As someone who worked for a Canadian Senator who has AI as one of her main areas of Parliamentary interest and activity, I have strongly upvoted this post and agree that AIGS is doing great work. I can personally attest to coming across their work in the course of my job advising my former boss. In fact, based on this post, I’d say AIGS is punching above its weight, as I would have assumed they were bigger / had more funding than this post indicates they do. 

As someone who did this, and ended up actually working as a political staffer for years, strongly agree. Not just for the reasons you mentioned, but volunteering on a campaign for a weekend is a pretty easy/cheap test to see if you have aptitude and/or enjoyment in the realm of politics as a whole. If you do, even a short stint is a great way to learn some pretty handy transferable skills, and to meet people that might be handy to know if you’re trying to influence policy down the line. Campaigns love thoughtful, passionate people, and they can be convinced to give you more to take on if you show that you’re willing and trustworthy. And as long as you’re not too loud about it or take on any permanent paid roles, it’s fairly concealable, if you are worried about being visibly partisan negatively impacting you in the future. 

Thanks for writing this, this is a super valuable question to be asking. I've been wondering about this myself recently.

Can I ask what your level of confidence is for these conclusions, or your knowledge of China generally, given that you stated you are more familiar with the U.S.? My level of information about China is not super high either (I do have a degree in Global and International Studies, but spent relatively little time focused on China), but I did find myself questioning some arguments / wondering what info they are based on. This is a valuable exercise even if you don't have high confidence in your China knowledge, but it would be helpful to have a sense of what that level is.

If it helps for context, here's some examples of what stuck out to me:

• Moral innovation: How did you take Eastern philosophical traditions into consideration? They do have their own, distinct philosophical tradition; very different from Western philosophy, but it does exist and leads them to different conclusions. Claims like "Moral philosophy research also seems far stronger in the West than in China" had me wanting some sort of citation. I don't have enough info to strenuously disagree, but enough to be skeptical without citation. I buy that the schools of thought you are "most aligned with" are more prominent in the West, but that doesn't mean they don't have competing schools of thought that could still lead to "good" outcomes.
• Economic stasis: I have some uncertainty that this is true for China currently, or at least in the near future, and even less moving into the far-future. It's possible I am over-updating based on some recent thinking in the field (basic example here). Not a strong disagreement, and it's very possible I misunderstood your argument here.

I hope that this doesn't come across as super critical! (Tone online can be hard to get right). I think this was a really good post and found it very valuable, I just feel it would be good to know up front how highly you would rate your knowledge/confidence that led to these conclusions.