Effective altruism and political power

Adam Zerner

I just saw that Donald Trump is running for president. Which led me to the following thought: would any of the big names in tech have a chance at being elected president of the US? Elon Musk? Sergey Brin? Jeff Bezos? Reid Hoffman? Peter Thiel? Edit: Bill Gates?

Some follow up questions/thoughts:

As far as maximizing altruistic impact goes, would it be a good idea for them to become president?
Do these people care about maximizing altruistic impact? To what extent? If so/enough, why not do it?
What other "sane" people have enough reputation in the public eye to have a chance at acquiring a lot of political power? My first thought was tech people, but I'm sure there are others. Big hedge fund managers? Ray Dalio? Or maybe some famous scientists?
What does EA have to say about acquiring political power?

Edit: hypothetically, if one of these big-name tech people were to try to gain political power, how should they go about doing so?

Some follow up questions/thoughts:

As far as maximizing altruistic impact goes, would it be a good idea for them to become president?
Do these people care about maximizing altruistic impact? To what extent? If so/enough, why not do it?
What other "sane" people have enough reputation in the public eye to have a chance at acquiring a lot of political power? My first thought was tech people, but I'm sure there are others. Big hedge fund managers? Ray Dalio? Or maybe some famous scientists?
What does EA have to say about acquiring political power?

Edit: hypothetically, if one of these big-name tech people were to try to gain political power, how should they go about doing so?

According to Pew, 3.1% of the US population is atheist so if most sane people are atheists, then you are claiming at least 93.8% of the US is insane. By any reasonable definition of insane that is just wrong but I presume you meant something else. At any rate, that statement to me comes across as quite prejudiced.

http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/

The original post was using "sane" to mean something closer to x-rational and highly effective, rather than sane in the conventional sense - I probably should have used quote marks to emphasise this. I'll edit my comment.

Atheists/agnostics are highly overrepresented at the far end of the bell curve - 93% of Nobel prize winning scientists are atheist/agnostic.

0jacob_cannell11y

According to google's first results, between 13% to 7% of Americans are atheist or agnostic. Also, somewhere between 20% to 30% is simply unaffiliated - whatever that means. Atheism/agnosticism correlates with education/intelligence at the upper levels of the latter. When you include transhumanism and the sim argument it becomes even more complex - technically I guess I'm a deist.

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Effective altruism and political power

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Effective altruism and political power

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