= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Wei_Dai comments on Open Thread, September 15-30, 2012 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (206)
I agree with everything in your comment. "Extremist" was a bad choice of word, maybe "single-minded" would be better. What I meant was, for example, if success at convincing people on any given political issue is linearly proportional to effort, you should spend all your effort arguing just one issue. More generally, if we look at all the causes in the world where the resulting utility to you depends on aggregated actions of many people and doesn't include a term for your personal contribution, the argument says you should support only one such cause.
But this isn't at all likely. For one thing you probably have a limited number of family and friends who highly trust your opinions, so your effectiveness (i.e., derivative of success) at convincing people on any given political issue will start out high and quickly take a dive as you spend more time on that issue.
I'm inclined to agree. A variant of the strategy would be to spend a lot of time arguing for other positions that are carefully selected to agree with and expand eloquently on the predicted opinions of the persuasion targets.