Attempting to fix things on a nation state level isn’t the best way in the 21st century.
There no need to change other cultures, it’s possible to start a subculture and draw people into that subculture. Making sure that members of a community feel good and develop well is more important than “outreach”.
This sounds like a good idea. Care to elaborate? Peope are trying to fix things on level higher than the nation-state (EU, NAFTA, UNO), it seems the world is moving towards higher units, what processes or changes or historical variables do in your view make acting in smaller units a better idea now than it used to be?
What makes the current age a good time for effective subcultures? The Internet?
Peope are trying to fix things on level higher than the nation-state (EU, NAFTA, UNO), it seems the world is moving towards higher units
UNO has very little power. Nafta is more an agreement that robs nation-states of power and allows them to be sued by corporations in investor-state settlement disputes than itself being a powerful institution. There no NAFTA parliament that’s a center of power. Corporations that are smaller entities get power through NAFTA.
The EU does have some power, but ACTA showed that EU leadership can’t anymore push through their will against grassroot opposition. The battle isn’t decided yet but I would guess that TIPP will face the same fate as ACTA.
20 years ago mainstream media was allowed to be boring. People listened to it anyway because they had no real alternative. With the internet bloggers driven by ideology which can make people exited get more power.
You need to polarize to get an audience in our era. Mainstream media that doesn’t want to alienate anybody can’t do that as effectively as people focusing on a small niche.
As Nassim Taleb says, the blogger is antifragile. Small subcultures can be antifragile in a way that a fragile nation state isn’t.
I personally feel little loyality towards Germany or the EU. If the interest of Germany were pitted against the interests of the LW community I might simply side with LW. Of course living in Berlin I might be a bit of an outlier, but more and more people don’t feel their prime loyality towards the state in which they are living.
If I look at my facebook feed quite a lot of my German friends don’t take the German mainstream media opinion of the conflict in the Ukraine but take a more pro-Russian position.
In politics you see what happens when the prime loyalty of politicians doesn’t lie with their country but with their friends, their ex-employer and their prospective employer after they end their political career.
There might be a few politicians here and there who still see the interest of their nation state as their prime objective, but I think it’s less than 20 years ago. That means the nation state has less power.
What do you need to get loyalty? It used to be that you get loyalty by providing food and water, medical care and blessing people marriages.
Today I feel loyalty towards communities that give me a sense of belonging and purpose. That’s not the nation state in which I’m living. I feel like in general subcultures are much better equipped for that purpose and therefore predict that more young people put their loyalty into their subculture than the nation state in which they are living.
Tight community that gives their members a sense of purpose and belonging also get more power. Wikileaks needed very little resources to have a bigger impact.
To the extend we can build a rationalist community that makes it’s members feel a sense of belonging and purpose, it’s members might feel more loyalty towards the community than towards the nation state in which they are living. If the community can coordinate because it’s filled with people who want to cooperate it can also make moves on a bigger scale.
In ten years a rationalist might run for office and Effective Altruism money completely finances the campaign, simply because that’s the reasonable play to maximize impact.
Lukewarm people don’t matter that much for power, but committed people do. A CFAR that can find a way to teach rationality in a way that actually helps people with their lives and make them feel like the belong together can lead in that direction.
Bloggers: I have seen all too often that bloggers have a limited amount of stuff they want to say, they say it, and the more or less stop. Whoever happened to discover their blogs—and that is a tiny fraction of the people who would be potentially interested but the information is super hard to fish out from the overwhelming amount online, there are no good Google keywords that filter for “anything, just interesting”—will forget a few years later because blogs are not as a good media to make classics as hardcover books. In fact, I am halfway surprised OB/LW managed to survive so far, and I think it managed to survive largely through consciously forming networks out in meatspace, many early readers and contributors living in the Bay Area and meeting face to face, this also being facilitated by the super extroverted and open culture of California, so, anyway, I think we need to see blogs that survive not as much as magazines but periodicals sent to members of a club who also meet and everybody has the phone number of someone who has the phone number of someone who has the phone number of anyone you would want to get in contact with. Without a meatspace backbone, most blogs die. Exceptions are the ones backed up by mass media fame.
National loyalty: it really depends on how well that nation is doing. If you were from the third world, or a closer example: Kosovo, you would probably see nationalism as an altruist ethical duty, and it would not be very wrong: perhaps Haiti needs more fixing, but still there is enough fixing work to do there, too. It would not be highly efficient altruism but efficient enough. The points: expect it to stay alive for less-well-off nations, because they can make a very convincing case of it being ethically okay. As of now, I think a lot of military-age Ukrainians living safe in the West feel ashamed a bit and wrestle with the felt duty to go back and fight. And this is at least defensible enough ethically and emotionally to safely predict that nation-in-trouble-nationalism will not die out as fast as the nationalism of rich, safe, comfortable nations.
I mean, my whole point is how to prepare the soil in the ex-second-and-third-world for some LW injection :)
Tight community that gives their members a sense of purpose and belonging also get more power. Wikileaks needed very little resources to have a bigger impact.
Definitely, but factor in that coercive power still lies in the hands of the nation-state. You probably don’t want to wield it, but it can be wielded against subcultures and their ideas. What happens when subcultures that value experimenting with psychedlics meat drug laws head-on?
Nassim Taleb writes a lot about why nation states lose power.
Where? I’ve read Anti-Fragile but I don’t remember this.
National loyalty: it really depends on how well that nation is doing. If you were from the third world, or a closer example: Kosovo, you would probably see nationalism as an altruist ethical duty, and it would not be very wrong: perhaps Haiti needs more fixing, but still there is enough fixing work to do there, too.
In a lot of the third world the prime loyalty is towards one’s clan and not a nation state. That’s why those states can’t implement the rule of law. The rule of law requires that loyality to the nation state is more important than loyality to one’s clan.
If you look at the Middle East the Sunni/Shia devide isn’t about nation state loyalities. IS might be called the Islamic State but it is no real state. It’s structured very differently from the way nation states are structured. The no need for a parliament that passes law because the law is the Sharia and a local Islamic community can simple govern itself after Sharia laws.
The “nations” in the Middle East are also very much 20st century inventions.
You probably don’t want to wield it, but it can be wielded against subcultures and their ideas. What happens when subcultures that value experimenting with psychedlics meat drug laws head-on?
Drug decriminalization. There’s a lot of movement towards it. Yes, it’s today still possible that the nation state wins some conflicts but it’s power dwindles and I wouldn’t be surprised if in one or two decades most of the drugs are decriminalized.
As of now, I think a lot of military-age Ukrainians living safe in the West feel ashamed a bit and wrestle with the felt duty to go back and fight. And this is at least defensible enough ethically and emotionally to safely predict that nation-in-trouble-nationalism will not die out as fast as the nationalism of rich, safe, comfortable nations.
In some sense yes, but do you notice that those Ukrainians you are talking about in that paragraph don’t live in Ukraine and likely don’t pay any taxes to the Ukrainian government? They might feel bad about not putting energy into supporting Ukraine, but as far as power is concerned it’s not the feeling guilty that counts, it’s the doing something.
30 years ago a lot of leaders of alternative groups were really bad. We had cults that were really awful. Complete obedience to a leader got preached in a lot of places. Cult members got encouraged not to think for themselves. They got encouraged to cut family ties.
An organisation like Landmark still resembles in some aspect the old cults but instead of encouraging to cut family ties they preach actually going and forgiving your family members for things that went wrong in the past and build better relationships with them. Instead of blind obedience people are encouraged to think for themselves.
France does fight Landmark and similar organisations as cults but overall those organisations do get better and can provide the sense of belonging and meaning that a lot of people seek.
It would be more accurate to say that institutions are trying to fix things on a supra-national (or explicitly international) level. Subcultures themselves also hold this promise in that, if you’re using English as a language, it’s difficult to confine their spread within the borders of one nation. They tend to spill over borders. Yes, the internet helps.
I think (I don’t know, I’m not ChristianKI) that the parent comment relied on the fact that there’s a bigger gap between the modus operandi of non-affiliated individuals and that of (state) institutions than it used to be in, say, the 19th century. Involvement in politics used to be more consequential back then compared to the impact of an average political comment on the internet. Nation states have gotten bigger, more complex, and more stable now when compared to then, and in the past there was more chance for subcultures to pass the institutional threshold and become political parties. It’s very possible that one’s best hope is a subculture. One that may, just may grow to include powerful institutionally-affiliated individuals. (Heck, just look at LessWrong itself.)
Attempting to fix things on a nation state level isn’t the best way in the 21st century.
There no need to change other cultures, it’s possible to start a subculture and draw people into that subculture. Making sure that members of a community feel good and develop well is more important than “outreach”.
This sounds like a good idea. Care to elaborate? Peope are trying to fix things on level higher than the nation-state (EU, NAFTA, UNO), it seems the world is moving towards higher units, what processes or changes or historical variables do in your view make acting in smaller units a better idea now than it used to be?
What makes the current age a good time for effective subcultures? The Internet?
UNO has very little power. Nafta is more an agreement that robs nation-states of power and allows them to be sued by corporations in investor-state settlement disputes than itself being a powerful institution. There no NAFTA parliament that’s a center of power. Corporations that are smaller entities get power through NAFTA.
The EU does have some power, but ACTA showed that EU leadership can’t anymore push through their will against grassroot opposition. The battle isn’t decided yet but I would guess that TIPP will face the same fate as ACTA.
20 years ago mainstream media was allowed to be boring. People listened to it anyway because they had no real alternative. With the internet bloggers driven by ideology which can make people exited get more power. You need to polarize to get an audience in our era. Mainstream media that doesn’t want to alienate anybody can’t do that as effectively as people focusing on a small niche.
As Nassim Taleb says, the blogger is antifragile. Small subcultures can be antifragile in a way that a fragile nation state isn’t.
I personally feel little loyality towards Germany or the EU. If the interest of Germany were pitted against the interests of the LW community I might simply side with LW. Of course living in Berlin I might be a bit of an outlier, but more and more people don’t feel their prime loyality towards the state in which they are living.
If I look at my facebook feed quite a lot of my German friends don’t take the German mainstream media opinion of the conflict in the Ukraine but take a more pro-Russian position.
In politics you see what happens when the prime loyalty of politicians doesn’t lie with their country but with their friends, their ex-employer and their prospective employer after they end their political career. There might be a few politicians here and there who still see the interest of their nation state as their prime objective, but I think it’s less than 20 years ago. That means the nation state has less power.
What do you need to get loyalty? It used to be that you get loyalty by providing food and water, medical care and blessing people marriages.
Today I feel loyalty towards communities that give me a sense of belonging and purpose. That’s not the nation state in which I’m living. I feel like in general subcultures are much better equipped for that purpose and therefore predict that more young people put their loyalty into their subculture than the nation state in which they are living.
Tight community that gives their members a sense of purpose and belonging also get more power. Wikileaks needed very little resources to have a bigger impact.
To the extend we can build a rationalist community that makes it’s members feel a sense of belonging and purpose, it’s members might feel more loyalty towards the community than towards the nation state in which they are living. If the community can coordinate because it’s filled with people who want to cooperate it can also make moves on a bigger scale.
In ten years a rationalist might run for office and Effective Altruism money completely finances the campaign, simply because that’s the reasonable play to maximize impact.
Lukewarm people don’t matter that much for power, but committed people do. A CFAR that can find a way to teach rationality in a way that actually helps people with their lives and make them feel like the belong together can lead in that direction.
General reading: IN SEARCH OF HOW SOCIETIES WORK Tribes — The First and Forever Form by David Ronfeld is very much worth reading to understand how networks do have power and how that social power is of a new quality.
Nassim Taleb writes a lot about why nation states lose power.
As a blog Global Guerrillas is quite good as well.
Hm, these are good points. Some remarks:
Bloggers: I have seen all too often that bloggers have a limited amount of stuff they want to say, they say it, and the more or less stop. Whoever happened to discover their blogs—and that is a tiny fraction of the people who would be potentially interested but the information is super hard to fish out from the overwhelming amount online, there are no good Google keywords that filter for “anything, just interesting”—will forget a few years later because blogs are not as a good media to make classics as hardcover books. In fact, I am halfway surprised OB/LW managed to survive so far, and I think it managed to survive largely through consciously forming networks out in meatspace, many early readers and contributors living in the Bay Area and meeting face to face, this also being facilitated by the super extroverted and open culture of California, so, anyway, I think we need to see blogs that survive not as much as magazines but periodicals sent to members of a club who also meet and everybody has the phone number of someone who has the phone number of someone who has the phone number of anyone you would want to get in contact with. Without a meatspace backbone, most blogs die. Exceptions are the ones backed up by mass media fame.
National loyalty: it really depends on how well that nation is doing. If you were from the third world, or a closer example: Kosovo, you would probably see nationalism as an altruist ethical duty, and it would not be very wrong: perhaps Haiti needs more fixing, but still there is enough fixing work to do there, too. It would not be highly efficient altruism but efficient enough. The points: expect it to stay alive for less-well-off nations, because they can make a very convincing case of it being ethically okay. As of now, I think a lot of military-age Ukrainians living safe in the West feel ashamed a bit and wrestle with the felt duty to go back and fight. And this is at least defensible enough ethically and emotionally to safely predict that nation-in-trouble-nationalism will not die out as fast as the nationalism of rich, safe, comfortable nations.
I mean, my whole point is how to prepare the soil in the ex-second-and-third-world for some LW injection :)
Definitely, but factor in that coercive power still lies in the hands of the nation-state. You probably don’t want to wield it, but it can be wielded against subcultures and their ideas. What happens when subcultures that value experimenting with psychedlics meat drug laws head-on?
Where? I’ve read Anti-Fragile but I don’t remember this.
Thanks for the book recommendations!
In a lot of the third world the prime loyalty is towards one’s clan and not a nation state. That’s why those states can’t implement the rule of law. The rule of law requires that loyality to the nation state is more important than loyality to one’s clan.
If you look at the Middle East the Sunni/Shia devide isn’t about nation state loyalities. IS might be called the Islamic State but it is no real state. It’s structured very differently from the way nation states are structured. The no need for a parliament that passes law because the law is the Sharia and a local Islamic community can simple govern itself after Sharia laws. The “nations” in the Middle East are also very much 20st century inventions.
Drug decriminalization. There’s a lot of movement towards it. Yes, it’s today still possible that the nation state wins some conflicts but it’s power dwindles and I wouldn’t be surprised if in one or two decades most of the drugs are decriminalized.
In some sense yes, but do you notice that those Ukrainians you are talking about in that paragraph don’t live in Ukraine and likely don’t pay any taxes to the Ukrainian government? They might feel bad about not putting energy into supporting Ukraine, but as far as power is concerned it’s not the feeling guilty that counts, it’s the doing something.
30 years ago a lot of leaders of alternative groups were really bad. We had cults that were really awful. Complete obedience to a leader got preached in a lot of places. Cult members got encouraged not to think for themselves. They got encouraged to cut family ties.
An organisation like Landmark still resembles in some aspect the old cults but instead of encouraging to cut family ties they preach actually going and forgiving your family members for things that went wrong in the past and build better relationships with them. Instead of blind obedience people are encouraged to think for themselves.
France does fight Landmark and similar organisations as cults but overall those organisations do get better and can provide the sense of belonging and meaning that a lot of people seek.
It would be more accurate to say that institutions are trying to fix things on a supra-national (or explicitly international) level. Subcultures themselves also hold this promise in that, if you’re using English as a language, it’s difficult to confine their spread within the borders of one nation. They tend to spill over borders. Yes, the internet helps.
I think (I don’t know, I’m not ChristianKI) that the parent comment relied on the fact that there’s a bigger gap between the modus operandi of non-affiliated individuals and that of (state) institutions than it used to be in, say, the 19th century. Involvement in politics used to be more consequential back then compared to the impact of an average political comment on the internet. Nation states have gotten bigger, more complex, and more stable now when compared to then, and in the past there was more chance for subcultures to pass the institutional threshold and become political parties. It’s very possible that one’s best hope is a subculture. One that may, just may grow to include powerful institutionally-affiliated individuals. (Heck, just look at LessWrong itself.)