I'm not asking EA to focus singularly on democracy. I'm asking EA to give any resources at all to the cause of democracy. Prove my ignorance wrong. Is any organization in EA involved with democracy at this moment? Is any organization bothering to evaluate potential interventions? What work has been done? What papers have been written? Is there some work saying, "Look, we've done the work, yes it turns out democracy has a terrible ROI!" How about you guys? Are you making any consideration or analysis on potential pro-democracy interventions? If you have, I'd love to see the analysis. My search for it, I've seen nothing. I hear crickets. 

Here's the thing about evidence. You have to look for it. Is EA bothering to look for it? Is your organization bothering to look for it? Otherwise, you have no idea how tractable it is or is not. 

The best rebuttal to this is that EA regularly tackles "longtermism" causes regularly, on the basis that they can use small bits of influence and money to help address major causes with disproportionate impact. AI is the biggest one the community is interested in.

And this is purely irrational.

The entire fabric of society is set to unravel by, say, next week. There's a near zero percent chance of anything good happening on any of EAs fronts, including AI. If the government either collapses or becomes unaligned there's absolutely no reason to think regulations or guidelines on AI will be followed or effective. There are few heuristics we can agree on with AI, but it should be absolutely obvious that an unaligned government creates an unaligned AI, and that government resources are orders of magnitude higher than anyone else.

Hence every cent of money or effort spent by EA on any non political long term cause is meaningless. Even if the money spent couldn't have mattered if it was political it's still an example of invalid and irrational spending; worrying about earthquakes while your house is on fire type logic. Nothing was more threatening than the collapse of democracy, including AI, not because AI is theoretically less destructive but because the risk was orders of magnitude more immediate. 

Yes, the risk was known. No, pleading ignorance doesn't absolve anyone.

This could and was predicted a decade ago. Decades if you view EA as an offshoot of the rationalist community and lump their efforts; as early as the "politics is the mind killer" post on less wrong people have been criticizing the de facto political neutrality of the movement, and they were right. I won't say it's the original sin, that's absolutely the obsession with the highly degenerative silicon valley tech sphere at the expense of humanities and social sciences (that could have addressed this too) in recruiting, outreach, and messaging, but it's up there.

Basically, EA choose political neutrality and what it got was eaten by politics. Now it's irrelevant. Nothing that's been done or will be done matters. 

You've lost. 

EA is a zombie.

It's dead.

My interest is in improving democracy. I believe things like Trump, or Netanyahou, or Erdogan, or most democratic backsliding is a sign of democratic incompetence. 

I think most people have little to no long-term vision for the question, "What would an advanced government of the future actually look like?" How much better could the world become if governments were smarter and more capable and just produced vastly more utility for people? 

There is one thing I think is a strong contender for a superior future government. It's called sortition. The premise is simple. In elections everybody participates. In sortition, a random sample of the public is chosen to participate. The benefit of sortition is scalability. Randomly chosen people, compensated or forced to participate, can engage in politics at enormous timescales compared to the average voter. More time to ask questions. Resources to become informed. The ability to seek and hire expertise. I elaborate about alleged benefits here. 

Of course there's a lot to do. First we need to prove the hypothesis. We have reasons why we think this is good, next we need to actually go out and test it. That takes a lot of money and research. This research will add evidence in its feasibility and capability. After that, if testing determines this thing to actually be good, more money is needed to campaign in favor of it.

Trump assuredly will not be the last authoritarian to arise out of liberal elections. If you value people's freedom, if you wish to maximize utility, we should be looking for better things out there. 

As far as why things like sortition would stop Trump, competent governments that are able to make their citizens feel content and satisfied with government performance, do not tend to appeal to tyrants for aid. Moreover if sortition is actually an effective way to organize people, it also might be an effective way to organize the Democratic Party. 

Another powerful feature of sortition is its potential ability to create Democratic Legitimacy without going through the bureaucracy of government. For example, a Citizens' Assembly can be potentially created through private funding, or through a referendum. A Citizens' Assembly could be used as a presidential candidate selection system, and could delegitimize Trump or any other un-endorsed candidate. 

Even if this is a "long-termist" project, the resources needed to say, test sortition, or launch a Citizens' Assembly, are only in the millions of dollars. The economic benefits could be immense. Imagine a government that's only 5% more efficient at increasing utility... that's hundreds of billions of dollars of value per year. If the will was there, testing could happen immediately and we'd have results out before the end of Trump's term. 

Of course this won't happen, not because it's infeasible, but because there's not yet funding, because sortition is mostly unheard of, because the idea hasn't reached the ears of funders. Or if it has, the funders have just written it off for unknown reasons. Tractability is a typical excuse I hear, yet I'm not sure how sortition is any less tractable than any other long-termist project out there.