Overall, I agree with Habryka’s comment that “negative evidence on the campaign would be ‘systematically filtered out’”. Although I maxed out donations to the primary campaign and phone banked a bit for the campaign, I had a number of concerns about the campaign that I never saw mentioned in EA spaces. However, I didn’t want to raise these concerns for fear that this would negatively affect Carrick’s chances of winning the election.
Now that Carrick’s campaign is over, I feel more free to write my concerns. These included:
The post claims “The race seems to be quite tight. According to this poll, Carrick is in second place among likely Democratic voters by 4% (14% of voters favor Flynn, 18% favor Salinas), with a margin of error of +/- 4 percentage points.” However, it declines to mention that “26 percent of the district’s voters holding an unfavorable opinion of him, compared to only 7 percent for Salinas” (The Hill).
At the time the post was written, a significant fraction of voters already had already voted. The claim “the campaign is especially impactful right now” seems misleading when it would have been better to help earlier on.
The campaign already has plenty of TV ads from the Protect the Future PAC, and there are lots of internet comments complaining about receiving mailers every other day and seeing Carrick ads all the time. (Though later I learned that PAC ads aren’t able to show Carrick speaking, and I’ve read a few internet comments complaining about how they’ve never heard Carrick speak despite seeing all those ads. So campaign donations could be valuable for ads which do show him speaking.)
Having a lot of people coming out-of-state to volunteer could further the impression among voters that Carrick doesn’t have much support from Oregonians.
If you can speak enthusiastically and knowledgeably about the campaign, you can do a better job of phone banking or door-knocking than the average person. However, the campaign already spent $847,000 for door-knockers. While volunteering for the campaign might have been high in expected value, the fact that other people could do door-knocking raises questions about whether it’s in out-of-state EAs’ comparative advantage to do so.
I’d recommend cross-posting your critiques of the “especially useful” post onto that post — will make it easier for anyone who studies this campaign later (I expect many people will) to learn from you.
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.
Overall, I agree with Habryka’s comment that “negative evidence on the campaign would be ‘systematically filtered out’”. Although I maxed out donations to the primary campaign and phone banked a bit for the campaign, I had a number of concerns about the campaign that I never saw mentioned in EA spaces. However, I didn’t want to raise these concerns for fear that this would negatively affect Carrick’s chances of winning the election.
Now that Carrick’s campaign is over, I feel more free to write my concerns. These included:
The vast majority of media coverage was negative from the start. If voters made even a cursory Google of Carrick Flynn’s name, they would be met with plenty of negative headlines like “Carrick Flynn, Crypto-Backed Candidate in New Congressional District, Has Rarely Voted in Oregon” or “Environmental Groups Condemn Congressional Candidate Carrick Flynn’s Comments on Spotted Owls and Timber Unity”.
The vast majority of comments on Oregon subreddits were also negative.
The campaign seemed to have quite few non-EA donors or volunteers, suggesting a lack of local support.
The campaign seemed to have few volunteers until about a week ago, after Why Helping the Flynn Campaign is especially useful right now was posted.
Even putting aside the issue of crypto funding, Carrick had a notable amount of other controversies such as his comments on spotted owl conservation, the fact that only 2.5% of donations were from Oregon, and that he only voted twice in the past 20 years.
I also have some critiques of the post Why Helping the Flynn Campaign is especially useful right now but I declined to write a comment. These include:
The post claims “The race seems to be quite tight. According to this poll, Carrick is in second place among likely Democratic voters by 4% (14% of voters favor Flynn, 18% favor Salinas), with a margin of error of +/- 4 percentage points.” However, it declines to mention that “26 percent of the district’s voters holding an unfavorable opinion of him, compared to only 7 percent for Salinas” (The Hill).
At the time the post was written, a significant fraction of voters already had already voted. The claim “the campaign is especially impactful right now” seems misleading when it would have been better to help earlier on.
The campaign already has plenty of TV ads from the Protect the Future PAC, and there are lots of internet comments complaining about receiving mailers every other day and seeing Carrick ads all the time. (Though later I learned that PAC ads aren’t able to show Carrick speaking, and I’ve read a few internet comments complaining about how they’ve never heard Carrick speak despite seeing all those ads. So campaign donations could be valuable for ads which do show him speaking.)
Having a lot of people coming out-of-state to volunteer could further the impression among voters that Carrick doesn’t have much support from Oregonians.
If you can speak enthusiastically and knowledgeably about the campaign, you can do a better job of phone banking or door-knocking than the average person. However, the campaign already spent $847,000 for door-knockers. While volunteering for the campaign might have been high in expected value, the fact that other people could do door-knocking raises questions about whether it’s in out-of-state EAs’ comparative advantage to do so.
I’d recommend cross-posting your critiques of the “especially useful” post onto that post — will make it easier for anyone who studies this campaign later (I expect many people will) to learn from you.
Thanks for the suggestion, just copied the critiques of the “especially useful” post over!
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.