“to the success of our hopeless cause” is such a good toast and we should use it more often. i first learned of it from the book of the same name, and apparently it was a common refrain at gatherings of Soviet dissidents. i like it because it captures the feeling of trying really hard to succeed despite being in the basement of the logistic success curve, and somehow, despite all odds, actually succeeding in the end.
I do find it poetic, but in seriousness I think if folks don’t actually feel hopeful about what they’re doing then they should do something else—leave the work / research direction / engineering / comms / whatnot to whoever actually feels hope about it...
To elaborate, the thing that’s poetic for me about “our hopeless cause” is because I have hope that is not cleanly legible to the outside, easy to write off as “hopeless”. And it’s important to stay in tune with your own knowings about this stuff. I think there are very deleterious effects from throwing energy into things one doesn’t have hope in.
(...And to elaborate further, mostly I think the bad stuff happens by lending support to corrupt things. And imo being pushed to work on X while you lack hope in X is a solid flag of corruption.)
...what sort of “coordination problems” does one “solve” by doing things you don’t have hope in? I really don’t get it and am perplexed. This photo is swellingly full of hope, and presumably we got there through people that had hope in their actions. Perhaps there’s detail in the history you’re referencing that’s going over my head.
the problem was that everyone hated living in the Soviet Union and other eastern Bloc countries, but few people were willing to stand up and protest, because doing so meant a knock on your door by men with guns who would take you away to a Siberian prison or mental institution.
the thing with protests is they are a coordination problem. to loosely paraphrase one of the dissidents from this era, if one person protests he becomes a martyr. if ten people protest they become a conspiracy. if ten thousand people protest the system has to change.
he problem is you have no way of knowing when the right moment is. under Stalin, dissent was impossible. everyone even suspected of being disloyal was instantly executed or thrown in a gulag.
after he died, Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s methods and instituted reforms, and dissent meant “only” being interrogated by the KGB, put on trial in a rigged but no longer completely farcical show trial, and sent to Siberia for only 10 years rather than being executed. this was enough easing up that the “chain reaction” started happening—people would protest, be arrested, someone would go secretly write a transcript of the trial and publish it, people would be outraged at the riggedness or the arrests of the people disseminating the transcripts, and go protest, etc. unfortunately, this never took off enough to cause mass protests, but there was no way of knowing without many people sacrificing themselves for the cause. these early dissidents also laid a lot of groundwork by creating underground networks to disseminate info (samizdat).
under Gorbachev, he loosened restrictions even further under glasnost and perestroika, because the economy of the Soviet Union was not doing well. as an unintended side effect, this pushed the R0 of protests past 1, and suddenly we started seeing huge protests in the eastern Bloc. and then once there are tens of thousands of people marching in the streets and the secret police can’t arrest them all, the system of terror stops working entirely. by the time the Berlin wall fell, the East German government had already ceased to function for months because nobody was afraid of their terror anymore. in theory this could have happened much earlier if everyone simply coordinated, bit everyone will not simply.
This helps me appreciate the mood of where you are coming from thanks! But uh I have objections also, mostly due to our spot in the thread.
I would second CronoDas’ point that the mechanics of change aren’t quite that simple. And I’d like to complain that this is not an example of a thing that is helped by people taking actions they don’t feel hope in!
I acknowledge than the secret police setup seems like it does well at bringing in the “you can’t communicate and build plans together” aspect that “coordination problem”/game-theory seems to typically evoke, I’ll note though that you still have a lot of communication/observation channels (including costly ones like protesting and being taken away or killed).
More importantly it seems like the robust way out of the situation is to try to build more infrastructure for being able to act with a coalition of peers in a constructive manner. Game theory as typically thrown around seems a poor model for this imo.
funny enough, at least one dissident at the time expressed that he didn’t like this toast because he wouldn’t be trying to dissent if he thought it was hopeless
I think some can have the feelings that go with hope in a cause, without actually believing the cause is likely to succeed. Cultural memes around fighting for hopeless causes (e.g. when heros go for hail mary strategies in movies) help.
It still matters whether you truly think it’s the best shot at victory, or the best way for you to help. That’s what I see as key to preventing the various problems that you mention.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by hope. Is a person who thinks there’s a 50% chance of their project failing, but considers that better than all the alternatives, not hopeful? Or 10%?
What I worry about is, what if the people who make such a seemingly hopeless play are actually right in their worldview, and the people who have higher hopes in their play are wrong? Then a rule that dissuades hopeless people from acting lowers the overall chance of success, and that would be bad.
“to the success of our hopeless cause” is such a good toast and we should use it more often. i first learned of it from the book of the same name, and apparently it was a common refrain at gatherings of Soviet dissidents. i like it because it captures the feeling of trying really hard to succeed despite being in the basement of the logistic success curve, and somehow, despite all odds, actually succeeding in the end.
I do find it poetic, but in seriousness I think if folks don’t actually feel hopeful about what they’re doing then they should do something else—leave the work / research direction / engineering / comms / whatnot to whoever actually feels hope about it...
To elaborate, the thing that’s poetic for me about “our hopeless cause” is because I have hope that is not cleanly legible to the outside, easy to write off as “hopeless”. And it’s important to stay in tune with your own knowings about this stuff. I think there are very deleterious effects from throwing energy into things one doesn’t have hope in.
(...And to elaborate further, mostly I think the bad stuff happens by lending support to corrupt things. And imo being pushed to work on X while you lack hope in X is a solid flag of corruption.)
This is a good heuristic when you’re fighting against nature, it’s not a good heuristic when you’re trying to solve coordination problems.
...what sort of “coordination problems” does one “solve” by doing things you don’t have hope in? I really don’t get it and am perplexed. This photo is swellingly full of hope, and presumably we got there through people that had hope in their actions. Perhaps there’s detail in the history you’re referencing that’s going over my head.
the problem was that everyone hated living in the Soviet Union and other eastern Bloc countries, but few people were willing to stand up and protest, because doing so meant a knock on your door by men with guns who would take you away to a Siberian prison or mental institution.
the thing with protests is they are a coordination problem. to loosely paraphrase one of the dissidents from this era, if one person protests he becomes a martyr. if ten people protest they become a conspiracy. if ten thousand people protest the system has to change.
he problem is you have no way of knowing when the right moment is. under Stalin, dissent was impossible. everyone even suspected of being disloyal was instantly executed or thrown in a gulag.
after he died, Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s methods and instituted reforms, and dissent meant “only” being interrogated by the KGB, put on trial in a rigged but no longer completely farcical show trial, and sent to Siberia for only 10 years rather than being executed. this was enough easing up that the “chain reaction” started happening—people would protest, be arrested, someone would go secretly write a transcript of the trial and publish it, people would be outraged at the riggedness or the arrests of the people disseminating the transcripts, and go protest, etc. unfortunately, this never took off enough to cause mass protests, but there was no way of knowing without many people sacrificing themselves for the cause. these early dissidents also laid a lot of groundwork by creating underground networks to disseminate info (samizdat).
under Gorbachev, he loosened restrictions even further under glasnost and perestroika, because the economy of the Soviet Union was not doing well. as an unintended side effect, this pushed the R0 of protests past 1, and suddenly we started seeing huge protests in the eastern Bloc. and then once there are tens of thousands of people marching in the streets and the secret police can’t arrest them all, the system of terror stops working entirely. by the time the Berlin wall fell, the East German government had already ceased to function for months because nobody was afraid of their terror anymore. in theory this could have happened much earlier if everyone simply coordinated, bit everyone will not simply.
If ten thousand people protest, sometimes they get massacred by the army.
Iran is a recent example of this.
This helps me appreciate the mood of where you are coming from thanks! But uh I have objections also, mostly due to our spot in the thread.
I would second CronoDas’ point that the mechanics of change aren’t quite that simple. And I’d like to complain that this is not an example of a thing that is helped by people taking actions they don’t feel hope in!
I acknowledge than the secret police setup seems like it does well at bringing in the “you can’t communicate and build plans together” aspect that “coordination problem”/game-theory seems to typically evoke, I’ll note though that you still have a lot of communication/observation channels (including costly ones like protesting and being taken away or killed).
More importantly it seems like the robust way out of the situation is to try to build more infrastructure for being able to act with a coalition of peers in a constructive manner. Game theory as typically thrown around seems a poor model for this imo.
funny enough, at least one dissident at the time expressed that he didn’t like this toast because he wouldn’t be trying to dissent if he thought it was hopeless
I think some can have the feelings that go with hope in a cause, without actually believing the cause is likely to succeed. Cultural memes around fighting for hopeless causes (e.g. when heros go for hail mary strategies in movies) help.
It still matters whether you truly think it’s the best shot at victory, or the best way for you to help. That’s what I see as key to preventing the various problems that you mention.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by hope. Is a person who thinks there’s a 50% chance of their project failing, but considers that better than all the alternatives, not hopeful? Or 10%?
What I worry about is, what if the people who make such a seemingly hopeless play are actually right in their worldview, and the people who have higher hopes in their play are wrong? Then a rule that dissuades hopeless people from acting lowers the overall chance of success, and that would be bad.