My sense is that even if the full weight of EA were thrown towards preventing Trump from getting elected, it would still have not been enough, and also it would have antagonized Trump.
I helped work on this piece along with some other research attempting to assess tractability. I think it wasn’t super obvious that it was the best way to spend money but it was probably cost-competitive with many top donation opportunities in expectation. There also may have been ways we could have influenced things early on if we’d been putting in the effort in, say, 2023 (e.g. trying to get Biden out faster).
Politics work is basically always going to very low probability, high reward. In this election I’d argue the expected impacts counterbalanced the low probability of success.
I agree. I don’t think any amount of political donations or support would’ve made “We should give lots of taxpayer money to Africa” politically palatable in 2024. Enough voters were in an isolationist mood.
This would absolutely be a bad message to use, voters don’t care about aid at all. You’d just use the best message-tested stuff available which generically moves the needle in the direction you want it to go
Is there any reason to believe that the election would have been a tractable cause area? As @Jason noted, “the pre-eminent EA funder was one of the top ten donors in the 2024 US elections cycle”
My sense is that even if the full weight of EA were thrown towards preventing Trump from getting elected, it would still have not been enough, and also it would have antagonized Trump.
I helped work on this piece along with some other research attempting to assess tractability. I think it wasn’t super obvious that it was the best way to spend money but it was probably cost-competitive with many top donation opportunities in expectation. There also may have been ways we could have influenced things early on if we’d been putting in the effort in, say, 2023 (e.g. trying to get Biden out faster).
Politics work is basically always going to very low probability, high reward. In this election I’d argue the expected impacts counterbalanced the low probability of success.
I agree. I don’t think any amount of political donations or support would’ve made “We should give lots of taxpayer money to Africa” politically palatable in 2024. Enough voters were in an isolationist mood.
This would absolutely be a bad message to use, voters don’t care about aid at all. You’d just use the best message-tested stuff available which generically moves the needle in the direction you want it to go