FWIW Alex Bores seems like a very mildly below-average integrity politician, having talked to him once and having followed his campaign and social media presence. He seems to say things he doesn’t believe somewhat more often than other politicians, but not much so, and he gives me some amount of “naive-consequentialist EA” vibes that make me think he is higher variance on this dimension than others. He does seem to really care about the AI Safety thing, he really appears to be targeted by a ton of very aggressive attack ads funded by AI capability companies, and it seems really pretty important to counteract that, all of which make me think it’s overall good to vote for him (and to do high-integrity campaigning for him).
His behavior on social media and speeches is very far below the integrity standards for leaders in the AI safety community, and if he behaved similarly here as he behaves in politics, I would advocate strongly against empowering him. Of course politics is a different playing field, and as I said, he seems roughly average for that domain. But if, as a result of people in the AI Safety community writing many glorious exhortations of him, you ended up with the impression that when Alex says something you can take it remotely as seriously as posts around here, please update.
Most of his social media posts and campaign actions appear to be things he doesn’t believe and is choosing to say for political reasons, including on AI topics (on which he happily conflates existential risks with things like trying to blame AI systems for triggering suicides in teenagers). I tentatively think this is OK given the standards in politics, and you ultimately have to vote for someone, but it’s also not great. IMO advocating for regulating AI on the basis of spurious harms like this is bad, will eventually backfire, and should be modeled as a cost, not as a benefit, from the perspective of predicting how useful his actions will be on AI safety topics. If you heard about him making “AI safety” his topic, you should remember he is mostly talking about that kind of safety (though he has mentioned existential risk as well, and I believe takes them genuinely seriously).
He has also proposed some partisan regulation that seems likely unconstitutional to me in a way that I think is substantially more harmful than what I’ve seen most other politicians propose (and would non-trivially escalate the existing intense conflict in US partisan politics).
He has a technical background and congress is very sorely lacking people with technical backgrounds. He has proposed some bad bills, and some quite good bills. Outside of AI safety I am not that impressed with his bill track record, but I haven’t evaluated it that closely. I find myself less excited than others about the RAISE act so I assign less credit for that, but he was a major champion of it and it does seem good on-net. I have not seen him write or say anything that demonstrates a deep understanding of AI safety.
I think it’s probably good to vote for him. I think people making uncaveated endorsements of him in a way that overstate his integrity, or speak with far more confidence about his character than is warranted, are causing great harm. By my lights, feel free to go around saying “vote for Bores, he seems competent, cares about AI Safety, and is about as sketch as the average politician”, but dropping opening sentences like “Alex Bores is the best politician of a generation”, given our current level of knowledge and understanding, seems extremely ill-advised to me.
To be clear, many people have been doing fine here. For example I have no objection of this kind to Eric Neyman’s original post on Bores’, though I do think not trying to evaluate Bores’ integrity was a pretty bad mistake and has predictably resulted in other people thinking about this badly down the line, but it’s not Eric’s job to evaluate every facet of a politician at all times and other people could have filled this niche, and he didn’t overstate his integrity either.
Thanks for posting this, and it’s something I’ve been thinking about, too. I think that running for office is really rough, and—pretty unfortunately—there can be a trade-off between sticking to your guns on your beliefs and winning elections. I’m not sure what to do about this and how I would advise politicians to navigate it.
I think I straightforwardly disagree with this part:
Alex Bores seems like a very mildly below-average integrity politician
I’m not sure exactly where my view (that Alex is an above-average integrity politician) comes from, but here are some pieces of evidence:
During his time in the Assembly, he has sometimes been one of the only Democrats voting against tech regulation bills that didn’t make sense. This is despite those votes being politically inexpedient for him. See here for some examples; my understanding is that A4550 is an example of straightforwadly bad regulation.
I believe that the amount of political capital he staked on fighting for a strong version of the RAISE Act in December is much larger than the most politically opportune amount of capital for him to have staked.
More generally, people who have worked closely with him say that he cares a ton about the substance of bills he fights for, rather than accepting more superficial wins that are politically expedient.
I also want to push back on this part--
If, based on the dozens of people in the AI Safety community writing glorious exhortations of him, you ended up with the impression that when Alex says something you can take it remotely as seriously as posts around here, please update.
--to which I reacted with “agree denotationally but object connotationally”. Here’s what I believe, and I’m curious if you disagree with: I think we have reasonably strong evidence that Bores’s primary concern on AI issues is catastrophic and existential risks.[1]
I have two main pieces of evidence for this:
The people who have worked most closely with him on bills—who, by the way, have dealt with many politicians—believe it to be true.
His defense of the RAISE Act on the State House floor stressed catastrophic risk in a way that actually pushed back on concerns about more immediate harms.
This doesn’t address all of your critiques of Bores, and I’m pretty sympathetic to your critique of his social media presence.
My guess is that his top two concerns are bio misuse risk and AI-enabled authoritarianism; I believe yours is AI takeover, so I’m not saying that you and Bores are precisely aligned.
I think we have reasonably strong evidence that Bores’s primary concern on AI issues is catastrophic and existential risks.
Yes, I also believe this to be the case (though politics changes people, so the Bores who stays in power might not be the Bores who still believes this). It is also one of the things that has left me concerned about his integrity, because in speeches and in public presentation that is not at all what he leads with or communicates, and this strikes me as strategic conflation. If I didn’t believe this I would have less concerns about his integrity!
Like, it seems very obvious to me that the vast majority of Bores’ statements on social media would be considered gross norm violations on LessWrong, because it would be so clear that he would be arguing in bad faith for harms from AI that are not important, but can be helpfully conflated with AI catastrophic and existential risk concerns. This does not strike me as being true of all politician’s public speech, though it does seem true of most. He, for example, strikes me as worse than Obama on the degree to which I am picking up conflation, exaggeration, and some amount of dishonesty in his public engagements. I often got the sense Obama retreated towards broad metaphorical speech when saying what he actually believed would be inconvenient, but did not end up conflating things that matter as directly with things that do not matter for political points (though he sure also did it a bunch).
I have less visibility into his behavior towards other politicians. I was relatively neutral about that, until he proposed the Anti-Insurrectionist-Act which struck me as being particularly partisan and uncooperative towards other politicians, which updated me downwards. But actually reading the bills and making decisions on the technical merits is good and updates me upwards.
I also personally think the strategy of conflating small harms from AI with catastrophic harms is fundamentally short-sighted. My guess is we will soon get many politicians who are very freaked out about AI, it has a decent chance of being a strong bipartisan topic, and the most likely topic on which the parties could come together are the most intense risks. Having Bores as a high-profile politician do a lot of conflation is a big cost that I think only seems worth it because there is so little traction on getting these topics considered seriously right now, but my guess is will seem like a great waste when there will be many many people who will be freaking out about the risks soon and will end up having a harder time orienting due to these risks being conflated.
This is despite those votes being politically inexpedient for him. See here for some examples; my understanding is that A4550 is an example of straightforwadly bad regulation.
Whoo boy, yeah, A4550 sure seems like a truly atrocious bill, just having read the summary:
prohibits any state entity from using artificial intelligence in any way that would result in the displacement of any currently employed worker or loss of position, including partial displacement such as a reduction in the hours of non-overtime work, wages or employment benefits, or results in the impairment of existing collective bargaining agreements.
I sure am glad he voted against that. The fact that the bill is so atrocious does make this a bit less of an update, but it’s still significant. Appreciate the data.
Also just following up on this footnote:
My guess is that his top two concerns are bio misuse risk and AI-enabled authoritarianism; I believe yours is AI takeover, so I’m not saying that you and Bores are precisely aligned.
I unfortunately think that if you are trying to prevent these two risks, then many interventions are close to diametrically opposed to what you would do if you tried to prevent loss of control risk. Indeed, my sense is these substantially mirror the motivations of the leading AI companies, which has resulted in an extremely intense race towards superintelligence in an attempt to permanently disempower “the bad guys” who would build the bioweapons or establish authoritarianism.[1]
It seems really important for people to know that loss of control doesn’t make the top of his list given that! (Though to be clear, there are lots of regulations one could pass that would help with these two and loss of control, but it indeed requires particular cool-headedness and integrity, which are not the dimensions on which I currently am most excited about Bores).
Though the importance of making trillions of dollars on the way there should not be understated and is probably more responsible for what is actually going on at the labs.
I unfortunately think that if you are trying to prevent these two risks, then many interventions are close to diametrically opposed to what you would do if you tried to prevent loss of control risk. Indeed, my sense is these substantially mirror the motivations of the leading AI companies, which has resulted in an extremely intense race towards superintelligence in an attempt to permanently disempower “the bad guys” who would build the bioweapons or establish authoritarianism.[1]
It seems really important for people to know that loss of control doesn’t make the top of his list given that! (Though to be clear, there are lots of regulations one could pass that would help with these two and loss of control, but it indeed requires particular cool-headedness and integrity, which are not the dimensions on which I currently am most excited about Bores).
I think a slowdown on AI development is effective at reducing both AI-enabled authoritarianism and loss of control risks.
For bioweapons, it’s less clear, but probably still good to have some marginal slowdown. That said the optimal slodown timing might be pretty different from the other risks.
Another difference between preventing extreme loss of control / authoritarianism and reducing risk from bioweapons is that a pause on public deployment without pausing internal development/deployment is potentially good for bio stuff (though still dependeng on timing), while imo likely bad for the other risks.
Given that some form of slowdown/pause is perhaps the most commonly discussed and important intervention, saying that the required interventions are diametrically opposed seems wrong. Of course there are interventions besides slowdowns/pauses and some of these might have sharper disagreements between preventing loss of control and AI-enabled authoritarianism, though my guess is they are generally pretty correlated. I think diametrically opposed would still be wrong for AI-enabled bio risk in particular vs. loss of control, but I could better understand where youre coming from. For example, AI for epistemics/coordination interventions help with all 3 of these.
My guess is that you disagree with me about how similar the effects of these possible slowdowns/pauses are for loss of control vs. extreme AI-enabled authoritarianism. If so, would be curious as to why. It seems that allowing society more time to have more people more wake up and prevent extreme concentration of power is quite helpful.
I think a slowdown on AI development is effective at reducing both AI-enabled authoritarianism and loss of control risks.
[...]
My guess is that you disagree with me about how similar the effects of these possible slowdowns/pauses are for loss of control vs. extreme AI-enabled authoritarianism.
Maybe we are using words differently here. Almost always when people say “AI-enabled authoritarianism” excluding “loss of control” they mean “China might win the AI race and establish global authoritarianism”. I think a pause or any slowdown would currently marginally make China “more likely to win”.
I think there are many steps of confusion in the lines of argument people usually run here, but it appears to be a pretty central attractor. I agree with you that a sane attitude towards concentration of power would not think that the most likely way that happens is “because China wins the race”, for many different reasons, and that after you realize that, many of the good interventions become more correlated.
On bio: I think if you believe that we can build safe Superintelligence, at which point you almost certainly have bio-defense dominance, then you just want to get there as soon as possible, and any waiting or slowdown period makes someone using AI systems for bioterrorism, or some kind of national conflict escalating into bioweapons conflict more likely. More generally, I think the central driver of biorisk in a world where you aren’t worried about loss of control is foreign nations and terrorists getting access to the models, so marginal time in the period where bio is offense-dominant (as it is right now) is risky.
I am less confident on this bio picture. I do think most biorisk mitigations involve trying pretty hard to increase access to capabilities by “trusted” actors, and to be pretty hawkish about AI policy, coordination and cooperation. I think those attitudes are usually harmful to handling loss of control risks.
Maybe we are using words differently here. Almost always when people say “AI-enabled authoritarianism” excluding “loss of control” they mean “China might win the AI race and establish global authoritarianism”. I think a pause or any slowdown would currently marginally make China “more likely to win”.
Yup, we were imagining different definitions. I would bet that Bores’s concerns include extreme concentration of power in the US government / POTUS. @Eric Neyman feel free to clarify.
On bio: I think if you believe that we can build safe Superintelligence, at which point you almost certainly have bio-defense dominance, then you just want to get there as soon as possible, and any waiting or slowdown period makes someone using AI systems for bioterrorism, or some kind of national conflict escalating into bioweapons conflict more likely. More generally, I think the central driver of biorisk in a world where you aren’t worried about loss of control is foreign nations and terrorists getting access to the models, so marginal time in the period where bio is offense-dominant (as it is right now) is risky.
I think pausing now would be net good for reducing bio x-risk because it would allow more time to establish defenses before getting to more dangerous capabilities. I agree that once you hit a high enough capability level a pause starts being basd, nad this level probably happens significantly before loss of control PONR.
Appreciate the clarification! I am worried this is a temporary situation and would change if e.g. a democrat is elected next election. Separately, “include” is a relatively weak statement. Do you have any sense of how much of his concern about AI is driven by foreign governments developing powerful AI systems?
I don’t, sorry! Although, for what it’s worth, in the two conversations I’ve had with him about risks from AI, China didn’t come up.
Edited to add: also, for what it’s worth (and apologies for venturing into explicitly partisan politics), I am personally substantially more worried about AI-enabled authoritarianism under Trump than under most other possible presidents (though my worry definitely doesn’t go away entirely).
The ability to have more integrity than the average politician is a luxury of being in a community that has the institutions and norms to reward it. IMO one can only be a competitive as a high-integrity politician if one has a super weird type of charisma compatible with integrity.
I think my pitch would look something like, “Vote for Bores so campaign planners and political operatives feel like politicians can still win with strong anti-AI stances despite millions of dollars of spending by opposing super pacs”.
I think poli-sci people are over influenced by outcomes in individual elections, and a Bores-loss would send the message that any would-be politician should not stand in the way of this particular interest group
He has a technical background and congress is very sorely lacking people with technical backgrounds.
Related to this, AFAIK he’s the only candidate in the race who has had a real (private sector) career outside of politics. IMO that’s a pretty good reason to support him (at least relative to other candidates) on its own.
How have you obtained a baseline for what “average” integrity is in this case? Have you looked at a lot of other politicians in comparable depth to Bores?
I’ve read a lot of books about politics, talked to a few congress people, have followed a few of them on social media, looked into local politics campaigns in more detail, etc.
Like, I am not a deep scholar of politics, but I try to generally be informed about politics and politicians, with a particular interest in understanding people’s integrity.
That said, this topic is super tricky to judge and I haven’t done a massive deep dive into Bores or any other politician, and I am far from confident.
I think that’s plenty of context to make the call “probably slightly lower integrity than median”. Ideally someone whose been working with congresspeople intimately could give more info, but until then I’ll defer to your judgement.
I mean, this is super hard to tell! The primary thing I would want to communicate is “there are costly signals someone can send of being high-integrity, which for example, Scott Alexander and Kelsey and many others in the extended AI Safety space have sent, and he has not done so, and there are a few mild flags that make me think he is not substantially better than other politicians”.
Most of his social media posts and campaign actions
To add some extra detail to the model, it’s pretty likely that he doesn’t personally control his social media posts, but has hired someone to manage it for him.
On the one hand, if so, he did hire that person to represent him, and so its pretty reasonable to hold him accountable for that.
On the other hand, a person might be higher integrity than average, and struggle to hire people who are similarly high integrity, or who have a similarly good understanding of eg AI issues.
IMO advocating for regulating AI on the basis of spurious harms like this is bad, will eventually backfire, and should be modeled as a cost, not as a benefit
Why, exactly?
(1) I don’t see why this supports the claim that Bores may be of “below-average integrity”. His view on what safety looks like on Capitol Hill might be a superset of yours (ours?). That does not mean that he believes one thing and does another. It means your definitions do not overlap.
(2) What is the threat model or tradeoff here? I don’t see what the mutual exclusivity point is here, though perhaps that is short-sighted of me. An election forces a constrained preference, and I’d hesitate to price “may be bad, may backfire, may be a cost” against nothing.
(3) What platform do you believe would satisfy both your interests and those of his constituency in UWS/UES/Midtown? Appealing to voters is a difficult task; the role of an elected official is to represent their community. Unless you are running for an open seat on CA-Telegraph Avenue, articulating these views in an accessible, publicly understood manner does require eschewing the focus on existential risk. This is not a narrative that the public appears to understand yet—just look at Cal Newport’s recent post.
(3) What platform do you believe would satisfy both your interests and those of his constituency in UWS/UES/Midtown? Appealing to voters is a difficult task; the role of an elected official is to represent their community. Unless you are running for an open seat on CA-Telegraph Avenue, articulating these views in an accessible, publicly understood manner does require eschewing the focus on existential risk.
I think a platform that mostly consisted of good and popular policy on non-AI topics, without making this muddled version of “AI Safety” your primary platform, would be better. I.e. I would rather support a politician who chooses popular economic and social policies (even if I somewhat disagree with them), but does not muddle existential risks and these more mundane harms.
articulating these views in an accessible, publicly understood manner does require eschewing the focus on existential risk
I am not quite sure what you mean by “these views”. Do you just mean “summoning up anti-AI sentiment”? There are to my knowledge no coherent worldviews that put existential risk from AI at the same level of importance as mundane harms, and people get very confused if you have one person claiming they are similarly important. I agree this might be an effective way to summon anti-AI sentiment, and this might be the right call, but I would not conflate it with “articulating these views”.
advocating for regulating AI on the basis of harms like this is bad, will eventually backfire, and should be modeled as a cost, not as a benefit, from the perspective of predicting how useful his actions will be on AI safety topics.
My main crux is the societal awareness[1] around capabilities of existing and future AIs and robots. I once remarkedthat laypeople do NOT foresee AI taking over the world because they fail to understand[2] the true extent of AIs’ transformative potential to the point of believing that the AIs have zero reasoning abilities.
A layperson who believed such nonsense would also believe that the AIs are at most toys capable of doing things like driving people into psychosis or destroying people’s relationships, but not of wiping mankind out and sustaining the civilisation. Therefore, I don’t understand how a safetyist can win the 2026 election while not making Bores-like factual errors.
UPD: on March 14 I remarked that the IABIED march had gathered 898 pledgers and 1630 people who signed to be notified of IABIED’s activities. By June 19 these numbers reached only 1105 and 1991.
Just noting for the record that he has narcissism face. Don’t know the relevance compared to base rate politicians. Increases my credence that he is doing gradient descent on popularity and doesn’t have any principled stances.
Yeah, we’ve been talking about training a classifier for it because it’s very prominent but without having it pointed out to you with a bunch of cases it can’t be directly described. It clearly has something to do with facial tension. It seems to have a surprisingly low rate of false positives and false negatives, but haven’t demonstrated that empirically yet.
Thank you for posting this—I’ve upvoted because I think the norm of raising concerns about people, especially politicians, is good. However, I disagree that either of the pieces of evidence you’ve presented are evidence of low integrity.
Most of his social media posts and campaign actions appear to be things he doesn’t believe and is choosing to say for political reasons, including on AI topics (on which he happily conflates existential risks with things like trying to blame AI systems for triggering suicides in teenagers).
Since you’ve talked to him, you might have information I don’t, but I’m otherwise somewhat confused why your default assumption is that he is claiming to believe in non-existential risks for political reasons, rather than considering both existential and non-existential risks important.
He has also proposed some partisan regulation that seems likely unconstitutional to me in a way that I think is substantially more harmful than what I’ve seen most other politicians propose (and would non-trivially escalate the existing intense conflict in US partisan politics).
I think our disagreement here may run deeper and more political, but hearing that he was the one who proposed that legislation actually increased my estimation of his integrity. Since I am currently unclear exactly what the norms around discussing object-level politics are, I’ve put my more detailed reasoning under the toggle below.
object-level politics toggle
First, my sense is that the “anti-weaponization fund” is in fact a fund that would have gone entirely to January 6th rioters, and is therefore a straightforward defection against norms of democracy. The fund has now been cancelled, so it isn’t really possible to bet on this, but I would’ve taken such a bet had the fund been implemented.
Second, over the last ten years, it has become increasingly clear that the current leadership of the political right in the United States defects by default, and that cooperation with the right does not result in an end to defection by the right. I’m willing to defend this claim if challenged, but I think it is fairly clearly evident.
In such an environment, I’ve generally seen two strategies advocated. First, that the left and/or center should aim to cooperate with the right by not responding to norm-breaking with further norm-breaking, in hopes that we might address whatever the root causes of the grievances are without sacrificing too much of what we care about on the object level. Second, that the left and/or center should aim to fight the right with some non-normal means in order to make it more costly to defect on norms, and in the process defend both norms and the object-level things we care about.
I think the second strategy is much stronger from a game-theoretic perspective. Robert Axelrod’s analysis of his game theory tournament found that the most successful strategies are Nice, Forgiving, Retaliatory, and Clear. I think it is reasonable to feel a pull towards trying to reason with or find common ground with the political right due to being Nice and Forgiving. However, completely avoiding any possibility of escalation fails to be Retaliatory, and so such strategies will lose.
For this reason, I think a 100% tax on any money received from the fund is a fairly proportionate response to a fund earmarked for January 6th rioters, and I have a higher opinion of Alex Bores due to his understanding of these game theoretic principles.
I don’t think it depends so much on your politics. Regardless of how you feel about the slush fund[1], the 100% tax is pretty straightforwardly unconstitutional and would have been blocked by a judge. It violates the intergovernmental tax immunity clause (you can’t single out taxing federal funds) and other rules.
@dawnlightmelody Yes, I have little doubt the original settlement fund is a brazen display of corruption.
This doesn’t mean all responses to corruption are appropriate, and in this case, having a state legislator propose that the state seizes the funds violates a bunch of red lines that I would really like to avoid violating (and also, my guess is a judge would have blocked this bill).
I’ve raised similar issues with Scott Weiner, given that, at least among Republicans and a sizable share of Independents, his name is synonymous with his bill to reduce penalties for certain cases of statutory rape[1], along with another controversial bill on reducing penalties for knowingly spreading HIV. It’s arguable that letting him make himself the face of the AI regulation movement has already damaged the movement’s reach beyond the San Francisco bubble.
Existential risk starts, by necessity, with a very extraordinary claim, and while it may not be fair, it’s naturally going to be held to a very high standard because of that. Any kind of untoward behavior by a figure that is seen as leading the movement will be disproportionately discrediting. As a metaphor, if you’ve just noticed that an alien invasion is imminent, you’re going to want to shave your beard, put on a suit, and ensure there isn’t a trace of alcohol on your breath, because people are going to make assumptions about you.
I know people have strong opinions in both directions on whether SB-145and SB-239 deserve their bad reputations, but I’m speaking strategically rather than morally. A substantial slice of the population, perhaps a majority, associates Scott Weiner more with strong opinions on the age of consent than with grounded positions on AI policy.
This… seems exactly backwards? Scott Weiner supporting morally good legislation that is potentially unpopular (according to your summary here) is evidence in favor of his integrity! I am not arguing Bores is not sufficiently popular! The thing you are advocating for here seems almost exactly backwards to me.
FWIW Alex Bores seems like a very mildly below-average integrity politician, having talked to him once and having followed his campaign and social media presence. He seems to say things he doesn’t believe somewhat more often than other politicians, but not much so, and he gives me some amount of “naive-consequentialist EA” vibes that make me think he is higher variance on this dimension than others. He does seem to really care about the AI Safety thing, he really appears to be targeted by a ton of very aggressive attack ads funded by AI capability companies, and it seems really pretty important to counteract that, all of which make me think it’s overall good to vote for him (and to do high-integrity campaigning for him).
His behavior on social media and speeches is very far below the integrity standards for leaders in the AI safety community, and if he behaved similarly here as he behaves in politics, I would advocate strongly against empowering him. Of course politics is a different playing field, and as I said, he seems roughly average for that domain. But if, as a result of people in the AI Safety community writing many glorious exhortations of him, you ended up with the impression that when Alex says something you can take it remotely as seriously as posts around here, please update.
Most of his social media posts and campaign actions appear to be things he doesn’t believe and is choosing to say for political reasons, including on AI topics (on which he happily conflates existential risks with things like trying to blame AI systems for triggering suicides in teenagers). I tentatively think this is OK given the standards in politics, and you ultimately have to vote for someone, but it’s also not great. IMO advocating for regulating AI on the basis of spurious harms like this is bad, will eventually backfire, and should be modeled as a cost, not as a benefit, from the perspective of predicting how useful his actions will be on AI safety topics. If you heard about him making “AI safety” his topic, you should remember he is mostly talking about that kind of safety (though he has mentioned existential risk as well, and I believe takes them genuinely seriously).
He has also proposed some partisan regulation that seems likely unconstitutional to me in a way that I think is substantially more harmful than what I’ve seen most other politicians propose (and would non-trivially escalate the existing intense conflict in US partisan politics).
He has a technical background and congress is very sorely lacking people with technical backgrounds. He has proposed some bad bills, and some quite good bills. Outside of AI safety I am not that impressed with his bill track record, but I haven’t evaluated it that closely. I find myself less excited than others about the RAISE act so I assign less credit for that, but he was a major champion of it and it does seem good on-net. I have not seen him write or say anything that demonstrates a deep understanding of AI safety.
I think it’s probably good to vote for him. I think people making uncaveated endorsements of him in a way that overstate his integrity, or speak with far more confidence about his character than is warranted, are causing great harm. By my lights, feel free to go around saying “vote for Bores, he seems competent, cares about AI Safety, and is about as sketch as the average politician”, but dropping opening sentences like “Alex Bores is the best politician of a generation”, given our current level of knowledge and understanding, seems extremely ill-advised to me.
To be clear, many people have been doing fine here. For example I have no objection of this kind to Eric Neyman’s original post on Bores’, though I do think not trying to evaluate Bores’ integrity was a pretty bad mistake and has predictably resulted in other people thinking about this badly down the line, but it’s not Eric’s job to evaluate every facet of a politician at all times and other people could have filled this niche, and he didn’t overstate his integrity either.
Thanks for posting this, and it’s something I’ve been thinking about, too. I think that running for office is really rough, and—pretty unfortunately—there can be a trade-off between sticking to your guns on your beliefs and winning elections. I’m not sure what to do about this and how I would advise politicians to navigate it.
I think I straightforwardly disagree with this part:
I’m not sure exactly where my view (that Alex is an above-average integrity politician) comes from, but here are some pieces of evidence:
During his time in the Assembly, he has sometimes been one of the only Democrats voting against tech regulation bills that didn’t make sense. This is despite those votes being politically inexpedient for him. See here for some examples; my understanding is that A4550 is an example of straightforwadly bad regulation.
I believe that the amount of political capital he staked on fighting for a strong version of the RAISE Act in December is much larger than the most politically opportune amount of capital for him to have staked.
More generally, people who have worked closely with him say that he cares a ton about the substance of bills he fights for, rather than accepting more superficial wins that are politically expedient.
I also want to push back on this part--
--to which I reacted with “agree denotationally but object connotationally”. Here’s what I believe, and I’m curious if you disagree with: I think we have reasonably strong evidence that Bores’s primary concern on AI issues is catastrophic and existential risks.[1]
I have two main pieces of evidence for this:
The people who have worked most closely with him on bills—who, by the way, have dealt with many politicians—believe it to be true.
His defense of the RAISE Act on the State House floor stressed catastrophic risk in a way that actually pushed back on concerns about more immediate harms.
This doesn’t address all of your critiques of Bores, and I’m pretty sympathetic to your critique of his social media presence.
My guess is that his top two concerns are bio misuse risk and AI-enabled authoritarianism; I believe yours is AI takeover, so I’m not saying that you and Bores are precisely aligned.
Appreciate you replying!
Yes, I also believe this to be the case (though politics changes people, so the Bores who stays in power might not be the Bores who still believes this). It is also one of the things that has left me concerned about his integrity, because in speeches and in public presentation that is not at all what he leads with or communicates, and this strikes me as strategic conflation. If I didn’t believe this I would have less concerns about his integrity!
Like, it seems very obvious to me that the vast majority of Bores’ statements on social media would be considered gross norm violations on LessWrong, because it would be so clear that he would be arguing in bad faith for harms from AI that are not important, but can be helpfully conflated with AI catastrophic and existential risk concerns. This does not strike me as being true of all politician’s public speech, though it does seem true of most. He, for example, strikes me as worse than Obama on the degree to which I am picking up conflation, exaggeration, and some amount of dishonesty in his public engagements. I often got the sense Obama retreated towards broad metaphorical speech when saying what he actually believed would be inconvenient, but did not end up conflating things that matter as directly with things that do not matter for political points (though he sure also did it a bunch).
I have less visibility into his behavior towards other politicians. I was relatively neutral about that, until he proposed the Anti-Insurrectionist-Act which struck me as being particularly partisan and uncooperative towards other politicians, which updated me downwards. But actually reading the bills and making decisions on the technical merits is good and updates me upwards.
I also personally think the strategy of conflating small harms from AI with catastrophic harms is fundamentally short-sighted. My guess is we will soon get many politicians who are very freaked out about AI, it has a decent chance of being a strong bipartisan topic, and the most likely topic on which the parties could come together are the most intense risks. Having Bores as a high-profile politician do a lot of conflation is a big cost that I think only seems worth it because there is so little traction on getting these topics considered seriously right now, but my guess is will seem like a great waste when there will be many many people who will be freaking out about the risks soon and will end up having a harder time orienting due to these risks being conflated.
Whoo boy, yeah, A4550 sure seems like a truly atrocious bill, just having read the summary:
I sure am glad he voted against that. The fact that the bill is so atrocious does make this a bit less of an update, but it’s still significant. Appreciate the data.
Also just following up on this footnote:
I unfortunately think that if you are trying to prevent these two risks, then many interventions are close to diametrically opposed to what you would do if you tried to prevent loss of control risk. Indeed, my sense is these substantially mirror the motivations of the leading AI companies, which has resulted in an extremely intense race towards superintelligence in an attempt to permanently disempower “the bad guys” who would build the bioweapons or establish authoritarianism.[1]
It seems really important for people to know that loss of control doesn’t make the top of his list given that! (Though to be clear, there are lots of regulations one could pass that would help with these two and loss of control, but it indeed requires particular cool-headedness and integrity, which are not the dimensions on which I currently am most excited about Bores).
Though the importance of making trillions of dollars on the way there should not be understated and is probably more responsible for what is actually going on at the labs.
I think a slowdown on AI development is effective at reducing both AI-enabled authoritarianism and loss of control risks.
For bioweapons, it’s less clear, but probably still good to have some marginal slowdown. That said the optimal slodown timing might be pretty different from the other risks.
Another difference between preventing extreme loss of control / authoritarianism and reducing risk from bioweapons is that a pause on public deployment without pausing internal development/deployment is potentially good for bio stuff (though still dependeng on timing), while imo likely bad for the other risks.
Given that some form of slowdown/pause is perhaps the most commonly discussed and important intervention, saying that the required interventions are diametrically opposed seems wrong. Of course there are interventions besides slowdowns/pauses and some of these might have sharper disagreements between preventing loss of control and AI-enabled authoritarianism, though my guess is they are generally pretty correlated. I think diametrically opposed would still be wrong for AI-enabled bio risk in particular vs. loss of control, but I could better understand where youre coming from. For example, AI for epistemics/coordination interventions help with all 3 of these.
My guess is that you disagree with me about how similar the effects of these possible slowdowns/pauses are for loss of control vs. extreme AI-enabled authoritarianism. If so, would be curious as to why. It seems that allowing society more time to have more people more wake up and prevent extreme concentration of power is quite helpful.
Maybe we are using words differently here. Almost always when people say “AI-enabled authoritarianism” excluding “loss of control” they mean “China might win the AI race and establish global authoritarianism”. I think a pause or any slowdown would currently marginally make China “more likely to win”.
I think there are many steps of confusion in the lines of argument people usually run here, but it appears to be a pretty central attractor. I agree with you that a sane attitude towards concentration of power would not think that the most likely way that happens is “because China wins the race”, for many different reasons, and that after you realize that, many of the good interventions become more correlated.
On bio: I think if you believe that we can build safe Superintelligence, at which point you almost certainly have bio-defense dominance, then you just want to get there as soon as possible, and any waiting or slowdown period makes someone using AI systems for bioterrorism, or some kind of national conflict escalating into bioweapons conflict more likely. More generally, I think the central driver of biorisk in a world where you aren’t worried about loss of control is foreign nations and terrorists getting access to the models, so marginal time in the period where bio is offense-dominant (as it is right now) is risky.
I am less confident on this bio picture. I do think most biorisk mitigations involve trying pretty hard to increase access to capabilities by “trusted” actors, and to be pretty hawkish about AI policy, coordination and cooperation. I think those attitudes are usually harmful to handling loss of control risks.
Yup, we were imagining different definitions. I would bet that Bores’s concerns include extreme concentration of power in the US government / POTUS. @Eric Neyman feel free to clarify.
I think pausing now would be net good for reducing bio x-risk because it would allow more time to establish defenses before getting to more dangerous capabilities. I agree that once you hit a high enough capability level a pause starts being basd, nad this level probably happens significantly before loss of control PONR.
I don’t speak for Bores, but I think Eli is correct.
Appreciate the clarification! I am worried this is a temporary situation and would change if e.g. a democrat is elected next election. Separately, “include” is a relatively weak statement. Do you have any sense of how much of his concern about AI is driven by foreign governments developing powerful AI systems?
I don’t, sorry! Although, for what it’s worth, in the two conversations I’ve had with him about risks from AI, China didn’t come up.
Edited to add: also, for what it’s worth (and apologies for venturing into explicitly partisan politics), I am personally substantially more worried about AI-enabled authoritarianism under Trump than under most other possible presidents (though my worry definitely doesn’t go away entirely).
Wow our thinking on these topics is very similar
The ability to have more integrity than the average politician is a luxury of being in a community that has the institutions and norms to reward it. IMO one can only be a competitive as a high-integrity politician if one has a super weird type of charisma compatible with integrity.
I think my pitch would look something like, “Vote for Bores so campaign planners and political operatives feel like politicians can still win with strong anti-AI stances despite millions of dollars of spending by opposing super pacs”.
I think poli-sci people are over influenced by outcomes in individual elections, and a Bores-loss would send the message that any would-be politician should not stand in the way of this particular interest group
Related to this, AFAIK he’s the only candidate in the race who has had a real (private sector) career outside of politics. IMO that’s a pretty good reason to support him (at least relative to other candidates) on its own.
How have you obtained a baseline for what “average” integrity is in this case? Have you looked at a lot of other politicians in comparable depth to Bores?
I’ve read a lot of books about politics, talked to a few congress people, have followed a few of them on social media, looked into local politics campaigns in more detail, etc.
Like, I am not a deep scholar of politics, but I try to generally be informed about politics and politicians, with a particular interest in understanding people’s integrity.
That said, this topic is super tricky to judge and I haven’t done a massive deep dive into Bores or any other politician, and I am far from confident.
I think that’s plenty of context to make the call “probably slightly lower integrity than median”. Ideally someone whose been working with congresspeople intimately could give more info, but until then I’ll defer to your judgement.
I mean, this is super hard to tell! The primary thing I would want to communicate is “there are costly signals someone can send of being high-integrity, which for example, Scott Alexander and Kelsey and many others in the extended AI Safety space have sent, and he has not done so, and there are a few mild flags that make me think he is not substantially better than other politicians”.
To add some extra detail to the model, it’s pretty likely that he doesn’t personally control his social media posts, but has hired someone to manage it for him.
On the one hand, if so, he did hire that person to represent him, and so its pretty reasonable to hold him accountable for that.
On the other hand, a person might be higher integrity than average, and struggle to hire people who are similarly high integrity, or who have a similarly good understanding of eg AI issues.
Why, exactly?
(1) I don’t see why this supports the claim that Bores may be of “below-average integrity”. His view on what safety looks like on Capitol Hill might be a superset of yours (ours?). That does not mean that he believes one thing and does another. It means your definitions do not overlap.
(2) What is the threat model or tradeoff here? I don’t see what the mutual exclusivity point is here, though perhaps that is short-sighted of me. An election forces a constrained preference, and I’d hesitate to price “may be bad, may backfire, may be a cost” against nothing.
(3) What platform do you believe would satisfy both your interests and those of his constituency in UWS/UES/Midtown? Appealing to voters is a difficult task; the role of an elected official is to represent their community. Unless you are running for an open seat on CA-Telegraph Avenue, articulating these views in an accessible, publicly understood manner does require eschewing the focus on existential risk. This is not a narrative that the public appears to understand yet—just look at Cal Newport’s recent post.
I’ve commented on some of this in this reply: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EQJfdqSaMcJyR5k73/habryka-s-shortform-feed?commentId=P7vWzuuCYj5z5Met2
I think a platform that mostly consisted of good and popular policy on non-AI topics, without making this muddled version of “AI Safety” your primary platform, would be better. I.e. I would rather support a politician who chooses popular economic and social policies (even if I somewhat disagree with them), but does not muddle existential risks and these more mundane harms.
I am not quite sure what you mean by “these views”. Do you just mean “summoning up anti-AI sentiment”? There are to my knowledge no coherent worldviews that put existential risk from AI at the same level of importance as mundane harms, and people get very confused if you have one person claiming they are similarly important. I agree this might be an effective way to summon anti-AI sentiment, and this might be the right call, but I would not conflate it with “articulating these views”.
My main crux is the societal awareness[1] around capabilities of existing and future AIs and robots. I once remarked that laypeople do NOT foresee AI taking over the world because they fail to understand[2] the true extent of AIs’ transformative potential to the point of believing that the AIs have zero reasoning abilities.
A layperson who believed such nonsense would also believe that the AIs are at most toys capable of doing things like driving people into psychosis or destroying people’s relationships, but not of wiping mankind out and sustaining the civilisation. Therefore, I don’t understand how a safetyist can win the 2026 election while not making Bores-like factual errors.
UPD: on March 14 I remarked that the IABIED march had gathered 898 pledgers and 1630 people who signed to be notified of IABIED’s activities. By June 19 these numbers reached only 1105 and 1991.
UPD: A similar point was made by Boaz Barak on the fourth fake graph.
Examples include Freddie de Boer’s attempt to drive home the point that the AIs are unlikely to acquire such capabilities, Casey Simpson’s video full of factual errors or a video released in MAY 2026 whose author claims that AI is a technology with no lived experience and zero reasoning abilities. The latter video was released AFTER GPT-5.4 Pro solved an Erdös problem, but before the triumph of an unreleased OpenAI model.
Just noting for the record that he has narcissism face. Don’t know the relevance compared to base rate politicians. Increases my credence that he is doing gradient descent on popularity and doesn’t have any principled stances.
what face is the narcissism face? I couldn’t google anything that looks trustworthy
Yeah, we’ve been talking about training a classifier for it because it’s very prominent but without having it pointed out to you with a bunch of cases it can’t be directly described. It clearly has something to do with facial tension. It seems to have a surprisingly low rate of false positives and false negatives, but haven’t demonstrated that empirically yet.
who’s “we”?
In person psychology research and ml dabblers. Overlaps with some existing interest in micro expression research.
Thank you for posting this—I’ve upvoted because I think the norm of raising concerns about people, especially politicians, is good. However, I disagree that either of the pieces of evidence you’ve presented are evidence of low integrity.
Since you’ve talked to him, you might have information I don’t, but I’m otherwise somewhat confused why your default assumption is that he is claiming to believe in non-existential risks for political reasons, rather than considering both existential and non-existential risks important.
I think our disagreement here may run deeper and more political, but hearing that he was the one who proposed that legislation actually increased my estimation of his integrity. Since I am currently unclear exactly what the norms around discussing object-level politics are, I’ve put my more detailed reasoning under the toggle below.
object-level politics toggle
First, my sense is that the “anti-weaponization fund” is in fact a fund that would have gone entirely to January 6th rioters, and is therefore a straightforward defection against norms of democracy. The fund has now been cancelled, so it isn’t really possible to bet on this, but I would’ve taken such a bet had the fund been implemented.
Second, over the last ten years, it has become increasingly clear that the current leadership of the political right in the United States defects by default, and that cooperation with the right does not result in an end to defection by the right. I’m willing to defend this claim if challenged, but I think it is fairly clearly evident.
In such an environment, I’ve generally seen two strategies advocated. First, that the left and/or center should aim to cooperate with the right by not responding to norm-breaking with further norm-breaking, in hopes that we might address whatever the root causes of the grievances are without sacrificing too much of what we care about on the object level. Second, that the left and/or center should aim to fight the right with some non-normal means in order to make it more costly to defect on norms, and in the process defend both norms and the object-level things we care about.
I think the second strategy is much stronger from a game-theoretic perspective. Robert Axelrod’s analysis of his game theory tournament found that the most successful strategies are Nice, Forgiving, Retaliatory, and Clear. I think it is reasonable to feel a pull towards trying to reason with or find common ground with the political right due to being Nice and Forgiving. However, completely avoiding any possibility of escalation fails to be Retaliatory, and so such strategies will lose.
For this reason, I think a 100% tax on any money received from the fund is a fairly proportionate response to a fund earmarked for January 6th rioters, and I have a higher opinion of Alex Bores due to his understanding of these game theoretic principles.
I don’t think it depends so much on your politics. Regardless of how you feel about the slush fund[1], the 100% tax is pretty straightforwardly unconstitutional and would have been blocked by a judge. It violates the intergovernmental tax immunity clause (you can’t single out taxing federal funds) and other rules.
See Claude here for more: https://claude.ai/share/239f4a67-7bf7-48f8-9718-843ffc65dce6
The escalation seems pointless and unproductive since it would have been blocked anyway, which Bores would’ve known about.
I personally agree with you that theres the massive corruption in the fund
@dawnlightmelody Yes, I have little doubt the original settlement fund is a brazen display of corruption.
This doesn’t mean all responses to corruption are appropriate, and in this case, having a state legislator propose that the state seizes the funds violates a bunch of red lines that I would really like to avoid violating (and also, my guess is a judge would have blocked this bill).
I’ve raised similar issues with Scott Weiner, given that, at least among Republicans and a sizable share of Independents, his name is synonymous with his bill to reduce penalties for certain cases of statutory rape[1], along with another controversial bill on reducing penalties for knowingly spreading HIV. It’s arguable that letting him make himself the face of the AI regulation movement has already damaged the movement’s reach beyond the San Francisco bubble.
Existential risk starts, by necessity, with a very extraordinary claim, and while it may not be fair, it’s naturally going to be held to a very high standard because of that. Any kind of untoward behavior by a figure that is seen as leading the movement will be disproportionately discrediting. As a metaphor, if you’ve just noticed that an alien invasion is imminent, you’re going to want to shave your beard, put on a suit, and ensure there isn’t a trace of alcohol on your breath, because people are going to make assumptions about you.
I know people have strong opinions in both directions on whether SB-145and SB-239 deserve their bad reputations, but I’m speaking strategically rather than morally. A substantial slice of the population, perhaps a majority, associates Scott Weiner more with strong opinions on the age of consent than with grounded positions on AI policy.
This… seems exactly backwards? Scott Weiner supporting morally good legislation that is potentially unpopular (according to your summary here) is evidence in favor of his integrity! I am not arguing Bores is not sufficiently popular! The thing you are advocating for here seems almost exactly backwards to me.