I have goals that can only be reached via a powerful political machine. Probably a lot of other people around here share them. (Goals include “ensure no powerful dangerous AI get built”, “ensure governance of the US and world are broadly good / not decaying”, “have good civic discourse that plugs into said governance.”) I think it’d be good if there was a powerful rationalist political machine to try to make those things happen. Unfortunately the naive ways of doing that would destroy the good things about the rationalist intellectual machine. This post lays out some thoughts on how to have a political machine with good epistemics and integrity. Recently, I gave to the Alex Bores campaign. It turned out to raise a quite serious, surprising amount of money. I donated to Alex Bores fairly confidently. A few years ago, I donated to Carrick Flynn, feeling kinda skeezy about it. Not because there's necessarily anything wrong with Carrick Flynn, but, because the process that generated "donate to Carrick Flynn" was a self-referential "well, he's an EA, so it's good if he's in office." (There might have been people with more info than that, but I didn’t hear much about [...] ---Outline:(02:32) The AI Safety Case(04:27) Some reason things are hard(04:37) Mutual Reputation Alliances(05:25) People feel an incentive to gain power generally(06:12) Private information is very relevant(06:49) Powerful people can be vindictive(07:12) Politics is broadly adversarial(07:39) Lying and Misleadingness are contagious(08:11) Politics is the Mind Killer / Hard Mode(08:30) A high integrity political machine needs to work longterm, not just once(09:02) Grift(09:15) Passwords should be costly to fake(10:08) Example solution: Private and/or Retrospective Watchdogs for Political Donations(12:50) People in charge of PACs/similar needs good judgment(14:07) Don't share reputation / Watchdogs shouldn't be an org(14:46) Prediction markets for integrity violation(16:00) LessWrong is for evaluation, and (at best) a very specific kind of rallying ---
First published:
December 14th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2pB3KAuZtkkqvTsKv/a-high-integrity-epistemics-political-machine
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