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.
ColdButtonIssues
Karma: 1,068
The Base Rate of Longtermism Is Bad
Before There Was Effective Altruism, There Was Effective Philanthropy
Go Republican, Young EA!
Smart Movements Start Academic Disciplines
Toby Ord’s The Scourge, Reviewed
The Case for Making Professional Degrees Undergraduate Degrees
The Powerball Lottery Is Now Positive Expected Value for Many Charitable Americans
The Case for a Strategic U.S. Coal Reserve for Climate and Catastrophes
One Million Missing Children
Don’t Be Comforted by Failed Apocalypses
Against Loneliness: Cause Exploration
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.
Effective Altruism Isn’t on TV.
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 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.