England chopped up Africa and trapped it in a cycle of conflict.
...companies like Amazon have sparked a global wave of consumerism
EAs get a little obsessed with alignment when hiring.
Maybe we’re so big on hiring value-aligned media people because we don’t want our movement to get melded back into the morass of ordinary leftist activism!
I agree with some of your points on style / communication—hedging can really mess up the process of trying to write compelling content, and EA should probably be more willing to be controversial and combative and identify villains of various sorts. But I think the subtext that we should specifically do this by leaning more in a standard-left-wing-activism direction risks worsening the crisis of lameness, rather than fixing it.
As other commenters have mentioned, I’d be worried about losing some of the things that make EA special (for example, suffering the same kind of epistemic decay that plagues a lot of activist movements).
But I’m also a little skeptical that, even if EA was fine with (or could somehow avoid) taking the epistemic hit of building a mass movement in this way, the aesthetics of billionaire-bashing and protest-attending and etc are really as intrinsically “sexy” to smart, ambitious young people as you make them out to be. I’d worry we’d create a vibe that ends up artificially self-limiting the audience we can reach. (I’m thinking about how a lot of left wing activism—abolish the police, extinction rebellion climate stuff, gaza protests, etc—often tends to create counterproductive levels of polarization, seemingly for polarization’s own sake, in a way that seems to just keep re-activating the same left-leaning folks, but not accomplishing nearly as much broad societal persuasion as would seem to be possible.)
(re: “EA should probably be more willing to be controversial and combative and identify villains”, my preferred take is that EA should be willing to be more weird in public, to talk seriously about things that seem sci-fi (like takeover by superintelligence) or morally bizarre (like shrimp welfare) or both (like possible utopian / transhumanist futures for humanity), thus attracting attention by further distinguishing itself from both left-wing and right-wing framings, thus offering something new and strange but also authentic and evidence-backed to people who have a truth-seeking mindset and who are tired of mainstream ideological culture-wars. Politically, I expect this would feel kind of like a “radical-centrist” vibe, or maybe like a kind of fresh alternate style of left-liberalism more like the historical Progressive Era, or something. Anyways, of course it takes plenty of media skill to talk about super-weird stuff well! And this vision of mine also has lots of drawbacks—who knows, maybe I have rose-tinted glasses and it would actually crash and burn even harder than a more standard lefty-activism angle. But it’s what I would try.)
Maybe we’re so big on hiring value-aligned media people because we don’t want our movement to get melded back into the morass of ordinary leftist activism!
I agree with some of your points on style / communication—hedging can really mess up the process of trying to write compelling content, and EA should probably be more willing to be controversial and combative and identify villains of various sorts. But I think the subtext that we should specifically do this by leaning more in a standard-left-wing-activism direction risks worsening the crisis of lameness, rather than fixing it.
As other commenters have mentioned, I’d be worried about losing some of the things that make EA special (for example, suffering the same kind of epistemic decay that plagues a lot of activist movements).
But I’m also a little skeptical that, even if EA was fine with (or could somehow avoid) taking the epistemic hit of building a mass movement in this way, the aesthetics of billionaire-bashing and protest-attending and etc are really as intrinsically “sexy” to smart, ambitious young people as you make them out to be. I’d worry we’d create a vibe that ends up artificially self-limiting the audience we can reach. (I’m thinking about how a lot of left wing activism—abolish the police, extinction rebellion climate stuff, gaza protests, etc—often tends to create counterproductive levels of polarization, seemingly for polarization’s own sake, in a way that seems to just keep re-activating the same left-leaning folks, but not accomplishing nearly as much broad societal persuasion as would seem to be possible.)
(re: “EA should probably be more willing to be controversial and combative and identify villains”, my preferred take is that EA should be willing to be more weird in public, to talk seriously about things that seem sci-fi (like takeover by superintelligence) or morally bizarre (like shrimp welfare) or both (like possible utopian / transhumanist futures for humanity), thus attracting attention by further distinguishing itself from both left-wing and right-wing framings, thus offering something new and strange but also authentic and evidence-backed to people who have a truth-seeking mindset and who are tired of mainstream ideological culture-wars. Politically, I expect this would feel kind of like a “radical-centrist” vibe, or maybe like a kind of fresh alternate style of left-liberalism more like the historical Progressive Era, or something. Anyways, of course it takes plenty of media skill to talk about super-weird stuff well! And this vision of mine also has lots of drawbacks—who knows, maybe I have rose-tinted glasses and it would actually crash and burn even harder than a more standard lefty-activism angle. But it’s what I would try.)