I was having a conversation with some friends of the blog. I previously thought that probably it was better to be politically passive, or politically unconscious. Friends of the blog think the opposite – that you should be politically active, or politically conscious.
Our conversation changed my mind to some extent. Here was my reasoning:
A lot of people are incredibly riled up about political stuff that doesn’t really matter.
(I’m sure you can think of examples of people on the other side getting whipped up into a frenzy about something that barely impacts the real world at all.)
This leads to wasted time, energy, and resources when people fight over stuff that doesn’t matter, implement expensive policies to fight stuff that doesn’t matter, and so on.
So it seems like things would be a lot better if everyone just calmed the freak down about this stuff and embraced political passivism
Therefore you should be a political passivist
I’m actually somewhat embarrassed to have put forward such a bad argument. As I thought about it more on the way home, I realized that there are massive holes between pretty much every step.
Mistake 1: A lot of people are also incredibly riled up about stuff that does really matter. So if we get everyone to just get less riled up in general, we’ll benefit that they stopped riling over unimportant things, but we’ll pay a cost when they stop riling over important things.
The above is enough to establish that not everything would necessarily be better if everyone just calmed the freak down about this stuff and embraced political passivism. But there’s another, bigger flaw in my argument:
Mistake 2: Even if it would be better if everyone was a political passivist, doesn’t mean YOU should not be a political passivist. Let’s say everyone is driving 90mph on the highway. Maybe it would be better if everyone drove 55mph, because there would be less accidents or something. But if you decide to drive 55mph while everyone else is still driving 90mph, you’re plausibly going to cause even more problems for no benefit.
These are all honestly pretty embarrassing mistakes. The first one I mentioned is the mistake where you look at only the costs or only the benefits, instead of looking at both and comparing them. Laugh at me if you want for falling into one of the classic blunders, but it’ll happen to you too one day!
The last one is another major mistake. I should honestly know better than that. It’s reminiscent of the prisoner’s dilemma, where everyone ends up defecting even though everyone would be better off if they all cooperated. This happens because, even though everyone would be better off if they all cooperated, no individual person can be better off by cooperating.
Here is my new position that the friends of the blog moved me to (although it’s not necessarily exactly their position):
It’s okay to be a political activist.
BUT you can’t just believe everything you read on social media. Actually you probably shouldn’t get political information from social media at all, since you have to fact-check it anyway and what information you do get will be super biased to whatever side.
This is where I fall off political activism. Fact checking stuff I read on social media is way too much work for me. My brain just absorbs anything I read as pure truth immediately without question. You may be better than me in this way, but is your brain so powerful that you can read the same dubious statement on social media every week for a year and not have it change your perspective?
My brain is not even close to being that powerful, so I de-politicized my tiktok as much as possible, but other platforms like twitter are just impossible (because everyone tweets about politics sometimes so you can’t avoid it).
AND you should actually research the stuff you’re being an activist about.
I’m not saying you need to become a climate scientist to talk about climate change. I’m talking like, 1-2 hours of research. I think most people can find the time to do this.
Here’s a link to the the IPCC 40-page “summary for policymakers” report from March 2023. It’s basically a summary of the situation, with concrete proposals for what to do next, written by the most knowledgable people in the world on that subject. If anyone reads it with an open mind, I think it stands to reason that they’ll be pretty well informed on the subject afterwards and can responsibly do whatever it is that political activists do.
That IPCC report is the quality of research I mean. Watching biased youtube videos or passively absorbing information while scrolling social media definitely doesn’t count. The reason is those forms of “research” are not capable of giving you an accurate and wholistic understanding of the issue. If you don’t know where to start, ask ChatGPT for the best resources for a layperson to learn about the subject.
We’re not lucky enough to have an equivalent to the IPCC report in every field, but I think you can always spend an hour to familiarize yourself with the basic facts of any issue.
Like, think of that clip where (paraphrasing) Joe Rogan asks “how many kids are on puberty blockers?” and Matt Walsh says (paraphrasing) “it’s gotta be up to the millions”. (The real answer is a few thousand.) Matt Walsh is a guy who made a whole documentary about this, so he apparently cares a lot about the issue, but he’s never googled incredibly basic and relevant facts to his side of the debate. Don’t be Matt Walsh. Think of the top 5 questions Joe Rogan might ask you about your chosen subject and Google them now, or I shall humiliate you in my substack as I just did to Matt.
I don’t think 1-2 hours of research is too much to ask. Most people do have the occasional hour or two of free time. If you don’t spend at least 3 hours a week scrolling social media or hanging out with your friends or watching TV, I give you the pass to skip this step. Otherwise, hit the books!
It’s actually fine to skip this step anyway, but in that case, you should be very aware that you haven’t done any research and try to have an appropriate level of confidence. This isn’t me trying to attack anyone – I have ridiculously strong opinions about lots of random shit I’ve never bothered to actually research. But it’s not something I’m proud of and I’m trying to get better at it. It’s actually pretty sad how much stuff I supposedly care about that I’ve never actually spent an hour researching.
AND you need to have a utilitarian perspective where you weigh benefits against harms.
Let’s say you’re an environmental person and you want to preserve endangered species. And a new dam is going to open up and probably make a species of fish go extinct. You shouldn’t just see that and decide you’re opposed to the dam. You need to also think if the dam will have any benefits you care about and compare them to how much you care about that fish. Just looking at the benefits or just looking at the costs is only doing half the work.
AND you shouldn’t let all the bad things in the world get you down too much emotionally.
This is something that sometimes happens to effective altruists – they sometimes find out that it on average costs $4,000 to save a life and then they feel like they’re horrible people unless they live a life of frugality to donate every spare cent to the global poor. Since no one is going to do that, it just means they’re going to feel like horrible people forever.
But utilitarianism just says “doing X is better than doing Y”. It doesn’t say “you have to do X or you’re a horrible person”. Whether you’re a horrible person for not doing X is only up to you. In my view, as long as you leave the world better than it would have been if you were never born, I can’t ask for anything more than that.
In general, I think you should view yourself neutrally by default. And then any good you do is just bonus points that move you into being positive. Let’s say you’re currently a meat eater but you decide to stop eating meat on Fridays to be nice to animals. You should think “every Friday where I order a vegetarian option instead of a burger, a cow smiles down on me from cow heaven”. Not “every day other than Friday when I order a burger, a cow screams up at me from cow hell”.
AND you should try to find neglected cause areas instead of the ones everyone else is looking at.
Neglected cause areas are the ones no one is paying attention to right now. Unlike the mainstream causes, neglected ones are awesome because you don’t automatically have an army of crazy people on the other side fighting you.
This is something I haven’t done any research on, but there’s apparently a law called the Jones act that makes life way worse for people in Puerto Rico. Wikipedia says: “[The Jones act] requires that all goods transported by water between U.S. ports be carried on ships that have been constructed in the United States and that fly the U.S. flag, are owned by U.S. citizens, and are crewed by U.S. citizens and U.S. permanent residents”. This supposedly makes shipping stuff to Puerto Rico from other parts of the US way more expensive, since there’s way less competition among who can ship stuff there. That’s extra bad since it seems like Puerto Rico is already pretty poor. Anyway, read the wikipedia page for more details, but doesn’t this seem like a potentially a pretty fire thing to be a political advocate for? One voice on this issue could potentially make a big difference.
I think this more nuanced suggestion solves the issues with my original take. If everyone did what I suggest, we would all probably focus a lot on important issues and focus much less on nonexistent issues. If any individual person did this, they would probably be better informed and more intentional in how they direct their energy, which I think would be an improvement for them and for how they affect the world.
Of course, nobody has to follow any of my suggestions. I’m just one random person who came up with this today after getting destroyed in a debate with my friends. But, tell me what you think!
