I think this sounds easier than it would likely be in practice:
-there are a lot of topics that could be considered high impact depending on your beliefs, but are very polarised (for example, access to abortion)
-for topics that are less polarised, it can still require specialist knowledge to tell if legislation is likely to help or hurt
-some well-intentioned legislation makes things worse in ways that isn’t obvious from reading a headline
Overall it’s reasonable for someone to try this—lots of people do things like this, at varying levels of success! - but I wouldn’t recommend just anyone do it, I wouldn’t label it as an “EA consensus” but rather one person’s views about how legislation could improve wellbeing, and I would be prepared for the possibility of this project being net negative or having almost no impact.
These are very reasonable concerns. To address them, I think it might make sense to limit submissions so that only people employed at EA orgs could submit, and only for bills related to their work at the org. Those people would presumably have the specialized knowledge needed to evaluate the legislation, and most EA orgs aren’t advocating for legislation that is polarizing within the community.
Alternately, submissions could stay open to everyone but the person receiving/organizing the submissions could be empowered to ask for more info about the submission, ask for qualifications from the person proposing the idea, or even delete submissions that aren’t aligned to current EA priorities (e.g. related to abortion). I’d like to believe that, if the submission form asked folks to only submit things they had a lot of knowledge about, that they would self-monitor.
I think this sounds easier than it would likely be in practice:
-there are a lot of topics that could be considered high impact depending on your beliefs, but are very polarised (for example, access to abortion)
-for topics that are less polarised, it can still require specialist knowledge to tell if legislation is likely to help or hurt
-some well-intentioned legislation makes things worse in ways that isn’t obvious from reading a headline
Overall it’s reasonable for someone to try this—lots of people do things like this, at varying levels of success! - but I wouldn’t recommend just anyone do it, I wouldn’t label it as an “EA consensus” but rather one person’s views about how legislation could improve wellbeing, and I would be prepared for the possibility of this project being net negative or having almost no impact.
These are very reasonable concerns. To address them, I think it might make sense to limit submissions so that only people employed at EA orgs could submit, and only for bills related to their work at the org. Those people would presumably have the specialized knowledge needed to evaluate the legislation, and most EA orgs aren’t advocating for legislation that is polarizing within the community.
Alternately, submissions could stay open to everyone but the person receiving/organizing the submissions could be empowered to ask for more info about the submission, ask for qualifications from the person proposing the idea, or even delete submissions that aren’t aligned to current EA priorities (e.g. related to abortion). I’d like to believe that, if the submission form asked folks to only submit things they had a lot of knowledge about, that they would self-monitor.