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.
A bit late to the party, but I wanted to point out that this is a very inaccurate view of how the subprime mortgage thing went down. I would know; I used to be a wire transfer auditor for a subprime correspondent loan company (Bear Stearns Mortgage, in fact.) I was also in a committed relationship for about ten years with a woman who worked as a loan coordinator. I ate, breathed, and slept mortgages for a sizable chunk of the window for which these things occurred.
The thing is -- what the ratings agencies were ensuring wasn't the loans themselves, but the expected payout rate of the loans, when bundled into aggregate products. (I.e.; if 20% default each loan that doesn't default brings in 25% profit, then the aggregate is worth 5% more than its invested value. This is a VAST oversimplification.) It's worth noting that subprime loans were very often amortized in such a manner that the first few years of their existence, they were pure interest payments. People were sold on the notion of buying a house as a way to improve/repair their credit; spend five years on a subprime and then refinance into a better mortgage. The single most common loan product out there in many areas was a 5-year Option ARM. This was a mortgage that was termed for five years, with a balloon payment due at the end of the five years for the remainder of the note. It was designed to be refinanced away.
So from the ratings' agencies perspective, these products were pure gold at the time. Of course, that was only true because the housing market kept going up -- but it was the genuine widespread belief of nearly everyone in the industry that housing prices could only keep going up. Homes were described as one of the best/easiest possible investments.
( It's also worth noting that some of this came down from Federal statutes coming out of the Clinton administration's push to increase homeownership in the US. The lending regulations were adjusted for political reasons and... well, we've all seen what happened. Not quite related to the ratings agency thing, but... this is a complicated and nuanced topic. You did start it out by mentioning that the economic recession was associated with this, and that opens the floor to further root-cause analysis.)
At the end of the day, though, the people who need to hear that it was a Democratic usurpation of a Republican talking point that "caused" the housing bubble -- are the same ones who, insofar as I can see, won't hear it.