@freemo You are mixing sacrifice, work and effectiveness. I agree that the amount of effort put into a protest is an indication of how serious they treat the problem. However, using work and (especially) sacrifice as measures of that effort discourages efficient protesting, which just seems counterproductive.

@timorl If someone is being efficient at protesting, but are just as devoted to it, then the amount of sacrfice (including investment of time/hard work) they put in wont be any less. It is just that they will get more results for the same input of effort.

If someone protests outside for 5 hours and reaches twice the number of people that is an increase in efficiency. However if you can reach twice as many people and therefore choose to put in half the effort, then clearly the cause isnt as important to you as it is to someone who would have worked twice as long at the same efficiency.

@freemo That approach would only work if there was a simple way to convert any amount of commitment to effectiveness through sacrifice. This is often not the case, many of the actions one can take are uh, I lost the appropriate English word, discrete? I mean you can spend 8 hours preparing a picket or 8 hours working at lobbying, but if you try spending 8 hours on one and 2 on the other, the additional 2 will be wasted. Even if you manage to cut down the amount of work needed for both those things to 6 hours each you still won't be able to do both and someone judging you on the amount of work you spent will think less of you.

Your reasoning works for fungible resources, like money, but not everybody has those and the exchange ratios on them might be very unfavourable.

@timorl Not sure im following you. If I am protesting by picketing my goal is to get my message out to as many people who pass me as possible. If i do that 8 hours a day and expose my message to 8,000 people, great. However if i realize that if i make my sign twice the size and therefore can be more efficient by reaching twice the number of people, then why wouldnt I protest for the same 8 hours int he day and reach 16,000 people instead of 8,000 people?

The time and effort I put in shows my devotion to the cause regardless of effiency

The reason 8 hours protesting and 2 hours lobbying isnt likely to work isnt because of anything other than the fact that if you spread your effort across too many things then you wont do any of them very well. It is not an indication, however, that doing something more efficient means you should spend less time doing it.

@freemo My point is exactly that this simplified picture of a bigger sign reaching linearly more people is too far removed from reality to be useful.

Let me try another example, simplified and exaggerated, but hopefully illustrating the real problem one might encounter. Lets concentrate on picketing to raise awareness. Lets say there is one place where many people pass during two specific hour-long windows during the day, but the rest of the day it's very quiet. Say 1000 people per busy hour, 10 people per calm hour. In this case a protestor can spend 8 hours to reach 2060 people, or 2 hours to reach 2000 people. If you judge them by the amount of work, then clearly the 8 hours signals they care more, but then you are actually demanding that he spends the 6 hours nearly for no gain (other than your approval).

Eh, let me abuse the liberal character limits on QOTO and elaborate a bit more. Usually people will have two indicators of how much they care. One is the price at which they are willing to pay for a thing (in the picketing case it might be 500 people reached per hour of work) and another is the cumulative price they are willing to pay (say, no more than 8 hours a day, because otherwise they have to quit their job). Opportunities to actually advance an agenda don't come in nice, continuous spectra, but rather in discrete packages -- in the previous example there are two packages with an exchange rate 1000 people reached per hour and six with a rate of 10 people per hour. If you judge the hypothetical 2 hour protestor by the amount of time they spend picketing you only learn that they value the cause at less than 10 people per hour and more than 1000 pph (ugh, this is inverted, the bigger the number the less they care, just mentioning this to avoid confusion). This is a terrible resolution that doesn't actually tell you much, even though the difference in effort is quite massive.

This might be a good place to plug effective altruism: https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ . They try to apply this kind of reasoning to charity, including research on the more advanced versions of the problem I mention here. And they are (usually) working with _money_, which is massively more fungible than one person''s time.

@timorl I agree it is an oversimplification, but the underlying point is valid.

Take your example of a street corner that is active for only 2 hours out of the day. sure it might not make sense to put in any more than 2 hours at that one location, but if your very motivated there are still other options. You could, for examplemove to a different street corner, you could spend your extra time writing senator, or simply spending that time recruiting others or other activities.

I'm all about making things efficient but when you do that it leaves you more time to do more.

If I look at my real world examples then I would look at my activism around feeding the homeless, until my spinal surgery I was pretty active every week hitting up the area and feeding any homeless I could find. Or countless other activities.

Over the years I found ways to reach them more quickly. I learned the locations they would be found at or made friends with them and would therefore be able to go direct to those locations and save a lot of time. I made the process more efficient. My answer wasnt "Wow instead of spending a few hours doing this now I can spend a few minutes and get the same done!"... no my reaction was "wow now that I know where to go to reach more people I can spend the same amount of time doing this and have even greater effect!"

Now I would agree that, of course, its very situational, so obviously a person should consider all the factors before judging just how committed a person is to a cause. But none the less the amount of time out of the day they spend invested in that cause is absolutely an indication of their devotion to it in the vast majority of cases.

Over time I found ways to make it more effective, I knew

@freemo The point is the choice of alternatives is often much more limited than one would imagine, especially for activism. Recruitment options are very limited, as are various relevant officials (and spamming them as one person is not very effective), and even pickets usually have to be organized with more people, which adds another set of constraints. Very soon you end up with the dilemma I outlined in my previous post -- spend extra effort just to impress people who care about how much I spent on the issue, or do something much more productive in another area of my life?

Obviously there are areas in which opportunities are much more continuous from the perspective of a single person (to add to your example of feeding homeless people, however much money you make you can probably spend on malaria nets and be pretty effective), but I'd argue most social change activism isn't really it.

@timorl Well that is, as I said, why a person should look at and consider all factors.

Though personally I think you are mistaken regarding options for activism. While one may wish to ally with organizations or groups in practice I find this is far less effective than someone acting personally.

Going back to my earlier statement if I had limited myself to groups and soup kitchens I too would have been very limited in my options. Show up when the soup kitchen is serving or needs help and thats about it. The truth is goign out there and feeding someone one-on-one does far more good and doesnt have those restrictions.

Unless the type of activism is something extremely specific (like trying to help people with a specific disease or something) in most cases there are probably more than enough options you can fill your time with if your trying to be an effective activist.

With all that said, in the end it just means if your going to try to judge someone's devotion to the cause you should take the time to hear the full story and make your judgement in full consideration of all factors. But with that said amount of time one invests is still the dominant factor in most situations.

@freemo I am mostly talking about social activism in the sense of attempting to change society. Charity, while definitely admirable, has different characteristics. With the social activism I am referring to coordination is much more important (although some of it can be done alone) and the low hanging fruit are scarce. And, in contrast to charity (usually), it receives pushback from society. The latter point is why I am so adamant about not devaluing any support for such causes -- if we want society to progress, changing it shouldn't be made even more difficult.

@timorl Im not sure social change is distinctly different from feeding the homeless. I dont feed the homeless to give them food despite evidence to the contrary. I feed them so they feel cared about, so they feel they have worth. It is to enact social change in both the homless as well as to encite others to change how they treat or think about the homeless, which is why I try to encourage people to join me when I do.

Perhaps, and this is just speculation, a lot of our difference in opinion just comes down to the mind set we are locked into with enacting our own change. I noticed earlier you had a hard time of coming up with ways to protest climate change when I had a doen ideas off the top of my head. Perhaps you have a harder time with coming up with good ideas to be active and thus rely more on groups (and their suggestions) than I might, this in turn might also explain why you see a need for them that is so significant when it comes to enacting social change and also why you might feel the number of options is otherwise limited.

@freemo I do sometimes struggle with finding direction (and definitely motivation!) without a group, that is true. (Although, for the record, the only of your suggestions that I didn't come up with and discard based on some criteria was the hunger strike one.) However I believe this is the case for many, if not most, people. And at least for those people I think my criteria for judging commitment are more appropriate.

@timorl Fair, I'm not against people using groups. If your out there and your doing good thats all that matters, I'm sure you agree

Im a bit jaded too and have my own biases. I fled america largely due to how people with good intentions act in large groups, which more often became the opposite of good.

So I have a pretty jaded view of how people with good intentions are likely to behave en masse.

With that said I think the good of groups is that you have a critical mass with which to enact certain types of changes you cant do alone. The bad side is that the group consciousness tends to be very brainwashy which can often lead to harmful ideals. There is a single minded, often blind, group-think that tends to be self destructive even to the most well meaning cause.

The extent of this effect seems to depend wildly on the mental health of the community. In the USA it seems to be a significant problem partly because mental health is pretty low in the general population there (to the point that I think virtually everyone is effected). In the Netherlands it seems to be far less of an issue and charity groups seem to function without so much internal dogmatic group-think. But the Dutch are also very rational people most of the time I find in general.