This is a platform for political research and discussion based on Effective Altruism (EA). If you don't know what EA is, it is a movement for answering one simple question: how can we use our resources to help others the most? We must use evidence and careful analysis to find the very best causes to work on. But it's no use answering the question unless we act on it. EA is about following thru. It's about being generous with your time and your money to do the most good you can. Learn more here.
That said, this website is totally independent, I take no money for it, it isn't affiliated with any EA organizations and doesn't necessarily represent the views of any other Effective Altruists (EAs), although I do base my views in part on what other EAs believe.
Who am I? I am an ordinary member of the EA movement who has lived in California, New Mexico, Texas, Nebraska, and Louisiana. I’ve studied international relations, economics, and computer science. I’ve served in the military and written philosophy. More recently I decided to investigate political issues. I went into this project with an open mind and genuine curiosity about who might be a good or a bad candidate and what might be a good or a bad policy.
I haven't made this all on my own. Various friends and commentators have suggested things which I have added to these pages. I am always grateful for this help although it isn't feasible to give attribution for every detail. Thanks also belong to The Site Wizard for help with web design.
We should judge our leaders and policies thru the EA lens, asking "are they promoting welfare for all concerned?" Moreover, we should engage with the political system to make it better, as that may be an effective way to help others.
Some EAs are apolitical. Those of us who are concerned about politics will prefer whichever policies and leaders seem best at making the world safer and happier for everyone in the long run, and will make this judgment thru careful reasoning and deference to scientific research. Not everyone else thinks this way, so in practice, this means we often have systematically different political views from the broader population. However, it doesn't mean we all think the same way, nor does it mean that people with other points of view are not welcome in EA.
You can take a side in politics without being biased. Being biased doesn't mean having a distorted point of view relative to other voters, it means having a distorted point of view relative to the available evidence. In fact, refusing to ever take a side is itself a form of bias called bothsidesism.
Of course, we could still be biased. Everyone is probably biased in some way, including me and including you! But that's OK. Biased people still have lots of important things to say. The best way to deal with the problem is for us all to actively listen to each other in pursuit of the truth.
This project is limited by time and manpower against the vast breadth, depth and complexity of the problems that it tackles. Therefore, many arguments and evidence will be missing – but I would love to include them. I am always happy to receive input from others. Many arguments and sources in this report were introduced by readers. Everything here is subject to revision and elaboration, and I will readily change my positions if the evidence warrants it. You can send feedback to me at my Reddit account; please do not message me there for any purpose except for direct discussion of the content of this website.
When disputing parts of the report, be cautious about making bias arguments.
Everything uploaded to this website must follow three values:
Contribution to this site is subject to the Pro-Truth Pledge: share truth, honor truth and encourage truth to the best of our abilities. Try to cite claims as well as possible. Report uncertainty where appropriate, avoiding false overconfidence. The audience of this website is people who are genuinely trying to make the world a better place, so it is no place to lie for the sake of advancing social causes.
Consider the bullfrog. Bullfrogs are aggressive predators with voracious appetites for all kinds of food including insects, mice, birds, bats, fish, snails, tadpoles, and other bullfrogs. Just as the bullfrog leaps after anything it can fit in its mouth, even if it seems gross to most people, we should actively search for diverse candidates, sources, arguments, and counter-arguments – whatever might help us improve global well-being. This doesn't mean we should believe anything, just that we should stay curious and never close ourselves off. (This might be the same thing as Julia Galef's 'scout mindset', but I came up with this idea before her book came out. Decent minds think alike.)
We must find the strongest possible arguments for different points of view. Note that this isn’t necessarily the same as being intellectually charitable as conventionally understood, or passing the Ideological Turing Test. Other people may be mistaken about the best arguments for their position, especially if they don’t share our ultimate values. So we should listen to everyone’s arguments, and even if they are framed in terms of non-EA values like nationalism or retribution, or even if they are made in bad faith, we may be able to digest them into sound arguments about well-being.
This website is designed for desktop browsing. In a mobile browser it has all the same functionality but the format is difficult to navigate on a small screen.
This site makes extensive use of tooltipsWhen you mouse over the marked text, the tooltip appears with extra information. for citations and notes. If you are trying to find something in a tooltip (e.g. you want to see if a particular author is cited somewhere), you cannot find it with ordinary control-F, but you can right-click the page, go to "View Page Source," and search for it with control-F there. You can also find occasional comments in the page source, which often consists of things like to-do lists, text which I'm unsure about whether to include, obsolete text which I feel loathe to delete because I worked hard on it, and so on. It's for my own benefit and not really meant for readers, but it's not meant to be hidden either; you can read it if you want to get every last bit of information.
Page numbers in citations refer to page numbers in the pdf document, not the numbers printed on the pages (this makes navigation easier).
I have decided (although have not yet updated everything yet) to capitalize Black and White, not because I endorse America's bipartisan fixation on skin color but because capitalizing these terms is the most consistent and fair approach. While both dark- and light-skinned people are far too diverse to be coherently described as ethnicities, in the American context Whites and Blacks are sufficiently homogeneous as to make the labels somewhat culturally meaningful. Capitalizing White and Black is also more consistent with the capitalization of other broad racial labels like Hispanic, Asian-American etc. Additionally, after the decision by major media outlets to capitalize Black, it seems fruitless to try to cling to a standard of noncapitalization for skin colors; for proponents of the lower-case "black", the battle has already been lost. It is much better to contribute to a standard of capitalizing White as well, as some sources take the unfortunate step of capitalizing Black but not White, a move which stinks of anti-White racial prejudice.
I spell through (and its derived words) as thru, in order to help change English spelling norms to make the language easier to learn, for the benefit of schoolchildren, adults with learning difficulties, and English-second-language learnersMany linguists are on a moral crusade insisting that all linguistic choices are perfectly equally good, and it's true there is nothing philosophically good or bad about any particular orthography, but in the real world there are real problems with complex and highly irregular languages being difficult to learn. When you think about it, language barriers are frankly one of the biggest barriers to inclusivity in the modern world. And English, as an international language with highly complicated and irregular spelling, is particularly appropriate for rationalization. Unfortunately the absence of an English standardization body means that undirected evolution is the only mechanism for change, but if a few people consciously choose to use certain new spellings which are already organically gaining steam, then this evolution may go a bit better and faster.
As far as cultural value goes, let me suggest that just as spatial linguistic diversity is important (we would lose cultural value if there was only a single language and single orthography in the whole world), so temporal linguistic diversity is important - there is more cultural richness in language and orthography which change from century to century.. Other spelling changes such as tho/altho and u are also superior but due to perceptions of unprofessionalism I'm not (yet) implementing them on this site.