On 22 January 2012 23:09, Mike Godwin <mnemonic(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 3:00 PM, Thomas Dalton
<thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I disagree - the null hypothesis is that the gain
from lobbying isn't
worth the cost, not that the gain is zero. (Cost includes far more
than just monetary cost, of course.)
Ah, then the proper experiment would have been for Wikipedians not to
black out enwiki for a day and see how effective that was in changing
the debate?
Of course not. If you were going to do that kind of experiment, you
would need to both blackout Wikipedia and not black it out and compare
the two. Obviously, that isn't possible. Not everything lends itself
to such simple experimentation.
Because, as you know, the blackout did entail a
significant non-monetary costs.
Of course, and very difficult ones to quantify, which makes analysing
this sort of thing even harder.
The trick, of course, is that political
experimentation of this sort
is similar to human experimentation generally -- the risk is that the
experiment, for all you learn from it, leads to negative consequences
down the line. My own view is that the blackout was unquestionably the
right thing to do, and I'm hugely proud to be associated in my own
small way with the people who took the risk of making our voices heard
this time.
That's a good analogy. The approach often taken with studies about
humanity is not to do experiments (because they can be harmful) but
instead to examine things that have already happened or are happening
anyway.
You could make some progress in working out how effective lobbying is
for non-profits by comparing countries where such lobbying is common
and countries where it isn't, or by comparing sub-sectors where it is
common and sub-sectors where it isn't. It wouldn't surprise me if
someone has done some research like that. As an expert on the subject,
I was hoping you would know about some.