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.
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.