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.
The Progressive Policy Institute and the Neoliberal Project are one example of an EA-adjacent political movement/organization/project. Can you list some others? Here is my own vague high-level list of some political groups that seem EA-adjacent (I don't know much about individual think-tanks or anything):
Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein, co-founders of Vox, have both talked about EA / rationalism in some of their writing, and interviewed on EA / rationalist podcasts. And of course Vox hosts Future Perfect, an explicitly EA column (although the rest of Vox does not strike me as significantly more EA than other center-left publications).
The Progress Studies movement is small and more oriented towards history than politics, but it seems to align with Marginal Revolution and the idea of long-term economic growth as a cause area. Charter Cities stuff is kinda connected to this area.
Perhaps there is a cluster of "institution design" people (which also has overlap in the cryptocurrency world), including folks such as Vitalik Buterin, Robin Hanson, and Glen Weyl. These type of folks seem very relevant to the important but IMO underdeveloped "improving institutional decisionmaking" wing of the EA movement. EA is also connected to some groups promoting more incremental / shovel-ready institutional tweaks, like approval voting.
Naturally lots of individual issues feed into niche political advocacy groups. Climate change and nuclear power, nuclear disarmament, international aid, vegetarian/vegan stuff. Although sometimes in these cases it's more like EA is just choosing the already-existing lobbying group that aligns with their goals, but the lobbying group is just excited about their particular EA-adjacent issue without anybody there having gone through larger philosophy of EA.
California tech / venture capital groups, maybe? Peter Thiel is usually cast by the media as some kind of supervillain, but his projects sometimes strike me as feeling distantly EA-adjacent.
I feel like after Covid, there ought to be a strong locus of people pushing for various reforms to the CDC and FDA, but I don't know of anything in that space?
Big fan of many of the groups discussed here, and we're often close with the groups you listed. We've had Matt and Ezra on the podcast several times, as well as Dylan Matthews from Future Perfect to discuss kidney donation. Love the work that Future Perfect does. I've also hosted on the podcast Glen Weyl, Jason Crawford of the Roots of Progress, and Mark Lutter of the Charter Cities Institute. Much less a fan of Peter Thiel, whose goals are explicitly anti-liberal (and being an ideological liberal I obviously view this as a very bad thing).
I th... (read more)