What business likes or wants regulation, especially if it's a shiny new business and is fearful that the government will meddle with them in ways that reduce their profitability and interfere with their unchecked chase after as near a monopoly as they can get, goshdarnit?
If people successfully sell the idea that AI could be dangerous instead of all "I am your happy friendly cheery chatty chappy", then that gets in the way of the sacred pursuit of free market capitalism. Who is going to buy a murderbot, if you've scared them about "this is a murderbot that wants to murder you"? And if some nanny-government department makes them take the time to slow down and not release anything that is not aligned, well how then can they beat their competitors to market?
Remember the one-size-fits-all argument about any limits on, or lack of funding for, research or any other project: But if we don't do it, China will and you don't want China to get there first, do you? That would be very bad!
(This fits everything from AI to embryos. China Will Do It, We Can't Let Them Be First).
To play devil's advocate, the obvious answer is 'a business that's already large and successful, and wants to strangle its competitors in the crib by smothering them with compliance paperwork they're not prepared to handle'.
Was tech particularly regulated? Even if you're in a gold rush, it doesn't make sense to waste money on bribes if there isn't much room for improvement. AI and crypto are different, seeing as there's a sizable amount of public backlash to both, making preventative measures reasonable.
If you own a mature company in a mature field, it almost always makes sense diversify into new fields with higher risk/return anyway. AFAIK most older companies and/or individuals in energy industries have by now substantially diversified into renewables already. You can check the list of biggest oil companies; the owners are by now mainly extremely diversified institutional actors like The Vanguard Group and BlackRock.
Once you've done this, backing a politician to safeguard the interests of the mature field is very mediocre value: It's unreliable, it makes you unpopular, and if you're smart you're already playing both sides, so why bother?
No, you do it the other way around; You back politicians who want to do investments into new and/or popular tech and scrounge up as much of that as possible. The Vanguard Group and BlackRock are primary leaders in ESG investments, for example. This way, you get everything: You have some safe income stream from a well-understood, reliable industry, you get some play money for free to invest into a new risky tech that will turn into real money if it works out (and if not, no worries, it wasn't yours anyway!) and you're popular (well, more popular at least than if you just stuck to the mature field).
The last time ANWR was opened, under Trump’s first administration, they held a leading claims auction that was only subscribed to by one single small Alaskan oil company. The larger oil companies gave it a wide berth.
This is principally because large oil companies saw it as more trouble than it was worth, mostly because they would inevitably face years of maximally motivated environmental groups trying to save their white whale through litigation. This process would almost certainly raise the silence of ANWR in the public eye, discrediting these oil companies to the public (as protecting ANWR is relatively supported albeit low-salience); more importantly, any litigation is almost sure to drag on beyond 4-8 years, after which you have a Democratic administration which is very likely to cancel your lease.
That is to say, large oil companies would probably only drill in ANWR if the political climate had changed to the point where they could be reasonably sure that they could sign a large lease while avoiding much of the litigation or the threat of cancellation. That would require a shift in the Overton window, which may have indeed occurred in recent years.
Reading about Rockefeller and how he got so rich, the government broke up Standard Oil because it was too powerful and ended up (unintentionally) making him even richer, since he held shares in the new companies that were founded out of breaking up Standard Oil, and they all shot to the moon.
So sometimes what is intended to happen results in the exact opposite. And oil companies have a lot of public mistrust due to environmental disasters, so - like the tobacco industry - they need to have the *appearance* of being squeaky-clean and not up to any shenanigans. "Why yes, I *am* in the pocket of the polluting industry that is killing the planet" is not a reputation any politician wants nowadays.
I really wish you wouldn't use AIPAC as your go to example of a single issue pac, given the number of people who (mostly for "Jews control the world" reasons) vastly overestimate the power of AIPAC (it's neither especially influential nor an especially big spender compared to other pacs in its class).
My source said it was extremely influential compared to other PACs in its class. I am basing this on their claim, but feel free to link me to evidence that they're wrong.
I imagine that the apparent importance of a particular lobby group is going to look enormously different depending on where you're sitting. For example, when I was involved in local/state politics in California c. 2008-2015, I heard essentially nothing about AIPAC. The big dogs I kept hearing about over and over again were SEIU on the Democratic Party side and Charlie Munger, Jr. on the Republican Party side.
Any PAC that is consistently on one side is dramatically weaker than "mercenary" PACs like AIPAC.
SEIU only has influence when they spend money. Because AIPAC is occasionally willing to pour money on either side of the aisle, they also have influence in all the races where they don't spend money, by employing the threat of funding the other side. There are a lot of politicians that are afraid of AIPAC flooding the donations to their future challenger, and thus keep their mouth shut about certain subjects even if AIPAC never spends any money on their races.
The other political organization that used to be disproportionately powerful compared to the amount of actual money spent was NRA. This was when NRA was entirely willing to fund the democrat if the republican they were facing was wavering even a little bit on gun rights. As NRA has become more and more just a part of the republican party extended universe, their influence has waned.
The thing in California is that in most districts, the real election is between members of the same party. Either in the primary or, because of the Top Two primary system, when there's two Democrats or occasionally two Republicans on the general election ballot. SEIU has influence because their donations and endorsements affect which Democrats make it through the primary and, when two Dems are on the general election ballot, which one wins.
Munger, last I heard, mainly gave money to party organizations, not directly to candidates. His influence comes from him being the one keeping the lights on for the California Republican Party and for at least a few of the county GOP committees. I think SEIU makes similar donations on the other side, but the California Democratic Party has a much longer fundraising list and they're less often hard pressed for cash for basic operations than the California Republican Party.
The important thing to remember about the NRA is that their influence didn't come from money. The NRA doesn't actually spend that much. What it does have is millions of extraordinarily dedicated single-issue-voter members who consistently turn up to the polls. Boots on the ground beat money in the bank 9 times out of 10.
Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank used to write a hilarious annual column about the extraordinary lengths AIPAC goes to each year at its convention in D.C. to impress members of Congress with its wealth and fervency.
Well, consider that during the pro-Israel lobby's annual conference yesterday, a fleet of police cars, sirens wailing, blocked intersections and formed a motorcade to escort buses carrying its conventioneers -- to lunch.
The annual meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has long produced a massive show of bipartisan pandering, as lawmakers praise the well-financed and well-connected group. But this has been a rough year for AIPAC -- it has dismissed its policy director and another employee while the FBI examines whether they passed classified U.S. information to Israel -- and the organization is eager to show how big it is.
Reporters arriving at the convention center yesterday were given a list of "Food Facts" for the three-day AIPAC meeting: 26,000 kosher meals, 32,640 hors d'oeuvres, 2,500 pounds of salmon, 1,200 pounds of turkey, 900 pounds of chicken, 700 pounds of beef and 125 gallons of hummus.
Another fact sheet announced that this is the "largest ever" conference, with its 5,000 participants attending "the largest annual seated dinner in Washington" joined by "more members of Congress than almost any other event, except for a joint session of Congress or a State of the Union address." The group added that its membership "has nearly doubled" over four years to 100,000 and that the National Journal calls it "one of the top four most effective lobbying organizations."
"More," "most," "largest," "top": The superlatives continued, and deliberately. In his speech Sunday, the group's executive director, Howard Kohr, said the "record attendance" at the conference would dispel questions about AIPAC raised by the FBI investigation.
"This is a test, a test of our collective resolve," Kohr said of the "unique challenge" presented by the FBI probe, "and your presence here today sends a message to every adversary of Israel, AIPAC and the Jewish community that we are here, and here to stay." (The official text has two exclamation points after that sentence.) ...
If they really had such influence maybe they wouldn't have to go to extraordinary lengths! Also, that article is 20 years old, my impression is their influence has much diminished since then.
Measuring influence directly is hard to do objectively (and my main concern here is subjective movements being impacted by stereotypes).
In terms of spending though they don't seem to be an outlier. According to open secrets they rank 21 out of 660 for total spending in 2024, which is high but not near the top.
But 2024 is an outlier year for them where they spent like 10x what they do on a normal year - if you look back to 2016 they get outspent over 10x by groups like the NRA. The NRA isn't bipartisan, but there's a bunch of bipartisan groups you probably haven't heard of, like the national association of realtors, who also outspent them.
I don't know man, if Jews didn't want to be seen as controlling the world, maybe they shouldn't be *trying* to control the world. Or at least, trying to shape public discourse and politics to be favorable to them. It's bad optics, and they just don't have the power right now to get away with everything.
This is really a bad and antisemitic take, which actively makes you a useful idiot for organizations like AIPAC. You're basically just blindly accepting and spreading AIPAC's claim that they represent the interests of Jewish people which is blatantly false. They represent the political interests of Israel's imperialist project, that's very different from representing all Jewish people, or even all citizens of Israel!
Given AIPAC's history of even calling Jewish people antisemitic when they oppose the actions of Israel, the notion AIPAC somehow represents all Jewish people is absurd.
You are clearly incredibly primed to dismiss anyone as bigoted or useless if they condemn AIPAC. Your highly motivated reasoning and this issue may ultimately prove ineffective
Did you read the article you're replying to? He doesn't claim they're an outlier in terms of spending, he lays out an argument on why their influence is disproportionate to their spending.
Second-largest for direct contributions to candidates (https://www.opensecrets.org/political-action-committees-pacs/top-pacs/2024), plus very widely reported much stronger donor list than anyone else (as Scott states). I'm not sure how much has changed in the past few years I imagine AIPAC is much much weaker than it used to be, partially because the salience has gone up dramatically which always weakens single-issue groups in the area, and partially because "I'm the best friend of Israel / No I'm the best friend of Israel" is no longer the basic description of political campaigning on the topic. But I don't think that, for example, Mearsheimer randomly decided to be anti-Semitic.
Scott is claiming that AIPAC is "orders of magnitude" more effective than other PACs, which seems like a stretch if their only real advantage is more hard-money funding due their donor class composition and more effective bargaining technique. We're still looking at ~2% of US lobbying spend.
How many other Jewish organizations are there that will follow AIPAC's lead on an issue or a campaign relevant to Israel? There are enough major Jewish organizations that there's an influential "Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations."
How many big donors to candidates or universities listen to AIPAC? The top 100 political donors in the U.S. are about half Jewish.
The top 100 billionaires are about 1/3rd Jewish. My impression is that Jewish billionaires (e.g., Larry Ellison, lately the world's richest man) tend to be more Zionist than average Jews, just as rich men in Alabama tend to be really into the U. of Alabama Crimson Tide football team. Israel is to a lot of rich Jews what the Notre Dame Fighting Irish is to a lot of rich Catholics.
What fraction of the prestige press is Jewish? When The Atlantic made up its list of the top pundits about 15 years ago, it was about 48% Jewish.
I read the Jewish press a lot so I'm more aware than most people of just how much money and influence Jewish Americans have earned over the last 150 years. It's not just a "trope," it's hard numbers.
Since October 7, 2023, Jewish support has been more up for grabs than it has been for decades. Anybody who wishes to play a role in American public life can't afford to underestimate what Jews have earned for themselves.
> "My impression is that Jewish billionaires (e.g., Larry Ellison, lately the world's richest man) tend to be more Zionist than average Jews"
George Soros has been pretty critical of Israeli policy, as I understand it, and I doubt that Zuckerberg or Altman have strong feelings one way or another.
"Orders of magnitude" literally means "at least 100x more effective" than other political orgs, which at 2% of spending means that AIPAC would have to be 200% effective at shifting public opinion- i.e, completely crushing and dominating all dissent on the topic and getting it's way on foreign policy 100% of the time. There is clearly far more Israel-critical op-ed coming out, including in the mainstream press, to be consistent with this hypothesis, and I doubt there'd be a US airbase in Qatar or hundreds of billions in arms deals to Saudi Arabia if Israeli interests were the sole concern of US foreign policy.
> "I read the Jewish press a lot so I'm more aware than most people of just how much money and influence Jewish Americans have earned over the last 150 years"
I'm perfectly aware of how tail effects on bell curves work out, and I know that a certain 2% of the population run ~20% of the US economy. This is not the point I made.
what's your model for why zionists/Israel are so hated in the academy, then? it's a bit circular...aipac is all powerful, until they're not? I think you have causation backwards. The reason aipac was so "successful" is bc it's easy to support israel--to support the alternative, you have to be a leftist/third-worldist, an islamic supremacist, or just a good old fashioned antisemite (or an anti-zionist, in the classic european 'it's bad for business' sense). Since most politicians were not those things, aipac was more or less asking people to "support the good guys," which ofc, they were happy to do. Now, however, those categories have grown, ergo aipac has become "less powerful."
So "AN order of magnitude" is empirically correct. I could see "orders" plural as being debatable, depending on whether or not you wanted to factor in non-financial aid, or consider that Israel is a high-income country, etc.
You could also argue that that the National Realtor Association supports various homeowner subsidies that are much larger than $4B/year (e.g. mortgage interest deduction, National Flood Insurance Program, public housing assistance, etc), which is absolutely correct. But then the appropriate denominator would be "all American homeowners" (roughly 50%) rather than "American Jews" (around 2%). It might also be fair to point out that those are _domestic_ aid, rather than _foreign_ aid.
Overall, I think "orders" plural is a stretch, but "order of magnitude" singular is very defensible.
I think the big issue is that AIPAC and Israel are following the NRA playbook (and to some extent Planned Parenthood/ACLU) where instead of being single issue pacs that try to play nice with both sides but care deeply about the issue become partisan actors (AIPAC is still bipartisan but less so).
It's interesting that exhibiting more loyalty to a given party dramatically reduces the actual payoff to your org, but there you have it. The NRA doesn't seem to follow the same playbook so much any more, though.
This is specifically for 2024, where they did an unprecedented spike in spending. Before that it's much smaller (conversely the other example I checked, the NRA, was a lot bigger one or two election cycles ago - every group has occasional spikes).
This is also checking a specific strategy, but other groups spend a lot more on lobbying with different strategies (e.g. Qatar spending half a billion dollars buying Trump a plane).
There's objective data available on that question. You can get top donors from OpenSecrets.org. The ethnicity of big donors is not all that hard to find from Wikipedia, Jewish magazines, and the like.
Among the top 100 donors to political candidates in the 2020 election, whether Republican or Democrats, people of Jewish ancestry gave 61% of dollars. In 2024 among the top 100 (a group that somewhat overlaps the top 100 in 2020), however, there was a 6% decline in dollars given by big Jewish donors to Democrats and a 129% surge in dollars given by big gentile donors to Republicans (with Elon Musk accounting for about one-third of that increase). So, the Jewish share of dollars donated to candidates by the top 100 fell from 61% to 39% in 2024.
For details and methodology, see my 2025 column at:
Jews very likely give smaller shares of total political contributions of all sizes since they make up about 1/3rd of the top 100 names in the 2019 Forbes 400.
Among campaign contributions from the top 100 donors in 2024, 68% of the Top 100 money going to Democrats came from Jewish givers, while 31% going to Republicans came from Jewish givers.
Those shares were down somewhat from 2020 and 2018.
I don't think it's Good for the Jews if we try to say that a thing that, as far as I can tell, everyone with any experience in the area agrees is true, is anti-Semitic (or at least in some gray area of "I won't call it anti-Semitic but I'll gesture in that direction").
I think there are plenty of things you can say that recognize AIPAC's influence without getting into Jews-run-the-world territory. E.g. Israel has historically been popular even with non-Jews, and it's a low salience issue, both of which raise its effectiveness.
And now that the circumstances have changed, you have things like moderate Dem Seth Moulton *returning AIPAC money*.
Last time I checked in 2011, since 1901 Jews had comprised between 21% and 26% of the Laureates in each of the three hard science Nobel Prizes (physics, chemistry, and medicine) despite making up only about 0.2% of the world's current population.
My general opinion is that Jews _are_ strikingly rich and influential ... because they've _earned_ their riches and influence.
And also, having been persecuted worldwide for literal millennia, they've learned to stick together pretty well. Of course, this history also means that when any outsider mentions this obvious fact, by default it's taken as an attack, not as a compliment.
I've read Jewish-American and Israeli periodicals more than most, and they _love_ enumerating Jewish billionaires and making other lists quantifying Jewish power and success. The New York Times, in contrast, doesn't usually find that news fit to print.
Often, I get asked accusingly: "Why do you want to _know_ about who has clout in your country? Huh?"
Well, I like knowing data. And I like knowing how my country works.
I don't want to get into an argument with Cormac McCarthy because I'd no doubt lose (even though he's dead), but I've never much worried about what in creation exists without my consent.
"AIPAC is one of many PACs with a moderate amount of influence" is a reasonable take. "AIPAC is a clear outlier that needs to be separated from the rest of political spending due to being an outlier in spending/influence" is false as a point of fact.
I am not very political and didn't even remember what the acronym AIPAC was.
But it got me thinking about a book review I read in my parents' WSJ the other day. (The same issue had a capsule review of Freddie Deboer's book, by the by; it's a pretty comprehensive book section, perhaps the last in America.)
I was also vaguely recalling that Obama himself used to joke about the "unlikelihood" of his name (middle name Hussein, I think? - though that maybe wrong) finding success in the presidential campaign arena.
The book was by a Mahmood Mamdani. I've forgotten what it was about, but it must have been some nonsense because I was reading parts of the review out loud for the general amusement.
(Googles: oh yeah, Idi Amin: greatest African.)
Parent said, oh, that's just awful, he's running for mayor of NYC.
No, no, I said - different guy.
But then I had to backpedal a bit later and say, well, it is his father.
Whose sinecure at NYU is owing to his willingness to praise 9/11.
And I think - the world really is unpredictable. Forget AIPAC. Forget Obama and his foreign name. Who would have thought that less than 25 years after 9/11, the son of this man - who has found success with this single schtick - would be the apparent next mayor of NYC?
He's correct, from what I can tell. I admire his honesty. He is definitely arguing against personal interest on this one.
It's hard for me too; I've got half the same ancestry as both of you (and on the side where it counts). But I have to admit it's a significant factor in American politics, just as I have to admit similarly Jews were a big part of the American left, particularly on the immigration issue and that's a big reason for the particular iteration of antisemitism on the American right.
All I can do is 'be the change I want to see in the world'; not go to bat for Israel (unless I genuinely think they're unjustly accused, which does happen) and don't support immigration.
Of course I'd expect people with other views to do other things.
I am a U.S. citizen or lawfully admitted permanent resident (i.e., green card holder).
This contribution is made from my own funds, and funds are not being provided to me by another person or entity for the purpose of making this contribution.
What would the legality be of donation swapping? Let's say I'm not a US citizen, but I'd like to donate. So I find a US EA who doesn't want to donate, and say "If you donate X to this politician, I'll donate X to a charity of your choice, that you would otherwise have donated to".
In this case, the US citizen is giving the money, and I haven't actually provided them any funds...but I'm not sure if this is a strong legal defense or not.
This is almost certainly illegal for both you and the other person under existing laws (straw donors) although whether you will be prosecuted for it or the existing laws will be found unconstitutional depend heavily on the party in power.
IANAL, but I don't think this is legal. The relevant law can be found here, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/52/30121 and criminalizes "direct or indirect" donations. My viewpoint is that if you are making a contribution with the intent of causing another person to make a contribution that you are prohibited from making, that is the kind of indirect donation that this law targets.
Seems weird that it's illegal for a foreign citizen to donate to a PAC, but it's also legal to have a PAC whose explicit and open reason for existence is to advocate for the interests of a foreign country.
That rule feels very correct to me. If PACs are supposed to represent the “voice of the American people”, it’s entirely appropriate that Americans get to decide what they do for others using their government, and it feels quite inappropriate for outsiders to use the same mechanism.
American politics and Israeli politics are pretty well integrated by this point.
Israeli citizens don't have to give up their American citizenship. Dual citizenship was invented by the Supreme Court in 1967 in the case, Afroyim v. Rusk, of an American who moved to Israel and became a member of the Knesset. It was A-OK for him to vote in America, the Supremes decided on the grounds that when you move to Israel you don't have to ask for Israeli citizenship, instead it is automatically bestowed on Jews. (Not surprisingly, the Israeli law was crafted to elicit that exact decision from the U.S. Supreme Court.)
Hillary's big financial supporter Haim Saban, the owner of the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, fought in the IDF in Israel.
The huge GOP donor Sheldon Adelson was also a big backer of Netanyahu. Trump was just joking about how Sheldon's widow, Israel-born Miriam Adelson, a huge Trump donor, loves Israel more than America.
But if you aren't an Israeli-American dual citizen but are instead a citizen of one of the other 199 countries on Earth, consult American counsel before trying this
This is just an anti - Israel jab. It's totally fine to be a dual citizen of any other country as well as America. Boris Johnson was an American citizen until he renounced it in 2016 for UK political reasons, not because America had an issue with it (and also to avoid the IRS)
Maybe dual citizenship is a great idea, but it wasn't the law in America until the Warren Court decided that in 1967 in the case of an Israeli citizen, Afroyim v. Rusk.
Winston Churchill had an America mother, but he wasn't an American citizen until he became the first honorary American citizen in 1963. Honorary American citizenship has only been extended to seven other individuals, all the others retroactive, such as William Penn, Raoul Wallenberg, Lafayette, and Mother Teresa.
I am aware, but dual citizenship was available universally to citizens of any other country from Afroyim, not just Israelis.
Incidentally your depiction of the case is factually quite inaccurate. He was never an MK, and he voted in an election that had a residency rather than citizenship requirement. Israeli citizenship was never the concern, it was that voting in another country's election could embarrass the US, but they determined Congress had no right to revoke citizenship, thus creating dual citizenship.
You won't need a legal defense since the only way the government finds out is if one the other guy snitches on you, and he has no incentive o because he's just as guilty.
Indeed, I'm not in the US, but if I were this sounds like it would be *by far* the most effective way I could spend $7k to reduce the chance we all get turned into paperclips or similar.
Hmm, there have been experiments setting an AI system to run a business...
<mildSnark>
If Clippy was coded in Silicon Valley and trained in US datacenters, could they argue on "birthright" (manufactureright?) grounds that they are entitled to donate the $7k to a candidate? Does it matter if the datacenter chips were fabricated in TSMC's Taiwan or Arizona fab? :-)
> It’s illegal to make contributions through a “straw donor” — a person or entity that receives money for the purpose of making a contribution and then passes that money on to a campaign in their own name.
But then what you're proposing isn't passing money from one person to another, it's exchanging in-kind favors. 🤷♂️
"Federal law prohibits contributions, donations, expenditures(including independent expenditures) and disbursements solicited, directed, received or made directly or indirectly by or from foreign nationals in connection with any federal, state or local election."
This is a legal grey area, and while I've never participated in it, I have heard conflicting opinions from some of the top campaign finance lawyers in the country on it. So I'd stay away from it until the courts give better guidance.
Sadly, this is the state of a lot of campaign finance law, which is generally vague, poorly written, and so selectively enforced (for obvious political reasons) that it's hard to get clear consistent guidance on many questions like these.
I feel like the most obvious rallying point here is to go absolutely nuclear on anybody that supported defunding PEPFAR. If there's one single program everybody at every level of EA agreed was very good it was that one right?
Although it would be nice to have a generic EA PAC, for various reasons the system is more set up for single-issue PACs, and the people I know are prioritizing AI - partly because they think it is more important, partly because it is faster-evolving, and partly because the people who care about it have more money (since many of them are in AI themselves).
This goes through lots of information about politics (like what sorts of pressures representatives are amenable to, and how party-line votes will be) that I don't know.
PEPFAR is a much less controversial program to support - "save babies dying in a painful way in countries that will never in any way rich the US" is a pretty easy sell. AI controls is much harder - "cripple a major source of economic growth that also happens to have highly salient military applications because of some hypothetical threat. China also seems to heavily invest in this btw."
For what it's worth, I think AI doomerism is silly and unfounded (yes I've read the book). So if you disagree with me on that, then at least take rallying around PEPFAR to establish credibility then go for AI research as advice.
> "cripple a major source of economic growth that also happens to have highly salient military applications because of some hypothetical threat"
The economic growth is roughly as hypothetical as the AI doom scenario atm (stock market gains are not generalising outside the top 10 US tech firms, and we know that generative AI is having all kinds of negative impacts on entry-level employment and student competencies.) Military applications I'll give you, sure, but that doesn't seem a million miles removed from the doom scenarios.
Well, if the AI bubble pops, the crisis that follows will certainly not feel hypothetical, for the entire economy. Current projections are "very bad, but perhaps not quite 2008 level bad".
> Military applications I'll give you, sure, but that doesn't seem a million miles removed from the doom scenarios.
I am not even convinced of that. Current-level AI has a lot of potential applications in autonomous drones and so on.
But the thing which is driving both OpenAI's plans to burn through hundreds of billions of dollars and the fear of the doomers is AI going FOOM. Of course, this would also affect military applications, in the same way that the Vogons removing Earth would affect the average American income.
Apart from the race to ASI, I think most military AI applications do not drastically benefit from cutting edge AI research. Intelligence has costs, you want your drones to be smarter than they have to be to be combat effective. As an evolutionary anchor, think wolves: they are exactly as smart as it is efficient for them to be in their natural environment. Granted, that is pretty smart, but not reading philosophy and developing quantum mechanics level of smart.
Even if you have drones big enough that running a LLM on them would be practical, I do not think that it would be something you want to do. The only reason I could think of is to let the LLM make high level ethical calls in lieu of a human pilot, absent a radio link. Personally, I do not think that LLMs should be trusted with that, and I would very much prefer a simple deterministic ruleset. The fictional example of the planet-destroying bomb from the movie Dark Star, which can be persuaded with philosophy not to explode is something nobody should want to create in earnest.
Sure, some AI safety people would also be opposed to keeping extinction-level amounts of autonomous-but-stupid weapon systems around given that they would make it slightly easier for an unaligned ASI to take over, but that is very much a secondary concern.
I think the winning strategy established in 2024 wasn't to focus on the marginal cases, but rather to focus on the safe ones and thereby shift the Overton window. I remember AIPAC spent huge sums of money in the primaries on a few candidates that analysts at the time thought were already unlikely to win their primary races. The analysts were puzzled, "Why throw all that money away on a race that's already won?" The perception that grew out of this was, "I guess they just have a lot of money to throw around."
In addition to what Scott says above about the strategy of giving to races that have already been one, there's a powerful signaling component to this strategy if you do it in an open and notorious way. If you don't have the money to go after everyone, at least make it LOOK like you do, and the political sheep will herd the way you want them to. A little nip at the heels is all it takes. And if you're in it for the long game and not the current headlines, this is the most effective approach.
Since this approach relies on scaring the sheep, I wonder what would happen if you put a lot of money into the other side of this debate on a race that's already supposed to win and give the opposite impression - that the issue itself isn't a win/lose proposition. Would that be enough to break the spell?Seems like a hypothesis Scott & co. are going to test with Bores.
PEPFAR used to be extremely bipartisan and even now I don't think there's a strong anti-PEPFAR position in Congress so much that nobody is really crossing the Trump administration on their destruction of it.
Well, it would be an issue PAC, trying to get support for a specific issue. Congress doesn't need to wildly buck its trend of surrendering to the President on everything, just on one issue he probably doesn't care that much about, for it to be successful.
Has Trump ever said anything about PEPFAR one way or another? I won't be surprised if he doesn't even know what it is. As I understand, it basically got in the way of Musk's chainsaw, without anybody specifically targeting it, then reinstated in a crippled state and promptly faded from notice.
I have a few concerns that I'm curious if you share:
1. AI accelerationists are probably going to be at least as much money as the EA AI safety people, so its possible you're going to just end up in a stalemate. This might still be worth it if you think absent your actions the accelerationists will just stomp, but it probably won't see the total victories M.A. has achieved.
2. Crypto and (until recently) Israel were pretty low salience issues in politics. Given that we are one disappointing Gemini demo away from a recession, AI probably will be high salience for the forseeable future. Nobody cares about PEPFAR on the other hand. It was basically canceled so JD Vance could impress a bunch of teenagers on discord. So a smallish, dedicated group could probably make a big difference at the margin.
He did say "until recently". And yeah, up until certain MENA migrant groups inveigled their way into the coalition of the fringes in the last few decades, most people in the US either didn't care much about Israel and or were mildly positive toward it.
Given the relatively scarce attention paid to other much-more-plausibly-genocidal events over the past decade or so, including those affecting muslims... no, I really don't think some principled opposition to genocide is the driving factor here, even when US arms sales are involved. How many grad students are marching to "Free Yemen", for example?
"people in America desperately care about the fourth largest currently ongoing war in the middle east because they're so committed to total pacifism" doesn't really pass the smell test.
You mean the genocide committed by Hamas on October 7? After calling Israel a "cockroach nest" that needs to be "exterminated"?
Israel is clearly not committing genocide, because Hamas hides behind Gazan civilians knowing this will protect them because Israel doesn't want to kill Gazan civilians.
As you can see in 2022 it did not even crack the top 18 issues, and in 2020 "foreign policy" was broadly in the mix, but given the times one would imagine this had more to do with China than Israel.
You can also see in this 2022 Gallup poll that "War in the Middle East" basically didn't register as an important issue at all.
I also encourage you to go watch debates and interviews for candidates around that time and see how often Israel is brought up compared to now.
So the point of a PAC, as discussed in the post, is that no matter who you vote for, the person who ends up in power is under their sway.
Although I probably shouldn't have literally stopped reading bc I guess you were talking about fundraising. In any case it's fucked that we're trying to literally vote with our dollars.
If we're gonna do this for one issue it should be overturning Citizens United.
I'll contend that your "virtually nobody" might have swung a key U.S. presidential elections. Granted, it's very hard to be sure.
You might consider stance on Israel a non-issue, but it has been a *very* live and important issue among the younger, more-online, farther left demographic in U.S. politics for many years. This is a demographic that (for better or worse) displays a very high ratio of vocal political engagement to actually getting out and voting.
It's hard to be sure *why* they're so bad at actually voting, but one reason individuals often give of themselves is that none of the candidates actually represented them. And the argument about whether it's better to vote for an unpalatable "lesser of two evils" Democrat or vote 3rd party or not at all is one that crops up every election season. Democrat support of Israel is a VERY common reason cited for going the "3rd party or don't vote" route.
Given how narrow Trump's margin of victory was in 2016, I think it's plausible (though somewhat unlikely) that a counterfactual world in which Clinton had been plausibly more neutral (or simply avoided taking a stance) could have seen a different outcome.
I'll say again, this is far, far from certain in this particular case. But the bigger takeaway is that when election outcomes hinge on relatively small differences in turnout (which they often do in the U.S.) an issue that "virtually nobody" cares about can still very plausibly be decisive. If 80% of voters care not at all about some issue and 10% care a bit and 10% care a lot, that last 10% can still play kingmaker if the remaining 90% are fairly evenly split.
PEPFAR would have been a great choice 2 years ago, but now it cuts on party lines. AIPAC was so successful because they got both Republicans and Democrats to support it. Now it’s unfortunately politicized. If anything I think a PEPFAR super PAC would be a good idea in 3 years, when it’s not as connected to the incumbent running for office.
I dont know if partisanship is a huge issue here. Theres always going to be a streak of "foreign aid bad" populism in both parties, so even if it becomes a partisan issue you can still have a lot of influence in the primaries
And of course the suspicion that PEPFAR would be used as a Trojan Horse: "well now we're restoring this vital programme, how about this other vital programme?" and eventually it'd be back to funding transgender operas.
PEPFAR does not cut on party lines: it is still popular on both the left and the right. Which is why it kept its full budget when the Republicans were doing recissions and gutting everything else, like PBS. PEPFAR is popular with evangelicals, and Republican Congresscritters don't see any value in angering the base over this.
But who in congress had a pivotal role in defunding it? I thought elon defunded it while marco rubio continued to insist it wasnt defunded and congress largely demurred. There may have been GOP members who cheered elon on twitter, but not in a congressional capacity. Also getting rid of them wont get pepfar back.
You're right: there's nobody to point to as "defunding PEPFAR" because officially it's not defunded. Congress approved their normal budget going forward, and the State Department says PEPFAR is open for business as usual. So who would the PAC attack?
That’s accurate. But it’s become a matter of “common knowledge” in online spaces that it has been defunded and is gone now. But it’s not. PEPFAR is supported by just about everyone in Washington, on the record anyway.
On paper, it is fully restored and fully funded. However, there was a lot of confusion around PEPFARs status while USAID was being gutted, so there have been a lot of claims that even though the money was budgeted and PEPFAR had a waiver to keep going, a lot of the money wasn't actually going out. In July there was a report that 50% of budgeted money had not gone out to providers. Not because of any official action, but because of all the chaos at USAID caused by DOGE and such.
Officially, congress has preserved PEPFAR and approved it's budget.
Nobody in congress is calling for PEPFAR to be defunded that I'm aware of: its a very popular program on both the left and the right. However, a State Department leak in July indicated that they were working on a plan to cut PEPFAR by 42% over a period of several years, with the idea that we'd be weaning countries off of depending on it. If that plan is moving forward, there hasn't been any news on it.
The classic “common knowledge” that isn’t true. I feel like someone can’t say they care much about PEPFAR while also not putting in the care to knowing whether it’s still operating or not.
I do not agree that this is "common knowledge" among politically engaged people. There is of course confusion about what is going on with PEPFAR. But that is because it is confusing. USAID was responsible for implementing around 60% of PEPFAR, which has caused a large, but not totally clear how large, reduction in its operating capacity. Of course, there are lots of people who only vaguely pay attention who couldn't tell you the details of which aid agencies have and have not been totally destroyed. But by this standard supporters of every single issue in existence don't care much about their issue because many are badly misinformed. In this case, even those vaguely paying attention are still correct about the essential point which is that Trump has cut enormous amounts of highly effective life save foreign aid. And the people who actually claim that it's one of their top issues do almost all know these details.
In March Congress approved $6.5 billion in funding for PEPFAR, which is consistent with prior years. Officially, on paper, PEPFAR has not had any reduction in budget and has waivers that allow it to operate regardless of what else DOGE is doing to USAID.
In practice there have been reports, most recently in July, that only half the money has actually gone out, because of chaos and confusion at USAID due to DOGE gutting it. But that seems to be resolving? It's hard to get a solid answer on that.
The main point is that PEPFAR is a very popular program and just about everyone in Congress supports keeping it, as does the White House. So it would be hard to do a PAC that tries to get people who supported defunding PEPFAR out of office, because nobody officially supported defunding PEPFAR and officially PEPFAR is not defunded.
Apart from the obvious objection that the actually altruistic thing to do would be to give money to global health programs yourselves, rather than using that money to coerce the government into using everyone’s money on global health programs?
And the actual libertarian thing to do would be to donate money to avoid Argentina's default under Milei yourself, rather diverting there money seized by armed agents of state under threat of violence (the bailout package is more than the original USAID budget btw). And yet...
The joke was that both villains, in movies from 1985 and 1978 respectively, separately plotted to destroy San Francisco (or California more generally) by various plans involving triggering earthquakes.
Luthor's primary residence is in Metropolis, while Zorin lives in France and also a blimp.
Effective altruists should donate their money to GiveWell recommended charities, like the ones against malaria & parasitic worms, instead. That's what I do.
GiveWell only claims to analyze the best places for global development donations. They make no claim to have considered issues like AI safety, and many of the people involved in GiveWell themselves make AI safety related donations (or donations to animal welfare, or other causes that GiveWell doesn't look at).
Although it would be nice to be able to avoid politics entirely, politics is also extremely very important, and it doesn't seem ideal to leave it entirely to the industry billionaire lobbyists. I don't think the usual "D and R donations cancel out and it's all a wash" argument applies when an industry is trying to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make politicians serve its naked interests.
It means you already know you're in a tug-of-war with someone. Someone whom you know to have plenty more money. I guess if you could get someone far richer on your side you could convince them they couldn't outspend you, like the Soviet Union in an arms race with the US. Elon Musk is supposedly the richest person, and played a role in founding OpenAI due to an interest in such risk, so maybe you have some hope. But that would be hope from appealing to him (or a set of people with a combined comparable amount of wealth).
but even if you lose that tug of war, you're forcing resources to be diverted from improving ai capabilities, which is a worthy end in itself if you're an ai doom believer
Dude, everyone has enemies. It's pretty simple: Figure out who you oppose ("who", not "what", that's important). Find out who opposes them. Find common cause. Ask them for money. Buy ads. Rinse and repeat.
Politics 101. And it works, ask any politician elected ever.
Right now your enemy of the people is Elon Musk. Easiest sell in the history of easy sells - never mind what his actual stand on AI safety is, if he has one. That's entirely irrelevant. For better or worse, right now he's the most recognizable face of Big Tech. Use that.
When you play the game of thrones, you play to win or you die.
>Right now your enemy of the people is Elon Musk. Easiest sell in the history of easy sells - never mind what his actual stand on AI safety is, if he has one. That's entirely irrelevant. For better or worse, right now he's the most recognizable face of Big Tech. Use that.
The problem is that you still have to win the Blue Tribe over on destroying the *rest* of the tech sector - Musk is largely irrelevant - and that helping the Blue Tribe make an Example of Musk burns your credibility with the Red Tribe.
Destroying Elon Musk just doesn't help with the goal, here. It's, indeed, not playing to win.
When I read that piece when it came out, it convinced me to disengage from politics, which in retrospect was a great choice. Looking at my peers that did go into politics at the time, they are now full blown MAGA Trump loyalists. I definitely think you gave good advice then.
That said, times change, and this issue is not Republican Democrat, but an internal war in Silicon Valley that could kill us all. I’m going to need to reread both pieces and contemplate where is the best place to make my annual donation.
"Lots of people work very hard and raise $10 million for the Democrats. Lots of other people work very hard and raise $10 million for the Republicans. Now the Democrats and Republicans are at exactly the same position vis-a-vis each other as they were before the effective altruists got involved, but we have wasted $20 million that could have gone to healing the sick or feeding the hungry. "
Indeed. It is, realostically, an arms race normal people have no hope of winning. And
That is simply false because you donating to something will not magically cause more people to come out of the woodwork and support your opposition. Also fighting someone in zero some contest is better than just rolling over and letting them win. There is a reason that countries at war don’t just cut the defence spend to 0. Even though both countries are burning resources could spend on something else. Unless you can do a credible deal for both of you to reduce your defence expenditure, it doesn’t make sense to unilaterally step back.
> Also fighting someone in zero some contest is better than just rolling over and letting them win.
It's 2025, and I do wonder about that. Is it really always better? Decades of low-grade pain, waste and slow decline because the idiocy just. won't. die and keeps attracting more and more richer and richer followers; vs one term of total capitulation, just turn the other cheek, lean in hard, bend over backwards, get it all out of our system at once, until the effects are utterly impossible to ignore, so we can finally all agree never to raise the matter again, and when some newborn sweet summer child who did not live through the idiocracy does bring it up the scars and smoking ruins are /right there/, proof positive of where it all leads, all the veterans make it very clear why it's utter bunk until the idea is firmly buried again, like the apocryphal monkey ladder experiment...
...and then I wake up and remind myself that people can stay irrational longer than the world can stay unburned.
The problem here are the establishment democrats. People like Chuck Schumer and Jeffries are beholden to the status quo - they were never in favor of large scale reform, which is what we need for "reason" to win.
The other thing to consider is that in politics, nothing is forever. But it might need to get worse before it gets better. This has all happened before - remember Mcarthyism? Robber Barons? The slave holding South?
The problem isn't that progress never happens - it's that progress happens so slowly that no one generation gets to enjoy the change. I'll be dead long before the smart people win, but my grandchildren will be better off for it. You can count on it - that's the over-arcing trend in history, and has been for hundreds of years.
>That is simply false because you donating to something will not magically cause more people to come out of the woodwork and support your opposition
I mean, that does happen, though. In fact, that's exactly this blog post is trying to do. It is no great insight that a view of your opponents marshaling their strength is a strong incentive for you to do the same.
Fair enough, although I do think that there is a good chance, Scott or people like him would have noticed the opportunity to lobby politicians on their own without this eventually. Still, I think there is absolutely no reason to think that this happens in a 1/1 ratio, and instead you have to look at the empirical facts of this case to determine how strong of a backlash you will get, and it will depend from situation to situation. Also keep in mind that in any zero-sum contest part of the reason, the other site does not escalate is fear of yourself escalating, but if you never escalate, there’s no reason for them not to go full force from day one. I think there is a good chance that accelerationists billionaires would have doubted the AI safety communities, willingness or capability to respond in kind, so I would not be surprised if it turns out. They already invested everything they were willing to, and in any case past a point, the benefit of increase spending will just not be worth the cost so there is a limit to how much they’re willing to expend instead of some law, ensuring that they will always add exactly the same amount as you.
I disengaged in 2015, reengaged in 2022, supported Nikki Haley, had a blog for a couple months, realized that was a mistake, took down all my posts in the blog, and am back to being disengaged. Even my blog was designed to get more people on the Right to become Non Partisan Civil Servants, but there is no appetite on that from the Right on Substack. They would rather tear down the institutions entirely than try to compete in them, and the current president, who I didn’t vote for, is happy to do that.
Even during that phase, I kept my donations going to pandemic preparedness research, and never donated to a politician. Also, Greek and Roman history is cool, and I’ll never apologize for having cool ascetics even if they signal that I’m on the right.
It WOULD undo PACs, yes, but it would also abolish the freedom of the press as generally understood if any state can decide that, say, the New York Times, as a corporation, may not do business in that state.
Do you have a specific example of country you think has what, say, the median American would consider a free press where, sticking with the Citizens United case, if a book was being published critical of a candidate by an organization not granted state imprimatur, that the government could stop publication, citing "campaign finance regulation"?
I could indeed name several examples of countries where I believe organizations are restricted from publishing and distributing opinions disfavored by the government – Afghanistan, Belarus, China, Djibouti, Eritrea,… – but how would that help? You'd just say those don't count because you had some other country in mind that made your point better.
But okay, that's more concrete: you're suggesting the UK as an example. Even granting that most Americans would consider its press free, I haven't seen an instance of the government imposing prior restraint on publication like what was forbidden in the Citizens United case.
Your claim was that a state could decide the NY Times couldn’t do business there. I think that’s unlikely and a straw man argument. The UK has fairly strict laws governing actions by non-party actors to influence an election, but the tabloids continue to operate.
To be fair, the median American would not consider the UK press free (although for the less-pertinent reasons of super-injunctions and hate speech laws).
That's not at issue. Publishing companies would be unaffected, because it's the author (a citizen) who is expressing the opinion, not the publishing platform. That's a well established feature of US law (it's what allows us to express our opinions on this substack, and Scott isn't liable in any way).
Are you replying to the right comment? I didn't say anything about the publishing company (or "platform") being liable for anything.
If it's about the scope of Citizens United, it looks like the government's lawyer, Malcom Stewart, disagrees with you: he argued the government COULD ban books that advocated for a candidate under campaign finance laws.
Hell, I don't know, substack threads are like navigating an overgrown maze. In the dark.
I was responding to the following: "It WOULD undo PACs, yes, but it would also abolish the freedom of the press as generally understood if any state can decide that, say, the New York Times, as a corporation, may not do business in that state."
Freedom of speech is a well established constitutional right, no simple law would be allowed to interfere with it. That isn't what the article is arguing anyway-it's about rewriting the definition of corporations so that they don't have free speech rights. That would not affect the rights of individual citizens within those corporations.
It happened in this country before Citizens United. The CU case was literally fought over the government banning someone from producing a political documentary.
Also, there is a significant difference between free speech and a free press: the latter is much narrower. You can have rules that allow the NYT to say what it wants about candidates, without allowing other kinds of organizations (or individuals) to do the same. Or at least, traditionally (pre-internet) that was a thing that could happen.
I'm also amused that anyone is holding the UK up as an example here, given the relative frequency of libel and defamation claims over things the US would consider perfectly normal speech.
It's not freedom of the press unless everyone has it one bit more than it would be freedom of speech if only I have it. The only case where this was true is broadcast rights where spectrum was limited by he laws of physics. It was never the case for newspapers, books, films, or any other type of media because there is no fundamental physical limit on the number of people who can use it.
Once upon a time "owns a printing press" was perhaps a plausibly reasonable and politically neutral filter that anyone could overcome, but still required a certain amount of dedication to make yourself heard. Meanwhile talking in public didn't scale and therefore was not much worth policing even when those in power might want to. Today none of those things is true.
That is not what happened. What happened was a production company wanted cable companies to make it available on a subsidized pay per view basis. It was paid advertising by another name.
That is not what happened. A production company wanted to advertise it's DVD about a specific candidate within 30 days of an election. The were never banned from making or distributing the video.
I don't think that's an accurate reading of the article (or the movement): "The sovereign authority to decide which powers states grant to the corporations they charter includes the authority to not grant their corporations the power to spend in politics."
It claims that state governments have the power to redefine what corporations are, and they can redefine them to not have powers of political expression. The article also claims that no Supreme Court decision has ever contradicted that, including Citizens United and Buckley vs Valeo.
None of that affects individual human beings rights of self-expression, nor does it directly impact the ability of a corporation to do business anywhere (so long as their business isn't political expression - the professional lobbying industry would be pretty much screwed).
The New York Times last year prominently printed an article headlined, "Donald Trump is unfit to lead." Do you argue that ISN'T political expression? Or that the NYT remains free to print and distribute such an article but only as long as they don't spend any money to do so?
Whatever you do to make it so, say, Tesla, can't print that article could probably be used against the New York Times Company too, even if you want to suppress only the former.
The argument being presented is that the NYT shouldn't have the right to publish that because they are a corporation and corporations are entitled to free speech. The NYT has the right to publish that because they are incorporated under state law as a newspaper, and special rules govern newspapers, as opposed to other corporations. One such rule is that newspapers can't commonly accept money that was solicited for political purposes. Money that was solicited for political purposes (however a particular state wishes to define that) could also be subject to special rules, because corporations should not have free speech rights. The whole point is that states have the right to define different types of corporations, and confer on them different rights. If the state of NY wishes to eliminate the distinctions between newspapers and car companies with respect to political speech, then they can. Or not, it 's up to the voters there.
> The whole point is that states have the right to define different types of corporations, and confer on them different rights.
As I said, if they do actually this, that'd be the end of freedom of the press as has been understood in the US since probably its founding, but definitely since the First Amendment was incorporated.
Of course, I don't expect the state of New York to suppress the NYT. But, if the classification of different kinds of companies became salient, then say, Texas could classify it as a gaming/entertainment company citing its comic strips and crossword, and Tesla as a news company because of notifications on the dashboard, and decide to confer only the latter with the privilege of distributing political speech.
I dont see how this plan can work as a run around. Those laws would be struck down on citizens united precedent straight forwardly. The whole corporations as a social/legal construct thing is fine philosophically, but is not relevant to 1st amendment rights legally. Persons are not given first ammendment rights by law, they precede all law. Under citizens united, corporate person hood gives them 1st amendment rights. You cant restrict that with either campaign finance law, or corporate charter law, for better or for worse.
It might undo PACs but then something else would spring up in their place. Politicians like and need money for their campaigns, and interest groups want to influence politicians to make laws and govern according to their ideas of what is best.
So if we (interest group that wants to lobby for all public spaces to be painted magenta) can only donate X amount directly as individuals because of pesky laws, and we can't found a PAC, then some other loophole about "getting a bunch of us together to hand over $$$$ to persuade politicians to pass laws about painting all public spaces magenta" will be found (e.g. "we are all close personal friends of the candidate in this constituency and their family and are related to them by marriage and other ties, and we are giving them wedding, birthday, and Christmas presents of nice fat cheques to spend as they wish on whatever they wish, no strings attached, all perfectly legal, oh what a coincidence that Candidate's cousin owns a paint shop which will supply all the magenta paint for the public spaces").
Very interesting. It does, indeed, seem strange that no-one has tried this before. My instinct is that this is the kind of situation in which everyone assumes that, if it worked, everyone else would already be doing it. But ultra-ambitious risk-taking maverick billionaires (i.e. the people best suited to using this strategy) don't seem like the kind of people to make that particular mistake.
Minor proofreading things:
> is a little bit paranoid and will truly accept that their safe seat is safe
I think there should be a "not" or "never" in this clause.
> and occasionally crossed skirted the border of illegality
It's probably just a case of everyone being pretty happy with the status quo and not wanting to rock the boat by outright buying politicians. The country is already as business friendly as you can reasonably expect a country to be.
I very much disagree with that last point. There is plenty of space between the current US regulatory regimen and Prospera that could be an improvement for the business environment. Every state government could have Delaware's legal code/system.
The $20 dollars on the sidewalk/everyone before is an idiot; claim is wrong the vast majority of the time, but sometimes it isn't.
The greatest breakthrough in human history came from putting bread mould onto wounds and it was only widely used in the 1940s, wheeled suitcases were only introduced in the 70s.
> The greatest breakthrough in human history came from putting bread mould onto wounds and it was only widely used in the 1940s
I disagree. Even if penicillin had never been discovered and we never got the beta-lactams at all, we would still definitely have sulfonamides, aminoglycosides, and tetracyclines (developed before or around the time that penicillin became widely known) and probably macrolides and fluoroquinolones too (impossible to say). In this world, treating infections would be harder but we wouldn't be stuck in the 19th century.
Going out on a limb here, but I believe the greatest antimicrobial discovery of the 20th century was Salvarsan (the first antibiotic that cured syphilis), invented by Paul Ehrlich's lab and marketed in 1910. Salvarsan itself was quickly replaced by better drugs, unlike penicillin which is in use today in close to the original form. But conceptually, Ehrlich's Nobel-winning work laid the foundation for drug discovery in the 20th century far more than Fleming's did and we would be worse off if we had lost him than Fleming (who also won the Nobel for his work.
- He described the concept of a "magic bullet", a chemical that precisely kills the pathogen but not the host. Salvarsan was the first such compound.
- Ehrlich's work laid the foundation for chemotherapy, a term he coined
- Salvarsan was the first antibiotic discovered via rational drug design
I think the fact that it happened with bitcoin demonstrates the reasons why it doesn't necessarily happen with other things.
Let's compare bitcoin to oil. Bitcoin is pretty much the optimal case for the value of buying politicians. There's a significant number of very rich people whose fortune is almost entirely tied up in bitcoin. The value of bitcoin is very dependent on US government policy, to the extent that there's plausible policy approaches the US Government might actually take which would 100x or 0.01x the value of bitcoin. And a lot of politicians haven't already made their mind up about bitcoin, so they're relatively easy to influence. Therefore it's easy for a single individual to spend a dollar influencing politicians and expect to get a greater-than-$1 return on it.
Compare to oil. There's a lot of money in oil, somehow, but it's pretty diffuse. Oil companies are ultimately owned by a bunch of people, most of whom own a lot of other things and are not single-mindedly exposed to the oil industry. Furthermore it's not clear that plausible US Government policy is going to have a huge impact on the fortunes of oil companies one way or the other; maybe you make a bit more money here or less money there, but ultimately oil is just going to keep on making money until it doesn't. If I'm some rich oil guy then it's not clear to me that spending money on politicians is going to make me personally richer... maybe it will make the oil industry collectively richer but now we have a collective action problem, unlike the bitcoin case where a single rich bitcoin guy can expect to make money by buying politicians just on his own.
That's a good point, I hadn't thought about the ways in which influencing crypto regulation specifically has a much higher ROI than lobbying for other industries.
I'm still slightly surprised that no eccentric billionaire has used this strategy to indulge a personal hobby-horse without expectation of turning a profit, but I suppose this would require a policy issue lying in the rare overlap between 'the average politician has no strong opinion on this' and 'someone is willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on this'.
I'm reminded of Phil Sokolof who spent his own money to successfully campaign McDonald's into changing from tallow to vegetable oils for frying, in a misguided attempt to save people from saturated fats. Instead leading to the proliferation of trans fats, likely killing quite a lot of people. Also ruining the taste of fries forever.
Idk, not sure I would eat oxidized linoleic acid no matter my ethical concerns regarding tallow. It's not quite as bad as trans fats, probably, but it's up there.
Everything in moderation… as a vegetarian, I’m grateful I can grab a medium McDonald’s fry on the occasional road trip. As for whether oxidized lineolic acid is healthier than trans fats, it’s hard for me to say — but I consume butter on an occasional basis as well.
It's plausible that Robert Mercer single-handedly made alt-right, and eventually Trumpism, a viable political force, and almost nobody has even heard of him. Pretty successful hobby-horsing, I'd say.
What is an example of a plausible policy approache the USG could take which would reduce Bitcoin's value by multiple orders of magnitude? I inquire because crypto has thus far seemed robust to government bans, e.g. in China, and am curious as to what other vulnerabilities are known/feared.
I think a US Government ban would be a lot more effective than a Chinese Government ban. (A Chinese Government ban was pretty much priced in from the start; of course the Chinese are going to ban it, they ban everything)
That said, I'm only wildly guessing. I don't claim to be able to accurately predict the effect of random events on the bitcoin price; if I were then I'd be incredibly rich.
That's easy - ban the exchange of cryptocurrency for US dollars, and create private right of action penalties against any financial institution with US assets or branches that provides it in violation of the law.
Cryptocurrency would still be available overseas, but it would be like prediction markets where being cut off from the huge, rich market full of would-be speculators in the US heavily constrains it. Both of them desperately needed the money of US investors, speculators, and suckers to really get going.
I don't have much crypto but if I thought it was going to be illegal to trade for currency or goods/services I would move immediately to sell all of it.
>That's easy - ban the exchange of cryptocurrency for US dollars, and create private right of action penalties against any financial institution with US assets or branches that provides it in violation of the law.
If you dislike cryptocurrency and want to badly weaken it, then effectively cutting it off from hordes of US buyers will do that quite effectively. It certainly won't disappear, but it will be vastly more marginal.
I'm not a fan of cryptocurrency, because to me it's just digital collectibles speculation that also makes cyber-crime and money laundering easier. It'd be better if folks were speculating on stocks or sports.
Likewise - which is why I haven't acquired any. The up and downs of index funds backed by a wide average across the market are irritating enough, to my taste - and at least these are backed by businesses that actually _exist_ . I'm neither a fan of nor an opponent of cryptocurrency.
>"crypto can let you do things the government might otherwise stop you from doing" which can be good or bad depending how much you agree with the [current] government.
This is an excellent point. The corresponding point to this is that unlike oil (where you have a few oilmen and many oil buyers) the vast majority of people (not just politicians) have no opinion whatsoever on the topic. It's the perfect lobbying opportunity.
I think at this point - unlike even a year ago - the average American does have an opinion on AI. I've heard it claimed that 90% of Americans wish AI didn't exist. I can't back that up with a source, but I find it plausible. That's good! But it might not last, once AI gets more integrated into things the average person would hate to lose.
And there was special legislation introduced to break up the monopoly of oil companies like Standard Oil. John D. Rockefeller probably could have bought and sold the politicians of his time, and the corporation did make large donations to particular political campaigns:
"Although it always had hundreds of competitors, Standard Oil gradually gained dominance of oil refining and sales as market share in the United States through horizontal integration, ending up with about 90% of the US market."
"Large sums had to be spent quickly, and Hanna energetically built a businesslike campaign. ... But as the campaign began operations, and began them on a huge scale, money was short. Hanna initially spent much of his time in New York, where many financiers were based. He faced resistance at first, both because he was not yet widely known on the national scene, and because some moneymen, although appalled at the Democratic position on the currency issue, felt Bryan was so extreme that McKinley was sure to win. ...Reports of Bryan support in the crucial Midwest, and intervention by Hanna's old schoolmate, John D. Rockefeller (his Standard Oil gave $250,000), made executives more willing to listen. After a gloomy August for the campaign's fundraising, in September, corporate moguls "opened their purse strings to Hanna". J. P. Morgan gave $250,000. Dawes recorded an official figure for fundraising of $3,570,397.13, twice what the Republicans had raised in 1892, and as much as ten times what Bryan may have had to spend. Dawes' figure did not include fundraising by state and local committees, nor in-kind donations such as railroad fare discounts, which were heavily subsidized for Republican political travelers, including the delegations going to see McKinley. Estimates of what Republicans may have raised in total have ranged as high as $16.5 million."
It's more that until recently, there were de facto limits on how much TV time/etc you could buy with money (only three networks, finite ad space, etc), and limitations on campaign finance used to have more teeth.
I'm also not totally sold on its effectiveness. The crypto money spam worked because Democratic politicians don't actually have that strong of opinions on cryptocurrency regulation, so a ton of money floating around was enough to sway them in a more positive direction (and of course the Trump people and associated Republicans are all too happy to have a new way to accept payments).
>It does, indeed, seem strange that no-one has tried this before.
The detached object-level analysis in the post shouldn't make anyone forget that "this" is "buying politicians", which is (was?) widely frowned upon and considered immoral and bad.
If an industry is outright buying politicians, people or the media would notice it and criticize it, and the damage to the industry's reputation might outweigh the expected gains. This is the Occam's razor explanation of why the almonds industry wasn't buying politicians, I think.
AIPAC is an obvious exception because until very recently it was de facto impossible to criticize it. Even in this comment section you can still see how any criticism is immediately accused of being just another "Jews control the world" conspiracy theory. Even mild criticism by someone who is literally world-famous for his honesty and objectivity and who's Jewish himself.
I'm not sure about why this is changing now, but crypto might have been an exception because regular billionaires still somewhat depend on the good will of their business partners and employees for their status, while for a crypto billionaire it's probably easier to just ignore public opinion.
The big hole in this theory is that before reading this post, I personally hadn't heard of the crypto influence in the 2024 elections at all. But for now, I'm chalking this up to me being uninformed and not even American.
>The detached object-level analysis in the post shouldn't make anyone forget that "this" is "buying politicians", which is (was?) widely frowned upon and considered immoral and bad.
I'm frankly surprised that the "dive bombing" tactics Scott describes in order to bully politicians into line is not very illegal, even in the US.
They probably did try it before, which is why we have laws around campaign finance etc. Think of things like the Teapot Dome scandal, or the various scandals that plagued Ulysses S. Grant's administration. We call such attempts bribes, because they were crude essays in the art.
For a long time Microsoft considered it gauche to donate to any politicians. Then Congressmen who took donations from their competitors dragged them. Ever since then they've been donors.
I get that you're Jewish, but uh, maybe it isn't a good idea to use an antisemitic dogwhistle in a post, even if it's a joke? Especially when said post has an activism component? Just saying.
Edit: Nevermind, apparently mentioning AIPAC at all was way worse. Well, your loss!
Is it really still an antisemitic dogwhistle? It used to be one, but (1) everyone knows what it means now and (2) the actual antisemites aren't using it anymore.
To me it read like jokingly using a period appropriate slur when writing an essay about a historical period -- the thing's been drained of all its dogwhistling power and relevance, so it can be used as a joke.
It would still be a bad idea to call black people negros in a piece complaining discussing the consequences of the Civil Rights Act. If you don't care about optics, that's fine, but Scott does have a reason to care in this case, so...
I think we're just getting different emotional voltages from seeing it -- maybe it's stupid of me to generalize, you're right that this is important. But also, like you mentioned -- Scott is a Jew. Can't he reclaim it like the black people did with Negro? Weren't there Civil Rights Leaders addressing each other like "my fellow negros"?
He doesn't make it his entire identity. But again, I don't care whether this is "right" or not. This is about optics. And given that (((Middle Eastern democracy supporters))) have greater-than-average disposable income, it makes little sense to alienate them in a post like this. Especially when you might tarnish the reputation of others by association.
This exchange is unintentionally hilarious - the word Negro *was not a slur* in the 1960's! People who wanted to slur blacks said (a different word that starts with N), or if they wanted to be slightly more subtle, they'd pronounce Negro more like Nigra. But Negro itself, I feel like people only started treating it as an actual slur within the last decade or so, after the other N-word became 100% unacceptable for non-blacks.
I think that was reclaimed ten years ago. Half the Jewish commentators on Twitter used to use it, although I think it's dropped out of popularity lately.
Yeah, I came to the comments to admit that it genuinely made me snort. I'm a little disappointed to see how many people here are lacking in a sense of humor.
I thought the general principle is you can get away with using an ethnic slur if you’re a member of the group it applies to, so African American rappers can use the N word and Jewish bloggers can put brackets round their name.
Yeah antisemetic dogwhistle is going a little far for that IMO. It doesn't really seem to hold any derogatory implication as it can't be used at someone.
Triple-parentheses around a name, e.g. (((Name))), is a convention among some antisemites for indicating the names of Jews. As Scott himself says in a different reply to the same parent comment, he's clearly using it in a joking/reclaimed way.
This whole thread just reminds me how everyone has a different Internet, because of The Algorithms. To me, not only has ((())) been reclaimed by people like (((me))), even that joke is a couple of years out of date. Meanwhile, on this subthread, there are people who still consider it a dog whistle, which mean that (to me!) they're two cycles behind, or multiple years.
Are people marching in the streets to oppose what AARP is for, the way for the last two years since October 7, 2023 some people have been marching to oppose what AIPAC favors?
Israel is a lot more hot button of an issue than retired people, especially over the last two years. But AIPAC has tended to win its battles.
Now, you could argue that AARP is so successful that retired people, unlike Israel, aren't even terribly controversial outside of Boomer-hating Xites.
I'm not unsympathetic to that argument, but, still, it's reasonable to point out that the Middle East is extremely controversial, yet AIPAC tends to win its fights in Washington.
In many ways, the crypto community today are analogous to Arab tribesman in the decades before muhummad, slowly growing in power and influence on the imperial periphery.
The religious angle of that analogy does make a lot of sense. Finally a religion that can have a truly immutable Word of God! Until someone finds the right exploit in the smart contracts, that is.
Marc Andreessen is as close as I think modern society has to the “man of lawlessness” or false prophet which is Biblically asserted to prepare society for the coming of the Antichrist.
"Specifically, he suggests the antichrist would be a “luddite who wants to stop all science”, referencing Thunberg, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Marc Andreessen.
'My thesis is that in the 17th, 18th century, the antichrist would have been a Dr Strangelove, a scientist who did all this sort of evil crazy science. In the 21st century, the antichrist is a luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta or Eliezer.
It’s not Andreessen, by the way. I think Andreessen is not the antichrist. Because you know, the antichrist is popular. I’m trying to say some good things about Andreessen here, come on.'"
I'm pretty sure that Thiel is also extremely heretical, his policy preferences are mainly concerned with the secular transcendence, not a supernatural one.
I think trying to create a synthetic God in the lab is almost laughably perfectly analogous to trying to immanentize the eschalon via creation of the antichrist (that is, assuming AGI is the antichrist). I’m just tying Thiel to the “false prophets” mentioned in Revelation who come before the antichrist and are meant to prepare the population for the antichrist’s rise.
Just my own view, but from my perspective it’s grimly hilarious to see Thiel projecting onto others these accusations of being the antichrist, when in fact it is he (and Andreessen) who I associate most closely with the coming of the Antichrist (AGI).
I think they would be more analogous to the Bedoin tribes who took over Saudi Arabua after WW1 when no one else wanted it much, and then suddenly found themselves rich beyond their wikdest dreams when oil was discovered there a few years later.
The crypto industry is merely a massive grifting enterprise. The only advantage crypto has it can be used for regulatory arbitrage; i.e. a bank has to verify your identity and take measures to ensure you aren't using your account for crimes. The miners and validators that support the blockchain have to do none of that.
All the Biden administration tried to do was prevent people from using cryptocurrency to break laws; the problem is they did not go far enough. We allow miners and validators to approve transactions between unknown counterparties; bankers would be prosecuted for doing that.
Crypto has many other advantages beyond regulatory arbitrage - for example, it makes it harder for the government to debank people, and substitutes for financial infrastructure in countries that don't have it. See https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-im-less-than-infinitely-hostile .
(EDITED TO ADD: Trying to donate to Bores, somehow two different credit cards and Paypal have both failed, both over ActBlue and over the phone, in ways that the credit card company cannot explain to me. Sure wish I could use crypto for this.)
I don't think so. I think of regulatory arbitrage as requiring a careful permit to register a bank, but you can register a crypto bank without a permit so it's cheaper but less safe. I think of debanking as something like the government freezing the accounts of protesters during a protest.
Depends somewhat on how you draw the lines but both of these seem like "crypto can let you do things the government might otherwise stop you from doing" which can be good or bad depending how much you agree with the government.
This. And for the most part its not like crypto is technically impossible for the givernment to regulate, or even particularly difficult. They just choose not to because crypto has successfully lobbied the government to keep it legal.
These are both the same thing being described with different Russell conjugations. The crypto bank is “less safe” *because* the government doesn’t have the power to freeze accounts at will.
I require a permit to establish a money services business.
These are functions banks could provide if we loosened restrictions. US banks could provide financial infrastructure anywhere crypto could if we removed regulations that make it costly to provide accounts to people who live in other countries .
Conversely the government can easily expand restrictions on crypto providers to make it almost impossible in the US to do what Scott desires.
Where did the Biden administration exceed reasonable bounds? Non KYC prosecutions involved securities laws. Perhaps in some cases the scams and lies fell outside of securities laws
The SEC lawsuit against Coinbase had nothing to do with KYC. They were claiming that all tokens outside Bitcoin were securities, looking to classify staking activity as a security, looking to expand the definition of brokers to include validators and miners, and to expand the definition of exchanges to include smart contracts like Uniswap. In short, strangle every major area of crypto innovation.
Staking will involves members of the public giving someone money with the intent of getting a return on its usage for a purpose. That fits the definition of a security. Likewise Uniswap allows people to trade things that have characteristics of investment contracts. The distinction is the technology stack— blockchain vs centralized counterparties.
There certainly is room to debate whether securities laws costs are worth the benefits of reducing scams; but one should not be able to evade
them by using a different tech stack or organizational structure
I think the strongest arguments against the SEC concern meme coins and NFTs. These are so intrinsically worthless they may be more like rigged gambling schemes than securities; but that is a legal fine point and hardly innovation that we should mourn if it vanished
Your original argument was that the Biden admin only pursued "non-KYC" and "scams and lies". That sounds non-objectionable and, if the crypto industry is legit, why would they object?
But the real argument, as you expand it, is the same as Liz Warren & Gary Gensler's anti-crypto army: government should extend its oversight to new technology and doesn't need congressional approval to do so. That's a lot more debatable, and it's not a surprise that the crypto industry would raise money to support candidates that don't share that opinion.
You misread my quote . I did not say everything they prosecuted was a scam or lie; just some some of the scams and lies may have not been covered by securities laws.
Securities law is not based on what tech you use for record keeping. Using cool tech or being innovative should not be a license to mislead and steal.
For example, the industry has repeatedly lied that certain Stablecoins had no risk, that NFTs were the first way to monetize digital property rights (Netflix and Getty images were and still are way ahead), and the you need crypto to accomplish what smart contracts do.
Whether these are securities laws violations or just consumer fraud does not depend on the tech, it depends on whether they are investments or just something benig sold.
That's unfair; it's not all grift. There's also collecting transaction fees from people who want to move money in ways that would otherwise result in law enforcement taking an interest, like drug deals, funding sanctioned foreign regimes and so on.
typo: "Any politician who’s survived long enough to matter is a little bit paranoid and will truly accept that their safe seat is safe" -> "...never truly accept..."
> Just as Substack bloggers may reload their browser again and again watching the likes and restacks come in, so politicians will reload their campaign metrics panel watching the flow of donations. [...] They don't even necessarily have some future campaign they're saving it for. They're just addicted to fundraising.
I do think in some sense this is one of the root issues of politics, in much the same way that people claw each other's eyes out to win a couple of elections even if they never actually do anything with that power. People are great at maximizing quantifiable things (funds, Congressional seats) and will spend their whole lives doing it without actually accomplishing any underlying goal, like a stereotypical rich workaholic who never takes a vacation.
Are you at all worried that your "Too Much Dark Money In Almonds" post might've directly or indirectly affected the political strategy of billionaires like Andreesen? Maybe there was a light taboo around billionaires buying elections which your post helped erase?
Also why isn't Eliezer Yudkowsky tweeting in support of a donation to Bores? Does he think it's another futile effort which isn't worth bothering with? I'm long-term unemployed with a chronic illness, so $7K is a lot of money for me.
Then why has the almond industry not responded? Seems like there must be political muscle there that they are waiting to flex, with all those billions from nut lovers.
To be honest, with the title of this post, I half-expected it to be almond growers versus data centres competing for water resources in California. Perhaps that is how we will restrict the growth of AI - pump it (literally) into the growth of tree nuts instead!
Leftists hate the almond-growing / Israel-supporting Resnick husband-wife team of billionaires. To quote at random:
"Lynda and Stewart Resnick–the Beverly Hills billionaire climate criminals ravaging California so they can build wealth and power off their pistachio and almond monopoly–are big fans of the occupation. They’ve been funneling millions to various charities connected with Israel’s occupation apparatus, including specifically the Israeli Defense Forces."
No, I cannot imagine that the market in knowledge is so inefficient that it would take a blogger saying "billionaires could spend more money on politics" to make billionaires realize they could spend more money on politics, if this were actually a very good strategy.
Bores is a moderate whose proposals are extremely far away from anything Eliezer thinks might be helpful. I also think it's reasonable for some people to have a norm against tweeting begs for money (I was nervous about blogging a demand for money, which was why I tried to compensate people with a useful post about the political situation).
I don't think if you are financially unstable you should spend a difficult-for-you amount of money on AI policy.
If the market in knowledge is so efficient, why even bother writing that post? The information was already known.
Are you at all familiar with the psychological literature around anchoring and framing effects? You reframed political donations from the common view ("way large") to a new view ("way small").
The space between the things that the people setting policy know (in this case, politicians, lobbyists, billionaires, etc), and that everyone else knows, is the entire reason that journalism is possible.
It's not even like I invented this argument! I was commenting on a paper saying the same thing! The idea that the market is so inefficient that commenting on a decades-old debate about why it looks like a $20 bill is left on the ground would lead someone to think "oh, cool, there's a way to take over the entire US government at minimal cost to me, I never was interested in this before, but I guess now this blog post has implicitly given me permission to do it" is just not how any of this works, and worrying about whether maybe it is is a good way to go from truth-seeking to being so paranoid that you never write about anything at all.
Seems like a bit of a false dichotomy. How many billionaires view themselves as "people setting policy"? Seems like a rather fluid category.
"It's not even like I invented this argument! I was commenting on a paper saying the same thing!"
Most academic papers are only read by a few academics, correct? I would guess you are responsible for far more exposures to this argument than anyone else. It's not about inventing arguments, it's about spreading them.
"is just not how any of this works"
Blog posts and memes have little influence on US policy and governance you say? This take is at least a decade out of date. Andreesen appears to be a memelord par excellence. And he is an ACX subscriber, if the Substack UI is any indication.
"go from truth-seeking to being so paranoid that you never write about anything at all"
Again, false dichotomy. Consider the least convenient possible world where you did, in fact, inspire Andreesen. What would the correct update be in that world? Maybe it might look something like: Do a trial run of an "80/20" red-teaming process for your posts, which aims to delay publication by at most 10 minutes, and filter out the posts which have the largest negative expected value. Do it for a month or two, then spend a few hours on a retrospective regarding whether it is worth continuing, or should even be expanded.
Thousands of people subscribe to your blog. Maybe you should take that a little more seriously?
"I would guess you are responsible for far more exposures to this argument than anyone else."
Scott looms large in his social niche, but I'm a non-academic (and recent ACX subscriber) who'd heard of that paper's findings before I read Scott's old blog post today. Let's not Basilisk ourselves into treating any discussion of bad political outcomes as an infohazard.
I do think it’s fair to say that Scott’s old blog was, in its heyday, easily the most influential widely-read source of “media” within Silicon Valley. It does not seem outside the scope of probability to assert what Ebenezer has here.
The _other_ knowledge availability consideration that one could make oneself paranoid over is that anything one writes is presumably going into the training data of the next iteration of LLMs, as well as more prosaic data consumers.
I'm confused how the push to donate to Bores meshes with what you said about the strategies that work, which wasn't "donate to the long-shot candidate who is already on your side" but "donate to the people that will win, so that you have influence on their later decisions"
I think that given that Andreessen is trying to create common knowledge that he will fight people who support AI regulation, it is especially useful to try to create common knowledge that we will support people who supports AI regulation. This is just my guess though, I am trusting the experienced political operatives.
> But also, AIPAC fights hard. If some random Congressman is anti-Israel, AIPAC will swoop down on their race in Middle Of Nowhere, Missouri and pour $10 million into electing their opponent. By now everyone knows this, and the mere threat of AIPAC action is enough to keep politicians in line.
If so, how do we account for several prominent politicians, including several Congresspeople and the current front-runner for the NYC mayor's race, being out-and-proud antisemites and vocal Hamas supporters? It would sure be nice if AIPAC had the power to reduce these human filth to political irrelevance, but that doesn't appear to be the case.
I think it's pretty obvious why AIPAC is not able to single-handedly defeat Zohran Mamdani, but why they can make the difference in some kind of close Congressional race.
Agreed, but that's not the claim that was made in the article. As I quoted above, you made it sound as if "everyone knows" that AIPAC can "keep politicians in line" and unconditionally cause people who are anti-Israel to not get elected.
Scott I know this is a sensitive topic and I hate to put you on the spot but I'm a bit concerned that you addressed this comment while completely ignoring the dehumanizing and inflammatory tone on display.
Also, it seems like an extraordinary claim to say that several Congresspeople are “out-and-proud antisemites.” I can think of only one individual at most who might sort of qualify for that claim.
That’s a strange thought, given that the mayor of New York probably sets policy for more Jewish people than any other individual in the world! (I’m assuming that the prime minister of Israel has to deal with more control by the Knesset than the mayor has to deal with from the city council.)
I assume they'll start caring if the NY government starts straight up segregating the Jewish population. Otherwise, there's not really any reason for them to care what goes on in local politics.
This is still less than almonds, but Michael Bloomberg put in $1 billion of his own wealth into his campaign. Tom Steyer, $342 million.
However, total political spending in 2024 was $20 billion, which is more than almonds. People believe that money has too much influence on politics, and I'm inclined to believe them, although I can't explian why.
I think the difference between Bloomberg and Andreessen is that Bloomberg was only able to spend his money on one thing (electing Bloomberg), which people didn't really want, but Andreessen can focus it on the most winnable races between people who are already both popular.
Bloomberg gives a lot of money to other candidates as well. He was the biggest donor to Democratic candidates in 2024 with $61 million according to OpenSecrets.org.
In the early 2000s I went to Naco, Arizona and walked into Naco, Mexico for an ice cream cone. The big difference between American Naco and Mexican Naco was the huge amount of political advertising in Mexico. My guess would be that in Mexico, at least a couple of dozen years ago, you could pretty easily convert an electoral victory into a financial rake-off. But in America in my lifetime, at least until Trump's win in 2024, that was a slower and less lucrative process.
That saturation point might be higher than it initially appears. Elon Musk was 10 points underwater at the time and very publicly associated w the effort. That certainly did some damage.
By oversaturation I literally mean that you've bought up 40% of the local tv ad spots. You can get your message out but you can't get people to like your message (Musk is finding you is part of the counter message)
Then how is AIPAC so effective? This just doesn't add up. I hear people complain about money in politics all the time but then I hear stories like this all the time too. I also remember the Freakonomics guys studying it systematically and concluding that money doesn't really impact election outcomes. I genuinely don't know what to think about it.
I'm inclined to think that it generally doesn't matter BUT if you happen to bet big on the winner by chance then you'll have an outsized amount of influence over him. Maybe the crypto people just happened to get lucky last year.
AIPAC is effective in many races because there is/was fairly broad support in the US for Israel (maybe not so much anymore among younger folks), and among both parties. It's an easy crowd to work, and you can see that when they actually try to unseat someone more challenging - like the failures to unseat AOC in her district.
Isn't AIPAC effective because US politicians fear it for more personal reasons than for electoral ones? If you're positive towards Israel, but lately have been having doubts, perhaps you refrain from making certain comments because you don't want to be *seen* as being anti-Israel. It's not that there was a period where a huge load of politicians switched from being pro-Israel to anti-Israel, and then AIPAC bought a load of campaign ads and these candidates all lost. It's that AIPAC's looming prescence keeps the least pro Israel of pro-Israel candidates in line, so that doesn't happen in the first place.
It prevents wavering, and keeps an existing status quo of pro-Israel politicians acting in unison. Its influence over anti-Israel/Zionist politicians and voters should be minimal, so it remains vulnerable to sudden generational swings. AIPAC is a creature of a particular era in politics.
This also explains the shift in strategy as well. AIPAC announced their Super PAC in late 2021, right around when public support for Israel was tanking amongst the left. Of course, that was still nothing compared to what would happen afterwards, so I guess they chose a good time to switch gears.
Paul Johnson's "History of the Jews" suggested that brilliant young Jewish cosmopolitans tend to get more ethnocentric as they age.
I'd had some extremely peripheral contact with Larry Ellison in the 1990s (I believe I sat in his desk chair at Oracle in 1994, but he wasn't there) and was always amused by his Bond Villain lifestyle. I was surprised to learn around 2010 that Larry had become a big donor to Haim Saban's charity supporting the Israeli Defense Force. A few weeks ago Larry was said to have displaced Elon Musk as the World's Richest Man, which is impressive for somebody who has been near the top for quite a few decades.
Now, Larry and his son David Ellison own CBS News and have put Bari Weiss in charge. So the generational swing looks, if anything, pro-Zionist.
Larry, by the way, is an interesting Nature-Nurture case study. His biological father was an Italian American pilot and his mother a young Jewish woman. His mother gave little Larry to her Jewish uncle and aunt to raise. So Larry was half-Jewish by Nature and all-Jewish by Nurture. I tend to assume that, unless shown evidence to the contrary, Nature and Nurture are roughly 50-50 in importance, so that would suggest by my idiosyncratic but not unreasonable arithmetic that Larry is 75% Jewish.
David Ellison's mom is Christian. I don't know much about his Nurture.
Note that Larry Ellison only displaced Elon Musk as richest man for *one day*, or possibly even just a few hours depending on how you count. It was due to a temporary spike in Oracle's stock price.
AIPAC has a pretty successful track record of unseating the small number of politicians they target, so they prevent from getting started the kind of anti-Israel mainstream political movements that we see in countries like Spain, since nobody wants to be the first Congressperson out of the trench shouting "Follow me, boys," because the AIPAC snipers will likely take you out.
It probably helps a lot when your target issue is very popular and low salience.
There probably is some dam breaking from the Gaza war but tbd on the long term effects. A few factors moving in opposite directions:
1. Peace means lower salience
2. Bump in positive polling towards Israel in peace time (people might be broadly sympathetic towards Israel but disliked war conduct), but netting out as negative from before the war.
3. Dam breaking you described on anti-Israel and AIPAC unable to police it with small amounts of money and Israel netting out as less popular.
4. Israel getting serious about a propaganda strategy in universities and media feeling it needs to counter Qatari money in the same.
5. Renewed focus on Hamas's governance of Gaza and mass executions makes Israel look better (this doesn't seem to be making a big dent)
6. Backlash to local anti-semitism.
7. Increase in local antisemitism and decrease in overall trust.
All of this is beyond AIPAC's control so I expect them to lose influence (if they actually had as much as people say).
AIPAC isn't actually that effective. It gets talked a lot as a boogyman in various parts of the media and Twitter for (((reasons))), but its actual influence isn't higher than you'd expect for a midsized PAC on a not-centrally-partisan issue (e.g. the NRA or Jones act people have historically been as successful or more).
Yes. I also can't tell whether AIPAC is actually that powerful or whether it's a conspiracy against the Jews.
I will say I'm very confused on what's going on with the NRA right now. It seems they went bankrupt 5 years ago and I haven't heard anything since but the gun laws haven't changed. Another issue where people blame the lobby but the real issue is public opinion (albeit more partisan in this case)?
Katie Porter is a weak candidate and probably would lose anyway (I expect her to lose the Governor's race regardless of crypto spending).
You can collect a few scalps as a PAC but if you screw up you negatively polarize the issue and can undermine long term progress (probably less of a concern for short-termists in tech in both AI/crypto).
Preventing action is easier than doing things in the US system.
I think you may have swapped hard and soft money in the section that starts "Safe-seat Congressmen want more hard money." Per my friend that works in political fundraising, "soft money fundraising is also just an expectation of the job [...] there's only so many ways chuck schumer can spend a check that gets written directly to him, and he doesn't really need that much money, so instead he gets someone to write a bunch of checks to a bunch of different groups all doing similar work." --which is the soft money, generally for a broad group of candidates not one specific guy.
> The tiny scale of US political spending is dangerous insofar as it means that one or two billionaires willing to go all-in can distort the national landscape. But it also makes it possible to oppose them.
I’m not sure that it’s true. The billionaires discussed in the post, it seems, aren’t spending for ideological reasons, but because they expect a clear ROI on this. $260m spent on crypto lobbying for a +100% return on BTC means it was just « good business ». The same is not true for people invested in the other side of the debate, but who can’t « cash in » on a win. I feel like the only way for non-billionaires to counter that influence is to fund the PAC to end all PACs that will finally lead to getting money out of politics.
I’ve thought for a while that the first and only “AI safety” law will be one to shield Sam Altman and co from liability. This will be followed by a gigantic tax cut to “incentivize innovation.”
This shift into politics seems quite directly counter to the advice from the original blog: "Guided By The Beauty Of Our Weapons", "Beware Systemic Change", general sentiment of trying to play cooperative games. And fair, maybe indeed "this time is different", but the post doesn't really go deep into this. It doesn't explain the tradeoffs. It doesn't actually argue back and forth, it doesn't try to steelman "why is this a bad idea".
For example, isn't it better to throw this money at finding common ground with pro-AI people politically? What are their main arguments and lines of attack? How does this compare to the usual advice of funding EA causes? What is likely to happen if the fight escalates? Who is likely to have more resources? Etc, etc. Just a donation link and a call to action.
The difference is, back then Scott was trying to reason from the first principles, and now he has enough clout for actual political consultants to tell him how it (supposedly) works in the real world.
I agree. "Guided By The Beauty Of Our Weapons" was ringing in my ears while reading this -- trying to get into a who-can-spend-the-most-money competition, where your opponents are the wealthiest people in the world, strikes me as fighting with asymmetric weapons pointed in exactly the wrong direction.
It seems consistent to me. He's not telling people to get into politics to enact systemic change and tear down Chesterton's fence. He is highlighting that other people are trying to tear down the fence and asking people to defend it.
If the anti ai regulation group gets a reputation as being able to primary AI safety proponents then it will affect the marginal legislators actions on AI safety.
Not ceeding that ground to them is practical politics not politics as aesthetic expression or calling for systemic change based on an outside view.
I also don't think just because the anti regulation group is well funded means the case is hopeless. If the funding is $0 on one side and $1m on the other that could have a big effect. If it's $1m on one side and $100billion on the other that will have less of an affect. Yes they can spend more than us but every marginal dollar does less
One might naively hope that the same strategy wouldn't be as effective for AI as it was for crypto and Israel, since there aren't as many rich AI lovers as there are rich crypto lovers and rich Israel supporters.
In other words, maybe there are more crypto millionaires who love crypto than there are AI millionaires who love AI.
But this is very optimistic and probably false hope.
Wow. This makes me wish the media was a bit more functional! I see there's been a bit of reporting on this, but not a huge amount, and it's a really big story. I'm glad Scott is aware, but this is the sort of thing that the media should be there to observe, and there just isn't very much.
I would model the millionaire's decision to spend or not spend money on politics to be a function of how much of their profits they expect to save (i.e. by avoiding a tax increase, or by getting a promised tax cut).
MONEY SPENT = (TAX RAISE - CURRENT TAX LEVEL) * PROBABILITY OF ACTUALLY IMPLEMENTING A TAX RAISE.
With this model, then it makes sense that they would actually not spend "too much" money if they were to belief that the actual likelihood of them getting a tax raise is low.
In the case of the oíl, finance, weapons industry... there seems to be few realistic chances to raise taxes on them, let alone to destroy those industries. So they spend little.
Another problem is a classical free loader problem.
In the case of crypto (or AI), it was very possible for those industries to be regulated to death (which should be treated in the model as a tax raise that takes away all their profit), so it makes sense that they are "donating" more money than ever
While EAs may have overlearned the lessons of the 2010s, this effort suggests they (we?) have underlearned the lessons of the 2020s. What are those lessons?
- Plunging tons of money into political campaigns does not, in fact, guarantee success, the somewhat limited evidence presented in this post notwithstanding. In fact, plunging tons of money into political campaigns can actually generate enormous amounts of unwanted attention.
- This unwanted attention can fundamentally alter the landscape for workaday EA organizations actively trying to influence policy in the nation's capital to such an extent that some such organizations actually withdraw from previously successful attempts at policy influence since EA relationships become seen as toxic.
- The story "a bunch of weird nerds are obsessed with AI and are spending tons of money to regulate it" is a much more tasty news peg than "rich guys are spending money to influence politics." In every context, the former will generate more news stories and indeed more negative news stories than the latter.
- Lobbying AGAINST something (more regulation of crypto!) is many multiples more cost-effective than lobbying FOR something (more regulation of AI!). This is a stylized fact rather conclusively well-supported in the empirical political science literature — and also one we can see throughout the 2020s.
- THE BETTER CAPITALIZED PARTY DOES NOT WIN EVERY POLITICAL BATTLE. Boy, this is a big one. In crypto and Katie Porter we have an existence proof of a certain kind of political activity.
This is really where I want to hammer on it. Is it the opinion of the AI Safety community that expending $1b on lobbying is the maximally cost-effective way to influence AI regulation? One comes away with the opinion that very little research has been done on the policymaking process.
I don't think the for/against distinction is clearly meaningful. Suppose we said we were only lobbying AGAINST federal pre-emption of AI regulation (a cause that we indeed don't like, and which is our main target)? Or suppose we said that the crypto people were lobbying FOR the GENIUS act and the Strategic Bitcoin reserve?
Given how thin this line is, I am willing to trust the experienced political operatives who have chosen this strategy, rather than your theory that although sure, spending lots of money worked amazing for our opponents, it will mysteriously backfire for us, and therefore we should let our opponents outspend us 100-1 and win easily.
It is, in fact, a distinction in the poli sci literature — as is the inconsistency of value in outspending. It is by no means an established fact that big spenders win elections or get their policy priorities implemented as a matter of course. As for the former issue, the distinction here is between "maintaining the status quo" and "making change":
Again, the issue here is what's valuable on the margin — trying to compete in this arena is *enormously expensive* and this doesn't just need to be *a good idea* — it needs to be *the best idea on the margin.*
"Plunging tons of money into political campaigns does not, in fact, guarantee success, the somewhat limited evidence presented in this post notwithstanding. In fact, plunging tons of money into political campaigns can actually generate enormous amounts of unwanted attention."
Yeah, I definitely think the Carrick Flynn election result burned them on pushing for any more directly political campaigns (I'm sorry, I mean no disrespect, but this story always makes me laugh since it was so clearly the triumph of idealism over going with the reality on the ground). That, plus SBF being the one shoving money into such backing and similar donations and the subsequent black eye that gave the movement.
Wow, you've really crossed over into "Jews pulling the strings to control society" conspiracy land. Honestly, this post should be the last nail in the coffin of the rationalist movement. Rationalism has a lot of good criticisms of other ideologies, but as a positive theory in its own right, it's time to let go.
Every immoral ideology merges with antisemitism eventually; and for a philosophy that sees itself explicitly as the antidote to conspiracy thinking, seeing you transition so smoothly into embracing the oldest conspiracy theory is a clarifying moment. What was it in the end? Did you just fall for the avalanche of defamation and blood libels? Or was it reactionary hatred of Trump?
That’s not what they said though; they said that in 2024 they were the largest PAC *advocating for Israel*. That seems very plausibly true. But that would hardly make them the largest PAC, period.
And “96% of AIPAC-backed candidates win” is a useless statistic on its own. It lacks any control or discussion of when and why AIPAC backs someone. It smacks of the “judges are more lenient after lunch” study, which I believe has been discussed here before: the truth was that judges got to preview the cases and the facts in those summaries were usually the whole story, so judges scheduled their cases so they would get to lunch on time.
In the same way, AIPAC might simply have been choosing not to back candidates in close or losing elections. For example, America is very polarized rural vs urban. If you live in a big city and back the Dem nominee (or in a small town and back the GOP nominee) you’re well on your way to having backed the winner, without having influenced the outcome.
I think there's also an effect of "judges let defendants with lawyers go first". Not sure to what extent that's professional courtesy vs not making the client pay for their lawyer to twiddle thumbs while waiting to be called, but from my own experiences in court, it's very common.
And naturally, defendants with private attorneys do much better than those without.
This was a very specific study from 2011, focused on a specific Israeli parole board. Other law experiences may vary significantly from this one, although the courtesy you describe is another way this effect could arise.
That's why I'm so skeptical of AIPAC's massive claimed success rate; it serves both their purposes (look how effective we'll be with your money, <future donor>!") and the purposes of antisemites ("Jews control the world") for those numbers to be high. Nobody in that space has any reason to go in and say, wait a moment, maybe AIPAC is just a moderately effective organization that has been advocating for something (the American-Israeli relationship) that was (until relatively recently) quite popular. Because like in the "hungry judges" study, AIPAC has ways to fudge the numbers without increasing their real effect.
Regardless of the particulars of AIPAC, Jews are represented in powerful positions at much higher rates than their fraction of the population in the population. The book "Thou Shalt Prosper" (by rabbi Daniel Lapin, not exactly raging anti-semite) claims it's 64%
Honestly, the surest sign that there ISN'T a secret cabal: half the time the messaging is "man, Jews hold $POWER_MARKER at 20x their rate in the general population, aren't we awesome?"... and half the time the messaging is "don't you dare repeat falsehoods like that, it feeds anti-semitism!"
I'm only a little bit tongue-in-cheek with that, but at least under USA law, truth is an absolute defense against defamation. This is the same reason why discussion of poor outcomes in Blacks, per se, can't really be shot down. You can certainly be a dick about it (framing as "they deserve it!") or not ("they need more help"). I think if people are saying "Jews outperform expectations" rather than "Jews run the world", that's pretty clearly not anti-semitism. But YMMV.
The ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu for several war crimes, but not for genocide. (By the way, at the same time it issued a warrant against a Hamas leader for "extermination" aka genocide, though said Hamas leader was already dead at the time so there was no chance of this leading to actual prosecution. So not only did the ICC not say Israel was committing genocide, but instead it said Israel was the victim of genocide.)
Similarly, the ICJ did not label it genocide. It did not even say that the situation was plausibly genocide. Rather it accepted that Gazans have a plausible right to be protected from genocide, meaning that the ICJ would continue monitoring the situation in case it might at some future point become genocide. See:
Are you aware that Scott is a member of the "pullers of the strings to control society"? It's a lighthearted self-effacing joke which made no conspiratorial insinuations and just stated obvious public information, relax. If anything it's poking fun at the conspiratorial-minded.
(((Scott Alexander))) is pulling on the strings to control society by writing about what he thinks about issues of importance on his popular blog Astral Codex Ten. A lot of smart and influential people read the blog and might be influenced by the ideas they see published there and also by the ideas of other people publishing blog posts engaging with (((Scott's))) posting. Also I heard that he publicly gave grant money to a bunch of people and organizations who he thought were doing good or interesting work in the world, which makes him kind of similar to (((George Soros))).
I suspect this is second- or third-hand influence, and that Scott learned about PACs from a source that is generally reliable except for the lean towards specific dangerous tropes (or a source that themselves learned from such a source), leading to the distortion being presented as fact. This is the kind of thing that will often happen to people who are not themselves at all antisemitic.
(An alternative hypothesis is that this presentation of AIPAC/Jewish donors is actually accurate, but when you're in a society that spontaneously generates "Jews control everything" conspiracies regardless of circumstances, your bar for sufficient evidence for that should be *very* high.)
I think it is unlikely that Scott is a self-hating Jew.
What do you say to "AIPAC is, in fact, Jews pulling the strings to control society"? If it's an organisation set up to defend Jewish interests and the method of action on that is influencing elections?
I don't think it's anti-Semitic to go "yes, this is a Jewish organisation promoting Jewish interests". If every criticism of anything Israel, Israel-supporting organisation, or Jewish actions gets met with "anti-Semitism! you're trying to send me to the gas chambers!" then eventually it will be crying wolf and people will take *more* notice of those who want to say "psst, lemme tell you about some shady stunts these guys are pulling".
Mostly that AIPAC isn't particularly large as PACs go (it was the twenty something biggest PAC by total spending in 2024, a year it spent over 10x what it usually does. In 2016 it didn't even make the ranking list and spent less than, say, the national realtor association)
Call them antisemitic conspiracy theorists one more time, that’s the bombshell that you need to win the culture war! But be sure to not include any object-level counterarguments, that would kinda ruin it.
With crypto, I'd keep in mind that Trump won the popular vote by less than 2% against the unpopular last minute replacement for a historically unpopular incumbent. The Democratic base is now very against crypto and a lot of Silicon Valley stuff, and if Harris had won, they might be in a bad situation now. It's not clear that spending all that money actually is some unbeatable strategy.
My sense is that the Musk buying Twitter thing really did help but the situation is a bit sui generis.
Also re AI, they tried to add a "states can't regulate AI" provision into their law earlier this year and it generated backlash and got dropped.
Now _that_ would cost a lot in political donations!
California water rights got grandfathered in in 1915. Increasingly, California's hereditary water baron families intermarry so they are getting fewer in number but richer.
Somebody brought up the idea of water property rights reform to Gavin Newsom. He agreed it would a good thing to do, but said that no way was _he_ going to lead a political campaign against the Water Powers That Be.
Maybe the reason oil companies dont buy politicians in the direct sense is that they find it more effective to buy issues via the economy. Oil supports lots of jobs etc, which is why there are no shortage of pro oil politicians.
This makes crypto well suited, maybe uniquely suited for buying politicians directly. Theres tons of money in it without supporting many jobs somehow (kinda the point of the anti crypto position, dont interpret that as me being pro or anti)
I hear AI is supporting the global economy these days. That might be more important than their PAC, but by running both, I guess we wont get clean data
Maybe we can get some good AI regulations but the odds are the regulations will just slow the industry down without doing much good, I think the potential harms of a future AI are to broad to be able to affectivley pin down in legislation
AIPAC was not founded as a PAC; it only became one in 2021. It has historically disbursed a smaller dollar amount than many industry lobby groups and quite a few actual foreign countries lobbying. Compare their 10s of millions to China dropping 1/2 a billion dollars, and the Saudis 1/3 of a billion. Until October 7th, iirc AIPAC was smaller than most ag sector lobbyists.
AIPAC gets its way far less often than other domestic lobbies, especially on the issues it has considered the most important. They completely failed to prevent the JCPOA, which American Jews felt was a bad deal. In fact, they failed so badly that they got replaced by J Street within the Democratic Party, and J Street is at best a fringe organization of American Jews.
Now, AIPAC says they’re successful, and of course they want to say so because who would donate to an ineffective lobby? And antisemites say that AIPAC is successful, because without that conspiracy they might have to reckon with the idea that most people don’t like to see Jews killed.
But are they successful? What specifically have they accomplished in the last twenty years? Thirty? Forty? AIPAC claims they got the development aid and military aid for Israel. Did they? Or were there clear strategic reasons that America chose to make those interventions - such as stabilizing Israel in the Yom Kippur War, and securing Israel enough that they’d go along with risky diplomatic plans such as peace with Egypt or the JCPOA - where America was just following its own interests as it saw them? Those three events account for, if memory serves, more than half of all aid to Israel period, including development aid. AIPAC is pushing on open doors, at eye-watering cost, and thinks that makes them kingmakers.
And if AIPAC *isn’t* the kingmaker they like to say they are, then repeating their narrative can play into the hands of the blood libel of Ilhan Omar and co.
Their boastful speaking has ended up giving the blood libelers a lot of ammunition for no obvious purpose.
If you ask me to amateurly psychologize, the discrimination that Jews faced in the late 1800s and early 1900s in America was so humiliating that it created a powerful need to show and assert Jewish strength within America. And I get it; when at the height of Jewish migration 5 out of every 6 people changing their names in the state of New York are changing their names to not be recognizably Jewish so they can get a job, that’s the sort of thing that will scar you.
And I think much of the “substitute AIPAC for Israel or Jews so as not to get canceled” is just a legacy of Soviet and Arab seething without any relation to facts. But it sure doesn’t help you convince someone that “no, there isn’t a cabal of Jews running the world, actually” when a bunch of smug Jews are going around patting themselves on the back and saying “ho ho ho, we run the world!”
And so we of course come back to the factual question; does AIPAC actually swing elections and votes at any notable rate as compared to other lobbying efforts? Do they have more money than analogous efforts? Or are they being handed cartoon bags of cash (instead of, say, that money going to Jewish schools) to crow about tailwinds and whine about headwinds? I submit that the burden of proof is on proving that they’re remarkable, which Scott seems to have taken as a given.
America is pretty divided politically lately over issues like DEI and immigration, but is Israel all that controversial in partisan terms? It seems like both Trump Administrations and the Biden Administration were pretty pro-Israel. Republicans prefer Likud and Democrats would prefer the anti-Likud coaltion, but both are awfully rightwing by 21st Century standards. Israel's leftwing coalition might well be at risk for getting banned in Germany for being extremely rightwing.
"Israel's leftwing coalition might well be at risk for getting banned in Germany for being extremely rightwing."
Really? Why? Even under the current very right wing government, Israel has affirmative action for Arabs. In both universities and civil service. The previous government had an Arab party in it. How would someone like Yair Golan get banned in Germany for being right-wing? Netanyahu wouldn't even get banned. Maybe Smotrich and Ben-Gvir.
Obviously, Germany will be the last country to crack down on Israel for its rightwingishness ... because of Hitler and the Holocaust.
But that raises an interesting question: are there any white countries on earth more rightwing in 2025 than Israel?
Yeah, I know about the Ethiopian and Yemeni Jews, but take a look at Bibi. And he's a lot more moderate than Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, whom you'd have to be Nick Fuentes to call not white.
Perhaps Stephen Miller dreams about someday heading a government as right wing as Bibi's, but that still seems a long way off.
Russia is unambiguously white under whatever racial definition and clearly under Putin it's far more right-wing than Israel is. But I take the "white country" in your post to mean "developed white country". Ben-Gvir is a swarthy Kurdish Jew, but I agree that most Middle Easterners are white. I would consider Syria to be a white country that is more right-wing than Israel and is run by a former Al-Qaeda guy. Turkey as well. But anyway, I know by "white country" you meant "developed white country".
How are you measuring this though? Right-wing along what axis? I think Israel is similar to America. Trump in many ways is similar to Netanyahu. Stephen Miller seems as extreme as Smotrich and is running US immigration policy. There are people in Homeland Security who are huge Fuentes fans and doing 1488 dog whistles, analogous to Ben-Gvir running internal security. And both the current Israeli government and the current American government represent the right half of their country's political spectrum. Granted, being similar to America means you are to the right of Canada, Australia, and Europe.
The one objective thing I found is "World Values Survey" where Israel is to the "left" of Romania, Albania, Croatia, and Portugal, as it's above and to the right of them on the chart. See here:
I wish you (and Americans more generally) would consider the implications of posts like these - describing moneyed interests who support often unpopular positions (Cryptocurrency, Zionism) outright sinking hostile candidates with attack ads on unrelated issues, while funding both sides of competitive races - and reconsider their reflexive defenses of the American political system, or their analysis of the country as a democracy.
I think it will go to their heads, they'll try spending $500 million in 2026, and the results will be really disappointing for them. Congressmen obviously don't like having tens of millions in attack ads dumped against them, but ultimately Porter was a weak candidate in a race against a far more popular, high-profile Democrat who ultimately won it (Schiff), and on an issue where most of the Democrats don't have strongly held opinions on the topic.
As I pointed out in the 2019 post, "that's what we spent on almonds, so it's not a lot of money" is bad reasoning because just because we think of almonds as insignificant doesn't mean that the amount is small.
I decided to look up https://data.ers.usda.gov/reports.aspx?ID=4057 which shows almonds at 5.8 billion, but that's "cash receipts", not the size of the industry or how much Americans spend. Still, there are a lot of other crops in the table and I should be able to get relative sizes without having to compare apples to oranges (except literally). Almonds beat out every single one of the 32 "vegetables and melons" (though potatoes are close) as well as all 31 other items in the "fruits and nuts" category except for grapes.
Almonds are about half of wheat and beat out sugar cane and sugar beets combined, cotton (though only for 2024), and tobacco. They're still nothing compared to animals or feed crops, and nowhere near the military or health care, but why Scott thinks almond spending is insignificant is beyond me. Something that spends as much as we spend on almonds is a big deal.
The table also seems to give single lines for things that are both consumed by humans and used as animal feed. Separate googling claims that about half of wheat is used for animal feed and 90% of soybeans. In 2019, when Scott made his original post, grapes were less than almonds, and almonds were more than now (in real dollars), which means that Scott managed to choose an "insignificant" example that was the highest of all food crops.
I've got a 2.5 pound of bag of Costco almonds sitting next to my laptop as I type.
I love almonds, but they require a huge amount of water and sunshine to grow, so they are dependent upon a bizarre 1915 California water property rights decision. Someday a California politician is going to rally the 30 million Californians who don't love almonds to go to war with the Almond Interests. But when Gavin Newsom was asked if he would go to war with the Almond Water Powers, he replied, in effect, No way, dude. Trump and Vance I can take on, but the Almond Barons are much too scary.
This discussion is such a narrow view of the issue. The real damage to American politics (which is now washing into international politics) was the Citizens United decision. The real question here is not, “how effective is political spending?”, but “Would American politics be better if it was not completely dominated by campaign finance?” Since I’ve seen estimates that Congresspeople spend 2-3 days per week just raising money, the answer is probably “yes”, just from a functional point of view. And since multiple studies have shown that those policy measures that are implemented are much more likely to be those that are aligned with the interests of the rich, the answer is probably “yes” from the perspective of a functioning democracy.
Why is Marc Andreessen with his puny $2B even relevant? During the 2024 campaign, I have heard (not sure if this is 100% true) that Elon Musk has spent about $250M to support Donald Trump. That's not even mentioning him buying Twitter. There seem to be a lot of people who could spend way way more than Andreessen even has at all.
In 1993, the president of Mexico invited 30 oligarchs to whom he'd sold state-owned industries, such as Carlos Slim, the future world's richest man, to a dinner at his presidential palace. He asked them for a 1994 campaign contribution of 25 million each.
"25 million pesos? No problemo," they replied, pulling out their checkbooks.
"No," President Salazar replied. "$25 million U.S. dollars."
"Gulp," they replied, except for Slim, who thought the amount reasonable but the site risky.
Eventually, they all agreed to pony up $750 million U.S. dollars, but then the story hit the papers, as Slim predicted it would, and it fell through.
Also, I know that the author is very concerned about AI alignment and regulation, but aren't there some... more pressing issues about the American democracy, the ones which warrant our attention? Or is that too small in the face of AI?
Assuming someone or a lot of people do this and start outright buying politics generally considered left-wing leaning (to be concrete: ai safety, regulations in general, things that are bad for profit of business head figures) isn't this like opening the flood gates? The people on the opposite hhave far more money and so far didn't use it to buy politics, except in case of silicon valley they kinda did.
What happens if every billionaire starts this and no one has any illusions anymore if you can or can't buy democracy anymore, because obviously you can and you did?
Its probably an irrelevant fear because the arms race already kinda started but still if everyone goes full on plutocracy it seams doubtful to me if this is really a net positive. On the other hand we're already headed there so what is one more push and trying to change direction of the plutocracy with that push ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Well, given that Scott wrote "AI 2027", he expects this stuff to be pivotal in the very near term, so from his POV it makes sense to go for symmetrical measures half a step ahead of the opposition.
I find it mind-boggling that the conclusion of this post isn't "and we should do X and Y to limit the influence of political donations in US politics, here's how you can contribute" and instead the conclusion is "and we should get in on the money-burning game, here's a guy on our tribe's side, give him your savings".
Why are Americans so primed to believe that massive political donations are an inevitable fact of life?
But the US differs from Europe/UK in degrees. Even in Europe election campaigns cost a lot of money. Someone has to fund that. That someone gets a lot of say.
Because there is no viable plan to alter the impact of money in politics in America, and in fact, even if there was the marginal contribution of an individual would be negligible at least when compare to the larger impact of that individual donating to one side of a political race, since the arms race is already on, and the only way it stops is some kind of event totally unforeseen by either side. Basically, looking at Congress and the Supreme Court right now, there is no way to alter the arms, race, dynamic, and in fact, preaching about that would be the classic case of making people think they are contributing when they are just indulging their politics hobby without having any impact.
EA should make a PAC that threatens african leaders with Uncle Sam's Big Stick/Denial of Carrot if they don't use their Rolls-Royce and MiGs budgets to buy anti-malarial nets and dewormers to everybody who needs them.
It would be cheaper and more effective than EA paying for them directly and trying to distribute them in the middle of nowhere.
Wait a second - that Katie Porter story? So she *already* got slapped down hard in an election?
And her takeaway from that was *still* “How would I need them in order to win, ma’am?” for the governor of California election? 🤦♀️
I now wonder how the hell she ever got elected to the House of Representatives in the first place! (I can well believe the mashed potato story and the rest of it, but how did someone this clueless ever succeed in an election at all?)
Party connections and a safe congressional district. It's why I'm strongly against California gerrymandering even if it feels like unilater disarmament not to - when you gerrymander you get reps like this.
You need to include in your model that /the battle does not stay won/. At best, it stays won for four years. So the right way to think about the cost of getting a policy you want isn't a one-off payment of $X million; it's an ongoing expense of $X/4 million per year - and this not for a certain purchase, but to shift probabilities - increasing over time with at least inflation but also how annoyed your political opponents get with not having their way as time goes on, for as long as you need the policy in place.
Certainly the billionaires will be factoring this into their ROI calculations.
1-Other industries know how far their money can go in politics vs how far it can go doing something else. Example: Oil can price a congressman vs down-payment on a new vessel.
Crypto doesn't actually produce anything, crypto billionaires can buy more coin and/or make the coin they have more valuable.
Maybe they did the math and realized they're at a point where buying more is not going as far as making it a bit more valuable/preventing it from crashing. Maybe right now politics is their blue ocean.
Maybe it's the same for AI, they've reached a point where their money in the actual business only goes so far, because they keep burning money. Maybe dumping this money into politics means AI and crypto are showing some concern with a bubble.
2-Other businesses have long bought their way into politics and the economy, AI and crypto are the nouveau riche and just now are buying their way into politics. Maybe what they're spending now is not so different from what other businesses have spent in the past, or total spent over the years, adjusted for inflation.
I'd like to separate the issue of AI safety from whatever opponents of AI mean when they say "regulation" (all while making light of the safety issue). At least in online discourse and elsewhere, "AI regulation" seems to mean something between taxing, neutering, or banning of various AI tools, with some "think of the children" thrown in for good measure.
I'm sure the PACs will be inclined to fight both forms, but today's AI majors seem likely to acccept a form of safety-as-regulatory-capture, and I suspect they're less likely to go after a vaguely worded "test before you ASI" bill than a "stop AI from stealing our water" bill.
I need to admit that my honest reaction to this post was "come on, Scott, don't feed Moloch." I realise that figuring out a way to stop the bad thing from happening, rather than co-opting the bad thing for your own purposes, is really difficult to even figure out intellectually and even harder to orchestrate (all of which needs more time than the co-opting, besides), so I'm not upset or even want to particularly stop you. Instead, I sincerely wish you well (even though I don't have full agreement with even the cause). But I do hope you reconsider the whole approach.
Heck, even if you don't actually do another approach, I'd be super interested in knowing what you can come up with to solve the underlying issue. You've already thought about it a lot, so I think you could come up with some pretty interesting approaches. So there's at least another article that could come out of this? :) I'm hoping.
I wish Scott would engage with this more. The post implicitly mentions the (main?) mechanism to prevent aggressive lobbying: norms. It is outrageous that lobbies have such political control. This reaction is a powerful yet fragile regulator; let's not break it. As an example in the post: we harness Sam Altman's ability to donate large personal sums through these norms. This seems to be the answer to why billionaires are not (all) buying elections. I love almonds; I am disgusted by lobbies. The worst possible response is to slide in our collective instinct: stop being outraged, and wonder if we (who are the righteous) should do the same.
Higher up, Scott suggest that his role, as a mere blogger, is negligible. Who else, but those with large social platforms, have influence over norms?
Under the assumptions that norms limit more widespread pro-AI donation pro-crypto, it seems counter productive to actively engage in breaking norms. The direct effect of anti-AI lobby is to reduce the political/public reputational harm for pro-AI tech billionaires.
Leading The Future still only has 2% as much money as the almond industry.
No, not exactly. The almond industry does not 'have' $12B, it has revenue totaling that. This figure comes from the sales of Almonds and products mostly in American supermarkets. a lot of that number is Supermarket profit, and groceries are a notoriously low-margin business. Shippers, packers, processors and truckers get most of the rest. In the produce industry you are lucky if 10-20% make it back to the grower. Thanks for mentioning produce, though!
Voters in the UK should be worried too. Imagine a trillionaire who owns a social media company. He is best friends with the leader of one of the parties, and wants his party to be elected.
Campaign finance laws are really strict in the UK (£11,000 per donor, per year; total donations in 2021 were £50m). What's to stop this trillionaire from buying the election? Musk doesn't even need to give any money to Farage. He can just buy all the ads on YouTube and Facebook — and he already owns X.
Americans have never been interested in British elections, but for some reason, we now have Evangelicals campaigning about abortion laws, plus Presidents and Trillionaires speaking up for their preferred candidates. What happens next?
Positions on committees are for sale with price lists, and the price lists represent the amount of money raised. Also, campaigns can shift money to each other, so politicians in safe seats can funnel money to other candidates and build their own coalition. Finally, if you look at TX-23, even a safe seat can, in theory, be lost to a primary challenger.
I think AI safety is the wrong issue. No one cares. If a plurality of voters are willing to elect someone to be the American warlord and run roughshod over constitutional boundaries in order to "get things done", then why would anyone care about AI? Half the voters are probably hoping one takes over.
Broaden the issue to broaden the appeal. Oppose "online addiction"--it's well documented, everyone hates it, and it includes AI as well as social media and cryptocurrency regulation. It's broad and ambiguous enough to include pretty much anything the tech billionaires are for, up to and including privacy issues, gamification of platforms, and "protect the children." Throw in for regulating pornography, and there's middle American parents right there. You could easily position it as a bipartisan movement. It's a no-loser.
This article misunderstands the core positive feedback loop that drives capitalism. Its not possible for effective altruism to win because its ineffective unless it fully embraces capitalism, but since doing so requires being two faced (unlike pro ai or pro crypto who are pursuing agendas they believe in) it will always require extra effort and provide space for ftx style fraudsters.
Without the positive feedback of money -> politics-> profits -> money you cant win your pet cause.
I think we are probably in a transition period, political spending is rapidly rising, finding new opportunities, where various factions and groups are still feeling their way. Fairshake had first mover advantage, but I am reasonably certain that won't last. The reason Big Oil isn't spending a lot anymore is that they've given up - fossil is doomed, regardless of what anyone spends, and they know it. So all their resources are going into diversification. They're following Big Tobacco (anyone remember them?).
The NRA is another "once was the big dog" no one pays attention to anymore. Big Food (Coke and McD). Big Aerospace. These things wax and wane, while the professional and industry groups never go away. Real estate may have never been #1, isn't now, and never will be, but they will always be in the top ten, forever. Ditto Big Pharma and healthcare.
Meanwhile, professional lobbying, taken as an industry itself, is bigger and more powerful than ever. At a little over 4 billion and change, it isn't top ten, but obviously a dollar spent on a lobbyist has an ROI way over 1:1. That's the industry we really need to regulate.
I'm sure glad none of the PACs you mentioned have an interest in the candidate you plugged at the end of your post. I'm sure glad the entire reason he got a plug isn't that he's opposed to the core interests of two or more or the most well-funded emerging PACs. Imagine what that would do to his electoral prospects! I donated to him yesterday and I'm very happy that this post gave me no reason at all to update against his successful deployment of my cash.
Quoting from the original almond post to make a point that, if one spends the maximum amount of hard dollar donations (currently $7k), one gets much more than $7k of political influence: "In this model, the difference between politics and almonds is that if you spend $2 on almonds, you get $2 worth of almonds. In politics, if you spend $2 on Bernie Sanders, you get nothing, unless millions of other people also spend their $2 on him. People are great at spending money on direct consumption goods, and terrible at spending money on coordination problems."
Yes, if you spend $2 on a political donation you get nothing; however, if you spend $7k (or honestly even $2k) you will likely end up with a Member of Congress' phone number. Maybe you are not that good at persuasion, but maybe you are. Also maybe you can bring a few more friends who can all also give $7k (or $2k). Even very senior politicians have a surprisingly small set of "max" political donors. I just happened to be looking at the FEC reports for one senior GOP Congressman the other day and he only had like 4 people who had consistently given him max checks (again now just $7k; used to be less) over the last several cycles. Each of those individuals can reliably get his ear on any issue (this doesn't mean he would necessarily do their bidding or something, but he would listen and especially on smaller issues be inclined to act). If you care about AI safety and take this strategy, you will almost certainly not be able to get the modal member of Congress to turn into Scott Weiner. But you can also almost certainly get them to insert language into bills that, on the margins, improves the safety situation (and to socialize more important steps that could be taken in situations where the equilibrium is punctuated).
I don't think this was your intent, but this is the most compelling article I have ever read for why we need to get rid of Citizen's United and introduce significant campaign finance reform
I don't think anyone is deliberately trying to make him the face of anything, he's just the person who was willing to fight for it.
Also, the California politics people I talk to seem to think he's 10x more effective, per unit of de jure power, than anyone else in the state. I agree he has some weird beliefs I don't agree with, but man is he good at getting his bills passed.
“a real estate group 25-50% the size of AIPAC”. I always wondered what it took to to have and keep a law where capital gains on real estate is not taxed when you sell it, if you buy another property (1031 exchange), unlike every other asset. Now I know.
I used to work heavily in politics, particularly primary politics (on both sides of the aisle). Can confirm Scott's assertion of AIPAC's outsized impact. A few factors making them more impactful than other political groups:
1. They spend way more in primary elections than other groups, and money in primaries move the needle ~10x further on an issue than money in general elections.
2. They do a very good job marrying their political giving to lobbying and advocacy work in a way that others either don't have an interest in or don't succeed as well at.
3. There is...a lot more money coming from pro-Israel groups than what is publicly attributed to AIPAC. This includes:
- Many similar but technically not AIPAC pro-Israel organizations
- 501(c)(4)s that don't have to disclose how much money they spend
- Donor circles of individuals directly giving hard dollars to members of Congress
- Very large political contributors to major parties who partly leadership know care a lot about Israel
Accounting for all of these sources is nearly impossible, and certainly more than a non-profit like opensecrets can or should be responsible for. But a (fairly pro-Israel) political consultant I used to work with once estimated that there's $1 billion/year in pro-Israel efforts when you add it all up.
To be clear, I'm not claiming that any of this is illegal or immoral. I myself am Jewish and don't really have a strong opinion about Israel-Palestine or other Middle East issues. And as for money in politics, well, it's reasonable to be concerned about the influence that money can have, although I myself have changed my opinion on this over the past 5-10 years. But if you're going to allow for money in politics in a myriad of ways, it's a little strange to then shame pro-Israel groups for availing themselves of the opportunity.
And I don't know, there are a lot of issues to care about. People really lose a lot of sleep over the plight of a relatively small number of people in a region that seems pretty fucked no matter what we try to do. Losing sleep makes sense if you're one of those people, or your family is. But there are only so many hours in the day, the conflicts seem pretty intractable, and I chose to focus on issues that mattered more to me where I felt like I could make a bigger difference.
One of my biggest pet peeves working in politics was the unification of all issues, particularly under partisan labelling. You couldn't care about the environment without opposing police brutality. You couldn't talk about economic freedom without worshipping Trump. It made it much harder for people with different ideologies to actually make progress on the issues that they agreed on, because they kept alienating their potential coalition partners by bringing unrelated wedge issues into the conversation. The fastest way to end a new political alliance with someone is to mention 5 issues like Israel-Palestine. You'll each find 2 that you disagree strongly on, and all your goodwill and trust will evaporate.
Or maybe this is all just cope for "I was too lazy to read a long body of literature on entrenched Middle East conflicts and come to my own conclusions about the right American foreign policy in the region."
I don't think Scott was shaming AIPAC so much as "this is how a PAC can be really, really effective even though it represents a small proportion of the electorate". It is then a legitimate question as to "how are they so much more effective than the other PACs?" and "can other PACs emulate them?" and "if we are really serious about concerns around AI, and we have all this money sloshing around being invested in AI, then we should set up a PAC on the same lines as AIPAC, which has demonstrated that effective lobbying on your sole issue can be done, even if it's a minority interest".
I want to know where you arrived at this figure about how much Americans spend on almonds. Does that include indirectly, e.g. by buying almond milk or almond butter, or only the ones you find in the snack aisle? What about almonds purchased by restaurants and put into food, is that just factored in as an estimate or has someone collected the restaurants’ receipts?
Also, a lot of almond products are year round weekly grocery purchases, like I eat nuts every day for lunch so I keep them stocked in my lunchbox. Contrast with sending money to politicians, which I would guess usually happens once every four years for most (average plus minus one standard deviation) of the people who ever do it, and probably only a few times over the modal person’s life. (Again: my sober guess.)
It might be the case that money spent by PACs is subject to diminishing returns. Once you have blanketed every media and Internet channel with whatever message you want to push, plastered your ads on every available physical surface, commissioned a famous pop singer to create an album about how great you are, and so on... what more can you do ? On top of that, the number of voters you're trying to influence is not very large. Undecided voters are rare, and so are voters in primaries; most of the population had either already made up their minds in perpetuity, or doesn't care. On top of that, the more money you've got and the more irons you have in the fire, the more management you need, which likewise reduces your efficiency. Thus it could very well be the case that the sub-almond amount of PAC investment is in fact optimal.
" Once you have blanketed every media and Internet channel with whatever message you want to push, plastered your ads on every available physical surface, commissioned a famous pop singer to create an album about how great you are, and so on... what more can you do ?"
Lose the election? Make sure that when you pay out $$$$$ to Famous Pop Star to show up and endorse you, and all the attendees are expecting a concert or at least a performance, then Famous Pop Star *does* perform a few of her Greatest Hits rather than stand there, give a short speech, and have everyone going "what the heck was that?"
I am getting the impression that politicians really do judge success on "how much money did we get in donations?" I remember Hillary's campaign boasting that they had *way* more money and their donors had *way* deeper pockets than Trump's campaign, and the post-'where did it all go wrong?' apologias by Harris' campaign included "well but Trump's campaign had more money than us, he had all these PACs raising a ton of money for him!"
So the moral of the story seems to be: if you are a campaign manager, you need to keep your candidate happy by showing them simple graphs of "look all the money! us so money! them no money!"
There's strong disagreement in the political world on what the diminishing returns curve looks like. It likely varies by intervention (e.g. TV ads v direct mail campaigns) and by election (local v federal, primary v general, etc). But my guess from the research is that it diminishes less than one might think*. Also I agree with Deiseach that even if money can't move elections, it has the appearance of moving elections, which can be as important.
* specifically that /holding everything else constant/, the cost per net vote of the marginal dollar doesn't go down that much as you raise more dollars. However, this doesn't mean that money is the only thing that matters. You could imagine, for example, that your candidate's success was ~ [fundraising]*[likability]. Holding likability constant, the return to fundraising is linear, but if you're unlikable, then improving likability might still be much more important than improving fundraising.
One possible strategy would be for candidates to stay silent on political issues where their opinions would cause attack ads against them, and only come out in the open once it is too late for EvilPAC to fund an attack ad campaign against them, say shortly before the election.
However, this approach has multiple problems. Signaling an opinion late is obviously much less costly than signaling it earlier, and thus a less credible signal. You can only pull this stunt once, so if you do that in the primaries, EvilPAC can still fund attack ads in the main election. Likely your opsec might not be good enough to keep your opponents in the dark until it is too late. If you have a lot of staff which are on LW, I can make an educated guess on your AI safety position. And of course a policy position you only announce a day before the election is unlikely to make you win.
When we estimate how much money was spent on politics (with the intention of making it an apples-to-apples comparison to spending on almonds), how do we count in Musk's 44billion$ Twitter purchase? Not counting it at all is dumb because it influenced the elections quite a lot, which was the intention of the money; and counting it as 44bil is dumb because Twitter did other things than influencing politics.
Here's the reason I think oil and gas companies don't need to spend as much on politics as crypto: lots of people already have financial ties to oil and gas. If you own, like, a mutual fund, you own a bunch of oil and gas companies, so all of the rich donors care about oil and gas. Plenty of politicians also have more specific ties to oil and gas. Lots of districts have a lot of oil and gas jobs.
This isn't the case at all for crypto. Most members of congress aren't going to have meaningful crypto holdings, neither do their rank and file donors and constituents.
Pretty grim for Scott to write that labor groups are helping destroy America. He's so compassionate and personable that one often forgets about the underlying strain of dystopic free market ideology.
Is nobody mentioning the tariffs? A pneumatic theory of politics means that pressure in one area results in pressure in another. In exchange for all that crypto lobbying, Silicon Valley accepted a tariff pill, which specifically hurt Tim Cook, Elon Musk, and Jensen Huang.
Maybe the almond analogy holds because there's no found money in politics? Found money implies mistake theory. Its absence implies belief theory.
The Koch brothers have probably spent quite a lot over the years, but the strategy used to be different considering previous limitations on spending, and the fact that their wealth was built on US institutions, not 'the cloud' or 'decentralized finance'. Nevr this much in one year though. However, the difference between stuff like oil, guns and tobacco on the one hand and crypto on the other hand, seems to be pretty obvious in that these businesses actually have something to produce. So their costs are much higher compared, and freely available cash much lower (and investors want some of that cash going to them). Also, oil has probably realized that they'll be able drain all the fields before anyone will legislate away their rights to do so. Nor will lobbying for less regulation do that much to create new demand.
Crypto, however, 'produces' cash, so obviously there's a lot of freely available cash, and it lives on hypecycle only, the more it's pumped the more cash they'll have and the more their cash will be worth (whereas costs are relatively low, and marginal costs near zero, considering that it's all vapor).
Crypto can do nothing that traditional banking is not able to do in a society with stable and trusted institutions, besides supporting exactly those things a society needs to regulate, such as gambling and crime. (Admittedly there are efficiency gains possible in current traditional banking and payments, especially in the international context, which might be why we've been so lenient with crypto at first, despite it being mostly pump 'n dump schemes). But on the whole, crypto is not needed in the US, if it were a well organized nation, and for the legal economy it does nothing but inflate a speculative financial bubble. This much political spending is a problem though, because it clearly skewers politics towards elite interests, and lower trust in democratic institutions. The political spending by crypto is aimed at destabilizing the US and decredeting it's traditional institutions, in the believe that this will open up the space for de-fi, which it does by it's spending (and by whom it supports), something that other industries were never willing to do because they realized they needed the stability of the US government. which cryptolords such as Andreessen, think is not, or no longer, true for them.
Regulation always stirs up such lively debate here—and it's fascinating to see how the conversation shifts when the idea of influence (or perceived influence) comes up. Some argue power follows the money; others point out it's more about organizing and message discipline. Either way, it reminds me a bit of the challenge behind strategic logic: sometimes it’s less about the resources, more about moves within constrained rules. If you enjoy that kind of thinking, you should try the https://queensgame.io Colorful Queens Puzzle Experience .
The complexity of these systems is mind-boggling. For a more tangible kind of creativity, I've been diving into https://craftfood.recipes lately - learning to craft homemade dishes from scratch. It's refreshing to focus on something you can actually taste and share, away from the abstract world of PACs and lobbying.
If this is true, why would they be fighting it so hard and spending so much money to stop it?
What business likes or wants regulation, especially if it's a shiny new business and is fearful that the government will meddle with them in ways that reduce their profitability and interfere with their unchecked chase after as near a monopoly as they can get, goshdarnit?
If people successfully sell the idea that AI could be dangerous instead of all "I am your happy friendly cheery chatty chappy", then that gets in the way of the sacred pursuit of free market capitalism. Who is going to buy a murderbot, if you've scared them about "this is a murderbot that wants to murder you"? And if some nanny-government department makes them take the time to slow down and not release anything that is not aligned, well how then can they beat their competitors to market?
Remember the one-size-fits-all argument about any limits on, or lack of funding for, research or any other project: But if we don't do it, China will and you don't want China to get there first, do you? That would be very bad!
(This fits everything from AI to embryos. China Will Do It, We Can't Let Them Be First).
> What business likes or wants regulation
To play devil's advocate, the obvious answer is 'a business that's already large and successful, and wants to strangle its competitors in the crib by smothering them with compliance paperwork they're not prepared to handle'.
This is just the simple truth.
Was tech particularly regulated? Even if you're in a gold rush, it doesn't make sense to waste money on bribes if there isn't much room for improvement. AI and crypto are different, seeing as there's a sizable amount of public backlash to both, making preventative measures reasonable.
Can you explain why it doesn't make sense outside a gold rush? Surely oil wants stuff like climate regulations and ANWR to go its direction.
If you own a mature company in a mature field, it almost always makes sense diversify into new fields with higher risk/return anyway. AFAIK most older companies and/or individuals in energy industries have by now substantially diversified into renewables already. You can check the list of biggest oil companies; the owners are by now mainly extremely diversified institutional actors like The Vanguard Group and BlackRock.
Once you've done this, backing a politician to safeguard the interests of the mature field is very mediocre value: It's unreliable, it makes you unpopular, and if you're smart you're already playing both sides, so why bother?
No, you do it the other way around; You back politicians who want to do investments into new and/or popular tech and scrounge up as much of that as possible. The Vanguard Group and BlackRock are primary leaders in ESG investments, for example. This way, you get everything: You have some safe income stream from a well-understood, reliable industry, you get some play money for free to invest into a new risky tech that will turn into real money if it works out (and if not, no worries, it wasn't yours anyway!) and you're popular (well, more popular at least than if you just stuck to the mature field).
Vanguard, BlackRock, etc. are index fund managers. They own everything because they run index funds, not due to active investing on their own account.
The last time ANWR was opened, under Trump’s first administration, they held a leading claims auction that was only subscribed to by one single small Alaskan oil company. The larger oil companies gave it a wide berth.
This is principally because large oil companies saw it as more trouble than it was worth, mostly because they would inevitably face years of maximally motivated environmental groups trying to save their white whale through litigation. This process would almost certainly raise the silence of ANWR in the public eye, discrediting these oil companies to the public (as protecting ANWR is relatively supported albeit low-salience); more importantly, any litigation is almost sure to drag on beyond 4-8 years, after which you have a Democratic administration which is very likely to cancel your lease.
That is to say, large oil companies would probably only drill in ANWR if the political climate had changed to the point where they could be reasonably sure that they could sign a large lease while avoiding much of the litigation or the threat of cancellation. That would require a shift in the Overton window, which may have indeed occurred in recent years.
Reading about Rockefeller and how he got so rich, the government broke up Standard Oil because it was too powerful and ended up (unintentionally) making him even richer, since he held shares in the new companies that were founded out of breaking up Standard Oil, and they all shot to the moon.
So sometimes what is intended to happen results in the exact opposite. And oil companies have a lot of public mistrust due to environmental disasters, so - like the tobacco industry - they need to have the *appearance* of being squeaky-clean and not up to any shenanigans. "Why yes, I *am* in the pocket of the polluting industry that is killing the planet" is not a reputation any politician wants nowadays.
I really wish you wouldn't use AIPAC as your go to example of a single issue pac, given the number of people who (mostly for "Jews control the world" reasons) vastly overestimate the power of AIPAC (it's neither especially influential nor an especially big spender compared to other pacs in its class).
My source said it was extremely influential compared to other PACs in its class. I am basing this on their claim, but feel free to link me to evidence that they're wrong.
Did your source mention the importance of "legislative subsidy" for lobbying? Probably less relevant for AIPAC than more domestic lobbies.
I imagine that the apparent importance of a particular lobby group is going to look enormously different depending on where you're sitting. For example, when I was involved in local/state politics in California c. 2008-2015, I heard essentially nothing about AIPAC. The big dogs I kept hearing about over and over again were SEIU on the Democratic Party side and Charlie Munger, Jr. on the Republican Party side.
Any PAC that is consistently on one side is dramatically weaker than "mercenary" PACs like AIPAC.
SEIU only has influence when they spend money. Because AIPAC is occasionally willing to pour money on either side of the aisle, they also have influence in all the races where they don't spend money, by employing the threat of funding the other side. There are a lot of politicians that are afraid of AIPAC flooding the donations to their future challenger, and thus keep their mouth shut about certain subjects even if AIPAC never spends any money on their races.
The other political organization that used to be disproportionately powerful compared to the amount of actual money spent was NRA. This was when NRA was entirely willing to fund the democrat if the republican they were facing was wavering even a little bit on gun rights. As NRA has become more and more just a part of the republican party extended universe, their influence has waned.
The thing in California is that in most districts, the real election is between members of the same party. Either in the primary or, because of the Top Two primary system, when there's two Democrats or occasionally two Republicans on the general election ballot. SEIU has influence because their donations and endorsements affect which Democrats make it through the primary and, when two Dems are on the general election ballot, which one wins.
Munger, last I heard, mainly gave money to party organizations, not directly to candidates. His influence comes from him being the one keeping the lights on for the California Republican Party and for at least a few of the county GOP committees. I think SEIU makes similar donations on the other side, but the California Democratic Party has a much longer fundraising list and they're less often hard pressed for cash for basic operations than the California Republican Party.
The important thing to remember about the NRA is that their influence didn't come from money. The NRA doesn't actually spend that much. What it does have is millions of extraordinarily dedicated single-issue-voter members who consistently turn up to the polls. Boots on the ground beat money in the bank 9 times out of 10.
Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank used to write a hilarious annual column about the extraordinary lengths AIPAC goes to each year at its convention in D.C. to impress members of Congress with its wealth and fervency.
From https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2005/05/24/aipacs-big-bigger-biggest-moment/48af6c09-c5e7-46e3-8ed8-87c788546c7b/
AIPAC's Big, Bigger, Biggest Moment
May 24, 2005
By Dana Milbank
How much clout does AIPAC have?
Well, consider that during the pro-Israel lobby's annual conference yesterday, a fleet of police cars, sirens wailing, blocked intersections and formed a motorcade to escort buses carrying its conventioneers -- to lunch.
The annual meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has long produced a massive show of bipartisan pandering, as lawmakers praise the well-financed and well-connected group. But this has been a rough year for AIPAC -- it has dismissed its policy director and another employee while the FBI examines whether they passed classified U.S. information to Israel -- and the organization is eager to show how big it is.
Reporters arriving at the convention center yesterday were given a list of "Food Facts" for the three-day AIPAC meeting: 26,000 kosher meals, 32,640 hors d'oeuvres, 2,500 pounds of salmon, 1,200 pounds of turkey, 900 pounds of chicken, 700 pounds of beef and 125 gallons of hummus.
Another fact sheet announced that this is the "largest ever" conference, with its 5,000 participants attending "the largest annual seated dinner in Washington" joined by "more members of Congress than almost any other event, except for a joint session of Congress or a State of the Union address." The group added that its membership "has nearly doubled" over four years to 100,000 and that the National Journal calls it "one of the top four most effective lobbying organizations."
"More," "most," "largest," "top": The superlatives continued, and deliberately. In his speech Sunday, the group's executive director, Howard Kohr, said the "record attendance" at the conference would dispel questions about AIPAC raised by the FBI investigation.
"This is a test, a test of our collective resolve," Kohr said of the "unique challenge" presented by the FBI probe, "and your presence here today sends a message to every adversary of Israel, AIPAC and the Jewish community that we are here, and here to stay." (The official text has two exclamation points after that sentence.) ...
If they really had such influence maybe they wouldn't have to go to extraordinary lengths! Also, that article is 20 years old, my impression is their influence has much diminished since then.
I've also found AIPAC to be a lot more pro than pretty much everyone else in politics.
Measuring influence directly is hard to do objectively (and my main concern here is subjective movements being impacted by stereotypes).
In terms of spending though they don't seem to be an outlier. According to open secrets they rank 21 out of 660 for total spending in 2024, which is high but not near the top.
But 2024 is an outlier year for them where they spent like 10x what they do on a normal year - if you look back to 2016 they get outspent over 10x by groups like the NRA. The NRA isn't bipartisan, but there's a bunch of bipartisan groups you probably haven't heard of, like the national association of realtors, who also outspent them.
Source https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/american-israel-public-affairs-cmte/
I feel like this comment and username is a good example of why I think it's generally a bad idea to use AIPAC as an example.
I don't know man, if Jews didn't want to be seen as controlling the world, maybe they shouldn't be *trying* to control the world. Or at least, trying to shape public discourse and politics to be favorable to them. It's bad optics, and they just don't have the power right now to get away with everything.
Wow.
Which group of people does not try to shape public discourse and politics to be favorable to them?
This is really a bad and antisemitic take, which actively makes you a useful idiot for organizations like AIPAC. You're basically just blindly accepting and spreading AIPAC's claim that they represent the interests of Jewish people which is blatantly false. They represent the political interests of Israel's imperialist project, that's very different from representing all Jewish people, or even all citizens of Israel!
Given AIPAC's history of even calling Jewish people antisemitic when they oppose the actions of Israel, the notion AIPAC somehow represents all Jewish people is absurd.
You are clearly incredibly primed to dismiss anyone as bigoted or useless if they condemn AIPAC. Your highly motivated reasoning and this issue may ultimately prove ineffective
Did you read the article you're replying to? He doesn't claim they're an outlier in terms of spending, he lays out an argument on why their influence is disproportionate to their spending.
What about the NRA?
Second-largest for direct contributions to candidates (https://www.opensecrets.org/political-action-committees-pacs/top-pacs/2024), plus very widely reported much stronger donor list than anyone else (as Scott states). I'm not sure how much has changed in the past few years I imagine AIPAC is much much weaker than it used to be, partially because the salience has gone up dramatically which always weakens single-issue groups in the area, and partially because "I'm the best friend of Israel / No I'm the best friend of Israel" is no longer the basic description of political campaigning on the topic. But I don't think that, for example, Mearsheimer randomly decided to be anti-Semitic.
I guess the question is "is AIPAC far more effective than the National Realtors Association or Beer Wholesalers Association?"
AIPAC goes to great lengths to get powerful people to believe it is powerful
It sounds kind of anti-Semitic to pooh-pooh AIPAC's claim to be powerful by asserting that the most important Jewish lobby is notoriously deceitful.
Scott is claiming that AIPAC is "orders of magnitude" more effective than other PACs, which seems like a stretch if their only real advantage is more hard-money funding due their donor class composition and more effective bargaining technique. We're still looking at ~2% of US lobbying spend.
How many other Jewish organizations are there that will follow AIPAC's lead on an issue or a campaign relevant to Israel? There are enough major Jewish organizations that there's an influential "Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations."
How many big donors to candidates or universities listen to AIPAC? The top 100 political donors in the U.S. are about half Jewish.
The top 100 billionaires are about 1/3rd Jewish. My impression is that Jewish billionaires (e.g., Larry Ellison, lately the world's richest man) tend to be more Zionist than average Jews, just as rich men in Alabama tend to be really into the U. of Alabama Crimson Tide football team. Israel is to a lot of rich Jews what the Notre Dame Fighting Irish is to a lot of rich Catholics.
What fraction of the prestige press is Jewish? When The Atlantic made up its list of the top pundits about 15 years ago, it was about 48% Jewish.
I read the Jewish press a lot so I'm more aware than most people of just how much money and influence Jewish Americans have earned over the last 150 years. It's not just a "trope," it's hard numbers.
Since October 7, 2023, Jewish support has been more up for grabs than it has been for decades. Anybody who wishes to play a role in American public life can't afford to underestimate what Jews have earned for themselves.
> "My impression is that Jewish billionaires (e.g., Larry Ellison, lately the world's richest man) tend to be more Zionist than average Jews"
George Soros has been pretty critical of Israeli policy, as I understand it, and I doubt that Zuckerberg or Altman have strong feelings one way or another.
"Orders of magnitude" literally means "at least 100x more effective" than other political orgs, which at 2% of spending means that AIPAC would have to be 200% effective at shifting public opinion- i.e, completely crushing and dominating all dissent on the topic and getting it's way on foreign policy 100% of the time. There is clearly far more Israel-critical op-ed coming out, including in the mainstream press, to be consistent with this hypothesis, and I doubt there'd be a US airbase in Qatar or hundreds of billions in arms deals to Saudi Arabia if Israeli interests were the sole concern of US foreign policy.
> "I read the Jewish press a lot so I'm more aware than most people of just how much money and influence Jewish Americans have earned over the last 150 years"
I'm perfectly aware of how tail effects on bell curves work out, and I know that a certain 2% of the population run ~20% of the US economy. This is not the point I made.
what's your model for why zionists/Israel are so hated in the academy, then? it's a bit circular...aipac is all powerful, until they're not? I think you have causation backwards. The reason aipac was so "successful" is bc it's easy to support israel--to support the alternative, you have to be a leftist/third-worldist, an islamic supremacist, or just a good old fashioned antisemite (or an anti-zionist, in the classic european 'it's bad for business' sense). Since most politicians were not those things, aipac was more or less asking people to "support the good guys," which ofc, they were happy to do. Now, however, those categories have grown, ergo aipac has become "less powerful."
According to the CFR and Wikipedia, the USA gives Israel around $4B/year in foreign aid, whereas the average for other countries is around $400M.
https://www.cfr.org/article/us-aid-israel-four-charts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_foreign_aid
So "AN order of magnitude" is empirically correct. I could see "orders" plural as being debatable, depending on whether or not you wanted to factor in non-financial aid, or consider that Israel is a high-income country, etc.
You could also argue that that the National Realtor Association supports various homeowner subsidies that are much larger than $4B/year (e.g. mortgage interest deduction, National Flood Insurance Program, public housing assistance, etc), which is absolutely correct. But then the appropriate denominator would be "all American homeowners" (roughly 50%) rather than "American Jews" (around 2%). It might also be fair to point out that those are _domestic_ aid, rather than _foreign_ aid.
Overall, I think "orders" plural is a stretch, but "order of magnitude" singular is very defensible.
Jews are good at punching above our weight!
I think the big issue is that AIPAC and Israel are following the NRA playbook (and to some extent Planned Parenthood/ACLU) where instead of being single issue pacs that try to play nice with both sides but care deeply about the issue become partisan actors (AIPAC is still bipartisan but less so).
It's interesting that exhibiting more loyalty to a given party dramatically reduces the actual payoff to your org, but there you have it. The NRA doesn't seem to follow the same playbook so much any more, though.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/tech-pacs-are-closing-in-on-the-almonds/comment/168560511
This is specifically for 2024, where they did an unprecedented spike in spending. Before that it's much smaller (conversely the other example I checked, the NRA, was a lot bigger one or two election cycles ago - every group has occasional spikes).
This is also checking a specific strategy, but other groups spend a lot more on lobbying with different strategies (e.g. Qatar spending half a billion dollars buying Trump a plane).
There's objective data available on that question. You can get top donors from OpenSecrets.org. The ethnicity of big donors is not all that hard to find from Wikipedia, Jewish magazines, and the like.
Among the top 100 donors to political candidates in the 2020 election, whether Republican or Democrats, people of Jewish ancestry gave 61% of dollars. In 2024 among the top 100 (a group that somewhat overlaps the top 100 in 2020), however, there was a 6% decline in dollars given by big Jewish donors to Democrats and a 129% surge in dollars given by big gentile donors to Republicans (with Elon Musk accounting for about one-third of that increase). So, the Jewish share of dollars donated to candidates by the top 100 fell from 61% to 39% in 2024.
For details and methodology, see my 2025 column at:
https://www.takimag.com/article/semitical-thinking/https://www.takimag.com/article/semitical-thinking/
Jews very likely give smaller shares of total political contributions of all sizes since they make up about 1/3rd of the top 100 names in the 2019 Forbes 400.
Gave *similar shares, perhaps?
Among campaign contributions from the top 100 donors in 2024, 68% of the Top 100 money going to Democrats came from Jewish givers, while 31% going to Republicans came from Jewish givers.
Those shares were down somewhat from 2020 and 2018.
I don't think it's Good for the Jews if we try to say that a thing that, as far as I can tell, everyone with any experience in the area agrees is true, is anti-Semitic (or at least in some gray area of "I won't call it anti-Semitic but I'll gesture in that direction").
I think there are plenty of things you can say that recognize AIPAC's influence without getting into Jews-run-the-world territory. E.g. Israel has historically been popular even with non-Jews, and it's a low salience issue, both of which raise its effectiveness.
And now that the circumstances have changed, you have things like moderate Dem Seth Moulton *returning AIPAC money*.
Last time I checked in 2011, since 1901 Jews had comprised between 21% and 26% of the Laureates in each of the three hard science Nobel Prizes (physics, chemistry, and medicine) despite making up only about 0.2% of the world's current population.
My general opinion is that Jews _are_ strikingly rich and influential ... because they've _earned_ their riches and influence.
And also, having been persecuted worldwide for literal millennia, they've learned to stick together pretty well. Of course, this history also means that when any outsider mentions this obvious fact, by default it's taken as an attack, not as a compliment.
I've read Jewish-American and Israeli periodicals more than most, and they _love_ enumerating Jewish billionaires and making other lists quantifying Jewish power and success. The New York Times, in contrast, doesn't usually find that news fit to print.
Often, I get asked accusingly: "Why do you want to _know_ about who has clout in your country? Huh?"
Well, I like knowing data. And I like knowing how my country works.
I prefer to answer with "whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent".
I don't want to get into an argument with Cormac McCarthy because I'd no doubt lose (even though he's dead), but I've never much worried about what in creation exists without my consent.
"AIPAC is one of many PACs with a moderate amount of influence" is a reasonable take. "AIPAC is a clear outlier that needs to be separated from the rest of political spending due to being an outlier in spending/influence" is false as a point of fact.
I am not very political and didn't even remember what the acronym AIPAC was.
But it got me thinking about a book review I read in my parents' WSJ the other day. (The same issue had a capsule review of Freddie Deboer's book, by the by; it's a pretty comprehensive book section, perhaps the last in America.)
I was also vaguely recalling that Obama himself used to joke about the "unlikelihood" of his name (middle name Hussein, I think? - though that maybe wrong) finding success in the presidential campaign arena.
The book was by a Mahmood Mamdani. I've forgotten what it was about, but it must have been some nonsense because I was reading parts of the review out loud for the general amusement.
(Googles: oh yeah, Idi Amin: greatest African.)
Parent said, oh, that's just awful, he's running for mayor of NYC.
No, no, I said - different guy.
But then I had to backpedal a bit later and say, well, it is his father.
Whose sinecure at NYU is owing to his willingness to praise 9/11.
And I think - the world really is unpredictable. Forget AIPAC. Forget Obama and his foreign name. Who would have thought that less than 25 years after 9/11, the son of this man - who has found success with this single schtick - would be the apparent next mayor of NYC?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74ZA-GdeQP4
I would recommend watching rep Thomas Massie’s interview where he spoke about the influence of AIPAC in congress before jumping to such assertions.
He's correct, from what I can tell. I admire his honesty. He is definitely arguing against personal interest on this one.
It's hard for me too; I've got half the same ancestry as both of you (and on the side where it counts). But I have to admit it's a significant factor in American politics, just as I have to admit similarly Jews were a big part of the American left, particularly on the immigration issue and that's a big reason for the particular iteration of antisemitism on the American right.
All I can do is 'be the change I want to see in the world'; not go to bat for Israel (unless I genuinely think they're unjustly accused, which does happen) and don't support immigration.
Of course I'd expect people with other views to do other things.
Contribution rules say:
I am a U.S. citizen or lawfully admitted permanent resident (i.e., green card holder).
This contribution is made from my own funds, and funds are not being provided to me by another person or entity for the purpose of making this contribution.
What would the legality be of donation swapping? Let's say I'm not a US citizen, but I'd like to donate. So I find a US EA who doesn't want to donate, and say "If you donate X to this politician, I'll donate X to a charity of your choice, that you would otherwise have donated to".
In this case, the US citizen is giving the money, and I haven't actually provided them any funds...but I'm not sure if this is a strong legal defense or not.
I don't know. The closest case seems to be https://scholarship.law.unc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1007&context=ncjolt . For now I would not do this, because I think the ethical grayness outweighs the chance of gaining something.
For reference, VOTE swapping is legal.
This is almost certainly illegal for both you and the other person under existing laws (straw donors) although whether you will be prosecuted for it or the existing laws will be found unconstitutional depend heavily on the party in power.
IANAL, but I don't think this is legal. The relevant law can be found here, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/52/30121 and criminalizes "direct or indirect" donations. My viewpoint is that if you are making a contribution with the intent of causing another person to make a contribution that you are prohibited from making, that is the kind of indirect donation that this law targets.
Seems weird that it's illegal for a foreign citizen to donate to a PAC, but it's also legal to have a PAC whose explicit and open reason for existence is to advocate for the interests of a foreign country.
That rule feels very correct to me. If PACs are supposed to represent the “voice of the American people”, it’s entirely appropriate that Americans get to decide what they do for others using their government, and it feels quite inappropriate for outsiders to use the same mechanism.
American politics and Israeli politics are pretty well integrated by this point.
Israeli citizens don't have to give up their American citizenship. Dual citizenship was invented by the Supreme Court in 1967 in the case, Afroyim v. Rusk, of an American who moved to Israel and became a member of the Knesset. It was A-OK for him to vote in America, the Supremes decided on the grounds that when you move to Israel you don't have to ask for Israeli citizenship, instead it is automatically bestowed on Jews. (Not surprisingly, the Israeli law was crafted to elicit that exact decision from the U.S. Supreme Court.)
Hillary's big financial supporter Haim Saban, the owner of the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, fought in the IDF in Israel.
The huge GOP donor Sheldon Adelson was also a big backer of Netanyahu. Trump was just joking about how Sheldon's widow, Israel-born Miriam Adelson, a huge Trump donor, loves Israel more than America.
But if you aren't an Israeli-American dual citizen but are instead a citizen of one of the other 199 countries on Earth, consult American counsel before trying this
This is just an anti - Israel jab. It's totally fine to be a dual citizen of any other country as well as America. Boris Johnson was an American citizen until he renounced it in 2016 for UK political reasons, not because America had an issue with it (and also to avoid the IRS)
Maybe dual citizenship is a great idea, but it wasn't the law in America until the Warren Court decided that in 1967 in the case of an Israeli citizen, Afroyim v. Rusk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afroyim_v._Rusk
Winston Churchill had an America mother, but he wasn't an American citizen until he became the first honorary American citizen in 1963. Honorary American citizenship has only been extended to seven other individuals, all the others retroactive, such as William Penn, Raoul Wallenberg, Lafayette, and Mother Teresa.
I am aware, but dual citizenship was available universally to citizens of any other country from Afroyim, not just Israelis.
Incidentally your depiction of the case is factually quite inaccurate. He was never an MK, and he voted in an election that had a residency rather than citizenship requirement. Israeli citizenship was never the concern, it was that voting in another country's election could embarrass the US, but they determined Congress had no right to revoke citizenship, thus creating dual citizenship.
The Pope has dual citizenship. And is now the head of state of the Vatican.
You won't need a legal defense since the only way the government finds out is if one the other guy snitches on you, and he has no incentive o because he's just as guilty.
Well, coordinating it on a public blog, or some similar action, would be problematic
Indeed, I'm not in the US, but if I were this sounds like it would be *by far* the most effective way I could spend $7k to reduce the chance we all get turned into paperclips or similar.
Hmm, there have been experiments setting an AI system to run a business...
<mildSnark>
If Clippy was coded in Silicon Valley and trained in US datacenters, could they argue on "birthright" (manufactureright?) grounds that they are entitled to donate the $7k to a candidate? Does it matter if the datacenter chips were fabricated in TSMC's Taiwan or Arizona fab? :-)
</mildSnark>
https://campaignlegal.org/update/straw-donor-schemes-arent-legal-loophole-theyre-just-illegal
> It’s illegal to make contributions through a “straw donor” — a person or entity that receives money for the purpose of making a contribution and then passes that money on to a campaign in their own name.
But then what you're proposing isn't passing money from one person to another, it's exchanging in-kind favors. 🤷♂️
This is illegal! Do not do this.
"Federal law prohibits contributions, donations, expenditures(including independent expenditures) and disbursements solicited, directed, received or made directly or indirectly by or from foreign nationals in connection with any federal, state or local election."
https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/foreign-nationals/
This is a legal grey area, and while I've never participated in it, I have heard conflicting opinions from some of the top campaign finance lawyers in the country on it. So I'd stay away from it until the courts give better guidance.
Sadly, this is the state of a lot of campaign finance law, which is generally vague, poorly written, and so selectively enforced (for obvious political reasons) that it's hard to get clear consistent guidance on many questions like these.
I feel like the most obvious rallying point here is to go absolutely nuclear on anybody that supported defunding PEPFAR. If there's one single program everybody at every level of EA agreed was very good it was that one right?
Although it would be nice to have a generic EA PAC, for various reasons the system is more set up for single-issue PACs, and the people I know are prioritizing AI - partly because they think it is more important, partly because it is faster-evolving, and partly because the people who care about it have more money (since many of them are in AI themselves).
Which do you think would be better? A PAC focused on PEPFAR or AI?
This goes through lots of information about politics (like what sorts of pressures representatives are amenable to, and how party-line votes will be) that I don't know.
PEPFAR is a much less controversial program to support - "save babies dying in a painful way in countries that will never in any way rich the US" is a pretty easy sell. AI controls is much harder - "cripple a major source of economic growth that also happens to have highly salient military applications because of some hypothetical threat. China also seems to heavily invest in this btw."
For what it's worth, I think AI doomerism is silly and unfounded (yes I've read the book). So if you disagree with me on that, then at least take rallying around PEPFAR to establish credibility then go for AI research as advice.
> "cripple a major source of economic growth that also happens to have highly salient military applications because of some hypothetical threat"
The economic growth is roughly as hypothetical as the AI doom scenario atm (stock market gains are not generalising outside the top 10 US tech firms, and we know that generative AI is having all kinds of negative impacts on entry-level employment and student competencies.) Military applications I'll give you, sure, but that doesn't seem a million miles removed from the doom scenarios.
Well, if the AI bubble pops, the crisis that follows will certainly not feel hypothetical, for the entire economy. Current projections are "very bad, but perhaps not quite 2008 level bad".
> Military applications I'll give you, sure, but that doesn't seem a million miles removed from the doom scenarios.
I am not even convinced of that. Current-level AI has a lot of potential applications in autonomous drones and so on.
But the thing which is driving both OpenAI's plans to burn through hundreds of billions of dollars and the fear of the doomers is AI going FOOM. Of course, this would also affect military applications, in the same way that the Vogons removing Earth would affect the average American income.
Apart from the race to ASI, I think most military AI applications do not drastically benefit from cutting edge AI research. Intelligence has costs, you want your drones to be smarter than they have to be to be combat effective. As an evolutionary anchor, think wolves: they are exactly as smart as it is efficient for them to be in their natural environment. Granted, that is pretty smart, but not reading philosophy and developing quantum mechanics level of smart.
Even if you have drones big enough that running a LLM on them would be practical, I do not think that it would be something you want to do. The only reason I could think of is to let the LLM make high level ethical calls in lieu of a human pilot, absent a radio link. Personally, I do not think that LLMs should be trusted with that, and I would very much prefer a simple deterministic ruleset. The fictional example of the planet-destroying bomb from the movie Dark Star, which can be persuaded with philosophy not to explode is something nobody should want to create in earnest.
Sure, some AI safety people would also be opposed to keeping extinction-level amounts of autonomous-but-stupid weapon systems around given that they would make it slightly easier for an unaligned ASI to take over, but that is very much a secondary concern.
I think the winning strategy established in 2024 wasn't to focus on the marginal cases, but rather to focus on the safe ones and thereby shift the Overton window. I remember AIPAC spent huge sums of money in the primaries on a few candidates that analysts at the time thought were already unlikely to win their primary races. The analysts were puzzled, "Why throw all that money away on a race that's already won?" The perception that grew out of this was, "I guess they just have a lot of money to throw around."
In addition to what Scott says above about the strategy of giving to races that have already been one, there's a powerful signaling component to this strategy if you do it in an open and notorious way. If you don't have the money to go after everyone, at least make it LOOK like you do, and the political sheep will herd the way you want them to. A little nip at the heels is all it takes. And if you're in it for the long game and not the current headlines, this is the most effective approach.
Since this approach relies on scaring the sheep, I wonder what would happen if you put a lot of money into the other side of this debate on a race that's already supposed to win and give the opposite impression - that the issue itself isn't a win/lose proposition. Would that be enough to break the spell?Seems like a hypothesis Scott & co. are going to test with Bores.
Wouldn't a PAC focused on PEPFAR, just be one of many pro-Democratc PACs?
PEPFAR used to be extremely bipartisan and even now I don't think there's a strong anti-PEPFAR position in Congress so much that nobody is really crossing the Trump administration on their destruction of it.
So it would mostly just be an anti-Trump (and eventually anti-Vance) PAC, which feels like a saturated market.
Well, it would be an issue PAC, trying to get support for a specific issue. Congress doesn't need to wildly buck its trend of surrendering to the President on everything, just on one issue he probably doesn't care that much about, for it to be successful.
Has Trump ever said anything about PEPFAR one way or another? I won't be surprised if he doesn't even know what it is. As I understand, it basically got in the way of Musk's chainsaw, without anybody specifically targeting it, then reinstated in a crippled state and promptly faded from notice.
I have a few concerns that I'm curious if you share:
1. AI accelerationists are probably going to be at least as much money as the EA AI safety people, so its possible you're going to just end up in a stalemate. This might still be worth it if you think absent your actions the accelerationists will just stomp, but it probably won't see the total victories M.A. has achieved.
2. Crypto and (until recently) Israel were pretty low salience issues in politics. Given that we are one disappointing Gemini demo away from a recession, AI probably will be high salience for the forseeable future. Nobody cares about PEPFAR on the other hand. It was basically canceled so JD Vance could impress a bunch of teenagers on discord. So a smallish, dedicated group could probably make a big difference at the margin.
Stopped reading at "Israel is a low salience issue in politics".
The Only Democracy In the Middle East?™️ Low salience?
He did say "until recently". And yeah, up until certain MENA migrant groups inveigled their way into the coalition of the fringes in the last few decades, most people in the US either didn't care much about Israel and or were mildly positive toward it.
Given the relatively scarce attention paid to other much-more-plausibly-genocidal events over the past decade or so, including those affecting muslims... no, I really don't think some principled opposition to genocide is the driving factor here, even when US arms sales are involved. How many grad students are marching to "Free Yemen", for example?
Bro I think it's less about the migrant groups and more about the genocide.
If 65K in casualties is what Israel taking the gloves off would look like, I think you lack imagination.
"people in America desperately care about the fourth largest currently ongoing war in the middle east because they're so committed to total pacifism" doesn't really pass the smell test.
You mean the genocide committed by Hamas on October 7? After calling Israel a "cockroach nest" that needs to be "exterminated"?
Israel is clearly not committing genocide, because Hamas hides behind Gazan civilians knowing this will protect them because Israel doesn't want to kill Gazan civilians.
Virtually nobody made a voting decision based on a candidate's position towards Israel prior to Oct 7
Here are two Pew polls about the top issues Americans were considering in the 2020 and 2022 elections.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/02/16/publics-top-priority-for-2022-strengthening-the-nations-economy/
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2020/08/13/important-issues-in-the-2020-election/
As you can see in 2022 it did not even crack the top 18 issues, and in 2020 "foreign policy" was broadly in the mix, but given the times one would imagine this had more to do with China than Israel.
You can also see in this 2022 Gallup poll that "War in the Middle East" basically didn't register as an important issue at all.
I also encourage you to go watch debates and interviews for candidates around that time and see how often Israel is brought up compared to now.
So the point of a PAC, as discussed in the post, is that no matter who you vote for, the person who ends up in power is under their sway.
Although I probably shouldn't have literally stopped reading bc I guess you were talking about fundraising. In any case it's fucked that we're trying to literally vote with our dollars.
If we're gonna do this for one issue it should be overturning Citizens United.
I'll contend that your "virtually nobody" might have swung a key U.S. presidential elections. Granted, it's very hard to be sure.
You might consider stance on Israel a non-issue, but it has been a *very* live and important issue among the younger, more-online, farther left demographic in U.S. politics for many years. This is a demographic that (for better or worse) displays a very high ratio of vocal political engagement to actually getting out and voting.
It's hard to be sure *why* they're so bad at actually voting, but one reason individuals often give of themselves is that none of the candidates actually represented them. And the argument about whether it's better to vote for an unpalatable "lesser of two evils" Democrat or vote 3rd party or not at all is one that crops up every election season. Democrat support of Israel is a VERY common reason cited for going the "3rd party or don't vote" route.
Given how narrow Trump's margin of victory was in 2016, I think it's plausible (though somewhat unlikely) that a counterfactual world in which Clinton had been plausibly more neutral (or simply avoided taking a stance) could have seen a different outcome.
I'll say again, this is far, far from certain in this particular case. But the bigger takeaway is that when election outcomes hinge on relatively small differences in turnout (which they often do in the U.S.) an issue that "virtually nobody" cares about can still very plausibly be decisive. If 80% of voters care not at all about some issue and 10% care a bit and 10% care a lot, that last 10% can still play kingmaker if the remaining 90% are fairly evenly split.
PEPFAR would have been a great choice 2 years ago, but now it cuts on party lines. AIPAC was so successful because they got both Republicans and Democrats to support it. Now it’s unfortunately politicized. If anything I think a PEPFAR super PAC would be a good idea in 3 years, when it’s not as connected to the incumbent running for office.
I dont know if partisanship is a huge issue here. Theres always going to be a streak of "foreign aid bad" populism in both parties, so even if it becomes a partisan issue you can still have a lot of influence in the primaries
And of course the suspicion that PEPFAR would be used as a Trojan Horse: "well now we're restoring this vital programme, how about this other vital programme?" and eventually it'd be back to funding transgender operas.
PEPFAR does not cut on party lines: it is still popular on both the left and the right. Which is why it kept its full budget when the Republicans were doing recissions and gutting everything else, like PBS. PEPFAR is popular with evangelicals, and Republican Congresscritters don't see any value in angering the base over this.
But who in congress had a pivotal role in defunding it? I thought elon defunded it while marco rubio continued to insist it wasnt defunded and congress largely demurred. There may have been GOP members who cheered elon on twitter, but not in a congressional capacity. Also getting rid of them wont get pepfar back.
You're right: there's nobody to point to as "defunding PEPFAR" because officially it's not defunded. Congress approved their normal budget going forward, and the State Department says PEPFAR is open for business as usual. So who would the PAC attack?
Is PEPFAR canceled? I thought they reauthorized it and it’s been operating until the expected congressional reauthorization next year.
That’s accurate. But it’s become a matter of “common knowledge” in online spaces that it has been defunded and is gone now. But it’s not. PEPFAR is supported by just about everyone in Washington, on the record anyway.
Has it been fully restored? Last I heard, they've apparently gotten back about 50% of capacity.
On paper, it is fully restored and fully funded. However, there was a lot of confusion around PEPFARs status while USAID was being gutted, so there have been a lot of claims that even though the money was budgeted and PEPFAR had a waiver to keep going, a lot of the money wasn't actually going out. In July there was a report that 50% of budgeted money had not gone out to providers. Not because of any official action, but because of all the chaos at USAID caused by DOGE and such.
Officially, congress has preserved PEPFAR and approved it's budget.
Nobody in congress is calling for PEPFAR to be defunded that I'm aware of: its a very popular program on both the left and the right. However, a State Department leak in July indicated that they were working on a plan to cut PEPFAR by 42% over a period of several years, with the idea that we'd be weaning countries off of depending on it. If that plan is moving forward, there hasn't been any news on it.
The classic “common knowledge” that isn’t true. I feel like someone can’t say they care much about PEPFAR while also not putting in the care to knowing whether it’s still operating or not.
I do not agree that this is "common knowledge" among politically engaged people. There is of course confusion about what is going on with PEPFAR. But that is because it is confusing. USAID was responsible for implementing around 60% of PEPFAR, which has caused a large, but not totally clear how large, reduction in its operating capacity. Of course, there are lots of people who only vaguely pay attention who couldn't tell you the details of which aid agencies have and have not been totally destroyed. But by this standard supporters of every single issue in existence don't care much about their issue because many are badly misinformed. In this case, even those vaguely paying attention are still correct about the essential point which is that Trump has cut enormous amounts of highly effective life save foreign aid. And the people who actually claim that it's one of their top issues do almost all know these details.
It’s not gone but it is at majorly diminished capacity.
In March Congress approved $6.5 billion in funding for PEPFAR, which is consistent with prior years. Officially, on paper, PEPFAR has not had any reduction in budget and has waivers that allow it to operate regardless of what else DOGE is doing to USAID.
In practice there have been reports, most recently in July, that only half the money has actually gone out, because of chaos and confusion at USAID due to DOGE gutting it. But that seems to be resolving? It's hard to get a solid answer on that.
The main point is that PEPFAR is a very popular program and just about everyone in Congress supports keeping it, as does the White House. So it would be hard to do a PAC that tries to get people who supported defunding PEPFAR out of office, because nobody officially supported defunding PEPFAR and officially PEPFAR is not defunded.
I think we agree then that it's at diminished capacity
Apart from the obvious objection that the actually altruistic thing to do would be to give money to global health programs yourselves, rather than using that money to coerce the government into using everyone’s money on global health programs?
Apparently you're not a consequentialist.
And the actual libertarian thing to do would be to donate money to avoid Argentina's default under Milei yourself, rather diverting there money seized by armed agents of state under threat of violence (the bailout package is more than the original USAID budget btw). And yet...
This is news to me. I have updated my views to be that San Fransisco must be destroyed.
Feel free to start a SuperPAC to that effect, although I think competing SuperPACs will probably outraise you.
There should be a Dominant Assurance Contract contingent on destroying Godzilla should he surface there.
I dunno, Max Zorin and Lex Luthor both have pretty deep pockets.
Don't they have residences in SF too?
The joke was that both villains, in movies from 1985 and 1978 respectively, separately plotted to destroy San Francisco (or California more generally) by various plans involving triggering earthquakes.
Luthor's primary residence is in Metropolis, while Zorin lives in France and also a blimp.
Well I've got good news for you about SF...
Ceterum censeo Sanctus Franciscus esse delendam.
Isn't this is a policy proposal of the Cato Institute?
Effective altruists should donate their money to GiveWell recommended charities, like the ones against malaria & parasitic worms, instead. That's what I do.
Please provide the reasoning behind your assertion.
GiveWell analyzes the best places for donated money. Those places avoid the political tug of war. https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/rope-tugs-are-not-charityhtml
GiveWell only claims to analyze the best places for global development donations. They make no claim to have considered issues like AI safety, and many of the people involved in GiveWell themselves make AI safety related donations (or donations to animal welfare, or other causes that GiveWell doesn't look at).
Although it would be nice to be able to avoid politics entirely, politics is also extremely very important, and it doesn't seem ideal to leave it entirely to the industry billionaire lobbyists. I don't think the usual "D and R donations cancel out and it's all a wash" argument applies when an industry is trying to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make politicians serve its naked interests.
It means you already know you're in a tug-of-war with someone. Someone whom you know to have plenty more money. I guess if you could get someone far richer on your side you could convince them they couldn't outspend you, like the Soviet Union in an arms race with the US. Elon Musk is supposedly the richest person, and played a role in founding OpenAI due to an interest in such risk, so maybe you have some hope. But that would be hope from appealing to him (or a set of people with a combined comparable amount of wealth).
but even if you lose that tug of war, you're forcing resources to be diverted from improving ai capabilities, which is a worthy end in itself if you're an ai doom believer
Dude, everyone has enemies. It's pretty simple: Figure out who you oppose ("who", not "what", that's important). Find out who opposes them. Find common cause. Ask them for money. Buy ads. Rinse and repeat.
Politics 101. And it works, ask any politician elected ever.
Right now your enemy of the people is Elon Musk. Easiest sell in the history of easy sells - never mind what his actual stand on AI safety is, if he has one. That's entirely irrelevant. For better or worse, right now he's the most recognizable face of Big Tech. Use that.
When you play the game of thrones, you play to win or you die.
Who has the money and willingness to outspend Elon Musk?
>Right now your enemy of the people is Elon Musk. Easiest sell in the history of easy sells - never mind what his actual stand on AI safety is, if he has one. That's entirely irrelevant. For better or worse, right now he's the most recognizable face of Big Tech. Use that.
The problem is that you still have to win the Blue Tribe over on destroying the *rest* of the tech sector - Musk is largely irrelevant - and that helping the Blue Tribe make an Example of Musk burns your credibility with the Red Tribe.
Destroying Elon Musk just doesn't help with the goal, here. It's, indeed, not playing to win.
I think the best argument against this are what you wrote a decade ago https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/22/beware-systemic-change/
When I read that piece when it came out, it convinced me to disengage from politics, which in retrospect was a great choice. Looking at my peers that did go into politics at the time, they are now full blown MAGA Trump loyalists. I definitely think you gave good advice then.
That said, times change, and this issue is not Republican Democrat, but an internal war in Silicon Valley that could kill us all. I’m going to need to reread both pieces and contemplate where is the best place to make my annual donation.
I quote:
"Lots of people work very hard and raise $10 million for the Democrats. Lots of other people work very hard and raise $10 million for the Republicans. Now the Democrats and Republicans are at exactly the same position vis-a-vis each other as they were before the effective altruists got involved, but we have wasted $20 million that could have gone to healing the sick or feeding the hungry. "
Indeed. It is, realostically, an arms race normal people have no hope of winning. And
That is simply false because you donating to something will not magically cause more people to come out of the woodwork and support your opposition. Also fighting someone in zero some contest is better than just rolling over and letting them win. There is a reason that countries at war don’t just cut the defence spend to 0. Even though both countries are burning resources could spend on something else. Unless you can do a credible deal for both of you to reduce your defence expenditure, it doesn’t make sense to unilaterally step back.
> Also fighting someone in zero some contest is better than just rolling over and letting them win.
It's 2025, and I do wonder about that. Is it really always better? Decades of low-grade pain, waste and slow decline because the idiocy just. won't. die and keeps attracting more and more richer and richer followers; vs one term of total capitulation, just turn the other cheek, lean in hard, bend over backwards, get it all out of our system at once, until the effects are utterly impossible to ignore, so we can finally all agree never to raise the matter again, and when some newborn sweet summer child who did not live through the idiocracy does bring it up the scars and smoking ruins are /right there/, proof positive of where it all leads, all the veterans make it very clear why it's utter bunk until the idea is firmly buried again, like the apocryphal monkey ladder experiment...
...and then I wake up and remind myself that people can stay irrational longer than the world can stay unburned.
The problem here are the establishment democrats. People like Chuck Schumer and Jeffries are beholden to the status quo - they were never in favor of large scale reform, which is what we need for "reason" to win.
The other thing to consider is that in politics, nothing is forever. But it might need to get worse before it gets better. This has all happened before - remember Mcarthyism? Robber Barons? The slave holding South?
The problem isn't that progress never happens - it's that progress happens so slowly that no one generation gets to enjoy the change. I'll be dead long before the smart people win, but my grandchildren will be better off for it. You can count on it - that's the over-arcing trend in history, and has been for hundreds of years.
I agree with your point in general, but this very blog post is a counterexample.
>That is simply false because you donating to something will not magically cause more people to come out of the woodwork and support your opposition
I mean, that does happen, though. In fact, that's exactly this blog post is trying to do. It is no great insight that a view of your opponents marshaling their strength is a strong incentive for you to do the same.
Fair enough, although I do think that there is a good chance, Scott or people like him would have noticed the opportunity to lobby politicians on their own without this eventually. Still, I think there is absolutely no reason to think that this happens in a 1/1 ratio, and instead you have to look at the empirical facts of this case to determine how strong of a backlash you will get, and it will depend from situation to situation. Also keep in mind that in any zero-sum contest part of the reason, the other site does not escalate is fear of yourself escalating, but if you never escalate, there’s no reason for them not to go full force from day one. I think there is a good chance that accelerationists billionaires would have doubted the AI safety communities, willingness or capability to respond in kind, so I would not be surprised if it turns out. They already invested everything they were willing to, and in any case past a point, the benefit of increase spending will just not be worth the cost so there is a limit to how much they’re willing to expend instead of some law, ensuring that they will always add exactly the same amount as you.
That’s an argument for not being the one who starts the arms race. The post is saying that the other side has already started it.
I find it interesting that you disengaged from politics but kept the greco-roman bust avatar. Also, what's up with the blog?
I disengaged in 2015, reengaged in 2022, supported Nikki Haley, had a blog for a couple months, realized that was a mistake, took down all my posts in the blog, and am back to being disengaged. Even my blog was designed to get more people on the Right to become Non Partisan Civil Servants, but there is no appetite on that from the Right on Substack. They would rather tear down the institutions entirely than try to compete in them, and the current president, who I didn’t vote for, is happy to do that.
Even during that phase, I kept my donations going to pandemic preparedness research, and never donated to a politician. Also, Greek and Roman history is cool, and I’ll never apologize for having cool ascetics even if they signal that I’m on the right.
Hey, I got no beef with greco-roman aesthetics. I think going scorched-earth on the institutions is the only realistic strategy at this point, though.
All depends on what you are planning to put in their place - and details matter.
Recently, I've read of a movement to undo Citizens United by state-level action: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-corporate-power-reset-that-makes-citizens-united-irrelevant/ If this succeeded, wouldn't it undo the PACs and erase this concern? Could be another route.
It WOULD undo PACs, yes, but it would also abolish the freedom of the press as generally understood if any state can decide that, say, the New York Times, as a corporation, may not do business in that state.
Has that happened in other countries with campaign finance regulation?
Do you have a specific example of country you think has what, say, the median American would consider a free press where, sticking with the Citizens United case, if a book was being published critical of a candidate by an organization not granted state imprimatur, that the government could stop publication, citing "campaign finance regulation"?
I think if you’re so sure in your convictions you could name examples. Do you think UK tabloids don’t attack candidates?
I could indeed name several examples of countries where I believe organizations are restricted from publishing and distributing opinions disfavored by the government – Afghanistan, Belarus, China, Djibouti, Eritrea,… – but how would that help? You'd just say those don't count because you had some other country in mind that made your point better.
But okay, that's more concrete: you're suggesting the UK as an example. Even granting that most Americans would consider its press free, I haven't seen an instance of the government imposing prior restraint on publication like what was forbidden in the Citizens United case.
Your claim was that a state could decide the NY Times couldn’t do business there. I think that’s unlikely and a straw man argument. The UK has fairly strict laws governing actions by non-party actors to influence an election, but the tabloids continue to operate.
To be fair, the median American would not consider the UK press free (although for the less-pertinent reasons of super-injunctions and hate speech laws).
That's not at issue. Publishing companies would be unaffected, because it's the author (a citizen) who is expressing the opinion, not the publishing platform. That's a well established feature of US law (it's what allows us to express our opinions on this substack, and Scott isn't liable in any way).
Are you replying to the right comment? I didn't say anything about the publishing company (or "platform") being liable for anything.
If it's about the scope of Citizens United, it looks like the government's lawyer, Malcom Stewart, disagrees with you: he argued the government COULD ban books that advocated for a candidate under campaign finance laws.
Hell, I don't know, substack threads are like navigating an overgrown maze. In the dark.
I was responding to the following: "It WOULD undo PACs, yes, but it would also abolish the freedom of the press as generally understood if any state can decide that, say, the New York Times, as a corporation, may not do business in that state."
Freedom of speech is a well established constitutional right, no simple law would be allowed to interfere with it. That isn't what the article is arguing anyway-it's about rewriting the definition of corporations so that they don't have free speech rights. That would not affect the rights of individual citizens within those corporations.
It happened in this country before Citizens United. The CU case was literally fought over the government banning someone from producing a political documentary.
This is a good point.
Also, there is a significant difference between free speech and a free press: the latter is much narrower. You can have rules that allow the NYT to say what it wants about candidates, without allowing other kinds of organizations (or individuals) to do the same. Or at least, traditionally (pre-internet) that was a thing that could happen.
I'm also amused that anyone is holding the UK up as an example here, given the relative frequency of libel and defamation claims over things the US would consider perfectly normal speech.
It's not freedom of the press unless everyone has it one bit more than it would be freedom of speech if only I have it. The only case where this was true is broadcast rights where spectrum was limited by he laws of physics. It was never the case for newspapers, books, films, or any other type of media because there is no fundamental physical limit on the number of people who can use it.
I agree.
Once upon a time "owns a printing press" was perhaps a plausibly reasonable and politically neutral filter that anyone could overcome, but still required a certain amount of dedication to make yourself heard. Meanwhile talking in public didn't scale and therefore was not much worth policing even when those in power might want to. Today none of those things is true.
> an organization not granted state imprimatur,
That was why I added this clause: lots of countries have some controlled opposition that's allowed to be critical.
That is not what happened. What happened was a production company wanted cable companies to make it available on a subsidized pay per view basis. It was paid advertising by another name.
That is not what happened. A production company wanted to advertise it's DVD about a specific candidate within 30 days of an election. The were never banned from making or distributing the video.
I don't think that's an accurate reading of the article (or the movement): "The sovereign authority to decide which powers states grant to the corporations they charter includes the authority to not grant their corporations the power to spend in politics."
It claims that state governments have the power to redefine what corporations are, and they can redefine them to not have powers of political expression. The article also claims that no Supreme Court decision has ever contradicted that, including Citizens United and Buckley vs Valeo.
None of that affects individual human beings rights of self-expression, nor does it directly impact the ability of a corporation to do business anywhere (so long as their business isn't political expression - the professional lobbying industry would be pretty much screwed).
The New York Times last year prominently printed an article headlined, "Donald Trump is unfit to lead." Do you argue that ISN'T political expression? Or that the NYT remains free to print and distribute such an article but only as long as they don't spend any money to do so?
Whatever you do to make it so, say, Tesla, can't print that article could probably be used against the New York Times Company too, even if you want to suppress only the former.
The argument being presented is that the NYT shouldn't have the right to publish that because they are a corporation and corporations are entitled to free speech. The NYT has the right to publish that because they are incorporated under state law as a newspaper, and special rules govern newspapers, as opposed to other corporations. One such rule is that newspapers can't commonly accept money that was solicited for political purposes. Money that was solicited for political purposes (however a particular state wishes to define that) could also be subject to special rules, because corporations should not have free speech rights. The whole point is that states have the right to define different types of corporations, and confer on them different rights. If the state of NY wishes to eliminate the distinctions between newspapers and car companies with respect to political speech, then they can. Or not, it 's up to the voters there.
> The whole point is that states have the right to define different types of corporations, and confer on them different rights.
As I said, if they do actually this, that'd be the end of freedom of the press as has been understood in the US since probably its founding, but definitely since the First Amendment was incorporated.
Of course, I don't expect the state of New York to suppress the NYT. But, if the classification of different kinds of companies became salient, then say, Texas could classify it as a gaming/entertainment company citing its comic strips and crossword, and Tesla as a news company because of notifications on the dashboard, and decide to confer only the latter with the privilege of distributing political speech.
I propose that we consolidate our discussion into just one thread.
I dont see how this plan can work as a run around. Those laws would be struck down on citizens united precedent straight forwardly. The whole corporations as a social/legal construct thing is fine philosophically, but is not relevant to 1st amendment rights legally. Persons are not given first ammendment rights by law, they precede all law. Under citizens united, corporate person hood gives them 1st amendment rights. You cant restrict that with either campaign finance law, or corporate charter law, for better or for worse.
It might undo PACs but then something else would spring up in their place. Politicians like and need money for their campaigns, and interest groups want to influence politicians to make laws and govern according to their ideas of what is best.
So if we (interest group that wants to lobby for all public spaces to be painted magenta) can only donate X amount directly as individuals because of pesky laws, and we can't found a PAC, then some other loophole about "getting a bunch of us together to hand over $$$$ to persuade politicians to pass laws about painting all public spaces magenta" will be found (e.g. "we are all close personal friends of the candidate in this constituency and their family and are related to them by marriage and other ties, and we are giving them wedding, birthday, and Christmas presents of nice fat cheques to spend as they wish on whatever they wish, no strings attached, all perfectly legal, oh what a coincidence that Candidate's cousin owns a paint shop which will supply all the magenta paint for the public spaces").
Very interesting. It does, indeed, seem strange that no-one has tried this before. My instinct is that this is the kind of situation in which everyone assumes that, if it worked, everyone else would already be doing it. But ultra-ambitious risk-taking maverick billionaires (i.e. the people best suited to using this strategy) don't seem like the kind of people to make that particular mistake.
Minor proofreading things:
> is a little bit paranoid and will truly accept that their safe seat is safe
I think there should be a "not" or "never" in this clause.
> and occasionally crossed skirted the border of illegality
You only need one of crossed/skirted.
It's probably just a case of everyone being pretty happy with the status quo and not wanting to rock the boat by outright buying politicians. The country is already as business friendly as you can reasonably expect a country to be.
I very much disagree with that last point. There is plenty of space between the current US regulatory regimen and Prospera that could be an improvement for the business environment. Every state government could have Delaware's legal code/system.
The $20 dollars on the sidewalk/everyone before is an idiot; claim is wrong the vast majority of the time, but sometimes it isn't.
The greatest breakthrough in human history came from putting bread mould onto wounds and it was only widely used in the 1940s, wheeled suitcases were only introduced in the 70s.
And even as late as the 90s the leading design for a wheeled suitcase had two wheels on a single corner and always wanted to tip over.
Penicillin is the greatest breakthrough in history??
Yes.
I disagree here https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/tech-pacs-are-closing-in-on-the-almonds/comment/169183241
> The greatest breakthrough in human history came from putting bread mould onto wounds and it was only widely used in the 1940s
I disagree. Even if penicillin had never been discovered and we never got the beta-lactams at all, we would still definitely have sulfonamides, aminoglycosides, and tetracyclines (developed before or around the time that penicillin became widely known) and probably macrolides and fluoroquinolones too (impossible to say). In this world, treating infections would be harder but we wouldn't be stuck in the 19th century.
Going out on a limb here, but I believe the greatest antimicrobial discovery of the 20th century was Salvarsan (the first antibiotic that cured syphilis), invented by Paul Ehrlich's lab and marketed in 1910. Salvarsan itself was quickly replaced by better drugs, unlike penicillin which is in use today in close to the original form. But conceptually, Ehrlich's Nobel-winning work laid the foundation for drug discovery in the 20th century far more than Fleming's did and we would be worse off if we had lost him than Fleming (who also won the Nobel for his work.
- He described the concept of a "magic bullet", a chemical that precisely kills the pathogen but not the host. Salvarsan was the first such compound.
- Ehrlich's work laid the foundation for chemotherapy, a term he coined
- Salvarsan was the first antibiotic discovered via rational drug design
I think the fact that it happened with bitcoin demonstrates the reasons why it doesn't necessarily happen with other things.
Let's compare bitcoin to oil. Bitcoin is pretty much the optimal case for the value of buying politicians. There's a significant number of very rich people whose fortune is almost entirely tied up in bitcoin. The value of bitcoin is very dependent on US government policy, to the extent that there's plausible policy approaches the US Government might actually take which would 100x or 0.01x the value of bitcoin. And a lot of politicians haven't already made their mind up about bitcoin, so they're relatively easy to influence. Therefore it's easy for a single individual to spend a dollar influencing politicians and expect to get a greater-than-$1 return on it.
Compare to oil. There's a lot of money in oil, somehow, but it's pretty diffuse. Oil companies are ultimately owned by a bunch of people, most of whom own a lot of other things and are not single-mindedly exposed to the oil industry. Furthermore it's not clear that plausible US Government policy is going to have a huge impact on the fortunes of oil companies one way or the other; maybe you make a bit more money here or less money there, but ultimately oil is just going to keep on making money until it doesn't. If I'm some rich oil guy then it's not clear to me that spending money on politicians is going to make me personally richer... maybe it will make the oil industry collectively richer but now we have a collective action problem, unlike the bitcoin case where a single rich bitcoin guy can expect to make money by buying politicians just on his own.
That's a good point, I hadn't thought about the ways in which influencing crypto regulation specifically has a much higher ROI than lobbying for other industries.
I'm still slightly surprised that no eccentric billionaire has used this strategy to indulge a personal hobby-horse without expectation of turning a profit, but I suppose this would require a policy issue lying in the rare overlap between 'the average politician has no strong opinion on this' and 'someone is willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on this'.
> no eccentric billionaire has used this strategy to indulge a personal hobby-horse
At least one HAS. His "hobby-horse" is "Open Societies," and has been quite influential.
How influential can you say Soros has been on Hungary when it’s been under the Orban régime for so long, which is diametrically opposed to openness?
I'm reminded of Phil Sokolof who spent his own money to successfully campaign McDonald's into changing from tallow to vegetable oils for frying, in a misguided attempt to save people from saturated fats. Instead leading to the proliferation of trans fats, likely killing quite a lot of people. Also ruining the taste of fries forever.
On the other hand, at least making it so that I can eat McDonald’s fries.
Idk, not sure I would eat oxidized linoleic acid no matter my ethical concerns regarding tallow. It's not quite as bad as trans fats, probably, but it's up there.
Everything in moderation… as a vegetarian, I’m grateful I can grab a medium McDonald’s fry on the occasional road trip. As for whether oxidized lineolic acid is healthier than trans fats, it’s hard for me to say — but I consume butter on an occasional basis as well.
It's plausible that Robert Mercer single-handedly made alt-right, and eventually Trumpism, a viable political force, and almost nobody has even heard of him. Pretty successful hobby-horsing, I'd say.
What is an example of a plausible policy approache the USG could take which would reduce Bitcoin's value by multiple orders of magnitude? I inquire because crypto has thus far seemed robust to government bans, e.g. in China, and am curious as to what other vulnerabilities are known/feared.
I think a US Government ban would be a lot more effective than a Chinese Government ban. (A Chinese Government ban was pretty much priced in from the start; of course the Chinese are going to ban it, they ban everything)
That said, I'm only wildly guessing. I don't claim to be able to accurately predict the effect of random events on the bitcoin price; if I were then I'd be incredibly rich.
Grey market BTC activity continues in China, four years post-ban:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2025/03/31/chinese-people-continue-buying-more-bitcoin-despite-strict-bans/
Need an action be priced in if it is not terribly effective? The Chinese New Year holiday price movements are also fairly well-established.
That's easy - ban the exchange of cryptocurrency for US dollars, and create private right of action penalties against any financial institution with US assets or branches that provides it in violation of the law.
Cryptocurrency would still be available overseas, but it would be like prediction markets where being cut off from the huge, rich market full of would-be speculators in the US heavily constrains it. Both of them desperately needed the money of US investors, speculators, and suckers to really get going.
I don't have much crypto but if I thought it was going to be illegal to trade for currency or goods/services I would move immediately to sell all of it.
>That's easy - ban the exchange of cryptocurrency for US dollars, and create private right of action penalties against any financial institution with US assets or branches that provides it in violation of the law.
Sounds plausible... Strictly speaking, does it need a statute? Holding gold was prohibited by an executive order https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/executive-order-6102-forbidding-the-hoarding-gold-coin-gold-bullion-and-gold-certificates
( Any particular reason for _wanting_ to do this? I have no dog in this fight in either direction... )
One could just short Bitcoin, and then drive the price down, but cryptocurrency isn't particularly special in admitting such a strategy.
Many Thanks, good point!
If you dislike cryptocurrency and want to badly weaken it, then effectively cutting it off from hordes of US buyers will do that quite effectively. It certainly won't disappear, but it will be vastly more marginal.
I'm not a fan of cryptocurrency, because to me it's just digital collectibles speculation that also makes cyber-crime and money laundering easier. It'd be better if folks were speculating on stocks or sports.
Many Thanks!
>to me it's just digital collectibles speculation
Likewise - which is why I haven't acquired any. The up and downs of index funds backed by a wide average across the market are irritating enough, to my taste - and at least these are backed by businesses that actually _exist_ . I'm neither a fan of nor an opponent of cryptocurrency.
>cyber-crime and money laundering
Shrug. I like Daniel's Russell conjugations in
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/tech-pacs-are-closing-in-on-the-almonds/comment/168726773
>I require a permit to establish a money services business.
>You freeze assets of money launderers.
>They debank their political opponents.
Or Paul Goodman's point in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/tech-pacs-are-closing-in-on-the-almonds/comment/168527359
>"crypto can let you do things the government might otherwise stop you from doing" which can be good or bad depending how much you agree with the [current] government.
This is an excellent point. The corresponding point to this is that unlike oil (where you have a few oilmen and many oil buyers) the vast majority of people (not just politicians) have no opinion whatsoever on the topic. It's the perfect lobbying opportunity.
I think at this point - unlike even a year ago - the average American does have an opinion on AI. I've heard it claimed that 90% of Americans wish AI didn't exist. I can't back that up with a source, but I find it plausible. That's good! But it might not last, once AI gets more integrated into things the average person would hate to lose.
And there was special legislation introduced to break up the monopoly of oil companies like Standard Oil. John D. Rockefeller probably could have bought and sold the politicians of his time, and the corporation did make large donations to particular political campaigns:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Rockefeller#Monopoly
"Although it always had hundreds of competitors, Standard Oil gradually gained dominance of oil refining and sales as market share in the United States through horizontal integration, ending up with about 90% of the US market."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_McKinley_1896_presidential_campaign#Fundraising_and_organization
"Large sums had to be spent quickly, and Hanna energetically built a businesslike campaign. ... But as the campaign began operations, and began them on a huge scale, money was short. Hanna initially spent much of his time in New York, where many financiers were based. He faced resistance at first, both because he was not yet widely known on the national scene, and because some moneymen, although appalled at the Democratic position on the currency issue, felt Bryan was so extreme that McKinley was sure to win. ...Reports of Bryan support in the crucial Midwest, and intervention by Hanna's old schoolmate, John D. Rockefeller (his Standard Oil gave $250,000), made executives more willing to listen. After a gloomy August for the campaign's fundraising, in September, corporate moguls "opened their purse strings to Hanna". J. P. Morgan gave $250,000. Dawes recorded an official figure for fundraising of $3,570,397.13, twice what the Republicans had raised in 1892, and as much as ten times what Bryan may have had to spend. Dawes' figure did not include fundraising by state and local committees, nor in-kind donations such as railroad fare discounts, which were heavily subsidized for Republican political travelers, including the delegations going to see McKinley. Estimates of what Republicans may have raised in total have ranged as high as $16.5 million."
It's more that until recently, there were de facto limits on how much TV time/etc you could buy with money (only three networks, finite ad space, etc), and limitations on campaign finance used to have more teeth.
I'm also not totally sold on its effectiveness. The crypto money spam worked because Democratic politicians don't actually have that strong of opinions on cryptocurrency regulation, so a ton of money floating around was enough to sway them in a more positive direction (and of course the Trump people and associated Republicans are all too happy to have a new way to accept payments).
>It does, indeed, seem strange that no-one has tried this before.
The detached object-level analysis in the post shouldn't make anyone forget that "this" is "buying politicians", which is (was?) widely frowned upon and considered immoral and bad.
If an industry is outright buying politicians, people or the media would notice it and criticize it, and the damage to the industry's reputation might outweigh the expected gains. This is the Occam's razor explanation of why the almonds industry wasn't buying politicians, I think.
AIPAC is an obvious exception because until very recently it was de facto impossible to criticize it. Even in this comment section you can still see how any criticism is immediately accused of being just another "Jews control the world" conspiracy theory. Even mild criticism by someone who is literally world-famous for his honesty and objectivity and who's Jewish himself.
I'm not sure about why this is changing now, but crypto might have been an exception because regular billionaires still somewhat depend on the good will of their business partners and employees for their status, while for a crypto billionaire it's probably easier to just ignore public opinion.
The big hole in this theory is that before reading this post, I personally hadn't heard of the crypto influence in the 2024 elections at all. But for now, I'm chalking this up to me being uninformed and not even American.
>The detached object-level analysis in the post shouldn't make anyone forget that "this" is "buying politicians", which is (was?) widely frowned upon and considered immoral and bad.
I'm frankly surprised that the "dive bombing" tactics Scott describes in order to bully politicians into line is not very illegal, even in the US.
They probably did try it before, which is why we have laws around campaign finance etc. Think of things like the Teapot Dome scandal, or the various scandals that plagued Ulysses S. Grant's administration. We call such attempts bribes, because they were crude essays in the art.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teapot_Dome_scandal
For a long time Microsoft considered it gauche to donate to any politicians. Then Congressmen who took donations from their competitors dragged them. Ever since then they've been donors.
I get that you're Jewish, but uh, maybe it isn't a good idea to use an antisemitic dogwhistle in a post, even if it's a joke? Especially when said post has an activism component? Just saying.
Edit: Nevermind, apparently mentioning AIPAC at all was way worse. Well, your loss!
I was shocked when I saw that. Is this intentional outrage bait? It almost seems specifically designed to be screenshotted and posted everywhere.
If it was just an attempt at humor, it was in very bad taste.
Is it really still an antisemitic dogwhistle? It used to be one, but (1) everyone knows what it means now and (2) the actual antisemites aren't using it anymore.
Well yeah, but the fact that everyone knows about it now makes it worse for optics...
To me it read like jokingly using a period appropriate slur when writing an essay about a historical period -- the thing's been drained of all its dogwhistling power and relevance, so it can be used as a joke.
It would still be a bad idea to call black people negros in a piece complaining discussing the consequences of the Civil Rights Act. If you don't care about optics, that's fine, but Scott does have a reason to care in this case, so...
I think we're just getting different emotional voltages from seeing it -- maybe it's stupid of me to generalize, you're right that this is important. But also, like you mentioned -- Scott is a Jew. Can't he reclaim it like the black people did with Negro? Weren't there Civil Rights Leaders addressing each other like "my fellow negros"?
He doesn't make it his entire identity. But again, I don't care whether this is "right" or not. This is about optics. And given that (((Middle Eastern democracy supporters))) have greater-than-average disposable income, it makes little sense to alienate them in a post like this. Especially when you might tarnish the reputation of others by association.
This exchange is unintentionally hilarious - the word Negro *was not a slur* in the 1960's! People who wanted to slur blacks said (a different word that starts with N), or if they wanted to be slightly more subtle, they'd pronounce Negro more like Nigra. But Negro itself, I feel like people only started treating it as an actual slur within the last decade or so, after the other N-word became 100% unacceptable for non-blacks.
I think that was reclaimed ten years ago. Half the Jewish commentators on Twitter used to use it, although I think it's dropped out of popularity lately.
Anecdote: I thought it was hilarious.
Yeah, I came to the comments to admit that it genuinely made me snort. I'm a little disappointed to see how many people here are lacking in a sense of humor.
Well, only half my family is Jewish, but I found it rather funny. Similar to the classic "Hitler's lottery numbers" joke. Mensch points awarded.
I did open my eyes wide a little, but hey, if you can't make a joke about your fellows, who can?
I thought the general principle is you can get away with using an ethnic slur if you’re a member of the group it applies to, so African American rappers can use the N word and Jewish bloggers can put brackets round their name.
I looked through and I can’t find the antisemitic dogwhistle. Am I missing something?
> AIPAC's natural constituency, (((Middle Eastern democracy supporters))),
As others have pointed out, it's not really a dogwhistle anymore, everyone knows what it means and it's mostly used as a joke.
Yeah antisemetic dogwhistle is going a little far for that IMO. It doesn't really seem to hold any derogatory implication as it can't be used at someone.
Triple-parentheses around a name, e.g. (((Name))), is a convention among some antisemites for indicating the names of Jews. As Scott himself says in a different reply to the same parent comment, he's clearly using it in a joking/reclaimed way.
This whole thread just reminds me how everyone has a different Internet, because of The Algorithms. To me, not only has ((())) been reclaimed by people like (((me))), even that joke is a couple of years out of date. Meanwhile, on this subthread, there are people who still consider it a dog whistle, which mean that (to me!) they're two cycles behind, or multiple years.
Surely the AARP is even more influential than AIPAC?
Are people marching in the streets to oppose what AARP is for, the way for the last two years since October 7, 2023 some people have been marching to oppose what AIPAC favors?
Israel is a lot more hot button of an issue than retired people, especially over the last two years. But AIPAC has tended to win its battles.
Now, you could argue that AARP is so successful that retired people, unlike Israel, aren't even terribly controversial outside of Boomer-hating Xites.
I'm not unsympathetic to that argument, but, still, it's reasonable to point out that the Middle East is extremely controversial, yet AIPAC tends to win its fights in Washington.
Yes, and so is the NRA (until recently at least), and the Jones act lobby for that matter.
In many ways, the crypto community today are analogous to Arab tribesman in the decades before muhummad, slowly growing in power and influence on the imperial periphery.
The religious angle of that analogy does make a lot of sense. Finally a religion that can have a truly immutable Word of God! Until someone finds the right exploit in the smart contracts, that is.
Quantum encryption breaking is a foreseeable problem, I hear.
Being developed by godless heathens, no doubt.
Marc Andreessen is as close as I think modern society has to the “man of lawlessness” or false prophet which is Biblically asserted to prepare society for the coming of the Antichrist.
Peter Thiel doesn't think so (or does he?):
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/10/peter-thiel-lectures-antichrist
"Specifically, he suggests the antichrist would be a “luddite who wants to stop all science”, referencing Thunberg, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Marc Andreessen.
'My thesis is that in the 17th, 18th century, the antichrist would have been a Dr Strangelove, a scientist who did all this sort of evil crazy science. In the 21st century, the antichrist is a luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta or Eliezer.
It’s not Andreessen, by the way. I think Andreessen is not the antichrist. Because you know, the antichrist is popular. I’m trying to say some good things about Andreessen here, come on.'"
I'm pretty sure that Thiel is also extremely heretical, his policy preferences are mainly concerned with the secular transcendence, not a supernatural one.
I think trying to create a synthetic God in the lab is almost laughably perfectly analogous to trying to immanentize the eschalon via creation of the antichrist (that is, assuming AGI is the antichrist). I’m just tying Thiel to the “false prophets” mentioned in Revelation who come before the antichrist and are meant to prepare the population for the antichrist’s rise.
Just my own view, but from my perspective it’s grimly hilarious to see Thiel projecting onto others these accusations of being the antichrist, when in fact it is he (and Andreessen) who I associate most closely with the coming of the Antichrist (AGI).
I think they would be more analogous to the Bedoin tribes who took over Saudi Arabua after WW1 when no one else wanted it much, and then suddenly found themselves rich beyond their wikdest dreams when oil was discovered there a few years later.
I guess we'll just have to wait and see if crypto has a "battle of Yarmuok" moment.
I appreciate this because I learned something. How to buy an election.
No, we learnt how to buy an election before 2024.
Typos:
"will truly accept" should be "will never truly accept"
"miniscule" should be "minuscule"
"crossed skirted" should be just one of those words,
@gmail.com? Really? Are DeepMind anti-AI now?
The crypto industry is merely a massive grifting enterprise. The only advantage crypto has it can be used for regulatory arbitrage; i.e. a bank has to verify your identity and take measures to ensure you aren't using your account for crimes. The miners and validators that support the blockchain have to do none of that.
All the Biden administration tried to do was prevent people from using cryptocurrency to break laws; the problem is they did not go far enough. We allow miners and validators to approve transactions between unknown counterparties; bankers would be prosecuted for doing that.
This is false in several ways.
Crypto has many other advantages beyond regulatory arbitrage - for example, it makes it harder for the government to debank people, and substitutes for financial infrastructure in countries that don't have it. See https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-im-less-than-infinitely-hostile .
(EDITED TO ADD: Trying to donate to Bores, somehow two different credit cards and Paypal have both failed, both over ActBlue and over the phone, in ways that the credit card company cannot explain to me. Sure wish I could use crypto for this.)
The Biden administration's attack on crypto went beyond normal KYC; see some of the discussion in https://www.axios.com/2025/02/06/debanking-crypto-operation-choke-point-house-hearing
Isn't "it makes it harder for the government to debank people" just "regulatory arbitrage" but with positive affect?
I don't think so. I think of regulatory arbitrage as requiring a careful permit to register a bank, but you can register a crypto bank without a permit so it's cheaper but less safe. I think of debanking as something like the government freezing the accounts of protesters during a protest.
Depends somewhat on how you draw the lines but both of these seem like "crypto can let you do things the government might otherwise stop you from doing" which can be good or bad depending how much you agree with the government.
And also depends on the government in question. Not everybody has the luxury of living in the first world, however decayed it may have gotten.
This. And for the most part its not like crypto is technically impossible for the givernment to regulate, or even particularly difficult. They just choose not to because crypto has successfully lobbied the government to keep it legal.
These are both the same thing being described with different Russell conjugations. The crypto bank is “less safe” *because* the government doesn’t have the power to freeze accounts at will.
I require a permit to establish a money services business.
You freeze assets of money launderers.
They debank their political opponents.
These are functions banks could provide if we loosened restrictions. US banks could provide financial infrastructure anywhere crypto could if we removed regulations that make it costly to provide accounts to people who live in other countries .
Conversely the government can easily expand restrictions on crypto providers to make it almost impossible in the US to do what Scott desires.
Where did the Biden administration exceed reasonable bounds? Non KYC prosecutions involved securities laws. Perhaps in some cases the scams and lies fell outside of securities laws
The SEC lawsuit against Coinbase had nothing to do with KYC. They were claiming that all tokens outside Bitcoin were securities, looking to classify staking activity as a security, looking to expand the definition of brokers to include validators and miners, and to expand the definition of exchanges to include smart contracts like Uniswap. In short, strangle every major area of crypto innovation.
Staking will involves members of the public giving someone money with the intent of getting a return on its usage for a purpose. That fits the definition of a security. Likewise Uniswap allows people to trade things that have characteristics of investment contracts. The distinction is the technology stack— blockchain vs centralized counterparties.
There certainly is room to debate whether securities laws costs are worth the benefits of reducing scams; but one should not be able to evade
them by using a different tech stack or organizational structure
I think the strongest arguments against the SEC concern meme coins and NFTs. These are so intrinsically worthless they may be more like rigged gambling schemes than securities; but that is a legal fine point and hardly innovation that we should mourn if it vanished
Your original argument was that the Biden admin only pursued "non-KYC" and "scams and lies". That sounds non-objectionable and, if the crypto industry is legit, why would they object?
But the real argument, as you expand it, is the same as Liz Warren & Gary Gensler's anti-crypto army: government should extend its oversight to new technology and doesn't need congressional approval to do so. That's a lot more debatable, and it's not a surprise that the crypto industry would raise money to support candidates that don't share that opinion.
You misread my quote . I did not say everything they prosecuted was a scam or lie; just some some of the scams and lies may have not been covered by securities laws.
Securities law is not based on what tech you use for record keeping. Using cool tech or being innovative should not be a license to mislead and steal.
For example, the industry has repeatedly lied that certain Stablecoins had no risk, that NFTs were the first way to monetize digital property rights (Netflix and Getty images were and still are way ahead), and the you need crypto to accomplish what smart contracts do.
Whether these are securities laws violations or just consumer fraud does not depend on the tech, it depends on whether they are investments or just something benig sold.
> is merely a massive grifting enterprise
That's unfair; it's not all grift. There's also collecting transaction fees from people who want to move money in ways that would otherwise result in law enforcement taking an interest, like drug deals, funding sanctioned foreign regimes and so on.
typo:
> Any politician who’s survived long enough to matter is a little bit paranoid and will [never?] truly accept that their safe seat is safe.
typo: "Any politician who’s survived long enough to matter is a little bit paranoid and will truly accept that their safe seat is safe" -> "...never truly accept..."
> Just as Substack bloggers may reload their browser again and again watching the likes and restacks come in, so politicians will reload their campaign metrics panel watching the flow of donations. [...] They don't even necessarily have some future campaign they're saving it for. They're just addicted to fundraising.
I do think in some sense this is one of the root issues of politics, in much the same way that people claw each other's eyes out to win a couple of elections even if they never actually do anything with that power. People are great at maximizing quantifiable things (funds, Congressional seats) and will spend their whole lives doing it without actually accomplishing any underlying goal, like a stereotypical rich workaholic who never takes a vacation.
And one might even add, like a paperclip optimizing AI that never stops to think about why it wants paperclips.
Are you at all worried that your "Too Much Dark Money In Almonds" post might've directly or indirectly affected the political strategy of billionaires like Andreesen? Maybe there was a light taboo around billionaires buying elections which your post helped erase?
Also why isn't Eliezer Yudkowsky tweeting in support of a donation to Bores? Does he think it's another futile effort which isn't worth bothering with? I'm long-term unemployed with a chronic illness, so $7K is a lot of money for me.
It is pretty likely Thiel, Musk, Vance, Anderseen and Horowitz read the article given that they were/are fans of Scott.
Maybe a great example of the virtue of silence.
Then why has the almond industry not responded? Seems like there must be political muscle there that they are waiting to flex, with all those billions from nut lovers.
To be honest, with the title of this post, I half-expected it to be almond growers versus data centres competing for water resources in California. Perhaps that is how we will restrict the growth of AI - pump it (literally) into the growth of tree nuts instead!
Leftists hate the almond-growing / Israel-supporting Resnick husband-wife team of billionaires. To quote at random:
"Lynda and Stewart Resnick–the Beverly Hills billionaire climate criminals ravaging California so they can build wealth and power off their pistachio and almond monopoly–are big fans of the occupation. They’ve been funneling millions to various charities connected with Israel’s occupation apparatus, including specifically the Israeli Defense Forces."
https://mronline.org/2024/02/21/california-pistachio-billionaires-funding-israels-occupation-regime/
No, I cannot imagine that the market in knowledge is so inefficient that it would take a blogger saying "billionaires could spend more money on politics" to make billionaires realize they could spend more money on politics, if this were actually a very good strategy.
Bores is a moderate whose proposals are extremely far away from anything Eliezer thinks might be helpful. I also think it's reasonable for some people to have a norm against tweeting begs for money (I was nervous about blogging a demand for money, which was why I tried to compensate people with a useful post about the political situation).
I don't think if you are financially unstable you should spend a difficult-for-you amount of money on AI policy.
If the market in knowledge is so efficient, why even bother writing that post? The information was already known.
Are you at all familiar with the psychological literature around anchoring and framing effects? You reframed political donations from the common view ("way large") to a new view ("way small").
Also you didn't address my point about norms.
Thanks for answering my q about donation.
The space between the things that the people setting policy know (in this case, politicians, lobbyists, billionaires, etc), and that everyone else knows, is the entire reason that journalism is possible.
It's not even like I invented this argument! I was commenting on a paper saying the same thing! The idea that the market is so inefficient that commenting on a decades-old debate about why it looks like a $20 bill is left on the ground would lead someone to think "oh, cool, there's a way to take over the entire US government at minimal cost to me, I never was interested in this before, but I guess now this blog post has implicitly given me permission to do it" is just not how any of this works, and worrying about whether maybe it is is a good way to go from truth-seeking to being so paranoid that you never write about anything at all.
"people setting policy"
Seems like a bit of a false dichotomy. How many billionaires view themselves as "people setting policy"? Seems like a rather fluid category.
"It's not even like I invented this argument! I was commenting on a paper saying the same thing!"
Most academic papers are only read by a few academics, correct? I would guess you are responsible for far more exposures to this argument than anyone else. It's not about inventing arguments, it's about spreading them.
"is just not how any of this works"
Blog posts and memes have little influence on US policy and governance you say? This take is at least a decade out of date. Andreesen appears to be a memelord par excellence. And he is an ACX subscriber, if the Substack UI is any indication.
"go from truth-seeking to being so paranoid that you never write about anything at all"
Again, false dichotomy. Consider the least convenient possible world where you did, in fact, inspire Andreesen. What would the correct update be in that world? Maybe it might look something like: Do a trial run of an "80/20" red-teaming process for your posts, which aims to delay publication by at most 10 minutes, and filter out the posts which have the largest negative expected value. Do it for a month or two, then spend a few hours on a retrospective regarding whether it is worth continuing, or should even be expanded.
Thousands of people subscribe to your blog. Maybe you should take that a little more seriously?
"I would guess you are responsible for far more exposures to this argument than anyone else."
Scott looms large in his social niche, but I'm a non-academic (and recent ACX subscriber) who'd heard of that paper's findings before I read Scott's old blog post today. Let's not Basilisk ourselves into treating any discussion of bad political outcomes as an infohazard.
I do think it’s fair to say that Scott’s old blog was, in its heyday, easily the most influential widely-read source of “media” within Silicon Valley. It does not seem outside the scope of probability to assert what Ebenezer has here.
<mildSnark>
The _other_ knowledge availability consideration that one could make oneself paranoid over is that anything one writes is presumably going into the training data of the next iteration of LLMs, as well as more prosaic data consumers.
Hi Roko's Basilisk!
Hi NSA!
</mildSnark>
I'm confused how the push to donate to Bores meshes with what you said about the strategies that work, which wasn't "donate to the long-shot candidate who is already on your side" but "donate to the people that will win, so that you have influence on their later decisions"
I think that given that Andreessen is trying to create common knowledge that he will fight people who support AI regulation, it is especially useful to try to create common knowledge that we will support people who supports AI regulation. This is just my guess though, I am trusting the experienced political operatives.
> But also, AIPAC fights hard. If some random Congressman is anti-Israel, AIPAC will swoop down on their race in Middle Of Nowhere, Missouri and pour $10 million into electing their opponent. By now everyone knows this, and the mere threat of AIPAC action is enough to keep politicians in line.
If so, how do we account for several prominent politicians, including several Congresspeople and the current front-runner for the NYC mayor's race, being out-and-proud antisemites and vocal Hamas supporters? It would sure be nice if AIPAC had the power to reduce these human filth to political irrelevance, but that doesn't appear to be the case.
One is surely allowed to object to apologists for murderers even though one has not (yet) personally been murdered.
Don't feed the trolls; just report them.
I think it's pretty obvious why AIPAC is not able to single-handedly defeat Zohran Mamdani, but why they can make the difference in some kind of close Congressional race.
Agreed, but that's not the claim that was made in the article. As I quoted above, you made it sound as if "everyone knows" that AIPAC can "keep politicians in line" and unconditionally cause people who are anti-Israel to not get elected.
Scott I know this is a sensitive topic and I hate to put you on the spot but I'm a bit concerned that you addressed this comment while completely ignoring the dehumanizing and inflammatory tone on display.
> the current front-runner for the NYC mayor's race, being out-and-proud antisemites
Andrew "those people and their f**king tree houses" Cuomo is actually losing in the latest polls.
True. If he's not the frontrunner, then he's not the person I'm talking about.
Probably AIPAC doesn't care about the NYC mayoral race because mayors have no ability to affect aid to Israel.
Also, it seems like an extraordinary claim to say that several Congresspeople are “out-and-proud antisemites.” I can think of only one individual at most who might sort of qualify for that claim.
Which one are you thinking of?
That’s a strange thought, given that the mayor of New York probably sets policy for more Jewish people than any other individual in the world! (I’m assuming that the prime minister of Israel has to deal with more control by the Knesset than the mayor has to deal with from the city council.)
I assume they'll start caring if the NY government starts straight up segregating the Jewish population. Otherwise, there's not really any reason for them to care what goes on in local politics.
AIPAC isn't a lobbying group for Jews, but for Israel, and the mayor of NYC doesn't set policy for Israel.
> had the power to reduce these human filth
way less of this please
This is still less than almonds, but Michael Bloomberg put in $1 billion of his own wealth into his campaign. Tom Steyer, $342 million.
However, total political spending in 2024 was $20 billion, which is more than almonds. People believe that money has too much influence on politics, and I'm inclined to believe them, although I can't explian why.
(data sources: ChatGPT)
I think the difference between Bloomberg and Andreessen is that Bloomberg was only able to spend his money on one thing (electing Bloomberg), which people didn't really want, but Andreessen can focus it on the most winnable races between people who are already both popular.
Bloomberg gives a lot of money to other candidates as well. He was the biggest donor to Democratic candidates in 2024 with $61 million according to OpenSecrets.org.
I'm a Bloomberg fan. Having a crime-fighting billionaire win three terms as mayor of New York was like Bruce Wayne getting elected mayor of Gotham.
In the early 2000s I went to Naco, Arizona and walked into Naco, Mexico for an ice cream cone. The big difference between American Naco and Mexican Naco was the huge amount of political advertising in Mexico. My guess would be that in Mexico, at least a couple of dozen years ago, you could pretty easily convert an electoral victory into a financial rake-off. But in America in my lifetime, at least until Trump's win in 2024, that was a slower and less lucrative process.
Elon musk spent 100m dollars to unseat a judge in a Wisconsin special election and lost.
I feel like there's only so many tv ads you can buy before it gets oversaturated and spending more money just doesn't convince people better.
That saturation point might be higher than it initially appears. Elon Musk was 10 points underwater at the time and very publicly associated w the effort. That certainly did some damage.
By oversaturation I literally mean that you've bought up 40% of the local tv ad spots. You can get your message out but you can't get people to like your message (Musk is finding you is part of the counter message)
Then how is AIPAC so effective? This just doesn't add up. I hear people complain about money in politics all the time but then I hear stories like this all the time too. I also remember the Freakonomics guys studying it systematically and concluding that money doesn't really impact election outcomes. I genuinely don't know what to think about it.
I'm inclined to think that it generally doesn't matter BUT if you happen to bet big on the winner by chance then you'll have an outsized amount of influence over him. Maybe the crypto people just happened to get lucky last year.
AIPAC is effective in many races because there is/was fairly broad support in the US for Israel (maybe not so much anymore among younger folks), and among both parties. It's an easy crowd to work, and you can see that when they actually try to unseat someone more challenging - like the failures to unseat AOC in her district.
Isn't AIPAC effective because US politicians fear it for more personal reasons than for electoral ones? If you're positive towards Israel, but lately have been having doubts, perhaps you refrain from making certain comments because you don't want to be *seen* as being anti-Israel. It's not that there was a period where a huge load of politicians switched from being pro-Israel to anti-Israel, and then AIPAC bought a load of campaign ads and these candidates all lost. It's that AIPAC's looming prescence keeps the least pro Israel of pro-Israel candidates in line, so that doesn't happen in the first place.
It prevents wavering, and keeps an existing status quo of pro-Israel politicians acting in unison. Its influence over anti-Israel/Zionist politicians and voters should be minimal, so it remains vulnerable to sudden generational swings. AIPAC is a creature of a particular era in politics.
This also explains the shift in strategy as well. AIPAC announced their Super PAC in late 2021, right around when public support for Israel was tanking amongst the left. Of course, that was still nothing compared to what would happen afterwards, so I guess they chose a good time to switch gears.
Paul Johnson's "History of the Jews" suggested that brilliant young Jewish cosmopolitans tend to get more ethnocentric as they age.
I'd had some extremely peripheral contact with Larry Ellison in the 1990s (I believe I sat in his desk chair at Oracle in 1994, but he wasn't there) and was always amused by his Bond Villain lifestyle. I was surprised to learn around 2010 that Larry had become a big donor to Haim Saban's charity supporting the Israeli Defense Force. A few weeks ago Larry was said to have displaced Elon Musk as the World's Richest Man, which is impressive for somebody who has been near the top for quite a few decades.
Now, Larry and his son David Ellison own CBS News and have put Bari Weiss in charge. So the generational swing looks, if anything, pro-Zionist.
Larry, by the way, is an interesting Nature-Nurture case study. His biological father was an Italian American pilot and his mother a young Jewish woman. His mother gave little Larry to her Jewish uncle and aunt to raise. So Larry was half-Jewish by Nature and all-Jewish by Nurture. I tend to assume that, unless shown evidence to the contrary, Nature and Nurture are roughly 50-50 in importance, so that would suggest by my idiosyncratic but not unreasonable arithmetic that Larry is 75% Jewish.
David Ellison's mom is Christian. I don't know much about his Nurture.
Note that Larry Ellison only displaced Elon Musk as richest man for *one day*, or possibly even just a few hours depending on how you count. It was due to a temporary spike in Oracle's stock price.
AIPAC has a pretty successful track record of unseating the small number of politicians they target, so they prevent from getting started the kind of anti-Israel mainstream political movements that we see in countries like Spain, since nobody wants to be the first Congressperson out of the trench shouting "Follow me, boys," because the AIPAC snipers will likely take you out.
It probably helps a lot when your target issue is very popular and low salience.
There probably is some dam breaking from the Gaza war but tbd on the long term effects. A few factors moving in opposite directions:
1. Peace means lower salience
2. Bump in positive polling towards Israel in peace time (people might be broadly sympathetic towards Israel but disliked war conduct), but netting out as negative from before the war.
3. Dam breaking you described on anti-Israel and AIPAC unable to police it with small amounts of money and Israel netting out as less popular.
4. Israel getting serious about a propaganda strategy in universities and media feeling it needs to counter Qatari money in the same.
5. Renewed focus on Hamas's governance of Gaza and mass executions makes Israel look better (this doesn't seem to be making a big dent)
6. Backlash to local anti-semitism.
7. Increase in local antisemitism and decrease in overall trust.
All of this is beyond AIPAC's control so I expect them to lose influence (if they actually had as much as people say).
Tbd
I think it matters for small races. I said this in another comment but money can get your message out but it can't make people like your message.
AIPAC isn't actually that effective. It gets talked a lot as a boogyman in various parts of the media and Twitter for (((reasons))), but its actual influence isn't higher than you'd expect for a midsized PAC on a not-centrally-partisan issue (e.g. the NRA or Jones act people have historically been as successful or more).
Yes. I also can't tell whether AIPAC is actually that powerful or whether it's a conspiracy against the Jews.
I will say I'm very confused on what's going on with the NRA right now. It seems they went bankrupt 5 years ago and I haven't heard anything since but the gun laws haven't changed. Another issue where people blame the lobby but the real issue is public opinion (albeit more partisan in this case)?
A few thoughts:
Katie Porter is a weak candidate and probably would lose anyway (I expect her to lose the Governor's race regardless of crypto spending).
You can collect a few scalps as a PAC but if you screw up you negatively polarize the issue and can undermine long term progress (probably less of a concern for short-termists in tech in both AI/crypto).
Preventing action is easier than doing things in the US system.
I think you may have swapped hard and soft money in the section that starts "Safe-seat Congressmen want more hard money." Per my friend that works in political fundraising, "soft money fundraising is also just an expectation of the job [...] there's only so many ways chuck schumer can spend a check that gets written directly to him, and he doesn't really need that much money, so instead he gets someone to write a bunch of checks to a bunch of different groups all doing similar work." --which is the soft money, generally for a broad group of candidates not one specific guy.
> The tiny scale of US political spending is dangerous insofar as it means that one or two billionaires willing to go all-in can distort the national landscape. But it also makes it possible to oppose them.
I’m not sure that it’s true. The billionaires discussed in the post, it seems, aren’t spending for ideological reasons, but because they expect a clear ROI on this. $260m spent on crypto lobbying for a +100% return on BTC means it was just « good business ». The same is not true for people invested in the other side of the debate, but who can’t « cash in » on a win. I feel like the only way for non-billionaires to counter that influence is to fund the PAC to end all PACs that will finally lead to getting money out of politics.
I’ve thought for a while that the first and only “AI safety” law will be one to shield Sam Altman and co from liability. This will be followed by a gigantic tax cut to “incentivize innovation.”
I have no idea what you are talking about.
The post is about tech PACs and I am predicting what they will lobby for.
Liability for what?
By default, they are not going to liable for misuse of their inventions.
LLMs are engaging in commercial speech. They are not protected by section 230 like the social media companies.
Haven’t there already been a few AI safety laws passed in California and the EU? They’re not as strong as the ones I would like, but they do exist.
This shift into politics seems quite directly counter to the advice from the original blog: "Guided By The Beauty Of Our Weapons", "Beware Systemic Change", general sentiment of trying to play cooperative games. And fair, maybe indeed "this time is different", but the post doesn't really go deep into this. It doesn't explain the tradeoffs. It doesn't actually argue back and forth, it doesn't try to steelman "why is this a bad idea".
For example, isn't it better to throw this money at finding common ground with pro-AI people politically? What are their main arguments and lines of attack? How does this compare to the usual advice of funding EA causes? What is likely to happen if the fight escalates? Who is likely to have more resources? Etc, etc. Just a donation link and a call to action.
The difference is, back then Scott was trying to reason from the first principles, and now he has enough clout for actual political consultants to tell him how it (supposedly) works in the real world.
I agree. "Guided By The Beauty Of Our Weapons" was ringing in my ears while reading this -- trying to get into a who-can-spend-the-most-money competition, where your opponents are the wealthiest people in the world, strikes me as fighting with asymmetric weapons pointed in exactly the wrong direction.
Perhaps we have shifted to a post-truth world, where sound logic and evidence just aren't convincing anymore.
It seems consistent to me. He's not telling people to get into politics to enact systemic change and tear down Chesterton's fence. He is highlighting that other people are trying to tear down the fence and asking people to defend it.
If the anti ai regulation group gets a reputation as being able to primary AI safety proponents then it will affect the marginal legislators actions on AI safety.
Not ceeding that ground to them is practical politics not politics as aesthetic expression or calling for systemic change based on an outside view.
I also don't think just because the anti regulation group is well funded means the case is hopeless. If the funding is $0 on one side and $1m on the other that could have a big effect. If it's $1m on one side and $100billion on the other that will have less of an affect. Yes they can spend more than us but every marginal dollar does less
One might naively hope that the same strategy wouldn't be as effective for AI as it was for crypto and Israel, since there aren't as many rich AI lovers as there are rich crypto lovers and rich Israel supporters.
In other words, maybe there are more crypto millionaires who love crypto than there are AI millionaires who love AI.
But this is very optimistic and probably false hope.
Maybe the AI datacenters coming for the almond industry water will get the nut bros aligned and active 🤔
Wow. This makes me wish the media was a bit more functional! I see there's been a bit of reporting on this, but not a huge amount, and it's a really big story. I'm glad Scott is aware, but this is the sort of thing that the media should be there to observe, and there just isn't very much.
There have actually been lots of good mainstream stories on this, for example https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/technology/silicon-valley-ai-super-pacs.html
I would model the millionaire's decision to spend or not spend money on politics to be a function of how much of their profits they expect to save (i.e. by avoiding a tax increase, or by getting a promised tax cut).
MONEY SPENT = (TAX RAISE - CURRENT TAX LEVEL) * PROBABILITY OF ACTUALLY IMPLEMENTING A TAX RAISE.
With this model, then it makes sense that they would actually not spend "too much" money if they were to belief that the actual likelihood of them getting a tax raise is low.
In the case of the oíl, finance, weapons industry... there seems to be few realistic chances to raise taxes on them, let alone to destroy those industries. So they spend little.
Another problem is a classical free loader problem.
In the case of crypto (or AI), it was very possible for those industries to be regulated to death (which should be treated in the model as a tax raise that takes away all their profit), so it makes sense that they are "donating" more money than ever
While EAs may have overlearned the lessons of the 2010s, this effort suggests they (we?) have underlearned the lessons of the 2020s. What are those lessons?
- Plunging tons of money into political campaigns does not, in fact, guarantee success, the somewhat limited evidence presented in this post notwithstanding. In fact, plunging tons of money into political campaigns can actually generate enormous amounts of unwanted attention.
- This unwanted attention can fundamentally alter the landscape for workaday EA organizations actively trying to influence policy in the nation's capital to such an extent that some such organizations actually withdraw from previously successful attempts at policy influence since EA relationships become seen as toxic.
- The story "a bunch of weird nerds are obsessed with AI and are spending tons of money to regulate it" is a much more tasty news peg than "rich guys are spending money to influence politics." In every context, the former will generate more news stories and indeed more negative news stories than the latter.
- Lobbying AGAINST something (more regulation of crypto!) is many multiples more cost-effective than lobbying FOR something (more regulation of AI!). This is a stylized fact rather conclusively well-supported in the empirical political science literature — and also one we can see throughout the 2020s.
- THE BETTER CAPITALIZED PARTY DOES NOT WIN EVERY POLITICAL BATTLE. Boy, this is a big one. In crypto and Katie Porter we have an existence proof of a certain kind of political activity.
This is really where I want to hammer on it. Is it the opinion of the AI Safety community that expending $1b on lobbying is the maximally cost-effective way to influence AI regulation? One comes away with the opinion that very little research has been done on the policymaking process.
I don't think the for/against distinction is clearly meaningful. Suppose we said we were only lobbying AGAINST federal pre-emption of AI regulation (a cause that we indeed don't like, and which is our main target)? Or suppose we said that the crypto people were lobbying FOR the GENIUS act and the Strategic Bitcoin reserve?
Given how thin this line is, I am willing to trust the experienced political operatives who have chosen this strategy, rather than your theory that although sure, spending lots of money worked amazing for our opponents, it will mysteriously backfire for us, and therefore we should let our opponents outspend us 100-1 and win easily.
It is, in fact, a distinction in the poli sci literature — as is the inconsistency of value in outspending. It is by no means an established fact that big spenders win elections or get their policy priorities implemented as a matter of course. As for the former issue, the distinction here is between "maintaining the status quo" and "making change":
See e.g.:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41759323
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/abs/organized-interests-and-agenda-setting-in-the-us-supreme-court/7E9792FB9880F9F333DD3F74C7E7DA36
https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/100/2/303/58458/Information-and-Legislative-Bargaining-The?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Again, the issue here is what's valuable on the margin — trying to compete in this arena is *enormously expensive* and this doesn't just need to be *a good idea* — it needs to be *the best idea on the margin.*
"Plunging tons of money into political campaigns does not, in fact, guarantee success, the somewhat limited evidence presented in this post notwithstanding. In fact, plunging tons of money into political campaigns can actually generate enormous amounts of unwanted attention."
Yeah, I definitely think the Carrick Flynn election result burned them on pushing for any more directly political campaigns (I'm sorry, I mean no disrespect, but this story always makes me laugh since it was so clearly the triumph of idealism over going with the reality on the ground). That, plus SBF being the one shoving money into such backing and similar donations and the subsequent black eye that gave the movement.
Wow, you've really crossed over into "Jews pulling the strings to control society" conspiracy land. Honestly, this post should be the last nail in the coffin of the rationalist movement. Rationalism has a lot of good criticisms of other ideologies, but as a positive theory in its own right, it's time to let go.
Every immoral ideology merges with antisemitism eventually; and for a philosophy that sees itself explicitly as the antidote to conspiracy thinking, seeing you transition so smoothly into embracing the oldest conspiracy theory is a clarifying moment. What was it in the end? Did you just fall for the avalanche of defamation and blood libels? Or was it reactionary hatred of Trump?
That’s not what they said though; they said that in 2024 they were the largest PAC *advocating for Israel*. That seems very plausibly true. But that would hardly make them the largest PAC, period.
And “96% of AIPAC-backed candidates win” is a useless statistic on its own. It lacks any control or discussion of when and why AIPAC backs someone. It smacks of the “judges are more lenient after lunch” study, which I believe has been discussed here before: the truth was that judges got to preview the cases and the facts in those summaries were usually the whole story, so judges scheduled their cases so they would get to lunch on time.
In the same way, AIPAC might simply have been choosing not to back candidates in close or losing elections. For example, America is very polarized rural vs urban. If you live in a big city and back the Dem nominee (or in a small town and back the GOP nominee) you’re well on your way to having backed the winner, without having influenced the outcome.
I think there's also an effect of "judges let defendants with lawyers go first". Not sure to what extent that's professional courtesy vs not making the client pay for their lawyer to twiddle thumbs while waiting to be called, but from my own experiences in court, it's very common.
And naturally, defendants with private attorneys do much better than those without.
This was a very specific study from 2011, focused on a specific Israeli parole board. Other law experiences may vary significantly from this one, although the courtesy you describe is another way this effect could arise.
That's why I'm so skeptical of AIPAC's massive claimed success rate; it serves both their purposes (look how effective we'll be with your money, <future donor>!") and the purposes of antisemites ("Jews control the world") for those numbers to be high. Nobody in that space has any reason to go in and say, wait a moment, maybe AIPAC is just a moderately effective organization that has been advocating for something (the American-Israeli relationship) that was (until relatively recently) quite popular. Because like in the "hungry judges" study, AIPAC has ways to fudge the numbers without increasing their real effect.
The original 2011 "hungry judges" study:
https://law.stanford.edu/index.php?webauth-document=event/265474/media/slspublic/Israeli_judges.pdf
The immediate rebuttal, noting that judges had influence over their schedules:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1110910108
A further rebuttal in 2023 modeling the time that cases take, finding the 2011 rebuttal plausible:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/judgment-and-decision-making/article/irrational-hungry-judge-effect-revisited-simulations-reveal-that-the-magnitude-of-the-effect-is-overestimated/61CE825D4DC137675BB9CAD04571AE58
Regardless of the particulars of AIPAC, Jews are represented in powerful positions at much higher rates than their fraction of the population in the population. The book "Thou Shalt Prosper" (by rabbi Daniel Lapin, not exactly raging anti-semite) claims it's 64%
https://recapio.com/digest/why-64-of-fortune-500-companies-have-jewish-ceos-by-entreleadership
Although I also wouldn't be surprised if AIPAC is much more effective than average - this would be a great example of "Pulling the rope sideways"
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/policy_tugowarhtml
Honestly, the surest sign that there ISN'T a secret cabal: half the time the messaging is "man, Jews hold $POWER_MARKER at 20x their rate in the general population, aren't we awesome?"... and half the time the messaging is "don't you dare repeat falsehoods like that, it feeds anti-semitism!"
I'm only a little bit tongue-in-cheek with that, but at least under USA law, truth is an absolute defense against defamation. This is the same reason why discussion of poor outcomes in Blacks, per se, can't really be shot down. You can certainly be a dick about it (framing as "they deserve it!") or not ("they need more help"). I think if people are saying "Jews outperform expectations" rather than "Jews run the world", that's pretty clearly not anti-semitism. But YMMV.
"an ICC- and ICJ- double-labelled genocide"
Both halves of this are false.
The ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu for several war crimes, but not for genocide. (By the way, at the same time it issued a warrant against a Hamas leader for "extermination" aka genocide, though said Hamas leader was already dead at the time so there was no chance of this leading to actual prosecution. So not only did the ICC not say Israel was committing genocide, but instead it said Israel was the victim of genocide.)
Similarly, the ICJ did not label it genocide. It did not even say that the situation was plausibly genocide. Rather it accepted that Gazans have a plausible right to be protected from genocide, meaning that the ICJ would continue monitoring the situation in case it might at some future point become genocide. See:
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-middle-east-68906919
Are you aware that Scott is a member of the "pullers of the strings to control society"? It's a lighthearted self-effacing joke which made no conspiratorial insinuations and just stated obvious public information, relax. If anything it's poking fun at the conspiratorial-minded.
(((Scott Alexander))) is pulling on the strings to control society by writing about what he thinks about issues of importance on his popular blog Astral Codex Ten. A lot of smart and influential people read the blog and might be influenced by the ideas they see published there and also by the ideas of other people publishing blog posts engaging with (((Scott's))) posting. Also I heard that he publicly gave grant money to a bunch of people and organizations who he thought were doing good or interesting work in the world, which makes him kind of similar to (((George Soros))).
I suspect this is second- or third-hand influence, and that Scott learned about PACs from a source that is generally reliable except for the lean towards specific dangerous tropes (or a source that themselves learned from such a source), leading to the distortion being presented as fact. This is the kind of thing that will often happen to people who are not themselves at all antisemitic.
(An alternative hypothesis is that this presentation of AIPAC/Jewish donors is actually accurate, but when you're in a society that spontaneously generates "Jews control everything" conspiracies regardless of circumstances, your bar for sufficient evidence for that should be *very* high.)
I think it is unlikely that Scott is a self-hating Jew.
What do you say to "AIPAC is, in fact, Jews pulling the strings to control society"? If it's an organisation set up to defend Jewish interests and the method of action on that is influencing elections?
I don't think it's anti-Semitic to go "yes, this is a Jewish organisation promoting Jewish interests". If every criticism of anything Israel, Israel-supporting organisation, or Jewish actions gets met with "anti-Semitism! you're trying to send me to the gas chambers!" then eventually it will be crying wolf and people will take *more* notice of those who want to say "psst, lemme tell you about some shady stunts these guys are pulling".
Mostly that AIPAC isn't particularly large as PACs go (it was the twenty something biggest PAC by total spending in 2024, a year it spent over 10x what it usually does. In 2016 it didn't even make the ranking list and spent less than, say, the national realtor association)
Call them antisemitic conspiracy theorists one more time, that’s the bombshell that you need to win the culture war! But be sure to not include any object-level counterarguments, that would kinda ruin it.
Does anyone know where to donate to Leading the Future? Is there somewhere better to give for individuals opposed to AI regulation?
With crypto, I'd keep in mind that Trump won the popular vote by less than 2% against the unpopular last minute replacement for a historically unpopular incumbent. The Democratic base is now very against crypto and a lot of Silicon Valley stuff, and if Harris had won, they might be in a bad situation now. It's not clear that spending all that money actually is some unbeatable strategy.
My sense is that the Musk buying Twitter thing really did help but the situation is a bit sui generis.
Also re AI, they tried to add a "states can't regulate AI" provision into their law earlier this year and it generated backlash and got dropped.
Crypto also benefited from Trump being an unusually *transactional* president, to put it mildly.
Man I read the title and I was hoping they were going to do something to rationalize California's water rationing policies.
Now _that_ would cost a lot in political donations!
California water rights got grandfathered in in 1915. Increasingly, California's hereditary water baron families intermarry so they are getting fewer in number but richer.
Somebody brought up the idea of water property rights reform to Gavin Newsom. He agreed it would a good thing to do, but said that no way was _he_ going to lead a political campaign against the Water Powers That Be.
Maybe the reason oil companies dont buy politicians in the direct sense is that they find it more effective to buy issues via the economy. Oil supports lots of jobs etc, which is why there are no shortage of pro oil politicians.
This makes crypto well suited, maybe uniquely suited for buying politicians directly. Theres tons of money in it without supporting many jobs somehow (kinda the point of the anti crypto position, dont interpret that as me being pro or anti)
I hear AI is supporting the global economy these days. That might be more important than their PAC, but by running both, I guess we wont get clean data
Maybe we can get some good AI regulations but the odds are the regulations will just slow the industry down without doing much good, I think the potential harms of a future AI are to broad to be able to affectivley pin down in legislation
AIPAC was not founded as a PAC; it only became one in 2021. It has historically disbursed a smaller dollar amount than many industry lobby groups and quite a few actual foreign countries lobbying. Compare their 10s of millions to China dropping 1/2 a billion dollars, and the Saudis 1/3 of a billion. Until October 7th, iirc AIPAC was smaller than most ag sector lobbyists.
AIPAC gets its way far less often than other domestic lobbies, especially on the issues it has considered the most important. They completely failed to prevent the JCPOA, which American Jews felt was a bad deal. In fact, they failed so badly that they got replaced by J Street within the Democratic Party, and J Street is at best a fringe organization of American Jews.
Now, AIPAC says they’re successful, and of course they want to say so because who would donate to an ineffective lobby? And antisemites say that AIPAC is successful, because without that conspiracy they might have to reckon with the idea that most people don’t like to see Jews killed.
But are they successful? What specifically have they accomplished in the last twenty years? Thirty? Forty? AIPAC claims they got the development aid and military aid for Israel. Did they? Or were there clear strategic reasons that America chose to make those interventions - such as stabilizing Israel in the Yom Kippur War, and securing Israel enough that they’d go along with risky diplomatic plans such as peace with Egypt or the JCPOA - where America was just following its own interests as it saw them? Those three events account for, if memory serves, more than half of all aid to Israel period, including development aid. AIPAC is pushing on open doors, at eye-watering cost, and thinks that makes them kingmakers.
And if AIPAC *isn’t* the kingmaker they like to say they are, then repeating their narrative can play into the hands of the blood libel of Ilhan Omar and co.
AIPAC constantly boasts about how powerful AIPAC is. Is AIPAC blood-libeling Jews?
Their boastful speaking has ended up giving the blood libelers a lot of ammunition for no obvious purpose.
If you ask me to amateurly psychologize, the discrimination that Jews faced in the late 1800s and early 1900s in America was so humiliating that it created a powerful need to show and assert Jewish strength within America. And I get it; when at the height of Jewish migration 5 out of every 6 people changing their names in the state of New York are changing their names to not be recognizably Jewish so they can get a job, that’s the sort of thing that will scar you.
And I think much of the “substitute AIPAC for Israel or Jews so as not to get canceled” is just a legacy of Soviet and Arab seething without any relation to facts. But it sure doesn’t help you convince someone that “no, there isn’t a cabal of Jews running the world, actually” when a bunch of smug Jews are going around patting themselves on the back and saying “ho ho ho, we run the world!”
And so we of course come back to the factual question; does AIPAC actually swing elections and votes at any notable rate as compared to other lobbying efforts? Do they have more money than analogous efforts? Or are they being handed cartoon bags of cash (instead of, say, that money going to Jewish schools) to crow about tailwinds and whine about headwinds? I submit that the burden of proof is on proving that they’re remarkable, which Scott seems to have taken as a given.
America is pretty divided politically lately over issues like DEI and immigration, but is Israel all that controversial in partisan terms? It seems like both Trump Administrations and the Biden Administration were pretty pro-Israel. Republicans prefer Likud and Democrats would prefer the anti-Likud coaltion, but both are awfully rightwing by 21st Century standards. Israel's leftwing coalition might well be at risk for getting banned in Germany for being extremely rightwing.
"Israel's leftwing coalition might well be at risk for getting banned in Germany for being extremely rightwing."
Really? Why? Even under the current very right wing government, Israel has affirmative action for Arabs. In both universities and civil service. The previous government had an Arab party in it. How would someone like Yair Golan get banned in Germany for being right-wing? Netanyahu wouldn't even get banned. Maybe Smotrich and Ben-Gvir.
Obviously, Germany will be the last country to crack down on Israel for its rightwingishness ... because of Hitler and the Holocaust.
But that raises an interesting question: are there any white countries on earth more rightwing in 2025 than Israel?
Yeah, I know about the Ethiopian and Yemeni Jews, but take a look at Bibi. And he's a lot more moderate than Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, whom you'd have to be Nick Fuentes to call not white.
Perhaps Stephen Miller dreams about someday heading a government as right wing as Bibi's, but that still seems a long way off.
Russia is unambiguously white under whatever racial definition and clearly under Putin it's far more right-wing than Israel is. But I take the "white country" in your post to mean "developed white country". Ben-Gvir is a swarthy Kurdish Jew, but I agree that most Middle Easterners are white. I would consider Syria to be a white country that is more right-wing than Israel and is run by a former Al-Qaeda guy. Turkey as well. But anyway, I know by "white country" you meant "developed white country".
How are you measuring this though? Right-wing along what axis? I think Israel is similar to America. Trump in many ways is similar to Netanyahu. Stephen Miller seems as extreme as Smotrich and is running US immigration policy. There are people in Homeland Security who are huge Fuentes fans and doing 1488 dog whistles, analogous to Ben-Gvir running internal security. And both the current Israeli government and the current American government represent the right half of their country's political spectrum. Granted, being similar to America means you are to the right of Canada, Australia, and Europe.
The one objective thing I found is "World Values Survey" where Israel is to the "left" of Romania, Albania, Croatia, and Portugal, as it's above and to the right of them on the chart. See here:
https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvsimages/Cultural_Map_2023.png
Every political organization pretends to be all powerful to get donations and influence. This isn't special to them.
I wish you (and Americans more generally) would consider the implications of posts like these - describing moneyed interests who support often unpopular positions (Cryptocurrency, Zionism) outright sinking hostile candidates with attack ads on unrelated issues, while funding both sides of competitive races - and reconsider their reflexive defenses of the American political system, or their analysis of the country as a democracy.
I think it will go to their heads, they'll try spending $500 million in 2026, and the results will be really disappointing for them. Congressmen obviously don't like having tens of millions in attack ads dumped against them, but ultimately Porter was a weak candidate in a race against a far more popular, high-profile Democrat who ultimately won it (Schiff), and on an issue where most of the Democrats don't have strongly held opinions on the topic.
As I pointed out in the 2019 post, "that's what we spent on almonds, so it's not a lot of money" is bad reasoning because just because we think of almonds as insignificant doesn't mean that the amount is small.
I decided to look up https://data.ers.usda.gov/reports.aspx?ID=4057 which shows almonds at 5.8 billion, but that's "cash receipts", not the size of the industry or how much Americans spend. Still, there are a lot of other crops in the table and I should be able to get relative sizes without having to compare apples to oranges (except literally). Almonds beat out every single one of the 32 "vegetables and melons" (though potatoes are close) as well as all 31 other items in the "fruits and nuts" category except for grapes.
Almonds are about half of wheat and beat out sugar cane and sugar beets combined, cotton (though only for 2024), and tobacco. They're still nothing compared to animals or feed crops, and nowhere near the military or health care, but why Scott thinks almond spending is insignificant is beyond me. Something that spends as much as we spend on almonds is a big deal.
The table also seems to give single lines for things that are both consumed by humans and used as animal feed. Separate googling claims that about half of wheat is used for animal feed and 90% of soybeans. In 2019, when Scott made his original post, grapes were less than almonds, and almonds were more than now (in real dollars), which means that Scott managed to choose an "insignificant" example that was the highest of all food crops.
I've got a 2.5 pound of bag of Costco almonds sitting next to my laptop as I type.
I love almonds, but they require a huge amount of water and sunshine to grow, so they are dependent upon a bizarre 1915 California water property rights decision. Someday a California politician is going to rally the 30 million Californians who don't love almonds to go to war with the Almond Interests. But when Gavin Newsom was asked if he would go to war with the Almond Water Powers, he replied, in effect, No way, dude. Trump and Vance I can take on, but the Almond Barons are much too scary.
This discussion is such a narrow view of the issue. The real damage to American politics (which is now washing into international politics) was the Citizens United decision. The real question here is not, “how effective is political spending?”, but “Would American politics be better if it was not completely dominated by campaign finance?” Since I’ve seen estimates that Congresspeople spend 2-3 days per week just raising money, the answer is probably “yes”, just from a functional point of view. And since multiple studies have shown that those policy measures that are implemented are much more likely to be those that are aligned with the interests of the rich, the answer is probably “yes” from the perspective of a functioning democracy.
Was Eddington secretly a documentary?
Why is Marc Andreessen with his puny $2B even relevant? During the 2024 campaign, I have heard (not sure if this is 100% true) that Elon Musk has spent about $250M to support Donald Trump. That's not even mentioning him buying Twitter. There seem to be a lot of people who could spend way way more than Andreessen even has at all.
In 1993, the president of Mexico invited 30 oligarchs to whom he'd sold state-owned industries, such as Carlos Slim, the future world's richest man, to a dinner at his presidential palace. He asked them for a 1994 campaign contribution of 25 million each.
"25 million pesos? No problemo," they replied, pulling out their checkbooks.
"No," President Salazar replied. "$25 million U.S. dollars."
"Gulp," they replied, except for Slim, who thought the amount reasonable but the site risky.
Eventually, they all agreed to pony up $750 million U.S. dollars, but then the story hit the papers, as Slim predicted it would, and it fell through.
Presumably, you have a lot more influence if you're willing to potentially support both sides.
Also, I know that the author is very concerned about AI alignment and regulation, but aren't there some... more pressing issues about the American democracy, the ones which warrant our attention? Or is that too small in the face of AI?
The great part about this plan is that you can bribe politicians regardless of what kind of political system you're in!
Come on, Scott has written plenty of posts in the Orange man bad genre. It's only been a month since the most recent one: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/defining-defending-democracy-contra
Assuming someone or a lot of people do this and start outright buying politics generally considered left-wing leaning (to be concrete: ai safety, regulations in general, things that are bad for profit of business head figures) isn't this like opening the flood gates? The people on the opposite hhave far more money and so far didn't use it to buy politics, except in case of silicon valley they kinda did.
What happens if every billionaire starts this and no one has any illusions anymore if you can or can't buy democracy anymore, because obviously you can and you did?
Its probably an irrelevant fear because the arms race already kinda started but still if everyone goes full on plutocracy it seams doubtful to me if this is really a net positive. On the other hand we're already headed there so what is one more push and trying to change direction of the plutocracy with that push ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Well, given that Scott wrote "AI 2027", he expects this stuff to be pivotal in the very near term, so from his POV it makes sense to go for symmetrical measures half a step ahead of the opposition.
I find it mind-boggling that the conclusion of this post isn't "and we should do X and Y to limit the influence of political donations in US politics, here's how you can contribute" and instead the conclusion is "and we should get in on the money-burning game, here's a guy on our tribe's side, give him your savings".
Why are Americans so primed to believe that massive political donations are an inevitable fact of life?
💯💯
I had the same reaction.
But the US differs from Europe/UK in degrees. Even in Europe election campaigns cost a lot of money. Someone has to fund that. That someone gets a lot of say.
Because there is no viable plan to alter the impact of money in politics in America, and in fact, even if there was the marginal contribution of an individual would be negligible at least when compare to the larger impact of that individual donating to one side of a political race, since the arms race is already on, and the only way it stops is some kind of event totally unforeseen by either side. Basically, looking at Congress and the Supreme Court right now, there is no way to alter the arms, race, dynamic, and in fact, preaching about that would be the classic case of making people think they are contributing when they are just indulging their politics hobby without having any impact.
Awesome, thanks a lot Scott
EA should make a PAC that threatens african leaders with Uncle Sam's Big Stick/Denial of Carrot if they don't use their Rolls-Royce and MiGs budgets to buy anti-malarial nets and dewormers to everybody who needs them.
It would be cheaper and more effective than EA paying for them directly and trying to distribute them in the middle of nowhere.
Wait a second - that Katie Porter story? So she *already* got slapped down hard in an election?
And her takeaway from that was *still* “How would I need them in order to win, ma’am?” for the governor of California election? 🤦♀️
I now wonder how the hell she ever got elected to the House of Representatives in the first place! (I can well believe the mashed potato story and the rest of it, but how did someone this clueless ever succeed in an election at all?)
Party connections and a safe congressional district. It's why I'm strongly against California gerrymandering even if it feels like unilater disarmament not to - when you gerrymander you get reps like this.
It makes a lot more sense now why that clip got leaked and went viral.
Do extra brackets signify irony?
Extra brackets mean that the person with (((this name))) is Jewish. It was a code developed by the antisemitic Twitter right.
Thanks
You need to include in your model that /the battle does not stay won/. At best, it stays won for four years. So the right way to think about the cost of getting a policy you want isn't a one-off payment of $X million; it's an ongoing expense of $X/4 million per year - and this not for a certain purchase, but to shift probabilities - increasing over time with at least inflation but also how annoyed your political opponents get with not having their way as time goes on, for as long as you need the policy in place.
Certainly the billionaires will be factoring this into their ROI calculations.
Couple of ideas:
1-Other industries know how far their money can go in politics vs how far it can go doing something else. Example: Oil can price a congressman vs down-payment on a new vessel.
Crypto doesn't actually produce anything, crypto billionaires can buy more coin and/or make the coin they have more valuable.
Maybe they did the math and realized they're at a point where buying more is not going as far as making it a bit more valuable/preventing it from crashing. Maybe right now politics is their blue ocean.
Maybe it's the same for AI, they've reached a point where their money in the actual business only goes so far, because they keep burning money. Maybe dumping this money into politics means AI and crypto are showing some concern with a bubble.
2-Other businesses have long bought their way into politics and the economy, AI and crypto are the nouveau riche and just now are buying their way into politics. Maybe what they're spending now is not so different from what other businesses have spent in the past, or total spent over the years, adjusted for inflation.
I'd like to separate the issue of AI safety from whatever opponents of AI mean when they say "regulation" (all while making light of the safety issue). At least in online discourse and elsewhere, "AI regulation" seems to mean something between taxing, neutering, or banning of various AI tools, with some "think of the children" thrown in for good measure.
I'm sure the PACs will be inclined to fight both forms, but today's AI majors seem likely to acccept a form of safety-as-regulatory-capture, and I suspect they're less likely to go after a vaguely worded "test before you ASI" bill than a "stop AI from stealing our water" bill.
I need to admit that my honest reaction to this post was "come on, Scott, don't feed Moloch." I realise that figuring out a way to stop the bad thing from happening, rather than co-opting the bad thing for your own purposes, is really difficult to even figure out intellectually and even harder to orchestrate (all of which needs more time than the co-opting, besides), so I'm not upset or even want to particularly stop you. Instead, I sincerely wish you well (even though I don't have full agreement with even the cause). But I do hope you reconsider the whole approach.
Heck, even if you don't actually do another approach, I'd be super interested in knowing what you can come up with to solve the underlying issue. You've already thought about it a lot, so I think you could come up with some pretty interesting approaches. So there's at least another article that could come out of this? :) I'm hoping.
I wish Scott would engage with this more. The post implicitly mentions the (main?) mechanism to prevent aggressive lobbying: norms. It is outrageous that lobbies have such political control. This reaction is a powerful yet fragile regulator; let's not break it. As an example in the post: we harness Sam Altman's ability to donate large personal sums through these norms. This seems to be the answer to why billionaires are not (all) buying elections. I love almonds; I am disgusted by lobbies. The worst possible response is to slide in our collective instinct: stop being outraged, and wonder if we (who are the righteous) should do the same.
Higher up, Scott suggest that his role, as a mere blogger, is negligible. Who else, but those with large social platforms, have influence over norms?
Under the assumptions that norms limit more widespread pro-AI donation pro-crypto, it seems counter productive to actively engage in breaking norms. The direct effect of anti-AI lobby is to reduce the political/public reputational harm for pro-AI tech billionaires.
I wish they *had* called it AI PAC. Although you'd probably get called racist for caring so much about whitespace.
Leading The Future still only has 2% as much money as the almond industry.
No, not exactly. The almond industry does not 'have' $12B, it has revenue totaling that. This figure comes from the sales of Almonds and products mostly in American supermarkets. a lot of that number is Supermarket profit, and groceries are a notoriously low-margin business. Shippers, packers, processors and truckers get most of the rest. In the produce industry you are lucky if 10-20% make it back to the grower. Thanks for mentioning produce, though!
Voters in the UK should be worried too. Imagine a trillionaire who owns a social media company. He is best friends with the leader of one of the parties, and wants his party to be elected.
Campaign finance laws are really strict in the UK (£11,000 per donor, per year; total donations in 2021 were £50m). What's to stop this trillionaire from buying the election? Musk doesn't even need to give any money to Farage. He can just buy all the ads on YouTube and Facebook — and he already owns X.
Americans have never been interested in British elections, but for some reason, we now have Evangelicals campaigning about abortion laws, plus Presidents and Trillionaires speaking up for their preferred candidates. What happens next?
Gaza has changed the equation
Fairshake's actual influence over election outcomes is disputed: https://www.semafor.com/article/08/22/2025/did-crypto-get-unlikely-help-becoming-a-campaign-kingmaker
Positions on committees are for sale with price lists, and the price lists represent the amount of money raised. Also, campaigns can shift money to each other, so politicians in safe seats can funnel money to other candidates and build their own coalition. Finally, if you look at TX-23, even a safe seat can, in theory, be lost to a primary challenger.
Not knowing any of this is disqualifying.
I think AI safety is the wrong issue. No one cares. If a plurality of voters are willing to elect someone to be the American warlord and run roughshod over constitutional boundaries in order to "get things done", then why would anyone care about AI? Half the voters are probably hoping one takes over.
Broaden the issue to broaden the appeal. Oppose "online addiction"--it's well documented, everyone hates it, and it includes AI as well as social media and cryptocurrency regulation. It's broad and ambiguous enough to include pretty much anything the tech billionaires are for, up to and including privacy issues, gamification of platforms, and "protect the children." Throw in for regulating pornography, and there's middle American parents right there. You could easily position it as a bipartisan movement. It's a no-loser.
This article misunderstands the core positive feedback loop that drives capitalism. Its not possible for effective altruism to win because its ineffective unless it fully embraces capitalism, but since doing so requires being two faced (unlike pro ai or pro crypto who are pursuing agendas they believe in) it will always require extra effort and provide space for ftx style fraudsters.
Without the positive feedback of money -> politics-> profits -> money you cant win your pet cause.
I think we are probably in a transition period, political spending is rapidly rising, finding new opportunities, where various factions and groups are still feeling their way. Fairshake had first mover advantage, but I am reasonably certain that won't last. The reason Big Oil isn't spending a lot anymore is that they've given up - fossil is doomed, regardless of what anyone spends, and they know it. So all their resources are going into diversification. They're following Big Tobacco (anyone remember them?).
The NRA is another "once was the big dog" no one pays attention to anymore. Big Food (Coke and McD). Big Aerospace. These things wax and wane, while the professional and industry groups never go away. Real estate may have never been #1, isn't now, and never will be, but they will always be in the top ten, forever. Ditto Big Pharma and healthcare.
Meanwhile, professional lobbying, taken as an industry itself, is bigger and more powerful than ever. At a little over 4 billion and change, it isn't top ten, but obviously a dollar spent on a lobbyist has an ROI way over 1:1. That's the industry we really need to regulate.
Any ideas?
I think the NRA is different in that they simply WON: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Right_to_Carry,_timeline.gif
Heh, possibly. Sometimes that happens, as in no fault divorce laws, or gay marriage.
Amazing article, quick question. So most PACs donate mostly "soft money" which goes to ads but not directly in politician's pockets?
In that case the system isn't nearly as corrupt as I thought if the cap of "hard money" is truly $7K per person.
It's slightly more restricted than even that, to $3.5k in the primary and $3.5k in the general.
Wow, that seems great
I'm sure glad none of the PACs you mentioned have an interest in the candidate you plugged at the end of your post. I'm sure glad the entire reason he got a plug isn't that he's opposed to the core interests of two or more or the most well-funded emerging PACs. Imagine what that would do to his electoral prospects! I donated to him yesterday and I'm very happy that this post gave me no reason at all to update against his successful deployment of my cash.
"AI PAC was already taken"
This is the second time in the last two decades that I have ruined a keyboard by spitting coffee all over it at one of Scott's jokes
I've got an idea: Keyboard-industry PAC to train AI on Scott's jokes and create 5,000 ACX-like blogs
Quoting from the original almond post to make a point that, if one spends the maximum amount of hard dollar donations (currently $7k), one gets much more than $7k of political influence: "In this model, the difference between politics and almonds is that if you spend $2 on almonds, you get $2 worth of almonds. In politics, if you spend $2 on Bernie Sanders, you get nothing, unless millions of other people also spend their $2 on him. People are great at spending money on direct consumption goods, and terrible at spending money on coordination problems."
Yes, if you spend $2 on a political donation you get nothing; however, if you spend $7k (or honestly even $2k) you will likely end up with a Member of Congress' phone number. Maybe you are not that good at persuasion, but maybe you are. Also maybe you can bring a few more friends who can all also give $7k (or $2k). Even very senior politicians have a surprisingly small set of "max" political donors. I just happened to be looking at the FEC reports for one senior GOP Congressman the other day and he only had like 4 people who had consistently given him max checks (again now just $7k; used to be less) over the last several cycles. Each of those individuals can reliably get his ear on any issue (this doesn't mean he would necessarily do their bidding or something, but he would listen and especially on smaller issues be inclined to act). If you care about AI safety and take this strategy, you will almost certainly not be able to get the modal member of Congress to turn into Scott Weiner. But you can also almost certainly get them to insert language into bills that, on the margins, improves the safety situation (and to socialize more important steps that could be taken in situations where the equilibrium is punctuated).
Can you email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com , I have a question for you.
I don't think this was your intent, but this is the most compelling article I have ever read for why we need to get rid of Citizen's United and introduce significant campaign finance reform
Wiener seems like a fairly controversial figure, not sure having him as the face of AI safety is going to be net positive?
Sacramento legislators seem dumb in general, while Scott Wiener seems pretty smart.
I don't think anyone is deliberately trying to make him the face of anything, he's just the person who was willing to fight for it.
Also, the California politics people I talk to seem to think he's 10x more effective, per unit of de jure power, than anyone else in the state. I agree he has some weird beliefs I don't agree with, but man is he good at getting his bills passed.
>Safe-seat Congressmen want more soft money because . . . the consultants I talked to didn’t have a great answer here.
It’s because soft money lets you give cushy consulting jobs to your buddies.
“a real estate group 25-50% the size of AIPAC”. I always wondered what it took to to have and keep a law where capital gains on real estate is not taxed when you sell it, if you buy another property (1031 exchange), unlike every other asset. Now I know.
Submitted my resume (I've got a relevant background). Geniunely hopeful after reading this.
I used to work heavily in politics, particularly primary politics (on both sides of the aisle). Can confirm Scott's assertion of AIPAC's outsized impact. A few factors making them more impactful than other political groups:
1. They spend way more in primary elections than other groups, and money in primaries move the needle ~10x further on an issue than money in general elections.
2. They do a very good job marrying their political giving to lobbying and advocacy work in a way that others either don't have an interest in or don't succeed as well at.
3. There is...a lot more money coming from pro-Israel groups than what is publicly attributed to AIPAC. This includes:
- Many similar but technically not AIPAC pro-Israel organizations
- 501(c)(4)s that don't have to disclose how much money they spend
- Donor circles of individuals directly giving hard dollars to members of Congress
- Very large political contributors to major parties who partly leadership know care a lot about Israel
Accounting for all of these sources is nearly impossible, and certainly more than a non-profit like opensecrets can or should be responsible for. But a (fairly pro-Israel) political consultant I used to work with once estimated that there's $1 billion/year in pro-Israel efforts when you add it all up.
To be clear, I'm not claiming that any of this is illegal or immoral. I myself am Jewish and don't really have a strong opinion about Israel-Palestine or other Middle East issues. And as for money in politics, well, it's reasonable to be concerned about the influence that money can have, although I myself have changed my opinion on this over the past 5-10 years. But if you're going to allow for money in politics in a myriad of ways, it's a little strange to then shame pro-Israel groups for availing themselves of the opportunity.
But damn, do they ever.
Banned for this comment.
Thank you for your comment, I find it very insightful.
I'm intrigued though: How did you managed to work heavily in politics without developing a strong opinion on Middle-East issues?
You're welcome!
And I don't know, there are a lot of issues to care about. People really lose a lot of sleep over the plight of a relatively small number of people in a region that seems pretty fucked no matter what we try to do. Losing sleep makes sense if you're one of those people, or your family is. But there are only so many hours in the day, the conflicts seem pretty intractable, and I chose to focus on issues that mattered more to me where I felt like I could make a bigger difference.
One of my biggest pet peeves working in politics was the unification of all issues, particularly under partisan labelling. You couldn't care about the environment without opposing police brutality. You couldn't talk about economic freedom without worshipping Trump. It made it much harder for people with different ideologies to actually make progress on the issues that they agreed on, because they kept alienating their potential coalition partners by bringing unrelated wedge issues into the conversation. The fastest way to end a new political alliance with someone is to mention 5 issues like Israel-Palestine. You'll each find 2 that you disagree strongly on, and all your goodwill and trust will evaporate.
Or maybe this is all just cope for "I was too lazy to read a long body of literature on entrenched Middle East conflicts and come to my own conclusions about the right American foreign policy in the region."
I don't think Scott was shaming AIPAC so much as "this is how a PAC can be really, really effective even though it represents a small proportion of the electorate". It is then a legitimate question as to "how are they so much more effective than the other PACs?" and "can other PACs emulate them?" and "if we are really serious about concerns around AI, and we have all this money sloshing around being invested in AI, then we should set up a PAC on the same lines as AIPAC, which has demonstrated that effective lobbying on your sole issue can be done, even if it's a minority interest".
Oh totally agreed. The shaming point intended more generally, not at Scott, but I could have been clearer about that.
I want to know where you arrived at this figure about how much Americans spend on almonds. Does that include indirectly, e.g. by buying almond milk or almond butter, or only the ones you find in the snack aisle? What about almonds purchased by restaurants and put into food, is that just factored in as an estimate or has someone collected the restaurants’ receipts?
Also, a lot of almond products are year round weekly grocery purchases, like I eat nuts every day for lunch so I keep them stocked in my lunchbox. Contrast with sending money to politicians, which I would guess usually happens once every four years for most (average plus minus one standard deviation) of the people who ever do it, and probably only a few times over the modal person’s life. (Again: my sober guess.)
It might be the case that money spent by PACs is subject to diminishing returns. Once you have blanketed every media and Internet channel with whatever message you want to push, plastered your ads on every available physical surface, commissioned a famous pop singer to create an album about how great you are, and so on... what more can you do ? On top of that, the number of voters you're trying to influence is not very large. Undecided voters are rare, and so are voters in primaries; most of the population had either already made up their minds in perpetuity, or doesn't care. On top of that, the more money you've got and the more irons you have in the fire, the more management you need, which likewise reduces your efficiency. Thus it could very well be the case that the sub-almond amount of PAC investment is in fact optimal.
" Once you have blanketed every media and Internet channel with whatever message you want to push, plastered your ads on every available physical surface, commissioned a famous pop singer to create an album about how great you are, and so on... what more can you do ?"
Lose the election? Make sure that when you pay out $$$$$ to Famous Pop Star to show up and endorse you, and all the attendees are expecting a concert or at least a performance, then Famous Pop Star *does* perform a few of her Greatest Hits rather than stand there, give a short speech, and have everyone going "what the heck was that?"
I am getting the impression that politicians really do judge success on "how much money did we get in donations?" I remember Hillary's campaign boasting that they had *way* more money and their donors had *way* deeper pockets than Trump's campaign, and the post-'where did it all go wrong?' apologias by Harris' campaign included "well but Trump's campaign had more money than us, he had all these PACs raising a ton of money for him!"
So the moral of the story seems to be: if you are a campaign manager, you need to keep your candidate happy by showing them simple graphs of "look all the money! us so money! them no money!"
There's strong disagreement in the political world on what the diminishing returns curve looks like. It likely varies by intervention (e.g. TV ads v direct mail campaigns) and by election (local v federal, primary v general, etc). But my guess from the research is that it diminishes less than one might think*. Also I agree with Deiseach that even if money can't move elections, it has the appearance of moving elections, which can be as important.
* specifically that /holding everything else constant/, the cost per net vote of the marginal dollar doesn't go down that much as you raise more dollars. However, this doesn't mean that money is the only thing that matters. You could imagine, for example, that your candidate's success was ~ [fundraising]*[likability]. Holding likability constant, the return to fundraising is linear, but if you're unlikable, then improving likability might still be much more important than improving fundraising.
It always go like this:
1. "Let's do some good."
2. "We are doing some good, Yay!"
3. "We can do more!"
4. "We lack resources!"
5. "You know who has lots resources? The government"
6. "Let's stop doing good directly, first we will take over the government, then we can do good".
Now all resources are directed to accumulating power and taking over.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence
Great stuff!
One possible strategy would be for candidates to stay silent on political issues where their opinions would cause attack ads against them, and only come out in the open once it is too late for EvilPAC to fund an attack ad campaign against them, say shortly before the election.
However, this approach has multiple problems. Signaling an opinion late is obviously much less costly than signaling it earlier, and thus a less credible signal. You can only pull this stunt once, so if you do that in the primaries, EvilPAC can still fund attack ads in the main election. Likely your opsec might not be good enough to keep your opponents in the dark until it is too late. If you have a lot of staff which are on LW, I can make an educated guess on your AI safety position. And of course a policy position you only announce a day before the election is unlikely to make you win.
When we estimate how much money was spent on politics (with the intention of making it an apples-to-apples comparison to spending on almonds), how do we count in Musk's 44billion$ Twitter purchase? Not counting it at all is dumb because it influenced the elections quite a lot, which was the intention of the money; and counting it as 44bil is dumb because Twitter did other things than influencing politics.
Here's the reason I think oil and gas companies don't need to spend as much on politics as crypto: lots of people already have financial ties to oil and gas. If you own, like, a mutual fund, you own a bunch of oil and gas companies, so all of the rich donors care about oil and gas. Plenty of politicians also have more specific ties to oil and gas. Lots of districts have a lot of oil and gas jobs.
This isn't the case at all for crypto. Most members of congress aren't going to have meaningful crypto holdings, neither do their rank and file donors and constituents.
Pretty grim for Scott to write that labor groups are helping destroy America. He's so compassionate and personable that one often forgets about the underlying strain of dystopic free market ideology.
The best campaign finance reform tool would be to implement sortition: forming legislatures by random selection.
This idea is growing in the us and abroad. While it is radical, it can be implemented incrementally and piecemeal with local civic assemblies.
Several us organizations are advocating for this and they could use your donations!
Public Democracy LA
Democracy Without Elections
Assemble America
Healthy Democracy
Is nobody mentioning the tariffs? A pneumatic theory of politics means that pressure in one area results in pressure in another. In exchange for all that crypto lobbying, Silicon Valley accepted a tariff pill, which specifically hurt Tim Cook, Elon Musk, and Jensen Huang.
Maybe the almond analogy holds because there's no found money in politics? Found money implies mistake theory. Its absence implies belief theory.
The Koch brothers have probably spent quite a lot over the years, but the strategy used to be different considering previous limitations on spending, and the fact that their wealth was built on US institutions, not 'the cloud' or 'decentralized finance'. Nevr this much in one year though. However, the difference between stuff like oil, guns and tobacco on the one hand and crypto on the other hand, seems to be pretty obvious in that these businesses actually have something to produce. So their costs are much higher compared, and freely available cash much lower (and investors want some of that cash going to them). Also, oil has probably realized that they'll be able drain all the fields before anyone will legislate away their rights to do so. Nor will lobbying for less regulation do that much to create new demand.
Crypto, however, 'produces' cash, so obviously there's a lot of freely available cash, and it lives on hypecycle only, the more it's pumped the more cash they'll have and the more their cash will be worth (whereas costs are relatively low, and marginal costs near zero, considering that it's all vapor).
Crypto can do nothing that traditional banking is not able to do in a society with stable and trusted institutions, besides supporting exactly those things a society needs to regulate, such as gambling and crime. (Admittedly there are efficiency gains possible in current traditional banking and payments, especially in the international context, which might be why we've been so lenient with crypto at first, despite it being mostly pump 'n dump schemes). But on the whole, crypto is not needed in the US, if it were a well organized nation, and for the legal economy it does nothing but inflate a speculative financial bubble. This much political spending is a problem though, because it clearly skewers politics towards elite interests, and lower trust in democratic institutions. The political spending by crypto is aimed at destabilizing the US and decredeting it's traditional institutions, in the believe that this will open up the space for de-fi, which it does by it's spending (and by whom it supports), something that other industries were never willing to do because they realized they needed the stability of the US government. which cryptolords such as Andreessen, think is not, or no longer, true for them.
Regulation always stirs up such lively debate here—and it's fascinating to see how the conversation shifts when the idea of influence (or perceived influence) comes up. Some argue power follows the money; others point out it's more about organizing and message discipline. Either way, it reminds me a bit of the challenge behind strategic logic: sometimes it’s less about the resources, more about moves within constrained rules. If you enjoy that kind of thinking, you should try the https://queensgame.io Colorful Queens Puzzle Experience .
The complexity of these systems is mind-boggling. For a more tangible kind of creativity, I've been diving into https://craftfood.recipes lately - learning to craft homemade dishes from scratch. It's refreshing to focus on something you can actually taste and share, away from the abstract world of PACs and lobbying.