Well, no. Whether that change was actually good, by its own lights, is the whole point. Change that looks big but doesn’t actually help is not something that you should meaningfully count as a success. Magnitude of effect is not in itself good. I have no interest in emulating social movements that cause big effects in the world, in ways that don’t actually help, or maybe even actively harm, my goals. I don’t see at all why I should classify something that just had a big effect, without that effect actually being useful, as a “success”.
This is a really important distinction because in my model of the world it is much much easier to have some big effect on the world, than it is to have a specifically targeted big effect on the world. So measuring social movements by just “the size of their effect” is almost purely sampling from movements that took a path of lowest resistance of just doing things that are big, which is a path that doesn’t seem like it generalizes at all to helping with things that we care about.
While you could call the French Revolution “successful”, in the dictionary sense of “accomplishing an aim or purpose”, you certainly don’t have to. That’s a reasonable distinction to draw.
As I said, I wouldn’t have put the list together the same way, and I’d also much prefer to learn from movements and groups that actually achieved things I value.
*****
That said, I’ve seen a lot of people in rationalist spaces discuss the rise of certain religions as interesting phenomena worthy of study, at least in piecemeal ways. Even if religious rituals are used to bond small social groups together, around shared belief in something false, one can still consider whether it’s possible to copy the bonding elements without getting false beliefs at the same time. On a larger scale, can we learn from people who successfully lobbied for bad policies if we want to lobby for good policies?
(Another spin on this is to find examples of groups that started with worthy goals, then lost sight of the goals as they grew more capable of changing the world. What happens to groups like that, and what makes them different from groups that keep hold of their goals? How can we keep our own groups in the second category rather than the first?)
Well, no. Whether that change was actually good, by its own lights, is the whole point. Change that looks big but doesn’t actually help is not something that you should meaningfully count as a success. Magnitude of effect is not in itself good. I have no interest in emulating social movements that cause big effects in the world, in ways that don’t actually help, or maybe even actively harm, my goals. I don’t see at all why I should classify something that just had a big effect, without that effect actually being useful, as a “success”.
This is a really important distinction because in my model of the world it is much much easier to have some big effect on the world, than it is to have a specifically targeted big effect on the world. So measuring social movements by just “the size of their effect” is almost purely sampling from movements that took a path of lowest resistance of just doing things that are big, which is a path that doesn’t seem like it generalizes at all to helping with things that we care about.
While you could call the French Revolution “successful”, in the dictionary sense of “accomplishing an aim or purpose”, you certainly don’t have to. That’s a reasonable distinction to draw.
As I said, I wouldn’t have put the list together the same way, and I’d also much prefer to learn from movements and groups that actually achieved things I value.
*****
That said, I’ve seen a lot of people in rationalist spaces discuss the rise of certain religions as interesting phenomena worthy of study, at least in piecemeal ways. Even if religious rituals are used to bond small social groups together, around shared belief in something false, one can still consider whether it’s possible to copy the bonding elements without getting false beliefs at the same time. On a larger scale, can we learn from people who successfully lobbied for bad policies if we want to lobby for good policies?
(Another spin on this is to find examples of groups that started with worthy goals, then lost sight of the goals as they grew more capable of changing the world. What happens to groups like that, and what makes them different from groups that keep hold of their goals? How can we keep our own groups in the second category rather than the first?)