LintzA

• LintzA 9 Oct 2025 14:03 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Benevolent_Rain’s comment on: Pre­dic­tion mar­kets & many ex­perts think au­thor­i­tar­ian cap­ture of the US looks dis­tinctly possible

  Interesting! Hadn’t read this newsletter yet. Excerpting the text here: “It remains a good idea for readers concerned about tail risks to consider getting a residency permit, or a passport, in countries such as Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Uruguay, etc., in case the political climate in the US becomes more turbulent.”

• LintzA 9 Oct 2025 0:22 UTC

  17 points

  2 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Marcus Abramovitch 🔸’s comment on: Pre­dic­tion mar­kets & many ex­perts think au­thor­i­tar­ian cap­ture of the US looks dis­tinctly possible

  Thanks for pointing this out, I have a vague sense that Manifold markets can be non-ideal but don’t really know why or what these biases you’re talking about might be. I added a few more questions from other markets to compensate a bit + moved my disclaimer from the footnotes to the top of the section. These are still among the only public forecasts with actual numbers I know of, so seems better than nothing, right?

  Also, fwiw, some well-informed people I know (who’s estimates I can’t share) have estimates quite similar to these prediction markets.

Pre­dic­tion mar­kets & many ex­perts think au­thor­i­tar­ian cap­ture of the US looks dis­tinctly possible

• LintzA 27 Aug 2025 13:28 UTC

  7 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: WillieG’s comment on: Poli­tics is an EA blindspot

  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

• LintzA 27 Aug 2025 13:24 UTC

  2 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ian Turner’s comment on: Poli­tics is an EA blindspot

  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.

• LintzA 27 Aug 2025 13:13 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: AnonymousTurtle’s comment on: Poli­tics is an EA blindspot

  It’s true that some EAs work in government but I think this piece lays out pretty well what that actually looks like, and it doesn’t typically involve politics—it’s more civil service type things. I’m pretty sure I know most EAs who work on direct pollitical work (e.g. elections) and it’s quite a small number.

  That said, yeah, it’s good that there are some people working in government and that does help broader EA understand the political situation a little better.

• LintzA 26 Aug 2025 16:05 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Anton’s comment on: Poli­tics is an EA blindspot

  Agree this is a very thorny problem and I am unsure of how to deal with it. Suspect there’s some degree to which you can balance it usefully and that it’s worth paying some cost of looking partisan but ultimately it’s not really viable to coordinate everyone’s level of partisanship.

  
  I think a big part of mitigating the costs is just trying to avoid the sense that you’re speaking on behalf of EA or AI safety when talking about partisan stuff

• LintzA 26 Aug 2025 15:59 UTC

  26 points

  4 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ben_West🔸’s comment on: Poli­tics is an EA blindspot

  I made a prediction that foreign aid would be cut significantly in ~September of last year (see below) so seems like there’s some degree to which at least some cuts were predictable. I think the intervention I advocated for at the time, stopping Trump from being elected, would have been the most straightforward action to take (and I think EV of doing that from even a pure global health perspective looked alright).

  I didn’t predict specific DOGE cuts. That said, if one had, then trying to get the message to Musk that this matters could have been a reasonable action to take (and would have been usefully informed by better political analysis). Plausibly there’s some messaging stuff one could do?
  
  Otherwise, the best thing to do might have been to have some contingency planning for large aid cuts? I’m not sure how much counterfactual value having those plans would end up being but it seems possible that with some preparation beforehand one could keep larger parts of PEPFAR alive maybe? Certainly it seemed like the sector was really overwhelmed upon learning of USAID cuts and that seems like some indication that more preparation would have been useful.

  Overall, I don’t feel too strongly that knowing DOGE cuts were coming would have been super high leverage but I think it exemplifies politics as being something which can have extremely far reaching impacts on cause areas that EAs care about—even far beyond anything happening internal to the field. Same thing seems true of AI as well as animal welfare and pandemic prevention. In the extreme, the end of democracy in the US would seem pretty likely to have a bigger negative impact (by far) on all EA cause areas than basically anything one could do internal to the cause area.
  
  Exact prediction about aid cuts (which I made after maybe 1-2 hours of looking into this):
  “If [Harris] spends at the same level as Biden (and Trump reverts to his prior spending), getting her into office would lead to ~$16 billion going to international aid [over the full term] that otherwise wouldn’t have. ”
  

• LintzA 25 Aug 2025 20:04 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Angelina Li’s comment on: Poli­tics is an EA blindspot

  Thank you! Fixed

Poli­tics is an EA blindspot

• LintzA 31 Jan 2025 15:39 UTC

  17 points

  3 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Joe Rogero’s comment on: The Game Board has been Flipped: Now is a good time to re­think what you’re doing

  That’s my bad, I did say ‘automated’ and should have been ‘automatable’. Have now corrected to clarify

• LintzA 31 Jan 2025 15:36 UTC

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Buck’s comment on: The Game Board has been Flipped: Now is a good time to re­think what you’re doing

  Do you have anything you recommend reading on that?

  I guess I see a lot of the value of people at labs happening around the time of AGI and in the period leading up to ASI (if we get there). At that point I expect things to be very locked down such that external researchers don’t really know what’s happening and have a tough time interacting with lab insiders. I thought this recent post from you kind of supported the claim that working inside the labs would be good? - i.e. surely 11 people on the inside is better than 10? (and 30 far far better)
  
  I do agree OS models help with all this and I guess it’s true that we kinda know the architecture and maybe internal models won’t diverge in any fundamental way from what’s available OS. To the extent OS keeps going warning shots do seem more likely—I guess it’ll be pretty decisive if the PRC lets Deepseek keep OSing their stuff (I kinda suspect not? But no idea really).
  
  I guess rather than concrete implications I should indicate these are more ‘updates given more internal deployment’ some of which are pushed back against by surprisingly capable OS models (maybe I’ll add some caveats)

The Game Board has been Flipped: Now is a good time to re­think what you’re doing

• LintzA 3 Sep 2024 17:51 UTC

  4 points

  1 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Eric Neyman’s comment on: The value of a vote in the 2024 pres­i­den­tial election

  I think it’s very reasonable to say that 2008 and 2012 were unusual. Obama is widely recognized as a generational political talent among those in Dem politics. People seem to look back on, especially 2008, as a game-changing election year with really impressive work by the Obama team. This could be rationalization of what were effectively normal margins of victory (assuming this model is correct) but I think it matches the comparative vibes pretty well at the time vs now.

  As for changes over the past 20+ years, I think it’s reasonable to say that there’s been fundamental shifts since the 90s:

  • Polarization has increased a lot

  • The analytical and moneyball nature of campaigns has increased by a ton. Campaigns now know far more about what’s happening on the ground, how much adversaries spend, and what works.

  • Trump is a highly unusual figure which seems likely to lead to some divergence

  • The internet & good targeting have become major things

  Agree that 5-10% probability isn’t cause for rejection of the hypothesis but given we’re working with 6 data points, I think it should be cause for suspicion. I wouldn’t put a ton of weight on this but 5% is at the level of statistical significance so it seems reasonable to tentatively reject that formulation of the model.

  Trump vs Biden favorability was +3 for Trump in 2020, Obama was +7 on McCain around election day (average likely >7 points in Sept/​Oct 2008). Kamala is +3 vs Trump today. So that’s some indication of when things are close. Couldn’t quickly find this for the 2000 election.

• LintzA 3 Sep 2024 17:06 UTC

  12 points

  3 ∶ 2

  on: The value of a vote in the 2024 pres­i­den­tial election

  I think this is all very reasonable and I have been working under the assumption of one votes in PA leading to a 1 in 2 million chance of flipping the election. That said, I think this might be too conservative, potentially by a lot (and maybe I need to update my estimate).

  Of the past 6 elections 3 were exceedingly close. Probably in the 95th percentile (for 2016 & 2020) and 99.99th percentile (for 2000) for models based off polling alone. For 2020 this was even the case when the popular vote for Biden was +8-10 points all year (so maybe that one would also have been a 99th percentile result?). Seems like if the model performs this badly it may be missing something crucial (or it’s just a coincidental series of outliers).
  
  I don’t really understand the underlying dynamics and don’t have a good guess as to what mechanisms might explain them. However, it seems to suggest that maybe extrapolating purely from polling data is insufficient and there’s some background processes that lead to much tighter elections than one might expect.

  Some incredibly rough guesses for mechanisms that could be at play here (I suspect these are mostly wrong but maybe have something to them):

  • Something something polarization, steady voting blocs for Rep & Dem aren’t shifting much year to year. This means we should expect similar margins this year as 2016 & 2020.

  • Some balancing out process where politicians are adjusting their platform, messaging, etc to react to their adversary and this ends up increasing how close elections get.

  • Maybe something where voters have local information on whether the person they don’t like is more likely to win and they then feel more motivated to vote? Turns out, in aggregate, this local information is pretty accurate and leads to tighter-than-expected elections.

  • Maybe political parties/​donors observe how much their adversary spends in a given state and are consistently able to spend to counteract their efforts. This maybe provides a balancing effect that tightens the race. This would have the unfortunate consequence that visible spending is much less effective—but maybe implies that smaller, more under-the-radar, projects are better.

• LintzA 28 Aug 2024 14:42 UTC

  7 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: richard_ngo’s comment on: The case for con­tribut­ing to the 2024 US elec­tion with your time & money

  I think it’s plausible that Dems turned a blind eye to some of this and that led to a few thousand extra votes here and there. US elections (and elections in general) always have issues like this and AFAIK there’s no reason to believe they played any larger or more important role in 2020 than any other election. In fact, given the amount of highly-motivated scrutiny applied to the 2020 election, I suspect it was cleaner than most previous elections.

  Even had Trump received any credible evidence of unusual tampering (you’d think he’d have laid it out by now if he had), his actions were beyond the pale. His own Attorney General refused to recognize any signs of fraud. He tried to cajole anyone he could into not certifying the results in any state or district he could despite no real evidence of wrong-doing. His scheme to create alternate slates of electors was an out-and-out attempt at election fraud. There’s no world in which that was intended to be representative of ground-truth.

  This article spells out a bunch of Trump’s actions around the 2020 election. I’m curious what you think of it.

  To be fair (kinda) to Trump, I think he really may have thought the election was stolen. He seems extremely capable of deluding himself about things like that. E.g. he just said that, if Jesus were counting the vote, he would win California easily. My hot take is that having a president who is actively trying to delude himself and his followers into believing 2020 was stolen (and that 2024 will be stolen) is bad, that it displays a weakness of character & epistemics that should be disqualifying. It should, e.g., make us question his ability to act reasonably in a crisis situation or when presented with a complicated new risk like AI.

• LintzA 26 Aug 2024 15:41 UTC

  22 points

  4 ∶ 0

  in reply to: richard_ngo’s comment on: The case for con­tribut­ing to the 2024 US elec­tion with your time & money

  Generally feels like it’s primarily talking to an audience who already agrees that Trump is bad, and just needs to be persuaded about how bad he is

  This is true to some extent. I did not write this thinking it would be ‘the EA case for Kamala’ in response to Hammond’s piece. I also was wary about adding length to an already too-long piece so didn’t go into detail on various counterpoints to Kamala.

  Is framed it not just as a case for Kamala, but as a case for action (which, I think, requires a significantly higher bar than just believing that it’d be better on net if Kamala won).

  I personally see Trump’s anti-democratic behavior and demonstrably bad values as very-nearly disqualifying on their own (similar to, e.g., Scott Aaronson’s case against Trump). That’s why I focus so much on likely damage to liberal democracy. In my view these are crucial enough considerations that I would require some strong and clearly positive data points in Trump’s favor to override his obvious flaws. I am not aware of clear and strong positives on Trump’s side, only some points which seem closer to ‘maybe he would do this good thing. He hasn’t talked about it, but it seems more likely he’d do it than that Harris would’.

  Except where business-as-usual decisions would affect catastrophic risk scenarios I think they generally wash out when compared to Trump’s flaws.

  Doesn’t address the biggest concerns with another Democrat administration (some of which I lay out here).

  I address a good chunk of those concerns here. Agree that I could have talked about this more (though again, the piece was already very long).

  And yet it has been heavily upvoted. Very disappointing lack of consistency here, which essentially demonstrates that the criticisms of the previous post, while framed as criticisms of the post itself, were actually about the side chosen.

  I don’t see why this follows from the above. The claim seems to be that the only reason that post could have been downvoted and this post upvoted is because of bias. You’ve argued that there’s some content I didn’t address, and that it’s written for a Harris-leaning audience, but haven’t put forward a critique of the positions put forward in the post. It also seems clear that I’ve, on each cause area at least, attempted to present both sides of the argument. I’m curious why you see it as inconsistent? People disagree on object-level politics – and many people on here seem to strongly disagree with you – but one side is generally right, on net. Two posts advocating for different sides of an issue shouldn’t be treated the same just because it’s about politics. Also, this post has received its fair share of criticism (e.g. Larks’ comment, which I thought was useful and led me to update the post).

  one of the most harmful things that can be done for AI safety is to heavily politicize it

  Agreed, I don’t want to politicize AI safety. I really hope that, should Trump be elected, he’ll have good advisors and make good decisions on AI policy. I suspect he won’t, but I really hope he does.

  Here’s my thoughts on why it seems fine to post this:

  • There’s been pro-Trump content on the Forum already but virtually no pro-Harris content AFAIK.

  • This post doesn’t show up on the front page because it’s politics (at least that’s my understanding, I didn’t see it there personally despite the upvotes).

  • We’re not spreading this publicly in any ways that non-EAs are likely to see.

  • This kind of post seems like a drop in the bucket. Lots of EAs identify as Democrat, many as Republican. Having debates about who to elect seems perfectly reasonable. I’m glad there’s not a ton of posts like this on the forum, if there were I probably wouldn’t have written it. Adding one on the margin doesn’t seem like a big deal to me.

  • This post talks about AI safety fairly little and, what content there is, is mainly in the appendix.

  By default, we should expect that a lot more people will end up getting on the AI safety train over time; the main blocker to that is if they’re so entrenched in their positions that they fail to update even in the face of overwhelming evidence. We’re already heading towards entrenchment; efforts like this will make it worse.

  Not sure I fully understand this point but will attempt to answer. Again, I do not think this post or any of my other efforts are contributing meaningfully to politicizing/​polarizing AI safety or “entrenching” positions about it, and I really hope a Trump administration will make good decisions on AI policy in case he is elected (and I’ll support efforts to this end). However, this is fully compatible with believing that a Harris administration would be far better – or far less bad – in expectation for AI policy. I give several important reasons for believing this in the post, e.g.: Trump has vowed to repeal Biden’s executive order on AI on day 1; Trump generally favors non-regulation and plans to abolish various agencies (Vance favors tech non-regulation in particular); and the demographics and professions that make up the AI safety/​governance movement seem to have a far better chance at getting close to and influencing a Democratic administration than a MAGA administration, for several reasons.

• LintzA 25 Aug 2024 18:51 UTC

  44 points

  11 ∶ 2

  in reply to: richard_ngo’s comment on: The case for con­tribut­ing to the 2024 US elec­tion with your time & money

  [This is part 1, I will get to foreign policy and AI-specific questions hopefully soon]

  I don’t think it’s fair to put an attempt to overthrow an election on par with biased media coverage (seems like both sides do this about equally, maybe conservative media is worse?) or dumping on opposition candidates (not great but also typical of both parties for many decades AFAIK). Scott Aaronson lays out some general concerns well here.

  Trump incited a violent coup/​insurrection attempt to prevent the 2020 election from being certified as well as other extremely norm-violating and likely illegal behavior to overturn the 2020 election (see long list here). The Republican party and supporting infrastructure (committees, media, influencers, fans, etc.) have since agreed to support his re-election attempt, punished members of the party for holding Trump accountable, and are touting January 6th insurrectionists as heroes.

  Lawfare seems more concerning (though also far from new or specific to Dems) - curious what examples you’re worried about here. FWIW, I think the Supreme Court’s Trump immunity ruling is far and away worse than anything Dems have done in the past several years.

  RFK Jr, a lifelong Democrat (and a Kennedy to boot), has now endorsed Trump because he considers Democrat behavior too undemocratic

  As far as comments from Stein or RFK Jr., don’t third party candidates always hate their mainstream counterparts? The Democratic party, like the GOP, is going to act in ways which help get their candidate elected. Boosting third party candidates who take votes from them is not something an American party will ever do. Maybe that’s not great but it’s more a systemic issue than an issue with the party itself.

  One thing I’ll acknowledge in this vein is the Dems failure to run a real primary this year. I think that was a big mistake. There’s nothing illegal about this though, parties are private entities and can do whatever they want to select a candidate. I consider it more of a strategic mistake than an outright betrayal of Democratic principles. To be clear, I think the DNC is kinda incompetent (probably the RNC too though, Trump’s daughter-in-law is leading it now).

  coordinated social media censorship

  I don’t think the link you provided on Reddit censorship demonstrates censorship? What I saw was mostly people expressing political views in a space where most people disagree with them getting downvoted as well as posts from subreddits with lots of very lefty people where very lefty posts get lots of upvotes. Non-lefty posts and comments get downvotes there. It’s not great epistemics, sure, but it’s extremely typical of both sides. There are very similar conservative spaces where Dem posters don’t even exist (e.g. patriots.win). Am I missing something on this? (I haven’t read the other link you posted which seems more substantial but very long, might read another time).

  Arguably Musk is doing something worse with Twitter right now (though I haven’t looked into it). FB is the go-to place for conservatives and conspiracy groups, I really don’t think it’s a haven for liberal censorship.

  From the linked comment:

  The strongest case for Trump is that the Democrat establishment is systematically deceiving the American people (e.g. via the years-long cover-up of Biden’s mental state

  I think it’s really bad that top Dems covered up Biden’s mental state (which is why I pushed hard to get him to step down) and it reduces my trust in the party. I think this pales in comparison to Trump’s willingness to silence critics (e.g. via hush money and threats).

  generally growing the power of unaccountable bureaucracies over all aspects of life

  To be honest, I’m sympathetic to this concern and I’d be happy to have a reasonable Republican (if we get one) take a swing at reducing over-regulation in 2028. To the extent this is a cost of electing Harris, I will happily pay it.

  What links here?

  • Ba­sic game the­ory and how you can do a bunch of good in ~3 Hours. (de­vel­op­ing ar­ti­cle.) by Amateur Systems Analyst (10 Oct 2024 4:30 UTC; -3 points)

• LintzA 24 Aug 2024 6:41 UTC

  13 points

  3 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Larks’s comment on: The case for con­tribut­ing to the 2024 US elec­tion with your time & money

  I agree with the criticism. The quotes provided aren’t good evidence that she is personally concerned about x-risk. We just don’t have much information about her views on catastrophic risks. I’ve updated the text to reflect this and tried to encompass more of what Trump has said about AI as well. Also edited a few other parts of the piece.

  I’ve pasted the new text for Harris below:

  Harris tends to focus on present harms, but has expressed some concern about existential risk.

  Harris has generally put more emphasis on current harms, highlighting that local/​personal harms feel existential to individuals (and implicitly deprioritizing globally existential threats posed by AI) in a November 2023 speech. That said, in the same speech, she acknowledged that AI might “endanger the very existence of humanity”, citing “AI-formulated bioweapons” and “AI-enabled cyberattacks” as particular concerns. In general, it seems reasonable to expect that Harris will at least not reverse the Biden-Harris administration’s previous actions on AI safety. The Biden administration has made impressive progress on AI safety policy, including the establishment of the US AI Safety Institute, securing voluntary commitments on AI safety from many companies, and the 2023 AI Executive Order.

• LintzA 23 Aug 2024 16:19 UTC

  5 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: River’s comment on: The case for con­tribut­ing to the 2024 US elec­tion with your time & money

  To be fair, there is at least one pro-Trump post up on the Forum. Neither this nor that post will go to front page AFAIK because it’s politics, but there are at least points on both sides.