ParanoidAltoid
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User ID: 1028
ParanoidAltoid
7mo ago
Mike Pesca interviews a reporter during the 2010s in Brazil on his new book, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution
https://open.spotify.com/episode/62QiTDxfwA0g5WBD4RMXO6?si=8a7f222ee5124b7d
My brief summary of his account: In 2013 Brazilian leftists, anarchists and punks take to streets to protest bus fares. After about 4 protests things become violent/rowdy and police crack down, the media switches to become sympathetic with the protest. Millions enter the streets with various demands. Among those are right-wing soccer hooligans (the Brazil national football jersey becomes their uniform), who physically expel the original leftist protestors. Like, manhandling them off of the streets.
All protester criticisms are aimed at the popular left-leaning ruling party of the time, despite the president being somewhat sympathetic. Two years later, she's gone and far-right Bolsonaro takes power.
My commentary: These protests swelled to contain numerous amorphous groups from everywhere on the political spectrum. Social media, traditional media, and the government all had different levels of sympathy at different times. Though the chaos is unpredictable, the leftists started a chain of events that contributed to a far-right demagogue taking power.
The current thing: Similarly, the pro-Palestine protestors contain many overlapping subfactions. A Muslim may start chanting "From the river to the sea" believing it to mean "Kill all Jews", his cousin and a college student may join in thinking it's only about equal rights for Palestine. Another college student might join in knowing what the chant means, but not want to cause a fuss and shift focus away from the bombings. A third college student may think violent revolution is actually pretty cool and American Jews who don't speak up against Israel are valid targets.
I have no hot takes, the various overlapping factions make things chaotic and hard to draw lessons from. However, Western nations in 2023 are looking a lot like Brazil 2013, maybe this is our future. I would like to see Metaculus posts for "Will over 1 million protestors take to streets on any given day before 2025?"
ParanoidAltoid
10mo ago
I somewhat agree, but, there is the argument that getting a solid blue majority is easier than getting everyone to take red, which will never happen in any real scenario. Sure, taking blue is really dumb if you were, eg, the first person to run into a blender. But I can reframe it too: 50 people on a raft drifting into shore, one guy jumps off early so he can swim to shore early, and the captain yells "If too many people jump off early the raft will collapse." The authority figure and inaction bias both push towards a shelling point of staying put, and if someone immediately jumps off I'm gonna think he's a jackass who could've killed someone.
I can't help but notice this is like a platonic respectability cascade, and is also really controversial just like respectability cascades: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/give-up-seventy-percent-of-the-way As a reminder, this is where something innocent, like shortening Japanese to "Jap", is perceived as signaling something bad the speaker, leading to a cascade whereby it does start to signal something bad because only the actual bad people are willing to keep doing it.
We could all ignore the blue pill, but as soon as a majority people do it eventually it does become selfish not to. I can see how it has the dynamics of a toxic respectability cascade: I don't think anyone thought blacklist was racist until that paper in 2018, people looking to create a moral dilemma they can be on the right side of spread it, until actual good people start believing it and suddenly I'm in the most heated argument I've ever had with my (now ex) gf.
In the original poll I picked red, then switched to blue in follow up polls when it felt safe, and my groupchat went 6 - 1 blue. Unkilled so far across all of them, and never chose red in a blue majority poll since the first one. So, I'm not dying on any hills here. But like in the Scott Alexander article, I'm at least not going to be one of the first to join some destructive cascade.
True. But I don't think you need anything as concretely magic as ESP to argue the point that a materialistic worldview is extremely limited.
We know qualia is real. We know the self is some kind of illusion, and might operate on some weird paradoxical mechanism a la Hofstader's Strang Loop. Either way it's too complicated to model and neuroscience is a baby field.
We also have the replication crisis, and academic institutions that seem to pathologically deny their limitations in order to maintain their narrative. We know that narratives can completely reframe how we see the world; even if you don't go full post-modern it's clear that narratives are still extremely distorting yet necessary. Our understanding of meaning is a mess, yet is pretty much the most important thing to everyone at every moment.
And there's the egregore theories; even a weak version like "social networks are complicated and practically incomputable in a similar way as large neural networks or brains" leaves us pretty in the dark about how to predict and understand the world.
All in all, ESP just seems like a strawman of the "materialism is limited" camp.
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