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I'm not an American but I don't know anything about the OWS that would make it one bit more interesting to "rationalist communities" than any other political movement anywhere in the world. I don't find it any more interesting than the Tea Parties. For that matter, I find it significantly less interesting than the Pirate Party.

Modern-day leftwing movements are even significantly less rational than they used to be. Once upon a time, the english version of the Internationale said "Away with all your superstitions," and "No saviour from on high delivers,". In the 1990s Billy Bragga-revised version it says "Let racist ignorance be ended," and "Change will not come from above". The condemnation of superstition and religion is no longer politically convenient.

Do you think that the OWS participants would be open to ask for the tax-exemption of churches to be ended? They're allied to the religious left, so probably not.

And ofcourse even that level of rationality would be too little for the purposes that would be desired by the LessWrong community -- significant amount of money devoted to medical immortality research, cryonics, friendly artificial intelligence, etc, etc.

I don't know any leftwing political movement that'd be capable of debating even whether they seek equality and justice as an instrumental or terminal value. Or indeed any actually core issue that would make it remotely interesting to LessWrong.

See in context

-11

Should LessWrong be Interested in the Occupy Movements?

by DBreneman

25th Nov 2011

2 min read

-11

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.

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[-]ArisKatsaris13y180

Do you think that the OWS participants would be open to ask for the tax-exemption of churches to be ended? They're allied to the religious left, so probably not.

[-][anonymous]13y150

Since early October, I've been closely following Occupy Wall Street [...] 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 want to co-opt an explicitly non-political community to join in my favoured political movement.

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.

They’re at least interesting, but that isn’t why 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.

We are very, very strong monkey tribe. Join us, can’t you taste the power?

And I'm not exactly strong in the ways of rationality yet, still reading and re-reading the Sequences

Re-read this post.

[-]fortyeridania13y150

I voted this down because I disapprove of the sarcastic "translations" of OP. Such rhetoric antagonizes (me, anyway), which makes taking sides easier than it otherwise would be. There's some irony there.

Bravo for recommending a specific post for the author to read, though.

[-]RobertLumley13y60

Upvoted for having been downvoted for explaining a downvote. I don't think anyone should be downvoted for explaining a vote - that discourages their explanation, which isn't good.

[-][anonymous]13y50

Disingenuity deserves skewering. The attempt to dress up political recruitment as "interesting to rationalists", whilst claiming naivety, is disingenuous.

Incidentally I would say the same thing if someone asked if LWers should be interested in putting their weight behind the Tea Party movement (of whom it could also be said that their "goal is lasting societal change, and they have a good deal of momentum already") or any other political group.

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[-]DBreneman13y70

That wasn't my core intent, and I'm sorry I angered you by making it look like it was. Honestly I'm a bit of a pop-politics junkie. I also followed the tea party closely, as well as the campaigns of minor candidates like ron paul, because I found it interesting to see how well non-core-party rhetoric would work.

I guess I wanted LW to have a discussion page about it or something because we are a big powerful monkey tribe, and because the stupid ancestral part of my brain respects that, and wants to see what the tribe thinks of my interests. Putting in that little bit about potentially getting involved in the party was going too far, and I'm sorry about that.

[-][anonymous]13y60

Actually, a quick google search of your username leads me to believe you. I apologise for being harsh. Your post came across very badly because of that "little bit", which seemed like its focal point, though. Perhaps you were unaware of the strong taboo against overtly political discussion here.

I would suggest you sate your interest in politics and community organisation by reading books instead. Implying no necessary endorsement of any of these thinkers, here are some that you might find interesting: The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli is the original article; Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals should be relevant to understanding OWS; (selections from) Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks outlines progressive bureaucratic incrementalism; Mencius Moldbug's political writings offer a reactionary perspective; The Machiavellians by James Burnham is a lesser known classic of political science from the mid-20th century; and Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann discusses the interaction of journalism and democracy.

[-]Vladimir_M13y60

The Machiavellians by Robert Burnham is a lesser known classic of political science from the mid-20th century;

That would be James Burnham. The book certainly can't be recommended highly enough, though! The opening essay clicks particularly strongly with some of the central OB/LW themes about signaling.

[-][anonymous]13y00

Thanks, fixed. Duh.

[-]DBreneman13y30

Thanks for that, it looks like a great selection. The only one of those I've read before is The Prince, and that was a long, long time ago. I definitely need to track all of those down and give my brain a nice warm bath.

I'd read about politics being the mind killer and all that, and that makes my mistakes even more silly in retrospect. I think I wanted my main focus to be on looking at what's useful/worth discussing about the movements, and whether or not they're something that knowledge could be gained from. I thought that would be apolitical enough, but then I went and injected politics into it anyway.

[-][anonymous]13y00

I would suggest you sate your interest in politics and community organisation by reading books instead; you'll probably learn more that way in any case. Implying no necessary endorsement of any of these thinkers, here are some that you might find interesting: [The Prince] by Niccolo Machiavelli is the original article; Saul Alinsky's [Rules for Radicals] should be relevant to understanding OWS; Antonio Gramsci's [Prison Notebooks] outlines progressive bureaucratic incrementalism and the "long march through the institutions"; Mencius Moldbug's political writings offer a reactionary perspective; The Machiavellians by Robert Burnham is a lesser known classic of political science from the mid-20th century; and Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann discusses the interaction of journalism and democracy.

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[-]Richard_Kennaway13y40

I think this post is even more required reading. "A big evolutionary experiment in community formation" may just as easily produce monsters as any desirable sort of "stronger communities". In fact, maybe it's doing that already. (Thanks to Eugine_Nier for that link, and see more from that writer on the subject here.)

[-][anonymous]13y70

Or perhaps no evolutions for corporations or nanodevices. "Evolutionary" metaphors should be strictly secondary to substantive arguments regarding the direction of some community.

[-]lessdazed13y10

We are very, very strong monkey tribe. Join us, can’t you taste the power?

I interpreted that paragraph about being more, "Come. We show tree with young of third tribe. We show how raid third tribe for meat. Gift to you! No obligation join our tribe in fight," after reading:

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.

That last quote is the "We strong, join" one.

[-]Eugine_Nier13y100

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,

Skip it. It's the least important of all the sequences.

[-]DBreneman13y20

Oh I've already gone past and read Metaethics and the stuff past it. I just keep coming back to QM because I don't understand it, and I'd very much like to. Partially because I'm interested in how the world works, partially because I just don't like that I don't understand it.

[-]Shmi13y50

You can read it for fun (it is fun to read), but it's the most controversial one and it teaches you little about rationality. The whole thing has maybe one equation, and if you think you can understand QM without the relevant math, your critical thinking is not up to par. Basically, Harry's musings in MoR on partial transfiguration cover the essence of EY's views on QM, if you discard the many worlds advocacy.

[-]prase13y00

Do you understand QM (the mathematical formalism, how to make predictions etc.)? If not, the QM sequence is not the right text to learn it.

[-]DBreneman13y00

Loosely. I'm only entirely in my area with math up to trig and medium-level calculus. I can sometimes feel my earwax burning as I stumble through the more complex QM stuff. I have a few textbooks on it I bought awhile back, and I'm thumbing through them trying to get more comfortable with it, and looking to the QM sequence as a more 'human' understanding of what's going on under it all.

[-]prase13y50

Linear algebra is useful. Not necessarily on much advanced level, just notions of vector spaces, operators, eigenvalues and eigenvectors, commutativity of operators; this is the language of QM. Knowing this (and complex numbers, but that I assume you certainly know already) is enough to fully understand simplest QM systems described by observables attaining finite number of possible values. Unfortunately, this means spin, and spin can be very unintuitive for beginners because it has no exact classical counterpart (and the "partial" classical counterpart, angular momentum, is also not the easiest quantity to reason about). If you want to deal with observables with infinite (or even continuous) spectrum of values (which means position, momentum, energy), you have to know also a bit of calculus and basic differential equations, since you will have to upgrade the linear-algebra formalism to infinite-dimensional spaces, and vectors in such spaces are usually represented by functions.

An important note: to understand QM on gut level you don't need to know the whole deduction tree of calculus or linear algebra. Linear algebra and especially calculus courses are usually taught as mathematics, the definition-theorem-lemma-proof style. This illustrates well the consistency and elegance of the mathematical discipline, but unless you want to investigate some more subtle problems of QM, much of that is useless for your goal. You certainly should have an intuitive idea about what integration is, but you don't need to worry about difference between Riemann and Lebesgue integral or between weak and strong convergence of operator series; you should be able to diagonalise a matrix, but don't worry about Jordan blocks or pseudo-inverses.

[-][anonymous]13y40

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.

I can see why this would appeal to some LWers, like burning man, just colder weather.

[-]Larks13y30

p =0.95 you feel more sympathetic to OWS than the Tea Party Movement. If we're going to have posts about politics, they shouldn't have this much mutual information with the author's political views.

[-]RobertLumley13y00

p = 0.99. Should we make a prediction book?

[-]RobertLumley13y70

Actually, now that I think about it, that's too high. The probability of him being a troll alone should be at least 1%. I'm revising mine to 0.95.

[-][anonymous]13y30

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.

Mostly media hype in my opinion. My p for anything like that happening is below 1%. Them actually doing anything that would upset the "ruling class" must be orders of magnitudes lower, the VoI for me to actually determine how much isn't high enough to bother determining just how much lower.

[-]DBreneman13y-20

I'd not discount the movement's potential for change entirely. Consider the effect that the Tea Party has on politics right now. Are any of their candidates going to win? Probably not. But they have high priority advertising space in the political spectrum, and they can force ideas and discussion onto stage.

Likewise, while the Occupy movement probably won't reach even a tiny fraction of its goals, it most certainly will change the political discourse, and potentially upset a few elections.

[-][anonymous]13y20

Likewise, while the Occupy movement probably won't reach even a tiny fraction of its goals, it most certainly will change the political discourse, and potentially upset a few elections.

I can agree that is plausible.

Where I suspect we may disagree is that I am sceptical of democracy. I don't think upsetting or winning a few elections is something that amounts to meaningful or lasting societal change. Even political discourse, at least as it exists in the public sphere, might not matter much beyond the short term.

[-]DBreneman13y00

Agreed in full! On its own, changing the political discourse has only a short term effect. But it also serves to legitimize the protestors' viewpoints. Once you have serious discussion, you can start assembling voting blocs and existing candidates who do support your views (the progressive party seems a likely ally.) As the discussion grows more legitimate, and the voters grow more confident, your political allies gain more power. And they in turn can use that power to further spread the discussion.

You'd never have a big win, just lots of small wins, never taking a single leap of improbability too big to flip the whole thing over, until you're where you want to be.

[-][anonymous]13y30

But it also serves to legitimize the protestors' viewpoints.

This only works if you optimize for positive attention in media and academia. While I can see getting positive or very positive coverage from both, let me ask you, do you think the Ivy League professor or the media mogul, regardless of what noises they are making, really have it in their best interest something that corresponds to an idealised, rationally cleaned up version, of what OWSers really want? Even if the believe themselves to be pursuing something, what has LW taught us of self-deception and selection effects?

Once you have serious discussion, you can start assembling voting blocs and existing candidates who do support your views (the progressive party seems a likely ally.) As the discussion grows more legitimate, and the voters grow more confident, your political allies gain more power. And they in turn can use that power to further spread the discussion.

This is essentially part of the theory behind why a democratic process, or at least modern parliamentary democracy, should work. It is here that I also think the failure point is. I think there are systemic issues with which opinions and programs can and which can not cascade in this fashion.

[-]DBreneman13y00

"do you think the Ivy League professor or the media mogul, regardless of what noises are making, really have it in their best interest something that corresponds to an idealised, rationally cleaned up version, of what OWSers really want? "

Of course not, which is where I think most of the difficulty in getting democratic systems to work comes in. It's hard to communicate the will of the majority effectively, and it's hard to tell on which points the leaders diverge sometimes. This ends up making bills that aren't what you want, and making them frequently.

I'll have to think of if there are any ways to change that, some hack to reduce the complexity of the task to something doable. I'll also have to think of that sometimes when it's not 2:00 AM. I'll be thinking about this though, and I hope other people who stop by will too.

[-]fortyeridania13y20

Voted down in agreement with Phlebas and the first paragraph of ArisKatsaris.

Bringing up politics on LessWrong is almost always a bad idea.

[-]lessdazed13y20

The whole thing's a great big...emotional...mess

This factor makes it not an ideal subject for exercises in learning how to think. I understand the appeal, as that trait is what makes them areas in which deliberating and debiasing could be applied most fruitfully. But the problem is almost prohibitive.

[-]DBreneman13y10

You're right, there are great big swaths of the Occupy movement that are too prone to becoming sides to take, or teams to cheer for, and would take far too much time and attention to unravel for the utility they'd provide. But I don't think the problem's entirely prohibitive, at least not all of its parts. Broad discussions on whether the protests' methods are moral, or whether their cause is just, those probably are too messy. But I think that problems that the protests bring up that we'd not see in normal day-to-day society, like the increasing militarization of police forces in the US of late, they could be useful discussions to have.

[-]magfrump13y20

If I recall correctly I saw a facebook update from Louie Helm stating that he was going to be at Occupy UC Berkeley.

I would suggest that, yes, following the whole occupy movement is important for LessWrongians, and, yes, there is a giant community organization experiment occurring with vital lessons to be learned, and that, yes, summarizing the lessons of these things would make a great sequence of posts and that for that to happen at least someone has to get involved, and that getting involved has the potential to be of great instrumental value.

On the other hand, it is somewhat accepted that talking politics here is likely to bring down the level of the discussion, bring in folk who aren't interested in rationality, and generally is a good way to make Less Wrong more wrong.

I think this would be an excellent topic for meetups, it might be a good idea to try to bring a large LW contingent to another forum for discussing the issues, but I do think divorcing that from the main content of this site is still a good idea.

[-]Kevin13y60

I also went, brought bubble machines, was continuously followed around by mainstream photographers and brought joy to thousands of people. It's amazing what $40 and a little bit of agency does to a protest.

We, as rationalists, don't particularly care about the politics, but I love the aesthetics of protest and political street theater. I think a lot of the movement people agree with me, but aren't self-aware enough to notice.

[-]DBreneman13y00

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.

[-]magfrump13y00

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 would be appropriate for political topics, especially concerning taking actual real world actions and coordination, I would be happy to participate or even to help writing material or researching links to get some things going.

[-]DBreneman13y00

We should probably wait and see what kind of response this initial proposal gets over the course of a day or so, to see if there are people interested in discussing it further, and to see if there are potential actions to coordinate. After that, setting up an alternate forum is pretty easy (Maybe a community blog over on blogspot or something, or even just a facebook page would do)

As for advertising, I don't know... I'm very new to discussing things here on LW, I don't really know what does and doesn't work in drawing community attention.

[-]magfrump13y00

Agreed, waiting for a larger response is a good idea, and might bring attention from people who do know how to advertise things.

If that doesn't happen, I'd also be happy to discuss things in PMs or over e-mail or skype if you just want someone (rational?) to talk to and having a larger discussion seems unlikely.

[-]Eugine_Nier13y10

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.

Sorry but the position of being the shadowy group secretly in control of the occupy movement is already taken.

[-]Kevin13y00

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/28/111128fa_fact_schwartz?currentPage=all

[+]DBreneman13y-50

[-]buybuydandavis13y00

In the sense at least that the Occupy movements' goal is lasting societal change ...

Change is anything different than now; it isn't much of a goal.

A blind monkey could see that something was wrong with trillions of dollars of bailouts and debt assumption. If you're not really identifying what that something is, I don't think you're adding much to the discussion. As it is, the one sided attack on corporate culpability for the mess, while ignoring government's hand in it, leaves me to conclude that any diagnosis they come up with will miss the mark.

The movements I think are worth looking at are the ones that create value, routing around current institutions. Basically all the open source efforts to actually make things by harnessing the cognitive surplus of an increasingly educated and connected world.

Doing is more important than squawking, as long as the regime isn't completely oppressive. The increasing maker culture, bringing technology and design to solve problems, is more transformative than politics as performance self entertainment.

[-]magfrump13y50

I downvoted this comment because I feel it dives too far into the specific politics of the situation, without being constructive in specific ways. That makes me think it is likely to increase the amount of mind-killing, without really raising the level of the discussion.

EDIT: I am curious why this was downvoted. I was trying to be more polite than offering a simple downvote by offering information which could be used to create more productive comments. If I haven't done that well I'd appreciate a response in kind rather than simple downvotes.

[-]RobertLumley13y10

Upvoted again.

[-]DBreneman13y00

Yeah I realized that myself shortly after writing it, mostly the 'blind monkey' bit.

[-]Eugine_Nier13y40

Yeah I realized that myself shortly after writing it, mostly the 'blind monkey' bit.

What do you mean here? You're not the one who wrote that comment.

[-]DBreneman13y20

I mean that I shouldn't have snarked back like that using that language, it was immature. Sorry about that.

... Wow I seem to be getting a lot of downvotes.

[-]DBreneman13y-20

Actually, a lot of the movements have addressed the political source of the problems. Some of them locally (A lot of Occupy Oakland's rhetoric has been against the decisions of the city trade council and its mayor) some of them more universally (occupyDC has drafted a deficit/jobs bill in rough, and is currently petitioning and protesting to get it through, http://october2011.org/99 )

And the squawking itself also serves a purpose. Because a blind monkey sees a lot better than the legislative bodies of most modern nations, if the rhetoric and bills and such are any indication. Sometimes you do have to create a lot of noise to draw attention to a problem.

[-][anonymous]13y00

Because a blind monkey sees a lot better than the legislative bodies of most modern nations

This statement in itself deserves an up vote.

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[-][anonymous]13y-10

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.

This would be very interesting and I think if we are careful we could pull it off. The problem is the very careful bit. You know politics being the mindkiller and all.

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