Consider not donating under $100 to political candidates
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In that case, go to the casino's roulette table first and put all on 0 n times to make it a (1/37)^n chance of 36^n the donation, with n chosen to keep the variance of the beneficiary's total donations reasonable.
Alas, there is a $6,600 limit to how much you can donate to a political candidate (per election cycle).
Cross-posting this comment from the EA Forum:
I basically agree with this (and might put the threshold higher than $100, probably much higher for people actively pursuing policy careers), with the following common exceptions:
It seems pretty low-cost to donate to a candidate from Party X if...
- You've already made donations to Party X. Larger and more recent ones are slightly worse, but as Daniel notes, even small ones from several elections ago can come back to bite.
- You don't see a realistic world where you go into the federal government during a Party Y administration even if you didn't donate to Party X, because...
- You don't think you could go into the federal government at all (though as Daniel notes, you may not realize at the time of making the donation that you might want to later; what I have in mind is like, you have significantly below average people skills, and/or you've somehow disqualified yourself).
- You have a permanently discoverable digital paper trail of criticizing Party Y, e.g. social media posts, op-eds, etc.
- You just don't think you'd be able to stomach working in a Party Y administration. (Though consider asking, would you really not be able to stomach it for a few years if it seemed like an amazing career and impact opportunity?)
I can't speak to the US context, but this is much less true in Australia, if you support a third party at least.
I can personally speak to the fact that the Australian greens regularly run races on less than $1000AUD (and I've heard of them running on less than $100 in rural seats). So the expected value of a donation can be significantly higher.
This probably goes much less for a donation to one of the major parties, or to a well funded minor (think Trumpet of Patriots).
Side note: High level policy positions are also significantly less "political" (for lack of a better word) here, since public servants are unelected and somewhat independent from the legislature, but there are still times when making political donations can be harmful. This is the case in some finance jobs, and I believe (read: I cannot verify) it may come up in background checks for some security and defense positions.
Is donating to both political parties an effective hedging strategy? For example, consider a scenario where you intended to donate $3 to Party A. To minimize career risk, could you instead donate $4 to Party A and $1 to Party B? This approach would put you on record as having donated to both parties while still maintaining your desired $3 differential in favor of Party A.
I don't know. I would imagine it's more like "it's bad to donate to the 'wrong' party" than "it's good to donate to the 'right' party".
I actually think people concerned about AI should be more politically involved, not less politically involved.
Seems possible, but the post is saying "being politically involved in a largely symbolic way (donating small amounts) could jeopardize your opportunity to be politically involved in a big way (working in government)"
1$3 isn't going to help as much as $100 for sure, I think it's at least a fair point (though tbf I also think the general point of "won't hire you for a possibly technical position because you donated $3 to the other guy once" is incredibly petty and anyone thinking that way is probably not going to be someone I want to work for anyway).
Taking government positions to influence AI is being politically involved. The political impact it has is likely a lot higher than that of a small donation.
What's the political impact of millions of rats/EA withholding being politically active so that maybe a couple of them can obtain a government policy position they wouldn't have otherwise?
Note that this post does not encourage people to withhold being politically active, or to totally refrain from making political donations.
There are not millions of rats/EA.
Generally, if you want to make a political impact by being politically active it makes sense to have a theory of change and pick actions based on that theory of change. If you just randomly copy the kind of things other people who want to make political change do like going to protest and making small donations, the impact is likely not going to be very large.
This reminds me of a discussion I had with someone from East Europe going to a government protest. I asked her what she was protesting and she said that there's a complex situation and no good English language source that describes it. Writing an article (or talking someone else into write an article) for the Guardian's Comment is Free to explain the decision would have done much more to affect political change than having another body at the protest, yet she did the easy thing of going to the protest instead of doing the EA thing of getting the article written.
So I don't know who's advising Trump and Vance on AI today. Is it an EA? Could an EA reasonably have replicated that person's path if not? Could EA compliant advice get through to Trump or Vance? If the third question is no then op's theory of change isn't sound anyway.
Basically, you are saying that you don't know what you are talking about. On the other hand, the person who started this post does know what they are talking about from talking with people in the AI governance space.
For effective political action, it's useful to take insider information about how the process works seriously.
That's not knows what they're talking about, that's has talked to people who sound like they know what they're talking about. The epistemic status is clear about this so I'm not knocking OP. "Epistemic status: thing people have told me that seems right." This is actually what taking hearsay from insiders seriously looks like.
There were roughly 2000 respondents to the 2024 EA survey; if we assume that's undercounting by a factor of 100, that would still only give us 200,000 EAs (and I expect that it's really more like 10x, for 20,000).
This is with regards to specifically small donations, of under $100; taking $50 as the average small donation and assuming every EA makes political donations, 50 times 200,000 would equal $1 million of campaign contributions ($100,000 if we assume there are only 10x as many EAs as answered the survey).
That is enough to fully cover a small campaign or two, but it's not clear to me whether, spread over many candidates as would happen in real life, even the higher number would make much of a difference to any of their races.
I would recommend EAs become more politically active not less politically active. We can just rebrand it as "working to influence AI policy by influencing election outcomes upstream of AI policy decisions" to respect the rule that all decisions must reduce from working on alignment.
>for example, I think Donald Trump is extremely bad, and am disappointed in my fellow countrymen for voting for him
LessWrong is a special site in that there is a norm here against blunt political statements (since politics is the mind-killer). I am disappointed in you for burning the commons with a statement like this. You could make it on any other site, as they are all already cesspools of political-warring, but perhaps you desire to bring the same ugly battles here too. You should not desire this.
3Eliezers post about how politics is the mind-killer is about the idea that if you talk in a non-political post about politics, you make it a lot harder for your reader to engage with the non-political part of your post.
The question about whether or not to donate money to political candidates is inherently a political question.
DanielFilan is essentially saying that even so, he thinks Trump is bad, people should still be wary about making certain donations for Democrats to oppose Trump.
The question about whether or not to donate money to political candidates is inherently a political question.
Yes, but the reasons explained apply equally to all political candidates.
That's not true, the US is not equally governed by Republicans and Democrats at the same time with Republicans and Democrats always acting the same. The reason that this post exists is likely downstream of how the Trump administration manages hiring for positions.
While not specified in this post, and me not knowing the exact ground reality, it's possible that the Biden administration was more technocratic about their hiring decisions. It's certainly possible that a future democrat administration also cares a lot about this, but also possible that they don't.
I disagree because Daniel's opinion is bracketed and doesn't invite or bait engagement on the object level (nor has it gotten any), and it's a claim-by-example that he doesn't endorse general cowardice and self censorship for political expediency. Without his included (importantly against the current regime) opinion, the piece would be easy to mistake with (Sarah Constantin's) Ra worship, rather than a specific, bounded recommendation.
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1I agree it doesn't invite engagement - it is just a drive-by shot, ugly to any reader who doesn't agree with the bracketed text.
It shouldn't be too surprising: until very recently, it was standard practice for one of the two major political parties to have their agencies staffed almost entirely by "independent, non-partisan experts" who openly loathed them and actively worked to sabotage their agenda, so publicly pledging support to the other party wouldn't hurt your career if they lost, and could help if they won.
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