I’ll probably write a longer comment later but for now, I’d just like to record that I strongly disagreed with the downvoting of the original post. I’d concede that the meta-level discussion on the role of electoral politics in EA isn’t straightforward, but I think that the object-level case for engaging in the US election to get Donald Trump out of office is sufficiently strong that it – at the very, very least – deserves to be heard and discussed. Particularly because I would argue that the case can be substantiated by appeals to many of the things that EAs purport to care about (reducing catastrophic risks from climate change, anthropogenic biological events, nuclear conflict; improving global health and development) and can be supported by the kinds of evidence and quantitative estimates that EAs tend to rely on.
but I think that the object-level case for engaging in the US election to get Donald Trump out of office is sufficiently strong that it – at the very, very least – deserves to be heard and discussed
Unfortunately I don’t think “discussed” is possible in today’s environment, due to reasons I wrote at ea.greaterwrong.com /posts/68TmDK6MrjfJgvA7p/introducing-landslide-coalition-an-ea-themed-giving-circle. For example I’m personally afraid to say anything that could be interpreted as being positive about Trump in public (or even in private), and I’m probably within the top percentile of EAs in terms of being less vulnerable to cancellation.
I’ll go ahead and say some positive things about Trump:
My overall impression is that his policy on China has been fairly effective at increasing pressure without leading to open hostilities. (I should note that I am in no way an expert on US-China relations though)
I think he’s been a good match for Kim Jong-Un and his handling of that relationship has probably gone better than we could have expected under Clinton.
I appreciate that he doesn’t appear to have any great appetite for armed conflict with other countries, although the Soleimani assassination was one glaring exception to that which could have turned out very differently.
I am genuinely impressed with his creativity, ability to think outside the box, and willingness to endure in the face of criticism.
Sorry, I did not mean to imply that someone who just wrote a whole post about opposing Trump’s reelection will get into trouble for saying a few positive things about him. Should I have been more clear about that? I thought it would be obvious that the risk is in being taken as a Trump supporter, or creating doubt in others’ minds that one might be a Trump supporter. Or do you think a healthy debate about whether EA should oppose Trump’s reelection can be had that excludes every potential participant except those who are clearly at no such risk?
Is your fear of saying positive things about Trump based on how you would expect people in the EA community to react? Is it more about people elsewhere on the internet who might happen to see your views or track them down because of an unrelated grudge they hold against you?
I can easily imagine someone in the EA community taking a pro-Trump position for EA-related reasons (e.g. a belief that abortion is a hugely neglected cause area, or that gains from Trump’s economic/war-avoiding policies overwhelm losses from his other policies). What do you predict would happen to someone like that? Would you expect them to be fired if they held a position at an EA org? Barred from attending EA Global? Shunned by people in their local group?
I’ll also note that the positions in a discussion like the one Ian proposes aren’t really “pro-Trump” and “anti-Trump”: they are “Trump is so bad that preventing his election is a competitive EA cause area” and “no, this doesn’t really measure up to other cause areas, or is otherwise a bad idea.” Someone could easily argue for the latter point even if they would never vote for Trump.
(That said, if this discussion really would exclude everyone who could possibly be taken as a Trump supporter, that seems very unhealthy to me. I just don’t think that’s what would happen.)
It’s based on how I expect some people in the EA community to react (they would be less likely to consider me in a positive light, take my ideas seriously, be willing to lend me their cooperation when I need it, hire me, etc.), and also on the fact that I live in a very left-leaning area (as most EAs probably do) where being (or suspected of being) a Trump supporter can easily make someone socially ostracized, which would impact not just me but my family. And yes, I also expect and fear that my views will be tracked down, perhaps deliberately misinterpreted, and used against me, by someone who might hold a grudge against me in the future, or just think that’s a good way to get what they want, e.g., in a policy dispute.
If you’re still skeptical that people are reluctant or afraid to speak positively about Trump or Republicans in general, have you noticed that nobody has pushed back against the recent Democrat-promoting posts here on object-level grounds? I’ve seen the same on FB posts of prominent EA people promoting voting for Democrats, where every comment is some flavor of support. Can it really be that out of thousands of forum users and FB friends/followers, there is not one Trump or Republican supporter who might object to voting for Democrats on object-level grounds, or perhaps just someone who thinks that the authors are overstating their case for object-level reasons?
If you’re still skeptical that people are reluctant or afraid to speak positively about Trump or Republicans in general...
I never said I was skeptical that people felt this way. I’m quite certain people do feel this way, because you’ve said you feel it and so have others. I just wanted to hear more details about that feeling of reluctance/fear, and to express doubt that no Trump supporter would ever be willing to express that support in a public EA discussion.
It’s certainly possible, even likely, that “some people” in the community would react negatively to hearing that someone was a Trump supporter, in a way that made future interactions a bit less collaborative or more fraught. But I think that’s the nature of expressing strong opinions generally, in almost any community. Someone who came out as a communist would likely face similar challenges. Same for someone who was very religious, or a supporter of PETA, or a fan of Antifa. Probably not for a moderate liberal, even an outspoken one, but that’s because EAs are overwhelmingly moderately liberal.
This phenomenon makes it hard to have totally open discussions on many topics, politics among them. And I agree with you that any public discussion about politics within EA could be skewed* -- but I just don’t think it would be skewed to the point that an idea many people held wouldn’t show up at all.
People write controversial Forum comments all the time. People have bitter online arguments in various EA spaces. There are plenty of loud and opinionated people in the community who aren’t concerned about how others will react to them (heck, anyone who wants to can make an anonymous account on the Forum—where are the anonymous Trump supporters?).
*This is one reason I’d prefer we not have much partisan political discussion here. And if a group of people were to look for “political donation opportunities,” I’d hope that they would start by looking carefully at the object-level virtues of each important candidate in a given election, without partisanship.
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Can it really be that out of thousands of forum users and FB friends/followers, there is not one Trump or Republican supporter who might object to voting for Democrats on object-level grounds,
I’ve seen political posts from EAs I know that drew in Trump supporters who happened to be in their social networks (though I’m not sure how many of said supporters would consider themselves interested in EA). But I don’t spend much time on Facebook in general, and EA Twitter doesn’t have especially active political conversation in my experience (most of Rob Wiblin’s recent posts have ~1 comment, and he’s one of the most popular EA Twitter users). So I’m interested in your experiences (and those of other people who spend more time than I do in the relevant spaces). Are these FB/Twitter posts getting 5 comments? 10? 50?
When people respond to partisan political posts from friends they know personally, I’d expect agreeable responses to dominate. When my socialist Facebook friends post about socialism, they get a lot of responses from other socialists and very few from capitalists, even though I expect they have lots of capitalists in their social networks, and I wouldn’t expect capitalists who respond to them to be worried about shunning given that capitalism is a normal position in elite spaces. I think people just don’t like starting arguments with their friends over touchy subjects.
Of course, this assumes that the dynamic in play is “responding to a friend.” If these are posts in discussion-oriented spaces and there are lots of responses, and the responses are all one-sided, that’s stronger evidence that people don’t want to speak out in support of Trump. (However, it also seems plausible that EA is so anti-Trump generally that there just aren’t people around who disagree and care enough to comment, especially given how much of the community is non-American.)
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As for this Forum: On the post we’re now discussing, the opinionated comments are (as I type this) as follows:
Our back-and-forth (with Ian’s contribution)
Your comment which links to other comments where you push back on the post
xccf’s comment pushing back on the post and making what I see as a good-faith attempt to steelman Trump supporters
Ryan Carey’s comment pushing back on the post
Linch’s comment pushing back on the post (and related discussion)
Abraham Rowe’s generally supportive comment
My comment pushing back on the post (though my tone was supportive)
Ben’s comment pushing back on the post (but supporting Ian for taking the time to discuss things)
MarcSerna’s comment pushing back on the post
MichaelStJules presenting some neutral thoughts/feedback
JTM endorsing the concept of the post and pushing for more discussion
Jordan Warner’s comment pushing back on the post
Almost unanimously, people seem to want EA to stay out of partisan political stuff. No one aside from Ian and maybe JTM actually argued against Trump on the object level. I’m not surprised that there were no pro-Trump arguments on the object level.
Comments on the “recommendations for donating to beat Trump post” are:
Me noting that we won’t frontpage it (and expressing support for the cause)
A discussion between Peter and Ian about the general case for donating vs. volunteering
Other comments by Peter where he mentions he’d consider donating
And… that’s it. Only three unique respondents, hardly a landslide even if they all express a desire for Trump to lose the election.
On which other Forum posts would it make sense for a pro-Trump EA to discuss their support for Trump? The subject is only now coming up with the election season almost over (kbog had his “Candidate Scoring System” posts a while back, but those didn’t lead to much or any partisan discussion IIRC). If it took until now for someone to write the post “supporting Democrats might be a good EA cause” and 90% of EA leans left, I’m not surprised that the post “supporting Republicans might be a good EA cause” hasn’t come up.
In some posts made around the time of the 2016 election, there were a few comments pointing out potential benefits of a President Trump (see HenryMaine and Larks here). There were more anti-Trump comments, but nothing surprising given the underlying demographics of EA. I just don’t think there’s enough overall activity on the Forum for “no recent object-level pro-Trump comments” to mean much.
What do you predict would happen to someone like that? Would you expect them to be fired if they held a position at an EA org? Barred from attending EA Global? Shunned by people in their local group?
Peter Thiel spoke at the EA Summit in 2014 I think, what happened to him? I heard at least one EA say we should kick him out.
Was the “at least one EA” someone in a position of influence?
My understanding is that Thiel stopped being especially interested in EA around the time he got into politics, but he might still be making AI-related donations here and there. I’d be surprised if he had wanted to speak at any recent EA Global conference, as most of his current work seems either opposed to or orthogonal to common EA positions. But I don’t have any special knowledge here. (Certainly he was never Glebbed.)
Was the “at least one EA” someone in a position of influence?
Not really.
most of his current work seems either opposed to or orthogonal to common EA positions.
I think you have to be careful here, because if someone’s work is “opposed” to a common EA position, it’s possible that they disagree on facts related to that position but they are still motivated by doing the most good. It plays into the feedback loop I was talking about in the other comment. If you disagree with someone a lot, and you don’t think you will be able to change their mind, you might not want to invest the time in exploring that disagreement.
Sure—that’s a good thing to clarify. When I say “opposed to,” I mean that it seems like the things he presently cares about don’t seem connected to a cause-neutral welfare-maximizing perspective (though I can’t say I know what his motivations are, so perhaps that is what he’s aiming for).
Most notably, his PAC explicitly supports an “America First immigration policy,” which seems difficult to square with his espoused libertarianism and his complaints about technological slowdown in addition to being directly opposed to work from Open Phil and others. I don’t understand exactly what his aims are at this point, but it feels like he’s far away enough from the EA baseline that I wouldn’t want to assume a motivation of “do the most good in a cause-neutral way” anymore.
I think it’s plausible many EAs would not want to interact with a Trump supporter regularly, and while I doubt it would cost them their job or get them banned from EA global, I do wonder if it would count against them in trying to get a job at EA orgs. I think this is more likely in the effective animal advocacy space, which is influenced by the broader animal advocacy/activism space, and so seems further left than EA on average.
I’ll probably write a longer comment later but for now, I’d just like to record that I strongly disagreed with the downvoting of the original post. I’d concede that the meta-level discussion on the role of electoral politics in EA isn’t straightforward, but I think that the object-level case for engaging in the US election to get Donald Trump out of office is sufficiently strong that it – at the very, very least – deserves to be heard and discussed. Particularly because I would argue that the case can be substantiated by appeals to many of the things that EAs purport to care about (reducing catastrophic risks from climate change, anthropogenic biological events, nuclear conflict; improving global health and development) and can be supported by the kinds of evidence and quantitative estimates that EAs tend to rely on.
Unfortunately I don’t think “discussed” is possible in today’s environment, due to reasons I wrote at ea.greaterwrong.com /posts/68TmDK6MrjfJgvA7p/introducing-landslide-coalition-an-ea-themed-giving-circle. For example I’m personally afraid to say anything that could be interpreted as being positive about Trump in public (or even in private), and I’m probably within the top percentile of EAs in terms of being less vulnerable to cancellation.
I’ll go ahead and say some positive things about Trump:
My overall impression is that his policy on China has been fairly effective at increasing pressure without leading to open hostilities. (I should note that I am in no way an expert on US-China relations though)
I think he’s been a good match for Kim Jong-Un and his handling of that relationship has probably gone better than we could have expected under Clinton.
I appreciate that he doesn’t appear to have any great appetite for armed conflict with other countries, although the Soleimani assassination was one glaring exception to that which could have turned out very differently.
I am genuinely impressed with his creativity, ability to think outside the box, and willingness to endure in the face of criticism.
See? Wasn’t that hard.
Sorry, I did not mean to imply that someone who just wrote a whole post about opposing Trump’s reelection will get into trouble for saying a few positive things about him. Should I have been more clear about that? I thought it would be obvious that the risk is in being taken as a Trump supporter, or creating doubt in others’ minds that one might be a Trump supporter. Or do you think a healthy debate about whether EA should oppose Trump’s reelection can be had that excludes every potential participant except those who are clearly at no such risk?
Is your fear of saying positive things about Trump based on how you would expect people in the EA community to react? Is it more about people elsewhere on the internet who might happen to see your views or track them down because of an unrelated grudge they hold against you?
I can easily imagine someone in the EA community taking a pro-Trump position for EA-related reasons (e.g. a belief that abortion is a hugely neglected cause area, or that gains from Trump’s economic/war-avoiding policies overwhelm losses from his other policies). What do you predict would happen to someone like that? Would you expect them to be fired if they held a position at an EA org? Barred from attending EA Global? Shunned by people in their local group?
I’ll also note that the positions in a discussion like the one Ian proposes aren’t really “pro-Trump” and “anti-Trump”: they are “Trump is so bad that preventing his election is a competitive EA cause area” and “no, this doesn’t really measure up to other cause areas, or is otherwise a bad idea.” Someone could easily argue for the latter point even if they would never vote for Trump.
(That said, if this discussion really would exclude everyone who could possibly be taken as a Trump supporter, that seems very unhealthy to me. I just don’t think that’s what would happen.)
It’s based on how I expect some people in the EA community to react (they would be less likely to consider me in a positive light, take my ideas seriously, be willing to lend me their cooperation when I need it, hire me, etc.), and also on the fact that I live in a very left-leaning area (as most EAs probably do) where being (or suspected of being) a Trump supporter can easily make someone socially ostracized, which would impact not just me but my family. And yes, I also expect and fear that my views will be tracked down, perhaps deliberately misinterpreted, and used against me, by someone who might hold a grudge against me in the future, or just think that’s a good way to get what they want, e.g., in a policy dispute.
If you’re still skeptical that people are reluctant or afraid to speak positively about Trump or Republicans in general, have you noticed that nobody has pushed back against the recent Democrat-promoting posts here on object-level grounds? I’ve seen the same on FB posts of prominent EA people promoting voting for Democrats, where every comment is some flavor of support. Can it really be that out of thousands of forum users and FB friends/followers, there is not one Trump or Republican supporter who might object to voting for Democrats on object-level grounds, or perhaps just someone who thinks that the authors are overstating their case for object-level reasons?
I never said I was skeptical that people felt this way. I’m quite certain people do feel this way, because you’ve said you feel it and so have others. I just wanted to hear more details about that feeling of reluctance/fear, and to express doubt that no Trump supporter would ever be willing to express that support in a public EA discussion.
It’s certainly possible, even likely, that “some people” in the community would react negatively to hearing that someone was a Trump supporter, in a way that made future interactions a bit less collaborative or more fraught. But I think that’s the nature of expressing strong opinions generally, in almost any community. Someone who came out as a communist would likely face similar challenges. Same for someone who was very religious, or a supporter of PETA, or a fan of Antifa. Probably not for a moderate liberal, even an outspoken one, but that’s because EAs are overwhelmingly moderately liberal.
This phenomenon makes it hard to have totally open discussions on many topics, politics among them. And I agree with you that any public discussion about politics within EA could be skewed* -- but I just don’t think it would be skewed to the point that an idea many people held wouldn’t show up at all.
People write controversial Forum comments all the time. People have bitter online arguments in various EA spaces. There are plenty of loud and opinionated people in the community who aren’t concerned about how others will react to them (heck, anyone who wants to can make an anonymous account on the Forum—where are the anonymous Trump supporters?).
*This is one reason I’d prefer we not have much partisan political discussion here. And if a group of people were to look for “political donation opportunities,” I’d hope that they would start by looking carefully at the object-level virtues of each important candidate in a given election, without partisanship.
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I’ve seen political posts from EAs I know that drew in Trump supporters who happened to be in their social networks (though I’m not sure how many of said supporters would consider themselves interested in EA). But I don’t spend much time on Facebook in general, and EA Twitter doesn’t have especially active political conversation in my experience (most of Rob Wiblin’s recent posts have ~1 comment, and he’s one of the most popular EA Twitter users). So I’m interested in your experiences (and those of other people who spend more time than I do in the relevant spaces). Are these FB/Twitter posts getting 5 comments? 10? 50?
When people respond to partisan political posts from friends they know personally, I’d expect agreeable responses to dominate. When my socialist Facebook friends post about socialism, they get a lot of responses from other socialists and very few from capitalists, even though I expect they have lots of capitalists in their social networks, and I wouldn’t expect capitalists who respond to them to be worried about shunning given that capitalism is a normal position in elite spaces. I think people just don’t like starting arguments with their friends over touchy subjects.
Of course, this assumes that the dynamic in play is “responding to a friend.” If these are posts in discussion-oriented spaces and there are lots of responses, and the responses are all one-sided, that’s stronger evidence that people don’t want to speak out in support of Trump. (However, it also seems plausible that EA is so anti-Trump generally that there just aren’t people around who disagree and care enough to comment, especially given how much of the community is non-American.)
*****
As for this Forum: On the post we’re now discussing, the opinionated comments are (as I type this) as follows:
Our back-and-forth (with Ian’s contribution)
Your comment which links to other comments where you push back on the post
xccf’s comment pushing back on the post and making what I see as a good-faith attempt to steelman Trump supporters
Ryan Carey’s comment pushing back on the post
Linch’s comment pushing back on the post (and related discussion)
Abraham Rowe’s generally supportive comment
My comment pushing back on the post (though my tone was supportive)
Ben’s comment pushing back on the post (but supporting Ian for taking the time to discuss things)
MarcSerna’s comment pushing back on the post
MichaelStJules presenting some neutral thoughts/feedback
JTM endorsing the concept of the post and pushing for more discussion
Jordan Warner’s comment pushing back on the post
Almost unanimously, people seem to want EA to stay out of partisan political stuff. No one aside from Ian and maybe JTM actually argued against Trump on the object level. I’m not surprised that there were no pro-Trump arguments on the object level.
Comments on the “recommendations for donating to beat Trump post” are:
Me noting that we won’t frontpage it (and expressing support for the cause)
A discussion between Peter and Ian about the general case for donating vs. volunteering
Other comments by Peter where he mentions he’d consider donating
And… that’s it. Only three unique respondents, hardly a landslide even if they all express a desire for Trump to lose the election.
On which other Forum posts would it make sense for a pro-Trump EA to discuss their support for Trump? The subject is only now coming up with the election season almost over (kbog had his “Candidate Scoring System” posts a while back, but those didn’t lead to much or any partisan discussion IIRC). If it took until now for someone to write the post “supporting Democrats might be a good EA cause” and 90% of EA leans left, I’m not surprised that the post “supporting Republicans might be a good EA cause” hasn’t come up.
In some posts made around the time of the 2016 election, there were a few comments pointing out potential benefits of a President Trump (see HenryMaine and Larks here). There were more anti-Trump comments, but nothing surprising given the underlying demographics of EA. I just don’t think there’s enough overall activity on the Forum for “no recent object-level pro-Trump comments” to mean much.
Peter Thiel spoke at the EA Summit in 2014 I think, what happened to him? I heard at least one EA say we should kick him out.
Was the “at least one EA” someone in a position of influence?
My understanding is that Thiel stopped being especially interested in EA around the time he got into politics, but he might still be making AI-related donations here and there. I’d be surprised if he had wanted to speak at any recent EA Global conference, as most of his current work seems either opposed to or orthogonal to common EA positions. But I don’t have any special knowledge here. (Certainly he was never Glebbed.)
Not really.
I think you have to be careful here, because if someone’s work is “opposed” to a common EA position, it’s possible that they disagree on facts related to that position but they are still motivated by doing the most good. It plays into the feedback loop I was talking about in the other comment. If you disagree with someone a lot, and you don’t think you will be able to change their mind, you might not want to invest the time in exploring that disagreement.
Sure—that’s a good thing to clarify. When I say “opposed to,” I mean that it seems like the things he presently cares about don’t seem connected to a cause-neutral welfare-maximizing perspective (though I can’t say I know what his motivations are, so perhaps that is what he’s aiming for).
Most notably, his PAC explicitly supports an “America First immigration policy,” which seems difficult to square with his espoused libertarianism and his complaints about technological slowdown in addition to being directly opposed to work from Open Phil and others. I don’t understand exactly what his aims are at this point, but it feels like he’s far away enough from the EA baseline that I wouldn’t want to assume a motivation of “do the most good in a cause-neutral way” anymore.
I think it’s plausible many EAs would not want to interact with a Trump supporter regularly, and while I doubt it would cost them their job or get them banned from EA global, I do wonder if it would count against them in trying to get a job at EA orgs. I think this is more likely in the effective animal advocacy space, which is influenced by the broader animal advocacy/activism space, and so seems further left than EA on average.