Personal context: I’m writing this as an individual rather than a moderator. I was happy to see your recommendations for political donations in the other threads, and I agree with you that the current president is much more dangerous than a more generic leader might be (though I’m not sure about “orders of magnitude”; the Iraq War was also very bad, and we missed a lot of potential climate change benefits when Al Gore didn’t become president).
I generally agree with you that EA should treat politics mostly as it does other issues, though I think it’s beneficial to take steps to avoid what frequently happens to other movements that become political (that is, politics sucks up more and more of their time and they lose focus on other things). This was the impetus behind the Forum’s policy on political posts.
However, with the background of that general agreement, I have some questions/concerns about aspects of this post.
Many of those who push back against political engagement in EA see the left, and particularly the social justice movement, as some kind of scary juggernaut seeking world domination by mind control.
This seems like an uncharitable representation of how the median concerned Forum user expresses those concerns. I’ve interacted with a few people who seem to view the left as more culturally powerful than they are, but I’ve also had better discussions with people who had more reasonable concerns.* Using a phrase like “mind control” to describe the beliefs of one’s opponents (even those on the fringes of community opinion) isn’t great.
I thought the section other than this paragraph was very good, especially the point that supporting the Democratic Party doesn’t equate to supporting the far left. But reading this nearly soured me on your argument in general (even though I don’t think of myself as someone who “pushes back”).
* For example, that while the far left isn’t very numerous or popular, their support overlaps a lot with EA’s core growth demographics, such that we might end up absorbing many of their norms or ideas without meaning to.
It will reduce EA’s long-term impact
I have to confess I’ve never really understood this argument.
Can you provide an example of someone saying this? I struggle to think of any arguments I’ve seen that resemble this. Maybe the idea that EA doesn’t want to cut off conservative people from feeling like they can belong in the movement, because that makes it harder to grow the movement?
A better way, in my opinion, would be to have some kind of formal system to weigh the risks against the opportunities on a case-by-case basis, as well as the risks of not engaging.
In principle, a system like this could be useful, but EA doesn’t have a system like this for anything right now. Even an organization like EA Funds, which evaluates opportunities to do good and recommends that some of them get support, is just a few experienced people trying to convince other people to trust their judgment. If someone wanted to, they could start doing this for political opportunities right now (and indeed, we’ve had people try to compare candidates before).
Within EA, individuals typically vote with their wallets, job applications, and Forum posts. There’s not much in the way of coordination around “official” EA recommendations, even if some orgs are trusted by much of the community to recommend things. The equivalent of voting against community approval for candidate X (as a cause worth supporting over various other causes) is to not donate to candidate X.
So while I like the idea of an organization that reviews political campaigns to seek out opportunities for impact — as I would almost any org that reviews opportunities for impact — I don’t think we’d need that organization to be uniquely “official” within EA. They’d just have to present their arguments clearly and convincingly.
(And, I suppose, not be actively opposed by other orgs in the movement, though I don’t think that would be likely to happen as long as the org in question avoided representing itself as “the official EA political charity” or something.)
Were this organization to exist, one factor that would help me personally trust it would be if their most common recommendation were “no action, this campaign doesn’t seem important/tractable enough to support either candidate rather than giving to (insert nonpartisan charity).”
Thanks very much Aaron, I always appreciate your thoughtful comments. Re: “mind control,” that was intended to be an exaggeration for humorous effect, but I can see how it may reduce the credibility of the post for anyone who might be on the fence about these issues. So point taken and thank you.
Before the original post was taken down, there was an example of an argument that EA’s effectiveness as a movement will be reduced by excessive partisanship. NunoSempere wrote, “I’ve briefly looked at the evolution of past social movements, and I don’t get the sense that doing this kind of thing leads to a social movement being very long lived. One of the long lived movements I’ve studied cultivated (though perhaps not consciously) the skill of having members on both sides of any political conflict. If I imagine EA being very long lived, which seems somewhat valuable, playing politics is not a thing I picture happening in that scenario. See also the intersection between politics and movement collapse scenarios”. I’ll leave it to Nuno to elaborate further if so desired.
Your comments on the structure and positioning of the recommending organization seem reasonable to me, and yes, my assumption is that there should be a fairly high bar for propagating a recommendation.
By the way Ian, I’ve not followed these posts in great detail and I mostly think getting involved in partisan politics in most straightforward ways seems like a bad idea, but I’ve really appreciated the level of effort you’ve put in and are clearly willing to put in to have an actual conversation about this (in comments here, with Wei Dai, with others). It’s made me feel more at home in the Forum. Thank you for that.
Personal context: I’m writing this as an individual rather than a moderator. I was happy to see your recommendations for political donations in the other threads, and I agree with you that the current president is much more dangerous than a more generic leader might be (though I’m not sure about “orders of magnitude”; the Iraq War was also very bad, and we missed a lot of potential climate change benefits when Al Gore didn’t become president).
I generally agree with you that EA should treat politics mostly as it does other issues, though I think it’s beneficial to take steps to avoid what frequently happens to other movements that become political (that is, politics sucks up more and more of their time and they lose focus on other things). This was the impetus behind the Forum’s policy on political posts.
However, with the background of that general agreement, I have some questions/concerns about aspects of this post.
This seems like an uncharitable representation of how the median concerned Forum user expresses those concerns. I’ve interacted with a few people who seem to view the left as more culturally powerful than they are, but I’ve also had better discussions with people who had more reasonable concerns.* Using a phrase like “mind control” to describe the beliefs of one’s opponents (even those on the fringes of community opinion) isn’t great.
I thought the section other than this paragraph was very good, especially the point that supporting the Democratic Party doesn’t equate to supporting the far left. But reading this nearly soured me on your argument in general (even though I don’t think of myself as someone who “pushes back”).
* For example, that while the far left isn’t very numerous or popular, their support overlaps a lot with EA’s core growth demographics, such that we might end up absorbing many of their norms or ideas without meaning to.
Can you provide an example of someone saying this? I struggle to think of any arguments I’ve seen that resemble this. Maybe the idea that EA doesn’t want to cut off conservative people from feeling like they can belong in the movement, because that makes it harder to grow the movement?
In principle, a system like this could be useful, but EA doesn’t have a system like this for anything right now. Even an organization like EA Funds, which evaluates opportunities to do good and recommends that some of them get support, is just a few experienced people trying to convince other people to trust their judgment. If someone wanted to, they could start doing this for political opportunities right now (and indeed, we’ve had people try to compare candidates before).
Within EA, individuals typically vote with their wallets, job applications, and Forum posts. There’s not much in the way of coordination around “official” EA recommendations, even if some orgs are trusted by much of the community to recommend things. The equivalent of voting against community approval for candidate X (as a cause worth supporting over various other causes) is to not donate to candidate X.
So while I like the idea of an organization that reviews political campaigns to seek out opportunities for impact — as I would almost any org that reviews opportunities for impact — I don’t think we’d need that organization to be uniquely “official” within EA. They’d just have to present their arguments clearly and convincingly.
(And, I suppose, not be actively opposed by other orgs in the movement, though I don’t think that would be likely to happen as long as the org in question avoided representing itself as “the official EA political charity” or something.)
Were this organization to exist, one factor that would help me personally trust it would be if their most common recommendation were “no action, this campaign doesn’t seem important/tractable enough to support either candidate rather than giving to (insert nonpartisan charity).”
Thanks very much Aaron, I always appreciate your thoughtful comments. Re: “mind control,” that was intended to be an exaggeration for humorous effect, but I can see how it may reduce the credibility of the post for anyone who might be on the fence about these issues. So point taken and thank you.
Before the original post was taken down, there was an example of an argument that EA’s effectiveness as a movement will be reduced by excessive partisanship. NunoSempere wrote, “I’ve briefly looked at the evolution of past social movements, and I don’t get the sense that doing this kind of thing leads to a social movement being very long lived. One of the long lived movements I’ve studied cultivated (though perhaps not consciously) the skill of having members on both sides of any political conflict. If I imagine EA being very long lived, which seems somewhat valuable, playing politics is not a thing I picture happening in that scenario. See also the intersection between politics and movement collapse scenarios”. I’ll leave it to Nuno to elaborate further if so desired.
Your comments on the structure and positioning of the recommending organization seem reasonable to me, and yes, my assumption is that there should be a fairly high bar for propagating a recommendation.
By the way Ian, I’ve not followed these posts in great detail and I mostly think getting involved in partisan politics in most straightforward ways seems like a bad idea, but I’ve really appreciated the level of effort you’ve put in and are clearly willing to put in to have an actual conversation about this (in comments here, with Wei Dai, with others). It’s made me feel more at home in the Forum. Thank you for that.
Thank you, Ben, that means a lot to me.
:)