Candidate Scoring System recommendations for the Democratic presidential primaries

(Sorry for late reply)

First, did you see the truthfulness part? I rated candidates per their average truth/lies to the public, according to PolitiFact. That's not identical to what you're asking about, but may be of interest.

Biden does relatively poorly. Sanders does well, though (and I haven't factored this in, maybe I should) he seems to have a more specific and serious trend of presenting misleading narratives about the economy. Warren does well, though I did dock some points for some specifically significant lies. Bloomberg seems to be doing quite well, though he has less of a track record so it's harder to be sure.

OTOH, it seems like you're primarily concerned about epistemics within an administration - that there might be some kinds of political correctness standards. I've docked points from Trump because there have been a number of cases of this under his watch. Among Democrats, I feel there would be more risk of it with Sanders, because of how many of his appointments/staff are likely to come from the progressive left. Even though he's perceived as a rather unifying figurehead as far as the culture wars are concerned, he would likely fare worse from your angle. But I feel this is too speculative to include. I can't think of any issues where the 'redpill' story, if true, would be very important for the federal government to know about. And there will not be a lot of difference between candidates here.

EA forum user Bluefalcon has pointed out that Warren's plan to end political appointments to the Foreign Service may actually increase groupthink because the standard recruitment pipeline puts everyone through very similar paces and doctrine. Hence, I've recently given slightly fewer points to Warren's foreign policy than I used to.

Also, Gabbard says she's been vegan for a while and I think animal welfare is part of it, not just religion. She said the treatment of animals in factory farms breaks her heart.

Good point. Increasing the weight by 40% until I or someone else does a better calculation.

I previously included wild animal suffering in the long run weight of animal welfare. Having looked at some of these links and reconsidering, I think I was over-weighting animal welfare's impact on wild animal suffering.

One objection here is that improving socioeconomic conditions can also broadly improve people's values. Generally speaking, increasing wealth and security promotes self-expression values, which correspond decently well to having a wide moral circle. So there's less general reason to single out moral issues like animal welfare as being a comparatively higher priority.

However, improving socioeconomic conditions also accelerates the date at which technological s-risks will present themselves. So in some cases, we are looking for differential moral progress. So this tells me to increase the weight of animal welfare for the long run. (It's overall slightly higher now than before.)

Another objection: a lot of what we perceive as pure moral concern vs apathy in governance could really be understood as a different tradeoff of freedom versus government control. It's straightforward in the case of animal farming or climate change that the people who believe in a powerful regulatory state are doing good whereas the small-government libertarians are doing harm. But I'm not sure that this will apply generally in the future.

Emerging tech is treated as an x-risk here, so s-risks from tech should be considered separately. In terms of determining weights and priorities I would sooner lump s-risks into growth and progress than into x-risks.

I don't see climate change policy as promoting better moral values. Sure, better moral values can imply better climate change policy, but that doesn't mean there's a link the other way. One of the reasons animal welfare uniquely matters here is that we think there is a specific phenomenon where people care less about animals in order to justify their meat consumption.

At the moment I can't think of other specific changes to make but I will keep it in mind and maybe hit upon something else.

kbog, maybe you should reach out to one of the writers for Vox's Future Perfect and ask what you could do to get an article there about your work?

I think you'd want to show the scores without weighting/aggregating across issues, and just leave "?" instead of the party priors when there's too little info, since Bayesianism might be too much for a more general audience. Articles ranking candidates on issues are pretty common.

One concern, though, is that readers will just use their own values which are not very EA-aligned (less concern for non-Americans, speciesist, less concern for the far future), or you'll have to omit issues which aren't EA enough, and then readers will complain that important issues have been left out. I don't think there's any way to win here, since the readers will have different values.

Another possibility is making an alignment quiz like https://www.isidewith.com/political-quiz

The first link, "CSS Model," is the one produced at the time of the most recent PDF report, and should be looked at for understanding the report.

The second link, "CSS model for current draft" is the file that can have more recent updates (e.g. new polling) and should be used if you want to get the most accurate scores, whether or not you insert your own weights.

I generally don't.

There are some reasons to think scandals will be as or more consequential in 2020 as they were in 2016: The executive branch under Trump could seize upon them to manipulate the election, and the mainstream media doesn't seem to recognize that they had central role in damaging Hillary. OTOH, most American elections in history have not been decided by scandals. The Comey letter that probably cost Hillary the election made for a somewhat unusual perfect storm. Swing voters will probably go into this knowing that Trump is more corrupt/scandalous - it's not like 2016 when Trump was a kind of unknown alternative. And the mainstream media might behave better this time, despite not publicly blaming themselves for 2016. For one thing, they won't assume that Trump will lose, which is likely what motivated the disproportionate coverage of the email scandal.

Anyway, scandals can happen to anyone and it's hard to differentiate stronger/weaker candidates without descending into tea-leaves divination.

I was previously worried about Biden-Ukraine, but as Vox pointed out, the coverage surrounding the Trump-Ukraine scandal doesn't seem to have hurt Biden either in the Dem primaries or in head-to-head polling against Trump.

There is Warren's deception about her ancestry. But that is kind of well known and internalized by now.

There have been other controversies turning up in the Dem primaries, most notably against Pete, and then we have the story that Bernie is a millionaire, but these are mostly things that bother highly politically engaged left wing voters, who are unrepresentative and likely to turn out for the Dems anyway.

Hm, I thought that 'air pollution' would be readily interpreted as including climate change.

I called it air pollution rather than climate change because I think it's perceived as a more convincing and less partisan term. And it's more correct, given that we're also addressing other consequences besides climate change.

I don't call it environment because we don't have evaluations regarding ground and water pollution but I could change it, if more people feel the same way.

These seem like small impacts on the national level. My comment on this dimension of wealth taxation is simply:

"Wealth taxes would also encourage more rapid spending on luxury consumption, political contributions, and philanthropy. It’s not clear if this is generally good or bad. Of course the tax would also reduce the amount of money that is ultimately available for the rich to use on these things, although the cap on political contributions means that it probably wouldn’t make much difference there."