abstractapplic's Shortform

abstractapplic

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If you told an EA from 15 years ago that a non-negligible number of EAs were sending their charitable donations to (specific candidates fielded by) the US Democratic Party, they'd assume something had gone very wrong.

(I know the obvious answer to the above is to gesture at the state of US politics, and/or the state of AI development, and say "why yes, something has gone very wrong, I'm glad you noticed!". And I don't have an answer to that answer. Even so, it seems like it might be worth someone writing the above paragraph somewhere people can see; so I did.)

"Oh, cool, the future Dems are finally putting forward some really good candidates."

- past me's leading hypothesis, probably

45Lukas Finnveden4mo

Depends on the EA. I think plenty wouldn't. See e.g. Carl Shulman from 2019. (Only halfway towards 15y ago, but my guess is he wouldn't have said something very different 15 years ago.) [...] Or see How important is politics? from Brian Tomasik (first written 2014; last update 2019) [...]

50Zach Stein-Perlman4mo

I agree. (To be clear, since OP is ambiguous: generically boosting the Democratic Party might be surprising, but that's very much not what's going on. EAs donate to Ds and Rs, although the three most common donation-targets for the 2026 elections are all Ds. And none of these three donations increase D power — they're all about replacing one D with a different D. Maybe OP misunderstands the situation.)