2. Something around sincerity and performativity?? I care a lot of sincere speech and sincerely-motivated speech. I feel innately most interested to talk about things that confuse me or questions I have, or to express an unusual opinion I havent seen expressed. If loads of people around me are saying ‘X is bad!‘, for whatever reason I seldom feel motivated to also say ‘X is bad’, even if I think it’s bad
I think this type of attitude would lead to bad outcomes if generalised.
For ease of discussion, let’s imagine a hypothetical unambiguously horrible thing. Say tomorrow Joe Biden, with no justification, announces a bill placing all citizens of Albanian descent in internment camps.
Do you think such a policy would actually go through? Probably not. But how would it be prevented?
Well, it would be prevented by everyone would kick up a storm. The airwaves would be dominated by people blasting the decision, everyone’s lunchroom conversations would be like “what, that’s insane”, there would be massive protests, democratic funders would threaten to pull out, poll numbers would drop, the rank and file democrats would attack it, etc. Even democrat officials who hated Albanians for some reason would feel pressured to publicly stand against the policy, until the overwhelming pressure causes a drop in the policy. There are innumerable examples throughout the world of policies being dropped due to public outrage like this.
All this relies on people publicly stating X is bad, even if other people are already stating X is bad. In fact that’s kind of the point! You need a critical mass of people to exert enough pressure to make changes. If everyone adopted the attitude “don’t say X is bad if Y number of people are already saying it”, then you never get more than Y people saying it, when you might need many more than that to make a difference.
I think you misunderstood me—I’m talking about my innate motivations, not what I would propose as a general norm.
I think part of the lack of motivation is that I in fact don’t viscerally see (my) public outrage having much of an effect. Like, you’re right that it plausibly does. But I’m strongly liberal/left and I’ve spent most of my life under right-wing governments, having my social circles being vocally outraged about all sorts of things, and having the governments basically seem to ignore this outrage.
Yeah, to be clear, I’m not trying to shame individuals here.
One of the issues here is that the effectiveness of public outrage is highly dependent on how many people are riled up: A small group of outraged people will generally have zero effect on policy, but a very large group of outraged people has demonstrably real effects. This can make an EA ITN style analysis kinda weird: in order to be effective, a cause can’t be neglected.
Thanks Amber and titotal for engaging with this conversation and for being honest about where you’re coming from! Some follow-up questions and thoughts:
In terms of effectiveness, I agree that there is no guarantee that a letter to an MP would be effective. It is very likely that a lot of the letters we send to our MPs don’t lead to any change, but if the volume of these letters is large and the reach to the number of MPs is broad, we may be able to move at least some MPs to act. Perhaps a parallel here with EAs working on high risk high reward projects (i.e., while some of them will have little or no impact, the best could have a very large impact)? When emailing MPs, I used a template I found through the Australian Palestine Advocacy Network, which I then edited. This gave me a starting point for my email and had all the email addresses ready to go, which saved a lot of time. I actually did receive a few responses from the MPs as well, which I then took some time to respond to. You’re right, this did take a while to write up (~20 minutes).
That’s so interesting! I was keen to hear more about your thinking here, so thanks for responding to titotal’s comment on this. a. Is there something about commonly-held perspectives that come across as “going with the flow”, rather than being something people genuinely believe in? Like just saying X to fit in? b. I totally understand that feeling of not being heard; it can genuinely be quite demotivating as oftentimes there is little to no change. In line with titotal’s comment about critical mass, I recently came across this paper, which suggests that the tipping point for social change is 25% (“When minority groups reached the critical mass—that is, the critical group size for initiating social change—they were consistently able to overturn the established behavior”). Would this be a case for persisting, especially with causes that we find meaningful/important?
That’s fair. I’ve tried to follow people on social media with opposing views to make sure I have as balanced a perspective as I can (though to be completely honest, it’s so easy/automatic to dismiss contrary viewpoints. I have noticed it takes conscious choice for me to cognitively engage with posts I don’t immediately agree with), and to double check claims using different sources. Again, as you pointed out, this does take some investment. I find I’m quite emotionally invested in this issue though, so I naturally gravitate towards wanting to spend time learning about it. I understand that this is not the case for everyone, just as I am spending more time learning about this compared to other humanitarian issues.
That’s an excellent point. It’s certainly why I have tried to point people towards EA principles.
Thanks again for your comments. Not only have they helped me understand your perspectives, but they have also made me reflect upon why I hold my own views.
I think this type of attitude would lead to bad outcomes if generalised.
For ease of discussion, let’s imagine a hypothetical unambiguously horrible thing. Say tomorrow Joe Biden, with no justification, announces a bill placing all citizens of Albanian descent in internment camps.
Do you think such a policy would actually go through? Probably not. But how would it be prevented?
Well, it would be prevented by everyone would kick up a storm. The airwaves would be dominated by people blasting the decision, everyone’s lunchroom conversations would be like “what, that’s insane”, there would be massive protests, democratic funders would threaten to pull out, poll numbers would drop, the rank and file democrats would attack it, etc. Even democrat officials who hated Albanians for some reason would feel pressured to publicly stand against the policy, until the overwhelming pressure causes a drop in the policy. There are innumerable examples throughout the world of policies being dropped due to public outrage like this.
All this relies on people publicly stating X is bad, even if other people are already stating X is bad. In fact that’s kind of the point! You need a critical mass of people to exert enough pressure to make changes. If everyone adopted the attitude “don’t say X is bad if Y number of people are already saying it”, then you never get more than Y people saying it, when you might need many more than that to make a difference.
I think you misunderstood me—I’m talking about my innate motivations, not what I would propose as a general norm.
I think part of the lack of motivation is that I in fact don’t viscerally see (my) public outrage having much of an effect. Like, you’re right that it plausibly does. But I’m strongly liberal/left and I’ve spent most of my life under right-wing governments, having my social circles being vocally outraged about all sorts of things, and having the governments basically seem to ignore this outrage.
Yeah, to be clear, I’m not trying to shame individuals here.
One of the issues here is that the effectiveness of public outrage is highly dependent on how many people are riled up: A small group of outraged people will generally have zero effect on policy, but a very large group of outraged people has demonstrably real effects. This can make an EA ITN style analysis kinda weird: in order to be effective, a cause can’t be neglected.
Thanks Amber and titotal for engaging with this conversation and for being honest about where you’re coming from! Some follow-up questions and thoughts:
In terms of effectiveness, I agree that there is no guarantee that a letter to an MP would be effective. It is very likely that a lot of the letters we send to our MPs don’t lead to any change, but if the volume of these letters is large and the reach to the number of MPs is broad, we may be able to move at least some MPs to act. Perhaps a parallel here with EAs working on high risk high reward projects (i.e., while some of them will have little or no impact, the best could have a very large impact)?
When emailing MPs, I used a template I found through the Australian Palestine Advocacy Network, which I then edited. This gave me a starting point for my email and had all the email addresses ready to go, which saved a lot of time. I actually did receive a few responses from the MPs as well, which I then took some time to respond to. You’re right, this did take a while to write up (~20 minutes).
That’s so interesting! I was keen to hear more about your thinking here, so thanks for responding to titotal’s comment on this.
a. Is there something about commonly-held perspectives that come across as “going with the flow”, rather than being something people genuinely believe in? Like just saying X to fit in?
b. I totally understand that feeling of not being heard; it can genuinely be quite demotivating as oftentimes there is little to no change. In line with titotal’s comment about critical mass, I recently came across this paper, which suggests that the tipping point for social change is 25% (“When minority groups reached the critical mass—that is, the critical group size for initiating social change—they were consistently able to overturn the established behavior”). Would this be a case for persisting, especially with causes that we find meaningful/important?
That’s fair. I’ve tried to follow people on social media with opposing views to make sure I have as balanced a perspective as I can (though to be completely honest, it’s so easy/automatic to dismiss contrary viewpoints. I have noticed it takes conscious choice for me to cognitively engage with posts I don’t immediately agree with), and to double check claims using different sources. Again, as you pointed out, this does take some investment. I find I’m quite emotionally invested in this issue though, so I naturally gravitate towards wanting to spend time learning about it. I understand that this is not the case for everyone, just as I am spending more time learning about this compared to other humanitarian issues.
That’s an excellent point. It’s certainly why I have tried to point people towards EA principles.
Thanks again for your comments. Not only have they helped me understand your perspectives, but they have also made me reflect upon why I hold my own views.