I appreciate this post, upvoted. I agree with basically all the reasons for donating. Alex Bores is one of the few potential politicians who has shown any care at all about existential risk from AI, has great EA-minded staff around him, cares about other EA priorities (like AW), and rare for a politician, seems like he might be an overall decent person.
I want to push back on the career implications/career capital costs of making a donation like this. I think EAs are, by in large, far too paranoid about these kind of risks and stress out about analyzing them so I want to give the following points.
Nobody cares. People in practice simply don’t look up this type of stuff. They just don’t. Have you ever done checked the political donations of even your closest friends/family? If you’ve ever hired somebody, have you ever looked into them on this type of thing on a background check? Nobody is following your life that attentively other than you. Everyone else is like you, they don’t look up random people’s political donations. You can dance and donate like nobody’s watching because nobody is.
This type of donation is extremey defensible and justifiable. When asked about it, you simply say “yes, existential risk from AI is one of my top priorities and Alex was one of the few politicians taking it seriously at the time”. If he does something bad in the future you just say “yes, at the time he seemed to care about AI safety. Unfortunately I was wrong”.
People forget and change their minds. The current President, Donald Trump is not someone who most would consider to be accepting of criticism and dissent, to put it lightly. With that in mind, here are some things JD Vance has said about Trump prior to become Vice President:
“My god, what an idiot.”
“America’s Hitler” or a “cynical asshole like Nixon.”
“I’m a ‘Never Trump’ guy. I never liked him.”
“Trump is cultural heroin.”
Other Trump appointees have said similar things. In practice, this type of stuff just doesn’t matter. The half life of the importance of donations/speech on careers is extremely short, if it even matters in the first place
Here are some more additional reasons to make this donation:
There’s a limit to who can donate and how much they can donate. Only US citizens and permanent residents can donate up to a certain amout.
As much as possible, it’d be good for there to be a political coalition for people that care about AI safety. Showing that this exists will make AI safety a more politically salient issue, somewhat like environmentalism.
I want to be a counterpoint to this. Ariel Simnegar and I made AltX, which, while we shut down, I think it’s hard to say did anything ethically questionable apart from merely trading crypto. We didn’t do any scams, no pump and dumps, no nothing. We didn’t make crazy amounts of money but we made a decent amount of money for our investors and ultimately decided to shut down since it seemed we would have trouble raising enough money and scaling our arbitrage strategies to make the effort worthwhile. All investments and profits were returned to investors without issue and I continue to have a good relationship with our investors.