I’m curious about your fear that these comments would negatively affect Carrick’s chances. What was the mechanism you expected? The possibility of reduced donations/volunteering from people on the Forum? The media picking up on critical comments?
If “reduced donations” were a factor, would you also be concerned about posting criticism of other causes you thought were important for the same reason? I’m still working out what makes this campaign different from other causes (or maybe there really are similar issues across a bunch of causes).
One thing that comes to mind is time-sensitivity: if you rethink your views on a different cause later, you can encourage more donations to make up for a previous reduction. If you rethink views on a political campaign after Election Day, it’s too late.
If that played a role, I can think of other situations that might exert the same pressure — for example, organizations running out of runway having a strong fundraising advantage if people are worried about dooming them. Not sure what to do about that, and would love to hear ideas (from anyone, this isn’t specifically aimed at Michael).
I think I was primarily concerned that negative information about the campaign could get picked up by the media. Thinking it over now though, that motivation doesn’t make sense for not posting about highly visible negative news coverage (which the media would have already been aware of) or not posting concerns on a less publicly visible EA platform, such as Slack. Other factors for why I didn’t write up my concerns about Carrick’s chances of being elected might have been that:
no other EAs seemed to be posting much negative information about the campaign, and I thought there might have been a good reason for that
aside from the posting of “Why Helping the Flynn Campaign is especially useful right now”, there weren’t any events that triggered me to consider writing up my concerns
the negative media coverage was obvious enough that I thought anyone considering volunteering would already know about it, and it had to already have been priced into the election odds estimates on Metaculus and PredictIt, so drawing attention to it might not have been valuable
time-sensitivity, as you mentioned
public critiques might have to be quite well-reasoned, and I might want to check-in with the campaign to make sure that I didn’t misunderstand anything, etc. That could be a decent amount of effort on my part and their part and also somewhat awkward given that I was also volunteering for the campaign.
However, if someone privately asked me for my thoughts on how likely the campaign was to succeed or how valuable helping with it was, I would have been happy to share my honest opinion, including any concerns.
Thanks for sharing all of this!
I’m curious about your fear that these comments would negatively affect Carrick’s chances. What was the mechanism you expected? The possibility of reduced donations/volunteering from people on the Forum? The media picking up on critical comments?
If “reduced donations” were a factor, would you also be concerned about posting criticism of other causes you thought were important for the same reason? I’m still working out what makes this campaign different from other causes (or maybe there really are similar issues across a bunch of causes).
One thing that comes to mind is time-sensitivity: if you rethink your views on a different cause later, you can encourage more donations to make up for a previous reduction. If you rethink views on a political campaign after Election Day, it’s too late.
If that played a role, I can think of other situations that might exert the same pressure — for example, organizations running out of runway having a strong fundraising advantage if people are worried about dooming them. Not sure what to do about that, and would love to hear ideas (from anyone, this isn’t specifically aimed at Michael).
I think I was primarily concerned that negative information about the campaign could get picked up by the media. Thinking it over now though, that motivation doesn’t make sense for not posting about highly visible negative news coverage (which the media would have already been aware of) or not posting concerns on a less publicly visible EA platform, such as Slack. Other factors for why I didn’t write up my concerns about Carrick’s chances of being elected might have been that:
no other EAs seemed to be posting much negative information about the campaign, and I thought there might have been a good reason for that
aside from the posting of “Why Helping the Flynn Campaign is especially useful right now”, there weren’t any events that triggered me to consider writing up my concerns
the negative media coverage was obvious enough that I thought anyone considering volunteering would already know about it, and it had to already have been priced into the election odds estimates on Metaculus and PredictIt, so drawing attention to it might not have been valuable
time-sensitivity, as you mentioned
public critiques might have to be quite well-reasoned, and I might want to check-in with the campaign to make sure that I didn’t misunderstand anything, etc. That could be a decent amount of effort on my part and their part and also somewhat awkward given that I was also volunteering for the campaign.
However, if someone privately asked me for my thoughts on how likely the campaign was to succeed or how valuable helping with it was, I would have been happy to share my honest opinion, including any concerns.