I work in Democratic data analytics in the US and I agree that there's potentially a lot of value to EAs getting involved in the partisan side rather than just the civil service side to advance EA causes. If anyone is interested in becoming more involved in US politics, I'd love to talk to them. You can shoot me a message.

Hey; I work in US politics (in Data Analytics for the Democratic Party). Would love to chat if you think it would be useful for you.

Yes. People aren't spending much money yet because people will mostly forget about it by the election.

Independent of the desirability of spending resources on Andrew Yang's campaign, it's worth mentioning that this overstates the gains to Steyer. Steyer is running ads with little competition (which makes ad effects stronger), but the reason there is little competition is because decay effects are large; voters will forget about the ads and see new messaging over time. Additionally, Morning Consult shows higher support than all other pollsters. The average for Steyer in early states is considerably less favorable.

I'd be curious which initiatives CSER staff think would have the largest impact in expectation. The UNAIRO proposal in particular looks useful to me for making AI research less of an arms race and spreading values between countries, while being potentially tractable in the near term.

There's also other counterfactual matching opportunities that tend to arise around the same time though.

Yeah, I don't think filling the finite universe we know about is where the the highest expected value is. It's likely some form of possible infinite value, since it's not implausible that this could exist. But ultimately, I agree that the implications of this are minor and our response should basically be the same as if we lived in a finite universe (keep humanity alive, move values towards total hedonic utilitarianism, and build safe AI).

I'm not arguing for arguing for false arguments; I'm just saying that if you have a point you can make around racial bias, you should make that argument, even if it's not an important point for EAs, because it is an important one for the audience.

I think this is rather weak and mostly arguing against a straw-man. I don't see Effective Altruists arguing that you should refrain from investments in your human capital. It makes sense to cut down on consumption (eg. eat out less). But I don't know of any EAs arguing that you should refrain from say buying books.

In general, I'm glad that it was included because it ads legitimacy to the overall argument with Vox's center-left audience.