NancyLebovitz comments on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance - LessWrong

58 [deleted] 25 November 2012 11:33PM

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Comment author: JoshuaZ 28 November 2012 05:15:54PM 8 points [-]

One thing that concerns me about anti-racism/feminism is that people who support them don't seem to have a vision of what success would be like.

This is connected to a more general issue: Institutions and movements very rarely acknowledge when the issue they've dealt with is essentially solved. You see this in other examples as well organizations to prevent animal cruelty would be one example. When an organization goes completely away it is more often because they were on the losing side of political and social discourse (e.g. pro-prohibition groups, anti-miscegenation organizations). The only example I'm aware of where the organizations simply died out after essentially a success is organizations to help deal with polio, and even that still exists in limited forms.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 28 November 2012 07:23:45PM 6 points [-]

I've got some sympathy for people who don't want to shut down organizations merely because they've succeeded.

Stable organizations are hard to create, and people apt to have a lot of valuable social relationships in them.

Ideally, an organization which has achieved a definitive win would find a new goal.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 28 November 2012 07:30:58PM 8 points [-]

Ideally, an organization which has achieved a definitive win would find a new goal.

Yes, but this seems to happen extremely rarely. The only example I'm aware of is how some abolitionist groups helped transition into pro-black rights groups in the post Civil War era.