It seems pretty plausible that due to opposition to nuclear power and polarization and politicization of the whole space, the environmental movement has been overall harmful to the goals of that movement.
I think it’s a somewhat hard call to make, and don’t think it’s obvious whether the environmental movement was harmful by its own lights or not, but I definitely wouldn’t count it as an obvious success.
My sense is overall the goals of the prohibition movement became harder to achieve after it took off, and it overall reinforced the role of alcohol in society, and made future efforts to reduce alcohol consumption harder. Again, not obviously harmful for its own goals, but also not obviously a success.
(Not defending any particular example on Lutter’s list, which is clearly an early-stage project and needs some filtering.)
The modern environmental movement seems to have changed the course of history, using policies and positions supported by a majority of the movement’s supporters.
Whether the net effect of all this change was actually good, by the movement’s own lights, may be in doubt, but it seems to have done much of what it set out to do, to a greater extent than many similar movements. (Similarly, the French Revolution could be called “successful” even if many of its own leaders died in the process and the average French person was harmed more than helped.)
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?)
Trying to imagine Lutter’s reply, I’d say the uprising “brought many people together to fight for the same thing, to an unusual degree,” even if it didn’t succeed.
Personally, I wouldn’t include it on a list like this, and I think better examples for the list will involve more concrete change. (Though perhaps the longer-term history of China would have looked somewhat different without the uprising?)
Thanks, I edited it to read succeeded and failed. There are lots of examples that I left out as the list of social movements in very large. I will likely slowly add to the list over the coming years.
The goal is mostly to get tech folks thinking about the mechanisms for social change. I think the EA folks do that ok now, but tech hasn’t really done so, and developing good mental models will be useful for them.
I’m not sure that all of these things are examples of
For example, what concretely did:
succeed in changing?
Similarly:
It seems pretty plausible that due to opposition to nuclear power and polarization and politicization of the whole space, the environmental movement has been overall harmful to the goals of that movement.
I think it’s a somewhat hard call to make, and don’t think it’s obvious whether the environmental movement was harmful by its own lights or not, but I definitely wouldn’t count it as an obvious success.
Also:
My sense is overall the goals of the prohibition movement became harder to achieve after it took off, and it overall reinforced the role of alcohol in society, and made future efforts to reduce alcohol consumption harder. Again, not obviously harmful for its own goals, but also not obviously a success.
(Not defending any particular example on Lutter’s list, which is clearly an early-stage project and needs some filtering.)
The modern environmental movement seems to have changed the course of history, using policies and positions supported by a majority of the movement’s supporters.
Whether the net effect of all this change was actually good, by the movement’s own lights, may be in doubt, but it seems to have done much of what it set out to do, to a greater extent than many similar movements. (Similarly, the French Revolution could be called “successful” even if many of its own leaders died in the process and the average French person was harmed more than helped.)
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?)
Trying to imagine Lutter’s reply, I’d say the uprising “brought many people together to fight for the same thing, to an unusual degree,” even if it didn’t succeed.
Personally, I wouldn’t include it on a list like this, and I think better examples for the list will involve more concrete change. (Though perhaps the longer-term history of China would have looked somewhat different without the uprising?)
Thanks, I edited it to read succeeded and failed. There are lots of examples that I left out as the list of social movements in very large. I will likely slowly add to the list over the coming years.
The goal is mostly to get tech folks thinking about the mechanisms for social change. I think the EA folks do that ok now, but tech hasn’t really done so, and developing good mental models will be useful for them.