Democrats Veto, Republicans Coin Flip

On Epistemics, Coalitions and Reality

Let’s consider a purely rationalist case for which party EAs should support. This means we aren’t going to consider existing tribal loyalties of people in EA. It might be true that in practice, a lot of EAs care more about abortion or gay marriage than the literal end of humanity (a mirror of Hanania), but we’re going to set that aside for now.

Many EA cause areas, including AI governance, pandemic prevention, nuclear proliferation, and malaria eradication could benefit strongly from both the finances and legitimacy offered by the state. In classical cost-benefit analysis terms, we should be thinking of the probability of gaining this power multiplied by the effectiveness of said power. 

Vitalik Buterin has a model of decision curves as compromises or coin flips. With some decisions, the average choice is preferable to either extreme, while in others, either extreme is preferable to the average. An example of the former is the tax rate, where reasonably center-left to center-right tax rates beats totalitarianism or anarchism any day. An example of the latter is covid lockdowns, where partial lockdowns still result in everyone being infected while nonetheless inflicting severe costs. 

You can see where this is going. Democratic politics, policy, and lobbying is much closer to the compromise model. The distribution of factional loyalties is highly intermixed, influenced by legacy media coverage, and static. Republican politics, on the other hand, is undergoing an enormous generational turnover, which I witnessed first hand at the National Conservatism Conference two weeks ago. Now, this doesn’t actually mean that it’s easier to infiltrate or “climb” the Republican party, especially if you’re a left wing person. Instead it means that you have a better shot at simply making your arguments. I also find that conservatism as an ideology is actually much more aligned with being skeptical of AGI and dangerous biotechnology such as gain of function research. This somewhat speaks to the danger of EA falling into an echo chamber where their entire model of politics is based off of the suffocating careerist culture of left-wing politics. This should also, by the way, make you question the Democratic party / media culture itself, but that’s an article for another day. 

Is this strategy guaranteed to succeed? No, but it is much closer to a coin flip. As conservative columnist Ross Douthat puts it:

Ross Douthat @DouthatNYT

One arguable takeaway from this analysis is that being an intellectual attached the GOP is a really depressing business *unless* your faction can seize control of a GOP WH, in which case you'll face relatively few constraints on action from your base:

richardhanania.substack.comLiberals Read, Conservatives Watch TVExplaining why Trump emerged on the right, why only liberals debate filibuster reform, how anti-vax became a partisan issue, how David Shor is half right, “Dems are the real racists” and much else.

The important thing about practical governance is that coin flips are much more powerful than reductions. The probability of a policy direction actually being implemented (not simply passed) is an exponential curve, due to the numerous veto points and methods of obstruction that exist. This curve is particularly steep for the ongoing institutions that need to be built for issues such as pandemic prevention, which must prevent bureaucratic obstruction that results in most Western public health institutions worsening public health. 

The bitter pill to swallow for left-EAs is that more centralized coalitions are simply more conducive to interesting ideas than diffuse, status-oriented/press-oriented ones. The even more bitter pill to swallow is that legacy press is highly correlated with ineffective altruism and consequently a major threat to EA, but that’s another article altogether. Recombining the unfortunate truth that most EAs are left-EAs, these pills aren’t as bitter because you don’t actually need to swallow them. The funny thing about outreach in this style is that it’s typically best done by people who have conservative sensibilities in the first place, so the actionable in this blog post is more on establishing and not demonizing EA-aligned institutions on both the left and the right. I trust that we can do this.