Politics on the EA Forum
With the U.S. presidential election cycle in full swing, we want to lay out the way we think about political discussion on the Forum.
Political issues are clearly relevant to improving the world. However, in our experience, we’ve seen that partisan political discussion tends to have a strong polarizing effect on public forums; it consumes a lot of a community’s attention and can lead to emotionally charged arguments. Overall, we think the EA Forum will be healthier, and better-positioned to achieve its goals, if we limit the space given to political topics.
We don’t plan to prohibit any content based on its political nature. However, the following types of post will remain in the “Personal Blog” category (meaning that they will not appear on the Forum’s homepage, but will appear in “All Posts,” in the author’s profile, and on any relevant tag pages):
Posts advocating for or against a specific political candidate or group of candidates (e.g. “Why effective altruists should vote for candidate Y”)
This policy also applies to posts which neutrally solicit opinions on a particular candidate, since those opinions are generally going to be advocacy for or against the candidate, which risks leading to the same issues.
Posts discussing policy issues with only tenuous connection to the main EA cause areas (e.g. “What John Smith’s position on gun rights means for EA voters”)
Some political content will continue to receive “Frontpage” categorization:
Posts discussing general systems for evaluating any political candidate (e.g. “Candidate Scoring System, Third Release”)
Posts discussing policy issues that are directly connected to core EA cause areas (e.g. this post on a campaign to boost Canadian development assistance)
These policies aren’t set in stone, and we’d welcome any feedback.
(Also, we reserve the right to make exceptions in exceptional circumstances. For example, if the favored candidate of the “Destroy Human Civilization” party is leading the polls in a nuclear-armed nation, that seems to merit a Frontpage post about how to stop them.)
- 's comment on The best $5,800 I’ve ever donated (to pandemic prevention). by (5 Feb 2022 2:51 UTC; 63 points)
- Guide to norms on the Forum by (28 Apr 2022 13:28 UTC; 57 points)
- When does it make sense to support/oppose political candidates on EA grounds? by (14 Oct 2020 13:51 UTC; 49 points)
- 's comment on When does it make sense to support/oppose political candidates on EA grounds? by (16 Oct 2020 14:32 UTC; 22 points)
- 's comment on When does it make sense to support/oppose political candidates on EA grounds? by (14 Oct 2020 23:22 UTC; 17 points)
- 's comment on When does it make sense to support/oppose political candidates on EA grounds? by (19 Oct 2020 8:43 UTC; 16 points)
- 's comment on Consider paying me (or another entrepreneur) to create services for effective altruism by (9 Nov 2020 9:56 UTC; 14 points)
- Running for U.S. president as a high-impact career path by (22 Jan 2022 4:56 UTC; 13 points)
- 's comment on What is the increase in expected value of effective altruist Wayne Hsiung being mayor of Berkeley instead of its current incumbent? by (7 Aug 2020 7:47 UTC; 12 points)
- Areas in the US Election that *might* be higher leverage to work on by (6 Sep 2020 17:23 UTC; 11 points)
- 's comment on 4 Years Later: President Trump and Global Catastrophic Risk by (26 Oct 2020 16:44 UTC; 7 points)
- 's comment on Recommendations for prioritizing political engagement in the 2020 US elections by (14 Oct 2020 22:35 UTC; 5 points)
- 's comment on Instability risks of the upcoming U.S. election and recommendations for EAs by (3 Nov 2020 8:14 UTC; 4 points)
Where does a post on vote-trading/vote-pairing fit in? On the one hand, it’s about electoral politics tactics rather than an object-level discussion of which candidates or political parties are better.
On the other hand, they’re usually structured to implicitly or explicitly benefit some candidates at the cost of others.
That post seems totally fine to me. I don’t see these methods as being too much more implicitly beneficial to certain candidates than approval voting is. And it’s hard to talk about political reform without thinking about which groups might benefit. I’d just not want to frontpage people who argue that reform X is good only because it will elect the awesome Y party and kick out the evil Zs.