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.
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.