Month: December 2018

All About Me, Politics

Knocking on a thousand more doors – political campaigns revisited

Posted on by Zach

“Hi, I’m Zach! I’m out here knocking on doors for Tenille Bonoguore, who is running to represent you in Ward 7. Do you have any questions for her, or concerns that you’d like her to know about…” is now a sentence I have said more than possibly any other.

Ontario had municipal elections on October 22nd. I looked at the bios of my local candidates, emailed all of them to find out more about their platforms, met with two of them, and ultimately decided that I wanted to help Tenille. Soon after that, I had been drafted to help manage canvassing efforts (although my colleague Tanya did more of that work than I did) and I was out knocking on doors again.

I knocked on countless doors and talked to an incredible variety of people. I don’t even know how many times I went out canvassing, but it was lots. More, I think, than the last time I did this.

This blog post outlines the differences (I found) between municipal politics and provincial politics, as well as the difference between volunteering for a campaign and being part of the core campaign team. I hope it can be informative for other people looking to get involved in politics any level.

The first thing I should mention about municipal campaigns is that they are (in many cities; Toronto is one notable exception) much smaller than campaigns for provincial or national government. If you’re volunteering for one, you will probably frequently meet and talk with the candidate. This was a big contrast to my volunteering at the provincial level, where I met the candidate only once (and that was brief), despite regularly canvassing on her behalf.

This, along with the non-partisan nature of many municipal elections means that volunteering at the municipal level is a much better way to get your voice heard. When there’s no party line to toe, your perspective (or a voter’s perspective as relayed by you) can change someone’s mind and lead to a (potential) city councillor voting differently.

Money also goes a lot further in municipal elections. Waterloo had a spending limit of around $12,000 (and I don’t know how many candidates even hit that). This means that donating a couple hundred dollars could make you one of the largest donors to a candidate. I don’t recommend this as a way of influencing policy – I didn’t see anyone act differently because of who donated and I sure as heck didn’t see donors get any sort of special “access”. Trying to get “access” is more or less pointless anyways; municipal boundaries are often small enough that a simple email is all you need to get real, detailed answers right from a candidate (or sitting counsellor).

That said donating is a great way to support a candidate you care about and help them get their message out.

The smaller scale of municipal campaigns also means that any past experience will probably make you the resident expert in something. When you volunteer for a provincial campaign, you’re a small cog in a big machine. When you volunteer municipally, it’s not like that.

Although not all campaigns need your help to the same degree. Incumbents almost never lose races municipally. Only one incumbent (out of 4 who stood for re-election) lost in Waterloo. In Cambridge, no incumbent counsellor lost re-election. Incumbent counsellors are also more likely to have an experienced existing team, potentially limiting the responsibility you could hold. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing! There’s lots to be said for learning skills from more experienced people.

Still, if your main goal is to maximize your contribution towards the election of candidates who you trust, you should focus on open seat races (a seat where there’s no incumbent, due to retirement, scandal, etc.). Second to open seat races might be challengers who are unusually good candidates (e.g. they have extensive community ties and recognition, or other political experience).

(This is speculative. Local conditions may vary. You, or a sitting counsellor you trust might be best positioned to figure out where you can do the most good)

The ease in which you can find yourself in a position of responsibility in a municipal campaign comes with one drawback if you accept it – it can be stressful to be responsible. I don’t want to discourage anyone from getting involved, but I did find even my limited leadership role a source of stress.

From my point of view, three things make being part of a campaign team stressful:

  1. It’s a lot of work; the emotion work of listening to people’s concerns can be emotionally draining and the walking physically taxing. This leads to you trying to do admin work when tired and worn-out.
  2. The outcome is uncertain. Many people like certainty and the combination of caring about a specific outcome a lot and being unsure if it will come about can wear you down.
  3. The buck stops with you. When you’re a simple canvasser, you just need to show up; everything else is taken care of. When people asked me to do things, they wouldn’t get done unless I took care of them.

Now there were two further factors that probably made this more stressful for me than the average volunteer. First, I was working around my blogging French practice. If I was exhausted from campaigning and didn’t work on them, I’d beat myself up about it. People who respond to exhaustion in healthier ways (hint: any other way) wouldn’t have this stressor.

Second, one of the other candidates may have been engaging in underhanded tactics. As a young idealist, I took this rather hard and wasted a lot of energy being angry about it.

Now, I want to be clear that me being such a ball of stress wasn’t the fault of the campaign or anyone else in it.

I read an article a few months ago (that I’m now no longer able to find) about a campaign run and almost entirely staffed by women in California. The women who worked on it talked about how supportive the environment was and how useful it was to have things like “what are times you need off for childcare?” and “please let us know if you feel like you’re taking on too much” asked explicitly at the start.

Tenille’s campaign wasn’t run entirely by women, but it was pretty close (there was only myself and her husband on the core team). And just like the campaign I read about in California, Tenille and Zivy (our campaign manager) did an excellent job checking in with everyone and doing their best to make sure no one took on too much. If I pushed myself past the point I should have, it wasn’t for lack of them trying to create a campaign that didn’t encourage that.

I don’t want to get all gender essentialist here, but working on this campaign made me genuinely believe that women might bring something important and different to the political process. Previously, I’d wanted to see gender balance in elected representatives for basic fairness reasons. Now I find myself even more committed to it.

I think there were two things that made the stress all worth it. The first was getting Tenille elected. I was continually floored by just how good she will be as a counsellor. She knows so much about how Waterloo’s weird two-level government works, has been very involved in the community, and has a journalist’s instinct for hard questions. The second upside is all the other people I met.

There’s this branch of decision theory called functional decision theory that claims the key component of decision making is the algorithm that people use to make decisions. Functional decision theory holds that you can coordinate with someone without talking to them, as long as you can make an accurate guess as to what their decision-making algorithm will be.

This is relevant to campaigning, because you can coordinate with other cool people with similar beliefs to all end in the same room. All you have to do is figure out what candidate they’ll volunteer for and get on her campaign team. Then you’ll all show up in that candidate’s living room, drink coffee, and figure out how to get her elected.

(This can also be a general piece of advice; if you want to meet people you’ll find cool, go do whatever you think a 10% cooler version of you would do. Being part of a core campaign team works so well for this because you’ll spend a lot of time with the other members and be in a social context that provides lots of stuff for you all to talk about. This beats being a canvassing volunteer, where you’ll only see the same people intermittently and have less of a context that encourages mingling.)

Most of the people I met through the campaign are in a rather different stage of life than I am; they aren’t all young techies like most of my other friends. Many of them had kids. Some of them even had jobs outside of tech! Despite the fact that our lives looked rather different, I found I really liked them. They were universally kind, thoughtful, and willing to listen to other perspectives.

(It is rare that I get to hear multiple people talk about why that had kids, what they expected to get out of it, and how they were surprised, but it turns out I really enjoy it when I do. Knowing people at other stages of life is great because you can get advice about your stage of life.)

We had a potluck and reunion a month after the campaign was over and I found myself giddy afterwards; it wasn’t just the stress of the campaign that made me like them. They’re just cool people.

The social scientist Jonathon Haidt wrote in The Righteous Mind that many of the experiences people highlight as the most meaningful in their life happen in the context of some shared struggle. Whatever the depredations, working together for some important cause feels good. In my last post on canvassing, I also quoted Hannah Arendt, who talked about the “extreme pleasure” of working in a group. She was right. Haidt is right as well. Canvassing, volunteering, trying to get someone elected – these are all things that you will look back on and feel proud about.

It’s for these reasons – and because politics needs good, dedicated, decent people – that I recommend becoming involved at any and all levels of government. You don’t have to run yourself. There are plenty of excellent candidates out there who need help, money, and time. If you’re new to politics, consider volunteering to knock on doors. If you’re an old hand, consider taking on a leadership role.

You might change the world. And you might make amazing friends.

Model, Quick Fix

When QALYs Are Wrong – Thoughts on the Gates Foundation

Posted on by Zach

Every year, I check in to see if we’ve eradicated polio or guinea worm yet. Disease eradications are a big deal. We’ve only successfully eradicated one disease – smallpox – so being so close to wiping out two more is very exciting.

Still, when I looked at how much resources were committed to polio eradication (especially by the Gates Foundation), I noticed they seemed incongruent with its effects. No polio eradication effort can be found among GiveWell’s top charities, because it is currently rather expensive to prevent polio. The amount of quality-adjusted life years (QALYs, a common measure of charity effectiveness used in the Effective Altruism community) you can save with a donation to preventing malaria is just higher than for polio.

I briefly wondered if it might not be better for all of the effort going to polio eradication to instead go to anti-malaria programs. After thinking some more, I’ve decided that this would be a grave mistake. Since I haven’t seen why explained anywhere else, I figured I’d share my thinking, so that anyone else having the same thought can see it.

A while back, it was much cheaper to buy QALYs using the polio vaccines. As recently as 1988, there were more than 350,000 cases of polio every year. It’s a testament to the excellent work of the World Health Organization and its partners that polio has become so much rarer – and therefore so much more expensive to prevent each new case of. After all, when there are few new cases, you can’t prevent thousands.

It is obviously very good that there are few cases of polio. If we decided that this was good enough and diverted resources towards treating other diseases, we might quickly find that this would no longer be the case. Polio could once again become a source of easy QALY improvements – because it would be running rampant in unvaccinated populations. When phrased this way, I hope it’s clear that polio becoming a source of cheap QALY improvements isn’t a good thing; the existence of cheap QALY improvements means that we’ve dropped the ball on a potentially stoppable disease.

If polio is eradicated for good, we can stop putting any effort into fighting it. We won’t need any more polio vaccines or any more polio monitoring. It’s for this reason that we’re much better off if we finish the eradication effort.

What I hadn’t realized was that a simple focus on present QALYs obscures the potential effects our actions can have on future QALYs. Abandoning diseases until treatments for them save many lives cheaply might look good for our short term effectiveness, but in the long term, the greatest gains come from following through with our eradication efforts, so that we can repurpose all resources from an eradicated disease to the fight against another, forever.

Link Post

Link Post – December 2018

Posted on by Zach

This true crime story ticks a lot of my boxes. The villain is created by the slow entropic decay of corruption and temptation, while the hero chose to prosecute white collar crimes because he wanted to go after crimes of greed, not desperation. I continue to believe that as a society, we’re too lenient on crimes of greed and too harsh on crimes of desperation, so it was easy to cheer the prosecution on.

This post claims that the pharmaceutical industry is soon going to fall apart because returns on R&D aren’t keeping up; all the low hanging fruit is gone and none of the harder to reach stuff is profitable. If anyone can give me a sense of how deeply I should be worried by this, I’ll be deeply appreciative.

If your restaurant is failing, or if you want to maximize your chances of success when you open a new location, you can apparently turn to restaurant consultants. I was especially appreciative of their weird specialized vocabulary.

The first commercial flight to circumnavigate the world did so accidentally, soon after the attack on Pearl Harbour made its return flight over the Pacific too dangerous. This is one of the cases where you want to yell at reality for being too unrealistic with its tropes; it features everything from an accidental passenger to a near miss in a mine field.

When I wrote about scrip stamp currencies, I joked that if they lasted more than a couple years, they’d melt down in some bizarre way. Alberta provides a real life example, where the scrip stamp system broke down within a month.

I’m young enough that I kind of just assumed the food item known as “the wrap” always existed. Turns out this is not the case! This article tracks the rise of wraps and the mania that surrounded them, as well as their inevitable fall and strange afterlife as a bland staple in catered lunches.

In 1994, Paul Krugman wrote the famous “Myth of Asia’s Miracle“, which claimed that Asian countries could not maintain their high growth rates indefinitely, especially because they lacked high productivity growth. 15 years later, another economist revisits this assertion and shows that massive re-investment can more than make up for slow productivity growth and drive strong overall growth. Turns out that in nation-building, quantity can have a quality all of its own.

LASIK side-effects worse, more common than most people realize.

I found a record of important political events from 1890 and I have to say, I’m glad we’ve come so far since the 19th century. Back then, the rest of the world was ganging up on America for taking a sudden protectionist turn, which doesn’t remind me of anything current at all.

I find I really enjoy it when judges are acerb, which makes this paper written by a judge about how annoying lawyers like catnip to me. It contains the line: ‘On mornings when I am scheduled to hear a family case, if someone greets me in the court house hallway with, “Have a good morning, Your Honour,” I typically reply, “Thank you, but I have other plans.” I adhere to the view that a legal system without Family Court is like Christianity without Hell.’, in the introduction, so you can tell right away that it’s going to be good.