There's one benefit in early activism, though: even if it doesn't have a major impact, it will allow you to credibly signal your interest in the cause and thus network with other people who are active in the field. This may have a considerable impact on your ability to achieve things related to the cause later on.
E.g. when I started getting interested in educational games, I wrote a bunch of blog posts about the topic (as I was studying it), and even though I haven't yet accomplished anything concrete, those posts helped me get on the radar of a bunch of people in the field who have offered useful advice. Similarly, even though my stint in politics some years back didn't really accomplish anything concrete, it did net me lots of new contacts who liked what I did do. The early conference articles on AI risk that I wrote weren't very significant by themselves but they helped me get to know the MIRI-(then SIAI-)folk better, and so on.
Interesting. This is one more reason for me to start a blog, getting actual exposure at a young age.
Suppose a high school student is deeply interested in a particular social or political issue and interested in doing something about the subject. What advice would you give him/her?
You may assume that the high school student is roughly similar in profile to the typical active LessWrong participant when he/she was in high school.
Some candidate social and political issues are listed below.
Topics of particular interest to the LessWrong audience:
Others that are more commonly perceived as important issues in the world today:
I asked a few people to opine on the last two issues on the list (in Facebook posts linked above) and the respondents generally focused on the acquisition of background knowledge rather than direct activism (i.e., read and learn rather than proselytize). Prima facie, this seems like sound advice. But it's quite possible that the set of people I interact with on Facebook is biased in favor of armchair stuff to the exclusion of activism. What do people here think?
Feel free to pick on one particular item in one of the above lists, or something not on either of the lists, and provide a specific answer for that. Or, provide general guidelines. Also feel free to specify additional assumptions (such as the country the student is in, or the student's other abilities or interests) and answer within the constraints of those assumptions.
PS: For some of the issues, you may feel that the issue is overrated or misguided (for instance, you may think that global warming is a non-issue, or that the status quo is optimal with respect to civil liberties or migration policy). In this case, your advice to the hypothetical high school student might largely be directed at making him/her come around to your point of view of the irrelevance of the issue. Comments suggesting you'd give advice of that sort are also welcome. If you'd simply suggest to the high school student to refrain from thinking about socially or politically charged topics entirely, that would also be interesting to know (cf. politics is the mindkiller).