I won't say who it was (though they can out themselves) but someone convinced me that they do a donation strategy that I approve of. They donate to both sides to be able to lobby their congressperson on AI issues. I think this makes a lot of sense.

#changedmymind

First, sorry for the late reply. I thought I had sent it but it was still in autosave.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/21582440241279659#bibr25-21582440241279659

I had chatgpt analyze this paper on US House of Representatives. It finds that doubling spending for incumbents actually has ~no effect and in general you get about 4.5% increased win probability from doubling spending. You get the biggest gains for challengers with little name recognition. It also turns out that incumbents spend about $3M on a race and challengers spend about the same as well. So we're talking about $3M to gain 4.5% extra chance of winning a house seat. 

The paper goes on to explain that increases in spending faces increasingly diminishing returns.

To answer the question bluntly. I'll just define past a certain point as 50% more than average spending. About 5% of races are "close" based on my crude metric of a margin of victory of less than 3 points.

Also, my criticism basically don't apply (and in fact, I think we should be spending more money on) things like ballot initiatives and specific campaigns. I'm also much happier about things like primaries than general elections. If you are donating to just a generic race, even if it's close, I don't think there is actually enough evidence that one party is much better than the other. 

A lot of money is spent on politics already. Unless there is very very specific issues of EA concern, I don't think it's worth donating to. There are tremendously good donation opportunities out there and political ads or Beyonce concerts aren't among them IMO.

One thing I've been saying since the FTX days is that we absolutely shouldn't be donating to politics in general (with exceptions of course but in broad strokes and definitely don't donate to the Presidential race or a national party). The evidence that donations to political parties past a certain point do much is unclear (people only can see so many ads) and there are just much much larger problems in the world that EAs should be spending their money on, at worst you can just donate to AMF and this would do way better than most money spent on politics.

The exceptions would be that a very high integrity person was running who was a committed EA. In these cases, I think the math checks out but rarely will it for just some generic candidate.

Small bets allow you to get cheap signaling. Larger amounts force people to be at least a little more serious. FWIW, I offered Remmelt to do more.

It was difficult to come up with operationalizations for investment metrics. Remmelt wanted things like AI & ML VC deal activity being <30% and Anthropic valuation <$30B. I wanted things like % of YC startups being AI-related and didn't want some large investment round in SpaceX or Stripe dominate funds raised.

Thanks for writing this. I've told other people this in the past.

Should EA avoid using AI art for non-research purposes?

To the contrary, you probably cost the AI labs a bunch of compute and this is the overwhelming effect.

Also, the environmental costs are tiny. If you are doing it for the environment, nearly all your environmental footprint is your diet and transportation, not electricity usage.

Sometimes rationalist-y people and lawyers really like to use/insist on maximally precise/literal language or legalese. I have a word for lawyers who do this in my business interactions with them; shitty lawyers.

I'm somewhat sympathetic to these people since it allows for exact communication and for some, it makes truthful information sharing easier. However, this just isn't how the world works. What you point to simply isn't fraud by the commonplace usage of the word. What you mean is that by your interpretation, they should advertise 285 piglets/dollar and not 354 and that you don't think their reason for stating 354 isn't well supported.

Again, this over-the-top and inflammatory language is hurting rather than helping you and the animal welfare movement.

Vote power should scale with karma

To a point, maybe a bit less than it does currently but in general it seems to work well. 

A great number of EAs in America/Europe could learn a lot from you.