No. I’m more saying that the act of carefully weighing up career capital / PR considerations, and then not donating to a democrat based on a cost-benefit analysis of those considerations, feels to me like very stereotypical democrat / blue-tribe behavior.
Strongly disagree with the implication that Republicans/conservatives don’t carefully weigh up career capital and PR considerations when making decisions like this! The vast majority of elected Republicans and even more of their staff are comparably strategic in this regard as their Democratic counterparts. Of course, the exceptions are much higher-profile, which I think could be leading to an availability bias. (Again, notably Hanania is not employed in the government.)
And further, that some people could have a visceral negative reaction to that kind of PR sensitivity more so than the donations themselves.
“Some people,” sure. Federal government hiring managers? No.
Sure, but if he were the kind of person who would do that, he probably would not have gotten as popular as he is in the first place.
I mean, depends on if your goal is serving in the government or becoming a widely read Substacker.
And even then I’m not sure it’s true; many, many media figures with huge followings on both sides of the aisle are hardcore partisans. See for example (most of) the hosting lineups of MSNBC and Fox. LessWrong is an extreme outlier in how much readers intentionally consume heterodox and disagreeable content; the vast majority of political media consumers trust and prefer to listen to their co-partisans.
I agree / believe you that it’s common for Republican staffers to have refrained from ever donating to a Democratic cause, and that this is often more of a strategic decision than a completely uniform / unwavering opposition to every Democrat everywhere.
I still think that the precise kind of optics considerations described and recommended in this post (and other EA-ish circles) are subtly but importantly different from what those staffers are doing. And that this difference is viscerally perceptible to some “red tribe”-coded people, but something of a blind spot for traditionally blue-tribe coded people, including many EAs.
I’m not really making any strong claims about what the distribution / level of caring about all this is likely to be among people with hiring authority in a red tribe administration. Hanania was probably a bad example for me to pick for that kind of question, but I do think he is an exemplar of some aspects of “red tribe” culture that are at a zenith right now, and understanding that is important if you actually want to have a realistic chance at a succeeding in a high-profile / appointee position in a red tribe administration. But none of this is really in tension with also just not donating to democrats if that’s you’re aspiration, so I’m not really strongly dis-recommending the advice in this post or anything.
Another way of putting things: I suspect that “refrained from donating to a democrat I would have otherwise supported because I read a LW / EAF about optics” is anti-correlated with a person’s chances of actually working in a Republican administration in a high-profile capacity. But I’m not particularly confident that that’s actually true in real life [edit: and not confident that the effect is causal rather than evidential], and especially not confident that the effect is large vs. the first order effect of just quietly taking the advice in the post. I am more confident that being blind to the red-tribe cultural things I gestured at is going to be pretty strongly anti-correlated, though.
I still think that the precise kind of optics considerations described and recommended in this post (and other EA-ish circles) are subtly but importantly different from what those staffers are doing.
It’s true that LessWrong readers would be doing a subtly but importantly different thing from what the staffers are doing. But the way that it’s different is that Congressional staffers, of all political persuasions, are much more intuitively and automatically doing these kinds of considerations because they’re pursuing careers in policy and politics in DC, whereas LessWrong readers tend to be technical people largely in the Bay Area who might someday later consider a career in policy and politics, and therefore they need to have these considerations explicitly laid out, as would anyone who’s considering a career pivot into an industry with very different norms.
Strongly disagree with the implication that Republicans/conservatives don’t carefully weigh up career capital and PR considerations when making decisions like this! The vast majority of elected Republicans and even more of their staff are comparably strategic in this regard as their Democratic counterparts. Of course, the exceptions are much higher-profile, which I think could be leading to an availability bias. (Again, notably Hanania is not employed in the government.)
“Some people,” sure. Federal government hiring managers? No.
I mean, depends on if your goal is serving in the government or becoming a widely read Substacker.
And even then I’m not sure it’s true; many, many media figures with huge followings on both sides of the aisle are hardcore partisans. See for example (most of) the hosting lineups of MSNBC and Fox. LessWrong is an extreme outlier in how much readers intentionally consume heterodox and disagreeable content; the vast majority of political media consumers trust and prefer to listen to their co-partisans.
I agree / believe you that it’s common for Republican staffers to have refrained from ever donating to a Democratic cause, and that this is often more of a strategic decision than a completely uniform / unwavering opposition to every Democrat everywhere.
I still think that the precise kind of optics considerations described and recommended in this post (and other EA-ish circles) are subtly but importantly different from what those staffers are doing. And that this difference is viscerally perceptible to some “red tribe”-coded people, but something of a blind spot for traditionally blue-tribe coded people, including many EAs.
I’m not really making any strong claims about what the distribution / level of caring about all this is likely to be among people with hiring authority in a red tribe administration. Hanania was probably a bad example for me to pick for that kind of question, but I do think he is an exemplar of some aspects of “red tribe” culture that are at a zenith right now, and understanding that is important if you actually want to have a realistic chance at a succeeding in a high-profile / appointee position in a red tribe administration. But none of this is really in tension with also just not donating to democrats if that’s you’re aspiration, so I’m not really strongly dis-recommending the advice in this post or anything.
Another way of putting things: I suspect that “refrained from donating to a democrat I would have otherwise supported because I read a LW / EAF about optics” is anti-correlated with a person’s chances of actually working in a Republican administration in a high-profile capacity. But I’m not particularly confident that that’s actually true in real life [edit: and not confident that the effect is causal rather than evidential], and especially not confident that the effect is large vs. the first order effect of just quietly taking the advice in the post. I am more confident that being blind to the red-tribe cultural things I gestured at is going to be pretty strongly anti-correlated, though.
It’s true that LessWrong readers would be doing a subtly but importantly different thing from what the staffers are doing. But the way that it’s different is that Congressional staffers, of all political persuasions, are much more intuitively and automatically doing these kinds of considerations because they’re pursuing careers in policy and politics in DC, whereas LessWrong readers tend to be technical people largely in the Bay Area who might someday later consider a career in policy and politics, and therefore they need to have these considerations explicitly laid out, as would anyone who’s considering a career pivot into an industry with very different norms.