Should LessWrong be Interested in the Occupy Movements?
Since early October, I’ve been closely following Occupy Wall Street, and the other protests it spawned. At first I was interested in it as a sort of social experiment, I’ve never heard of long-term camping as a means of protest, and I was curious to see how it would work out. As it’s grown though, I’ve been thinking that there might be a couple of things happening in the movements that might be of interest to rationalist communities. I’ve not seen much discussion of Occupy and its tactics on LessWrong, and I think that if nothing else, they’re at least interesting, so I thought I’d open it up here.
Each Occupy movement is a hotbed of community experimentation. Things like General Assemblies (horizontally democratic voting discussions to make policy decisions) and ad-hoc sanitation, fire, and security committees of all shapes and sizes are popping up all over. What’s more, as the events grow in size, and as police pressure on the events rises, these constructs are going to be tested more and more. We have a wildly varied gene pool, strong environmental constraints, and a fast mutation rate. It’s a big evolutionary experiment in community formation. And I think if we look closely, we can find a whole lot of useful hacks to make stronger communities.
The whole thing’s a great big ethical, emotional, and legal mess. There are issues with how private/public property laws intersect with freedom of speech, there are matters of what level of force is justifiable for police to keep peace in certain situations, there’re issues of whether health and safety trump rights of protest, on and on and on. If nothing else, there’s an interesting discussion there, about what a truly rational set of laws would look like, and whether or not the protesters or the police are justified in their actions.
And at the risk of sounding like a James Bond villain, there are some serious options for us to take over the world here. In the sense at least that the Occupy movements’ goal is lasting societal change, and they have a good deal of momentum already. If members of the rationalist community moved to help them, they might have a fair deal more. And if we introduce them to rational ways of thinking, if we inject those memes into the discussion, there’s some serious opportunity here to help stop the world being so insane.
At least that’s my take on the whole thing. And I’m not exactly strong in the ways of rationality yet, still reading and re-reading the Sequences (I keep getting lost somewhere halfway into the QM sequence, I think I need to practice mathematics more to understand it on a more instinctive level) and I’d certainly appreciate the view of those Stronger than me.
I’m not an American but I don’t know anything about the OWS that would make it one bit more interesting to “rationalist communities” than any other political movement anywhere in the world. I don’t find it any more interesting than the Tea Parties. For that matter, I find it significantly less interesting than the Pirate Party.
Modern-day leftwing movements are even significantly less rational than they used to be. Once upon a time, the english version of the Internationale said “Away with all your superstitions,” and “No saviour from on high delivers,”. In the 1990s Billy Bragga-revised version it says “Let racist ignorance be ended,” and “Change will not come from above”. The condemnation of superstition and religion is no longer politically convenient.
Do you think that the OWS participants would be open to ask for the tax-exemption of churches to be ended? They’re allied to the religious left, so probably not.
And ofcourse even that level of rationality would be too little for the purposes that would be desired by the LessWrong community—significant amount of money devoted to medical immortality research, cryonics, friendly artificial intelligence, etc, etc.
I don’t know any leftwing political movement that’d be capable of debating even whether they seek equality and justice as an instrumental or terminal value. Or indeed any actually core issue that would make it remotely interesting to LessWrong.
I want to co-opt an explicitly non-political community to join in my favoured political movement.
They’re at least interesting, but that isn’t why I thought I’d open it up here.
We are very, very strong monkey tribe. Join us, can’t you taste the power?
Re-read this post.
I voted this down because I disapprove of the sarcastic “translations” of OP. Such rhetoric antagonizes (me, anyway), which makes taking sides easier than it otherwise would be. There’s some irony there.
Bravo for recommending a specific post for the author to read, though.
Upvoted for having been downvoted for explaining a downvote. I don’t think anyone should be downvoted for explaining a vote—that discourages their explanation, which isn’t good.
Disingenuity deserves skewering. The attempt to dress up political recruitment as “interesting to rationalists”, whilst claiming naivety, is disingenuous.
Incidentally I would say the same thing if someone asked if LWers should be interested in putting their weight behind the Tea Party movement (of whom it could also be said that their “goal is lasting societal change, and they have a good deal of momentum already”) or any other political group.
That wasn’t my core intent, and I’m sorry I angered you by making it look like it was. Honestly I’m a bit of a pop-politics junkie. I also followed the tea party closely, as well as the campaigns of minor candidates like ron paul, because I found it interesting to see how well non-core-party rhetoric would work.
I guess I wanted LW to have a discussion page about it or something because we are a big powerful monkey tribe, and because the stupid ancestral part of my brain respects that, and wants to see what the tribe thinks of my interests. Putting in that little bit about potentially getting involved in the party was going too far, and I’m sorry about that.
Actually, a quick google search of your username leads me to believe you. I apologise for being harsh. Your post came across very badly because of that “little bit”, which seemed like its focal point, though. Perhaps you were unaware of the strong taboo against overtly political discussion here.
I would suggest you sate your interest in politics and community organisation by reading books instead. Implying no necessary endorsement of any of these thinkers, here are some that you might find interesting: The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli is the original article; Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals should be relevant to understanding OWS; (selections from) Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks outlines progressive bureaucratic incrementalism; Mencius Moldbug’s political writings offer a reactionary perspective; The Machiavellians by James Burnham is a lesser known classic of political science from the mid-20th century; and Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann discusses the interaction of journalism and democracy.
That would be James Burnham. The book certainly can’t be recommended highly enough, though! The opening essay clicks particularly strongly with some of the central OB/LW themes about signaling.
Thanks, fixed. Duh.
Thanks for that, it looks like a great selection. The only one of those I’ve read before is The Prince, and that was a long, long time ago. I definitely need to track all of those down and give my brain a nice warm bath.
I’d read about politics being the mind killer and all that, and that makes my mistakes even more silly in retrospect. I think I wanted my main focus to be on looking at what’s useful/worth discussing about the movements, and whether or not they’re something that knowledge could be gained from. I thought that would be apolitical enough, but then I went and injected politics into it anyway.
Actually, a quick google search of your username leads me to believe you. I apologise for being harsh. Your post came across very badly because of that “little bit”, which seemed like its focal point, though. Perhaps you were unaware of the strong taboo against overtly political discussion here.
I would suggest you sate your interest in politics and community organisation by reading books instead; you’ll probably learn more that way in any case. Implying no necessary endorsement of any of these thinkers, here are some that you might find interesting: [The Prince] by Niccolo Machiavelli is the original article; Saul Alinsky’s [Rules for Radicals] should be relevant to understanding OWS; Antonio Gramsci’s [Prison Notebooks] outlines progressive bureaucratic incrementalism and the “long march through the institutions”; Mencius Moldbug’s political writings offer a reactionary perspective; The Machiavellians by Robert Burnham is a lesser known classic of political science from the mid-20th century; and Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann discusses the interaction of journalism and democracy.
I think this post is even more required reading. “A big evolutionary experiment in community formation” may just as easily produce monsters as any desirable sort of “stronger communities”. In fact, maybe it’s doing that already. (Thanks to Eugine_Nier for that link, and see more from that writer on the subject here.)
Or perhaps no evolutions for corporations or nanodevices. “Evolutionary” metaphors should be strictly secondary to substantive arguments regarding the direction of some community.
I interpreted that paragraph about being more, “Come. We show tree with young of third tribe. We show how raid third tribe for meat. Gift to you! No obligation join our tribe in fight,” after reading:
That last quote is the “We strong, join” one.
Skip it. It’s the least important of all the sequences.
Oh I’ve already gone past and read Metaethics and the stuff past it. I just keep coming back to QM because I don’t understand it, and I’d very much like to. Partially because I’m interested in how the world works, partially because I just don’t like that I don’t understand it.
You can read it for fun (it is fun to read), but it’s the most controversial one and it teaches you little about rationality. The whole thing has maybe one equation, and if you think you can understand QM without the relevant math, your critical thinking is not up to par. Basically, Harry’s musings in MoR on partial transfiguration cover the essence of EY’s views on QM, if you discard the many worlds advocacy.
Do you understand QM (the mathematical formalism, how to make predictions etc.)? If not, the QM sequence is not the right text to learn it.
Loosely. I’m only entirely in my area with math up to trig and medium-level calculus. I can sometimes feel my earwax burning as I stumble through the more complex QM stuff. I have a few textbooks on it I bought awhile back, and I’m thumbing through them trying to get more comfortable with it, and looking to the QM sequence as a more ‘human’ understanding of what’s going on under it all.
Linear algebra is useful. Not necessarily on much advanced level, just notions of vector spaces, operators, eigenvalues and eigenvectors, commutativity of operators; this is the language of QM. Knowing this (and complex numbers, but that I assume you certainly know already) is enough to fully understand simplest QM systems described by observables attaining finite number of possible values. Unfortunately, this means spin, and spin can be very unintuitive for beginners because it has no exact classical counterpart (and the “partial” classical counterpart, angular momentum, is also not the easiest quantity to reason about). If you want to deal with observables with infinite (or even continuous) spectrum of values (which means position, momentum, energy), you have to know also a bit of calculus and basic differential equations, since you will have to upgrade the linear-algebra formalism to infinite-dimensional spaces, and vectors in such spaces are usually represented by functions.
An important note: to understand QM on gut level you don’t need to know the whole deduction tree of calculus or linear algebra. Linear algebra and especially calculus courses are usually taught as mathematics, the definition-theorem-lemma-proof style. This illustrates well the consistency and elegance of the mathematical discipline, but unless you want to investigate some more subtle problems of QM, much of that is useless for your goal. You certainly should have an intuitive idea about what integration is, but you don’t need to worry about difference between Riemann and Lebesgue integral or between weak and strong convergence of operator series; you should be able to diagonalise a matrix, but don’t worry about Jordan blocks or pseudo-inverses.
I can see why this would appeal to some LWers, like burning man, just colder weather.
p =0.95 you feel more sympathetic to OWS than the Tea Party Movement. If we’re going to have posts about politics, they shouldn’t have this much mutual information with the author’s political views.
p = 0.99. Should we make a prediction book?
Actually, now that I think about it, that’s too high. The probability of him being a troll alone should be at least 1%. I’m revising mine to 0.95.
Mostly media hype in my opinion. My p for anything like that happening is below 1%. Them actually doing anything that would upset the “ruling class” must be orders of magnitudes lower, the VoI for me to actually determine how much isn’t high enough to bother determining just how much lower.
I’d not discount the movement’s potential for change entirely. Consider the effect that the Tea Party has on politics right now. Are any of their candidates going to win? Probably not. But they have high priority advertising space in the political spectrum, and they can force ideas and discussion onto stage.
Likewise, while the Occupy movement probably won’t reach even a tiny fraction of its goals, it most certainly will change the political discourse, and potentially upset a few elections.
I can agree that is plausible.
Where I suspect we may disagree is that I am sceptical of democracy. I don’t think upsetting or winning a few elections is something that amounts to meaningful or lasting societal change. Even political discourse, at least as it exists in the public sphere, might not matter much beyond the short term.
Agreed in full! On its own, changing the political discourse has only a short term effect. But it also serves to legitimize the protestors’ viewpoints. Once you have serious discussion, you can start assembling voting blocs and existing candidates who do support your views (the progressive party seems a likely ally.) As the discussion grows more legitimate, and the voters grow more confident, your political allies gain more power. And they in turn can use that power to further spread the discussion.
You’d never have a big win, just lots of small wins, never taking a single leap of improbability too big to flip the whole thing over, until you’re where you want to be.
This only works if you optimize for positive attention in media and academia. While I can see getting positive or very positive coverage from both, let me ask you, do you think the Ivy League professor or the media mogul, regardless of what noises they are making, really have it in their best interest something that corresponds to an idealised, rationally cleaned up version, of what OWSers really want? Even if the believe themselves to be pursuing something, what has LW taught us of self-deception and selection effects?
This is essentially part of the theory behind why a democratic process, or at least modern parliamentary democracy, should work. It is here that I also think the failure point is. I think there are systemic issues with which opinions and programs can and which can not cascade in this fashion.
“do you think the Ivy League professor or the media mogul, regardless of what noises are making, really have it in their best interest something that corresponds to an idealised, rationally cleaned up version, of what OWSers really want? ”
Of course not, which is where I think most of the difficulty in getting democratic systems to work comes in. It’s hard to communicate the will of the majority effectively, and it’s hard to tell on which points the leaders diverge sometimes. This ends up making bills that aren’t what you want, and making them frequently.
I’ll have to think of if there are any ways to change that, some hack to reduce the complexity of the task to something doable. I’ll also have to think of that sometimes when it’s not 2:00 AM. I’ll be thinking about this though, and I hope other people who stop by will too.
Voted down in agreement with Phlebas and the first paragraph of ArisKatsaris.
Bringing up politics on LessWrong is almost always a bad idea.
This factor makes it not an ideal subject for exercises in learning how to think. I understand the appeal, as that trait is what makes them areas in which deliberating and debiasing could be applied most fruitfully. But the problem is almost prohibitive.
You’re right, there are great big swaths of the Occupy movement that are too prone to becoming sides to take, or teams to cheer for, and would take far too much time and attention to unravel for the utility they’d provide. But I don’t think the problem’s entirely prohibitive, at least not all of its parts. Broad discussions on whether the protests’ methods are moral, or whether their cause is just, those probably are too messy. But I think that problems that the protests bring up that we’d not see in normal day-to-day society, like the increasing militarization of police forces in the US of late, they could be useful discussions to have.
If I recall correctly I saw a facebook update from Louie Helm stating that he was going to be at Occupy UC Berkeley.
I would suggest that, yes, following the whole occupy movement is important for LessWrongians, and, yes, there is a giant community organization experiment occurring with vital lessons to be learned, and that, yes, summarizing the lessons of these things would make a great sequence of posts and that for that to happen at least someone has to get involved, and that getting involved has the potential to be of great instrumental value.
On the other hand, it is somewhat accepted that talking politics here is likely to bring down the level of the discussion, bring in folk who aren’t interested in rationality, and generally is a good way to make Less Wrong more wrong.
I think this would be an excellent topic for meetups, it might be a good idea to try to bring a large LW contingent to another forum for discussing the issues, but I do think divorcing that from the main content of this site is still a good idea.
I also went, brought bubble machines, was continuously followed around by mainstream photographers and brought joy to thousands of people. It’s amazing what $40 and a little bit of agency does to a protest.
We, as rationalists, don’t particularly care about the politics, but I love the aesthetics of protest and political street theater. I think a lot of the movement people agree with me, but aren’t self-aware enough to notice.
I joined the BayAreaLessWrong group, but had to move out of the bay area shortly after, and right now I’m way out in the rurals, a long way from any of the meetups. I also imagine that there are a lot of LW readers in similar situations, or who can’t regularly attend their local meetup for some reason. Therefore I think if we move the discussion out of LW, it should be to an online forum (easier to do international comparison and organization that way too.)
At the same time, we want to make sure that the LW community at large knows that conversation is happening, so we’d have to advertise the link to that thread/forum pretty well. And extend it to other rationalist communities if we can.
I agree that restricting these things to meetups is overly prohibitive. I agree that getting the community informed about a different forum for these topics is a difficult logistics problem.
I do still think that turning Less Wrong’s attention to these kinds of emotional and political problems is likely to damage having a peaceful place to simply try to learn to be rational without distractions.
So that leaves us with a difficult logistics problem… but difficult is not the same as unsolvable. If you are interested in creating or finding a forum that would be appropriate for political topics, especially concerning taking actual real world actions and coordination, I would be happy to participate or even to help writing material or researching links to get some things going.
We should probably wait and see what kind of response this initial proposal gets over the course of a day or so, to see if there are people interested in discussing it further, and to see if there are potential actions to coordinate. After that, setting up an alternate forum is pretty easy (Maybe a community blog over on blogspot or something, or even just a facebook page would do)
As for advertising, I don’t know… I’m very new to discussing things here on LW, I don’t really know what does and doesn’t work in drawing community attention.
Agreed, waiting for a larger response is a good idea, and might bring attention from people who do know how to advertise things.
If that doesn’t happen, I’d also be happy to discuss things in PMs or over e-mail or skype if you just want someone (rational?) to talk to and having a larger discussion seems unlikely.
Sorry but the position of being the shadowy group secretly in control of the occupy movement is already taken.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/28/111128fa_fact_schwartz?currentPage=all
Who said anything about shadowy? I’d wager most of the more moderate protesters would openly support rationalist ideas as part of their policy discussion.
I wouldn’t be so quick to make that assumption. There’s a strong “post-modernism” “post-rationalism” bent amongst the political-left -- and based on the published “demands lists” the OWS-esque groups are reliably well on the political-left.
Post modernism most certainly, you can even see its artistic influences in some of the signs protesters are carrying.
I’m not familiar with post-rationalist opinions in the left though (or in general really.) Can you please provide me with a few examples/links?
The fundamental error here is assuming that I’m talking about two different things. This is, as it is an ongoing political phenomenon, a difficult topic to get concrete materials on but there have been instances of post-modern philosophers delivering speeches to OWS groups.
Post-modernism, further, is definitely not an “artistic” phenomenon—though there are classifications of art called post-modern. Post-modernism is a philosophical movement which rejects the notion of objective truths; holds that there is no “global meta-narrative”. It is a common belief to post-modernists that “rationalism” is an Enlightenment term and as such is ‘parochial, patriarchical, and fallacious’. This is where you get New Agers who say “Well that’s just your opinion, man.”
This is a directly antithetical view to notions Eliezer has expressed in the hoary past. Have you read The Simple Truth?
Ah, I see what you’re getting on about now (And yes, I did accidentally think you meant the post-modernist art style rather than the philosophy, sorry about that,)
I’ve been trying to figure out why philosophies like that tend to profuse in the left more than the right, actually. I’ve not come up with much yet, and I think that it may just be a Rattlers-v-Eagles type thing, where one party takes on a philosophy just to differentiate themselves from the other party.
So I think that this may just be a very good opportunity to help educate people out of those post-modernist leanings. Most every protester out there is angry at what they view as a rigged political and economic system, they’d probably be pliable to believing other systems aren’t true as well. And if we come up to them with very convincing arguments, they may just listen.
Not saying it’d work universally, or even all that widely, but teaching even a few people is a long way from being a bad thing.
“You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.” in the sense that it maps to free-floating beliefs, was my first thought when reading this.
But I think you are right about this. Maybe a small group of LW volunteers should try?
A fundamental value of the political left is multiculturalism and egalitarianism—the notion that “everyone ought to be ‘equal’”: equal in personal value, equal in economic outcome, equal in productivity and talent, equal in rank. These simply aren’t values of the right. And from that root extends the notion that all beliefs are “equal”.
In that sense, post-modernism is a ‘core value’ of the political left just as much as ‘tradition’ is a core value of the political right.
… The one thing protestors definitely have in common is the existence of strongly-held beliefs and/or opinions. They’re not there to have their minds changed; they’re there because they believe—strongly—that “the truth” is being ignored.
That’s not exactly a hotbed arena for rational discourse.
This post is much better than its grandparent and I hope you can write such stuff not as responses to questions. I’d like to see more like this and less:
Not the best way to begin a post.
“there have been”!? Also, quantity of speeches or something like that would be important, not instances.
Not ideal to caricature like that, but not terrible.
Authority is appealed to too often.
On that note I absolutely agree.
Quantity is not always necessarily the bottom line in providing information towards validating a statement. In this case for example, I believe it is sufficient that there has been at least one organized event—considering how bottom-up the organization of OWS itself is—where a known and reputed-as post-modern philosopher gave a speech at what is otherwise a purely political demonstration. That is more of a qualitative than a quantitative statement.
Would it help to consider it a disclosure of personal bias on my part?
Thank you for your continued help in my effort to become a better commenter. I will consider this further. No promises, though… I’m too cantankerous an ass to be easily amenable to change. :-)
That is a damn good point, and I don’t know if I can entirely counter it, because as far as I can tell it’s pretty darn true. I do think that there are arguments that will work for some of the less hippie-esque protesters though, the ones who are there more because of economic issues rather than moral ones.
A major part of what drove the economic recession that lead to most all of the problems that these people are protesting was speculation on subprime mortgages. These are mortgages that are plain-to-see crappy to everyone. However, ratings agencies gave the vast majority of these mortgages very high ratings. When speculators came to purchase insurance on these loans, they would see a AAA rating, no indication the loan was subprime until it comes crashing down upon them.
The ratings agencies have argued in court that they were merely giving their opinion about these mortgages, that it didn’t necessarily have to have anything to do with what was actually in the mortgages. They argue that their opinion is ‘true’ because it’s what they believe, and everyone else just chose to accept that.
Now, these ratings agencies were paid to analyze loans. Their word was used to price transactions on the market. There were literally in some cases lives on the line (in the case of medical loans.) Does this mean their opinion is worth two shakes? How about when their ‘truth’ causes the entire country to crash?
I think that argument would get a lot of people angry, but would also be a good setup for convincing them that objective truth not only exists, but should be priority when you’re negotiating economic and political deals.
I do not think you have really addressed Logos01′s point, which I understand to be that the OWS folks are characterized by epistemic zeal for existing beliefs. Your strategy does not seem designed to alter that.
Instead, you suggest starting by affirming a bedrock zeal-inducing belief, making sure it pisses them off, and then (somehow) getting them to apply the insight that admitting that they are wrong about a lot of things is one of the keys to becoming less so.
A bit late to the party, but I wanted to point out that this is a very inaccurate view of how the subprime mortgage thing went down. I would know; I used to be a wire transfer auditor for a subprime correspondent loan company (Bear Stearns Mortgage, in fact.) I was also in a committed relationship for about ten years with a woman who worked as a loan coordinator. I ate, breathed, and slept mortgages for a sizable chunk of the window for which these things occurred.
The thing is—what the ratings agencies were ensuring wasn’t the loans themselves, but the expected payout rate of the loans, when bundled into aggregate products. (I.e.; if 20% default each loan that doesn’t default brings in 25% profit, then the aggregate is worth 5% more than its invested value. This is a VAST oversimplification.) It’s worth noting that subprime loans were very often amortized in such a manner that the first few years of their existence, they were pure interest payments. People were sold on the notion of buying a house as a way to improve/repair their credit; spend five years on a subprime and then refinance into a better mortgage. The single most common loan product out there in many areas was a 5-year Option ARM. This was a mortgage that was termed for five years, with a balloon payment due at the end of the five years for the remainder of the note. It was designed to be refinanced away.
So from the ratings’ agencies perspective, these products were pure gold at the time. Of course, that was only true because the housing market kept going up—but it was the genuine widespread belief of nearly everyone in the industry that housing prices could only keep going up. Homes were described as one of the best/easiest possible investments.
( It’s also worth noting that some of this came down from Federal statutes coming out of the Clinton administration’s push to increase homeownership in the US. The lending regulations were adjusted for political reasons and… well, we’ve all seen what happened. Not quite related to the ratings agency thing, but… this is a complicated and nuanced topic. You did start it out by mentioning that the economic recession was associated with this, and that opens the floor to further root-cause analysis.)
At the end of the day, though, the people who need to hear that it was a Democratic usurpation of a Republican talking point that “caused” the housing bubble—are the same ones who, insofar as I can see, won’t hear it.
I don’t know what to say about “left” and “right” here—I don’t find those terms descriptive enough to be useful for analysis; they are more useful for branding—but it seems almost definitionally true that the sorts of people who find a mode of thought that emphasizes deconstructing conventional beliefs appealing are more likely to identify as political or social progressives than as conservatives.
FYI, I’ve downvoted each post where you claim the left is predominantly postmodernist. I’ll revoke them if you provide links to any sociological evidence to back this up, but it doesn’t accord with my experience at all. It reads like an ideological attack, and it’s not going to reduce mindkilling.
I made no such claim. I said that there exists a tendency towards post-modernism. This isn’t even remotely similar to saying “the left is predominantly postmodernist.
Post-modernism has such an established presence within the ideology of the political left that it has its own sub-entry on the wikipedia entry, “Left-wing politics”
Anything can achieve mind-killing status if you let it kill your mind. I refuse to allow the inability of others to address a topic sanely to prevent me from discussing that topic.
Please reconsider your position. It is uncalled for and inappropriate. A more-nuanced reading of my posts thus-far will reveal that you have misunderstood my statement.
Change is anything different than now; it isn’t much of a goal.
A blind monkey could see that something was wrong with trillions of dollars of bailouts and debt assumption. If you’re not really identifying what that something is, I don’t think you’re adding much to the discussion. As it is, the one sided attack on corporate culpability for the mess, while ignoring government’s hand in it, leaves me to conclude that any diagnosis they come up with will miss the mark.
The movements I think are worth looking at are the ones that create value, routing around current institutions. Basically all the open source efforts to actually make things by harnessing the cognitive surplus of an increasingly educated and connected world.
Doing is more important than squawking, as long as the regime isn’t completely oppressive. The increasing maker culture, bringing technology and design to solve problems, is more transformative than politics as performance self entertainment.
I downvoted this comment because I feel it dives too far into the specific politics of the situation, without being constructive in specific ways. That makes me think it is likely to increase the amount of mind-killing, without really raising the level of the discussion.
EDIT: I am curious why this was downvoted. I was trying to be more polite than offering a simple downvote by offering information which could be used to create more productive comments. If I haven’t done that well I’d appreciate a response in kind rather than simple downvotes.
Upvoted again.
Yeah I realized that myself shortly after writing it, mostly the ‘blind monkey’ bit.
What do you mean here? You’re not the one who wrote that comment.
I mean that I shouldn’t have snarked back like that using that language, it was immature. Sorry about that.
… Wow I seem to be getting a lot of downvotes.
Actually, a lot of the movements have addressed the political source of the problems. Some of them locally (A lot of Occupy Oakland’s rhetoric has been against the decisions of the city trade council and its mayor) some of them more universally (occupyDC has drafted a deficit/jobs bill in rough, and is currently petitioning and protesting to get it through, http://october2011.org/99 )
And the squawking itself also serves a purpose. Because a blind monkey sees a lot better than the legislative bodies of most modern nations, if the rhetoric and bills and such are any indication. Sometimes you do have to create a lot of noise to draw attention to a problem.
This statement in itself deserves an up vote.
This would be very interesting and I think if we are careful we could pull it off. The problem is the very careful bit. You know politics being the mindkiller and all.