Rats, Back a Candidate

You cannot engage (in politics) in any better way than by backing a candidate.

Why do you believe that?

Backing a candidate is an opportunity to change political rhetoric.

How does it do that? Especially if it involves backing a mainstream candidate?

I don't need to back a candidate to change political rhetoric. A more effective way to change political rhetoric is figure out ways to change the current culture.

By supporting a candidate, we are instigating a conversation.

I doubt it. I don't think you're interested in having an open-minded conversation. I suspect that you're only interested in supporting Kamala Harris. You haven't explained why you support Harris, and you obviously need to do that if you want to start a conversation.

It’s about using political engagement to bring more people into the rationalist fold and out of tribalism.

How does backing a candidate "bring more people out of tribalism"? You haven't given any explanation for this.

There is basically no method of engaging with politics worse than backing a national candidate. It has tiny impact even if successful, is the most aggressively tribalism-infected, and is incredibly hard to say anything novel.

If you must get involved in politics, it should be local, issue-based, and unaffiliated with LW or rationalism. It is far more effective to lobby on issues than for candidates, it is far more effective to support local candidates than national, and there is minimal upside and enormous downside to having any of your political efforts tied with the 'brand' of rationalism or LW.

I live in Europe.

My life is rooted in a desire to optimize. That’s what I get out of rationalism. Optimization strategies. Politics is new for me. I’m curious to see how the rationalist lens that I’ve used to optimize most aspects of my life (who I married, the job I’ve chosen, ..) can be applied in the political sphere. This is my naive attempt. I will optimize.

The idea is that we don’t need to say “Harris is great” because everyone already thinks that if they’re coming. We are only focusing on motivating metrically-defined outcome oriented actions. It’s a game. “Who can get the most votes for Harris?” Different teams will focus on different actions. Post card writing. Fundraising. Voter registration. We’ll optimize and learn.

Are you saying we shouldn’t even attempt to turn tribalistic thinkers into evidence based thinkers? My own experience at that has been rather successful.

Our New Orleans Rat group grows on tribalistic calls to action. “Donate to Global Health Initiatives,” “Do Art,” “Learn About AI.” At the events we tend to question the foundation of having those interests, working to better stances on the interests we keep or reject.

Example: We led a multipart series on EA for people who were already interested in EA. The series was led by someone who was very much an EA. The group mostly questioned why that person was an EA. The result: We continue to support several causes, such as Farm Animal Welfare, and ignore other causes, such as AI Doom, that didn’t seem to have enough evidence we found compelling.

Very few people I meet actually want to be limited by the scope of a tribe. Desire for autonomy prevails and the group gains deeper investment as we promote evidence-based thinking. I’m not dumb to the fact that this process is creating new tribalistic dynamics, but hopefully we have better reasons for why we do what we do.

I will probably open our Kamala Harris event with the question: “Why support a candidate?” I will also use this event as motivation to look into pros and cons with supporting a candidate, then use future events as a way to validate that evidence I’ve found.

Please post any research around supporting a candidate I should look at!