Fun method of becoming president
6/15/18
709am
Fun and productive way of running for president (fun and productive means you do something that is st the same time fun and also improves you on net, following the thinking of many others e.g. martin seligman, Steve pavlina, Aaron burr (!), etc.
Most people I think would find running for president unpleasant. I’ll imagine a Strategy that fits the average person as I imagine him or her.
So fun stuff that would help the average person run for president would be reading up on presidential topics which is just about anything. Read about topics you enjoy. Skip what is boring or incomprehensible (following nassim taleb’s study approach,and Scott Adams advice about learning more about news, etc probably).
It also seems like most people don’t like to argue, which seems like a big part of politics. Since the arguing might negate the fun of politics for the average person they might aim to avoid arguing. That would mean not doing debates or talking with confrontational reporters as a policy. It also might mean focusing on issues that people don’t get too worked up about. Punt on all the hot issues of the day with some standard remark about leaving the debate up to congress since they are better at representing their constituents and negotiating something reasonable to all stakeholders than the president would be at trying to put something together and pushing it through. The president could act as an honest broker in those situations and to do that it would be good to remain neutral so all sides feel they’re getting fair treatment. Something like that.
6/16/18
1215pm
How do you campaign? I don’t actually know much about the nittygritty of campaigning, but for the sake of speculation, i’ll go with my gut. You’ll have to file i guess. I think you have to file in multiple states to get on the ballot. I think you have to get enough people to sign a petition in order to be on the ballot in various states.
None of that sounds super fun. I guess you’d need to get some people supporting your campaign to help you with all of that. Since you don’t want to do anything that isn’t fun, or you want to somehow transmute the boring but necessary into the fun, you’ll need to figure out how to navigate all this boring stuff. Simplest solution is perhaps to get a volunteers to do it. The problem becomes recursive then, though--getting volunteers could potentially be boring too.
So i guess the focus would be in first figuring out how to get followers who will work on your campaign, and doing that in a fun way.
I guess people will volunteer for a presidential campaign if they think you have some chance of winning, or making a statement, or gaining power to influence the course of the election--perhaps getting the winning candidate of a primary or presidential election to move more in an agreeable way--i’ve probably heard others make this observation too.
So i guess you have to come up with a message and deliver it to a large enough audience that appeals to enough people to get you some volunteers so the campaign can get some personnel. I wonder if the average person avoiding controversial topics would actually be able to appeal to anyone.
Possibly a lot of people find the partisanship tiresome, so they might be somewhat attractive to a campaign that avoids hot button issues and focuses on new stuff that people don’t really have strong opinions about one way or the other.
On the other hand, lots of average-ish people are pretty partisan and okay with it, i guess. It’s just i don’t imagine maybe average-ish people very often being comfortable in a public controversy, which i guess is why i imagine they would wish to avoid them, even if they are personally pretty opinionated on matters.
So i imagine the campaign just grows or falls based on what the candidate, being an average-ish person, finds interesting to talk about in the non-controversial category of stuff. You could imagine an elon-musk type running a campaign focusing on potential technological fixes that cut tricky gordian knots in politics and that people haven’t really developed partisan attitudes on, e.g. musk’s mission to colonize mars to escape world-killing catastrophes (I've probably heard others make something like this argument too). You maybe propose outside-the-box solutions of interest, or look for them, and when they get controversial you shift to some new outside-the-box approach to keep ahead of controversy.
But the average person maybe might not want to take that approach. Out-side-the-box policy solutions are maybe going to be boring to talk about for most people. Another approach for the average fun-and-productive candidate is to talk about what they please, controversial or not, and just avoid debating with people who don’t like it. So they don’t dodge the controversial issues so much as the people who want to debate with them, and thereby escape what i imagine is the normal person’s tendency to avoid really public conflict.
The approach here would be to talk about what you like to talk about with people who like it, and avoid or cut-off any debate or criticism. This kind of approach is sort of occupying a bubble among people who agree with you and trying to expand the bubble size. Preach to the choir. Find more choirs. Don’t do debates. Don’t do interviews unless you know an interviewer is friendly. Or walk out if you get tricked.
It reminds me of the oil-spot strategy that military strategists i guess have contemplated and tried in some circumstances. The idea as i understand it, is to develop bases and then expand them--i think this was proposed for the vietnam war and was maybe used in the malaysian insurgency, if i remember my reading on it right. I think it maybe has a questionable track-record.
This approach of expanding the bubble also reminds me of the sampling method of ‘snowball sampling’, also called, from my reading, ‘chain referral’ and i think maybe some other stuff. The approach is used to examine populations that would be hard to get to by random sampling. You find a member of the population you want to study--the example i saw was drug-users--oh, also jazz musicians. Probably some overlap there. But anyway, you find a member of the group you want to study and then you ask the member to tell you about more people they know who are members of the population. And you ask those people who they know, and so on.
So that approach might help you find people who agree with you on a lot, or enough, i guess.
Another interesting question i guess at this point is, if you are able to get volunteers for your campaign, how do you handle discussion of operations within the campaign?
An initial thought, which i don’t know if it will be useful, is to bracket intense debate about operations. Should we do x or y strategy? We’re getting angry at each other and this is no fun, so let’s put the debate aside and see if we can bypass it (bypassing is inspired by basil liddell hart’s ‘indirect approach’, sun tzu and the ‘infiltration tactics’ developed in world war i, blitzkrieg--others too maybe).
But you could generalize the fun and productive approach to the campaign as a whole--not only you but the campaign workers should use the fun and productive method themselves. People should only do campaign work that is fun for them. Or they should only do campaign work in a way that is fun for them. Or as much as practically possible. 1259pm.
709am
Fun and productive way of running for president (fun and productive means you do something that is st the same time fun and also improves you on net, following the thinking of many others e.g. martin seligman, Steve pavlina, Aaron burr (!), etc.
Most people I think would find running for president unpleasant. I’ll imagine a Strategy that fits the average person as I imagine him or her.
So fun stuff that would help the average person run for president would be reading up on presidential topics which is just about anything. Read about topics you enjoy. Skip what is boring or incomprehensible (following nassim taleb’s study approach,and Scott Adams advice about learning more about news, etc probably).
It also seems like most people don’t like to argue, which seems like a big part of politics. Since the arguing might negate the fun of politics for the average person they might aim to avoid arguing. That would mean not doing debates or talking with confrontational reporters as a policy. It also might mean focusing on issues that people don’t get too worked up about. Punt on all the hot issues of the day with some standard remark about leaving the debate up to congress since they are better at representing their constituents and negotiating something reasonable to all stakeholders than the president would be at trying to put something together and pushing it through. The president could act as an honest broker in those situations and to do that it would be good to remain neutral so all sides feel they’re getting fair treatment. Something like that.
6/16/18
1215pm
How do you campaign? I don’t actually know much about the nittygritty of campaigning, but for the sake of speculation, i’ll go with my gut. You’ll have to file i guess. I think you have to file in multiple states to get on the ballot. I think you have to get enough people to sign a petition in order to be on the ballot in various states.
None of that sounds super fun. I guess you’d need to get some people supporting your campaign to help you with all of that. Since you don’t want to do anything that isn’t fun, or you want to somehow transmute the boring but necessary into the fun, you’ll need to figure out how to navigate all this boring stuff. Simplest solution is perhaps to get a volunteers to do it. The problem becomes recursive then, though--getting volunteers could potentially be boring too.
So i guess the focus would be in first figuring out how to get followers who will work on your campaign, and doing that in a fun way.
I guess people will volunteer for a presidential campaign if they think you have some chance of winning, or making a statement, or gaining power to influence the course of the election--perhaps getting the winning candidate of a primary or presidential election to move more in an agreeable way--i’ve probably heard others make this observation too.
So i guess you have to come up with a message and deliver it to a large enough audience that appeals to enough people to get you some volunteers so the campaign can get some personnel. I wonder if the average person avoiding controversial topics would actually be able to appeal to anyone.
Possibly a lot of people find the partisanship tiresome, so they might be somewhat attractive to a campaign that avoids hot button issues and focuses on new stuff that people don’t really have strong opinions about one way or the other.
On the other hand, lots of average-ish people are pretty partisan and okay with it, i guess. It’s just i don’t imagine maybe average-ish people very often being comfortable in a public controversy, which i guess is why i imagine they would wish to avoid them, even if they are personally pretty opinionated on matters.
So i imagine the campaign just grows or falls based on what the candidate, being an average-ish person, finds interesting to talk about in the non-controversial category of stuff. You could imagine an elon-musk type running a campaign focusing on potential technological fixes that cut tricky gordian knots in politics and that people haven’t really developed partisan attitudes on, e.g. musk’s mission to colonize mars to escape world-killing catastrophes (I've probably heard others make something like this argument too). You maybe propose outside-the-box solutions of interest, or look for them, and when they get controversial you shift to some new outside-the-box approach to keep ahead of controversy.
But the average person maybe might not want to take that approach. Out-side-the-box policy solutions are maybe going to be boring to talk about for most people. Another approach for the average fun-and-productive candidate is to talk about what they please, controversial or not, and just avoid debating with people who don’t like it. So they don’t dodge the controversial issues so much as the people who want to debate with them, and thereby escape what i imagine is the normal person’s tendency to avoid really public conflict.
The approach here would be to talk about what you like to talk about with people who like it, and avoid or cut-off any debate or criticism. This kind of approach is sort of occupying a bubble among people who agree with you and trying to expand the bubble size. Preach to the choir. Find more choirs. Don’t do debates. Don’t do interviews unless you know an interviewer is friendly. Or walk out if you get tricked.
It reminds me of the oil-spot strategy that military strategists i guess have contemplated and tried in some circumstances. The idea as i understand it, is to develop bases and then expand them--i think this was proposed for the vietnam war and was maybe used in the malaysian insurgency, if i remember my reading on it right. I think it maybe has a questionable track-record.
This approach of expanding the bubble also reminds me of the sampling method of ‘snowball sampling’, also called, from my reading, ‘chain referral’ and i think maybe some other stuff. The approach is used to examine populations that would be hard to get to by random sampling. You find a member of the population you want to study--the example i saw was drug-users--oh, also jazz musicians. Probably some overlap there. But anyway, you find a member of the group you want to study and then you ask the member to tell you about more people they know who are members of the population. And you ask those people who they know, and so on.
So that approach might help you find people who agree with you on a lot, or enough, i guess.
Another interesting question i guess at this point is, if you are able to get volunteers for your campaign, how do you handle discussion of operations within the campaign?
An initial thought, which i don’t know if it will be useful, is to bracket intense debate about operations. Should we do x or y strategy? We’re getting angry at each other and this is no fun, so let’s put the debate aside and see if we can bypass it (bypassing is inspired by basil liddell hart’s ‘indirect approach’, sun tzu and the ‘infiltration tactics’ developed in world war i, blitzkrieg--others too maybe).
But you could generalize the fun and productive approach to the campaign as a whole--not only you but the campaign workers should use the fun and productive method themselves. People should only do campaign work that is fun for them. Or they should only do campaign work in a way that is fun for them. Or as much as practically possible. 1259pm.
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