What is the increase in expected value of effective altruist Wayne Hsiung being mayor of Berkeley instead of its current incumbent?

I recall Hsiung being in favour of conducting disruptive protests against EAG 2015:

I honestly think this is an opportunity. "EAs get into fight with Elon Musk over eating animals" is a great story line that would travel well on both social and possibly mainstream media.

...

Organize a group. Come forward with an initially private demand (and threaten to escalate, maybe even with a press release). Then start a big fight if they don't comply.

Even if you lose, you still win because you'll generate massive dialogue!

It is unclear whether the motivation was more 'blackmail threats to stop them serving meat' or 'as Elon Musk will be there we can co-opt this to raise our profile'. Whether Hsiung calls himself an EA or not, he evidently missed the memo on 'eschew narrow minded obnoxious defection against others in the EA community'.

For similar reasons, it seems generally wiser for a community not to help people who previously wanted to throw it under the bus.

I find "Wayne has told me he wants to use evidence-based reasoning for deciding city policy and has identified as EA for years" to be extraordinarily weak evidence. Anyone can say either of those things.

Here is a recent newspaper article describing Wayne as using cult-like techniques and abuse with DxE, and also here.

Hi folks, someone pointed me to this thread a while back. Coming back to it because I came on the site to apply for EA Global, which I'm looking forward to attending. Briefly: 

- Running for mayor was a VERY interesting experience that updated me against conventional political efforts to address large scale problems. The short answer to this is that there are far too many institutional obstacles within conventional politics. 

- My view on disrupting EAG was not, from what I recall, based on non-collaborative principles but rather with the idea that a disruption might actually be good for all relevant stakeholders (including the speaker disrupted, Elon Musk). I think that's probably still the case, but I appreciate that's probably a minority view. 

- Re: DxE and cult-like behavior, hard to respond because there are no specific allegations, but I would say that the Berkeleyside article was sadly not done in a high-integrity way. Contrary sources I suggested the writer talk to were not even interviewed, including the then-current lead organizer (executive director equivalent) Almira Tanner. And clear factual errors were not addressed. I posted about some of them here: https://whhsiung.medium.com/factual-errors-in-berkeleysides-reporting-on-our-mayoral-campaign-eaf0e2d52b04

More generally, while I have not been in leadership for nearly 3 years (and did not have nearly the control folks sometimes suggest even when I was in leadership, e.g., I was opposed to most of the political disruptions performed by DxE), I try to be pretty open about my mistakes, and receptive to feedback. Always open to others' thoughts. For example, Jonas, I don't know you personally but certainly know you through mutual friends/acquaintances via your (important) animal welfare work, and I definitely would be interested in hearing what you think I could have done better. There are lots of hard choices one has to make when leading hundreds of people. Inevitably, one will make mistakes. (Some of mine include: pushing for a work culture that was probably unsustainable; not devoting enough time to personal relationships and communication when painful decisions were made.) The best way to respond to those mistakes, though, is to learn from them. Always eager to hear what I can learn from mine! 

I don't have a quantitative estimate that isn't extremely made up, but right now, I'm in favor of Wayne winning the Berkeley election. I know there were accusations of DxE being culty and fucked up in various ways, and I believe most of them, though I'm not particularly in the know. I also agree that it would have been better if Wayne had handled CEA's reversal on serving meat at EAG more cooperatively. I don't think DxE's strategy is super compelling. I don't think Wayne is a perfect candidate, but I don't think his wrongdoings/level of uncooperativeness are out of distribution for a politician; they actually seem pretty middle-of-the-road in severity, though perhaps unusually lurid and interesting to discuss.

Those things just seem way way less important to me than his stance on farm animal welfare. It seems like one candidate is strongly against the mass torture and killing of sentient beings, and has worked hard to stop it, and as far as I can tell, the other doesn't particularly have a stance. It feels directionally analogous to me to choosing between a vaguely sketchy candidate who is actively anti-racist before the civil rights movement, or pro women's suffrage before women had the chance to vote, or in favor of letting in Jewish refugees during the Holocaust and one who isn't (and who may or may not be sketchy). (I don't expect this argument to resonate for people who don't put a lot of moral weight on animal lives). I don't know how he'd do good for animals as mayor (I know he wants to ban meat, don't know how likely that is to work), and I'd be interested in arguments that it's implausible he'd do much good, but by default it doesn't seem crazy.

I don't know much about the incumbent; I'd guess we know more about Wayne's shortcomings than his, because Wayne has been more adjacent to EA. I also think Wayne has shown great energy and had some meaningful successes, e.g. in community organizing, and getting fur banned in Berkeley, that are indicative of him being an agenty person. My current silly guess based on not much at all is that electing him in expectation saves tens of thousands of farm animals from torture.

My biggest worry is that Wayne's work will backfire and have a negative effect on efforts to help farmed animals, e.g. because he gets elected but handles things poorly.

[edited just to fix a typo]

For all of the new commenters: it would have been more valuable to comment when I asked this question, as I was considering trying to coordinate EAs using an assurance contract to provide enough volunteers to help his campaign win. Given how the comments turned out, I decided it was not worth pursuing and therefore assume the Wayne campaign will lose with 50-80% probability, moreso because I didn't think EAs would buy-in (for better or worse) than due to having a sense of how good Wayne's mayorship would actually be for the world on the object-level.

(Since basically no one gave a good, quantitative answer to the question beyond their own social-emotional reasoning.)

So I've moved on. In general, dialogue about an election is worth much less in expectation a couple weeks out from the election than it is in advance.

I am a rather strong proponent of publishing credible accusations and calling out community leadership if they engage in abuse enabling behavior. I published a long post on Abuse in the Rationality/EA Community. I also publicly disclosed details of a smaller incident. People have a right to know what they are getting into. If community processes are not taking abuse seriously in the absence of public pressure then information has to be made public. Though anyone doing this should be careful.

Several people are discussing allegations of DXE being abusive and/or a cult. I joined in early 2020. I have not personally observed or heard any credible accusations of abusive or abuse enabling behavior by the leadership of DXE during the time I have been a member. It is hard for me to know what happened in 2016 or 2017.

Given my history in the rationality you should trust that if I had evidence I could post about systematic abuse within DXE I would post it. Even if I did not have the consent of victims to share evidence I will still publicly state I knew of abuse. I will note it is highly plausible DXE is acting badly behind closed doors. If this becomes clear to me I will certainly let people know.

(This is explicitly not a claim there is no evidence I find concerning. But I think you should be quite critical of most organizations and your eyes open for signs of abusive behavior.)

I am a member of DXE and have interacted with Wayne. I think if you care about animals the amount of QALYs gained would be massive. In general Wayne has always seemed like a careful, if overly optimistic, thinker to me. He always tries to follow good leadership practices. Even if you are not concerned with animal welfare I think Wayne would be very effective at advancing good policies.

Wayne being mayor would result in huge improvements for climate change policy. Having a city with a genuine green policy is worth a lot of QALYs. My only real complaint about Wayne is that he is too optimistic but that isn't the most serious issue for a Mayor.