If I lived in, or were inclined to move to, a red state and wanted to go into politics, I’d become a moderate Republican for the reasons you mention. Anywhere else I don’t think so. Pandemic risk already looks pretty politicized to me. Pre-2016 it didn’t; Bush did a lot of good work on it and I suspect Romney would have. But it is now. Biden came up with a decent pandemic prevention plan and the senate killed it just for fun. AI alignment so far is not, and seems like it could realistically remain apolitical if it’s mainly treated as a defense or foreign policy issue.
In a swing state, your participation in one party does seek to, and has a viable chance to, actively grow the number of jobs within that party, i.e. by replacing potential elected officials of the other party (and their appointees) with officials of your party. And in a blue state Republicans will simply be irrelevant, except in wave years where the state effectively becomes a swing state, with the same attendant problems. So there are quite real costs to this if you are broadly aligned with left-wing values. You’re sometimes replacing a generic Republican with yourself, and sometimes replacing a generic Democratic with your (by necessity somewhat more conservative) self. Maybe worth it for the benefits to AI risk but I’d like to see a Fermi estimate of what you believe the expected value of your contributions on that issue would be vs. the harm done by having to 1) work to elect other Republicans, 2) vote for or otherwise help enact Republican policies once in office (which will depend heavily on the position, so actually I’d like to see the estimates for different positions; i.e. maybe becoming a Republican is a good tradeoff if you’re going to work in specialized and mostly apolitical roles in defense or foreign policy but not so much if you’re going to have to make it through a GOP primary for Congress).
You may also be undervaluing people’s existing networks, but it depends on what unstated assumptions you are making here. If you run for office, you have to rely on your friends and family to get at least the first tranche of money. If you come from a liberal background and become a Republican, are they going to disown you? That’s not just cold uggos; it’s a serious practical problem with being able to run. Long run I think you can overcome that by building up your network within the GOP. BUT if you’re worried about AI risk, which is the one promising reason I see to do this, you may not have enough time to build your network! So this is only a viable strategy if you are primarily concerned about AI risk, AND either expect a long timeline, OR already have a ready to go GOP/bipartisan network to fundraise from. So if you’re serious about this idea, maybe you first need to present it to EAs who’d be interested in donating to a Republican EA candidate and get the fundraising machine set up, so you can solve this problem for anyone who takes your advice.
Biden came up with a decent pandemic prevention plan and the senate killed it just for fun.
It seems that the pandemic prevention plan was supposed to be part of the infrastructure bill. The people who negotiated the infrastructure bill and removed the pandemic prevention plan from it were all Democrats and not Republicans.
Nobody threatened to filibuster pandemic preparedness.
If someone cares about pandemic preparedness stopping gain-of-function research is an important issue and it’s likely easy to push for that from the Republican side. The Republican side is also less engaging in denialism about the origins of COVID-19.
Trump worked to deregulate the FDA and push for vaccine development while Biden’s FDA blocked Omicron-specific vaccines now for more than half a year.
If I lived in, or were inclined to move to, a red state and wanted to go into politics, I’d become a moderate Republican for the reasons you mention. Anywhere else I don’t think so. Pandemic risk already looks pretty politicized to me. Pre-2016 it didn’t; Bush did a lot of good work on it and I suspect Romney would have. But it is now. Biden came up with a decent pandemic prevention plan and the senate killed it just for fun. AI alignment so far is not, and seems like it could realistically remain apolitical if it’s mainly treated as a defense or foreign policy issue.
In a swing state, your participation in one party does seek to, and has a viable chance to, actively grow the number of jobs within that party, i.e. by replacing potential elected officials of the other party (and their appointees) with officials of your party. And in a blue state Republicans will simply be irrelevant, except in wave years where the state effectively becomes a swing state, with the same attendant problems. So there are quite real costs to this if you are broadly aligned with left-wing values. You’re sometimes replacing a generic Republican with yourself, and sometimes replacing a generic Democratic with your (by necessity somewhat more conservative) self. Maybe worth it for the benefits to AI risk but I’d like to see a Fermi estimate of what you believe the expected value of your contributions on that issue would be vs. the harm done by having to 1) work to elect other Republicans, 2) vote for or otherwise help enact Republican policies once in office (which will depend heavily on the position, so actually I’d like to see the estimates for different positions; i.e. maybe becoming a Republican is a good tradeoff if you’re going to work in specialized and mostly apolitical roles in defense or foreign policy but not so much if you’re going to have to make it through a GOP primary for Congress).
You may also be undervaluing people’s existing networks, but it depends on what unstated assumptions you are making here. If you run for office, you have to rely on your friends and family to get at least the first tranche of money. If you come from a liberal background and become a Republican, are they going to disown you? That’s not just cold uggos; it’s a serious practical problem with being able to run. Long run I think you can overcome that by building up your network within the GOP. BUT if you’re worried about AI risk, which is the one promising reason I see to do this, you may not have enough time to build your network! So this is only a viable strategy if you are primarily concerned about AI risk, AND either expect a long timeline, OR already have a ready to go GOP/bipartisan network to fundraise from. So if you’re serious about this idea, maybe you first need to present it to EAs who’d be interested in donating to a Republican EA candidate and get the fundraising machine set up, so you can solve this problem for anyone who takes your advice.
It seems that the pandemic prevention plan was supposed to be part of the infrastructure bill. The people who negotiated the infrastructure bill and removed the pandemic prevention plan from it were all Democrats and not Republicans.
Nobody threatened to filibuster pandemic preparedness.
If someone cares about pandemic preparedness stopping gain-of-function research is an important issue and it’s likely easy to push for that from the Republican side. The Republican side is also less engaging in denialism about the origins of COVID-19.
Trump worked to deregulate the FDA and push for vaccine development while Biden’s FDA blocked Omicron-specific vaccines now for more than half a year.