(Sorry, it doesn’t look like the conservatives have caught on to this kind of approach yet.)
Actually, if you look at religious proselytization, you’ll find that these techniques are all pretty well-known, albeit under different names and with different purposes. And while this isn’t actually synonymous with political canvassing, it often has political spillover effects.
If you wanted, one could argue this the other way: left-oriented activism is more like proselytization than it is factual persuasion. And LessWrong, in particular, has a ton of quasi-religious elements, which means that its recruitment strategy necessarily looks a lot like evangelism.
And even more deeply than door-to-door conversations, political and religious beliefs spread through long-term friend and romantic relationships, even unintentionally.
I can attest to this first-hand because I converted from atheism to Catholicism (25 years ago) by the unintended example of my girlfriend-then-wife, and then I saw the pattern repeat as a volunteer in RCIA, an education program for people who have decided to become Catholic (during the months before confirmation), and pre-Cana, another program for couples who plan to be married in the church (also months-long). The pattern in which a romantic relationship among different-religion (including no-religion) couples eventually ends up with one or the other converting is extremely common. I’d say that maybe 90% of the people in RCIA had a Catholic significant other, and maybe 40% of the couples in pre-Cana were mixed couples that became both-Catholic. What this vantage point didn’t show me was the fraction in which the Catholic member of the couple converted away or maybe just got less involved and decided against being married Catholic (and therefore no pre-Cana). I assume that happens approximately as often. But it still shows that being friends or more than friends is an extremely strong motivator for changing one’s views, whichever direction it goes.
Since it happened to me personally, the key thing in my case was that I didn’t start with a clear idea of what Catholics (or some Catholics, anyway) actually believe. In reading this article and the ones linked from it, I came to Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale, which illustrates the point very well: scottalexander quoted Bill Maher as saying that Christians believe that sin was caused by a talking snake, and scottalexander himself got into a conversation with a Muslim in Cairo who thought he believed that monkeys turned into humans. Both are wild caricatures of what someone else believes, or at least a way of phrasing it that leads to the wrong mental image. In other words, miscommunication. What I found when I spent a lot of time with a Catholic—who wasn’t trying to convert me—was that what some Catholics (can’t attest for all of them) meant by the statements in their creed isn’t at all the ridiculous things that written creed could be made to sound like.
In general, that point of view is the one Yudkowsky dismissed in Outside the Laboratory, which is to say that physical and religious statements are in different reality-boxes, but he dismissed it out of hand. Maybe there are large groups of people who interpret religious statements the same way they interpret the front page of the newspaper, but it would take a long-term relationship, with continuous communication, to even find out if that is true, for a specific individual. They might say that they’re biblical literalists on the web or fill out surveys that way, but what someone means by their words can be very surprising. (Which is to say, philosophy is hard.) Incidentally, another group I was involved in, a Faith and Reason study group in which all of the members were grad students in the physical sciences, couldn’t even find anyone who believed in religious claims that countered physical facts. Our social networks didn’t include any.
Long-term, empathic communication trades the birds-eye view of surveys for narrow depth. Surely, the people I’ve come in contact with are not representative of the whole, but they’re not crazy, either.
If you are Catholic, or remember being Catholic, and you’re here, maybe you can explain something for me.
How do you reconcile God’s benevolence and omnipotence with His communication patterns? Specifically: I assume you believe that the Good News was delivered at one specific place and time in the world, and then allowed to spread by natural means. God could have given everyone decent evidence that Jesus existed and was important, and God could have spread that information by some reliable means. I could imagine a trickster God playing games with an important message like that, but the Christian God is assumed to be good, not a trickster. How do you deal with this?
The whole technique of asking peoples’ opinion and repeating it back to them is extraordinarily effective with respect to currently in-fashion gender ideology. “What is a Woman” did just that; let people explain themselves in their own words and calmly and politely repeated it back. They hung themselves with no counter argument whatsoever. Now, whether they ever actually changed their mind is another thing.
I think you could do the same in the climate change context, though it’s not quite as easy.
Jehovah’s Witnesses are what first came to mind when reading the OP. They’re sort of synonymous with going door to door in order to have conversations with people, often saying that they’re willing for their minds to be changed through respectful discussions. They also are one of few christian-adjacent sects (for lack of a more precise description) to actually show large growth (at least in the west).
This is absolutely a fair point that I did not think about. All of David’s examples in the book are left-ish-leaning and I was mostly basing it on those. My goal with that sentence was to just lampshade that fact.
Actually, if you look at religious proselytization, you’ll find that these techniques are all pretty well-known, albeit under different names and with different purposes. And while this isn’t actually synonymous with political canvassing, it often has political spillover effects.
If you wanted, one could argue this the other way: left-oriented activism is more like proselytization than it is factual persuasion. And LessWrong, in particular, has a ton of quasi-religious elements, which means that its recruitment strategy necessarily looks a lot like evangelism.
And even more deeply than door-to-door conversations, political and religious beliefs spread through long-term friend and romantic relationships, even unintentionally.
I can attest to this first-hand because I converted from atheism to Catholicism (25 years ago) by the unintended example of my girlfriend-then-wife, and then I saw the pattern repeat as a volunteer in RCIA, an education program for people who have decided to become Catholic (during the months before confirmation), and pre-Cana, another program for couples who plan to be married in the church (also months-long). The pattern in which a romantic relationship among different-religion (including no-religion) couples eventually ends up with one or the other converting is extremely common. I’d say that maybe 90% of the people in RCIA had a Catholic significant other, and maybe 40% of the couples in pre-Cana were mixed couples that became both-Catholic. What this vantage point didn’t show me was the fraction in which the Catholic member of the couple converted away or maybe just got less involved and decided against being married Catholic (and therefore no pre-Cana). I assume that happens approximately as often. But it still shows that being friends or more than friends is an extremely strong motivator for changing one’s views, whichever direction it goes.
Since it happened to me personally, the key thing in my case was that I didn’t start with a clear idea of what Catholics (or some Catholics, anyway) actually believe. In reading this article and the ones linked from it, I came to Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale, which illustrates the point very well: scottalexander quoted Bill Maher as saying that Christians believe that sin was caused by a talking snake, and scottalexander himself got into a conversation with a Muslim in Cairo who thought he believed that monkeys turned into humans. Both are wild caricatures of what someone else believes, or at least a way of phrasing it that leads to the wrong mental image. In other words, miscommunication. What I found when I spent a lot of time with a Catholic—who wasn’t trying to convert me—was that what some Catholics (can’t attest for all of them) meant by the statements in their creed isn’t at all the ridiculous things that written creed could be made to sound like.
In general, that point of view is the one Yudkowsky dismissed in Outside the Laboratory, which is to say that physical and religious statements are in different reality-boxes, but he dismissed it out of hand. Maybe there are large groups of people who interpret religious statements the same way they interpret the front page of the newspaper, but it would take a long-term relationship, with continuous communication, to even find out if that is true, for a specific individual. They might say that they’re biblical literalists on the web or fill out surveys that way, but what someone means by their words can be very surprising. (Which is to say, philosophy is hard.) Incidentally, another group I was involved in, a Faith and Reason study group in which all of the members were grad students in the physical sciences, couldn’t even find anyone who believed in religious claims that countered physical facts. Our social networks didn’t include any.
Long-term, empathic communication trades the birds-eye view of surveys for narrow depth. Surely, the people I’ve come in contact with are not representative of the whole, but they’re not crazy, either.
If you are Catholic, or remember being Catholic, and you’re here, maybe you can explain something for me.
How do you reconcile God’s benevolence and omnipotence with His communication patterns? Specifically: I assume you believe that the Good News was delivered at one specific place and time in the world, and then allowed to spread by natural means. God could have given everyone decent evidence that Jesus existed and was important, and God could have spread that information by some reliable means. I could imagine a trickster God playing games with an important message like that, but the Christian God is assumed to be good, not a trickster. How do you deal with this?
I’m still Catholic. I was answering your question and it got long, so I moved it to a post: Answer to a question: what do I think about God’s communication patterns?
The whole technique of asking peoples’ opinion and repeating it back to them is extraordinarily effective with respect to currently in-fashion gender ideology. “What is a Woman” did just that; let people explain themselves in their own words and calmly and politely repeated it back. They hung themselves with no counter argument whatsoever. Now, whether they ever actually changed their mind is another thing.
I think you could do the same in the climate change context, though it’s not quite as easy.
Jehovah’s Witnesses are what first came to mind when reading the OP. They’re sort of synonymous with going door to door in order to have conversations with people, often saying that they’re willing for their minds to be changed through respectful discussions. They also are one of few christian-adjacent sects (for lack of a more precise description) to actually show large growth (at least in the west).
This is absolutely a fair point that I did not think about. All of David’s examples in the book are left-ish-leaning and I was mostly basing it on those. My goal with that sentence was to just lampshade that fact.