The flip side is that grift can be an opportunity. Suppose a bunch of members of congress decide EA donors are easy marks and they can get a bunch of money in exchange for backing some weird pandemic prevention bill they don’t even slightly care about or believe in. Well then the bill passes and that’s a good outcome.
That seems like a quite distinct case than what Ben is worrying about—more like a standard commercial interaction, ‘buying’ pandemic prevention. If I buy a pizza, it makes little difference to me if the cashier is deeply aligned with my dietary and health objectives—all I care about is that he got the toppings right. It is not from the benevolence of the pizza guy that we expect our dinner, but from his regard to his own interest. I think grift would be more like a politician writing a speech to cater to EA donors and then voting for exactly the same things they intended to anyway.
This specific story doesn’t seem to describe the greatest model of EA donors or political influence (it doesn’t seem like EA donors are that pliable or comfortable with politics, and the idea probably boils down to lobbying with extra steps or something).
But the thought seems true?
It seems worth imagining that, the minor media cycle around the recent candidate and other spending could create useful interest. For example, it could get sober attention and policy wonks to talk to EAs.
Since someone just commented privately to me with this confusion, I will state for the record that this commenter seems likely to be impersonating Matt Yglesias, who already has an EA Forum account with the username “Matthew Yglesias.” (EDIT: apparently it actually is the same Matt with a different account!)
The flip side is that grift can be an opportunity. Suppose a bunch of members of congress decide EA donors are easy marks and they can get a bunch of money in exchange for backing some weird pandemic prevention bill they don’t even slightly care about or believe in. Well then the bill passes and that’s a good outcome.
That seems like a quite distinct case than what Ben is worrying about—more like a standard commercial interaction, ‘buying’ pandemic prevention. If I buy a pizza, it makes little difference to me if the cashier is deeply aligned with my dietary and health objectives—all I care about is that he got the toppings right. It is not from the benevolence of the pizza guy that we expect our dinner, but from his regard to his own interest. I think grift would be more like a politician writing a speech to cater to EA donors and then voting for exactly the same things they intended to anyway.
This specific story doesn’t seem to describe the greatest model of EA donors or political influence (it doesn’t seem like EA donors are that pliable or comfortable with politics, and the idea probably boils down to lobbying with extra steps or something).
But the thought seems true?
It seems worth imagining that, the minor media cycle around the recent candidate and other spending could create useful interest. For example, it could get sober attention and policy wonks to talk to EAs.
Since someone just commented privately to me with this confusion, I will state for the record that this commenter seems likely to be impersonating Matt Yglesias, who already has an EA Forum account with the username “Matthew Yglesias.”(EDIT: apparently it actually is the same Matt with a different account!)(Object-level response: I endorse Larks’ reply.)
This is not true, just a duplicate account issue.
Now merged
Glib grift can grease good gifts