying group that aligns with their goals, but the lobbying group is just excited about their particular EA-adjacent issue without anybody there having gone through larger philosophy of EA.
California tech / venture capital groups, maybe? Peter Thiel is usually cast by the media as some kind of supervillain, but his projects sometimes strike me as feeling distantly EA-adjacent.
I feel like after Covid, there ought to be a strong locus of people pushing for various reforms to the CDC and FDA, but I don’t know of anything in that space?
Big fan of many of the groups discussed here, and we’re often close with the groups you listed. We’ve had Matt and Ezra on the podcast several times, as well as Dylan Matthews from Future Perfect to discuss kidney donation. Love the work that Future Perfect does. I’ve also hosted on the podcast Glen Weyl, Jason Crawford of the Roots of Progress, and Mark Lutter of the Charter Cities Institute. Much less a fan of Peter Thiel, whose goals are explicitly anti-liberal (and being an ideological liberal I obviously view this as a very bad thing).
I think your answer is a pretty thorough overview of the space, to be honest. ‘Rationalists’ generally, like the LessWrong and SlateStarCodex crowd, are heavily EA aligned. But that’s a fairly explicit thing. Economics as a field is fairly fertile ground due to the tendency towards cost-benefit analysis, modeling, etc.
The Progressive Policy Institute and the Neoliberal Project are one example of an EA-adjacent political movement/organization/project. Can you list some others? Here is my own vague high-level list of some political groups that seem EA-adjacent (I don’t know much about individual think-tanks or anything):
Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein, co-founders of Vox, have both talked about EA / rationalism in some of their writing, and interviewed on EA / rationalist podcasts. And of course Vox hosts Future Perfect, an explicitly EA column (although the rest of Vox does not strike me as significantly more EA than other center-left publications).
The Progress Studies movement is small and more oriented towards history than politics, but it seems to align with Marginal Revolution and the idea of long-term economic growth as a cause area. Charter Cities stuff is kinda connected to this area.
Perhaps there is a cluster of “institution design” people (which also has overlap in the cryptocurrency world), including folks such as Vitalik Buterin, Robin Hanson, and Glen Weyl. These type of folks seem very relevant to the important but IMO underdeveloped “improving institutional decisionmaking” wing of the EA movement. EA is also connected to some groups promoting more incremental / shovel-ready institutional tweaks, like approval voting.
Naturally lots of individual issues feed into niche political advocacy groups. Climate change and nuclear power, nuclear disarmament, international aid, vegetarian/vegan stuff. Although sometimes in these cases it’s more like EA is just choosing the already-existing lobbying group that aligns with their goals, but the lobbying group is just excited about their particular EA-adjacent issue without anybody there having gone through larger philosophy of EA.
California tech / venture capital groups, maybe? Peter Thiel is usually cast by the media as some kind of supervillain, but his projects sometimes strike me as feeling distantly EA-adjacent.
I feel like after Covid, there ought to be a strong locus of people pushing for various reforms to the CDC and FDA, but I don’t know of anything in that space?
Big fan of many of the groups discussed here, and we’re often close with the groups you listed. We’ve had Matt and Ezra on the podcast several times, as well as Dylan Matthews from Future Perfect to discuss kidney donation. Love the work that Future Perfect does. I’ve also hosted on the podcast Glen Weyl, Jason Crawford of the Roots of Progress, and Mark Lutter of the Charter Cities Institute. Much less a fan of Peter Thiel, whose goals are explicitly anti-liberal (and being an ideological liberal I obviously view this as a very bad thing).
I think your answer is a pretty thorough overview of the space, to be honest. ‘Rationalists’ generally, like the LessWrong and SlateStarCodex crowd, are heavily EA aligned. But that’s a fairly explicit thing. Economics as a field is fairly fertile ground due to the tendency towards cost-benefit analysis, modeling, etc.