I’m not asking EA to focus singularly on democracy. I’m asking EA to give any resources at all to the cause of democracy. Prove my ignorance wrong. Is any organization in EA involved with democracy at this moment? Is any organization bothering to evaluate potential interventions? What work has been done? What papers have been written? Is there some work saying, “Look, we’ve done the work, yes it turns out democracy has a terrible ROI!” How about you guys? Are you making any consideration or analysis on potential pro-democracy interventions? If you have, I’d love to see the analysis. My search for it, I’ve seen nothing. I hear crickets.
Here’s the thing about evidence. You have to look for it. Is EA bothering to look for it? Is your organization bothering to look for it? Otherwise, you have no idea how tractable it is or is not.
I understand your frustration here, but EAs may have decided it was better to engage in pro-democracy activity in a non-EA capacity. One data point: the pre-eminent EA funder was one of the top ten donors in the 2024 US elections cycle.
Or they may have decided that EA wasn’t a good fit for this kind of work for any combination of a half-dozen reasons, such as:
the EA brand could be ill-suited or even detrimental to this kind of work, either due to FTX or its association with a tech billionaire who made a lot of money on a platform that many believe to be corrosive of democracy;
the EA “workforce” isn’t well suited to this kind of work;
there are plenty of actors working in these spaces already, and there was no great reason to think that EAs would be more effective than those actors;
being seen as too political would impose heavy costs on other EA cause areas, especially AI policy—and “anti-authoritarian” is not non-partisan in 21st century America.
I don’t think it is necessary to rule out all possible alternative explanations before writing a critical comment. However, I think if you’re going to diagnose what you perceive as the root cause—“You wanted to settle for the ease of linear thinking”—I think it’s fair for us to ask for either clear evidence or a rule-out of alternative explanations.
As David points out, there have been a number of posts about democracy and elections, such as this analysis about the probability that a flipped vote in a US swing state would flip the presidential election outcome. I recall some discussion of the cost-per-vote as well. There are a lot of potential cause areas out there, and limited evaluative capacity, so I don’t think the evaluations being relatively shallow is problematic. That they did not consider all possible approaches to protecting/improving democracy is inevitable. I think it’s generally okay to place the burden of showing that a cause area warrants further investigation on proponents, rather than those proponents expecting the community to do a deep dive for them.
In my opinion, attempting to electioneer in 2024 by pumping money towards your preferred candidate, has little to do with democracy. It’s kind of the opposite. You’re engaging in oligarchy, trying to buy power with money, to attempt to save what democracy you have left. You’re not actually addressing the problems that led to the current crisis. As I said, mitigation and reaction.
>I think it’s generally okay to place the burden of showing that a cause area warrants further investigation on proponents,
And how can any cause area demonstrate this when you just won’t evaluate it anyways because of your limited evaluative capacity, because it’s not a priority cause area for your organization? Let’s imagine I have a proposal or a white paper. How and where can I submit it for evaluation? Take for example Open Philanthropy. Democracy’s not a cause area with any requests for proposals. Is there any organization accepting proposals?
The cause areas are driven from the top down, as far as I’m aware. Causes outside the org priorities are just not considered at all.
If you’re not proposing electioneering, what exactly is the program that you are suggesting could have prevented these USAID cuts? Because from where I’m sitting, I don’t really think there was anything EA could have done to prevent that, even if the whole weight of the movement were dedicated to that one thing.
Let’s imagine I have a proposal or a white paper. How and where can I submit it for evaluation?
>If you’re not proposing electioneering, what exactly is the program that you are suggesting could have prevented these USAID cuts?
“When should you have planted the seeds to grow a tree”? Just last year is a bit too late to grow a strong and capable democracy able to resist a tyranny.
A better year might have been 2016, when we were better understanding what the stakes were. That gives you 10 years. Or people have been complaining about the downfall of democracy since Occupy Wall Street. That’s 17 years (And people have obviously been complaining about democracy for far longer than that). But the next best thing might be now.
Throwing money at Biden/Harris 2025 is a method of last resort, particularly when it seems that money is highly ineffective in high-profile, money-saturated presidential campaigns.
Now let’s imagine that Trump actually does succeed in turning America into a dictatorship. Does that mean all hope is lost? No, there’s plenty of other countries where democracy can be strengthened.
>This forum might not be a bad place to start?
Plenty of ideas have been posted and ignored. I posted something for example on sortition which I’m a big fan of. Crickets. Neil Dullaghan made a great post about deliberative democracy here. What came of that?
Now maybe my idea is utter shit. OK sure, strikes and gutters. The silence is much more annoying.
Just so I understand you correctly, is your claim that if the EA movement had in 2016 spent resources advocating for sortition or electoral system changes, that we would not now be seeing cuts to USAID?
I’m asking because you started this thread with “These sorts of cuts highlight IMO the incorrect strategy EA has been on.” and finished with an article advocating sortition and an article advocating policies like approval voting (which EA already funds).
No, I’m requesting EA actually take the importance of improving democratic decision making seriously. Even if no action was able to stop these 2025 cuts, do you actually think “it’s over”? What about 2026? What about 2028? What about 2050? America is going to continue to make just stupid decisions until enough people get together and change the dumb way the system makes its decisions.
Moreover the second article isn’t about approval voting, I’m not sure how the only thing you got out of deliberation was approval voting.
If people in America were serious enough about improving democratic decision making, is it conceivable a reform could have stopped Trump? Imagine a new and improved Democratic Party was able to clearly demonstrate its ability to govern. Imagine a California government that was actually sufficiently competent to build high speed rail and more and more residential to attract more people into its borders. Instead Californians are fleeing because of rising costs.
Imagine an improved Democratic Party primary system that could elect a younger candidate that wouldn’t have grown senile by 2024.
Are these things *possible* within a small time frame? They certainly are. Trump himself demonstrates how quickly norms can be changed.
What’s wrong with US democracy isn’t just Trump, it’s an incompetent opposition party that people hate so much they’d rather trust something like Trump.
Finally yes, you mentioned approval voting. Would that ever be enough? Why are you putting all your eggs in just this one basket? IMO it’s a clear sign of EA’s myopia and lack of engagement with election theory, to ignore what is out there such as Single Transferable Vote, condorcet methods, and STAR voting. Even in this small niche of election reform in my opinion EA is far behind the theory.
I’m not asking EA to focus singularly on democracy. I’m asking EA to give any resources at all to the cause of democracy. Prove my ignorance wrong. Is any organization in EA involved with democracy at this moment? Is any organization bothering to evaluate potential interventions? What work has been done? What papers have been written? Is there some work saying, “Look, we’ve done the work, yes it turns out democracy has a terrible ROI!” How about you guys? Are you making any consideration or analysis on potential pro-democracy interventions? If you have, I’d love to see the analysis. My search for it, I’ve seen nothing. I hear crickets.
Here’s the thing about evidence. You have to look for it. Is EA bothering to look for it? Is your organization bothering to look for it? Otherwise, you have no idea how tractable it is or is not.
There has been quite a bit written about democracy, I’m not sure if it fits your description but some of those posts might be related.
Effektiv Spenden also has a ‘Defending Democracy’ fund.
I understand your frustration here, but EAs may have decided it was better to engage in pro-democracy activity in a non-EA capacity. One data point: the pre-eminent EA funder was one of the top ten donors in the 2024 US elections cycle.
Or they may have decided that EA wasn’t a good fit for this kind of work for any combination of a half-dozen reasons, such as:
the EA brand could be ill-suited or even detrimental to this kind of work, either due to FTX or its association with a tech billionaire who made a lot of money on a platform that many believe to be corrosive of democracy;
the EA “workforce” isn’t well suited to this kind of work;
there are plenty of actors working in these spaces already, and there was no great reason to think that EAs would be more effective than those actors;
being seen as too political would impose heavy costs on other EA cause areas, especially AI policy—and “anti-authoritarian” is not non-partisan in 21st century America.
I don’t think it is necessary to rule out all possible alternative explanations before writing a critical comment. However, I think if you’re going to diagnose what you perceive as the root cause—“You wanted to settle for the ease of linear thinking”—I think it’s fair for us to ask for either clear evidence or a rule-out of alternative explanations.
As David points out, there have been a number of posts about democracy and elections, such as this analysis about the probability that a flipped vote in a US swing state would flip the presidential election outcome. I recall some discussion of the cost-per-vote as well. There are a lot of potential cause areas out there, and limited evaluative capacity, so I don’t think the evaluations being relatively shallow is problematic. That they did not consider all possible approaches to protecting/improving democracy is inevitable. I think it’s generally okay to place the burden of showing that a cause area warrants further investigation on proponents, rather than those proponents expecting the community to do a deep dive for them.
In my opinion, attempting to electioneer in 2024 by pumping money towards your preferred candidate, has little to do with democracy. It’s kind of the opposite. You’re engaging in oligarchy, trying to buy power with money, to attempt to save what democracy you have left. You’re not actually addressing the problems that led to the current crisis. As I said, mitigation and reaction.
>I think it’s generally okay to place the burden of showing that a cause area warrants further investigation on proponents,
And how can any cause area demonstrate this when you just won’t evaluate it anyways because of your limited evaluative capacity, because it’s not a priority cause area for your organization? Let’s imagine I have a proposal or a white paper. How and where can I submit it for evaluation? Take for example Open Philanthropy. Democracy’s not a cause area with any requests for proposals. Is there any organization accepting proposals?
The cause areas are driven from the top down, as far as I’m aware. Causes outside the org priorities are just not considered at all.
If you’re not proposing electioneering, what exactly is the program that you are suggesting could have prevented these USAID cuts? Because from where I’m sitting, I don’t really think there was anything EA could have done to prevent that, even if the whole weight of the movement were dedicated to that one thing.
This forum might not be a bad place to start?
>If you’re not proposing electioneering, what exactly is the program that you are suggesting could have prevented these USAID cuts?
“When should you have planted the seeds to grow a tree”? Just last year is a bit too late to grow a strong and capable democracy able to resist a tyranny.
A better year might have been 2016, when we were better understanding what the stakes were. That gives you 10 years. Or people have been complaining about the downfall of democracy since Occupy Wall Street. That’s 17 years (And people have obviously been complaining about democracy for far longer than that). But the next best thing might be now.
Throwing money at Biden/Harris 2025 is a method of last resort, particularly when it seems that money is highly ineffective in high-profile, money-saturated presidential campaigns.
Now let’s imagine that Trump actually does succeed in turning America into a dictatorship. Does that mean all hope is lost? No, there’s plenty of other countries where democracy can be strengthened.
>This forum might not be a bad place to start?
Plenty of ideas have been posted and ignored. I posted something for example on sortition which I’m a big fan of. Crickets. Neil Dullaghan made a great post about deliberative democracy here. What came of that?
Now maybe my idea is utter shit. OK sure, strikes and gutters. The silence is much more annoying.
Just so I understand you correctly, is your claim that if the EA movement had in 2016 spent resources advocating for sortition or electoral system changes, that we would not now be seeing cuts to USAID?
I’m asking because you started this thread with “These sorts of cuts highlight IMO the incorrect strategy EA has been on.” and finished with an article advocating sortition and an article advocating policies like approval voting (which EA already funds).
No, I’m requesting EA actually take the importance of improving democratic decision making seriously. Even if no action was able to stop these 2025 cuts, do you actually think “it’s over”? What about 2026? What about 2028? What about 2050? America is going to continue to make just stupid decisions until enough people get together and change the dumb way the system makes its decisions.
Moreover the second article isn’t about approval voting, I’m not sure how the only thing you got out of deliberation was approval voting.
If people in America were serious enough about improving democratic decision making, is it conceivable a reform could have stopped Trump? Imagine a new and improved Democratic Party was able to clearly demonstrate its ability to govern. Imagine a California government that was actually sufficiently competent to build high speed rail and more and more residential to attract more people into its borders. Instead Californians are fleeing because of rising costs.
Imagine an improved Democratic Party primary system that could elect a younger candidate that wouldn’t have grown senile by 2024.
Are these things *possible* within a small time frame? They certainly are. Trump himself demonstrates how quickly norms can be changed.
What’s wrong with US democracy isn’t just Trump, it’s an incompetent opposition party that people hate so much they’d rather trust something like Trump.
Finally yes, you mentioned approval voting. Would that ever be enough? Why are you putting all your eggs in just this one basket? IMO it’s a clear sign of EA’s myopia and lack of engagement with election theory, to ignore what is out there such as Single Transferable Vote, condorcet methods, and STAR voting. Even in this small niche of election reform in my opinion EA is far behind the theory.
For what it’s worth, https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/aaronhamlin has been engaging with the EA community on the topic of electoral reform.