I deliberately didn’t dive into the dimensions of political movements and democratic conversation in this post, because it could distract the conversation away from the more substantial concerns I had towards broadly conflicting ideologies and group affiliations. But guess now is a good time.
Here are summarising notes I took of a conversation with a smart family member last Wednesday:
• Political dynamics are actually really complex here. And rationalists have a tendency to think that they analysed it and know what is going on
◦ R: and OpenPhil doesn’t seem like they’re specialised/great at understanding political nuances
◦ ... was there something else I wanted to add to writing here?
• From my experience learning about economics, not one type of theory but a bunch of assorted ones and can use one for situation/problem (especially in hindsight as economists often tend to do)
• also democrats tend to be more for stimulus, and republicans against
• bad that EA is going into something that seems political (R: and about broad ideology)
◦ targeted like vitamin D policy seems more sensible
And here is a post I wrote on my concerns of EA field builders optimising for their views to be represented more by policy decision-makers.
I’m particularly concerned by that key OpenPhil staff decided to jump in late 2015 to boosting the Fed Up campaign while not seeming to more openly enter into dialogue with and clarify the views of other stakeholders around this complex debate.
I find their conclusions of the political landscape quite suspect in how simplifying they sound (while stating “As ever, we acknowledge that this is an unusually complex policy area, and we could be mistaken in our views.” for their grants write-up on the progressive Center for Popular Democracy campaign). The following sounds the least simplifying of their summary explanations but still seems quite off (in particular, in how it seems to write off concerns by well-informed conservative thinkers as ‘inflation aversion’):
We’ve come to the view that there is institutional bias in a particular direction. We believe that there is more inflation aversion than is consistent with a “most good for everyone” attitude.
I’m also concerned about the higher chance of getting carried away inadvertently by partisan arguments and of fuelling political conflicts – from entering into what seems to be like what Robin Hanson refers to as a ‘policy tug of war’.
From the arguments I’ve been able to read/hear from OpenPhil staff, I get the sense that their focus was centred rather narrowly on ‘tweaking’ the weighting of criteria used for monetary decisions by the Federal Reserve to be closer to optimised for the general good for everyone. In case that’s about right (do correct me), I can very much relate. And I think that way of thinking was insufficiently allocentric in covering a broader set of relevant perspectives for what they were getting into.
I deliberately didn’t dive into the dimensions of political movements and democratic conversation in this post, because it could distract the conversation away from the more substantial concerns I had towards broadly conflicting ideologies and group affiliations. But guess now is a good time.
Here are summarising notes I took of a conversation with a smart family member last Wednesday:
And here is a post I wrote on my concerns of EA field builders optimising for their views to be represented more by policy decision-makers.
I’m particularly concerned by that key OpenPhil staff decided to jump in late 2015 to boosting the Fed Up campaign while not seeming to more openly enter into dialogue with and clarify the views of other stakeholders around this complex debate.
I find their conclusions of the political landscape quite suspect in how simplifying they sound (while stating “As ever, we acknowledge that this is an unusually complex policy area, and we could be mistaken in our views.” for their grants write-up on the progressive Center for Popular Democracy campaign). The following sounds the least simplifying of their summary explanations but still seems quite off (in particular, in how it seems to write off concerns by well-informed conservative thinkers as ‘inflation aversion’):
I’m also concerned about the higher chance of getting carried away inadvertently by partisan arguments and of fuelling political conflicts – from entering into what seems to be like what Robin Hanson refers to as a ‘policy tug of war’.
From the arguments I’ve been able to read/hear from OpenPhil staff, I get the sense that their focus was centred rather narrowly on ‘tweaking’ the weighting of criteria used for monetary decisions by the Federal Reserve to be closer to optimised for the general good for everyone. In case that’s about right (do correct me), I can very much relate. And I think that way of thinking was insufficiently allocentric in covering a broader set of relevant perspectives for what they were getting into.
Well, there you have it.