Oregonian here, born and raised. I don’t live in OR-6 but can see it from my home. I’m by no means a member of EA but I’m aware of it and until now had a generally favorable impression of you all.
I hope that rather than donating, folks in this thread will think about what they’re doing and whether it’s a good idea. The most obvious effect of this effort has been to 5-10x the total spending in this race. It’s pretty easy to read it as an experiment to see if CEA can buy seats in congress. Thats not innovative, it’s one of the oldest impulses in politics: we’re rich, let’s put my friend in power.
Further, it sounds like your friend Carrick is a great guy, but he’s got many defects as a candidate. He’s only lived in Oregon for about 18 months since college. From the few interviews he’s given, he doesn’t seem to have much familiarity or even really care about key issues in Oregon (in particular, the few interviews he’s given show that he lacks a nuanced understanding of issues like forest policy and drug decriminalization). He does not appear to have reached out to local leaders or tried to do any of the local network building you’d expect of a good representative. According to OPB he’s only voted twice in his adult life. He has no experience in government. And, of course, if elected he will very visibly owe his win to a single ultra-wealthy individual who is almost guaranteed to have business before the next congress in financial and crypto regulation.
Even if you think pandemic response is the only issue that matters, there’s little public evidence that he’s an expert: whatever consulting he did is private as far as I can tell. What he appears to be is a policy analyst studying AI governance. That’s not necessarily a bad thing but it’s not how he’s being sold. And frankly, I doubt it’s a pressing issue to most people in the district.
I also don’t see any thought about the other candidates in the race. It’s not your guy vs a potato: there are 3 credible, excellent choices. Reps Salinas and Leon are both children of immigrant ag workers who worked their way up through local politics. If you think pandemic response is the key issue, Dr. Harder is a highly experienced doctor who used to run the Oregon Medical Board. Medical and policy experience: maybe you still think your guy will be better, but by how much?
One final thought. I thought this group was supposed to be about deploying money more effectively. The amount that’s been spent here would have been more than enough to rent an office and pay a salary for Mr Flynn, an experienced lobbyist with a good Rolodex and support staff for several years. You could have had a dedicated smart pandemic response lobbying operation, not a 2% increased chance of your friend getting elected or whatever. How is your approach effective?
Thanks for the thoughtful comment! Without commenting on the candidacy or election overall, a response (lightly edited for clarity) to your point about pandemics:
You emphasize pandemic expertise, but pandemic prevention priorities are arguably more relevant to who will make a difference. It might not take much expertise to think that now is a bad time for Congress to slash pandemic prevention funding, which happened despite some lobbying against it. And for harder decisions, a non-expert member of Congress can hire or consult with expert advisors, as is common practice. Instead of expertise being most important in this case, a perspective I’ve heard from people very familiar with Congress is that Congress members’ priorities are often more important, since members face tough negotiations and tradeoffs. So maybe what’s lacking in Congress isn’t pandemic-related expertise or lobbying, but willingness to make it a priority to keep something like covid from happening again.
If you think pandemic response is the key issue, Dr. Harder is a highly experienced doctor who used to run the Oregon Medical Board. Medical and policy experience: maybe you still think your guy will be better, but by how much?
The FDA has hundreds of highly -experienced doctors and still had such a disastrous response to the pandemic they probably caused millions of extra deaths. They completely blocked challenge trials and delayed vaccine deployment by six months. What matters is not whether the people in government are doctors, it’s the policies on how the government behaves when an important problem arises. And crucially, the key issue isn’t pandemic response, it’s pandemic prevention. Carrick Flynn is the only congressional candidate I know of who’s running on that.
Thanks. I agree—you can debate who would be most effective on pandemic prevention! But it is debatable and I’d love for everyone here to factor that into their back of envelope effectiveness calculations.
But I also want to convince you all that your focus is way too narrow. This is not an election for pandemic czar, it’s an open seat several decades in the making and the representation for >650k Oregonians. So it rankles to see the race turned into an experiment to see if huge amounts of money can buy it for somebody who seems disinterested in most issues facing the district.
Hmm I fear there might be a cultural clash here. Many people on this forum believe that pandemic response (and especially prevention) was a massive and avoidable bipartisan failure on the part of the US, and a massive failure internationally on behalf of our institutions, experts, and governments overall (see here for an anonymous take). Many people on the forum don’t believe in the “overwhelming and avoidable failure” narrative, but at least they’re sufficiently familiar with this story that this is a common starting point of debates around here.
I think in contrast, many Americans (and I think this is more true of the elite than the public) would rather put the current pandemic behind us. And for those still concerned, a common pattern is to blame members of the other party. And I especially don’t like the typical attitudes of the Western intelligensia, which tends to blame the public for what is primarily the faults of our institutions and experts (zeynep’s take, my response).
The FDA has hundreds of highly -experienced doctors and still had such a disastrous response to the pandemic they probably caused millions of extra deaths
(Note that this has to include non-US mortality as well in the metric).
Let me add a positive suggestion. It’s down to the last few days, but if you’re reading this and still thinking about limiting out, your dollars will be better spent in the next district over.
OR-5 is currently represented by Kurt Schrader, a centrist democrat with a long history of blocking any sort of ambitious or progressive legislation. He was one of the members behind splitting Build Back Better, and therefore killing most of the interesting stuff off (including if I’m not mistaken, a bunch of Covid response funding). But his district was just re-drawn and about half the voters have changed.
He has a strong primary challenger in Jamie McLeod-Skinner, a lawyer with city management experience who is running to his left (you can’t really run to Schrader’s right as a democrat). McLeod-Skinner seems cool, and in her previous run came closer to getting elected in a safe R district than seemed possible, basically through heroic networking and ground game.
Here is American politics right now: good ideas are not scarce, the votes to enact them are. Replacing Schrader is a slam dunk, and it’s a cheaper race. It’s a better use of your dollar. Here’s a link: https://jamiefororegon.com/
Thanks! Constructive suggestions about good things to do seem great.
I think Carrick is getting a lot of support from a combination of making crucial issues like pandemic preparedness priorities, and also benefiting from reputation networks here (so people are justifiably confident that he isn’t going to be in it for himself or giving out political favours, which is just a super-important dimension). It’s certainly plausible that McLeod-Skinner’s campaign is a great opportunity to help out with, but my personal impression is that you haven’t (yet) made a comparably strong case, so I’m not sure how many people will be persuaded by what you’ve said so far. But if you (or anyone) wanted to dive into a deeper analysis of the value of supporting different campaigns from an impartial welfarist perspective, that could be useful, and I imagine you’d find a receptive (if critical!) audience here.
[Not me for US races; I’m not an American so won’t be giving anything. I’m following this one because Carrick is an ex-colleague and I think he’s a great guy.]
I know some Oregonians too and I think they find the use of money in all politics deplorable and would be fine or pretty happy with the candidate mentioned in the original post.
Do you mind telling us who you are and what your relationship with this OR-5 candidate is?
I’m not sure every person here understands how many forum accounts/time/erudite writing a full $2,900 political donation could produce.
Thinking behind my comment above or why you should care (something something minimal trust investigations)—I’m not saying I’m Correct, but this is how I sort of think so if this is terrible someone should stop me.
(I’m on mobile so formatting is weak.)
The comment pattern satisfies noticeable patterns for me that suggest a lot of practice or intent.
— Something noticeable is the how they repeat certain critiques in a way that is superficial. They do this in such a way I doubt their writing could be the full story behind this person’s views, or another plausible explanation is that their view is shallow and they found this content to fill out the comment. Either of these is less consistent with how I expect most concerned people to pop onto the forum to talk about OR-6. It suggests cultivation.
— Broadly, opinions and views repeat patterns and ideas that come from elsewhere.
— Their messaging across comments is pretty tight and goes through a progression I find deliberate . (I was born in Oregon and can see OR-6, have a favourable view of you guys) but then moves into critiques of funding later on, and then moves into what I would consider outright rhetoric and a leading point (is this the best way to spend your money?), which then seats the position for an ask.
— Note that the later content gives a funny characterization of EA (the CEA reference is not the biggest issue), this isn’t deceptive but it is consistent with learning enough about EA to make this comment (eg no real prior interest).
I don’t think this is evil or anything. The person is just trying to support someone they care about. The level of sophistication here is like at the level of any experienced campaigner.
My friends uses similar level of sophistication for buying a used car for example.
Other points:
— EAs focus on messaging and branding and have historic sensitivities. I think it would benefit EAs to know how sensitivities are being broadcast and their effect.
— Many political races have a candidate who could be supported to move it to the left. It’s unclear how or why the indicated race OR-5 would be a good donation.
— In general, no one has agreed or even raised the topic of EA generally supporting left (or right candidates). The support of the candidate mentioned in the OP has a more specific theory of change.
— The forum has been broadcast in national media multiple times now. I’m guessing the reason why cultivated activity hasn’t appeared is because communicating and learning EA diction and coming up with the indicated pattern I pointed out takes time and is risky. I think this has some information to judge comments that do make it in (Something something Bayesian).
My friends uses similar level of sophistication for buying a used car for example.
Ouch, was I really that bad?
I’m gonna retract the parent comment and didn’t mean to raise questions about my motivations. (I think you’re suggesting I might be a McLeod-Skinner secret agent? I’m flattered, I think). For what it’s worth, I have no connection to her campaign, have never met her, and am actually not even a donor in her current race (I donated to her first campaign a few years ago).
I was simply trying to provide an alternative, since I think you all are mis-spending kind of a lot of money.
Many political races have a candidate who could be supported to move it to the left.
For the amount being spent in OR-6, you could have had a significant influence on a bunch of those.
Nothing you wrote was bad. In fact it was fantastic.
I think you could use your real name and that seems very low cost.
The one issue on substance is that I wish you could have delved into more, was engaging about the long, high effort comments that was made about pandemic prevention, which isn’t the same as covid response. Especially not just saying that an incremental package from another candidate was comparable.
There is such a world of difference between pandemic prevention and another covid response package—that difference reflects how you could influence the people here who are donating to the candidate in the OP to donate somewhere else.
Re: too much spending.
(Another reason why the money is going where it is, is that this could lift the cruel 50% work hours that a congresswoman spends just calling donors and serving the party, with that lifted, they have freedom to serve their country and their constituents).
As a meta comment (a point about the process of my commenting), I guess my main issue is with the response here with the EA.
By the way I’m not an EA, no one likes me so this isn’t official or anything like that.
For anyone else reading this, including full on partisan and political policy people—I think EA and everyone would welcome detailed, policy like discussion on pandemic preparation.
You can do this even if it (highly) unfavorable to the candidate. That is the nature of EA.
One major opportunity with this press and money is that someone could use attention to create a virtuous cycle of actual policy discussion (as opposed to too much discussion about owls or gotchas).
A real convincing thread here about improving policy in pandemics that satisfies the EA would very possibly unlock principled political funding that protects Americans.
If you really had the knowledge, many people would navigate you through the silly EA terminology and habits.
I can’t respond to all of it now, but do want to point out one thing.
And, of course, if elected he will very visibly owe his win to a single ultra-wealthy individual who is almost guaranteed to have business before the next congress in financial and crypto regulation.
I think this isn’t accurate.
Donations from individuals are capped at $5,800, so whatever money Carrick is getting is not one giant gift from Sam Bankman-Fried, but rather many small ones from individual Americans. Some of them may work for organizations that get a lot of funding from big EA donors, but it’s still their own salary which they are free to spend however they like. As an aside, probably in most cases the funding of these orgs will currently still come from OpenPhil (who give away Dustin Moskovitz’s and Cari Tuna’s wealth), rather than FTX Future Fund (who give away SBF’s wealth among others).
I think it’s important that for the most part, this is money that not-crazy-rich Americans could have spent on themselves, but chose to donate to this campaign instead.
Thanks for the replies. This is exactly what I meant: Flynn likely wouldn’t be within striking distance without the firehose of ads provided by SBF’s super pacs. A really large % of the spending in the race is being provided by a single individual.
Donations from individuals are capped at $5,800, so whatever money Carrick is getting is not one giant gift from Sam Bankman-Fried, but rather many small ones from individual Americans.
There’s a really easy way around the $5800 limitation, called a super PAC (Political Action Committee). Super PACs don’t give to campaigns directly, but try to influence races via ads, etc. There are no restrictions on super PAC funds.
Oregonian here, born and raised. I don’t live in OR-6 but can see it from my home. I’m by no means a member of EA but I’m aware of it and until now had a generally favorable impression of you all.
I hope that rather than donating, folks in this thread will think about what they’re doing and whether it’s a good idea. The most obvious effect of this effort has been to 5-10x the total spending in this race. It’s pretty easy to read it as an experiment to see if CEA can buy seats in congress. Thats not innovative, it’s one of the oldest impulses in politics: we’re rich, let’s put my friend in power.
Further, it sounds like your friend Carrick is a great guy, but he’s got many defects as a candidate. He’s only lived in Oregon for about 18 months since college. From the few interviews he’s given, he doesn’t seem to have much familiarity or even really care about key issues in Oregon (in particular, the few interviews he’s given show that he lacks a nuanced understanding of issues like forest policy and drug decriminalization). He does not appear to have reached out to local leaders or tried to do any of the local network building you’d expect of a good representative. According to OPB he’s only voted twice in his adult life. He has no experience in government. And, of course, if elected he will very visibly owe his win to a single ultra-wealthy individual who is almost guaranteed to have business before the next congress in financial and crypto regulation.
Even if you think pandemic response is the only issue that matters, there’s little public evidence that he’s an expert: whatever consulting he did is private as far as I can tell. What he appears to be is a policy analyst studying AI governance. That’s not necessarily a bad thing but it’s not how he’s being sold. And frankly, I doubt it’s a pressing issue to most people in the district.
I also don’t see any thought about the other candidates in the race. It’s not your guy vs a potato: there are 3 credible, excellent choices. Reps Salinas and Leon are both children of immigrant ag workers who worked their way up through local politics. If you think pandemic response is the key issue, Dr. Harder is a highly experienced doctor who used to run the Oregon Medical Board. Medical and policy experience: maybe you still think your guy will be better, but by how much?
One final thought. I thought this group was supposed to be about deploying money more effectively. The amount that’s been spent here would have been more than enough to rent an office and pay a salary for Mr Flynn, an experienced lobbyist with a good Rolodex and support staff for several years. You could have had a dedicated smart pandemic response lobbying operation, not a 2% increased chance of your friend getting elected or whatever. How is your approach effective?
Thanks for the thoughtful comment! Without commenting on the candidacy or election overall, a response (lightly edited for clarity) to your point about pandemics:
You emphasize pandemic expertise, but pandemic prevention priorities are arguably more relevant to who will make a difference. It might not take much expertise to think that now is a bad time for Congress to slash pandemic prevention funding, which happened despite some lobbying against it. And for harder decisions, a non-expert member of Congress can hire or consult with expert advisors, as is common practice. Instead of expertise being most important in this case, a perspective I’ve heard from people very familiar with Congress is that Congress members’ priorities are often more important, since members face tough negotiations and tradeoffs. So maybe what’s lacking in Congress isn’t pandemic-related expertise or lobbying, but willingness to make it a priority to keep something like covid from happening again.
The FDA has hundreds of highly -experienced doctors and still had such a disastrous response to the pandemic they probably caused millions of extra deaths. They completely blocked challenge trials and delayed vaccine deployment by six months. What matters is not whether the people in government are doctors, it’s the policies on how the government behaves when an important problem arises. And crucially, the key issue isn’t pandemic response, it’s pandemic prevention. Carrick Flynn is the only congressional candidate I know of who’s running on that.
Thanks. I agree—you can debate who would be most effective on pandemic prevention! But it is debatable and I’d love for everyone here to factor that into their back of envelope effectiveness calculations.
But I also want to convince you all that your focus is way too narrow. This is not an election for pandemic czar, it’s an open seat several decades in the making and the representation for >650k Oregonians. So it rankles to see the race turned into an experiment to see if huge amounts of money can buy it for somebody who seems disinterested in most issues facing the district.
Hmm I fear there might be a cultural clash here. Many people on this forum believe that pandemic response (and especially prevention) was a massive and avoidable bipartisan failure on the part of the US, and a massive failure internationally on behalf of our institutions, experts, and governments overall (see here for an anonymous take). Many people on the forum don’t believe in the “overwhelming and avoidable failure” narrative, but at least they’re sufficiently familiar with this story that this is a common starting point of debates around here.
I think in contrast, many Americans (and I think this is more true of the elite than the public) would rather put the current pandemic behind us. And for those still concerned, a common pattern is to blame members of the other party. And I especially don’t like the typical attitudes of the Western intelligensia, which tends to blame the public for what is primarily the faults of our institutions and experts (zeynep’s take, my response).
(Note that this has to include non-US mortality as well in the metric).
Thanks for posting, I think this is a more than fair and very thoughtful challenge.
Let me add a positive suggestion. It’s down to the last few days, but if you’re reading this and still thinking about limiting out, your dollars will be better spent in the next district over.
OR-5 is currently represented by Kurt Schrader, a centrist democrat with a long history of blocking any sort of ambitious or progressive legislation. He was one of the members behind splitting Build Back Better, and therefore killing most of the interesting stuff off (including if I’m not mistaken, a bunch of Covid response funding). But his district was just re-drawn and about half the voters have changed.
He has a strong primary challenger in Jamie McLeod-Skinner, a lawyer with city management experience who is running to his left (you can’t really run to Schrader’s right as a democrat). McLeod-Skinner seems cool, and in her previous run came closer to getting elected in a safe R district than seemed possible, basically through heroic networking and ground game.
Here is American politics right now: good ideas are not scarce, the votes to enact them are. Replacing Schrader is a slam dunk, and it’s a cheaper race. It’s a better use of your dollar. Here’s a link: https://jamiefororegon.com/
Thanks! Constructive suggestions about good things to do seem great.
I think Carrick is getting a lot of support from a combination of making crucial issues like pandemic preparedness priorities, and also benefiting from reputation networks here (so people are justifiably confident that he isn’t going to be in it for himself or giving out political favours, which is just a super-important dimension). It’s certainly plausible that McLeod-Skinner’s campaign is a great opportunity to help out with, but my personal impression is that you haven’t (yet) made a comparably strong case, so I’m not sure how many people will be persuaded by what you’ve said so far. But if you (or anyone) wanted to dive into a deeper analysis of the value of supporting different campaigns from an impartial welfarist perspective, that could be useful, and I imagine you’d find a receptive (if critical!) audience here.
[Not me for US races; I’m not an American so won’t be giving anything. I’m following this one because Carrick is an ex-colleague and I think he’s a great guy.]
I know some Oregonians too and I think they find the use of money in all politics deplorable and would be fine or pretty happy with the candidate mentioned in the original post.
Do you mind telling us who you are and what your relationship with this OR-5 candidate is?
I’m not sure every person here understands how many forum accounts/time/erudite writing a full $2,900 political donation could produce.
Thinking behind my comment above or why you should care (something something minimal trust investigations)—I’m not saying I’m Correct, but this is how I sort of think so if this is terrible someone should stop me.
(I’m on mobile so formatting is weak.)
The comment pattern satisfies noticeable patterns for me that suggest a lot of practice or intent.
— Something noticeable is the how they repeat certain critiques in a way that is superficial. They do this in such a way I doubt their writing could be the full story behind this person’s views, or another plausible explanation is that their view is shallow and they found this content to fill out the comment. Either of these is less consistent with how I expect most concerned people to pop onto the forum to talk about OR-6. It suggests cultivation.
— Broadly, opinions and views repeat patterns and ideas that come from elsewhere.
— Their messaging across comments is pretty tight and goes through a progression I find deliberate . (I was born in Oregon and can see OR-6, have a favourable view of you guys) but then moves into critiques of funding later on, and then moves into what I would consider outright rhetoric and a leading point (is this the best way to spend your money?), which then seats the position for an ask.
— Note that the later content gives a funny characterization of EA (the CEA reference is not the biggest issue), this isn’t deceptive but it is consistent with learning enough about EA to make this comment (eg no real prior interest).
I don’t think this is evil or anything. The person is just trying to support someone they care about. The level of sophistication here is like at the level of any experienced campaigner.
My friends uses similar level of sophistication for buying a used car for example.
Other points:
— EAs focus on messaging and branding and have historic sensitivities. I think it would benefit EAs to know how sensitivities are being broadcast and their effect.
— Many political races have a candidate who could be supported to move it to the left. It’s unclear how or why the indicated race OR-5 would be a good donation.
— In general, no one has agreed or even raised the topic of EA generally supporting left (or right candidates). The support of the candidate mentioned in the OP has a more specific theory of change.
— The forum has been broadcast in national media multiple times now. I’m guessing the reason why cultivated activity hasn’t appeared is because communicating and learning EA diction and coming up with the indicated pattern I pointed out takes time and is risky. I think this has some information to judge comments that do make it in (Something something Bayesian).
Ouch, was I really that bad?
I’m gonna retract the parent comment and didn’t mean to raise questions about my motivations. (I think you’re suggesting I might be a McLeod-Skinner secret agent? I’m flattered, I think). For what it’s worth, I have no connection to her campaign, have never met her, and am actually not even a donor in her current race (I donated to her first campaign a few years ago).
I was simply trying to provide an alternative, since I think you all are mis-spending kind of a lot of money.
For the amount being spent in OR-6, you could have had a significant influence on a bunch of those.
Nothing you wrote was bad. In fact it was fantastic.
I think you could use your real name and that seems very low cost.
The one issue on substance is that I wish you could have delved into more, was engaging about the long, high effort comments that was made about pandemic prevention, which isn’t the same as covid response. Especially not just saying that an incremental package from another candidate was comparable.
There is such a world of difference between pandemic prevention and another covid response package—that difference reflects how you could influence the people here who are donating to the candidate in the OP to donate somewhere else.
Re: too much spending.
(Another reason why the money is going where it is, is that this could lift the cruel 50% work hours that a congresswoman spends just calling donors and serving the party, with that lifted, they have freedom to serve their country and their constituents).
As a meta comment (a point about the process of my commenting), I guess my main issue is with the response here with the EA.
By the way I’m not an EA, no one likes me so this isn’t official or anything like that.
For anyone else reading this, including full on partisan and political policy people—I think EA and everyone would welcome detailed, policy like discussion on pandemic preparation.
You can do this even if it (highly) unfavorable to the candidate. That is the nature of EA.
One major opportunity with this press and money is that someone could use attention to create a virtuous cycle of actual policy discussion (as opposed to too much discussion about owls or gotchas).
A real convincing thread here about improving policy in pandemics that satisfies the EA would very possibly unlock principled political funding that protects Americans.
If you really had the knowledge, many people would navigate you through the silly EA terminology and habits.
Hey, interesting to hear your reaction, thanks.
I can’t respond to all of it now, but do want to point out one thing.
I think this isn’t accurate.
Donations from individuals are capped at $5,800, so whatever money Carrick is getting is not one giant gift from Sam Bankman-Fried, but rather many small ones from individual Americans. Some of them may work for organizations that get a lot of funding from big EA donors, but it’s still their own salary which they are free to spend however they like. As an aside, probably in most cases the funding of these orgs will currently still come from OpenPhil (who give away Dustin Moskovitz’s and Cari Tuna’s wealth), rather than FTX Future Fund (who give away SBF’s wealth among others).
I think it’s important that for the most part, this is money that not-crazy-rich Americans could have spent on themselves, but chose to donate to this campaign instead.
SBF’s Protect Our Future PAC has put more than $7M towards Flynn’s campaign. I think this is what _pk and others are concerned about, not direct donations. And this is what most people concerned with “buying elections” are concerned about. (This is what the Citizens United controversy is about.)
Thanks for the replies. This is exactly what I meant: Flynn likely wouldn’t be within striking distance without the firehose of ads provided by SBF’s super pacs. A really large % of the spending in the race is being provided by a single individual.
Thanks for pointing this out, wasn’t aware of that, sorry for the mistake. I have retracted my comment.
There’s a really easy way around the $5800 limitation, called a super PAC (Political Action Committee). Super PACs don’t give to campaigns directly, but try to influence races via ads, etc. There are no restrictions on super PAC funds.
In this case the Protect Our Future (super) PAC (https://www.politico.com/news/2022/04/19/crypto-super-pac-campaign-finance-00026146). I’m not clear exactly how much POF spent on the Flynn campaign, but SBF donated $13M to POF.
Thanks for pointing this out, wasn’t aware of that, sorry for the mistake. I have retracted my comment.