I was one of the people who helped draft the constitutional amendment and launch the initiative.
This project seems hard and important. Your work seems impactful, as you mentioned, it seems noticeable and impressive to 37% support of banning a harmful industry.
As Mo Putera also suggested, would it make sense to further write up what you and others did on this project?
Maybe a write up would add depth, communicate the challenges faced, publicize the project, as well as give some sense of how to get started on similar object level work?
For example, I have no idea how to get a “constitutional initiative” started, or “how connected” someone would need to be (which could be easier because of EA networks/EA aligned people).
Useful work on animal welfare policy seems like it would apply to other initiatives.
(I understand you are busy. Maybe it make sense to hire an assistant or use some other service to help write this up?)
The short version is that it’s pretty easy for anyone to launch one if you have $500k in funding, it’s really hard to get the wording of the constitutional amendment right, and the base rate of initiatives passing is just ~10% so it’s hard to actually be successful. I already published a similar write-up here, which explains some of the background, and there is a general overview of ballot measures.
I’m not planning to produce a longer write-up because I don’t expect me producing a write-up will directly enable useful work. I don’t expect more Swiss ballot initiatives to be especially promising (though there might be cool ideas around), and ballot initiatives work quite differently elsewhere. The basics of how Swiss ballot initiatives work are easy to google and well-documented in the media (including English ones). I also wasn’t involved with the campaigning, so I can’t really comment on that.
This project seems hard and important. Your work seems impactful, as you mentioned, it seems noticeable and impressive to 37% support of banning a harmful industry.
As Mo Putera also suggested, would it make sense to further write up what you and others did on this project?
Maybe a write up would add depth, communicate the challenges faced, publicize the project, as well as give some sense of how to get started on similar object level work?
For example, I have no idea how to get a “constitutional initiative” started, or “how connected” someone would need to be (which could be easier because of EA networks/EA aligned people).
Useful work on animal welfare policy seems like it would apply to other initiatives.
(I understand you are busy. Maybe it make sense to hire an assistant or use some other service to help write this up?)
The short version is that it’s pretty easy for anyone to launch one if you have $500k in funding, it’s really hard to get the wording of the constitutional amendment right, and the base rate of initiatives passing is just ~10% so it’s hard to actually be successful. I already published a similar write-up here, which explains some of the background, and there is a general overview of ballot measures.
I’m not planning to produce a longer write-up because I don’t expect me producing a write-up will directly enable useful work. I don’t expect more Swiss ballot initiatives to be especially promising (though there might be cool ideas around), and ballot initiatives work quite differently elsewhere. The basics of how Swiss ballot initiatives work are easy to google and well-documented in the media (including English ones). I also wasn’t involved with the campaigning, so I can’t really comment on that.