Project looks really cool. I appreciate you sharing this. I hope this project continues to grow.
I really want to know what FTX ended up funding since the rejected grants I know of looked really promising to me.
Project looks really cool. I appreciate you sharing this. I hope this project continues to grow.
I really want to know what FTX ended up funding since the rejected grants I know of looked really promising to me.
This piece is sincere. I think the Republican Party is a really powerful institution that will make really important decisions in the future. Individuals within the party (bureaucrats, politicians) and those affiliated with them (activists, donors, think tankers, writers) will continue to influence the United States and the world.
There also seems to be very few EAs in the party or aligned even though EAs would work through the party and the broader US right on all kinds of issues like X-risk or pandemic preparedness and so forth.
I also think it’s probably easier to rise in the GOP than the Democratic Party if you’re a young person, especially one with elite credentials, because there will be less competition.
“Imagine that every time there was a big crisis in the news, some EAs produced well-researched, sensible lists of the most plausibly-effective ways for people to help with that crisis. The lists would be produced voluntarily by EAs who were passionate about or informed about the cause, and shared widely by other EAs. ”
I agree that working on LICAs can be a good idea for individuals EAs and I think your examples were well-chosen. I disagree that it is a good idea for the EA community or institutions to work on LICAs.
I completely agree that addressing important, but “less important” issues can be a good use of time. If an individual EA could meaningfully improve US food bank management that seems really good, even if rich country food banks aren’t an EA cause overall.
For EA institutions to work on these issues is a bad idea, IMO. If Open Phil staked out a position of abortion, for instance, it would alienate a lot of people. The only reason for EA orgs to work on divisive issues is because they are so important that the importance offsets the costs of division.
I agree that people shouldn’t make themselves miserable working in a hostile environment, and that some people can reasonably expect to be less welcomed as you pointed out.
I think the American Enterprise Institute is a good example of an alternative way to work on the right. As for Niskanen, my impression is that they’re no longer viewed as aligned with the right at all. The conservative Capital Research Center describes them as “nominally libertarian” and talks about how they’re funded by left-wing donors like Open Society.
Not quite a discipline, but I think American Christianity lost cultural influence by denominations ceding control of their colleges (based off this book).
Had the men’s right movement established men’s studies as more distinct from women’s studies maybe they would have benefited (hard to believe they ever had the political power to achieve this.)
I can imagine a world where sociobiology became its own discipline. It did not.
I think the establishment of chiropractic schools legitimized the practice in the United States compared to other alternative medicines. Also, allowed the practice to survive despite opposition to physicians.
I don’t have any criticisms of the GPI. Having a center seems to really free up the time of important researchers and gives them a lot more flexibility. But trying to create dozens of EA centers around the country/world would be less promising to me than trying to foster a discipline.
UNC Chapel Hill, a prestigious state school in the US, lets you endow a distinguished professorship for $2M. A major donor could endow several departments worth of professorships. The Agricultural and Applied Association has annual revenue less than $2M. The money to kickstart this discipline seems high but not outrageous.
Yeah, I enjoyed your article and I linked back to it in the text, but perhaps I could have been clearer that I was referencing your work!
I think you’re right. I also think it’s a weakness in EA that we have to or have chosen to couch outreach to Republicans/US conservatives in such careful terms. I think we should in general just be welcome aboard to most people!
There are some issues where the ideological divide seems pretty stark. For instance, I don’t know if a majority of EAs support literal open borders but I’d be surprised if support for massive increases in immigration to developed countries wasn’t a majority position among EAs. That’s a big gap between EAs and the modal Republican.
I genuinely think he wrote what turned out to be a decent anti-EA article.
If most people follow their moral principles, they run into really challenging situations- like confronting millions of spontaneous abortions per year. One response is to bite the bullet (rare), one is to not think about the implications of your moral commitments (common), and another is to argue that the fact that nobody follows a principle fully, you can discard it (I dislike this approach), but it’s a possible conclusion.
Instead, I think people should bite the bullet on moral reasoning, and not use arguments like “that’s weird” or “that’s too hard” and not conclude that if other people aren’t living out their claimed values, their values are wrong.
Edited to add this: If you think people not following through on the implications of moral claim X, lets you reject X, you can easily reject EA. Almost nobody outside of EA follows through on a lot of central EA claims about the future, global poor, or wild animals. Few EAs fully follow through- but I don’t think that justifies indifference to those claims.
I think campaign labor and campaign donations are distributed pretty inefficiently. Lots of money pours into races that appear hopeless (for example). So for instance I think you could work on a primary campaign for a US House candidate without meaningfully influencing which party controls the House.
Think tanks do seem like a better choice for people who think the Republicans, are not merely worse but extraordinarily worse.
Thanks, Ian (and others).
Thinking about my original claim that “[y]oung effective altruists in the United States interested in using public policy to make the world better should almost all be Republicans.”
I’ve been convinced that it’s overstated because of:
a) people who use public policy without engaging in obviously partisan politics like academics and other researchers.
b) effective altruists working on urban issues in blue cities or state-level issues in CA, NY, or other blue states where the Republican Party is really weak.
c) People working on a subset of issues where the Democratic Party is more promising. I personally think this subset is very small and the only issue I would confidently place here is animal welfare (if you’re involved in Republican/conservative politics let me know) but I know some EAs in the comments would add more issues.
I think a revised claim that I’m still confident of would be “young effective altruists in the United States interested in using partisan politics to make the world better should almost all be Republicans.”
This claim could still be wrong if my overall reasoning is wrong or the number of policy-oriented EAs working on animal issues or some other issues is a lot bigger than I think
“When I encounter questions like “is a world where we add X many people with Y level of happiness better or worse?” or “if we flatten the happiness of a population to its average, is that better or worse?”—my reaction is to reject the question.
First, I can’t imagine a reasonable scenario in which I would ever have the power to choose between such worlds.”
You’re a Senator. A policy analyst points out a new proposed tax reform will boost birth rates- good or bad?
You’re an advice columnist- people write you questions about starting a family. All else equal, do you encourage them?
You’re a pastor. A church member asks you: “Are children a blessing?”
You’re a redditor. On AITA, someone asks: “Is it wrong to ask my children when they plan on starting a family?”
Thanks for the counterexamples!
I’m trying to think of a way to get a fair example: Coding party manifestos by attention to long-term future and trying to rate their success in office? I’m really unsure.
What are the best strategies for political movements that claim to advocate for a voiceless group to take? (longtermism for future generations, animal rights for animals, pro-lifers for fetuses...)
Should groups with very niche, technocratic issues try to join a party or try to stay non-partisan? Implications for AI, biorisk, and so on.
Can Americanists come up with a measure of democratic decline that’s actually decent and not just a reskinned Polity/FreedomHouse metric?
EAs love economists. Can political scientists develop concepts that get them the same affection in EA circles?
In retrospect, the early 00′s feminist blogosphere seems like it was hugely impactful. Is that true and if so what can other movements (like EA) learn from them?
Can someone in American Political Development tell us whether successful movements in American politics were ever longtermist in motivation?
Thanks for putting the panel together!!!
People who claim to care about embryos may oppose abortion or even support embryo adoption- does their failure to care about spontaneous abortions discredit them? They’re not doing all they can.
People who care to claim about animals may be vegans- does their failure to become an animal rights advocate discredit them? They’re not doing all they can.
People who claim to care about the global poor may donate money- but do they donate all their money? They’re not doing all they can.
I reject the form of this argument. People are hypocrites and moral failures- they can still be correct in their claims.
I think more people being exposed to GiveWell would be good. Richer audiences with disposable incomes (CNBC/Bloomberg watchers?) I think would be a good target audience.
I do agree that not every part of EA would benefit from general awareness- debates on moral realism, competing theories of utilitarianism and so forth.
More so, the absence of EA on TV just surprised me. I didn’t walk around with a clear estimate of how many mentions in my head, but I thought GiveWell would be more prominent for sure.
“The other stuff seems more reasonable but if you’re going to restrict immigrants’ ability to work on AI you might as well restrict natives’ ability to work on AI as well. I doubt that the former is much easier than the latter.”
This part of your comment I disagree on. There are specific provisions in US law to protect domestic physicians, immigrants on H1B visas have way fewer rights and are more dependent on their employers than citizen employees, and certain federal jobs or contractor positions are limited to citizens/permanent residents. I think this isn’t outlandish, but certainly not hard.
The end of high-skilled immigration won’t happen, I agree. Even when RW populists actually win national elections, they don’t do this.
I do think Communism was on average a more longtermist movement than democratic revolutions. Maybe the typical revolutionary in all revolutions had similar goals, but Marx and many of his followers had a vision for how history was supposed to play out, and envisioned an intermediate form of society, between the revolution and an eventual classless society.
In contrast, a lot of democratic revolutions were more like “King George bad.” I don’t think the American founding fathers were utopian in the same sense as a lot of Marxists.
Thanks, I understand the distinction you’re making . I still disagree that we can reject their moral claims because they don’t take it care far enough- I think animal advocates are pretty sincere even though virtually none of them ever care about wild animals. But I still animal advocates make fair points.
Fascinating. Have any public health departments tried snake extirpation in certain areas? (Or is that an obviously flawed approach?)
I didn’t downvote you. I think you’re using Pascal’s Mugging idiosyncratically.
Pascal’s Mugging is normally for infinitesimal odds and astronomical payouts, with both odds and payouts often being really uncertain.
Here odds and payout are well-defined. The odds while extreme aren’t infinitesimal.
I think we should be doing lots of things with one in a million chances. Start-ups that could change the world, promising AI research paths, running for president or prime minister. :)
I don’t think most EAs have an obligation to involve themselves in politics at all and I don’t think every young EA should join the GOP- but I do think :
“Young effective altruists in the United States interested in using public policy to make the world better should almost all be Republicans.”
The people I would most like to think about this post are:
EAs who are conservative/centrist. Since I think there are too few EAs within the Republican Party, I think they should keep in mind that they can probably do more good than a similar EA who is contemplating entering politics on the left. They might still conclude that earning-to-give or direct work is more valuable, but the expected value of entering politics on the US right is higher, imo, than entering politics on the left.
People who care a ton about a specific issue to the point other issues seem small and think politics/public policy can contribute to this field and think the Republican Party isn’t actively working against them on this issue. People really worried about near-term AGI risk or pandemics I think could fall into this bucket. I think animal welfare advocates or open borders advocates would not. Another exception would be YIMBYs in blue cities, where all the politicians are Democrats.
Re: acquaintance- she took a job working on the specific issue she happens to be more conservative on.