All of trevorlevin's Comments + Replies

How do you think about the relationship between EA and electoral politics in e.g. the US and UK? Is engaging with it a good use of time (and what kinds of engagement), what research needs to be done, etc?

2
Cullen
4y
I actually don't think I have very good insights on this topic, despite spending a lot of my time on politics Twitter (despite my best judgment). I didn't have any particular experience in electoral politics and never really considered it as a career myself. I guess one "take" would be that there's a lot of ways to improve the world via government that don't involve seeking elected office or getting heavily involved in politics, and so people should have a clear idea of why elected office is better than that. All that said, my position is largely aligned with 80,000 Hours': from an expected value perspective it looks promising, but is obviously a low-probability route to impact. I'd be interested to see more research into how constrained altruistic decisionmakers actually are. There are some theoretical reasons to suspect that decisionmakers are actually quite constrained, which, if true, would maybe suggest we're over-estimating how important it is to get altruistic decision-makers (or change our identification of which offices are most worth seeking).