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.
Fwiw, I’m planning to write a sequence making the case for those views being morally reprehensible (among other theses on the relationship between politics and rationality), but it may be a while before the sequence is out due to busyness/akraisia.