Interested in AI safety talent search and development.
Peter
How to Reform Effective Altruism after SBF Vox interview with Holden Karnofsky 1/23/2023
Here is a synopsis from Primary School, a newsletter focused on democratic primaries. It’s kind of annoying to dig through their posts for the hard to see “see full post” button so I’m copy and pasting them.
EDIT FEC Update 2/5/2022
Carrick Flynn says he raised $430,000 in the first 10 days. Salinas only raised $174,000 in two months. Money isn’t everything in campaigns but that is kind of low for Salinas.--
Tl;dr: Salinas seems like a strong candidate and solid progressive who is supported by the local party. I’d be interested in seeing her first fundraising numbers when they are out.
1/27/2022
OR-06
″Oregon Medical Board member Kathleen Harder raised $129,000 in the two months since she announced her campaign, which means she’s going to be a real part of this ever-widening field of candidates. In addition to her, state Rep. Andrea Salinas, former Multnomah County Commissioner Loretta Smith, and dueling pro-cryptocurrency self-funders Matt West and Cody Reynolds, a new candidate has entered: State Rep. Teresa Alonso Leon. Leon, who is in her second term in the state house, was mentioned as a potential candidate for this seat when it was first drawn, but stayed quiet about any plans until people just assumed she wasn’t interested. That likely includes the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, who endorsed Salinas last month. Leon, an immigrant herself, has been fantastic on immigrant rights issues, and has fought to include the undocumented in Oregon’s Medicaid program. But her launch and campaign website have so far been light on the policy details, and she hasn’t taken any stances in inter-party fights that would make her allegiances more clear.Leon may not even be the only candidate entering—AI researcher Carrick Flynn has filed to run. While assorted professors and researchers run for Congress all the time without anyone noticing, Flynn spent years as a relatively public-facing part of a well endowed AI-related public policy program, so he probably knows more than a few rich people.”
Originally I read this last sentence as him being more knowledgeable than rich people about AI, but now I’ve realized they probably meant he likely knows a bunch of deep pocketed individuals.
1/18/2022
″...FEC records that say that Matt West’s the one who self-funded $437,000 and raised $182,000, while Reynolds self-funded $2,000,000 and only raised $10 elsewhere.”10/13/2021
″State Rep. Andrea Salinas is considering running for the new OR-06, a safely Democratic district containing the cities of Salem and Corvallis, as well as a significant chunk of the Portland suburbs. Salinas, first appointed to her suburban house seat in 2017, made it to House leadership just a couple years later, and has spent her time in office functioning as a solid progressive: She’s supported efforts to create a public option for Oregon (because “getting to some kind of single payer system is the best thing we could do..for all people in the US”), allow prisoners to vote, and give agricultural workers overtime pay. The local Democratic establishment clearly likes her if they appointed her to office, and to leadership not long after, so she’ll be a considerable force in the primary should she run. She also helped draw the new district, so the odds of it being at least somewhat optimized for her are pretty high.”- 19 Nov 2022 6:38 UTC; 11 points) 's comment on Some important questions for the EA Leadership by (
EARadio Returns—Suggest Episodes and Shoutouts
Carrick Flynn Results and Additional Ideas for Passing Pandemic Prevention Policy
This is a great list. Always happy to have people on EA Radio to talk about their projects if they want!
I think politics can seem very opaque, incomprehensible, and lacking clear positive payoffs but after volunteering, studying, and working on campaigns for a few years, I think it’s more simple but difficult.
I think politics is an area where there are a lot of entrenched ways of doing things as well as a lot of pitfalls that often require experience to navigate well. And even then, the chance of failure is still high. A moment’s slip up or bad assumptions or a random event can undermine months or years of work. This doesn’t happen as often in other areas.
For animal welfare, I think the outcomes show that it’s something people are more willing to vote for than pay for, so I think ballot initiatives are generally a good route to try out. I think the pork industry challenge to the MA law is pretty weak, but even if the initiative is struck down, it was probably good to try and see if it worked, and that may still open up some new opportunity. Winning by a large margin is good in that it may discourage special interests from trying to run a counter ballot initiative next time to repeal it.
I think it’s important not to become naive about anyone elected to office. Just because they have a similar background to you, say things you agree with, or belong to a group you like doesn’t mean they’re going to actually do good things or that the things they do are good. Just because they seem right about one or even many topics doesn’t mean they know what they are doing on other topics.
Politics is about coalition building and that often means various kinds of deal making. This is not for everyone, and not every deal is good or even necessarily clearly good or bad. It also involves constant tradeoffs and high uncertainty that will often make a lot of people unhappy.
Politicians spend most of their careers fundraising—even when in office—and not nearly enough time talking to groups of their constituents that represent the diversity of experiences in their districts. This means a lot of popular ideas get ignored, some of which are good and others which are maybe not. Being a good representative means knowing when, how, and how much to defer to people.
“We can Prevent AI Disaster Like We Prevented Nuclear Catastrophe”
What things would make people less worried about AI safety if they happened? What developments in the next 0-5 years should make people more worried if they happen?
It’s not legal to receive donations directly or indirectly from foreign nationals for any US race, but volunteering and asking people to donate is okay.
I like the idea of Protect Our Future being more transparent about how and why they make endorsements. Giving a specific list of ways they evaluate candidates would be helpful for people to understand their actions. I also worry a little bit that this would make it easy to game their endorsement process or encourage political stunts that are more about drawing attention than doing something useful. But I’m not sure how big of a worry this should be.
It took millions of years to create a species as smart as humans. It has only been 50 years and we already have AIs that can create art and solve scientific problems better than most people. What do you think will happen in the next 50 years?
On Flynn Campaign: I don’t know if it’s “a catastrophe” but I think it is maybe an example of overconfidence and naivete. As someone who has worked on campaigns and follows politics, I thought the campaign had a pretty low chance of success because of the fundamentals (and asked about it at the time) and that other races would have been better to donate to (either state house races to build the bench or congressional candidates with better odds like Maxwell Frost, a local activist who ran for the open seat previously held by Val Demings, listed pandemic prevention as a priority, and won. Then again, Maxwell raised a ton of money, more than all the other candidates combined, so maybe he didn’t need those funds as much as other candidates). Salinas was a popular, progressive, woman of color with local party support who already represented much of the district at the state level and helped draw the new one. So, it seemed pretty unlikely to me that she would lose to someone who had not lived in the state for years, did not have strong local connections, and had never run a campaign before, even with a massive money advantage. And from what I understand, the people in the district were oversaturated with ads to the point of many being annoyed. So I think of this as probably being an example where EAs would have benefitted from relying on more outside experts for which races to pick and how to run a campaign. There were a lot of congressional retirements this year, and there were probably better seats to try to win. Of course, nothing is going to guarantee a win though.
On FTX: And it seems like if anyone had thought to ask to look at FTX’s balance sheets, things might have been different? At least, considering what a mess those balance sheets are (or whatever records make sense, I’m not a financial expert)? If FTX refused or if they shared something that didn’t make sense, maybe that would have been a warning sign. So that seems like another example of where more outside expertise could have maybe been beneficial and saved a lot of headaches. Individually, maybe no one has an incentive to vet FTX even if they get a grant from them. But if we care about the EA ecosystem as a whole, and hundreds of millions suddenly start pouring in from a new source, maybe someone with the relevant financial and accounting expertise should at least request to look at the balance sheets of the new megafunder, especially when it comes from an industry full of crashes and scams. I’m not sure if this would have changed things but the fact that it doesn’t seem to have happened means there are probably many other things that we are missing. Things that people with relevant expertise are more likely to see. And I know people have said “well look all these other VCs missed it, they never looked into it” but EA sort of prides itself on NOT just doing what everyone else does but using reason and evidence to be more effective. We could have had a process for investigating any new megafunder a bit more thoroughly, perhaps with the help of outside experts. Not just donating to the same charities or picking the same career paths or volunteering for the same organizations just because other people do but being effective. So why would we think this is a good reason for failing to attempt better due diligence with respect to movement finances? We can’t change the past, but surely we can change some things going forward.
Well squad-esque seems like an odd litmus test since there are many other progressive members of congress than them but POF did support Maxwell Frost who won.
Well to be fair I didn’t say it was impossible, just that the outcome probably had more to do with the fundamentals of the race. It may have had a negative effect yes, but plenty of candidates win in races despite being supported by all kinds of PACs and having negative press about it.
Having more connections within the state for support and donations and highlighting those would have helped blunt negative attacks about PAC funding, for example.
Interesting post! Something I’ve thought about in a different direction is how EA seems to share the dedication to doing good of many religions but not the emphasis on a particular practices aimed at reducing greed/negative traits and building discipline/compassion/positive traits/emotional resources that help sustain such altruistic action. For example, various forms of meditation like loving-kindness and insight, reflection, etc.
Not sure but I think the Flynn campaign result was more likely an outcome of the fundamentals of the race: a popular, progressive, woman of color with local party support who already represented part of the district as a state rep and helped draw the new congressional district was way more likely to win over someone who hadn’t lived there in years and had never run a political campaign before.
I work in US politics and I’m more knowledgeable about the United States, but a few points come to mind:
Incremental ballot initiatives are more likely to pass than sweeping ones (at least in the USA)
The meat and agribusiness lobbies are incredibly powerful
Positively framed initiatives are generally more likely to pass than ones that take something away or focus on something negative. But arguments opposing changes are generally more likely to win over ones supporting changes. Most initiatives fail.
As for what this would look like with positive framing, it would probably take some careful thought but maybe end up with ballot text something like “Healthy/Natural Farms Initiative—ensure all farm animals live in healthy, safe, and humane conditions”
If we combine that with something more incremental, it might look like “Open stables initiative” “Ensure farm animals live free from disease causing overcrowding and confinement” or “have __ time outside cages.” A more specific narrow initiative may have helped against arguments that “factory farms don’t exist” which is perhaps harder to pin down what it means to people.
A series of narrow initiatives could potentially be more effective at eroding cruel conditions over time than a binary yes or no abolish ballot initiative that takes effect in 25 years since there are more chances for change to accumulate and less change on the ballot all at once.*I don’t really know much about specific policy interventions or mechanisms of change that would be narrow and impactful in the factory farming space, so someone else could probably improve these.
Based on what people have said here, I think Carrick sounds like a great candidate who would make a wonderful representative. However, my impression from loosely following primaries from time to time is that local reputation matters a lot. Self funders tend not to do well because they tend not to have real local support. Does Carrick have a strong base of support or message to compete against the likes of a popular progressive state rep like Salinas (I don’t believe we have fundraising numbers from her yet)? If anyone knows of a race where a similar candidate won in similar circumstances, I’d love to hear about it.
The first similar race that comes to mind for me is when Cenk Uygur ran in California in 2020. Cenk moved to the district to run for an open seat and had large financial support from his fanbase built running a progressive independent media outlet known as The Young Turks. But he only got around 6% of the vote with $1.7 million spent. Granted, there are a couple of differences here: California has Top Two/jungle primaries which means all candidates are on the same primary ballot; it was a special election which tends to have lower turnout; Cenk tends to be pretty abrasive; he never lived in the district before; the election was in a swing district; and Cenk had controversial misogynistic past blog posts from years ago when he identified as a conservative Republican and was hit hard in the media over it. He was running against a woman state rep with local party support who ultimately won the primary (although she ultimately lost the general election by a few hundred votes). I wasn’t able to find numbers for what she spent in the special election primary but she got over $5 million in all of 2020 so maybe less than half of that?- Carrick Flynn Results and Additional Ideas for Passing Pandemic Prevention Policy by 18 May 2022 7:33 UTC; 18 points) (
- 19 Nov 2022 6:38 UTC; 11 points) 's comment on Some important questions for the EA Leadership by (
Seems interesting, I’ll def check it out sometime
Jokes aside, this is a cool idea. I wonder if reading it yourself and varying the footage, or even adapting the concepts into something would help it be more attractive to watch. Though of course these would all increase the time investment cost. I can’t say it’s my jam but I’d be curious to see how these do on TikTok though since they seem to be a sort of prevalent genre/content style.
First, I want to say I did not donate to Carrick Flynn. Second, as someone who has been fairly involved in politics, primaries happen in every race every year and generally you shouldn’t expect much more than an endorsement from your opponents should you win, and even that isn’t guaranteed.
Third, telling another candidate’s supporters it’s their fault if your campaign is unsuccessful is pretty much the opposite of building a winning coalition. I think a much better strategy is to demonstrate commitment to the issue(s) those constituents care about so that they want to support you, if you truly believe their support is critical to your success.