timorl @timorl@qoto.org

How is it 2020 and the only acceptable mail client is (neo)mutt?

@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.

@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.

@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.

@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.

@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.

@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.

Don't demand people fighting for social change sacrifice something precious before you take them seriously. Even without visible sacrifices these fights are hard and scary.

@freemo
(Damn, I think we finally started mixing threads, this will be unreadable. >.< Mastodon is terrible for multithreaded discussions, although few tools are better.)

It seems (at least to me) that many more people are paying attention to the issue due to Greta, so I am not so sure the impact is negative.

I don't think there is a anti-educational message there, it's more about this being the only way that could be in any way effective. Of the methods you mentioned earlier, only hunger strikes might actually fulfill the criteria of being hard to ignore, but if Greta called for those she would just be seen as a crazy extremist by everyone. Calling for self-harm of children wouldn't fly in the media.
@nothingplanet

@freemo Organizing even a short picket is quite a lot of work -- have you tried it? And that is the least effortful option they suggest. And still, no option to "just not come in on Fridays".

Also after reading the instructions I am even more unsure they suggest protesting every Friday -- the "Every Friday" bit in the "When" section seems more like "pick any Friday you want, it counts", and this is the way I have seen it interpreted before you mentioned it should be every Friday. Are you sure you are interpreting it correctly (i.e. as the authors and most people would interpret it)? In particular I still wonder if some students actually protest every week -- do you have any sources for that?

@freemo
Even if it's not effective that doesn't stem from the lack of protester suffering involved, but rather lack of pressure at the employer. But we are getting sidetracked, a protest to change society is quite different from a work related one, in more than one way, so it's not that relevant to the discussion.
@nothingplanet

@freemo Well, finding their page was harder than I expected, but I assume you mean this doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vzhamVa5k1dYnUAvcxO6hF9MbtxHGVtnY2he5rkOSA4 . You seem to have missed the other 8 points that describe what to do, many of them requiring nontrivial amounts of work. While the call might be misinterpreted to only mean "don't go to school on Fridays", that is clearly not what it states there.

@nothingplanet Uh, why would striking on paid vacation be a problem? Even from the suffering perspective it doesn't make sense to view it as worse, since paid leave is a limited resource for a worker.

Although at least in the case of workers I kind of understand the need for some suffering -- they are usually (at least recently) fighting for their own personal gain rather than social change, so it shouldn't be entirely free.
@freemo

@freemo
This doesn't really address my main issue -- why do you insist they must suffer to be treated seriously? And I'm not asking why you think society won't take them seriously if they don't suffer (because I don't think this is the case for most of society, certainly not for me), this is a question personally addressed to you (and other people who feel the same, I guess).
@nothingplanet

@freemo @nothingplanet I'm also very annoyed by your insistence that protestors must suffer for it to be a legitimate protest. Social change is difficult for inherent reasons, mostly because society will resist it in many ways. If we want the world to improve we shouldn't insist on making it even harder.

@freemo I'm actually surprized to learn that students just stay home -- I only saw a couple instances and all of them included some forms of picketing. Wasn't this part of Greta's call (I would assume at least implicitly)? Do people actually just not go to school the way you say they do, or is it just your interpretation? I tried searching for that, but wikipedia quite explicitly states "(...)take time off from class on Fridays to participate in demonstrations(...)", so I'm just confused.

@freemo I think of the first part you write about as a necessary evil, rather than an inherent property of protests. Social change is difficult, the less inconvenience people trying to enact it face, the better.

As for the second part, I can think of few other things non-adults could do, that would exert more pressure on the institutions, and all of them either illegal or infeasible. It's worth remembering that, while schools certainly are a form of education, they also have different roles -- in particular keeping children/teenagers in a relatively safe place where their parents or society don't have to worry about them doing something stupid. If kids don't go to school, society has to figure out different solutions for these problems and that might be sufficiently annoying.

It would be better if the kids could do something more directly targeted at the institutions responsible, but those are governments. Influencing them can almost exclusively be done by voting or lobbying (neither possible for non-adaults, usually), so in this case they have to be targeted indirectly through society.

Maybe it's just my imagination that is failing me -- what form of protest would you suggest to teenagers, that would not be easy to ignore and legal?

@freemo This is a very strange way of looking at things. The walkouts are supposed to be a protest, right? Would you call any people advocating strikes "anti-work"?

@freemo
Huh, how is she anti-education?