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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.