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FiftyTwo comments on Open Thread, September 23-29, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I have a half written post about the cultural divisions in the environmentalist movement that I intend to put on a personal blog in the nearish future. (Tl;Dr there "Green" groups who advocate different things in a very emotional/moral way vs. "Scientific" environmentalists)
I've been thinking about comparisons between the structure of that movement and how future movements might tackle other potential existential risks, specifically UFAI. Would people be interested in a post here specifically discussing that?
If you haven't yet read Neal Stephenson's Zodiac, I recommend it.
As an aside, I find it convenient to think of a significant part of environmentalism as purely religious movement.
Thats a good analogy. By recycling plastic bottles you are displaying your virtue, whatever the extent of the practical consequences.
Yes. As I see, a lot of Greens are Misanthropes. Do you cover this aspect?
From what I can tell, it's actually a teeny-tiny number of people, but they get disproportional media coverage for reasons that should be obvious considering the interests of those doing the covering.
FWIW, while I've not met many misanthropic greens in real life, about half of the greens I've met on the Internet range from mildly to extremely misanthropic.
Sometimes the whole internet seems to be filled by misanthropic people, so I am not sure how much evidence this is about misanthropy of greens.
I wouldn't say misanthropic, maybe more a matter of scope insensitivity and an overromanticised view of the 'natural' state of the world. But I think they genuinely believe it would make humans better off, whereas truly misanthropic greens wouldn't care.
Is there anything you've learnt that's particular about groups trying to tackle x-risk in particular? If not, you could just make a post describing what you've learnt about groups that challenge big problems. Generality at no extra cost.
Political and social movements as a whole are so massive and varied that I don't think I could really give much non-trivial analysis. I'm not sure there's really a separate category of 'big problem' that can be separated out, all movements think their problem is big, and all big problems are composed of smaller problems.
I make the comparison between UFAI and environmentalism because its probably the only major risk that presently is really in public consciousness,* so provides a model of how people will act in response. E.g. the solutions that technical experts favour may not be the ones that the public support even if they agree on the problem.
*A few decades ago nuclear weapons might have also been analogous, but, whether correctly or not, the public perception of their risk has diminished.