Thanks to Aaron Gertler for inviting me to do this AMA.
My name is Jeremiah Johnson, and I'm one of the founders and directors of the Neoliberal Project. The Project is a organization dedicated to advancing liberalism with thousands of members and 70+ chapters around the world. You can find the quick version of what we believe here or here (happy to go into more detail). I help run the Project day to day, host the Neoliberal Podcast, and do basically anything/everything else including social media, political commentary, content creation, managing local chapters, etc.
Aaron was kind enough to invite me here because the EA and neoliberal online communities have a surprising amount of overlap. I've been personally involved in the EA movement in a number of ways. I created a series of charity drives on the neoliberal subreddit that have in total raised more than 1/3 of a million dollars for EA favorites like DeWorm The World and Against Malaria Foundation. I've interviewed EA-related guests on my podcast like Alvin Roth, (Nobel winning economist who created the algorithms for kidney swaps) Robert Wiblin (of 80000 hours), Rob Mather (CEO of Against Malaria), etc. I donate a portion of my salary to GiveWell recommended charities every year, and two years ago I donated a kidney to a stranger after some EA-aligned people convinced me that it was a good choice (I had a popular AMA on donating a kidney here, but happy to answer any questions here as well).
Ask Me Anything about:
- Purely EA topics like
- Kidney donation - either the policy side or my personal experiences going through the process
- Raising money for AMF, and why I like malaria bednets so much
- The intersection between the neoliberal community and the EA community
- Why I think politics is an underrated way to do good that the EA community sometimes overlooks
- The Neoliberal Project, neoliberalism, politics or political philosophy, etc.
- Or anything else that seems relevant or that you're curious about.
Hey, thanks for doing this. I'm curious about this bullet — "Why I think politics is an underrated way to do good that the EA community sometimes overlooks". What are we underrating? And what policies seem good to push for from an EA perspective, but which few EAs are looking at?
I'm someone who thinks of myself as an EA, but I don't engage at a deep level with the community at all times, so this is my half-insider-half-outsider view of EA. My general sense is that EA famously focuses on a handful of areas - AI, animal welfare, catastrophic risk management, GiveWell-style medical interventions, etc. I very rarely see EAs talking about 'normal politics' as a place to do good, and I think there are some normal politics issues that have deep promise.
One example is advocacy for increased immigration for rich countries. The eviden... (read more)