For politics and governance in the US, does there exist a tool that:

  • Prompts the user to enter their rough location (e.g., town, county, state)
  • Prompts the user to select interest keywords (e.g., housing, animal welfare, cannabis) 
  • Lists pending local (town / county), state, and federal level laws and regulations w.r.t. these interests
  • Lists current local (town / county), state, and federal level laws and regulations w.r.t. these interests
  • Includes summaries of current local (town / county), state, and federal level laws and regulations for accessibility
  • Lists special interest groups that typically support/counter laws and regulations relating to these interests at the local (town / county), state, and federal level
  • Lists ways in which the user could influence laws and regulations w.r.t. these interests (e.g., a step-by-step tutorial for participating in a certain election) 

If this tool doesn't exist, how much value would people get from it if it existed? How difficult would it be to implement each part? (please point me to any tools / organizations that roughly fulfill the duties outlined in the bullet points)

Lastly, w.r.t. the point 

  • Includes summaries of current local (town / county), state, and federal level laws and regulations for accessibility

I think GPT-X might work well for summarizing and distilling legal language - has this been done already? 

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swarriner

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The thing you've outlined sounds to me like news media, sort of, as well as implicitly leaning on existing news media. The amount of information entailed is comparable; having up-to-date info on over 3000 United States counties is a far from trivial endeavor.[1]

It's different of course in that existing news media isn't remotely incentivized to support this kind of work, instead being caught in the tar pit of getting eyeballs and ad dollars, as well as being an arena which monied interests know they need to optimize for. Of course if the tool you're describing became well-known, it would also become subject to competitive pressures from without.

And in practice, the number of people who would get value from it is probably not all that much different from the number of people who already are already immersed in activism. You get marginal gains from more efficient allocation of some of the ones who are just kind of being pulled along by their social networks.

Could a GPT-X in principle maybe help scrape through every local paper, every town council pdf, and output useful insight that current activist communities don't already have access to if they're sufficiently motivated? I think eventually yes, but by the time AI is that powerful there might be more important things to worry about.

  1. ^

    If you want to offer info at the town level, it gets even worse. There are nearly 20,000 incorporated towns cities and villages, although 3/4s are under 5k population.

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This would likely need to be a tool for local organizing that contains manuals. most of the information on the tool will be out of date and there needs to be a clear process for how to make it up to date, despite that people who potentially disagree with each other strongly would be updating it. AI could be included in the tool to help update it, but AI couldn't be the final authority at this time.

some references for content I'd suggest including, at least by reference - I make absolutely no attempt to be neutral in my recommendations:

  1. best match I know of, after significant effort spent looking over several months: https://localwiki.org/ - but it isn't quite what you want, and also it's slow and underpopular
  2. I don't know of a tool that filters by interests like that
  3. https://www.congress.gov/state-legislature-websites maybe? each site varies and some are very very slow. utah was fast, georgia was fast, alabama never loaded for me.
  4. ^
  5. ^
  6. https://ballotpedia.org/Main_Page maybe?
  7. maybe https://activisthandbook.org/en/home?

some bonus resources I think are relevant to effective organizing - note that you don't have to completely agree with these resources to learn from them and produce worlds that are better in subsets of the ways the authors intend:

some more non-electoral resources I've encountered recently but which I'm not sure are good-according-to-me yet, and I link anyway because they seem promising based on initial assessment and how I discovered them:

  • http://foodnotbombs.net/new_site/ (specific resource for aiding the poorest in an area with food, as far as I know this is one of the very highest options for local impact altruism, which can have second-order impacts via network effects that I think are undervalued by EA messaging; not sure they're undervalued by EA funders though, idk about that part)
  • https://netcentriccampaigns.org/7-elements/ (unsure I would feel comfy linking this site to someone without also linking c4ss, since their perspectives are compatible but may be too narrow without each other)
  • https://www.mutualaidhub.org/ (looks extremely promising for direct aid, which is key for connecting with a local community for the long haul, not so helpful for making a difference with only the aid of electoralism)

https://github.com/StampyAI/stampy-ui looks like an interesting tool to use on something like this