8 Comments

"Increasingly activists are seen as defect-bots" - in theory can be tested!

I also remember how is a strategy for a new product in business changes depending on a cycle. At first, they need early adopters, passionate and bombastic. Later they need someone more down-to-earth

As for "increasingly seen" - Toxoplasma of rage isn't new, but like I've said - could be tested

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How would you test these things? If you post an Internet survey, it will be filled out mostly by activists. On my own blog, where I have a list of followers and am pretty well acquainted with many of them, I've found that if I post something that I consider political but uncontroversial, somewhere around 1 in 10 of the leftist activists will reply angrily, while maybe 1 in 50 of the other users will reply. If it's a sensitive topic, the number of leftists who reply angrily goes up, while the number of other users who reply goes down, and I get a bunch of private messages saying "I want to thank you for posting this, but I was afraid to say that in public."

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I think Pew make phonecalls polls

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Interesting, but I'm so conflicted over the whole issue, and also so low-income, that I wasn't going to give them money anyway.

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That's interesting. I do wonder about the effectiveness of activism. Maybe you should post this in the EA forums?

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I don't buy it. You should get Holly on your podcast.

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Who's Holly?

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Holly Elmore, head of PauseAI US

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