I fully understand your anger, but it feels misdirected. If EA or GiveWell could have successfully protected democracy in the US or prevented Trump from getting elected we should have done that. However it’s very unclear that EA as a whole and especially GiveWell as an organization could have prevented this mess . Given the mess we are in what GiveWell is doing will still make it so many people survive who otherwise would have died. Every one of those people who might get to make friends, find love and meaning matter a ton. And that is not a solution to the problem, but it still good work.
So no millions cannot fill a gap of billions, but millions is still a lot better than nothing. If somehow those millions could be spent in a way that would have prevented the billions from disappearing, that would obviously have been more effective. But many millions have been spent on trying to prevent Trump 2.0 (including by EA’s) and it’s not clear what EA could have done.
It can not be simultaneously true that the awefulness of the current situation is a consequence of EA ‘forgetting about democracy’, and that protecting democracy is not tractable. If EA fully focussing on democracy as it’s singular cause area would have prevented the current situation protecting democracy would be tractable, that is what tractability means. The consequence you are drawing requires a lot more evidence than you are providing.
I’m sure many people at GiveWell are just as angry about the current situation as you are, they see the suffering every day. The argument that this is partly EAs fault requires a lot more evidence.
In the last 80.000 podcast Hugh White made a compelling case that the US cares less about Taiwan than China. Given shifts in relative might, I wonder how feasible it is as a long-term strategy to hope to deter China forever.
This article seems to assume under current deterrence China sees the costs of a Taiwan invasion as higher than the long-term benefits. Still, I’m a little afraid part of their calculus is an expectation that the costs will be lower in the future as their relative might increases and Taiwan might opt for a more peaceful resolution. If this is the case any build-up in deterrence might only provoke China into an invasion, as the expectation of future costs increase and long-term Taiwanese independence is unacceptable to them.
More military power could also increase the costs in case of an invasion, so you need to be quite confident that deterrence will work and continue working indefinitely.
You also mentioned this equation:
”37% chance of invasion × 50% USA intervenes × 5% nuclear risk = 0.9% nuclear war”
To me, the most tractable part of this equation seems to be the chance that the USA intervenes, but I’m profoundly uncertain if it would be better for the world if this were higher or lower. Do you have any views on that?
I’m a little nervous around geopolitics as a philanthropic cause area cause it seems so easy to harm when information and calculations are imperfect (and our information will be extremely imperfect). Decreasing the likelihood of conflict often comes from either sacrificing a lot of well-being by conceding important points (if Taiwan became part of China that would surely reduce the probability of great power conflict, at least in the short-medium term, but be awful in many other ways), increasing the cost of conflict (as I think your suggestion would do) and decreasing the cost often seems to come from increasing the likelihood/conceding important points. Do you think there are clear things we can do in this space to mitigate downside risks?