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Maybe I wasn't very clear. I am not against systemic change. Surely we need to keep pushing for it. It's not either/or. We should use every method we can. On t

Maybe I wasn't very clear. I am not against systemic change. Surely we need to keep pushing for it. It's not either/or. We should use every method we can. On the other hand, recently I've been thinking about this. According to some theory it takes about 3.5% of the population to take part in active resistance to cause change (https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=YJSehRlU34w https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=YJSehRlU34w). Now, 3.5% is clearly not a majority required to vote in the right politicians. Which leaves you with direct action. Something like that.

jlokier 7y ago
> According to some theory it takes about 3.5% of the population to take part in active resistance to cause change If that's true, it should be made more widely known. I think that would be cause for hope for many people who despair at democracy and collective idiocy, and it would change their behaviour because of hope and belief in the effect of personal actions. If the 3.5% is actually true, that change of behaviour caused by knowing it might tip serious balances.
- rjf72 7y ago
  Consider the very foreseeable 'unforeseen consequences' of suggestions such as this. Think of all the views you may find undesirable. Now how many of them do you think could round up 3.5% of people to engage in disruptive behavior if they believed it would let them 'win'? You end up in a situation where you want people you agree with to engage in disruptive behavior, but not people you disagree with. Yet messaging like this would fully motivate everybody. It seems likely to ultimately do little more than encourage fringe extremism because you have to remember everybody always seems themselves as the good guy. Let them think they can win with a negligible minority of disruption, and you're strongly motivating extreme behavior from fringe groups. For that matter you even motivate people who like to play puppeteer. Imagine you're a billionaire and you now believe you can achieve near anything you want if you can just get 3.5% of people to start misbehaving. Getting your way by misbehavior is exactly what we aimed to move away from with democracy. And I completely agree with you on the failings of democracy which does seem to be trending towards idiocracy. At the same time, I think this is the sort of solution where the cure is far worse than the disease. You keep the same idiocracy, but now you convince them that they can get whatever they want if they start trying to break down normal civil order. And the current establishment in politics would use it, similar to 9/11, as an excuse to greatly expand domestic surveillance and further strip away privacy and various civil rights. You know, for 'your' protection.
  - gmanley 7y ago
    I don't think the suggestions OP had were very extreme but even if they were civil disobedience is a very key part of democracy. The civil rights movement at the time was viewed by many as misbehavior and extremism. I think it changed our society for the better.
  - jlokier 7y ago
    With regard to "telling people about the 3.5% theory", I think that decision depends on how much you believe that "hopelessness" is playing a psychological part in our collective problems, or inability to deal with the largest threats. I agree when it comes to "getting your way by misbehaviour", that democracy is designed to improve on that. But if we generalise to "change caused by individuals' actions", which may not be the change each direct actioner demands, so much as the consequence of their applied lives, that covers more things. For example, climate change activists who don't fly and tell others not to, are not causing a democratic catastrophe, yet they are having an effect and it's probably disproportionate and probably good. I don't think that's chaos, I think it's a form of distributed intelligence and attention process. Albeit a messy one, without monotonic improvements.
rjf72 7y ago
It seems like this would be extremely difficult to accurately measure for many reasons. Two big ones immediately come to mind. 1) Confounding variables. She essentially states that she looked up resistance movements and then quantified what percent of people participated and the outcome. But there are going to be tremendous confounding factors here. While she does not offer much in the way of examples she did reference the most iconic examples - Gandhi and the US Civil Rights movement. The Civil Rights Movement has some great examples, but I think India is perhaps even more striking so let's just consider that. The British Empire was collapsing into bankruptcy in 1946 following World War 2. They were only saved by an emergency loan from the United States. At the same time this was happening the world had become divided between two superpowers - the USSR and the USA. And neither of them looked fondly upon British imperialism. India would be granted independence in a matter of months - in 1947. And over the next 18 years so would nearly every former colony of India, regardless of the level of resistance. And indeed, our author here almost certainly also listed all of these incidents as successes of nonviolent resistance from tiny minorities, even though their independence was driven largely by outside factors. 2) The meaning of protest has changed in the age of the internet. In the 1960s organizing was extremely difficult and travel was expensive. Seriously, imagine trying to organize things when the best you have is a phone where you have to manually dial each and every number (and long distance was pricey!) or things like hanging up signs on street lights. And people getting places was costly. A one-way domestic flight could set you back nearly a thousand dollars. The net effect of this is that in times past a single person represented far more people than just themselves. However today this has radically changed. Organizing people is completely trivial and free. Travel is still a burden but it's become much cheaper and easier than ever before. This also means that protests mean something entirely different. if there are a million people protesting something, it's entirely possible that these million people don't necessarily represent all that many people other than themselves. This also makes me wonder about something else, but since it's a distinct point - I'll put it in another post.
semi-extrinsic 7y ago
> We should use every method we can. This is something I hope people will soon recognize on a much broader scale. We should forget about fuel cells vs. batteries, wind vs. solar vs. nuclear, CO2 capture or not, etc. We need all of the emission reduction technologies we can muster ASAP.
rjf72 7y ago
Let's assume this is true. What happens to the rest of the population? For instance there are many issues that have far more than 3.5% of people that feel very strongly about them, and other people feel very strongly about them in the opposite direction. For instance about 30% of America would like to overturn Roe vs Wade. [1] So strongly do people feel about it that this is a topic that has inspired multiple instances of independent acts of domestic terrorism over the decades. So let's just imagine some chunk of this group starts engaging in civil disobedience and so on. You'd need less than 12% participating to hit that magic 3.5% from which it supposedly literally "never fails" according to our researcher. So now what? Clearly we're not going to now just go overturn Roe vs Wade. And even if we did it would create even more chaos. The protests themselves would also likely lead to violence due to the inevitable emergence of counter protesters. It may be the case that 3.5% works in some cases, but that's going to need to come with several asterisks after it to clarify what, when, where, why, how, and against whom. [1] - https://www.pewforum.org/2013/01/16/roe-v-wade-at-40/ https://www.pewforum.org/2013/01/16/roe-v-wade-at-40/

jlokier 7y ago

> According to some theory it takes about 3.5% of the population to take part in active resistance to cause change If that's true, it should be made more widely known. I think that would be cause for hope for many people who despair at democracy and collective idiocy, and it would change their behaviour because of hope and belief in the effect of personal actions. If the 3.5% is actually true, that change of behaviour caused by knowing it might tip serious balances.

rjf72 7y ago
Consider the very foreseeable 'unforeseen consequences' of suggestions such as this. Think of all the views you may find undesirable. Now how many of them do you think could round up 3.5% of people to engage in disruptive behavior if they believed it would let them 'win'? You end up in a situation where you want people you agree with to engage in disruptive behavior, but not people you disagree with. Yet messaging like this would fully motivate everybody. It seems likely to ultimately do little more than encourage fringe extremism because you have to remember everybody always seems themselves as the good guy. Let them think they can win with a negligible minority of disruption, and you're strongly motivating extreme behavior from fringe groups. For that matter you even motivate people who like to play puppeteer. Imagine you're a billionaire and you now believe you can achieve near anything you want if you can just get 3.5% of people to start misbehaving. Getting your way by misbehavior is exactly what we aimed to move away from with democracy. And I completely agree with you on the failings of democracy which does seem to be trending towards idiocracy. At the same time, I think this is the sort of solution where the cure is far worse than the disease. You keep the same idiocracy, but now you convince them that they can get whatever they want if they start trying to break down normal civil order. And the current establishment in politics would use it, similar to 9/11, as an excuse to greatly expand domestic surveillance and further strip away privacy and various civil rights. You know, for 'your' protection.
- gmanley 7y ago
  I don't think the suggestions OP had were very extreme but even if they were civil disobedience is a very key part of democracy. The civil rights movement at the time was viewed by many as misbehavior and extremism. I think it changed our society for the better.
- jlokier 7y ago
  With regard to "telling people about the 3.5% theory", I think that decision depends on how much you believe that "hopelessness" is playing a psychological part in our collective problems, or inability to deal with the largest threats. I agree when it comes to "getting your way by misbehaviour", that democracy is designed to improve on that. But if we generalise to "change caused by individuals' actions", which may not be the change each direct actioner demands, so much as the consequence of their applied lives, that covers more things. For example, climate change activists who don't fly and tell others not to, are not causing a democratic catastrophe, yet they are having an effect and it's probably disproportionate and probably good. I don't think that's chaos, I think it's a form of distributed intelligence and attention process. Albeit a messy one, without monotonic improvements.

rjf72 7y ago

It seems like this would be extremely difficult to accurately measure for many reasons. Two big ones immediately come to mind. 1) Confounding variables. She essentially states that she looked up resistance movements and then quantified what percent of people participated and the outcome. But there are going to be tremendous confounding factors here. While she does not offer much in the way of examples she did reference the most iconic examples - Gandhi and the US Civil Rights movement. The Civil Rights Movement has some great examples, but I think India is perhaps even more striking so let's just consider that. The British Empire was collapsing into bankruptcy in 1946 following World War 2. They were only saved by an emergency loan from the United States. At the same time this was happening the world had become divided between two superpowers - the USSR and the USA. And neither of them looked fondly upon British imperialism. India would be granted independence in a matter of months - in 1947. And over the next 18 years so would nearly every former colony of India, regardless of the level of resistance. And indeed, our author here almost certainly also listed all of these incidents as successes of nonviolent resistance from tiny minorities, even though their independence was driven largely by outside factors. 2) The meaning of protest has changed in the age of the internet. In the 1960s organizing was extremely difficult and travel was expensive. Seriously, imagine trying to organize things when the best you have is a phone where you have to manually dial each and every number (and long distance was pricey!) or things like hanging up signs on street lights. And people getting places was costly. A one-way domestic flight could set you back nearly a thousand dollars. The net effect of this is that in times past a single person represented far more people than just themselves. However today this has radically changed. Organizing people is completely trivial and free. Travel is still a burden but it's become much cheaper and easier than ever before. This also means that protests mean something entirely different. if there are a million people protesting something, it's entirely possible that these million people don't necessarily represent all that many people other than themselves. This also makes me wonder about something else, but since it's a distinct point - I'll put it in another post.

semi-extrinsic 7y ago

> We should use every method we can. This is something I hope people will soon recognize on a much broader scale. We should forget about fuel cells vs. batteries, wind vs. solar vs. nuclear, CO2 capture or not, etc. We need all of the emission reduction technologies we can muster ASAP.

rjf72 7y ago

Let's assume this is true. What happens to the rest of the population? For instance there are many issues that have far more than 3.5% of people that feel very strongly about them, and other people feel very strongly about them in the opposite direction. For instance about 30% of America would like to overturn Roe vs Wade. [1] So strongly do people feel about it that this is a topic that has inspired multiple instances of independent acts of domestic terrorism over the decades. So let's just imagine some chunk of this group starts engaging in civil disobedience and so on. You'd need less than 12% participating to hit that magic 3.5% from which it supposedly literally "never fails" according to our researcher. So now what? Clearly we're not going to now just go overturn Roe vs Wade. And even if we did it would create even more chaos. The protests themselves would also likely lead to violence due to the inevitable emergence of counter protesters. It may be the case that 3.5% works in some cases, but that's going to need to come with several asterisks after it to clarify what, when, where, why, how, and against whom. [1] - https://www.pewforum.org/2013/01/16/roe-v-wade-at-40/ https://www.pewforum.org/2013/01/16/roe-v-wade-at-40/