What level of cooperation with other activists or general agenty people is optimal? Everyone needs to “pick their battles” to maximize their impact and stay sane, but what does it look like in practice when you interact with those who’ve picked different “battles”? In this article I sketch some initial ideas I’ve had and hope to encourage others to test and refine them. There’s a lot of potential for someone with more knowledge of game theory to make them greatly more rigorous, nuanced, and reliable.
The post exceeded my timebox for it, so I’m a bit unhappy with its structure. Sorry about that.
The general idea is that:
There are a lot of moral entrepreneurs driving social change that we agree with.
They are successful to different degrees in different social bubbles.
There are thresholds that are hard to exceed, but above which social pressures lead to rapid success.
I wanted to develop a general framework that can be applied to all sorts of valuable social change, such as antispeciesism, antiracism, antisubstratism, antisexism, antiageism, etc. Hence my post covers a lot more details and edge cases. Here I’ll try to apply it to this case.
Maybe someone, a parent, has internalized the phrase “Spare the rod; spoil the child.” The child is dear to them and has 80+ years to live, so they don’t want to risk spoiling all of that (which parallels the health argument above). (They don’t know about the risks of traumatizing their child for life, just as meats can also have negative health effects.) Given their limited epistemic situation, the decision can look broadly similar to the one related to veganism.
Another guideline is to not walk on grass because it risks crushing like a dozen or so of invertebrates with every step. Or not living in cities that use surface water for the freshwater supply, because the filtration process kills uncounted numbers of beings. But maybe some great networking opportunity is tied to hikes across meadows or to that city with surface water.
To me the great difference is that I live in a community of friends and relatives that is fully – for all I know – strongly against beating children. The norm is so strong that even if someone violated it, it would backfire on them and not meaningfully weaken the norm. I treat this norm as a hard rule, but really I rarely think about it because it’s so universally endorsed in my circles.
I’m also in a community that is almost completely vegn, but not quite to the same extend that it is against violence against children, also because of nonvegan influences from the outside. I treat the vegn norm as a hard rule particularly because it seems somewhat fragile to me, like a tiny budding flower.
I’m also in a community that generally gets caring about invertebrates and has read some Brian Tomasik, but that doesn’t usually, with some exceptions, take care not to use surface water or not to step on grass. So I don’t treat this as a hard rule because I’m not optimistic (yet) that I can spread it up to its threshold. That can change though. (Your milage may vary if you’re particularly influential, high-status, charismatic, etc.)
So particularly when I feel that something is close to its threshold, from one side or the other, I take care to take into account in my cost-benefit calculation not only the costs and benefits that are mediated through me but also the costs and benefits that spreading the norm has.
And if in doubt I rather overestimate the closeness to the threshold since the societal costs can be great, have great variance, and are hard to know, but my personal costs are usually quite low variance and relatively well knowable. So you could say that I try to be at least a bit better than what I think the norm is, for all norms around me.
I’ve written about this topic in “Levels of Moral Cooperation.”
The post exceeded my timebox for it, so I’m a bit unhappy with its structure. Sorry about that.
The general idea is that:
There are a lot of moral entrepreneurs driving social change that we agree with.
They are successful to different degrees in different social bubbles.
There are thresholds that are hard to exceed, but above which social pressures lead to rapid success.
I wanted to develop a general framework that can be applied to all sorts of valuable social change, such as antispeciesism, antiracism, antisubstratism, antisexism, antiageism, etc. Hence my post covers a lot more details and edge cases. Here I’ll try to apply it to this case.
Maybe someone, a parent, has internalized the phrase “Spare the rod; spoil the child.” The child is dear to them and has 80+ years to live, so they don’t want to risk spoiling all of that (which parallels the health argument above). (They don’t know about the risks of traumatizing their child for life, just as meats can also have negative health effects.) Given their limited epistemic situation, the decision can look broadly similar to the one related to veganism.
Another guideline is to not walk on grass because it risks crushing like a dozen or so of invertebrates with every step. Or not living in cities that use surface water for the freshwater supply, because the filtration process kills uncounted numbers of beings. But maybe some great networking opportunity is tied to hikes across meadows or to that city with surface water.
To me the great difference is that I live in a community of friends and relatives that is fully – for all I know – strongly against beating children. The norm is so strong that even if someone violated it, it would backfire on them and not meaningfully weaken the norm. I treat this norm as a hard rule, but really I rarely think about it because it’s so universally endorsed in my circles.
I’m also in a community that is almost completely vegn, but not quite to the same extend that it is against violence against children, also because of nonvegan influences from the outside. I treat the vegn norm as a hard rule particularly because it seems somewhat fragile to me, like a tiny budding flower.
I’m also in a community that generally gets caring about invertebrates and has read some Brian Tomasik, but that doesn’t usually, with some exceptions, take care not to use surface water or not to step on grass. So I don’t treat this as a hard rule because I’m not optimistic (yet) that I can spread it up to its threshold. That can change though. (Your milage may vary if you’re particularly influential, high-status, charismatic, etc.)
So particularly when I feel that something is close to its threshold, from one side or the other, I take care to take into account in my cost-benefit calculation not only the costs and benefits that are mediated through me but also the costs and benefits that spreading the norm has.
And if in doubt I rather overestimate the closeness to the threshold since the societal costs can be great, have great variance, and are hard to know, but my personal costs are usually quite low variance and relatively well knowable. So you could say that I try to be at least a bit better than what I think the norm is, for all norms around me.