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Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

What do you suggest then? Resigning ourselves to apathy would seem to play right into their hand. Obviously a lot more than a petition is necessary to effect change, but it seems a reasonable place to start.

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> Obviously a lot more than a petition is necessary to effect change, but it seems a reasonable place to start.

If you live in the United States you have a congressperson. Contacting them is a much more reasonable place to start.

Okay, but a petition is a public focal point that takes 30 seconds to contribute too. The cynical attitude "I'm not going to do this because it won't help" is probably a greater negative to one's personal effect on the cause than however much time it might waste.

The petitions are ignored precisely because it takes so little effort to do. I'd also imagine that lots of people say 'oh, I signed that petition, I don't need to do anything else'.

I like the idea that of there being some easy middle ground between doing nothing and going to the effort of calling/emailing/writing a congressperson. If the person you were responding to is correct and nothing of consequence has come of these petitions, that is not what this is.

Venting that effort into something that doesn't work at all does not strike me as a net positive.

With the current legislature, a local vocal group of constituents is a much more effective means of citizen-government communication than an internet survey that takes 30 seconds to contribute to.

Why is it either-or?

A more reasonable place to start appears to be making a lot of money and then using it to lobby relentlessly.

Fact: you'll care less about this stuff once you have a lot of money.

I suspect a neurochemical basis for this - when one is rich and in the higher echelons of society, it goes to reason that their brains will have more serotonin swimming around due to a) better food and b) more socialising.

Having higher levels of serotonin makes us more blind to unfairness:

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/320/5884/1739.abstract

> We observed the effects of manipulating 5-HT function on behavior in the ultimatum game, where players must decide whether to accept or reject fair or unfair monetary offers from another player. Participants with depleted 5-HT levels rejected a greater proportion of unfair offers, but not fair offers, without showing changes in mood, fairness judgment, basic reward processing, or response inhibition.

Take the long view. Organize and build a large, broad-based coalition of support and advocate strategically and creatively for the change you want to see. It's the only thing that ever works.

And I'd argue that that's a good thing. Being able to get an official comment and maybe some future consideration of the issue from the White House is one thing, but being able to substantially impact policy by getting a relatively small number of people (in Internet terms) to spend a minute signing an online petition doesn't seem like a high enough threshold. Requiring the kind of effort you're talking about doesn't guarantee positive change either, but I think it helps ensure people really want the change their advocating.

I'm sure some people like the idea of being able to successfully demand that individuals in government be fired through the petition system, but that seems like a Pandora's box if ever there was one.

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