(This originally appeared on my Substack, Second Best, but I was recommended to cross-post it here.)
The title of this post is somewhat tongue-in-cheek as I am not (exactly) an Effective Altruist nor do I speak for anyone in the EA movement.
That said, I still consider myself a kind of rationalist, and am aligned with EAs on a number of important policy issues. My disagreements with EA are more technical / philosophical. In particular, I think utilitarianism is an incomplete moral philosophy that, per Charles Taylor, neglects the “deep diversity” of human goods; and that, per Robert Brandom, makes the mistake common to most modern moral philosophy of inverting the relationship between abstract normative theory and concrete social practice. The corollary is that I believe our ethical commitments have to be in some sense “instituted” within networks of reciprocal recognition to be real and binding. This is what generates the special roles and obligations associated with family, community, professional associations, nation-states, and so on.
That doesn’t mean utilitarian or consequentialist arguments are useless. On the contrary, there are many areas of life where “greatest good for the greatest number”-style thinking is the only practical framework. This is especially true in public policy, where discrete decisions often affect millions of people with diverse interests in a way that all but necessitates a more abstract, “system-level” decision criterion. I’ve previously described this as a kind of “moral gestalt,” as if we sometimes need to moralize about the forest and other times about the trees. Independent of the content of a particular moral theory, different types of theories naturally “supervene” to these different levels of construal. Thus, as a rule, we should be relatively utilitarian about system-level questions, like how to structure an economy or allocate scarce public resources, but guided more by personal duty and virtue in our day-to-day life.
The delta between our system-level and interpersonal ways of moralizing is why many utilitarian conclusions can seem “repugnant” to the man on the street. Economists are all-too familiar with this phenomenon. Both EAs and economists are partial to legalizing kidney markets, for example, in spite of the common intuition that the human body has an inviolable “dignity” that must resist “commoditization.” Similarly, many left-wing commentators were aghast when Matt Yglesias argued that “Different Places Have Different Safety Rules and That’s OK” following the deadly collapse of a garment factory in Bangladesh. And yet his arguments were perfectly correct, if maybe a bit “too soon.”
Rationalists strive to pierce the “social veil” that colors our moral intuitions and perceptions of reality more generally. As social animals, the human capacity for truth-seeking was built atop cognitive processes that first evolved for norm-following. We therefore tend to assimilate to the beliefs of our peer group and are easily manipulated by perceptions of social status and authority. Yet “reading the room,” while superb for group cohesion, is not a sound epistemology. It instead leads to intellectual fads and fashions that entangle the search for truth with aristocratic social graces. Like a fish in water, the conventional nature of belief is an obvious fact that’s usually invisible in the moment, though easily noticed by cultural outsiders and people immune to social desirability.
A Pivotal Act
So how should one think about the upcoming Presidential election from an EA or rationalist-consequentialist perspective? Let’s set aside the fact that voting is largely an exercise in self-expression and imagine that, against all odds, we’re casting the decisive vote; a potential “Pivotal Act.” At this fork in the road, which path leads to the better outcomes — the higher social welfare — relative to the counterfactual and independent of good intentions?
First, we should start by acknowledging the potential influence of our peer group on our perception of either candidate, and attempt to transcend the high-status prejudice against Donald Trump in particular. Everything about Trump is offensive to the folkways of America’s academic, cultural and media elites. To say he elicits “repugnance” is an understatement. Vance, as a Yale Law grad, is seen as a kind of class traitor and thus particularly “weird.” But unless these perceptions of cultural cachet have direct bearing on the society-wide outcomes of a Trump-Vance administration, they should be ignored as no more relevant than Kamala Harris’s laugh.
Second, we should focus on a marginal analysis and ignore sunk costs. Roe v. Wade cannot be overturned twice, and is not something a Harris administration can simply reinstate. Trump has expressed a moderate position on abortion, opposing a ban and supporting nation-wide access to mifepristone. Abortion access is thus unlikely to be substantially affected by the outcome of the election either way, despite being a motivating issue for many voters. There are any number of other issues that fall into this general category, i.e. culturally salient but irrelevant on most policy margins.
Third, without necessarily adopting a zero social discount rate, we should at least take the welfare of future people into serious consideration, which means caring about population growth and attending to low-probability existential risks. I’ve previously argued that “longtermism” of this sort is best thought of as a civilizational project, as our capacity to coordinate across generations and survive Black Swan events is largely downstream of competent institutions and high-functioning cultures.
Fourth, we should adopt a realist political economy based on a cold analysis of means and ends. The idealistic and sacred dimensions of politics have their place but can easily muddy the waters. Blame, just deserts, personal character, and other ethical or aesthetic variables only enter a consequentialist analysis indirectly, if at all.
Social Welfare
As an economist, I think of social welfare in terms of Pareto improvements: “win-win” outcomes that make at least one person better off without making anyone worse off. Markets tend to be welfare enhancing as trade only happens when both sides of an exchange believe they are better off by their own lights. Negative externalities and market frictions complicate this story, but it remains a good rule of thumb.
Pareto efficiency comes in two main flavors: allocative and innovative. Allocative efficiency is about letting assets flow to their highest valued use, like land-use reforms that allow apartments to be built in lucrative labor markets. Innovative efficiency is about pushing out the Pareto frontier and creating new production possibilities. The latter tends to be more important to social welfare in the long-run, as productivity improvements grow the economic pie in a way that compounds overtime and makes positive-sum negotiations easier to coordinate.
Medical innovation
At first order, the EA case for Trump is that a Trump-Vance administration will be much better for the innovative capacity of the U.S. economy. Pharmaceuticals are a case in point. As the economist Tomas J. Philipson notes in a recent piece for the WSJ,
A study I co-authored estimated that 135 fewer drugs will come to market through 2039 because of the Inflation Reduction Act. Research firm Vital Transformation’s forecast is even bleaker, predicting that the U.S. could lose 139 drugs within the next decade.
Dozens of life-sciences companies have announced cuts to their research and development pipelines because of the 2022 law. These announcements have come in earnings calls and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission—where deliberate misstatements would expose executives to civil and criminal penalties—so they can’t be chalked up to political posturing.
The social welfare benefits from America’s tolerance for high drug prices are such that Tyler Cowen has taken to calling proponents of pharmaceutical price controls “the supervillains”:
If you are ever tempted to cancel somebody, ask yourself “do I cancel those who favor tougher price controls on pharma? After all, they may be inducing millions of premature deaths.” If you don’t cancel those people — and you shouldn’t — that should broaden your circle of tolerance more generally.
What I like about this framing is how it aims to recalibrate our sense of repugnance in light of “scope insensitivity,” a deeply rooted cognitive bias that occurs “when the valuation of a problem is not valued with a multiplicative relationship to its size.” Or as Stalin supposedly put it, “a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic.”
Pharmaceutical innovation is also an area where the choice of administration is likely to have a big impact on the margin. The Harris campaign has pledged to set drug prices at “no more than 100 percent of its average price in comparable high-income countries,” while a future Trump admin would likely try to undo the controls introduced by the IRA. A Trump FTC would also likely roll-back commissioner Lina Khan’s crusade against mergers and acquisitions, which have been detrimental to pharmaceutical innovation in particular.
The potential benefits of a second Trump term for medical innovation should be obvious from the high watermark of his first administration: Operation Warp Speed. Operation Warp Speed directly saved an estimated 140,000 American lives by pulling forward vaccine timelines, and may save thousands more still through its indirect impact on research into mRNA vaccines for malaria, cancer and influenza.
While Trump can’t take sole credit for the program, it is hard to imagine such a large and relatively unfettered public-private-partnership emerging through the stakeholder-based politics of modern “everything bagel” liberalism. In fact, the special authorizations employed by OWS were downstream of an existing deregulatory push at FDA, spearheaded by the same Philipson quoted above and his Chicago School colleague, Casey Mulligan. As Mulligan notes in his retrospective,
Although COVID-19 would not arrive in the U.S. for two more years, Trump’s CEA was also being asked by the National Security Council’s biodefense team to look at the economics of vaccine innovation during pandemics. This was an opportune time to bring the Chicago tradition on regulation together with its results on epidemiology and the value of medical innovation. In a report published in September 2019, CEA concluded that “…improving the speed of vaccine production is more important for decreasing the number of infections than improving vaccine efficacy” and emphasized the need for large-scale manufacturing and the possible advantages of public-private partnerships (Council of Economic Advisers 2019).
The CEA’s report prompted President Trump to sign Executive Order 13887, “Modernizing Influenza Vaccines in the United States To Promote National Security and Public Health,” on September 19, 2019. The order created the framework ultimately used by OWS to establish “incentives for the development and production of vaccines by private manufacturers and public-private partnerships,” including through the use of “innovative, faster, and more scalable” platforms like mRNA.
OWS wasn’t the only EA-aligned health policy adopted by the last Trump administration. Trump also took on the kidney shortage by establishing reimbursements for the expenses incurred by living donors alongside expanded support for home-based dialysis and various other fixes. Given kidney disease accounts for 7% of Medicare’s entire budget, these reforms plausibly saved billions of dollars and tens of thousands of Quality Adjusted Life Years. And yet the reforms were only possible thanks to Waitlist Zero, an EA-affiliated advocacy org, and the cohort of Federalist Society lawyers running policy at HHS. It would be surprising if a second Trump term didn’t provide similar opportunities for libertarians and EAs to team up once again.
Housing and tax policy
On the allocative efficiency front, the Harris campaign has pledged to impose nation-wide rent controls, an idea first floated by President Biden. Under the proposal, “corporate landlords” with 50+ units would have to “either cap rent increases on existing units to no more than 5% or lose valuable federal tax breaks,” referring to depreciation write-offs. This would be a disastrously bad policy for the supply-side of housing, and an example of the sort of destructive economic populism normally ascribed to Trump.
Harris’s terrible housing policy can be discounted insofar as it would require an Act of Congress. That said, the impending expiration of key TJCA provisions creates a real opportunity for a version of this idea to be advanced via tax negotiations. As a senator, Harris introduced the Rent Relief Act in 2018, which would have offered “tax credits to renters who earn below $100,000 and spend more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities.” This tracks with her record as attorney general, where she drafted and helped pass the California Homeowner Bill of Rights while supporting a number of other dubious “affordable housing” initiatives. Her policy instincts are thus consistent with the worst “subsidize demand, restrict supply” form of lawyerly progressivism.
A Trump administration, in contrast, is likely to use tax negotiations to fight for an extension in the TCJA’s corporate tax cut. Research suggests corporate tax cuts cause a “sustained increase in GDP and productivity,” while the TCJA specifically “increased domestic investment in the short run by about 20 percent for a firm with an average-sized tax shock versus a no reform baseline.” Particularly valuable are incentives for R&D and full expensing. A long-term fix for R&D amortization is also more likely under Republican rule, as it has become a political football for Democrats seeking to increase the Child Tax Credit. The failure to fix amortization has induced layoffs in the tech sector and is contributing to a ~$15 billion drag on IP investment annually. While I also favor an expanded CTC, incentives for productive investment are far more important for social welfare in the long-run.
Science, labor and natalism
While JD Vance has expressed heterodox opinions on a handful of domestic policy issues, from antitrust to labor law, his net effect as VP is likely to be pro-technology. On antitrust, Vance admires Lina Khan but favors an approach based on breaking Big Tech’s network effect through open source and crypto, rather than targeting particular companies with flimsy test cases. And on labor, Vance follows Oren Cass in believing the Wagner Act model of adversarial, politicized trade unions is broken, and thus has no interest in passing the Pro Act, say.
Vance also supports a “substantial increase” in federal R&D spending. Importantly, a Trump admin is far less likely to funnel such investments through corrupt and moribund academic institutions. If Trump takes the advice of RFK Jr. and Nicole Shanahan, we may even see a push to “decentralize” science funding away from institutions like the NIH and NSF. While that could lead to more woo-woo ideas getting funded, any shake-up in federal R&D that enables high-variance and heterodox thinkers to thrive would be a very positive development.
Most notably, Vance is a card-carrying pro-natalist who has made collapsing fertility rates one of his signature issues. He is thus likely to push back against any effort to restrict access to fertility technologies like IVF, and may even advance initiatives to reduce the anti-fertility bias in certain government regulations and grant programs. As the Washington Post recently reported, Vance even drafted a bill designed to “make birth free” that was on the cusp of being introduced with three Democratic cosponsors. While obsessing about falling birth rates sets Vance up for being framed as “weird,” having a thoughtful natalist in the White House would be a clear EA win.
Immigration
Immigration is arguably the hardest policy area to make the EA case for Trump. Immigration has enormous economic benefits for both the immigrants themselves and the receiving country, however these benefits divide along the same allocative and innovative dimensions discussed above. Unskilled immigration primarily creates an allocative efficiency for both the immigrant and the high-skilled natives for whom their labor is a complement. High-skilled immigration, in contrast, has both allocative benefits and benefits for rates of innovation, as high-skilled immigrants found companies, file patents, and provide human capital for domestic R&D.
In The Culture Transplant, economist Garrett Jones makes an EA-adjacent case for favoring higher rates of skilled immigration while reducing unskilled immigration from countries with deep histories of institutional dysfunction. Even if those immigrants benefit in the short-run, Jones argues, protecting the cultural foundations of America’s innovative capacity should take priority, as the non-rivalry of ideas makes U.S. innovation a global public good.
I don’t fully buy Jones’ argument, though it should still be taken seriously. However, as a Canadian, I am already partial to the national interest argument for prioritizing skills-based immigration. This isn’t a strictly EA view, as EAs tend to be cosmopolitans. Nevertheless, the Canadian model has been unusually successful at maintaining a high and sustainable rate of immigration with limited public backlash. As Michael Cuenco argues, this success is inseparable from the perception that immigrants to Canada integrate into the middle-class, unambiguously benefit the domestic economy, and enter through a system under robust democratic control:
In Canada, governments of different political persuasions have cooperated to build a successful and dynamic immigration system, one that has earned the broad approval of its citizens. In the United States, on the other hand, the two political parties have managed to raise the level of ideological polarization to febrile extremes, in effect working together to maintain a highly dysfunctional status quo that in turn fuels greater backlash and polarization. The United States now has less of an immigration system and more of an intentionally anarchic “anti-system” in place.
Low trust makes replacing America’s immigration “anti-system” an uphill battle. Piecemeal reforms can help here and there, but a long-term solution will ultimately require a new “political settlement” that credibly restores perceptions of order and control. Paradoxically, the stalemated political economy of immigration may thus require conspicuous acts of restrictionism in the short-term to make future liberalizations credible. In his first administration, Trump supported moving to a points-based system, but immigration reform took a backseat to Paul Ryan’s tax agenda. This time around, Trump looks likely to make immigration reform a top legislative priority and has signaled strong support for high-skilled immigration, including at substantially higher rates. But to stick, truly comprehensive reform will require major investments in internal enforcement and employer-based verification a la the Canada model.
Just as only Nixon could go to China, there’s a legitimate case that only Trump can fix America’s broken immigration system. Indeed, right-wing rhetoric on immigration is often orthogonal to the policies right-wing governments adopt in practice. Just look at the recent record of the British Tories or Italy’s Giorgia Meloni. A Harris administration, in contrast, is likely to dither within the contours of the status-quo while passing social welfare reforms and domestic labor protections that undermine assimilation, fuel ethnic backlash, and push a new political settlement farther out of reach.1
Situational Awareness
With shortening timelines to the advent of Artificial General Intelligence, there is a nontrivial chance that the next President of the United States will preside over the most significant technological inflection point in the history of the human race. How a Trump or Harris administration responds to transformative AI could easily overshadow the importance of all the issues discussed so far.
Anecdotally, EAs seem more optimistic about a Democratic administration getting AI policy right, in part because EAs are themselves mostly Democrats. This makes sense for sociological reasons: EAs tend to be college educated, socially liberal, open to new experiences, etc. At the same time, EAs are but a tiny island within the ocean of powerful lobbies that make up the modern Democratic Party.
As the political scientists Matt Grossman and David Hopkins argue in their book, Asymmetric Politics, the Democratic Party is best understood as a “coalition of social groups” while the Republican Party is a “vehicle for an ideological movement.” This explains why Republican leaders “prize conservatism and attract support by pledging loyalty to broad values” while Democratic leaders “seek concrete government action, appealing to voters' group identities and interests by endorsing specific policies.” There are ideological currents in the Democratic Party as well, but the raw power of ideas is usually subordinated to the interests of the major party factions, from teachers’ unions to the plaintiffs bar.
This is relevant to AI policy as the risks from AGI are still mostly theoretical, and thus easier to anticipate and respond to through an ideological lens. To the extent a policy issue can be made consistent with conservative principles, Republicans are often better at adopting a first-best approach. This was the case with Operation Warp Speed. There was no lobby or interest group that asked Trump to develop a vaccine preparedness policy. It came from the ideological commitments of the libertarian economists that staffed his administration.
Democratic interest groups, in contrast, are far more likely to a) shift focus to AI’s “ethical” implications for bias and discrimination (a la Harris’s AI Bill of Rights), and b) leverage incumbent interests to resist the structural reforms needed to navigate the AI transition. Would you entrust the future of humanity to Randi Weingarten?
Unfortunately, the EA vs e/acc debate on Twitter has created the perception that AI safety is left-right polarized. The polls tell a different story. And as a participant on the Project2025 AI policy committee, I can confidently report that Trump’s supposed shadow transition takes AGI and its associated risks seriously.
As they should. Libertarians fear the use of AI for supercharging government surveillance and censorship. Populists worry that AI will undermine what it means to be human. Evangelical Christians fear the Singularity for eschatological reasons. Right-wing tech bros are Defensive Accelerationists to the max. And while the modal Republican lawmaker is far more techno-optimist than doomer, their animus for Big Tech could trigger a backlash at any moment.
Trump has himself called the prospect of “super-duper AI” “alarming and scary,” though not as scary as China building it first. This may be why the draft executive order that leaked from the America First Policy Institute proposes a whole-of-government push for energy abundance, defense-oriented Manhattan Projects, and industry-level initiatives to secure advanced AI systems from foreign adversaries. In short, “Make America First in AI.”
If the first nation to achieve AGI internally has even a modest chance of securing a decisive economic, technological and military advantage over its geopolitical competition, it is surely imperative that the U.S. be that nation and not China. So when Democrats say that freedom and democracy are on the ballot this November, the EA in me worries they have a point.
Wow, incredible that this has 0 agree votes and 43 disagree votes. EAs have had our brains thoroughly fried by politics. I was not expecting to agree with this but was pleasantly surprised at some good points.
Now that the election is over, I'd love to see a follow-up post on what will probably happen during the next administration, and what will be good and bad from an EA perspective.
Some reasons I'm pretty skeptical that Trump is net good for EA causes:
As for your specific arguments:
Pivotal Act: I've always found "pivotal act" phrasing/framing kinda suspicious in general, and I'm not even sure you're using it correctly here? I'm also not sure there's a real argument in this section.
Medical innovation: I think this is the strongest section. I think it's very plausible that a more lassiez faire regulatory environment will spark a lot of medical innovation and save many lives. OTOH I'm not sure medical innovation on the margin is net positive (cf covid). But reasonable people can disagree here, and I'm uncertain myself. I'd currently lean towards more innovation here being good.
Housing and tax policy: Speaking of scope sensitivity, I basically think this is a rounding error. Very implausible that marginal housing or tax changes in the US can compare to changes in global health, or factory farming, or x-risk, or long-run innovation, or...
Science, labor, and natalism: The arguments here seem pretty weak/underdetailed. I'm not even sure what you're really arguing here? Like what's the theory of change such that any of these things matter a lot?
Immigration: I guess when I look at the data, the case for low-skill immigration is stronger than for high-skill immigration. But I haven't looked too closely, and I know many EAs (and others) disagree. So let's grant for now the assumption that high-skill immigration is what matters. Under that worldview, I guess you haven't argued sufficiently that Trump's admin would actually promote more high-skill immigration?
Frankly this sounds more like, "Our immigration system is so terrible it can't get any worse. Let's get somebody chaotic like Trump in charge so things can get shaken up and maybe it will turn out alright." I don't believe this because a) I think the US immigration system is far from maximally bad and b) I think "things can't get possibly get any worse" is just a profoundly unserious way of arguing in general.
Situational Awareness: The Biden-Harris administration has already done actually useful things on AI safety, like the AI executive order (which Trump promises to repeal). I'm not aware of them proposing a better alternative.
As for your broader argument, the case that "the bad guys are going to build doomsday machines to destroy all of humanity. That's why we need to build the doomsday machines first, and aggressively" is...a dubious argument with a poor track record, to put it mildly.
My current candidate for the most likely way EA has been net negative in the past is spreading this flavor of meme among would-be AI labs, and my current candidate for the most likely way EA will be net negative in the future is via spreading this meme to governments (both Western actors and Chinese ones).
Even if you buy the "race" framing, which I don't, I think you should still question whether accelerating US AI progress, talking about this loudly, and open-sourcing your models are truly the best ways to accomplish those goals, or even net positive for them. I feel like there are pretty obvious arguments why this might be a bad strategy relative to a) more cooperative messaging plus better cybersec, etc, or b) doing literally nothing at all.
My understanding is this was largely despite Kamala, who for most of the Biden administration was viewed as a liability and given little influence, rather than because of her? For public commentary on this, see for example her here 'rebuking' Rishi for focusing on existential risks:
Or here, where she shows at best ignorance of the meaning of 'existential':
Scary. :/
What's so scary? I actually like that she talks about "full spectrum" and "additional risks", i.e. it's not dismissive of existential risk.
But anyway, it's a bit reading tea leaves at this point
Basically it seems like evidence she doesn't take x-risk seriously, if she considers those problems on par with the ending of human civilization.
That might be right. Another explanation is that even if she takes x-risk seriously, she thinks it's easier build political support around regulating AI by highlighting existing problems.
eh, I agree it's possible but in the examples I'm aware of, it looks like other people around her (e.g. Biden, Sunak) were more pro-regulation for x-risk reasons.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by this?
I don't know if on the margin more medical innovation increases or decreases the risk of global biocatastrophes. We still don't know for sure if covid was a lab leak, and covid was fairly mild as pandemics go (and also afaik not deliberately engineered for virulence).
EDIT: I do think this was the strongest section of OP, and correspondingly this is the weakest section in my comment.
Pronatalism seems straightforwardly ideologically correct from a sum-Utilitarian human-centric perspective, so long as marginal human lives are very happy (I think so)
I agree on the margin it's better to have more people than less;[1] I don't know how much it matters in practice; I'm fairly skeptical of governments' ability to increase population (given realistic governments and not idealized ones).
With maybe 55% probability? It's really hard to be sure of these things because of e.g. effects on factory farming etc.
I don't believe in the governments' ability to get above 2.1 TFR but I do believe they have the power to decrease birthrate, like with child car seat requirements, Obama-era fuel efficiency regs which in practice caused increase in automobile weight (which is dangerous to kids walking), housing supply restrictions via badly designed zoning guidelines, funding for academia. sex ed plausibly has a positive or negative effect - condom distribution causes higher rates of teen sex for instance.
The EA question is how much do these things matter. I'm too lazy to look it up but I predict that housing prices swamps everything else birth-wise and decreasing deathrate is way more tractable physically and politically.
I agree with several things here, however I'm still net in favor of Trump (for now) in terms of making the future better. The following response is incredibly long and detailed and so there may be some confirmation bias. If it's not too costly, I'd like to know where and why I'm wrong on whatever you think my highest priority misconceptions are. Cheers!
___
1. I agree PEPFAR was wonderful, though it doesn't seem that likely to do a ton long-term, whereas the Iraq war and the fear it has inspired in other countries about U.S. self control/risk of going to war on the basis of false info has put us on footing for war with Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, etc. which is a much greater risk. Trump did oppose the Iraq War before it started [edit: not in public/this is contested], (although there was a period before it started where he was briefly supportive in an uncertain manner). To me this reflects someone that was unusually thoughtful/changed their mind early relative to public convo (and their political party) at the time.
2. Agree Trump will likely not be great on factory farming. I do think this matters if morality gets "locked in" before too long in the future. At the same time, animals do not right now have the agency to chose to shape the future in the ways that humans do, it makes sense to focus on getting human affairs sorted first unfortunately in the same way it made sense for governments to spend money winning WW2 faster over doing famine relief for those in Axis occupied territory. The fundamental contests that must be won and made more win-win are human affairs: success here enables greater success on AI and animals. Right now, to the degree there are any health trade-offs, the veganism focus tends to make the EA coalition intellectually weaker and more politically polarized. My long-term ideal nevertheless is nutritionally complete veganism and cultivated meat, or eating animals with healthy happy lives and painless deaths.
3. Trump's rhetoric on strongmen gets blown out of proportion by media and is close to optimal for manipulating foreign dictators into accepting deals that are better for the world at large. I've seen academics that hate Trump for tribal reasons admit this. Likewise when he's not making the blunder of being belligerent without being strategic, his personality combo greatly reduces the prospect of war via mixing the right kinds of fear and assurance. Right away, the other side has greater uncertainty and fear about how Trump might respond to provocation which creates hesitancy to do anything that might start a war. On longer timelines, Trump's aim for deal making, opposition to regime change wars, and lower degree of ideological subversion provide greater assurance that a Trump status quo will be less personally existentially threatening to such leaders, their families, and their ruling coalitions... so long as they don't do really bad stuff. It is true that we didn't get new wars under Trump, I do think the strike on Qasem Soleimani was smart, and I do think his Afghanistan pull-out strategy of keeping an airbase was good in expectation, and something that the Biden admin squandered. (Though if what people say about his orders after losing the election are true, Trump may have tried to squander the pull-out on purpose for Biden, though I am not aware of irrecoverable mistakes/actual changes before Biden was in office?).
4. I agree on character mattering. I do not think Trump's character is great on some dimensions, however the dimensions that are most critical I am pretty sure are better with Trump than with Biden and Harris. There's a variety of comparisons you can make, but in general you can expect we know more of the negative info about Trump than about Biden and Harris given the media environment, so unless you have deep personal experience the default should be some degree of discounting on Trump's character flaws relative to Harris.
With Biden or Harris and rehearsed speech from speech writers, you get a lot of deception via factually true statements with selective context and cases of confident, convincing, and precisely calibrated lies where neither Biden nor Harris realize the talking points were false because of their relative lack of world model. These sorts of things fall apart in real time conversation, which is why we don't get to see many such real-time conversations and interviews. This can cause more deception in terms of people's impressions/belief formation: taking them seriously results in worse decision making on my end and in the federal bureaucracy. They are more vulnerable to groupthink pressure from their supporters in multiple areas of policy, whereas Trump isn't as bound by narrow alliances, elites, or even by stupid populist pressures despite being fairly populist. I think that's all upside, with the potential downside of personalist dictatorship risk: though I think that risk would be much higher yet with a younger more popular candidate and the candidates of the 2028 election if Trump is not elected. (will return to this later)
5. I am also worried about democratic concerns, especially in terms of freedom. That said:
On Sam's other arguments you responded to:
On a final, less related note: Trump is ironically more politically centrist than Harris. His rhetoric allows him to appease the Republicans without going as socially conservative or staffing the government with as many Republican appointees. Democratic admins are increasingly one party states with extreme groupthink, whereas a Trump admin in practice will likely be far more politically balanced even if he purges a ton of people and brings in a few nuts. You can look at party affiliations of appointees over time if you are skeptical of that claim.
I disagree with most of your points.[1] But even if I didn't, it would be unclear to me how those considerations outweigh Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, which you barely address.
What Trump and his supporters did in the wake of the 2020 election is a pretty central example of an attempted self-coup. To recap, Trump filed hundreds of lawsuits in all of the swing states to attempt to get ballots thrown out. He asked on Twitter for votes not to be counted. He begged and pleaded the Georgia Secretary of State to overturn Biden's victory in the state. He successfully got fake Electoral College certificates in seven different states. He urged Mike Pence to overturn the election for him, and after that didn't work, he chose a running mate this year that said he would have overturned the election if he were in Pence's place.
This is not the kind of thing that has ever happened before in a national election in a democratic country (that remained democratic afterward).
So, unless you have a counter-example in mind, we have to confront the fact that the United States is in a reference class with a very real risk of transitioning to an autocracy. And, notwithstanding some unfree, anti-market policies promoted by the Democratic party and the existence of woke journalists, the United States under Democratic rule is still a much better place to pursue EA projects (or pretty much any kind of large-scale enterprise) than any existing autocratic or hybrid regime.
[1] Here are some of my disagreements, in no particular order:
I think you're misremembering an offhand comment he made on a podcast in June. He said that he would give green cards automatically to foreign graduates of US colleges, which does sound great, but then his campaign walked back on that promise after the (predictable) backlash from his supporters.
Trump's last administration definitely cracked down on high-skilled legal immigration; it's unclear why he'd do a 180 in his next administration.
If you want people to have more children, it's unclear why you'd support a candidate whose primary policy goal is to prevent immigrants from providing affordable services to Americans.
Trump once hired his personal bodyman (literally the guy who carried his bags around, John McEntee) as Director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, who then performed a witch hunt in federal agencies, targeting everyone who wasn't MAGA enough or who made the mistake of liking a Taylor Swift Instagram post and replacing them with zealots. Trump seems to hire people on the basis of sycophancy rather than merit; many of his appointees had no expertise in the areas they were supposed to lead and even denied scientific consensus (e.g. Scott Pruitt).
In his next administration, Trump plans to fire tens of thousands of non-political federal government workers (including scientists and experts) and replace them with loyalists. This is a very clear indication that he values zealotry over expertise and merit. So I don't think it makes sense to claim that Trump would hire more competent people, when he transparently cares way less about competence than Democrats do.
This is very much not true. JD Vance has hinted that he'd support federal surveillance of interstate travel to prevent women from getting abortions; the federal government could ban mifepristone nationally if Trump is elected (which Project 2025 recommends), and Republican trifecta could, of course, pass a national abortion ban.
I mean TFR (total fertility rate) is falling everywhere, but it's at least plausible that preventing people from higher-TFR countries immigrating to lower-TFR countries will increase net number of children. (Just narrowly making a claim about the logical implication; not saying that I endorse this policy).
Hi. Thanks for your comment. I thought about it some. I'm inclined to disagree with the comment more after thinking about it, compared to when I initially read it. I'll try to give some non-exhaustive reasons below.
Re 1: I did bring it up first, sorry. But I don't think whether Iraq War is actually more or less important than PEPFAR is a central crux for me; Trump isn't running against Bush. So probably not worth getting into much detail. Two quick points I will quickly contest that he opposed the Iraq War before it happened (as opposed to claiming so much later). re: "this reflects someone that was unusually thoughtful/changed their mind early relative to public convo (and their political party) at the time." I don't know if this was what you had in mind, but I want to note that Trump was a Democrat at the time.
Re 2: I think we broadly agree then that Trump is worse for animal welfare, and that this isn't the most important question for this election. I do think this subclaim is confused "Right now, to the degree there are any health trade-offs, the veganism focus tends to make the EA coalition intellectually weaker and more politically polarized," as in it ties together two mostly unrelated things.
Re 3: This comment feels wrong to me but I feel like I'm not qualified/knowledgeable enough to assess this.
Re 4: "On competence: I think Trump has more of a world model than Biden or Harris, does more reasoning for himself, and yet also delegates more decision making." But independent thinking and world models are only good if it systematically leads you to have more correct beliefs! Note that there is a pretty obvious tension with your later comment "My main observation is that he and his people really do think the election was stolen from them." I think you need to believe one of:
A. Trump's independent thinking leads him to believe false(r) things, and this is good.
B. Trump's independent thinking leads him to believe true(r) things, and he was correct in believing that the election was stolen from him.
C. Trump's independent thinking leads him to believe true(r) things, the heuristic misfired this one time, but it pays off in other important areas. (which ones?)
Note that being wrong about the election has massive downstream consequences!
"Trump is also more willing to fire people whether for competence or personal loyalty, but the net result is more competence in decision making relative to the incentives provided by not firing people for anything other than scandals" Do you have empirical evidence here? It's easy to form a toy model where firing people for insufficient loyalty is worse for competency than not firing people (many people would consider this to be a major issue for Biden's inner circle).
"On character, I think Trump is just braver, more independent, and has a more valuable form of honesty despite being a chronic exaggerator" He's auditioning to be one of the most powerful people in the world! I really don't think a lack of "bravery" is anywhere near the most likely failure mode!
More importantly, I think a lot of what you see as heroically not falling prey to groupthink I see as "soon to be 82-year-old in an extremely powerful position doesn't listen to others and trusts his own gut over other voices or objective reality." If you have more examples of him coming to object-level true beliefs over expert-led consensus (even including all the problems that experts have) I'm willing to be swayed here; but the comment as it stands feels like applying rationalist-y local catechisms to a very different context.
"California isn't doing well" Huh? Not sure how much responsibility Harris has for California's status but also it's one of the richest places in the country and people's most common complaint is the lack of housing.
"On being able to deal with people honestly: When talking with people from other countries who focus on foreign policy, most experts I engaged with from ally countries thought Trump and his admin were easier to deal with than Biden." I have no way to verify this. I agree that this may be good evidence for you. (I feel similarly about the rest of this section)
Re 5:
(Some of your other claims in this section also seem implausible to me. Not addressing everything).
"It doesn't matter if QAnon dude on the internet says unhinged stuff when Republican appointees and their staff aren't actually as crazy or coerced into non-sensical beliefs." Eh, more than half of Republican Congresspeople say they don't believe climate change is caused by humans. This isn't even getting into the culture war stuff, where Republicans place more prominence on culture war issues than Democrats do, and are kinda crazy about it. I don't think most EAs, or most Americans, would view Republican elected officials as more "normal" in their beliefs and values than Democrat elected officials.
In general I find it very confusing when people take wokeness that seriously as an issue. I live in what has got to be literally one of the wokest places on the planet (Berkeley) and I can't say wokeness is more than a minor inconvenience in my day-to-day life. Both NIMBYism and car culture have more clear and negative ramifications in my day-to-day life, for context.
(I think you also haven't explained why you think people will be more woke if Harris wins than if Trump does; many of my ~centrist friends would consider 2020 to be peak woke)
"(minor note) Where in Trump's Jan 6th speech does he praise dictators?" I'm pretty sure I've never said this. Maybe you just misread my comment?
"I'm not surprised JD emotionally reacted in the way he did to the Trump assassination attempt." ???? What. Basic emotional regulation for your political speech acts is kind of a bare minimum for the VP job description? The guy's not applying for some junior programmer job in a tech company. He's applying to be (among others) in charge of the US nuclear arsenal in a not-that-unlikely event that an 82-year old dies or is otherwise incapacitated. Being "emotional" is very much not an excuse here.
re: science, labor, and natalism, I still stand by what I originally said.
re: immigration. I don't buy this line of reasoning narrowly. Biden specifically pushed for a bipartisan bill for border control that Trump shut down. I also don't buy the argument spiritually. Something about it just feels very off.
(I also note that you conflated "high-skilled" with "legal" and "low-skilled" with "illegal").
re: ai, I kinda feel like "I think a lot of the good stuff is likely to come back in a Trump admin even if the whole order were cut at the start. " sounds like wishful thinking to me. But the more positive vision here is that the future is not set in stone. If Trump wins, I hope many people, ideally people who can honestly stand him, will try to work actively with the Trump admin in e.g. being minimally sane and preventing ideological capture by e/accs, at least.
(I'd also be interested in you listing specific sections of the White House EO that you think should be cut, though it's not cruxy for me).
I agree that under some reasonable definitions Trump is more politically centrist than Harris. But I also think the most concerning issues, or greatest opportunities for improvement, are neither right- or left- wing. Eg authoritarianism is neither left nor right.
Thanks Linch!
Re 1, I think we are on the same page now. I'll consider his Iraq war views as basically not strong evidence either way.
Re 2, I don't think the second part is confused, but agree it is not relevant to Trump, just strategy selection for EAs.
Re 3, this is something I'd put like ~80% credence in, and I think it is more important than most points. The 20% comes from increased volatility/unpredictability.
Re 4, I believe C, and put a very low probability on B. I think it was rational for Trump, given his info state, to believe that he lost at least one state due to illegal voting. I think the vast majority of spammy claims and cases Republicans pressed were not credible at all, and I don't know how to feel about these overall in terms of norm decay, vs. attempting to get the legal system to check a lot of potential claims quickly when you don't yet have good evidence (I oppose anyone that was knowingly making false claims/cases). I do think their worries about mail-in ballots and vulnerability to illegal voting are justified, and that there is a lot gov could do to increase justified confidence in the elections. The states close to or below 1% margins went D with mail-in votes: its not surprising mail-in votes were more D heavy, but it's easy to see why they thought they got cheated. I'm pretty sure things like the Electronic Registration Information Center don't work super well given that I received mail in ballots and political calls for places I deregistered and no longer lived.
On the part about firing, see this NBER paper. It is necessary to firing people for political reasons to increase competency, and the left purges the bureaucracy more thoroughly that the right historically, granting the left cost advantages for programs they want. The problem is choosing good programs to do.
Re: Resisting expert pressure areas I think Trump made good decisions despite expert pressure:
- High confidence: Energy policy (also in Europe) + strategy for getting allies and NATO to pay more, negotiating the Abraham accords.
- Medium confidence: his version of the Afghan pullout strategy (keeping Bagram), striking Soleimani, using tariffs to renegotiate trade deals (though bad execution in some areas)
- Mixed: COVID: bad cuts (justified citing CFHS on the U.S. being the most prepared), bad to initially downplay, good on travel relative to experts at the time, good to do Operation Warp Speed and push for earlier scaling, inconsistent on masks, good on re-opening earlier and schools.
On Harris' record: It's fair she didn't have much influence on CA policy and wasn't in a good position to influence much in Congress either. The bills she's proposed would have cost more than $20 trillion by now, but those didn't pass and may have just been to send signals.
I agree you have no reason to take anything I say on expert interviews at face value. I think your set of views is reasonable to have given your network.
Re 5: Due to greater economic policy rationality, explicit false beliefs on climate change that are typical of many Republicans are less costly in practice than Democrat implicit false beliefs on climate trade-offs. Texas is building more clean energy capacity than basically everywhere else in the U.S. combined. Environmental reviews, lawsuits, and over regulation of nuclear power are all issues that largely come from the left and make it hard to do any construction that would reduce emissions. Because climate is a virtue signaling topic for the left, typical proposals sacrifice more value than they could hope to save due to uneconomical spending proposals and bans (e.g. on pipelines with allies, fracking, etc.) To be fair, Harris has shifted to be pro-fracking now I think, but she did propose $10 Trillion in climate spending before. We could debate the merits of the Paris agreement pull out and I agree the U.S. should be more energy efficient per capita, but fundamentally it doesn't make sense to handicap the U.S. economy more than the Chinese economy and have allies free-ride on U.S. defense spending at the same time.
Agree that NIMBYism and car culture pose big problems and conservatives can be worse on both, though as Dems control the cities and the policies that drive cost growth in them, I think they are more to blame in the worst cases. As an example, the environmental review to even look at digging another metro tunnel under the bay was set to cost a billion dollars. In the bay most of the NIMBY arguments complain about gentrification, stopping greedy developers, and protecting the environment. For national policy, Trump's head of HUD claimed to be anti-NIMBY and aimed to condition HUD funding on local zoning reform. That said, Walz is YIMBY too, the Biden admin does seem to be trying harder to increase housing supply now, and some of the permitting form looks potentially promising provided lots of the things they add on don't become veto points. Overall, I do think conservatives will be more NIMBY in the suburbs, but will open more areas to development and lower crime in a manner that facilitates relatively more urban density.
In terms of reducing wokeness there's both policy and attitudes. A Trump admin can continue repealing policies that incentivize and force people and companies to be more woke if they want to succeed or to defend rights that have little to do with discrimination. At the same time, people being mad about Trump will increase woke reactions, so that's fair and I am not sure how things net out on polarization. Causing the far right to go nuts doesn't sound great either when they have all the guns, but either way I don't want to be held hostage by extremist reactions.
On the praise for dictators thing, I misinterpreted your comma. Disregard.
Re: JD's statements around the assassination: I directionally agree, though if we consistently apply the standard that people who publicly jumps to conclusions about responsibility in response to violent events shouldn't be in office, then I'm not sure that many presidents/VPs reach the bar.
On immigration: my understanding was that the border proposal was unacceptable because it explicitly tolerates allowing just under 5,000 people in per day via illegal border crossings rather than via border control points. If this specific claim is not true, that would substantially change my view of how bad his opposition to the border compromise is.
On AI I share the same hopes as you. I don't want ideological capture by e/accs or EAs though, because both are too myopic. I want them counter balancing each other, and I want tech acceleration mostly focused on things other than AI and narrow/harder to abuse applications of AI. I think we need substantial growth to deal with the debt burden, and generate enough value to have more positive-sum politics and foreign policy. At the same time, I think it is hard to directly attack most of the EO as stated. One issue is largely on how the involvement of the government to assure that AI increases equity will lead to a lot of negative-sum behavior and censorship that has nothing to do with safety. Thiel sometimes articulates the more extreme version of the longer-term concern in terms of authoritarianism, but that seems further off.
Overall, I agree the biggest threats and opportunities aren't necessarily right or left wing. I feel now like I have a few points on foreign policy and immigration policy that could cause me to make large updates if I find more decisive counter-evidence to my current position. I think it may take me longer to sort through cruxes/points of info that would make me decisively more fearful of dictatorship risk.
(Quickly noting for casual readers that I didn't say all the things or hold all the views that this comment ascribed to me, though no particular detail was especially egregious. Just wanted to provide a heads-up for any onlookers to reread my own comments to understand any specific claims I make; people who know me well can also DM for clarifications).
To quickly clarify what I mean by "confused,"
I mean that I expect veganism's health tradeoffs and political polarization to almost be entirely independent of each other. It could be the case that veganism has no health tradeoffs but nonetheless EA should not focus on it because there is extreme political political polarization. It could also be the case that veganism has many health costs but its support is divided equally among partisan lines.
I also would be surprised if there's a strong correlational case. In general the world isn't that neat.
So I basically think your claim is pretty close to formally invalid. I'm a bit surprised people haven't noticed this even after I pointed it out initially.
Note that, according to wikipedia:
Elon bought Twitter in October 2022, after the program had already been online for a while. I don't know whether any important details changed after Elon joining, nor whether twitter already had plans to expand the program. So I don't know how much credit Elon should get here vs. the previous owners of Twitter.
That's fair. I would like to see better analysis of the responsibility chain here.
I appreciate you writing all of this up, thank you.
One byproduct of having reasonable people argue for the potential upsides of both candidates, is that it leads me to somewhat not just think, “oh, we’re absolutely doomed if X person becomes president.” Rather, that there may be reasonable arguments that both candidates could handle some area decently well, and I’m ever conscious, or trying to be, of negativity bias in the news. Maybe leaves some room for the optimistic observers or something.
Saying that, I will note this list from a comment on the original thread by Samuel Hammond, as something I’m not sure is addressed above re Jan 6th but does put me more on the side of “Trump as a threat to democracy side”. But I also haven’t independently evaluated these claims either. Just thought I’d contribute what I can in the moment:
“Trump’s threat to democracy and his overt willingness to break laws in order to hold on to power is NOT just about Jan 6. It is not n=1. There are multiple shocking and blatant examples of Trump’s attempts to undermine the election prior to the day of Jan 6. This includes use of false slate of electors (people illegally purported to be elected electors) to go to state governments to discount the vote of millions of Americans; the orders to members of his DOJ to send letters to states lying about corruption in the elections to have them overturned (in which DOJ officials en masse threatened to resign if Trump placed Clark as AG to do so); he called Raffensperger (Georgia’s SOS) as a private citizen for him to search for the exact number of votes he needed to win and threatened legal action; on the day of Jan 6, he told his VP to illegally throw out 81 million votes; and countless of many other examples.
Why is Pence not his running mate? How come many of the people he worked with before are not a part of his campaign? Because he made it clear that his 2nd term will have nothing but yes-men, and it is very unlikely they would have the courage like Pence or Jeffrey Rosen. Vance already said that Pence should have listened to Trump and throw out the votes. The "guardrails" that stopped him the first time wouldn't be there.”
And FWIW I’d be happy to discover all of the above list is also kinda unsubstantiated. May check them out independently if I have time.
I share this concern. I find the Georgia case very sketchy. There are other claims I haven't dug into as much yet.
My main observation is that he and his people really do think the election was stolen from them. In their media bubble you'll see stuff like surveys of non-U.S. citizens where double digit percentage say they vote: enough to sway some states that Trump lost if you extrapolate (but maybe this is complete disinfo?). Because they believe (whether their beliefs are accurate or not) that the democratic rules are already being hacked/broken against them, they want to get as close to cheating as possible (and some probably do want to just break rules fully). It is true that census resident counts (independent from citizenship) shape the electoral college numbers, and thus manipulating illegal immigration does directly contribute votes to whoever wins states with disproportionate shares of illegal immigrants.
I think all these forms of defection are unacceptable. We can't have the Dems playing the Rajneeshi strategy and the Republicans playing voter suppression. Dems have been serious about election security in the past, but right now Republicans at least superficially seem more serious about fixing things, because concessions from the Dems would play into the Trump narrative. OTOH, it wouldn't surprise me if the reforms proposed by Republicans to make voting easier and more secure include poison pills?
But anyway the core point I am making here is that the most important thing to do for coup proofing/election hacking is to establish more broadly/justifiably credible election integrity. There is a path to do it that Republicans will agree to, but the Dems can't for narrative reasons + the view that stronger voter ID laws are voter suppression (which they could be if changed very close to an election).
Separate from narrative, many Dems dislike the electoral college in general because it does geographically bias against what they'd get with popular voting. This is a general problem for scaling democracy in a mutually beneficial manner: smaller states/coalitions need disproportionate power to have incentive to join, or they can expect their interests to be decisively vetoed all the time. It's why the UN and EU don't do anything by population popular vote either.
I am skeptical that there is very much correlation between between the actual level of election integrity and the perceived level of election integrity by heavily partisan individuals. It is difficult to prove a negative. There are so many ways one could allegedly tamper with the election results, and a fair number of people seem to need ~0 evidence to believe they are truly happening (e.g., allegations of local officials dropping off premarked ballots by the truckload).
To fix the problem from a stability standpoint, an election integrity system would have to be strong enough to credibly disprove malicious lies told to a hyperpartisan audience. That is much harder than actually ensuring the integrity of elections. (And even that is harder than the task securing most things because of the limitations imposed by the need for ballot privacy.)
Agreed - I haven't looked very closely here either, but eg "Fox, Dominion reach $787M settlement over election claims" seems like a robust signal. https://apnews.com/article/fox-news-dominion-lawsuit-trial-trump-2020-0ac71f75acfacc52ea80b3e747fb0afe
Agree that's a strong signal!
That sounds to me like a reason not to elect him? Self-deceiving for personal gain (endemic though it is 😔) is not a positive trait for a president to have.
re: 1, do you have a source on Trump opposing the Iraq war before it started? I couldn't find any evidence of this (in contrast to eg Obama's outspoken and very unambiguous opposition).
I had thought I found a more credible source before and this is all I can find on search engines now. TL;DR: there isn't a public record of his opposition before the war started, and the person who claims he did oppose the war before it started primarily talks about right after it started and would have political incentives to lie or misremember. Will update the claim.
Another more balanced piece I appreciated: https://open.substack.com/pub/noahpinion/p/why-trump-or-harris-might-fail-to?r=128a6t&utm_medium=ios
To be honest this reads much more like "The EA case for Mitt Romney" or "The EA case for generic republican" than "The EA case for Trump" specifically. That not necessarily unreasonable, but I think it might be worth distinguishing between the two, especially because there are many ways that Trump seems noticeably worse than a generic republican from an EA (or really from any) perspective.
1. Trade: Trump and Vance are terrible on trade, especially if you care about citizens of foreign countries in addition to Americans. Beyond the immediate consequences of increasingly restrictionist trade policy, it seems like there is a serious long term risk from letting the Republican party get taken over by a restrictionist faction.
2. Foreign Policy: Foreign Policy is obviously very complicated, and I don't feel comfortable talking authoritatively here, but I find it very hard to imagine how one could make the EA case for an American first foreign policy. We should care deeply about our international role, and work hard to cooperate constructively with other countries and promote democratic/liberal values. Again it seems like there is a serious long term risk from letting the Republican party get taken over by an isolationist faction.
3. Immigration: Many republicans do favor increasing high skill immigration, but I do not think Trump is one of them. You cite a link to an article about Trump agreeing with a proposal to give green cards to foreign students who graduate (certain?) American colleges, but the same exact article says that Trump's campaign immediately walked that statement back. Trump has a habit of endorsing many different contradictory policy positions, which makes it easy for potential supporters to convince themselves that he will support their preferred policies, but I think that this impulse is mostly cope.
Furthermore, many of the people he is is likely to place in charge of immigration policy (e.g. Stephen Miller) seem completely opposed to all types of immigration. Maybe Trump would achieve the immigration equivalent of Nixon going to China, but I think it's unlikely, especially if it requires bipartisan legislation (Trump seems uniquely good at scaring democrats away from working with him). Perhaps most importantly, Trump has really awoken and strengthened a nativist portion of the Republican Party that opposes immigration full stop, and I think that anyone who cares about increasing any type of immigration should want to see this faction discredited within the Republican party. I find it extremely hard to imagine that republican legislators who secretly want to pass some sort of bipartisan immigration reform package that includes increases to high-skilled immigration will be able to do so when Trump has control of the Republican party
4. Long term survival/health of important American institutions:
You write that "longtermism ... is best thought of as a civilizational project, as our capacity to coordinate across generations and survive Black Swan events is largely downstream of competent institutions and high-functioning cultures."
This I agree with very strongly, but if you take this seriously, it suggests that you should care a lot more about preserving important institutions than short/medium term policy (even important policies). Trump has done a huge amount of damage to our institutions with his stop the steal stuff, his attacks on the press and basic truth in general, and also through the partisan response of many liberal institutions to his presidency. For me, this is the number one reason why another Trump presidency could be extremely dangerous.
There is probably more to say on climate change as well, but this comment is long enough already.
To recap, I think this article does a good job of making the case certain republican policy positions, but Trump is leading the faction of the Republican Party that wants to move away from almost all of their policies that I actually like. The Republican Party and the country would be much healthier without him, and that requires him losing.
At a more meta level:
Given that EA is a fairly liberal space, I think it is interesting and useful to consider arguments that certain conservative policies are actually better at advancing global welfare. I think some parts of this blog post did that pretty well, and I found them pretty thought provoking. As I said before, if this article were titled "The EA case for generic republican" then I would have viewed it rather positively.
However it was titled "The EA case for Trump 2024".
I do not think that the decision on who to vote for this election is remotely close, especially for EAs. Donald Trump poses a unique threat to American democracy and to a global word order that promotes peace, prosperity, and human rights.
At the beginning of the post you said "The title of this post is somewhat tongue-in-cheek as I am not (exactly) an Effective Altruist nor do I speak for anyone in the EA movement."
And yet (predictably) when I originally ran across this blog post on twitter, the vast majority of engagements were versions of people saying "oh I guess effective altruists really are evil capitalist facists".
It is fairly common to see someone who is not an EA writes a badly reasoned and maximally provocative article about how EA values actually support bad (often right-wing) policies to an audience that is also primarily not EAs, and then the takeaway from the audience is a gross mischaracterization of what EA actually represents.
This is extremely frustrating and demoralizing and bad for the public image of EA, and we should recognize it and push back whenever we see it happen.
On a meta-level,
I will likely write a very critical object-level comment later.
In some ways quite literally, e.g. due to demographics.
This post is mis-categorised as Community; it is about the external world, not the EA community. I'm confused why it would be tagged as such.
Huh, very sad this post is downvoted. I disagree with a lot of it, but it seemed like a genuine attempt at argument and reasoning and thinking about stuff, and on the margin much more valuable than a pro-democrats post, which I am pretty sure would not have been downvoted in the same way.
I think any genuine attempt needs to acknowledge that Trump tried to overturn the election he lost.
I'm all for discussing the policies, but here it's linked to "EAs should vote for Trump" and that demands that it assesses all the important consequences. (Also, arguing for a political candidate is against Forum norms. I wouldn't like a pro-Harris case)
Yeah, I agree that this is the biggest hole in the article and think that omission is indeed pretty bad (and I commented with basically exactly that on Twitter a few days ago).
I disagree in absolute terms (a lot of these things seem like a stretch), but I think it's plausible/probable that it's better than average than a pro-Democrat post, and likely the latter will be upvoted way more.
Fortunately nobody has written a pro-Harris post for us to directly analyze the counterfactual.
I also disagree that this post seems genuine. The author is clearly well informed and yet has left out the most glaring red flags of another Trump presidency, instead painting a picture of what a typical rational actor at the head of a democractic goverment might do. This feels misinformed at best and misleading at worst.
I think it's a mistake to try to predict Donald Trump's behavior in a second term based on any previous policy-specific statements or actions as he has clearly demonstrated his propensity to lie and say anything in order to gain power. If elected, Trump will consolidate power (as he already has to an alarming extent) and will no longer need to satisfy constituents (other than the ultra-rich). He will see AI as just another tool he can wield to gain and maintain his own power. Would you have wanted Hitler to have gotten the atomic bomb first if he had pledged to regulate nuclear power?
Comment I wrote on Samuel's substack:
I think this is an interesting kind of article, but I don't buy the AI point, which is the most cruxy one for me.
I think rent control is bad policy, but I think it's intellectually indefensible to not also note the various housing-restrictive things Trump has championed: e.g. https://www.donaldjtrump.com/agenda47/agenda47-ending-bidens-war-on-the-suburbs-that-pushes-the-american-dream-further-from-reach and https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/president-donald-j-trump-protecting-suburbs-preserving-american-dream-americans/. Vance has also framed this as a demand issue due to illegal immigrants rather than as a supply side issue, which is obvious nonsense and also in deep tension with his pronatalist position. You also fail to consider how a 10% tariff on goods imported into the country would affect construction costs (my guess: not good) or how mass deportation of an enormous proportion of the construction labor force would affect it (my guess: also not good).
I would also note that, for all the flaws of the Biden–Harris administration on housing, more houses are being built during their administration than during Trump's.
In general I find that a lot of your arguments are extremely one-sided in that they ignore very obvious counterarguments and fail to make the relevant comparisons on the same issue.
For example, on innovation policy, I think it's fair to praise the Trump administration for Operation Warp Speed, though this was a bipartisan effort that was enacted while Harris was a Senator, so she should also get credit for it. On the other hand, the Trump administration would do a lot of things that would be awful for innovation policy, including restricting immigration, making the US more culturally hostile to highly educated immigrants, increasing costs via 10% across-the-board tariffs, and reducing the fiscal resources available to subsidize innovation.
Strong downvoted on this basis.
My take is that most of the points raised here are second-order points, and actually the biggest issue in this election is how democratic the future of America will be. But having said that, it's not clear which side is overall better on this front:
Bureaucracy point seems potentially reasonable to me, although hard to say if that exactly equates to less/more democratic or just worse domestic situation.
The cover up of bidens mental state is "highly undemocratic"? that would be not in the top 1000 least democratic things trump/republicans have done in the last 8 years.
You don't have to just trust media portrayals or ex-advisor testimonies to know how authoritarian Trump is, much of this stuff is publicly available online and you can just look at primary sources. For example, the full Trump call to Georgia Sectary of State is uploaded to Youtube (I linked to the part where he started yelling but honestly the entire call, which you can listen to, is imo pretty damning). Trump afterwards Tweeted
Which is interesting because Raffensperger patiently responded to every allegation over a call lasting a whole hour.
Thanks very much for writing this very interesting post.
Is there much reason for optimism about specifically safety-orientated policy (e.g. RSPs, evals) from a future Trump administration, as opposed to policies than advance US AI vs China?
Where did you get this “allocative efficiency” and “innovative efficiency” definition? I have not seen this before (I studied and taught economics for ~25 years)
I'm sorry but this post is absurd and absolutely misses the point. It's no longer hyperbole to say that voting for Trump is voting to end democracy and institute dictatorship in the USA with a Hitler-like character at the helm. If you are at all skeptical about that statement then you are uninformed.
Here are some bullet points of why a second Trump presidency will be completely unlike the first:
Trump's "rhetoric" is not rhetoric. When he unapologetically says he wants to be dictator on day 1 in countless interviews, even when confronted on his seriousness about it and given chances to back down, that can no longer be considered rhetoric. When he tells people they won't need to vote anymore after this election that's not rhetoric. There's a reason his own vice president said he went back and forth on wondering if Trump was "America's hitler".
When he continues to make baseless claims and builds a large cult following around the idea of election fraud in 2020 even though those claims were widely investigated and found to be completely unsubstantiated, and then talks about getting retribution against people who have rigged the system against him, that's not rhetoric. If you're rationalist and value intellectual integrity how can you support one of the greatest gas lighters in history?
When he gives glowing reviews of other authoritarians like Putin and Xi Jinping that's not rhetoric.
The idea that anyone who is remotely interested in EA and doing good in the world can even considering supporting Trump is atrocious and makes me sad.
I think describing anyone "Hitler-like" is pretty bad for the discourse quality, especially if you don't support it with arguments. Autocrats differ quite a lot. For example, while Trump is extremely dismissive of democracy and willing to undermine it, he's not as ideologically driven as Hitler and mostly interested in power and praise.
I am also extremely worried about Trump being elected, and agree with your list of bullet points being very concerning. However, it's not certain that Trump would succeed in destroying US democracy.
I am curating relevant forecasts [on Manifold] (https://manifold.markets/news/us-democracy). Some relevant ones:
All these are very concerning, but not certainties. Also, they all depend on specific resolution criteria and I wish there were more forecasters on these questions (so please join & promote it among friends!)
That said, I agree with your broader point that focusing on a few disparate policies while ignoring the undermining is democracy makes this not a great post. (Although I like the fact that specific policies can be discussed here, and some can still be positive!)
Thanks for your response. To be clear, you are aware of these Hitler-like facts regarding Donald Trump (just to list the ones that first come to mind):
I would apologize for the relatively undiplomatic nature of my writing but the time for long-winded slow-moving discourse is long passed. There are barely 3 months left until the 2024 election which may prove to be one of the singular most important moments in human history.
If anyone is still undecided on this subject, please set aside a day this week to do your own research, come to a conclusion, and get to work. We need you.
I don't think all of the examples are reliable indicators, but I agree policy changes, declarations, and executive orders are clear demonstrations of intent. On specifics:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-very-fine-people/
The "stigmatize opponents as Nazis" tactic wins short-term but undermines epistemics and amplifies long-term conflict by reducing info access and the viability of reasonable dissent.
People with stigmatized beliefs hide them to keep their friends, and others become more sensitive to detect them. False-positive and false-negative rates go up. False accusations polarize victims and mobs while true accusations lose credibility as people cry wolf. Some associate with stigmatized people when they don't intend to, others avoid associating with people that don't even hold stigmatized views for their correlated reasonable views.
As all want every vote they can get, each side competes to stigmatize the other, while dog whistling to extremists to gain support without spooking the center. It's a big defection trap we should step back from, and focusing directly on policy helps avoid distraction.
I think Trump would crack down on illegal immigration. I'd be unhappy if it goes beyond throwing out criminals with victims and illegal immigrants consuming more than they make. I doubt it will be as extreme as what he says, because few things ever are and it wasn't before, but I do worry about downside risk. As things are, I worry more about status quo and downside risks with Harris on immigration outcomes and policy.
I think it’s important to get the facts right and to present the best case when trying to persuade someone who disagreees with you to change their mind.
This one is a bad example. When I first heard he’d said this, as an Australian my initial reaction was ‘he probably means that they won’t need to if they don’t want to, voting isn’t compulsory in the US and an insane amount of resources seems be spent each election on getting people to vote at all’. And sure enough, when asked by journalists what he’d meant, he said that Christians tend not to vote in these elections, and so he’s trying to convince them they should do so in this election because he’ll ban abortion and then they can go back to their non-voting.
This seems overly charitable to someone who literally tried to overturn a fair election and ticked all the boxes of a wannabe-autocrat back in 2018 already (as described in the excellently researched How Democracies Die). I don't think Trump will be able to stay in power without elections, but imo he's likely to try something (if his health allows it). This seems like standard dog whistling tactics to me, but of course I can't prove that.
It not about being charitable, it’s about what is the most straightforward explanation. I agree he is anti democratic, but this is not an example of that, and it makes it harder to convince people when you lump true and false things in together.
I wrote a rebuttal, if anyone is interested: https://amerex.substack.com/p/effective-altruism-and-donald-trump
Could you please make the title "My case for Trump 2024" or even just "The case for Trump 2024"? It would be a more accurate description of this piece, and you are hurting EA's reputation a bit with the current title.
It seems like a fair title to me, the post is about arguing for Trump based on specifically EA premises. The phrase "the X case for Y" doesn't preclude there being an "X case for not Y".
IMO it's pretty outrageous to make a piece entitled "The EA case for [X]" when you yourself do not call yourself identify as an effective altruist and the [X] in question is extremely toxic to most everyone on the outside. It's like if I made a piece "the feminist case for Benito Mussolini" where I made clear that I am not a feminist but feminists should be supporting Mussolini.
That seems not true to me? Trump and Kamala are roughly equally popular.
I guess I don't share your intuition there. Obviously you should try to accurately represent feminist premises and drive sound inferences, and object-level criticisms would be very appropriate if you failed in this, but the writing such a post itself seems fine to me if it passed the ideological turing test. It reminds me of how students and lawyers often have to write arguments for something from the perspective of someone else, even if they don't believe it.
It seems very strange to me to think that this post is bad, but a word-for-word identical post would be good if the author self-identified as an EA. The title is meant to describe the content of the post, and the post is about how EA premises might support Trump.
Re: extremely toxic, most people who would see this post are left-wing, that is obvious.
I don't think that a word-for-word identical where the author self-identified as an EA would be good. I think it would be less bad, and I might not clamor for the title to be changed.
The problem is that this post blew up on Twitter and a lot of people's image of EA was downgraded because of it. To me, that's very unfair; this post is wrong on the substance, this is an extremely unpopular opinion within EA, and the author doesn't even identify as an EA so the post does not provide any evidence that people who identify as EA think this way. Changing the title would alleviate most of the reputational damage to EA (or well it would have if it was done earlier) and does not seem too big an ask.