You’re right that effective altruism isn’t so radical that a broader public wouldn’t take interest in it. I probably shouldn’t have included it alongside existential risks and AGI. I’m editing my post to remove it from that sentence.
I don’t think trying to be moderate instead of radical is the right way to think. If you can give a journalist a story about how a radical movement does X and polarizes the world, than you are giving that journalist what he wants. That’s sort of what I did when giving QS presswork.
Take 3D-printer guys like Bre Pettis. Does the average person care about having a 3D-printer at home? No, the average person doesn’t. Yet Bre is a master at telling a story about how bringing the means of production finally to the average person so that the means of the production aren’t in the hands of capitalists but in the hands of the people.
That’s not the only story he tells. If you look at his Ted talk he begins with getting the people by talking about the school system. He begins by saying that you can’t teach creativity by teaching to the test. That’s a meme that resonates with a bunch of people. Then he tells a story about how the maker bot helps people express their creativity. The next meme he pushes is that if you make something yourself it’s yours. It’s better than buying it off the shelf. He brings back education and announces the MakerBot as the solution for the flawed education system. Half way into the talk he says he dropped out of school and recommends kids to do the same, then he changes subject again. Later he talks about how teachers need a backround plan when parents come into the school and complain that the childs are having fun because of the MakerBots and that the school administrator should be won for the project and be able to tell the parents what bureaucratic standards are fulfilled by the project.
Bre Pettis manages to beat most 21st century musicians at being cool. I’ve seen him multiple times live on stage and the way he works the room is amazing. Bre’s image does not consist mainly of moderate, socially acceptable ideas.
I talk lately on LW about the status of intelligence people and talked about standing our ground. Bre is the perfect example of how that works in practice. If you appear to bent to the status quo you aren’t cool. If you can get away with droping a side remark about how who dropped out of school and kids should do the same you are high status and cool. Especially when you are holding a sales talk that schools should buy your MakerBots and your agenda depends on convincing school teachers.
I’m sure Bre could give a talk on asteroid defense that makes asteroid defense sound really cool and that would motivate journalists to cover it. It probably requires speaking about asteroid defense instead of speaking about the detection of near earth objects but the change in wording isn’t costly.
When NASA announces something about going to Mars you could contact news programs and say that you think NASA has it’s priorities extremely wrong if it focus on Mars instead of taking asteroid defense seriously. If you have at least some reason why you are an authority on asteroid defense, it doesn’t cost the journalist something. Fox news is happy to have someone who slams Obama NASA policy so it’s win-win. You get to speak about asteroid defense and they get someone who says that Obama’s spending policies are wrong.
Of course Fox news wants someone who’s presentable in front of a camera, so you need some public speaking ability and in the ideal have some video openly available. Youtube provides an easy venue to publish videos.
If you want to go there the plan might be, form a little nonprofit with a name related to asteroid defense. Give it a nice website. Be it’s president. Publish some YouTube interviews with yourself on it.
Next step might be Guardian’s comment is free. Get an article that outlines the benefits of being serious about asteroid defense on it. Then you wait till the next announcement related to NASA policy and contact many news organisations that you can provide them with an angle on the topic that isn’t already in the media spot light.
If you are a democrat by heart you can sell it by saying usually I agree with Obama, but on this issue he’s really wrong… On the other hand you do have to compromise and accept that you are making a move that doesn’t help the agenda of the democratic party.
While you are talking about asteroids you might make a more general point about Xrisk without interfering what anyone else wants from the story.
If you want a cool hobby doing that project of asteroid defense PR for two years might be a lot more cool than going on the archery range shooting arrows or glassblowing. Cool in the sense that getting the project to work shows that you are intelligent. Also cool in the sense that you can impress the kind of people you meet at effective altruist events with it.
I also think it’s more cool than doing the kind of things you labeled as culture jamming.
I think we might be using different definitions of “radical” and “moderate, socially acceptable.” I’m not referring to things that massively impact society, but to things that clash with widely held values and attitudes.
3D printing doesn’t strike me as an idea most people negatively associate with “radical.” More importantly, even if it was, it is possible to present a “radical” or “weird” or “unfamiliar” idea in a way that it appears not to clash with people’s values and attitudes.
That’s what I suggest people be cautious to do. When you tell the average American that you fear an artificial agent will destroy humanity in this century, you are going to get mainly aversive reactions—in a way that you won’t get by telling people you think 3D printing will revolutionize our socioeconomic structure. Do you disagree with that?
That doesn’t doom FAI research to eternal neglect, it just means FAI outreach people need to be cognizant of the fact that they’re fighting an uphill battle toward persuasion that most outreach and marketing campaigns don’t have to face. As a result, it’s important to frame FAI as something consistent with most people’s attitudes. That probably involves leaving out certain details. As Bre Pettis demonstrates with the school dropout point, there can be socially acceptable ways to express minority views. He “smuggled” that idea into his talk about a non-offensive subject.
I should also add that I wrote that topic with the idea of a media platform in mind (that’s why I made the comparison to LW and not to individual posts on LW). So if you ran your own TV or radio station, I think it would be a better idea to use +Compromise and Smuggle+ than to cover only subjects such as cryonics, transhumanism, wild animal suffering, etc. In the latter case, you may cover topics you believe to be more important, but your station will be too easy for people uninterested in those topics to ignore. If you include some status quo material, you can lure in some unsuspecting listeners that will also catch the less conventional stuff. I think it can be compared to a pharmacy taking a loss on a product (“Toothpaste, $0.25 a tube!) just to get customers in their store, where they’ll likely buy other stuff on the shelves.
If you’re just submitting an article to a pre-existing news source then, as you say, you don’t really need to consider this. The mainstream content is probably the bulk of what they cover, so they’ll welcome your unconventional post.
I have no idea about culture jamming’s effectiveness. I read the book “Culture Jam” by Kalle Lasn, head of Adbusters, and it was pretty horrible. My impression is that it fuels cynicism and dissent. I support its existence because I think different tactics work on different people.
That doesn’t doom FAI research to eternal neglect, it just means FAI outreach people need to be cognizant of the fact that they’re fighting an uphill battle toward persuasion that most outreach and marketing campaigns don’t have to face.
I agree that FAI outreach is hard PR wise. Terminator did succeed in putting memes about an evil skynet into public consciousness but those memes and not really the ones we want even if they make some people opposed to AGI research.
The kinds of memes we want to push are more complex. I also don’t know if we actually have decided which memes we want to push. I personally don’t know enough about FAI to be confident in deciding which memes benefits the agenda of MIRI and FHI. If MIRI wants more PR the first step would be to articulate what kind of memes it actually wants to transmit to a broader public.
My impression is that it fuels cynicism and dissent. I support its existence because I think different tactics work on different people.
But we don’t want “dissent”. Cooperation in the Makerspaces that someone like Bre plays a large role are much better than dissent. Focusing on increasing dissent is pointless if you don’t provide alternatives.
In the latter case, you may cover topics you believe to be more important, but your station will be too easy for people uninterested in those topics to ignore.
In the 21st century news sources such as the Economist and Foreign Policy that don’t use pictures to illustrate their stories but write for a high level audience increased their subscriber while outlets that try to pander to everyone like the New York Times lost readership and had to lay off many journalists.
As far as written text goes the people who try to pander to everyone did mostly lose in the last decade. Mainstream media lost a lot of it’s power over the last two decades.
Getting a book recommend by Tim Ferriss in the Random show is much more valuable than getting a book recommended by the New York Time. Tim Ferriss recommendation might have more strength than anyone besides Oprah.
But even when we look at Oprah, does she try to pander to mainstream views in the usual sense of the word? I don’t think she does. A lot of people don’t like Oprah. It would be a losing move for Oprah to avoid talking about spirituality in a sense that makes some people hate her. If Oprah would go that way she would lose her base.
If you try to appeal to everyone you will appeal to no one.
If you don’t want to make a TV station that fiances itself by selling advertising that program crap into people, I don’t think it makes sense to even try to appeal to the mainstream when you start a new TV channel.
Oprah doesn’t need everyone to like her. She wants the largest viewership possible.
MIRI doesn’t need everyone to support it. It wants the most supporters possible.
They don’t need to appeal to everyone but they probably should appeal to a wider audience of people than they currently do (evidenced by the only ~10 FAI researches in the world) - and a different audience requires a different presentation of the ideas in order to be optimally effective.
I don’t think pointing new people toward Less Wrong would be as effective as just creating a new pitch just for “ordinary people.” Luke’s Reddit AMA, Singularity 1-on-1 interview, and Facing the Singularity ebook were pretty good for this but it doesn’t seem like many x-risk researchers have put much energy into marketing themselves to the broader public. (To be fair, in doing so, they might do more harm than good.)
The kinds of memes we want to push are more complex. I also don’t know if we actually have decided which memes we want to push. I personally don’t know enough about FAI to be confident in deciding which memes benefits the agenda of MIRI and FHI. If MIRI wants more PR the first step would be to articulate what kind of memes it actually wants to transmit to a broader public.
This was one of the suggestions in my post. :) Though I’m not sure it’s possible to communicate about AI and only spread “complex” memes. I think about memes more in terms of positive and negative effects rather than in terms of their accuracy.
MIRI doesn’t need everyone to support it. It wants the most supporters possible.
It don’t think that’s the case. MIRI cares a lot more about convincing the average AI researcher than it cares about convincing the average person who watches CNN.
If you start a PR campain about AI risk that results into bringing a lot of luddites into the AGI debate, it might be harder for MIRI to convince AI researchers to treat UFAI as a serious risk not easier because the average AI person might think how the luddites oppose AGI for all the wrong reasons. He’s not a luddite so why should he worry about UFAI?
If you look at environmental policy reducing mercury pollution and reducing CO2 emissions are both important priorities.
If you just look at what’s talked about in mainstream media you will find a focus on CO2 emissions. I think few people know how good the policy that the EPA policy under Obama about mercury pollution has been. The EPA did a really great move to reduce mercury pollution but it didn’t hit major headlines.
The policy wasn’t a result of a press campaign. It mostly happened silently in the background. On the other hand the fight about CO2 emissions is very intensive and the Obama administration didn’t get much done on that front.
I think about memes more in terms of positive and negative effects rather than in terms of their accuracy.
That’s the sort of thing that’s better not said in public if you are actually serious about making an impact. If you want to say it say it in a way that takes a full paragraph of multiple sentences and that’s not easily quoted by someone at gawker who writes an article about you in five years when you do have a public profile. Bonus points for using vobulary that allows people on LW to understand you express that idea but not the average person who reads a gawker article.
I also something that contradicts the goal you layed out above. You said you wanted to spread the meme: “Belief without evidence is bad.”
If you start pushing memes because you like the effect and not because they are supported by good evidence you don’t get “Belief without evidence is bad.”
If you start a PR campain about AI risk that results into bringing a lot of luddites into the AGI debate, it might be harder for MIRI to convince AI researchers to treat UFAI as a serious risk not easier because the average AI person might think how the luddites oppose AGI for all the wrong reasons. He’s not a luddite so why should he worry about UFAI?
Fair enough. I still believe there could be benefits to gaining wider support but I agree that this is an area that will be mainly determined by the actions of elite specialized thinkers and the very powerful.
I also something that contradicts the goal you layed out above. You said you wanted to spread the meme: “Belief without evidence is bad.” If you start pushing memes because you like the effect and not because they are supported by good evidence you don’t get “Belief without evidence is bad.”
I’m not sure I see a contradiction there. I can see that if I say things that aren’t true and people believe them just because I said them, that would be believing without evidence. But “belief without evidence is bad” doesn’t have to be true 100% of the time in order for it to be a good, safe meme to spread. If your argument is that the spreading of “Utility > Truth” interferes with “Belief without evidence is bad” so that the two will largely cancel out, then (1) I didn’t include “Utility > Truth” on my incomplete list of safe memes precisely because I don’t think it’s safe and (2) the argument would only be persuasive if the two memes usually interfered with each other, which I don’t think is the case. In most situations, people knowing the truth is a really desirable thing. Journalism and marketing are exceptions where it could make sense to oversimplify a message in order for laypeople to understand it, hence making the meme less accurate but more effective at getting people interested (in which case, they’ll hopefully continue researching until they have a more accurate understanding). Also, (3) even if two memes contradict each other, using both in tandem could theoretically yield more utilons than using either one alone (or neither), though I’d expect examples to be rare.
By the way, I emailed Adbusters about if/how they measure the effectiveness of their culture jamming campaigns. I’ll let you know when I get a response.
I don’t think trying to be moderate instead of radical is the right way to think. If you can give a journalist a story about how a radical movement does X and polarizes the world, than you are giving that journalist what he wants. That’s sort of what I did when giving QS presswork.
Take 3D-printer guys like Bre Pettis. Does the average person care about having a 3D-printer at home? No, the average person doesn’t. Yet Bre is a master at telling a story about how bringing the means of production finally to the average person so that the means of the production aren’t in the hands of capitalists but in the hands of the people.
That’s not the only story he tells. If you look at his Ted talk he begins with getting the people by talking about the school system. He begins by saying that you can’t teach creativity by teaching to the test. That’s a meme that resonates with a bunch of people. Then he tells a story about how the maker bot helps people express their creativity. The next meme he pushes is that if you make something yourself it’s yours. It’s better than buying it off the shelf. He brings back education and announces the MakerBot as the solution for the flawed education system. Half way into the talk he says he dropped out of school and recommends kids to do the same, then he changes subject again. Later he talks about how teachers need a backround plan when parents come into the school and complain that the childs are having fun because of the MakerBots and that the school administrator should be won for the project and be able to tell the parents what bureaucratic standards are fulfilled by the project.
Bre Pettis manages to beat most 21st century musicians at being cool. I’ve seen him multiple times live on stage and the way he works the room is amazing. Bre’s image does not consist mainly of moderate, socially acceptable ideas.
I talk lately on LW about the status of intelligence people and talked about standing our ground. Bre is the perfect example of how that works in practice. If you appear to bent to the status quo you aren’t cool. If you can get away with droping a side remark about how who dropped out of school and kids should do the same you are high status and cool. Especially when you are holding a sales talk that schools should buy your MakerBots and your agenda depends on convincing school teachers.
I’m sure Bre could give a talk on asteroid defense that makes asteroid defense sound really cool and that would motivate journalists to cover it. It probably requires speaking about asteroid defense instead of speaking about the detection of near earth objects but the change in wording isn’t costly.
When NASA announces something about going to Mars you could contact news programs and say that you think NASA has it’s priorities extremely wrong if it focus on Mars instead of taking asteroid defense seriously. If you have at least some reason why you are an authority on asteroid defense, it doesn’t cost the journalist something. Fox news is happy to have someone who slams Obama NASA policy so it’s win-win. You get to speak about asteroid defense and they get someone who says that Obama’s spending policies are wrong.
Of course Fox news wants someone who’s presentable in front of a camera, so you need some public speaking ability and in the ideal have some video openly available. Youtube provides an easy venue to publish videos.
If you want to go there the plan might be, form a little nonprofit with a name related to asteroid defense. Give it a nice website. Be it’s president. Publish some YouTube interviews with yourself on it.
Next step might be Guardian’s comment is free. Get an article that outlines the benefits of being serious about asteroid defense on it. Then you wait till the next announcement related to NASA policy and contact many news organisations that you can provide them with an angle on the topic that isn’t already in the media spot light.
If you are a democrat by heart you can sell it by saying usually I agree with Obama, but on this issue he’s really wrong… On the other hand you do have to compromise and accept that you are making a move that doesn’t help the agenda of the democratic party. While you are talking about asteroids you might make a more general point about Xrisk without interfering what anyone else wants from the story.
If you want a cool hobby doing that project of asteroid defense PR for two years might be a lot more cool than going on the archery range shooting arrows or glassblowing. Cool in the sense that getting the project to work shows that you are intelligent. Also cool in the sense that you can impress the kind of people you meet at effective altruist events with it.
I also think it’s more cool than doing the kind of things you labeled as culture jamming.
I think we might be using different definitions of “radical” and “moderate, socially acceptable.” I’m not referring to things that massively impact society, but to things that clash with widely held values and attitudes.
3D printing doesn’t strike me as an idea most people negatively associate with “radical.” More importantly, even if it was, it is possible to present a “radical” or “weird” or “unfamiliar” idea in a way that it appears not to clash with people’s values and attitudes.
That’s what I suggest people be cautious to do. When you tell the average American that you fear an artificial agent will destroy humanity in this century, you are going to get mainly aversive reactions—in a way that you won’t get by telling people you think 3D printing will revolutionize our socioeconomic structure. Do you disagree with that?
That doesn’t doom FAI research to eternal neglect, it just means FAI outreach people need to be cognizant of the fact that they’re fighting an uphill battle toward persuasion that most outreach and marketing campaigns don’t have to face. As a result, it’s important to frame FAI as something consistent with most people’s attitudes. That probably involves leaving out certain details. As Bre Pettis demonstrates with the school dropout point, there can be socially acceptable ways to express minority views. He “smuggled” that idea into his talk about a non-offensive subject.
I should also add that I wrote that topic with the idea of a media platform in mind (that’s why I made the comparison to LW and not to individual posts on LW). So if you ran your own TV or radio station, I think it would be a better idea to use +Compromise and Smuggle+ than to cover only subjects such as cryonics, transhumanism, wild animal suffering, etc. In the latter case, you may cover topics you believe to be more important, but your station will be too easy for people uninterested in those topics to ignore. If you include some status quo material, you can lure in some unsuspecting listeners that will also catch the less conventional stuff. I think it can be compared to a pharmacy taking a loss on a product (“Toothpaste, $0.25 a tube!) just to get customers in their store, where they’ll likely buy other stuff on the shelves.
If you’re just submitting an article to a pre-existing news source then, as you say, you don’t really need to consider this. The mainstream content is probably the bulk of what they cover, so they’ll welcome your unconventional post.
I have no idea about culture jamming’s effectiveness. I read the book “Culture Jam” by Kalle Lasn, head of Adbusters, and it was pretty horrible. My impression is that it fuels cynicism and dissent. I support its existence because I think different tactics work on different people.
I agree that FAI outreach is hard PR wise. Terminator did succeed in putting memes about an evil skynet into public consciousness but those memes and not really the ones we want even if they make some people opposed to AGI research.
The kinds of memes we want to push are more complex. I also don’t know if we actually have decided which memes we want to push. I personally don’t know enough about FAI to be confident in deciding which memes benefits the agenda of MIRI and FHI. If MIRI wants more PR the first step would be to articulate what kind of memes it actually wants to transmit to a broader public.
But we don’t want “dissent”. Cooperation in the Makerspaces that someone like Bre plays a large role are much better than dissent. Focusing on increasing dissent is pointless if you don’t provide alternatives.
In the 21st century news sources such as the Economist and Foreign Policy that don’t use pictures to illustrate their stories but write for a high level audience increased their subscriber while outlets that try to pander to everyone like the New York Times lost readership and had to lay off many journalists.
As far as written text goes the people who try to pander to everyone did mostly lose in the last decade. Mainstream media lost a lot of it’s power over the last two decades. Getting a book recommend by Tim Ferriss in the Random show is much more valuable than getting a book recommended by the New York Time. Tim Ferriss recommendation might have more strength than anyone besides Oprah.
But even when we look at Oprah, does she try to pander to mainstream views in the usual sense of the word? I don’t think she does. A lot of people don’t like Oprah. It would be a losing move for Oprah to avoid talking about spirituality in a sense that makes some people hate her. If Oprah would go that way she would lose her base.
If you try to appeal to everyone you will appeal to no one.
If you don’t want to make a TV station that fiances itself by selling advertising that program crap into people, I don’t think it makes sense to even try to appeal to the mainstream when you start a new TV channel.
Oprah doesn’t need everyone to like her. She wants the largest viewership possible. MIRI doesn’t need everyone to support it. It wants the most supporters possible.
They don’t need to appeal to everyone but they probably should appeal to a wider audience of people than they currently do (evidenced by the only ~10 FAI researches in the world) - and a different audience requires a different presentation of the ideas in order to be optimally effective.
I don’t think pointing new people toward Less Wrong would be as effective as just creating a new pitch just for “ordinary people.” Luke’s Reddit AMA, Singularity 1-on-1 interview, and Facing the Singularity ebook were pretty good for this but it doesn’t seem like many x-risk researchers have put much energy into marketing themselves to the broader public. (To be fair, in doing so, they might do more harm than good.)
This was one of the suggestions in my post. :) Though I’m not sure it’s possible to communicate about AI and only spread “complex” memes. I think about memes more in terms of positive and negative effects rather than in terms of their accuracy.
It don’t think that’s the case. MIRI cares a lot more about convincing the average AI researcher than it cares about convincing the average person who watches CNN.
If you start a PR campain about AI risk that results into bringing a lot of luddites into the AGI debate, it might be harder for MIRI to convince AI researchers to treat UFAI as a serious risk not easier because the average AI person might think how the luddites oppose AGI for all the wrong reasons. He’s not a luddite so why should he worry about UFAI?
If you look at environmental policy reducing mercury pollution and reducing CO2 emissions are both important priorities. If you just look at what’s talked about in mainstream media you will find a focus on CO2 emissions. I think few people know how good the policy that the EPA policy under Obama about mercury pollution has been. The EPA did a really great move to reduce mercury pollution but it didn’t hit major headlines.
The policy wasn’t a result of a press campaign. It mostly happened silently in the background. On the other hand the fight about CO2 emissions is very intensive and the Obama administration didn’t get much done on that front.
That’s the sort of thing that’s better not said in public if you are actually serious about making an impact. If you want to say it say it in a way that takes a full paragraph of multiple sentences and that’s not easily quoted by someone at gawker who writes an article about you in five years when you do have a public profile. Bonus points for using vobulary that allows people on LW to understand you express that idea but not the average person who reads a gawker article.
I also something that contradicts the goal you layed out above. You said you wanted to spread the meme: “Belief without evidence is bad.” If you start pushing memes because you like the effect and not because they are supported by good evidence you don’t get “Belief without evidence is bad.”
Fair enough. I still believe there could be benefits to gaining wider support but I agree that this is an area that will be mainly determined by the actions of elite specialized thinkers and the very powerful.
I’m not sure I see a contradiction there. I can see that if I say things that aren’t true and people believe them just because I said them, that would be believing without evidence. But “belief without evidence is bad” doesn’t have to be true 100% of the time in order for it to be a good, safe meme to spread. If your argument is that the spreading of “Utility > Truth” interferes with “Belief without evidence is bad” so that the two will largely cancel out, then (1) I didn’t include “Utility > Truth” on my incomplete list of safe memes precisely because I don’t think it’s safe and (2) the argument would only be persuasive if the two memes usually interfered with each other, which I don’t think is the case. In most situations, people knowing the truth is a really desirable thing. Journalism and marketing are exceptions where it could make sense to oversimplify a message in order for laypeople to understand it, hence making the meme less accurate but more effective at getting people interested (in which case, they’ll hopefully continue researching until they have a more accurate understanding). Also, (3) even if two memes contradict each other, using both in tandem could theoretically yield more utilons than using either one alone (or neither), though I’d expect examples to be rare.
By the way, I emailed Adbusters about if/how they measure the effectiveness of their culture jamming campaigns. I’ll let you know when I get a response.