AI Lobbying is Not Normal
17David Matolcsi
16Garrett Baker
9Algon
8Noosphere89
2Garrett Baker
4David Matolcsi
2Mitchell_Porter
8Algon
2Gordon Seidoh Worley
2Algon
2Gordon Seidoh Worley
New Comment
I'm confused. If Fairshake's $100 million was this influential, to the point that "politicians are advised that crypto is the single most important industry to avoid pissing off", why don't other industries spend similar amounts on super PACs? $100 million is just not that much money.
It has long been a mystery to me why there isn't more money in politics, but I always thought that the usual argument was that studies show that campaign spending matters surprisingly little, and in particular, super PAC dollars are very not effective at getting votes.
How strong is the evidence that the crypto industry managed to become very influential through Fairshake?
If Fairshake's $100 million was this influential, to the point that "politicians are advised that crypto is the single most important industry to avoid pissing off", why don't other industries spend similar amounts on super PACs? $100 million is just not that much money.
I agree, and therefore you should update toward the people at Fairshake being very good at politics, rather than the money at Fairshake being sufficiently large to buy a congress, and so get worried when Algon Daniel Eth claims that the people who were behind Fairshake will be behind Leading the Future, as they will have the political weight of Fairshake behind them to bootstrap Leading the Future.
That is, given limited success in just buying congressional votes, one should infer the bottleneck is not money, but something else, likely talent or connections.
Algon claims
Daniel Eth claims this. This is a linkpost. Says so at the top of the post. Sorry for the confusion! I added a screenshot from the start of the twitter thread. Hope that the edit make this clearer.
2I'm confused. If Fairshake's $100 million was this influential, to the point that "politicians are advised that crypto is the single most important industry to avoid pissing off", why don't other industries spend similar amounts on super PACs? $100 million is just not that much money.
It has long been a mystery to me why there isn't more money in politics, but I always thought that the usual argument was that studies show that campaign spending matters surprisingly little, and in particular, super PAC dollars are very not effective at getting votes.
A lot of this I suspect is related to way too many lobbyists targeting high-salience issues where the public is willing to vote against or for certain candidates, and I suspect a lot of the studies showing lobbying has no effect are on issues where the public is willing to vote against legislators that take the stances lobbyists prefer.
My general model for lobbying is that it's most useful in areas where you have reason to believe the public doesn't care about the issue, because you can provide money and selectively boost or depress candidates based on the more normal issues without talking about the issue, and it becomes much less useful when the public starts to care about an issue.
In essence, lobbying provides information, promises and threats on money as well as shifting the framing of issues in a legislator's mind.
the usual argument was that studies show that campaign spending matters surprisingly little, and in particular, super PAC dollars are very not effective at getting votes.
I tried to find a source for this, and failed. What are you basing this claim on?
It has long been a mystery to me why there isn't more money in politics
Can you add some context to this remark? I think it's widely believed that politics is already suffused with money (and that this is a bad thing).
Scott has an article which may answer your question. "Too much dark money in Almonds".
Let me quote the beginning, which essentially expands on the text you quoted from David.
Everyone always talks about how much money there is in politics. This is the wrong framing. The right framing is Ansolabehere et al’s: why is there so little money in politics? But Ansolabehere focuses on elections, and the mystery is wider than that.Sure, during the 2018 election, candidates, parties, PACs, and outsiders combined spent about $5 billion – $2.5 billion on Democrats, $2 billion on Republicans, and $0.5 billion on third parties. And although that sounds like a lot of money to you or me, on the national scale, it’s puny. The US almond industry earns $12 billion per year. Americans spent about 2.5x as much on almonds as on candidates last year.
But also, what about lobbying? Open Secrets reports $3.5 billion in lobbying spending in 2018. Again, sounds like a lot. But when we add $3.5 billion in lobbying to the $5 billion in election spending, we only get $8.5 billion – still less than almonds.
What about think tanks? Based on numbers discussed in this post, I estimate that the budget for all US think tanks, liberal and conservative combined, is probably around $500 million per year. Again, an amount of money that I wish I had. But add it to the total, and we’re only at $9 billion. Still less than almonds!
What about political activist organizations? The National Rifle Association, the two-ton gorilla of advocacy groups, has a yearly budget of $400 million. The ACLU is a little smaller, at $234 million. AIPAC is $80 million. The NAACP is $24 million. None of them are anywhere close to the first-person shooter video game “Overwatch”, which made $1 billion last year. And when we add them all to the total, we’re still less than almonds.
Add up all US spending on candidates, PACs, lobbying, think tanks, and advocacy organizations – liberal and conservative combined – and we’re still $2 billion short of what we spend on almonds each year. In fact, we’re still less than Elon Musk’s personal fortune; Musk could personally fund the entire US political ecosystem on both sides for a whole two-year election cycle.
My guess is that no amount of money can keep legislators completely away from regulating AI because it will eventually get too scary not to. Crypto would have similar issues if it posed a serious threat to, say, the stability of the economy.
1Not sure I understand your point. Let me try re-phrasing it: "Legislators will find it too scary to build AI. If Crypto threatened the stability of the economy, legislators would want to build it, too." Is that correct?
