The stake of the public good in any given election is much larger than the stake of any given entity, so the correct amount for altruists to invest in an election should be much larger than for a self-interested corporation or person.
not that he single-handedly caused Trump’s victory.
Didn’t claim this.
This is naive.
Not sure what this adds.
My guess is that this intuition is relatively inelastic to MIRI’s size. It might be worth trying to generate the counterfactual intuition here if MIRI were half its size or double its size. If that process outputs a similar intuition, it might be worth attempting to forget how many people MIRI employs in this area, and ask how many people should be working on a topic that by your estimation has a 10% chance of being instrumental to an existential win. Though my number is higher than 10%, I think even if I had that estimate, my answer to the number of people that should be working on that topic would be “as many as are available.”