I agree with everything in your comment. “Extremist” was a bad choice of word, maybe “single-minded” would be better. What I meant was, for example, if success at convincing people on any given political issue is linearly proportional to effort, you should spend all your effort arguing just one issue. More generally, if we look at all the causes in the world where the resulting utility to you depends on aggregated actions of many people and doesn’t include a term for your personal contribution, the argument says you should support only one such cause.
What I meant was, for example, if success at convincing people on any given political issue is linearly proportional to effort, you should spend all your effort arguing just one issue.
But this isn’t at all likely. For one thing you probably have a limited number of family and friends who highly trust your opinions, so your effectiveness (i.e., derivative of success) at convincing people on any given political issue will start out high and quickly take a dive as you spend more time on that issue.
But this isn’t at all likely. For one thing you probably have a limited number of family and friends who highly trust your opinions, so your effectiveness (i.e., derivative of success) at convincing people on any given political issue will start out high and quickly take a dive as you spend more time on that issue.
I’m inclined to agree. A variant of the strategy would be to spend a lot of time arguing for other positions that are carefully selected to agree with and expand eloquently on the predicted opinions of the persuasion targets.
Yes, that is the charity argument. Yes, you should not give money both to a local candidate and to a national candidate simultaneously.
But the political environment changes so much from election to election, it is not clear you should give money to the same candidate or the same single-issue group every cycle.
Moreover, the personal environment changes much more rapidly, and I do not agree with the hypothesis that success at convincing people depends linearly with effort. In particular, changing the subject to the more important issue is rarely worth the opportunity cost and may well have the wrong effect on opinion. If effort toward the less important issue is going to wear out your ability to exert effort for the more important issue an hour from now, then effort may be somewhat fungible. But effort is nowhere near as fungible as money, the topic of the charity argument.
I agree with everything in your comment. “Extremist” was a bad choice of word, maybe “single-minded” would be better. What I meant was, for example, if success at convincing people on any given political issue is linearly proportional to effort, you should spend all your effort arguing just one issue. More generally, if we look at all the causes in the world where the resulting utility to you depends on aggregated actions of many people and doesn’t include a term for your personal contribution, the argument says you should support only one such cause.
But this isn’t at all likely. For one thing you probably have a limited number of family and friends who highly trust your opinions, so your effectiveness (i.e., derivative of success) at convincing people on any given political issue will start out high and quickly take a dive as you spend more time on that issue.
I’m inclined to agree. A variant of the strategy would be to spend a lot of time arguing for other positions that are carefully selected to agree with and expand eloquently on the predicted opinions of the persuasion targets.
Yes, that is the charity argument. Yes, you should not give money both to a local candidate and to a national candidate simultaneously.
But the political environment changes so much from election to election, it is not clear you should give money to the same candidate or the same single-issue group every cycle.
Moreover, the personal environment changes much more rapidly, and I do not agree with the hypothesis that success at convincing people depends linearly with effort. In particular, changing the subject to the more important issue is rarely worth the opportunity cost and may well have the wrong effect on opinion. If effort toward the less important issue is going to wear out your ability to exert effort for the more important issue an hour from now, then effort may be somewhat fungible. But effort is nowhere near as fungible as money, the topic of the charity argument.