Much of the progress in modern anti-racism has been about persuading more people to think of racism as a structural, systemic issue rather than one of individual villainy. See: https://transliberalism.substack.com/.../the-revolution...
The historic popularity of socialism has been brought up as an argument for epistemic modesty. It's important to take into account the historic broadness of the term "socialism." This wasn't the entire intellectual class collectively jumping for centrally planned economies created by a vanguard party. Socialism has included a wide variety of schemes that weren't capitalism inc. mutualism (market economy but with worker's coops), guild socialism (high medieval city economy except modern tech), anarchocommunism (everyone lives in a decentralized network of kibbutzim, basically) and "libertarian communism" (planned economy but decentralized). Heck, Benjamin Tucker, ideological ancestor of modern anarcho-capitalists, considered himself a socialist because he believed the best economy for workers would be a laissez faire market economy. Like this was a bunch of different ideas on how to change society, most (if not all) of which wouldn't have worked, but many of which would have likely failed far more gracefully. For example, socialisms that were voluntaryist, nonviolent and/or gradualist. Mutualism isn't that improbable of a model, like, modern worker's coops exist in our economy and they function and have high worker's satisfaction rates. I don't think it's that far-fetched that the world would be a better place if they were the primary or exclusive form of corporation. A world where Proudhon won the argument at the first international and all the historic energy that went towards Marxist-Leninism went to founding worker's coops and credit unions would have been quite a bit better and such a history branch wasn't that improbable. And many socialists at the time of Lenin decried Leninism (Rosa Luxemburg), correctly predicted that it was going to go to shit(Bertrand Russell and Emma Goldman), and even lead rebellions (Kronstadt Rebellion). This isn't me saying socialism is good, this is me saying historic intellectual support for "socialism" is complicated and not as homogeneous as it may look initially.
I've increasingly moved towards the position that, regardless of whether or not the ideal society has a state or is stateless, the US is at serious risk of self-destruction and, in addition to trying to prevent said self-destruction, people should create non-state governance structures to prevent the default outcome of state collapse or at least mitigate it
the Internet causing shunning and boycotting to become more effective (ex. me too, canceling) causes me to wonder if it might be possible to move towards a society where we primarily enforce law-level norms(not raping people, not stealing, not refusing to serve black people at a lunch counter, not selling fraudulent medications, etc.) via decentralized economic/social (cutting off access to payment methods, firing, boycotting) rather than violent centralized (incarceration, execution, fines, etc.) or violent decentralized (feud law) methods.
I agree, this is a failure mode that rationalist often fall into, not a prescriptive suggestion
trying to think of ways to disentangle antifa's (in the sense of the Torch Network, Popular Mobilization and One People's Project) impact on authoritarian right organizing from law enforcement impact and non-antifa anti-authoritarian-right organizing such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and various faith groups.
The problem with trying to "address obesity" is that we've already been trying to do that for decades now. The bottleneck isn't lack of social will; it's lack of scientific knowledge about what interventions reliably cause someone to both lose weight and keep it off.