Rats, Back a Candidate
My rationalist group is hosting the event “Unite to Elect Kamala Harris” on August 11. This is a change from Rat business as usual. We are backing a US Presidential candidate, and I think you should too.
This isn’t just about making your candidate the leader of the free world. Backing a candidate is an opportunity to change political rhetoric. It’s about using political engagement to bring more people into the rationalist fold and out of tribalism.
Rationalists excel at critical thinking, evidence-based decision-making, and long-term planning. Our deep thinking about ethical engagement sharpens our intuition in the political space. Backing Kamala Harris has brought more people into our group’s circle than any other effort. By supporting a candidate, we are instigating a conversation. The challenge is to achieve this under rational terms and shift the political conversation from tribalism to evidence-based rationalism.
Launching an event as we have, directly sanctioned by the Democratic National Committee(see event link), while working to reduce tribalism may be setting us up for failure. But I am a rationalist because I try new things, fail, optimize, and fail again until I am less wrong. I hope everyone backs a candidate too so that we are brought into conversations and can move our political reality from an archaic place of heightened emotion and tribal warfare to a reasoned debate of ideas.
Let’s make politics more rational together.
I am sad this idea is getting so many down votes. More smart people need to engage with politics and you cannot engage in any better way than by backing a candidate.
Why do you believe that?
How does it do that? Especially if it involves backing a mainstream candidate?
I don’t need to back a candidate to change political rhetoric. A more effective way to change political rhetoric is figure out ways to change the current culture.
I doubt it. I don’t think you’re interested in having an open-minded conversation. I suspect that you’re only interested in supporting Kamala Harris. You haven’t explained why you support Harris, and you obviously need to do that if you want to start a conversation.
How does backing a candidate “bring more people out of tribalism”? You haven’t given any explanation for this.
I believe that because over 200 people RSVPed for the event, unlike anything else we’ve done. This even eclipses our AI event.
We’re going to focus on action and reasons for backing Harris vs “rah rah” hype making.
The open conversation is how to get a candidate elected.
Most people back a candidate like they back a sports team. They don’t have reasons. We’ll work toward reasons.
There is basically no method of engaging with politics worse than backing a national candidate. It has tiny impact even if successful, is the most aggressively tribalism-infected, and is incredibly hard to say anything novel.
If you must get involved in politics, it should be local, issue-based, and unaffiliated with LW or rationalism. It is far more effective to lobby on issues than for candidates, it is far more effective to support local candidates than national, and there is minimal upside and enormous downside to having any of your political efforts tied with the ‘brand’ of rationalism or LW.
Agreed. I don’t think I’m tying our event with the LW or Rat brand. I am simply saying more rats need to support a candidate.
This is a local event in which I will push my anti-tribalism agenda. My bet is many who attend are not interested in being tribalistic. Myself and those I know who are behind Kamala are largely behind her because we appreciate evidence-based thinking, which Donald Trump has worked against.
The first paragraph of the post is an explicit tie between the “Rat brand” and your event. You did not say that you were hosting an unaffiliated event, and you think Rats should join in—you said “My rationalist group is hosting the event”. By doing it under the aegis of your rationalist group, you are creating the tie.
Ah, yes. I meant I am not publicly tying a Rat brand to our event. There is no mention of rationality on the DNC event page.
I live in Europe.
I hope you can get political with EU rats.
I feel concerned when you say “backing Kamala Harris has brought more people into our group’s circle than any other effort”. You have explicitly selected for politically-motivated people when making such an event. Have you considered the potential consequences of getting said people involved in the Rationalist community? It seems like you were only considering the potential consequences for your preferred candidate, and not the consequences for the community.
Do you not remember when Scott was doxed by the New York Times? I do not think the Rationalist community would benefit from any more eyes on it from politically-motivated parties.
You should read David Chapman’s “Geeks, Mops, and Sociopaths”. It is a very good article on the dissolution and protection of a subculture. I do not think you are acting in a way a “geek” would.
I understand why you would feel sad that people are rejecting your post. I think you should reconsider whether your preferences are aligned with the Rationalist community. If they aren’t, and you are more concerned with politics, that is completely okay and I wish you all the best. If that’s not the case, I think you should talk to some people about the many, many failure states that come with being involved in politics and political thinking.
My life is rooted in a desire to optimize. That’s what I get out of rationalism. Optimization strategies. Politics is new for me. I’m curious to see how the rationalist lens that I’ve used to optimize most aspects of my life (who I married, the job I’ve chosen, ..) can be applied in the political sphere. This is my naive attempt. I will optimize.
So, by default I think this fails to teach anyone involved a useful rationality skill. I’m imagining a crowd comes together, you make a short speech about how Harris is great, and then the attendees mingle and talk to each other. Attendees might enjoy it and that’s not pointless, but it’s not something I’d be excited about.
If I somehow was placed in the position of having to run the linked meetup, my best idea in five minutes would be to arrange to give a short speech. That speech would consist of Policy Debates Should Not Appear Onesided, Correspondence Bias, and how I viewed prediction markets as a useful tool in how Harris got selected so pay attention to news reports with prediction market odds in them.
There’s probably a better way to run the meetup. I came up with that in about five minutes, based on the skills and knowledge I have. Anyone have an idea that beats that?
The idea is that we don’t need to say “Harris is great” because everyone already thinks that if they’re coming. We are only focusing on motivating metrically-defined outcome oriented actions. It’s a game. “Who can get the most votes for Harris?” Different teams will focus on different actions. Post card writing. Fundraising. Voter registration. We’ll optimize and learn.
The track record for attempts to turn tribalism into evidence-based thinking is very poor. The result, almost always, is to turn the evidence-based thinking into tribalism.
Are you saying we shouldn’t even attempt to turn tribalistic thinkers into evidence based thinkers? My own experience at that has been rather successful.
Our New Orleans Rat group grows on tribalistic calls to action. “Donate to Global Health Initiatives,” “Do Art,” “Learn About AI.” At the events we tend to question the foundation of having those interests, working to better stances on the interests we keep or reject.
Example: We led a multipart series on EA for people who were already interested in EA. The series was led by someone who was very much an EA. The group mostly questioned why that person was an EA. The result: We continue to support several causes, such as Farm Animal Welfare, and ignore other causes, such as AI Doom, that didn’t seem to have enough evidence we found compelling.
Very few people I meet actually want to be limited by the scope of a tribe. Desire for autonomy prevails and the group gains deeper investment as we promote evidence-based thinking. I’m not dumb to the fact that this process is creating new tribalistic dynamics, but hopefully we have better reasons for why we do what we do.
I will probably open our Kamala Harris event with the question: “Why support a candidate?” I will also use this event as motivation to look into pros and cons with supporting a candidate, then use future events as a way to validate that evidence I’ve found.
Please post any research around supporting a candidate I should look at!
If you consider those tribalistic calls to action, I’m not sure any of you are doing evidence-based thinking in the first place. I suppose if the damage is already done, it will not make anything worse if your specific group engages in politics.
Most people who attend our meetings just want to find folks who share their interests. That is the tribalistic impulse I’m referencing.
That’s not what tribalism means.
Why isn’t it? Our people form tribes over shared intellectual interests like others form tribes over shared affinity for a sports team.