I participated in politics at one point, getting 198 votes at the Finnish Parliamentary elections and being a board member of the Finnish Pirate Party for a while. I suspect that I would’ve stood a reasonable chance of eventually getting elected into some office if I’d kept up at it—the Pirates don’t look like they’ll be elected, but there exists a not-too-horrible more-mainstream party whose members have led me to understand that they’d be glad to have me if I was up for it. But there are a number of reasons for why I chose not to pursue that career option further, including:
My basic nature is that of a scientist—if there’s a problem in society, figure out what needs to be done to solve it, implement that change, and move on to the next problem. In politics, you figure out what needs to be done to solve a problem, and then spend the next several years talking to people and trying to convince them that this is the right answer, having to start the explanation basically from scratch each time you talk with a new person. I found this tedious.
A preference for at least some level of free speech—it’s not particularly uncommon for a politician to make the headlines because they made an ill-considered joke in a Facebook conversation. I don’t want to end up in a position where I need to run an extra check on everything that I write in public, to make sure that there’s nothing about it that could be used to attack me or my party.
I dislike talking to strangers on the phone, and journalists asking for interviews tend to rather frequently call you on the phone. I’m also not good at thinking up quick coherent answers to unanticipated questions when under pressure, such as when doing a live debate or interview.
I didn’t specifically ask them that question, but I believe that they’ve liked my social media activity and my writings: wrote a bunch of blog posts in Finnish when I was campaigning, also a book on the topic of copyright reform. I guess they considered my writings persuasive and well-reasoned. Also some of them used to be former Pirates who shifted parties when they saw that things weren’t working out.
I don’t know if we’d actually disagree on that much: e.g. the party is generally aligned with liberal values, which I tend to endorse, and has valuable stuff on its platform, like supporting a universal basic income. The specific people who’ve tried to attract me have also all been associated with a subgroup within the party that’s explicitly focused on science- and reason-based decision-making. Of course there are also points of disagreement, but that’s unavoidable when dealing with other people.
In politics, you figure out what needs to be done to solve a problem, and then spend the next several years talking to people and trying to convince them that this is the right answer, having to start the explanation basically from scratch each time you talk with a new person. I found this tedious.
Maybe there are higher-level solutions for this. For example, write a text explaining the topic, make a youtube video, or hire other people to do the explaining for you.
On the issue of copyright reform, I did try writing a number of texts, and when I came to the conclusion that I needed to cover more inferential distance than was possible in isolated texts, a book. The book was favorably received, with an extended and generally positive review in Finland’s biggest newspaper among other things, but didn’t ultimately seem to affect the landscape of the discussion very much, since only a limited amount of people actually bothered reading it. Maybe if we’d pushed it more aggressively in online discussions and such it could’ve had a bigger impact.
Politics is a lot about speaking with people and convincing them. If Kaj would join a major mainstream party and wants them to adopt his ideas then he has to talk face to face to many people in that party to convince them. Then he has to understand key objections of them and slightly change his pitch to address those objections.
Political journalist also are on deadlines. They call on the phone and want you to call them back in a few hours and then you have to talk to them. For a person who doesn’t like speaking on the phone that’s annoying.
Fortunately the kind of journalists who interviewed me for Quantified Self, weren’t under tight deadlines so I could afford to wait a few days or a week to talk to a journalist but especially at the beginning the prospect of directly having to talk to journalists is taxing.
It’s also the kind of talking where you are not allowed to get a single sentence wrong, because the journalist might quote that sentence. You have a message that’s more complex then the journalist can write down in his article. That means you have to dumb it down somewhere or else the journalist will.
As a member of a political party you not only have to take your own views into account and speak from them, but speak from the current consensus inside your party. Doing that live is a challenging task. Not impossible to learn but I can understand when Kaj thinks that wouldn’t be fun for him.
I participated in politics at one point, getting 198 votes at the Finnish Parliamentary elections and being a board member of the Finnish Pirate Party for a while. I suspect that I would’ve stood a reasonable chance of eventually getting elected into some office if I’d kept up at it—the Pirates don’t look like they’ll be elected, but there exists a not-too-horrible more-mainstream party whose members have led me to understand that they’d be glad to have me if I was up for it. But there are a number of reasons for why I chose not to pursue that career option further, including:
My basic nature is that of a scientist—if there’s a problem in society, figure out what needs to be done to solve it, implement that change, and move on to the next problem. In politics, you figure out what needs to be done to solve a problem, and then spend the next several years talking to people and trying to convince them that this is the right answer, having to start the explanation basically from scratch each time you talk with a new person. I found this tedious.
A preference for at least some level of free speech—it’s not particularly uncommon for a politician to make the headlines because they made an ill-considered joke in a Facebook conversation. I don’t want to end up in a position where I need to run an extra check on everything that I write in public, to make sure that there’s nothing about it that could be used to attack me or my party.
I dislike talking to strangers on the phone, and journalists asking for interviews tend to rather frequently call you on the phone. I’m also not good at thinking up quick coherent answers to unanticipated questions when under pressure, such as when doing a live debate or interview.
What did they see in you? If I may ask. You would disagree with your fellow party members on quite a lot of things, I’d imagine.
I didn’t specifically ask them that question, but I believe that they’ve liked my social media activity and my writings: wrote a bunch of blog posts in Finnish when I was campaigning, also a book on the topic of copyright reform. I guess they considered my writings persuasive and well-reasoned. Also some of them used to be former Pirates who shifted parties when they saw that things weren’t working out.
I don’t know if we’d actually disagree on that much: e.g. the party is generally aligned with liberal values, which I tend to endorse, and has valuable stuff on its platform, like supporting a universal basic income. The specific people who’ve tried to attract me have also all been associated with a subgroup within the party that’s explicitly focused on science- and reason-based decision-making. Of course there are also points of disagreement, but that’s unavoidable when dealing with other people.
Maybe there are higher-level solutions for this. For example, write a text explaining the topic, make a youtube video, or hire other people to do the explaining for you.
On the issue of copyright reform, I did try writing a number of texts, and when I came to the conclusion that I needed to cover more inferential distance than was possible in isolated texts, a book. The book was favorably received, with an extended and generally positive review in Finland’s biggest newspaper among other things, but didn’t ultimately seem to affect the landscape of the discussion very much, since only a limited amount of people actually bothered reading it. Maybe if we’d pushed it more aggressively in online discussions and such it could’ve had a bigger impact.
Politics is a lot about speaking with people and convincing them. If Kaj would join a major mainstream party and wants them to adopt his ideas then he has to talk face to face to many people in that party to convince them. Then he has to understand key objections of them and slightly change his pitch to address those objections.
Political journalist also are on deadlines. They call on the phone and want you to call them back in a few hours and then you have to talk to them. For a person who doesn’t like speaking on the phone that’s annoying.
Fortunately the kind of journalists who interviewed me for Quantified Self, weren’t under tight deadlines so I could afford to wait a few days or a week to talk to a journalist but especially at the beginning the prospect of directly having to talk to journalists is taxing.
It’s also the kind of talking where you are not allowed to get a single sentence wrong, because the journalist might quote that sentence. You have a message that’s more complex then the journalist can write down in his article. That means you have to dumb it down somewhere or else the journalist will.
As a member of a political party you not only have to take your own views into account and speak from them, but speak from the current consensus inside your party. Doing that live is a challenging task. Not impossible to learn but I can understand when Kaj thinks that wouldn’t be fun for him.