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The power of exponential growth: Will you commit to calling just five friends? [1]

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Date: 2024-10-26  

In middle school I read a series of books “Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators.” It was sort of like the Hardy Boys, except their were three of them and they were also middle-school age, and one of them was like a young pudgy MacGyver: Jupiter Jones.

Jupiter devised a powerful way to get a message out, something he called the “ghost to ghost” network. It leveraged the power of exponential growth. When a message had to be broadcast to a large number of others, each of the three investigators called five friends, who called five friends, who called five friends, etc. After five rounds, the message would reach 9,375 others. Another round would be five times more and so on. After eight rounds, it would be over a million others.

So here is what I am asking you to do. Right now, start calling your friends, until you can get five of them to commit to voting (for Harris) and to commit to calling five friends that they will ask to commit to voting and so on. If I can just get five of you to start, after 9 rounds we will have almost two million contacts. After 10. rounds, over 10 million. With two rounds per day, we can achieve that coverage in five days.

Asking someone that you know directly to make a commitment is powerful. Not everyone will honor the commitment and not everyone will be able to find five friends to also make the commitment. And many will have already committed to voting for Harris.

But. Asking for and getting a commitment will be that little extra nudge come Election Day to help everyone to actually get to the polls. Getting a call from a friend is more powerful than getting a call from an out of state stranger. It won’t take many extra nudges to tip things.

Great things can happen if everyone does their small part. Assume that you can count on everyone else also doing their small part (this is the opposite of the “optimal” choice in the prisoner’s dilemma).

So please, can I count on at least five of you to vote for Kamala Harris? Can I count on you to call five of your friends ask them to commit to casting a vote for Kamala Harris and to call five friends and get them to make the same commitment?

Or, call more than five. Call until you have five new commitments. But however you can help, call! And call now!

Now I am off to make my calls.

PS. Don’t call any Trump supporters, and if you do happen to get one, don't try to change their mind. Just move on. This is purely about getting out the vote for Kamala Harris.

PPS. If you don’t believe me, believe Douglas Hofstadter: Metamagical Themas: Sanity and Survival. For TL;DR skip to the second to last paragraph. He determined that fifteen minutes per day by enough people would be enough to make a difference. Fifteen minutes! Just the amount of time it will take you to call five friends.

PPPS. The exponential growth above assumes at each round, five unique people were contacted who had not been contacted yet.

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