Thanks for writing this. While I don’t personally enjoy being featured, I appreciate the post as a Forum reader and former mod.
A few notes on my approach to donating, since I was quoted:
Before choosing to donate, I spoke with two members of Carrick’s campaign team about their plans and what the early donations would go toward, did some background reading on the district and Oregon politics, and looked over Carrick’s campaign website and work history.
My view wound up looking similar to Zach’s (updated) view — Carrick’s chances weren’t great, but this still seemed like a strong opportunity. I didn’t have an estimate for “marginal % increase in his chances per dollar”; had I been asked to make one, I think I’d have come out somewhat lower than ASB. But I still thought the value proposition was strong.
I donated before ASB’s post went up, and well before I knew that Protect Our Future would join in. Had I known that a PAC would spend millions, there’s some chance I wouldn’t have donated (my views would have changed, but it’s hard to say exactly how).
It’s arguable that I should have considered the chance that some wealthy donor would provide PAC support to Flynn. I’ll take (dis)credit for that. But it honestly never crossed my mind; I’d just been on the phone with an obviously scrappy and overstretched campaign, and I saw a time-sensitive opportunity for marginal impact.
Looking back, I wish I’d worded my comment more carefully. Rather than “I recommend this highly to people looking for impactful donations”, I should have said “I highly recommend that people looking for impactful donations consider this as one option”. Or just “I made a donation and I’m excited to see where this goes”, full stop.
I didn’t expect or intend my comment to convince anyone to donate — I have no political experience or research background, and I didn’t include any models or estimates! I mostly wrote the comment out of excitement.
But I did want to be open about my choice (I share all my donations online), and I did think it would be valuable for more people to consider donating (and of course, to do their own research and thinking beforehand).
Other thoughts:
I was disappointed by some of the voting patterns I saw in the comments on ASB’s post, including on Zach’s comment. I was even more disappointed in the patterns on this post; I upvoted or strong-upvoted many of _pk’s comments there, and reported one especially bad comment to the moderators.
Looking back, I could have posted a bounty for the best argument against donating to the campaign. I did offer funding to the red-teaming contest, but they didn’t end up needing it, and it would have been too late for the election. Something to do next time I share a donation in public, maybe…
I think that the “socially punished” sentence of Habryka’s comment was wrong. I wouldn’t expect any large-scale reputational hit* for anyone who argued against supporting Carrick, pointed out flaws in his work, etc., as long as the arguments were solid.
I do think low-quality support skates by in ways that low-quality criticism doesn’t, which is a problem, but a different problem.
*I won’t say “no reputational hit at all”, because thousands of people read the Forum and some of them would probably be annoyed. Public online discussion is rough.
Thanks very much for your comments. I almost entirely approve/agree, and I think this is all useful. (And I’m sorry to quote you in particular, but that quote was one good example of the phenomenon). I’d just add two things:
Had I known that a PAC would spend millions, there’s some chance I wouldn’t have donated (my internal model would have changed, but it’s hard to say exactly how).
I wasn’t surprised that Protect Our Future intervened (though I was surprised by how much it spent). Others with relevant knowledge might have been able to confidently predict that or other relevant factors in advance. I think donating was correct in your epistemic state. But in general, even if one believes donating to X is higher EV than donating to anything else, it doesn’t imply that one should donate to X, if there’s also the option to learn more first. Repeating something from my post, it’s not worth spending so much time to guide a donation of $3K, but for a community donation of ~$900K it seems worth being more methodological.
I think that the “socially punished” sentence of Habryka’s comment was wrong.
I tentatively agree. But harm arises even if there’s no social punishment—just from the fear of social punishment leading to self-censorship.
I upvoted or strong-upvoted many of _pk’s comments there, and reported one especially bad comment to the moderators.
You don’t understand the premise of my comments in that thread (I am guessing) you reported where I contravened _pk.
The goal of my comments there is to mitigate issues of anonymous accounts that don’t contain new or verifiable information but are mainly emotional or appeal to norms or authority of various kinds (“I can see OR-6 from my house”). Anonymous comments like _pk (even if sweetly written and are >70% likely to be authentic) are problematic when emotional and influencing behaviour. This is extremely so when it involves movement of money which has no precedent on an Internet forum. I distrust your judgement about this issue described by this paragraph.
As part of an number of considerations, I take ownership of the repercussions by sandbagging this persona, which I believe mitigates issues. It is possible that inept countervening will simply cause me to relax this sandbag, to achieve the aims in the above paragraph, but the resulting envelope of achievable results will be much worse (e.g if this establishes some wretched authority or something to this account, the issues of which are sort of being pointed at by the post and your own comment).
The forum is really complicated and the norms under the previous moderator set things up for failure.
Thanks for writing this. While I don’t personally enjoy being featured, I appreciate the post as a Forum reader and former mod.
A few notes on my approach to donating, since I was quoted:
Before choosing to donate, I spoke with two members of Carrick’s campaign team about their plans and what the early donations would go toward, did some background reading on the district and Oregon politics, and looked over Carrick’s campaign website and work history.
My view wound up looking similar to Zach’s (updated) view — Carrick’s chances weren’t great, but this still seemed like a strong opportunity. I didn’t have an estimate for “marginal % increase in his chances per dollar”; had I been asked to make one, I think I’d have come out somewhat lower than ASB. But I still thought the value proposition was strong.
I donated before ASB’s post went up, and well before I knew that Protect Our Future would join in. Had I known that a PAC would spend millions, there’s some chance I wouldn’t have donated (my views would have changed, but it’s hard to say exactly how).
It’s arguable that I should have considered the chance that some wealthy donor would provide PAC support to Flynn. I’ll take (dis)credit for that. But it honestly never crossed my mind; I’d just been on the phone with an obviously scrappy and overstretched campaign, and I saw a time-sensitive opportunity for marginal impact.
Looking back, I wish I’d worded my comment more carefully. Rather than “I recommend this highly to people looking for impactful donations”, I should have said “I highly recommend that people looking for impactful donations consider this as one option”. Or just “I made a donation and I’m excited to see where this goes”, full stop.
I didn’t expect or intend my comment to convince anyone to donate — I have no political experience or research background, and I didn’t include any models or estimates! I mostly wrote the comment out of excitement.
But I did want to be open about my choice (I share all my donations online), and I did think it would be valuable for more people to consider donating (and of course, to do their own research and thinking beforehand).
Other thoughts:
I was disappointed by some of the voting patterns I saw in the comments on ASB’s post, including on Zach’s comment. I was even more disappointed in the patterns on this post; I upvoted or strong-upvoted many of _pk’s comments there, and reported one especially bad comment to the moderators.
Looking back, I could have posted a bounty for the best argument against donating to the campaign. I did offer funding to the red-teaming contest, but they didn’t end up needing it, and it would have been too late for the election. Something to do next time I share a donation in public, maybe…
I think that the “socially punished” sentence of Habryka’s comment was wrong. I wouldn’t expect any large-scale reputational hit* for anyone who argued against supporting Carrick, pointed out flaws in his work, etc., as long as the arguments were solid.
I do think low-quality support skates by in ways that low-quality criticism doesn’t, which is a problem, but a different problem.
*I won’t say “no reputational hit at all”, because thousands of people read the Forum and some of them would probably be annoyed. Public online discussion is rough.
Thanks very much for your comments. I almost entirely approve/agree, and I think this is all useful. (And I’m sorry to quote you in particular, but that quote was one good example of the phenomenon). I’d just add two things:
I wasn’t surprised that Protect Our Future intervened (though I was surprised by how much it spent). Others with relevant knowledge might have been able to confidently predict that or other relevant factors in advance. I think donating was correct in your epistemic state. But in general, even if one believes donating to X is higher EV than donating to anything else, it doesn’t imply that one should donate to X, if there’s also the option to learn more first. Repeating something from my post, it’s not worth spending so much time to guide a donation of $3K, but for a community donation of ~$900K it seems worth being more methodological.
I tentatively agree. But harm arises even if there’s no social punishment—just from the fear of social punishment leading to self-censorship.
You don’t understand the premise of my comments in that thread (I am guessing) you reported where I contravened _pk.
The goal of my comments there is to mitigate issues of anonymous accounts that don’t contain new or verifiable information but are mainly emotional or appeal to norms or authority of various kinds (“I can see OR-6 from my house”). Anonymous comments like _pk (even if sweetly written and are >70% likely to be authentic) are problematic when emotional and influencing behaviour. This is extremely so when it involves movement of money which has no precedent on an Internet forum. I distrust your judgement about this issue described by this paragraph.
As part of an number of considerations, I take ownership of the repercussions by sandbagging this persona, which I believe mitigates issues. It is possible that inept countervening will simply cause me to relax this sandbag, to achieve the aims in the above paragraph, but the resulting envelope of achievable results will be much worse (e.g if this establishes some wretched authority or something to this account, the issues of which are sort of being pointed at by the post and your own comment).
The forum is really complicated and the norms under the previous moderator set things up for failure.