Hi, I am Soon Jie Chong though also known as Max. I currently work towards a PhD in Astrophysics. I first got into EA through a local climate change talk in 2018 and climate change is still a concern to me till this day, alongside with nuclear security and most importantly, exploring research on cosmic existential risk as the focus of my career.
I have finally join the forum after knowing about its existence for years - look forward to the discussions!
Thanks for raising your concerns.
While I do think that the EA movement should not straight out alienate the MAGA movement, trying to pander to them is a dangerous move. Honestly, attempting a rational discourse with them is very difficult under the current climate, and perhaps even arguably futile. Under conditions like this, maybe the most effective action is to stand your ground (even there iffy things that Anthropic does) and oppose what are they trying to do (at least stop making the problem worse if you can no longer solve it)? Is having a moral bare minimum too much to ask?
This question of whether EA to attempting to win MAGA over reminds me of the current UK political situation (sorry if I get something badly inaccurate): Labour tried to garner the support of the far right and failed horribly cause the far right is going to hate it anyways. On the contrary, the Greens holds its ground and benefits a lot as a result!