Should LessWrong be Interested in the Occupy Movements?

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.

Since early October, I've been closely following Occupy Wall Street [...] 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 want to co-opt an explicitly non-political community to join in my favoured political movement.

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.

They’re at least interesting, but that isn’t why 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.

We are very, very strong monkey tribe. Join us, can’t you taste the power?

And I'm not exactly strong in the ways of rationality yet, still reading and re-reading the Sequences

Re-read this post.

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,

Skip it. It's the least important of all the sequences.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Voted down in agreement with Phlebas and the first paragraph of ArisKatsaris.

Bringing up politics on LessWrong is almost always a bad idea.

The whole thing's a great big...emotional...mess

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.

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.

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.

Sorry but the position of being the shadowy group secretly in control of the occupy movement is already taken.

In the sense at least that the Occupy movements' goal is lasting societal change ...

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.

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.

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.