Thank you for this extremely detailed post, with many helpful bits of analysis and info!
Here are some quick thoughts, mostly responding to your sections 2 and 4 about the overall place of social movement-building within EA (especially your section 2.8 about influencing organic growth by providing value-over-replacement-SMO):
Just as you mention your potential bias (towards liking Social Movement Organizations), I think EAs like myself should recognize their own potential bias in the other direction. Personally, I don’t think of myself as the “activist type”: I’m not very social, I prefer intellectual exploration to argument and persuasion, and EA’s celebration of this monkish, neutral curiosity was something that drew me to the movement. Temperamentally, I think I would have a hard time working at an SMO or doing other “activist-y” things, even if I thought it was the most important thing I could be doing! In that context, I salute your efforts and energy!
I agree that studying the movement-building questions around things like protests are a central, perhaps understudied question in various EA causes. Some issues seem best suited for behind-the-scenes elite persuasion (like how sensitive issues in biosecurity and AI safety are discussed among experts, or how EA talks to high-net-worth individuals about donating to the movement), others for popular mass movements (like animal welfare issues, and perhaps pandemic-prevention advocacy), others for various middle options like the kind of “educated & highly-engaged layperson persuasion / movement-building” that seems to describe much of EA and related movements (like r/neoliberal) at the moment. Right now, there’s not much of a “mass movement” arm to many EA causes, even causes that seem especially suitable, so working out the best way to develop one is probably an important task.
Leverage & Neglectedness versus the “Mass” part of Mass Movements
But here is one issue I’ve had with the idea of attending protests and mass movements: how can they be a good use of my time when they’re by-definition “mass”? Perhaps a protest will help advance some policy cause, which is great. But my decision to personally attend that protest will do very little—it will literally just add +1 person to the size of the crowd. How can something so marginal ever hope to live up to high standards of effectiveness & leverage?
Of course, you are not really arguing for merely attending protests—you are saying that people should organize protests and found new social movement organizations, which is certainly a great place to look for leverage. But the ultimate efficacy of this seems to hinge on some complicated questions:
Is there a pool of non-EAs who just enjoy protesting, who can be grabbed by a new organization? Or is it just EAs who would be attending? If the latter, then the idea of an “EA protest” (getting hundreds of extremely value-aligned, hardworking, highly educated EAs to gather together just to mill around outside some government buildings for a few hours) seems like it could never live up to the opportunity cost of everything else those people could have been working on.
(Of course, even with a purely attended-by-EAs protest, you could say “maybe we can find strange new things to protest that are 100x more effective than most traditional political causes”… I’ll talk about this later, but it seems harder than just recruiting a bunch of non-EA protest-fans to your organization.)
By contrast, if we can tap into a large preexisting pool of “people who like going to protests” or “people who care about this object-level issue but aren’t currently expressing themselves” or etc, then the argument for leverage via organizing goes through much more easily. This seems like the better bet, but it does raise other questions.
How easily can you start a social movement on just anything? To what extent can a movement on some random highly-effective cause be summoned out of thin air by organizers, versus to what extent do social movements arise inevitably as a result of underlying societal pressures? If the formation and growth of SMOs is mostly downstream of preexisting societal/cultural trends, then instead of picking your favorite cause area, maybe the best thing to do is to found a group in whatever up-and-coming cause area is likely to soon become mega-popular, then try to “steer” it in the most helpful direction.
In either case, how easy is it for a wonky EA movement to attract and steer the efforts of people with different politics/worldviews/temperaments, without overly compromising its direction or losing adherents to competing social movements that are more emotionally appealing/viral?
Which issues are most suitable for new Social Movement Organizations?
In which cause areas should we found new SMOs? Depends on those considerations mentioned earlier, especially “steering organic growth” versus “fueling growth of a neglected cause”.
If it’s about steering existing pressures:
Pandemic prevention seems like a really, really great area for a lot of reasons. I am excited about existing advocacy organizations like OneDaySooner and Guarding Against Pandemics, and I hope there are many more soon!
I personally would be psyched about an air-quality advocacy organization, perhaps fueled primarily by people’s personal complaints about California wildfires and covid risk, but also steering to advocate better air quality in poor countries.
There’s a whole genre of game plans that might sound like “found a standard lefty organization drawing on people concerned about unaffordable cost of living, unfairness in society, and kitchen-table economic issues, except try to steer proposed solutions in a georgist, deregulatory, & yimby direction instead of a marxist, cost-disease-socialism, & nimby direction”.
Case studies in “steering” that I’d like to learn more about:
In the world of leftist organizing, there seems to be a running theme of constant struggle to keep focused on marxist-style economic issues and “class solidarity” as opposed to the siren call of spicier racial disputes. I’ve also heard it stated as somewhat of a conspiracy theory—big business deliberately favors identity politics and race conflict as a way to divide and conquer the lower classes. Is there truth to the conspiracy theory (which would count as a particularly convoluted form of successful “steering” influence on behalf of big business)? Conversely, what steering techniques are used by likes of Bernie, unions, etc to keep their focus on economic issues?
The Sunrise Movement has somewhat transitioned from climate advocacy to generic social justice stuff. Was this a successful (albeit perhaps misguided) example of steering driven from above? Or was it an example of bottom-up change as the organization failed to steer its members away from a more attractive cause area?
I’ve been told that the official nonprofit organization called “Black Lives Matter” did a good job maintaining the centrality of the (unpopular and counterproductive) “Defund the Police” message, successfully shutting out other campaigns for more practical reforms, like “8 Can’t Wait”? Does the BLM organization really deserve credit for controlling the movement, or were they just riding the wave while the practical reformers were doomed to fail on their own? How might things have gone differently, and resulted in more actual reform/improvements to policing?
If it’s about summoning new movements:
For maximum impact, you might want to pick something far outside the overton window (ie something not usually considered a political issue or something to be protested… ), then treat protests as a brute-force way of getting something on the political agenda.
Advocating for radical institutional reform ideas—futarchy, other uses of prediction markets, Glen Weyl type stuff, liquid democracy, etc. (Although in many cases I think it would be more effective to try to build those systems directly and conduct trials of them, since the main bottleneck is their maturity as institutions rather than opposition to their adoption.)
Case studies in movement-founding that I’d like to learn more about:
Since the Great Recession, monetary policy (which was once too tight) has IMO readjusted to be approximately properly calibrated. Openphil has funded several monetary policy advocacy groups pushing this change, like “Fed Up” and “Employ America”. Other movements like r/neoliberal were also centers of agitation for policy change. But of course there were many other channels of discussion and influence, for instance among academic economists and politicians. It would be interesting to see a postmortem on what channels and efforts were most effective at accomplishing this change.
In conclusion:
Sorry if this is rambly, confused, or repetitive. I am trying to gesture at something with my “steering vs summoning”—what parts of politics and social dynamics should be considered fixed vs mutable? Where is the leverage? What is the value over replacement? I am very unfamiliar with the terrain of activism, so my speculations are perhaps not worth much. But these questions seem important for guiding one’s actions when trying to build social movements and contribute to causes.
Hi Jackson, thank you for the really interesting questions and thoughtful engagement! I’ll try to answer the various questions/points but let me know if I’ve missed something or misunderstood.
Is there a pool of non-EAs who just enjoy protesting, who can be grabbed by a new organization? Or is it just EAs who would be attending? If the latter, then the idea of an “EA protest” (getting hundreds of extremely value-aligned, hardworking, highly educated EAs to gather together just to mill around outside some government buildings for a few hours) seems like it could never live up to the opportunity cost of everything else those people could have been working on.
If the question is: are we targeting EAs vs non-EAs who just like protesting, my answer would be neither. EAs are generally a demographic that is way too small to solely focus on so I wouldn’t think that would be a great move. Also, I wouldn’t really say that there are that many people ‘who just enjoy protesting’. A lot of my friends organise/protest because they feel deeply about issues and feel like no one else will do it if they don’t. Most people get burnt out and extremely stressed due to the high-pressure situations so I would say most organisers don’t actively enjoy it, but rather feel compelled into it out of moral duty. For more “normal” people who might just attend protests but not organise, I also don’t think it’s accurate to say that they enjoy it and would do it for almost any issue. I’m not basing this off a whole lot of evidence but from experience of talking to people, they would generally only go to protests for 1-3 issues that they feel strongly about, rather than anything.
By contrast, if we can tap into a large preexisting pool of “people who like going to protests” or “people who care about this object-level issue but aren’t currently expressing themselves” or etc, then the argument for leverage via organizing goes through much more easily. This seems like the better bet, but it does raise other questions.
This is more what I’m talking about but I would change the framing from “people who like protests” to “people who care a bit about a certain issue and could be encouraged to care more”. I think the real value of social movements is mobilising 10,000 people who were only 20% concerned about an issue to 10,000 people who are 50% concerned, the point where they look for jobs in that area, contact politicians, attend protests, etc. So the leverage factor is using a small team of 10(ish) people and translating that into the labour and efforts of 10,000+ people, who would not have gotten engaged in the movement otherwise.
How easily can you start a social movement on just anything? To what extent can a movement on some random highly-effective cause be summoned out of thin air by organizers, versus to what extent do social movements arise inevitably as a result of underlying societal pressures? If the formation and growth of SMOs is mostly downstream of preexisting societal/cultural trends, then instead of picking your favorite cause area, maybe the best thing to do is to found a group in whatever up-and-coming cause area is likely to soon become mega-popular, then try to “steer” it in the most helpful direction.
These are great questions! On how easily you can start a movement on just about anything: I’m not sure and that’s definitely something I would want to study. I definitely think there is a question of whether popular societal issue → social movement or social movement picks an issue → popular societal issue. In my head, this is a cyclical relationship where one reinforces the other, but it’s not clear which one is more important. I think there is some precedent that social movement organisations can really propel an issue into the mainstream (climate change basically now the number one global priority) but there are questions of whether it needs a long-standing base of cultural awareness to do so, as the climate movement had.
maybe the best thing to do is to found a group in whatever up-and-coming cause area is likely to soon become mega-popular, then try to “steer” it in the most helpful direction.
Agreed—I think this would be particularly helpful for pandemic preparedness and animal welfare right now, both rapidly growing issues.
In either case, how easy is it for a wonky EA movement to attract and steer the efforts of people with different politics/worldviews/temperaments, without overly compromising its direction or losing adherents to competing social movements that are more emotionally appealing/viral?
Another great question! I think to a degree, social movements can use their narrative/framing to change public discourse e.g. the emergency framing used by Extinction Rebellion. It’s not clear to me how much this was latent in people’s underlying beliefs of climate change or if this was a concept newly seeded by XR so that could be something interesting to look into.
On the other point, I do definitely agree that there might be an inherent difficulty in marrying the concepts of effective altruism (rationality, evidence-driven) to the “sticky” slogans and less nuanced messaging used by most social movements. There definitely seems to be a tension with being populist/appealing via emotions and being strategic in the EA sense, tackling the most pressing issues in sometimes counterintuitive ways. I don’t have a clear answer for this but again, this is definitely something I want to explore further.
Pandemic prevention seems like a really, really great area for a lot of reasons. I am excited about existing advocacy organizations like OneDaySooner and Guarding Against Pandemics, and I hope there are many more soon!
I personally would be psyched about an air-quality advocacy organization, perhaps fueled primarily by people’s personal complaints about California wildfires and covid risk, but also steering to advocate better air quality in poor countries.
Definitely agree on pandemic prevention and interesting point about air quality! I haven’t thought about that recently. It’s definitely been trialled in London (funnily enough, by the people who then went to found XR) but I’m not sure they had the kind of success they wanted.
The Sunrise Movement has somewhat transitioned from climate advocacy to generic social justice stuff. Was this a successful (albeit perhaps misguided) example of steering driven from above? Or was it an example of bottom-up change as the organization failed to steer its members away from a more attractive cause area?
I think I would actually slightly disagree here—in my understanding, The Sunrise Movement has always been very explicitly social justice focused (as the Green New Deal inherently is, promising a just transition for workers). There definitely is also an element that newcomers who join movements do try to steer it towards their own personal interests so their social justice focus might have increased in recent years due to that. Roger Hallam who founded XR talks about this a bit in this video, referring to it as psychological herding to the mainstream.
I’ve been told that the official nonprofit organization called “Black Lives Matter” did a good job maintaining the centrality of the (unpopular and counterproductive) “Defund the Police” message, successfully shutting out other campaigns for more practical reforms, like “8 Can’t Wait”? Does the BLM organization really deserve credit for controlling the movement, or were they just riding the wave while the practical reformers were doomed to fail on their own? How might things have gone differently, and resulted in more actual reform/improvements to policing?
Again, I can’t really help here. I know quite little about BLM in the US and the policy reforms they were advocating for, sorry! There is a classic tension here however about symbolic demands vs instrumental demands, where symbolic demands seek to shift the Overton Window and instrumental demands are practical ones with the intention of passing. Generally the symbolic demands come from the more “radical” groups and view the instrumental-demanding organisations as “Reformers”, in a slightly negative manner.
If it’s about summoning new movements:
For maximum impact, you might want to pick something far outside the overton window (ie something not usually considered a political issue or something to be protested… ), then treat protests as a brute-force way of getting something on the political agenda.
Advocating for radical institutional reform ideas—futarchy, other uses of prediction markets, Glen Weyl type stuff, liquid democracy, etc. (Although in many cases I think it would be more effective to try to build those systems directly and conduct trials of them, since the main bottleneck is their maturity as institutions rather than opposition to their adoption.)
Whilst I agree with the thrust of this point, I definitely think some things like prediction markets might be too technical (or essentially, too uninspiring) to build a movement around, even early on. Generally though yes, this is pretty much the point I was wanting to make: protests can be a way to push an issue into the mainstream so salience and hopefully support for that issue increases, leading to positive policy change. Voting and international aid however are much more reasonable candidates, so agreed there.
In conclusion: Sorry if this is rambly, confused, or repetitive. I am trying to gesture at something with my “steering vs summoning”—what parts of politics and social dynamics should be considered fixed vs mutable? Where is the leverage? What is the value over replacement? I am very unfamiliar with the terrain of activism, so my speculations are perhaps not worth much. But these questions seem important for guiding one’s actions when trying to build social movements and contribute to causes.
No need to apologize, I think these questions have been extremely well thought through and ask a lot of the things that I don’t think we have clear answers to just yet. In brief to answer a few of these points:
The key leverage point for me is inspiring a group of people, who were taking no action yet on X cause and only felt mildly about it, to a point where they feel extremely strong about it and get involved in grassroots organising. Essentially, you are creating (paid or unpaid) labour for an issue that previously had little attention in society, which then boosts to increase public support and salience.
Fixed vs mutable: My relatively unqualified opinion is that a lot of social dynamics and issues in our society are mutable, and that we have the power to shape our societal agenda. I don’t have loads of evidence to go off here but again, so it would be interesting to look into it more.
I’m not sure if I’ve answered all your questions so please do chase me if there’s more. Thanks again for the very interesting questions and ideas!
Thank you for this extremely detailed post, with many helpful bits of analysis and info!
Here are some quick thoughts, mostly responding to your sections 2 and 4 about the overall place of social movement-building within EA (especially your section 2.8 about influencing organic growth by providing value-over-replacement-SMO):
Just as you mention your potential bias (towards liking Social Movement Organizations), I think EAs like myself should recognize their own potential bias in the other direction. Personally, I don’t think of myself as the “activist type”: I’m not very social, I prefer intellectual exploration to argument and persuasion, and EA’s celebration of this monkish, neutral curiosity was something that drew me to the movement. Temperamentally, I think I would have a hard time working at an SMO or doing other “activist-y” things, even if I thought it was the most important thing I could be doing! In that context, I salute your efforts and energy!
I agree that studying the movement-building questions around things like protests are a central, perhaps understudied question in various EA causes. Some issues seem best suited for behind-the-scenes elite persuasion (like how sensitive issues in biosecurity and AI safety are discussed among experts, or how EA talks to high-net-worth individuals about donating to the movement), others for popular mass movements (like animal welfare issues, and perhaps pandemic-prevention advocacy), others for various middle options like the kind of “educated & highly-engaged layperson persuasion / movement-building” that seems to describe much of EA and related movements (like r/neoliberal) at the moment. Right now, there’s not much of a “mass movement” arm to many EA causes, even causes that seem especially suitable, so working out the best way to develop one is probably an important task.
Leverage & Neglectedness versus the “Mass” part of Mass Movements
But here is one issue I’ve had with the idea of attending protests and mass movements: how can they be a good use of my time when they’re by-definition “mass”? Perhaps a protest will help advance some policy cause, which is great. But my decision to personally attend that protest will do very little—it will literally just add +1 person to the size of the crowd. How can something so marginal ever hope to live up to high standards of effectiveness & leverage?
Of course, you are not really arguing for merely attending protests—you are saying that people should organize protests and found new social movement organizations, which is certainly a great place to look for leverage. But the ultimate efficacy of this seems to hinge on some complicated questions:
Is there a pool of non-EAs who just enjoy protesting, who can be grabbed by a new organization? Or is it just EAs who would be attending? If the latter, then the idea of an “EA protest” (getting hundreds of extremely value-aligned, hardworking, highly educated EAs to gather together just to mill around outside some government buildings for a few hours) seems like it could never live up to the opportunity cost of everything else those people could have been working on.
(Of course, even with a purely attended-by-EAs protest, you could say “maybe we can find strange new things to protest that are 100x more effective than most traditional political causes”… I’ll talk about this later, but it seems harder than just recruiting a bunch of non-EA protest-fans to your organization.)
By contrast, if we can tap into a large preexisting pool of “people who like going to protests” or “people who care about this object-level issue but aren’t currently expressing themselves” or etc, then the argument for leverage via organizing goes through much more easily. This seems like the better bet, but it does raise other questions.
How easily can you start a social movement on just anything? To what extent can a movement on some random highly-effective cause be summoned out of thin air by organizers, versus to what extent do social movements arise inevitably as a result of underlying societal pressures? If the formation and growth of SMOs is mostly downstream of preexisting societal/cultural trends, then instead of picking your favorite cause area, maybe the best thing to do is to found a group in whatever up-and-coming cause area is likely to soon become mega-popular, then try to “steer” it in the most helpful direction.
In either case, how easy is it for a wonky EA movement to attract and steer the efforts of people with different politics/worldviews/temperaments, without overly compromising its direction or losing adherents to competing social movements that are more emotionally appealing/viral?
Which issues are most suitable for new Social Movement Organizations?
In which cause areas should we found new SMOs? Depends on those considerations mentioned earlier, especially “steering organic growth” versus “fueling growth of a neglected cause”.
If it’s about steering existing pressures:
Pandemic prevention seems like a really, really great area for a lot of reasons. I am excited about existing advocacy organizations like OneDaySooner and Guarding Against Pandemics, and I hope there are many more soon!
I personally would be psyched about an air-quality advocacy organization, perhaps fueled primarily by people’s personal complaints about California wildfires and covid risk, but also steering to advocate better air quality in poor countries.
There’s a whole genre of game plans that might sound like “found a standard lefty organization drawing on people concerned about unaffordable cost of living, unfairness in society, and kitchen-table economic issues, except try to steer proposed solutions in a georgist, deregulatory, & yimby direction instead of a marxist, cost-disease-socialism, & nimby direction”.
Case studies in “steering” that I’d like to learn more about:
In the world of leftist organizing, there seems to be a running theme of constant struggle to keep focused on marxist-style economic issues and “class solidarity” as opposed to the siren call of spicier racial disputes. I’ve also heard it stated as somewhat of a conspiracy theory—big business deliberately favors identity politics and race conflict as a way to divide and conquer the lower classes. Is there truth to the conspiracy theory (which would count as a particularly convoluted form of successful “steering” influence on behalf of big business)? Conversely, what steering techniques are used by likes of Bernie, unions, etc to keep their focus on economic issues?
The Sunrise Movement has somewhat transitioned from climate advocacy to generic social justice stuff. Was this a successful (albeit perhaps misguided) example of steering driven from above? Or was it an example of bottom-up change as the organization failed to steer its members away from a more attractive cause area?
I’ve been told that the official nonprofit organization called “Black Lives Matter” did a good job maintaining the centrality of the (unpopular and counterproductive) “Defund the Police” message, successfully shutting out other campaigns for more practical reforms, like “8 Can’t Wait”? Does the BLM organization really deserve credit for controlling the movement, or were they just riding the wave while the practical reformers were doomed to fail on their own? How might things have gone differently, and resulted in more actual reform/improvements to policing?
If it’s about summoning new movements:
For maximum impact, you might want to pick something far outside the overton window (ie something not usually considered a political issue or something to be protested… ), then treat protests as a brute-force way of getting something on the political agenda.
Unusually wonky things like advocating FDA reforms, or switching to a better voting system, or changing how international aid is distributed?
Advocating for radical institutional reform ideas—futarchy, other uses of prediction markets, Glen Weyl type stuff, liquid democracy, etc. (Although in many cases I think it would be more effective to try to build those systems directly and conduct trials of them, since the main bottleneck is their maturity as institutions rather than opposition to their adoption.)
Case studies in movement-founding that I’d like to learn more about:
Since the Great Recession, monetary policy (which was once too tight) has IMO readjusted to be approximately properly calibrated. Openphil has funded several monetary policy advocacy groups pushing this change, like “Fed Up” and “Employ America”. Other movements like r/neoliberal were also centers of agitation for policy change. But of course there were many other channels of discussion and influence, for instance among academic economists and politicians. It would be interesting to see a postmortem on what channels and efforts were most effective at accomplishing this change.
In conclusion: Sorry if this is rambly, confused, or repetitive. I am trying to gesture at something with my “steering vs summoning”—what parts of politics and social dynamics should be considered fixed vs mutable? Where is the leverage? What is the value over replacement? I am very unfamiliar with the terrain of activism, so my speculations are perhaps not worth much. But these questions seem important for guiding one’s actions when trying to build social movements and contribute to causes.
Hi Jackson, thank you for the really interesting questions and thoughtful engagement! I’ll try to answer the various questions/points but let me know if I’ve missed something or misunderstood.
If the question is: are we targeting EAs vs non-EAs who just like protesting, my answer would be neither. EAs are generally a demographic that is way too small to solely focus on so I wouldn’t think that would be a great move. Also, I wouldn’t really say that there are that many people ‘who just enjoy protesting’. A lot of my friends organise/protest because they feel deeply about issues and feel like no one else will do it if they don’t. Most people get burnt out and extremely stressed due to the high-pressure situations so I would say most organisers don’t actively enjoy it, but rather feel compelled into it out of moral duty. For more “normal” people who might just attend protests but not organise, I also don’t think it’s accurate to say that they enjoy it and would do it for almost any issue. I’m not basing this off a whole lot of evidence but from experience of talking to people, they would generally only go to protests for 1-3 issues that they feel strongly about, rather than anything.
This is more what I’m talking about but I would change the framing from “people who like protests” to “people who care a bit about a certain issue and could be encouraged to care more”. I think the real value of social movements is mobilising 10,000 people who were only 20% concerned about an issue to 10,000 people who are 50% concerned, the point where they look for jobs in that area, contact politicians, attend protests, etc. So the leverage factor is using a small team of 10(ish) people and translating that into the labour and efforts of 10,000+ people, who would not have gotten engaged in the movement otherwise.
These are great questions! On how easily you can start a movement on just about anything: I’m not sure and that’s definitely something I would want to study. I definitely think there is a question of whether popular societal issue → social movement or social movement picks an issue → popular societal issue. In my head, this is a cyclical relationship where one reinforces the other, but it’s not clear which one is more important. I think there is some precedent that social movement organisations can really propel an issue into the mainstream (climate change basically now the number one global priority) but there are questions of whether it needs a long-standing base of cultural awareness to do so, as the climate movement had.
Agreed—I think this would be particularly helpful for pandemic preparedness and animal welfare right now, both rapidly growing issues.
Another great question! I think to a degree, social movements can use their narrative/framing to change public discourse e.g. the emergency framing used by Extinction Rebellion. It’s not clear to me how much this was latent in people’s underlying beliefs of climate change or if this was a concept newly seeded by XR so that could be something interesting to look into.
On the other point, I do definitely agree that there might be an inherent difficulty in marrying the concepts of effective altruism (rationality, evidence-driven) to the “sticky” slogans and less nuanced messaging used by most social movements. There definitely seems to be a tension with being populist/appealing via emotions and being strategic in the EA sense, tackling the most pressing issues in sometimes counterintuitive ways. I don’t have a clear answer for this but again, this is definitely something I want to explore further.
Definitely agree on pandemic prevention and interesting point about air quality! I haven’t thought about that recently. It’s definitely been trialled in London (funnily enough, by the people who then went to found XR) but I’m not sure they had the kind of success they wanted.
I think I would actually slightly disagree here—in my understanding, The Sunrise Movement has always been very explicitly social justice focused (as the Green New Deal inherently is, promising a just transition for workers). There definitely is also an element that newcomers who join movements do try to steer it towards their own personal interests so their social justice focus might have increased in recent years due to that. Roger Hallam who founded XR talks about this a bit in this video, referring to it as psychological herding to the mainstream.
Again, I can’t really help here. I know quite little about BLM in the US and the policy reforms they were advocating for, sorry! There is a classic tension here however about symbolic demands vs instrumental demands, where symbolic demands seek to shift the Overton Window and instrumental demands are practical ones with the intention of passing. Generally the symbolic demands come from the more “radical” groups and view the instrumental-demanding organisations as “Reformers”, in a slightly negative manner.
Whilst I agree with the thrust of this point, I definitely think some things like prediction markets might be too technical (or essentially, too uninspiring) to build a movement around, even early on. Generally though yes, this is pretty much the point I was wanting to make: protests can be a way to push an issue into the mainstream so salience and hopefully support for that issue increases, leading to positive policy change. Voting and international aid however are much more reasonable candidates, so agreed there.
No need to apologize, I think these questions have been extremely well thought through and ask a lot of the things that I don’t think we have clear answers to just yet. In brief to answer a few of these points:
The key leverage point for me is inspiring a group of people, who were taking no action yet on X cause and only felt mildly about it, to a point where they feel extremely strong about it and get involved in grassroots organising. Essentially, you are creating (paid or unpaid) labour for an issue that previously had little attention in society, which then boosts to increase public support and salience.
Fixed vs mutable: My relatively unqualified opinion is that a lot of social dynamics and issues in our society are mutable, and that we have the power to shape our societal agenda. I don’t have loads of evidence to go off here but again, so it would be interesting to look into it more.
I’m not sure if I’ve answered all your questions so please do chase me if there’s more. Thanks again for the very interesting questions and ideas!