3 ms·

I understand the present day practical reason why she thinks that phone calls matter more, I really do, however phone calls are a time inefficient way of accomp

I understand the present day practical reason why she thinks that phone calls matter more, I really do, however phone calls are a time inefficient way of accomplishing that result. There are just so many things people could be doing with their lives, including communicating opinion about other political issues, that we should allow all of them to be done as efficiently as possible. An online petition is more efficient. The key is trust. What we really need is some sort of highly automatable, electronic way of voting or expressing political positions in a way that is trustable. We shouldn't not trust some expression of political intent merely because it's fast/efficient, that's almost ridiculous, instead we should only not trust it if it is forged or shilled.

AgentConundrum 15y ago
> that we should allow all of them to be done as efficiently as possible Efficiency is the enemy for things like this, because it only shows a minimum amount of involvement with the issue. You show you care at all by participating in petitions, but you prove you care more by participating in more time-intensive activities. This is something that you'll see people close to politicians say quite a lot, that the method of communication counts, and a multiplier is used to count your input based on that method. It's why you're supposed to write to your $political_representative on paper rather that firing off an email, and it's why you're supposed to hand write the letter (legibly, please!) rather than typing it. A person who takes an hour or two drafting a compelling response to legislation, writing a final copy by hand, taking it to the post office, affixing a stamp, and mailing it out has shown more concern for the issue than does a guy who goes on HN, sees this link, and fills out a form to effectively just say "yeah, me too, what he said!"
- mkramlich 15y ago
  I understood that. It's that there are 1000 other things we need to be doing as humans. plus, I think there are more substantive and focused ways of showing somebody understands a given topic area, spent time on it, and has a meritocratic opinion worth paying attention to it. People who write letters to an editor may show they're passionate about an issue. But is also shows their time has little value, and/or they are an ignorant quack. We need to be able to make a distinction between these cases. And at the same time make it as easy and fast and cheap and painless as possible to vote. And on November 8th, going into a voting booth, that is all that anyone can do already. Just push a button or fill in a circle which indicates "yeah, me too!". For those cases, let's speed it up and scale it up.
danssig 15y ago
And this is exactly the issue. If this issue isn't important enough for you to invest some of your time to make your opinion known on the subject, then you're probably not going to change your vote on it anyway.
rhizome 15y ago
Effectiveness is inversely proportional to efficiency. Phone calls matter more because Congresspeople only have so much time, too, you know? Did you think that anybody ever reads all eight zillion emails sent in about the legality of selling horse meat?

AgentConundrum 15y ago

> that we should allow all of them to be done as efficiently as possible Efficiency is the enemy for things like this, because it only shows a minimum amount of involvement with the issue. You show you care at all by participating in petitions, but you prove you care more by participating in more time-intensive activities. This is something that you'll see people close to politicians say quite a lot, that the method of communication counts, and a multiplier is used to count your input based on that method. It's why you're supposed to write to your $political_representative on paper rather that firing off an email, and it's why you're supposed to hand write the letter (legibly, please!) rather than typing it. A person who takes an hour or two drafting a compelling response to legislation, writing a final copy by hand, taking it to the post office, affixing a stamp, and mailing it out has shown more concern for the issue than does a guy who goes on HN, sees this link, and fills out a form to effectively just say "yeah, me too, what he said!"

mkramlich 15y ago
I understood that. It's that there are 1000 other things we need to be doing as humans. plus, I think there are more substantive and focused ways of showing somebody understands a given topic area, spent time on it, and has a meritocratic opinion worth paying attention to it. People who write letters to an editor may show they're passionate about an issue. But is also shows their time has little value, and/or they are an ignorant quack. We need to be able to make a distinction between these cases. And at the same time make it as easy and fast and cheap and painless as possible to vote. And on November 8th, going into a voting booth, that is all that anyone can do already. Just push a button or fill in a circle which indicates "yeah, me too!". For those cases, let's speed it up and scale it up.

danssig 15y ago

And this is exactly the issue. If this issue isn't important enough for you to invest some of your time to make your opinion known on the subject, then you're probably not going to change your vote on it anyway.

rhizome 15y ago

Effectiveness is inversely proportional to efficiency. Phone calls matter more because Congresspeople only have so much time, too, you know? Did you think that anybody ever reads all eight zillion emails sent in about the legality of selling horse meat?