I happen to believe this is misguided, but first I want to point out the irony in believing that politicization makes a movement less effective and yet fearing the awesome power of the social justice warriors.

Something can be "less effective" and "powerful" at the same time, if the power is misapplied. I find it very surprising and dispiriting that this needs to be explicitly pointed out, in a place like this.

I also stand by my previous comments, which are now hidden on EA Forum, but can still be viewed at ea.greaterwrong.com /posts/68TmDK6MrjfJgvA7p/introducing-landslide-coalition-an-ea-themed-giving-circle.

I think you should feel free to participate in politics as an individual, but I'm pretty uncomfortable with the EA movement developing an official ideology in an organic and ad-hoc way. It seems easy for a feedback loop to form where an ideology becomes associated with a particular group, and people who disagree with the ideology leave the group, and that strengthens the association. I know an online forum roughly as erudite as the EA forum where this happened in the opposite direction, and the majority of the participants (I believe) are voting for Trump (not because they like him but because they think the left is worse). (Notably, most users on this other forum are pseudonymous--I suspect this is a small thing which can make a big difference in the long run in terms of how a group's political beliefs evolve.)

I'm going to go ahead and try to explain the mindset of Trump supporters as I see it a little bit, not because I want anyone voting for him (please don't), but because I think it will be helpful for understanding considerations around getting involved in politics, and also because if you're going to try and change the votes of his supporters it helps to know what they're thinking.

Essentially I think the people who support Trump do so because their social media feed mostly shows examples of the media being dishonest, and the people who oppose Trump do so because their social media feed mostly shows examples of Trump being dishonest. I don't think it is unreasonable to be distrustful of the media. See Gell-Mann Amnesia, this overview of studies which show the dismal accuracy of newspapers, or this book which explains the dismal incentives of modern news publishers and why those incentives cause them to neglect the truth. Insofar as the media is inaccurate, I would expect them to favor Democrats--a 2014 survey found 4x as many journalists identify as Democrat than Republican. I would guess that the balance has worsened since 2014 due to the feedback loop I described above.

It does seem there have been cases where the press has been clearly unfair to Trump. Let's consider the "original" Trump scandal, the one where he supposedly said Mexicans were rapists.

When do we beat Mexico at the border? They’re laughing at us, at our stupidity.
...
When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

Here is the video of Trump saying the second bit. Note how he points to the audience as he says "They're not sending you"--i.e. suggesting that people in his audience are "Mexico's best people". I have never seen any media outlet point this out--it seems like his statement has been consistently presented so as to make Trump seem as xenophobic as possible. (By the way, Trump later referenced this article about coyotes who rape migrants to support his rapist claim.)

As a voter, my time to fact check stories is limited. So once I see two or three stories which seem clearly unfair on a deeper investigation, it doesn't seem totally unreasonable to wonder if most stories are unfair. In other words, the "corrupt establishment which is out to wreck Trump by any means possible" hypothesis becomes a hypothesis that does an OK job of explaining the data I see.

This theory of why people support Trump also explains why particular events have hurt his popularity in my view:

• Being a jerk to Joe Biden in the debate
• Coronavirus
• Trump's handling of BLM protests

I suspect the key issue is whether the event serves as a credible "out of band" signal of malfeasance on Trump's part--an event which requires relatively little trust in journalists to verify, and clearly indicates malfeasance even absent journalist editorializing.

You cite the fact that most EA survey respondents seem to oppose Trump. That's not a convincing argument in my view because of correlated errors. Young people in general oppose Trump and the EA movement skews young. Most EAs aren't analyzing political issues carefully and trying to come to conclusions from first principles; they're engaging in their spare time and reading what comes up in their feed. Reading people you disagree with is way less fun as a recreational activity, so people tend not to do it, and also it's easy to get pushed in a particular direction if friends will ostracize people for disagreement.

I'll go ahead and respond to a few more of your points individually:

In the context of United States politics, however, the extreme left has not been anywhere near as successful at capturing the Democratic Party as the far right has been at capturing its counterpart

That's not obvious to me:

The vast majority of current House Republicans have openly condemned QAnon, with all but 17 signing onto a recent House resolution calling it a “conspiracy theory.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/15/qanon-trump-maga-movement-429739

Have the vast majority of House Democrats condemned antifa?

as any actual leftist will be happy to complain to you about.

I understand that disappointment with Trump is a fairly common position on the far right.

You state that the left in the US "isn't even that extreme by international standards". However, a big part of what concerns me about the left is their rhetoric and their epistemology. If their objective was to prevent anyone from eating pineapple on pizza, and they considered any yellow or green plant topping to be "pineapple" (regularly referring to the Republicans as the fascist white nationalist party when Senate Republicans unanimously confirmed a Black man as Air Force chief of staff), and they were dropping guillotine memes on Twitter, staying just within the rules to hint about their plans for pineapple on pizza lovers, then I would consider that to be a problem even if I could do without pineapple on pizza. Additionally it's instructive to observe the trend--the left has gotten a lot more extreme in recent years, and it's possible that whatever force that caused this will continue to operate.

(Maybe this would be a good time to re-emphasize that I think Biden is the right person to vote for this year--in part because I notice that whatever process which caused the left to get more extreme seemed to operate faster during Trump's term. However, I acknowledge that my Trump-supporting friend (a brilliant engineer who keeps his views very close to his chest) has a point when he mentions that Trump has ordered a halt to (in his view) Orwellian anti-racism training in the federal government, and there's a chance Biden will reverse this order. This is a way in which your claim "To the extent there is problematic thinking and behavior on the left, I do not believe it is a problem that will be worsened by having Democrats in power" could be false.)

Anyway, hopefully some of that has given you a sense for why I think the current presidential election is a minefield in a way approval voting and ballot initiatives increasing aid for effective charities are not. In the modern political era, it's not enough to just mention a bunch of things you read in your feed. You want to do random in-depth fact checks, or provide incentives for normally reticent supporters of unpopular views to explain those views, or something.

[Politicisation] will reduce EA's long-term impact: I have to confess I've never really understood this argument. I can think of numerous examples of social movements that have been both highly politicized and tremendously impactful.

Right, but none that have done so without risking a big fight. The status quo is that EA consists of a few thousand people, often trying to enter important technocratic roles, and achieve change without provoking big political fights (and being many-fold more efficient by doing so). The problem is that political EA efforts can inflict effectiveness penalties on other EA efforts. If EA is associated with a side e.g., "caring about the long-term" is considered a long-term issue, then other EA efforts may become associated to that side, e.g. long-term security legislation gets drawn into large battles, diminishing the effectiveness of technocratic efforts many-fold.

Basically, by bringing EA into politics, you're basically taking a few people who normally use scalpels, and arming them for a large-scale machine gun fight. The risk is not just losing a particular fight, but inflaming a multi-front war.

There are a bunch of ways of mitigating the effectiveness penalties that one accrues on others. The costs are less if political efforts are taken individually, so that they're not seen as systematic to EA. Also if they're from less prominent people, e.g. if Will and Toby stay out of the fray. It's less costly if it's symmetric between parties. For example, the cost of affiliating to a Rubio at this point might be less than the cost of affiliating to a Buttigieg, or could even be net positive.

I really appreciated this post! Thanks for writing it. I also really appreciated the original post and am a bit bummed it got buried. I also want to note that I find it odd that post got downvoted (possibly for being explicitly partisan?) vs posts like this, which don't explicitly claim to be partisan / engaging in politics but I think are actually extremely political.

One thought, slightly unrelated to the question of whether or not there are good EA grounds for supporting / opposing political candidates (and I think it's highly likely that there are):

Effective altruism has long had a culture of shying away from explicit engagement in partisan politics

I think one really useful and accurate idea from the social justice community is the idea that you can't be neutral on many political issues. This seems like it ought to be even more compelling from a consequentialist perspective as well, as inaction on certain political opportunities (not exclusively, but definitely including removing Trump from office / Joe Biden winning the 2020 election in the US) might contribute directly to the worse outcome. The status quo is already a manifestation of political positions, so if you're not engaging in changing the status quo, you are taking whatever political positions built it.

For example, I live in Pennsylvania, and theoretically my vote might matter in the US presidential election this year. I can vote for Joe Biden, not vote (or vote for a third party), or vote for Donald Trump. I think it seems clear that the downside risk from Trump winning is very high compared to Joe Biden, and given that Trump will win if Joe Biden doesn't, there is almost as much risk in not voting. I think that I pretty clearly on (some kind of rough near-termist) consequentialist grounds should vote for Joe Biden, and probably should try to get as many people as possible to do the same.

I think there are probably lots of good reasons to think that dollars directed by the EA community shouldn't go to political candidates as a general rule of thumb (though there are probably really good giving opportunities at times), but broadly, as a community interested in ethics, it seems like we are inherently taking fairly strong political positions, but then not really willing to discuss them or make them explicit .

This was a bit of a ramble because my thoughts aren't well-formed, but I think it is pretty likely that attempting to be "neutral" on political issues is close to being as bad as taking the political position that will lead to the worse outcome, or something along those lines.

Of the top 18 states by highest per-capita COVID-19 incidence to date, 17 voted for Trump in 2016.

Minor note, but this is not as much evidence as it first appears. If we use reported deaths, rather than reported cases, we'll see that ~8 or so of the top 12 states for covid-19 deaths per capita did not vote for Trump, including the top 4. (Visualization here).

Personal context: I'm writing this as an individual rather than a moderator. I was happy to see your recommendations for political donations in the other threads, and I agree with you that the current president is much more dangerous than a more generic leader might be (though I'm not sure about "orders of magnitude"; the Iraq War was also very bad, and we missed a lot of potential climate change benefits when Al Gore didn't become president).

I generally agree with you that EA should treat politics mostly as it does other issues, though I think it's beneficial to take steps to avoid what frequently happens to other movements that become political (that is, politics sucks up more and more of their time and they lose focus on other things). This was the impetus behind the Forum's policy on political posts.

However, with the background of that general agreement, I have some questions/concerns about aspects of this post.

Many of those who push back against political engagement in EA see the left, and particularly the social justice movement, as some kind of scary juggernaut seeking world domination by mind control.

This seems like an uncharitable representation of how the median concerned Forum user expresses those concerns. I've interacted with a few people who seem to view the left as more culturally powerful than they are, but I've also had better discussions with people who had more reasonable concerns.* Using a phrase like "mind control" to describe the beliefs of one's opponents (even those on the fringes of community opinion) isn't great.

I thought the section other than this paragraph was very good, especially the point that supporting the Democratic Party doesn't equate to supporting the far left. But reading this nearly soured me on your argument in general (even though I don't think of myself as someone who "pushes back").

* For example, that while the far left isn't very numerous or popular, their support overlaps a lot with EA's core growth demographics, such that we might end up absorbing many of their norms or ideas without meaning to.

It will reduce EA's long-term impact

I have to confess I've never really understood this argument. 

Can you provide an example of someone saying this? I struggle to think of any arguments I've seen that resemble this. Maybe the idea that EA doesn't want to cut off conservative people from feeling like they can belong in the movement, because that makes it harder to grow the movement?

A better way, in my opinion, would be to have some kind of formal system to weigh the risks against the opportunities on a case-by-case basis, as well as the risks of not engaging.

In principle, a system like this could be useful, but EA doesn't have a system like this for anything right now. Even an organization like EA Funds, which evaluates opportunities to do good and recommends that some of them get support, is just a few experienced people trying to convince other people to trust their judgment. If someone wanted to, they could start doing this for political opportunities right now (and indeed, we've had people try to compare candidates before).

Within EA, individuals typically vote with their wallets, job applications, and Forum posts. There's not much in the way of coordination around "official" EA recommendations, even if some orgs are trusted by much of the community to recommend things. The equivalent of voting against community approval for candidate X (as a cause worth supporting over various other causes) is to not donate to candidate X.

So while I like the idea of an organization that reviews political campaigns to seek out opportunities for impact — as I would almost any org that reviews opportunities for impact — I don't think we'd need that organization to be uniquely "official" within EA. They'd just have to present their arguments clearly and convincingly. 

(And, I suppose, not be actively opposed by other orgs in the movement, though I don't think that would be likely to happen as long as the org in question avoided representing itself as "the official EA political charity" or something.)

Were this organization to exist, one factor that would help me personally trust it would be if their most common recommendation were "no action, this campaign doesn't seem important/tractable enough to support either candidate rather than giving to (insert nonpartisan charity)."

I'll probably write a longer comment later but for now, I'd just like to record that I strongly disagreed with the downvoting of the original post. I'd concede that the meta-level discussion on the role of electoral politics in EA isn't straightforward, but I think that the object-level case for engaging in the US election to get Donald Trump out of office is sufficiently strong that it – at the very, very least – deserves to be heard and discussed. Particularly because I would argue that the case can be substantiated by appeals to many of the things that EAs purport to care about (reducing catastrophic risks from climate change, anthropogenic biological events, nuclear conflict; improving global health and development) and can be supported by the kinds of evidence and quantitative estimates that EAs tend to rely on.

I don't see it as a priority. By following this road, the EA community is at risk of allienating half of humanity which feel conservative and might be great givers and have deep concern for doing good effectively, but feel almost the same urgency you feel about Trump about people on the other side of the spectrum.

Most importantly, this issue has a lot of attention already, so I don't think making a stand from the EA community would make any significant difference.

So I see a great cost (losing conservative altruists for their lifetime) at almost no gain (adding your voice to a saturated debate).

I would freely vote and be vocal about my political ideas, those are part of your identity and important for your community, but I would prefer to leave EA out of it.

I'd say another risk of making political engagement a big part of EA would be alienating non-US citizens, who hear quite enough about US politics everywhere else!

Engagement with politics divides the movement geographically as well as politically, which I think is worth considering. While the rest of the world clearly cares about US politics, I don't think it would be good for EA to encourage foreign interference in any countries elections, so political discussions are alienating to the rest of us.

This isn't a reason to never engage with politics, and I'd imagine political action in other countries could be even more high impact than in the US, by virtue of being more neglected (probably less impactful though, to be honest). It's just another reason to minimise the role of politics in the movement.

On the object-level question for a decision process for supporting/opposing particular candidates/parties, I think we should look for fairly strong consensus in favour of doing so for a given decision, if it's expected to reflect back on the EA community generally. If 

1. <X% more EAs (weighted by engagement or selecting only among engaged EAs, and maybe weighted/selecting based on knowledge of the relevant issues and discussion) are in favour of it than are against getting involved, or
2. at least Y% of EAs (weighted again) are against getting involved,

then we should not get involved.

I'd guess X% > 20% and 10% < Y% < 30%.

If you think getting involved is wasteful, i.e. worse than the counterfactual use of those resources, you should vote against getting involved.

I think it's worth further distinguishing between political engagement generally and supporting/opposing political candidates or parties, since parties come with a lot of baggage that EA doesn't want to commit/associate to and is more zero-sum. Animal welfare initiatives and the Zurich initiative are political, but they

1. are in line with EA cause prioritization and don't commit/associate us to anything more than we already are committed/associated to (e.g. views on other controversial topics) 
2. don't touch the usual culture war issues politics is getting very polarized over that EAs might find unimportant or EAs are themselves divided on. 
3. aren't so zero-sum within EA because of the narrow focus. While many EAs don't prioritize those causes and find them wasteful, I think far fewer find them (very) actively harmful (except insofar as they take resources away from more important things). When you support or oppose a politician, there are many ways in which they could be good or bad according to a given EA, and you're more likely to actually do harm according to some other EA's values.

In the light of recent events, have your opinion or the epistemic status of your beliefs held shifted?