Here is a very long list of large, organised groups failing to engineer transitions to socialism within individual countries, because the United Stated were larger, more organised, and better-funded.

The general thrust of my take here is that most economies are a hybrid of pro- and anti-property systems, so it's hard to disentangle a lot of it. But I'll have a crack:

the post above outlines the USSR's space program or China's economic growth as examples of socialist successes, so it must be to do with the 'socialism' in those economies

Oh, I read these as counter-examples to the theory that capitalism is a superior economic principle; that whatever causes these things could be independent of either. But equally, China's economic growth might be more attributable to their capitalist tendencies than their socialist ones.

Your definition sounds like capitalism to me: you can pay rent to a landlord, have your surplus labour taken, the only condition is that 'private capital' is being 'reduced'

It's all a spectrum, right? No system is entirely 'capitalist' either, in the sense that not all forms of capital are subject to private ownership for profit. So I was looking more at decreasing private capital relative to the status quo, rather than abolishing it entirely. It wouldn't be beyond the pale to refer to such acts as 'socialist'.

being intergovernmental organisations, I don't believe IMF and World Bank are 'private capital'

Given that almost every capitalist government raises some of its own capital by borrowing money from private citizens, yes, these organisations partially serve private capital. I can't speak to the extent, untangling global debt flows seems hard.

In other words the attributes pro-imperialism and pro-capitalism are independent.

I think that's fair. I was speaking toward the tendency of capitalist systems to exhaust themselves of growth in their places of origin, and then start looking outward. The usual example leftists like to trot out here is the Dutch East India Company (not without reason!). I think you might be able to be capitalist and anti-imperialist, but it's harder work and you might find yourself out-competed by those willing to extract the extra value by doing so.

I agree that this finding is not a negative, and that including mindfulness should be a net positive for mental health interventions (especially since it'll adapt well to a lot of cultural contexts). The reason I included this null-ish result was to indicate that Vipassana-style mindfulness is unlikely to produce measurable 'enlightenment' when scaled up as an intervention—otherwise, where is it hiding in these studies? The burden of proof is with mindfulness proponents to find evidence that their method produces the superior effects they claim it does (a) when scaled up and (b) within a time-frame that would make it cost-effective.

(FWIW I think that it probably produces non-inferior effects at scale on comparable timeframes, and for some small number of the population might achieve superiority after some time with the method, but this wouldn't make it a superior candidate for a global health intervention)

Just doing some napkin math, the ruling coalition lead by about 400,000 votes. So that’s approximately 6,000 EUR lost per vote. It’s obviously not all going to be spent cost-effectively & doesn’t consider counterfactuals, but that’s a good marker for how much someone should be willing to spend to swing those votes.

I tend to think the question is less 'should EAs advocate for socialism?', and more practically, 'should EAs and socialists collaborate?'. Framing it in the former way is only going to highlight the very real differences between both movements. We can learn from the history of leftist disunity that historically, leftist movements have been strongest when they focus on finding ways to collaborate rather than persuading each other of their exact flavour of the ideology.

I think the collaboration between EA and existing animal welfare ideologies is a great template for what I mean here.

Contra tractability specifically, this depends on a lot on what societies count as 'socialist' or not. A lot of European countries, for example, are essentially market socialist or hybrid economies (large social states as in the Nordics, strong or mandatory labour unions as in Germany, large cooperative companies as in Spain, widespread state ownership of industry as in the Nordics or Poland). These countries have the longest histories of socialist movements, and have all achieved these economies through reform.

Perhaps this is a cop-out, but 'socialism' generally just means the reduction of private capital. This doesn't necessarily mean more government or authority.

In fact, I think you'd probably agree with a lot of socialist anti-imperialism, such as replacing the IMF, World Bank, and Belt & Road with grantmaking organisations (these don't require enforced austerity or other impositions of power when the recipients don't make repayments). Equally, without uniform U.S. interventionism in every left-wing revolution since WWII, we may have seen some of these economies flourish. Both of these stances are motivated by an analysis of the West's involvement as being motivated by protection or enhancement of private capital (whether you buy that or not), but I do agree that the original post could've clarified this further.

Prioritizing longtermist over neartermist causes was predicted by higher levels of engagement, male gender, white ethnicity, and younger age (when accounting for the influence of these and several other variables in the same model).

This raises some hackles in me, gender & race are both dimensions of privilege (‘based in US’ is a much less clear marker of privilege in this context). This is speculation, but I wonder if psychological distance from suffering is a strong predictor of longtermist beliefs; i.e. that suffering yourself or being in a context of suffering leads you to prefer near-term causes. This, at least, is one thing I think critics of longtermism take issue with (at their strongest & in best faith).

Could you explain the ‘mental health’ cause area more? Is that about mental health of EAs, mental health as a global health intervention, or some combination of the two? Is the label unambiguous in the survey? (I’m sure this has been answered somewhere but it’s unclear from this post)