If you really thought this was the highest EV thing you could do. Would you not pursue it anyway through other means!
I would love to see what you come up with and who you meet, after attending CE and the MIT bootcamp.

The counterfactual impact of this grant could well skew negative if it prevented you from going through CE.

Been reluctant to write this up because I'm... pretty sharply critical, but it seems like I should share my thinking, in case any of it is new, since it's not universal! Main reasons I'm strongly doubtful of this one:

- Very high goals of changing political objectives of political parties to be longtermist, but no model of political incentives that suggest there's a tractable intervention.

- No visible political connections in any candidate political system, nor experience in or demonstrated understanding of lobbying in any particular system.

- Not actually entirely neglected; there are other projects like 1DaySooner trying to get various longtermist goals done, plus various other orgs and projects mentioned in the application, which have much more relevant experience and expertise and would be much better suited to manage or at least advise on a project like this.

- Very vague.

Under mechanism for achieving positive outcomes, very many different candidate strategies, but they all honestly seem extremely weak and things that the applicant has not demonstrated a good case for the ability to do:

- No evidence of experience founding new think tanks, or working in think tanks.

- No particular case for tractability of a mass citizen's movement around longtermism, and I'm personally very doubtful. No experience of the grantee in leading mass audience political campaigns, or noted collaborations with people who have previously lead political campaigns or groups (as with e.g. the pandemic prevention pledge).

- No particular case for tractability or expertise in producing mass media campaigns to convince the general public of longtermism; if this was to get funding it should be for someone who has experience in advertising campaigns and can put together an EA cause area contest-like case for it being tractable.

- "Working together" with political parties- none named as interested in working with the applicant, or having shared goals such that the applicant can commit to. No case that political parties feel they need assistance from the applicant to perform their political polling and implement "evidence-based" strategy into their platform to the extent they believe it performs well. I think it's unlikely that they do need such assistance.

If the applicant thinks these are reflective of the ideas that are likely to come out of their review, what makes them believe they're going to be able to execute any of them, or that any of them have even a small chance of success? There's no tractability analysis here and eyeballing the ideas this is probably because their tractability is very, very low. The applicant says 40% chance of impact, minimum 20%; what's the case for this?

Their answer to project-specific question 5 "What if it turns out that incentives among politicians are such that they personally lose out by prioritizing the long term? What leverage points do you see there being toward improving incentives or getting politicians to prioritize long-term thinking despite potentially strong incentives to prioritize the short term?" also seems very weak to me.

There's again a grabbag approach to suggested leverage points but their first is "For politicians, this could mean extending the definition of “sustainability”, where a politician's willingness to promote it is something that is already widely considered an asset rather than a liability.", to recruit people who already endorse sustainability- I think it's wildly implausible that you can persuade a politician to do what you want with such simple word tricks! Their evidence for this isn't politicial science literature or sourced from lobbying expertise, but a GWWC page trying to make much more plausible applications of values people already hold. It doesn't engage with the question of whether the politician would, intuitively, be interested in the meaning of the word their voters used.

The best case for funding anything is to is for the "just fund a literature review" approach, to post on EAF or similar, but for even that to be funded to the tune of $20,000, I think there ought to be some kind of tractability analysis based on how the applicant's existing Political Science knowledge and experience informs that this is expected to be a tractable and fruitful search, likely to contain not just a description of how politicians are incentivised to follow current voter incentives, but viable interventions, and a description of what this literature review is likely to contain, what political systems they're aware of having relevant literature for, etc.

I think we should have something at the Cause Exploration Prizes level establishing the plausibility of this before even funding a $20,000 literature review- somewhere doing much smaller personal funding to write that up would be more appropriate at this super, super early stage.

Good ways to improve this going forward:

- Write something at the Cause Exploration Prizes level establishing tractability and neglectedness and plausibility of the intervention. If it's at maybe the honourable mention level, I think funding a $10k+ literature review to expand it makes sense.

- After this, make a -much- less vague application for a specific thing to actually perform, after getting some warm contacts together on a potential team- in particular this should include someone with experience in politics in the particular country to be targeted who can sense-check the application. The applicant has great EA contacts, but no team yet. With a team with the relevant expertise and background, implementation would be a lot more credible.

- Connect with some of the concrete pandemic prevention projects with existing experience trying to lobby for political longtermism.

I'd fund this to up to $30,000 so the applicant can complete the initial stages. The going rate for a systematic review on the academic market seems a little higher than this (e.g. at Oxford it's £33,309 to £40,927 on a part-time contract) but also asks for more qualifications and experience.

The applicant says they can do a systeamtic review and a little more on 30k:

If you received $30,000 USD from this regranting program six weeks from now, what would your plan be for the six months following that? Please be really concrete about what you’re trying to get done.

30,000 USD would be enough to cover the initial stages of my project, which will revolve around background research, establishing academic cooperations and networks and setting up the necessary structures to decide on how to proceed after 6 months. 

More specifically, this means I will 

• Conduct a systematic review of the literature on political presentism 

• Interview experts on their estimates of the biggest problems and their respective tractability 

• Establish a framework that can be used to evaluate potential programs 

• Select a country for the MVP to be tested in 

• Select a specific program for this country 

• Conduct a pre-mortem on the program 

• Hire staff (most likely ops/research) to run and evaluate the program 

• (set up an organisation/initiative that can host the program, hire people etc.)

So this seems like a fair amount of work to get this going and check the viability. As a funder I probably would first confirm that what is meant by a systematic review is a systematic review, i.e. preregistered, PRISMA protocol, second rater etc, all the standard bells and whistles. But barring that should be good value for 30k. I do think a lot of longtermist folks just assume there's a big beautiful future out there but underscore logistics like political cooperation so this could have value. At the same time as others have pointed out, there are lots of fail scenarios and it's otherwise a really big buy-in. At 30k and about 6-12 months in, there should be a much clearer sense of how things went and if/what should be chased further.

@RinaRazh True, but that going rate is for a postdoctoral researcher under the guidance of a world-leading academic. I can’t see any advantage in having someone far less qualified do it freelance.

@EmmaRolls Agreed on that caveat and I have acknowledged it above. To me, the bullet points under the 30k (sys review + all else) seem fair play for the cash amount and enough to have a minimum viable product here. There's acknowledgement of uncertainities and some relevant past experiences. That + the fact that to me rationalists/EA spheres don't do much in relation to politics or systemic change makes me more positive about this proposal. I think there's something to be done under the bracket 10-30k that's informative. We'll see what CT decide :)

I like this project but it is more like an undergrad thesis or early postgrad research question at this stage. There seems to be such a range of finalists in this competition, from Stanford University and major lobbyists to individual students. University programs are already developing the best researchers in each academic field and I think the question with all the projects based on existing political literature (this, socio-political impacts of nuclear winter, nuclear off-ramps, pandemic prevention pledge etc) is whether the return on value would be better than sponsoring a PhD or postdoctoral research award. When competition for those awards is so high anyone being funded at this level should be the best person to execute the research (or one of the best). Work that is largely duplicating or restructuring more advanced researchers’ output is unlikely to have the maximum impact, unless the person can demonstrate a proven record building and running a think tank or similar research project, which is very unlikely at the beginning of someone’s career.

Seems to me that while the whole amount isn't likely to get funded here, working with the candidate to fund say $20 for some research is pretty plausible.

I think it's interesting to compare https://manifold.markets/clearthinkbot/will-we-fund-pandemic-prevention-pl and this; they both aim to tackle x-risk related issues in politics, but this one is broader, unsettled in terms of country, and has abstract aspirations to reduce polarisation and convince politicians that evidence-based policy is popular, while the other aims to establish a commitment to treat a specific x-risk as important within a specific country based on modelling of that particular country's parliamentary system and groups.

My own thought from this comparison is that however the two sit relative to everything else, this one should probably be below the other in priority for funding, because the other is more developed, has evidence of specific expertise within the target country, and I expect the ambitions of this one would correspondingly scale down at the specific programme selection step and that either could serve as a stepping stone to future aspirations.

Trading NO here and a little YES there to switch around their market probabilities accordingly.

@jbeshir +1

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