Thanks for those examples. I have been looking for cases of movies also. Also it is good that you had here an example of something that a lot of people would view as a negative case (making the invention of the hydrogen bomb faster).
What surprised me and conflicted with my intuitions is the way that works of art pushing already highly familiar ideas that already had lots of artistic works about them are capable of still having a huge effect if they catch the public imagination in either a way previous works hadn’t, or that this particular generation of movie goers hadn’t been affected.
Obviously The Day After and The Holocaust were not the first movies about those subjects, nor even the first hugely popular and successful movies about those successes (or even in the case of The Day After the first movie that is credited with substantially improving popular awareness on the subject). But despite the fact that it would seem like something which had already been done, there seems to be a clear argument that each had an important effect on the margin.
I’m pretty sure it is actually the same case with the classic slavery example of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I mean, I don’t know much of anything about the history, but on reflection it would be very surprising to me if it was the first popular novel focused on the theme of slavery being terrible. And there had at that point been a century of abolitionist activity as a central theme of political life. But it still plausibly had an important marginal influence.
This makes me update away from my view that writing books pushing specifically an AI safety angle wouldn’t be useful because it has already been done and people are aware of the ideas. Though I still think that ideas about how to make sure that there is a decent distribution of resources that can make a post human labor society an actually good thing for almost everyone are far more neglected.
It feels like a lot of what made the cases above work is that they influenced specific people. There may be other cases of media being popular and having an impact on the populace, but one way to make your media really effective is to show it to someone influential.
Also it is good that you had here an example of something that a lot of people would view as a negative case (making the invention of the hydrogen bomb faster).
There’s also the example of a work without which the Russian Revolution, and the subsequent deaths of tens of millions of people in famines and mass killings, may not have occurred. But until you mentioned it, I hadn’t realized that fiction appears to be more often credited with having a positive than a negative influence, whereas for philosophy the reverse seems to be the case. Would be interesting to move beyond impressions and come up with a more rigorous way of testing this.
Thanks for those examples. I have been looking for cases of movies also. Also it is good that you had here an example of something that a lot of people would view as a negative case (making the invention of the hydrogen bomb faster).
What surprised me and conflicted with my intuitions is the way that works of art pushing already highly familiar ideas that already had lots of artistic works about them are capable of still having a huge effect if they catch the public imagination in either a way previous works hadn’t, or that this particular generation of movie goers hadn’t been affected.
Obviously The Day After and The Holocaust were not the first movies about those subjects, nor even the first hugely popular and successful movies about those successes (or even in the case of The Day After the first movie that is credited with substantially improving popular awareness on the subject). But despite the fact that it would seem like something which had already been done, there seems to be a clear argument that each had an important effect on the margin.
I’m pretty sure it is actually the same case with the classic slavery example of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I mean, I don’t know much of anything about the history, but on reflection it would be very surprising to me if it was the first popular novel focused on the theme of slavery being terrible. And there had at that point been a century of abolitionist activity as a central theme of political life. But it still plausibly had an important marginal influence.
This makes me update away from my view that writing books pushing specifically an AI safety angle wouldn’t be useful because it has already been done and people are aware of the ideas. Though I still think that ideas about how to make sure that there is a decent distribution of resources that can make a post human labor society an actually good thing for almost everyone are far more neglected.
It feels like a lot of what made the cases above work is that they influenced specific people. There may be other cases of media being popular and having an impact on the populace, but one way to make your media really effective is to show it to someone influential.
There’s also the example of a work without which the Russian Revolution, and the subsequent deaths of tens of millions of people in famines and mass killings, may not have occurred. But until you mentioned it, I hadn’t realized that fiction appears to be more often credited with having a positive than a negative influence, whereas for philosophy the reverse seems to be the case. Would be interesting to move beyond impressions and come up with a more rigorous way of testing this.