This is with regards to specifically small donations, of under $100; taking $50 as the average small donation and assuming every EA makes political donations, 50 times 200,000 would equal $1 million of campaign contributions ($100,000 if we assume there are only 10x as many EAs as answered the survey).
That is enough to fully cover a small campaign or two, but it’s not clear to me whether, spread over many candidates as would happen in real life, even the higher number would make much of a difference to any of their races.
I would recommend EAs become more politically active not less politically active. We can just rebrand it as “working to influence AI policy by influencing election outcomes upstream of AI policy decisions” to respect the rule that all decisions must reduce from working on alignment.
There were roughly 2000 respondents to the 2024 EA survey; if we assume that’s undercounting by a factor of 100, that would still only give us 200,000 EAs (and I expect that it’s really more like 10x, for 20,000).
This is with regards to specifically small donations, of under $100; taking $50 as the average small donation and assuming every EA makes political donations, 50 times 200,000 would equal $1 million of campaign contributions ($100,000 if we assume there are only 10x as many EAs as answered the survey).
That is enough to fully cover a small campaign or two, but it’s not clear to me whether, spread over many candidates as would happen in real life, even the higher number would make much of a difference to any of their races.
I would recommend EAs become more politically active not less politically active. We can just rebrand it as “working to influence AI policy by influencing election outcomes upstream of AI policy decisions” to respect the rule that all decisions must reduce from working on alignment.