I live for a high disagree-to-upvote ratio
That’s not strictly true, a lot of animal orgs are farmer-facing and will speak to a motivation the farmer cares about (yield) while they secretly harbour another one (welfare of animals). I’ve heard that same orgs go to great lengths to hide their true intentions and sometimes even take money from their services just to appear as if they have a non-suspicious motivation.
I am actually curious why a similar approach hasn’t been tried in biodiversity—if it was just EAs yucking biodiversity (which I have seen, same as you), that’d be really disappointing.
Late to this, but something I didn’t catch in the comments—Global Health looks overfunded in your calculations, but my sense is that Global Health is quite efficient at spending money. Much of the money in global health goes directly to programmes and beneficiaries, or working-class talent that often gets excluded as ‘not what we mean’ in these kinds of surveys. I would argue, too, that the other cause areas here are often quite talent-dense. Under these terms, it’s probably still valid to argue that Animal Welfare is under-resourced relative to Existential Risks though :)
I think maybe a little bit of nuance is lost when just saying ‘electoral politics isn’t neglected and might be quite hard’—that’s not the EA response to large global health issues, or existential risks. It’s just that once you get down to brass tacks, most Western political systems are pretty easy to buy your way into, and it’s substantially cheaper to effect meaningful piecemeal change by paying for lobbyists.
You only need electoral politics when trying to undertake massive political/ideological shifts (see: the kochs/mercers shifting the U.S. to a sort of anarcho-capitalism), and fundamentally, most EAs are on the centre-left and don’t see these kinds of changes as desirable.
(You can see this in the LessWrong post you linked, most of the post and replies are proposing exactly what Kamala Harris did in 2024 and lost doing)
((Vastly oversimplifying but I hope it provides some nuance that the other answers are missing))
I’m a little confused about your problem statement, indeed, most of the extreme politicians in the U.S. seem to win outright, in ranked-choice primaries, or systems with two-candidate runoffs.
In the Democratic party, which I’m more familiar with, their most extreme (this is not an endorsement or disendorsement of their policies, just to note that these politicians are the furthest left in the party) elected officials tend to win outright majorities or in reformed elections:
Similarly, I skimmed the Wikipedias for a few far-right politicians, whom I’m less familiar with, and they demonstrated similar trends. MTG, for example, won a contested primary with 40%, but then won a two-candidate runoff and has seen outright wins since.
It seems as though extreme politicians are genuinely popular—enough that people don’t form coalitions to oppose them in future elections, even when there’s only one other candidate on the ballot. I am not very convinced that your proposed form would work.
I’d also be curious about whether Abundance money could fund this, too. Urban sprawl is a big driver of habitat destruction!