Since early October, I've been closely following Occupy Wall Street, and the other protests it spawned. At first I was interested in it as a sort of social experiment, I've never heard of long-term camping as a means of protest, and I was curious to see how it would work out. As it's grown though, I've been thinking that there might be a couple of things happening in the movements that might be of interest to rationalist communities. I've not seen much discussion of Occupy and its tactics on LessWrong, and I think that if nothing else, they're at least interesting, so I thought I'd open it up here.
Each Occupy movement is a hotbed of community experimentation. Things like General Assemblies (horizontally democratic voting discussions to make policy decisions) and ad-hoc sanitation, fire, and security committees of all shapes and sizes are popping up all over. What's more, as the events grow in size, and as police pressure on the events rises, these constructs are going to be tested more and more. We have a wildly varied gene pool, strong environmental constraints, and a fast mutation rate. It's a big evolutionary experiment in community formation. And I think if we look closely, we can find a whole lot of useful hacks to make stronger communities.
The whole thing's a great big ethical, emotional, and legal mess. There are issues with how private/public property laws intersect with freedom of speech, there are matters of what level of force is justifiable for police to keep peace in certain situations, there're issues of whether health and safety trump rights of protest, on and on and on. If nothing else, there's an interesting discussion there, about what a truly rational set of laws would look like, and whether or not the protesters or the police are justified in their actions.
And at the risk of sounding like a James Bond villain, there are some serious options for us to take over the world here. In the sense at least that the Occupy movements' goal is lasting societal change, and they have a good deal of momentum already. If members of the rationalist community moved to help them, they might have a fair deal more. And if we introduce them to rational ways of thinking, if we inject those memes into the discussion, there's some serious opportunity here to help stop the world being so insane.
At least that's my take on the whole thing. And I'm not exactly strong in the ways of rationality yet, still reading and re-reading the Sequences (I keep getting lost somewhere halfway into the QM sequence, I think I need to practice mathematics more to understand it on a more instinctive level) and I'd certainly appreciate the view of those Stronger than me.
I joined the BayAreaLessWrong group, but had to move out of the bay area shortly after, and right now I'm way out in the rurals, a long way from any of the meetups. I also imagine that there are a lot of LW readers in similar situations, or who can't regularly attend their local meetup for some reason. Therefore I think if we move the discussion out of LW, it should be to an online forum (easier to do international comparison and organization that way too.)
At the same time, we want to make sure that the LW community at large knows that conversation is happening, so we'd have to advertise the link to that thread/forum pretty well. And extend it to other rationalist communities if we can.
I agree that restricting these things to meetups is overly prohibitive. I agree that getting the community informed about a different forum for these topics is a difficult logistics problem.
I do still think that turning Less Wrong's attention to these kinds of emotional and political problems is likely to damage having a peaceful place to simply try to learn to be rational without distractions.
So that leaves us with a difficult logistics problem... but difficult is not the same as unsolvable. If you are interested in creating or finding a forum that woul... (read more)