I agree that we should judge the actions ex ante. I also agree that (you are implying this I think) you have to start early and do good thinking in order to be effective here. 3 months before the election is too late. We had to get on this years before the election and the most effective solutions will look like getting good, sound, authentic, moderate candidates into the running or paying Biden $100mm to committ to not running.
I think if you went to say Reid Hoffman and Mark Cuban and others and said “it’s going to cost $10B, $10B and we flip this election.”, I think they would probably put in ~100mm (maybe less tbh) each, personally and go pretty gung-ho to get you to $10B.
The main problem is that I just don’t think you can turn money into votes through advertising past a point. I think you need to actually just pay people (which is illegal) and then you can flip votes. But for the vast majority of people, showing them more ads just does nothing. There’s even some evidence that it turns people off.
I’m not going to scrutinize your calculations. I think you realize that you don’t know in advance how many votes you need and where and that perhaps $1k/vote flip is on the margin and once you pick that fruit, it gets a lot harder and that you don’t have good accuracy on which votes you flip (even in a model where you do get to pay $1k/vote flip, most of the time that vote flip just happens in some random unimportant state). Thus, you basically got this advantage where the math looks great due to the importance of certain states due to the electoral college but that advantage gets effectively undone because you don’t get to perfectly target the states you want.
I would greatly expect that once everything is accounted for, donating EA money to politics won’t be cost effective but I like that you’re thinking about this and realize that it’s not going to be “EA money” predominantly.
I would greatly expect that once everything is accounted for, donating EA money to politics won’t be cost effective but I like that you’re thinking about this and realize that it’s not going to be “EA money” predominantly.
To be clear, I wasn’t advocating here to donate EA money. I think this would place this at a significantly higher bar. My point instead is that I think that the political issue is much more mainstream than EA causes, and would have been a clearer cause for many other people, including the top 0.1%.
Didn’t mean to imply you were, sorry if it came off that way.
Yup, I agree. But I think most people don’t care as much about political outcomes as they purport to, based on their actions. I think a lot of that is social desirability bias.
I agree that we should judge the actions ex ante. I also agree that (you are implying this I think) you have to start early and do good thinking in order to be effective here. 3 months before the election is too late. We had to get on this years before the election and the most effective solutions will look like getting good, sound, authentic, moderate candidates into the running or paying Biden $100mm to committ to not running.
I think if you went to say Reid Hoffman and Mark Cuban and others and said “it’s going to cost $10B, $10B and we flip this election.”, I think they would probably put in ~100mm (maybe less tbh) each, personally and go pretty gung-ho to get you to $10B.
The main problem is that I just don’t think you can turn money into votes through advertising past a point. I think you need to actually just pay people (which is illegal) and then you can flip votes. But for the vast majority of people, showing them more ads just does nothing. There’s even some evidence that it turns people off.
I’m not going to scrutinize your calculations. I think you realize that you don’t know in advance how many votes you need and where and that perhaps $1k/vote flip is on the margin and once you pick that fruit, it gets a lot harder and that you don’t have good accuracy on which votes you flip (even in a model where you do get to pay $1k/vote flip, most of the time that vote flip just happens in some random unimportant state). Thus, you basically got this advantage where the math looks great due to the importance of certain states due to the electoral college but that advantage gets effectively undone because you don’t get to perfectly target the states you want.
I would greatly expect that once everything is accounted for, donating EA money to politics won’t be cost effective but I like that you’re thinking about this and realize that it’s not going to be “EA money” predominantly.
To be clear, I wasn’t advocating here to donate EA money. I think this would place this at a significantly higher bar. My point instead is that I think that the political issue is much more mainstream than EA causes, and would have been a clearer cause for many other people, including the top 0.1%.
Didn’t mean to imply you were, sorry if it came off that way.
Yup, I agree. But I think most people don’t care as much about political outcomes as they purport to, based on their actions. I think a lot of that is social desirability bias.
I also don’t think it’s that clear that Kamala is obviously the better pick or that Trump being President over Kamala is worth $1-10T of value. I like this comment about the better choice for President being non-obvious.