From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Jun 20 2001 - 13:33:25 MDT
On Tue, Jun 19, 2001 at 03:36:21PM -0700, hal@finney.org wrote:
> Anders writes:
> > On Mon, Jun 18, 2001 at 11:46:09AM -0700, hal@finney.org wrote:
> > > Can't you draw the opposite lesson from this, though? It is a bad sign if
> > > you find yourself resorting to propaganda in order to make your policies
> > > acceptable. If the most successful propaganda states were Nazi Germany
> > > and Communist Russia, are you sure you want to advocate joining them?
> >
> > Waldemar's point was not that propaganda is important, but that these
> > regimes spent a lot of energy on developing their philosophies. Then
> > they distributed that as propaganda, of course.
>
> It's still not clear to me how that lesson applies to us. I am not
> comfortable with the thought that we should borrow from the tactics
> of these groups. Yes, they had a degree of effectiveness, but it was
> built on a completely false foundation. If your system is built on a
> lie, you need to work in a certain way to get it accepted. But we are
> surely starting from a completely different point.
OK, let's take the enlightenment thinkers as an example instead. I would
say the enlightenment had a far truer foundation than the other
philosophies. They also did this: they developed a philosophy, used it
to explore a lot of subjects (everything from political science to the
economics of ideas) and then a second layer of popularizers spread these
ideas far and wide. And they suceeded in overthrowing the memetic
dominance of dogma across Europe and America.
> Imagine an honest man seeking to go into business and be successful.
> Should he copy from the techniques of the Mafia? They're successful,
> they make a lot of money. Should he threaten his potential customers and
> try to frighten them into doing business with him? Of course we agree
> he should not. The methods of a movement built on sound principles must
> inherently be of a completely different nature than those of one built
> on falsehoods.
Not necessarily. Some of the Mafia ideas can be adopted to work in a
rights-repsecting system. The basic idea of the original Mafia was to a
large extent a spontaneous order for mutual protection against foreign
interests on Sicily (which quickly got corrupted since it did not
respect rights or have any incentive to do so). The omerta code of
silence is a strategy to achieve cooperation in literal prisoner's
dilemma situations and could be enforced with contracts or
incentives/disincentives rather than threats. And so on.
There is a difference between core ideas and methods. Some methods are
by their nature incompatible with some ideas, others can be adapted.
> > If you have a badly thought out system propaganda will not help you
> > beyond a certain point, since people will easily poke holes in it. But
> > if you have strong arguments (even if they are eventually wrong) the
> > propaganda is amplified, and you might actually get on with less
> > propaganda than you otherwise might have needed.
>
> Yes, this is consistent with what I was saying, but I took it farther.
> I said we could get by with no propaganda at all.
Propaganda has pejorative connotations; I would rather call what we need
outreach.
> I understand that people look at the world and see many groups advocating
> positions different from our own. Some of those movements are gaining
> momentum. This raises the concern that our perspectives are losing
> ground, that they will be lost, that we will not move into the future
> world which we hope to see.
>
> I presume that this is what motivates the desire to engage in propaganda.
> It is a pragmatic observation that, to put it bluntly, we seem to
> be losing. We need to take different steps since our current path is
> not working.
>
> Now, I do not agree with this argument. But perhaps it is a straw man
> and does not represent the views of those who feel that we need to take a
> more active role in trying to persuade people of the merits of our cause.
> So I will not try to argue against it until I get a better understanding
> of why people think we need to engage in propaganda.
Ideas shape society. Sure, other factors play a role too, but the ideas
that make up a culture affect how new technologies are developed and
what they are used for, which economical approaches are allowed and
successful, which laws are passed and what is considered worthwile
endeavors.
We need outreach in order to make sure our ideas are at least accepted
as valid ideas, since otherwise we will very likely not get the
opportunities to implement many of our visions.
As an example, currently the ideas surrounding biomedicine, sports and
human rights are in general against human enhancement (partially due to
old models of what health is, what constitutes a human, that natural is
better than artificial etc) and this get expressed as regulations and
laws that in turn make research on such fields hard. No pharmaceutical
corporation would spend money on researching anything that would only be
regarded as doping (cannot be sold). Hence most of the performance
enhancing drugs are really intended for medical treatments rather than
enhancement, and are thus suboptimal for it, heavily regulated and used
outside of medical supervision making them more dangerous. If these
ideas can be affected, there will be incentives for more research and
less resistance against it.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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