This is one of my favorite posts by Yudkowsky.
But is is more difficult than either of these to be the first person in a rebellion. To be the only one who is saying something different. That doesn't feel like going to school in black. It feels like going to school in a clown suit.
I often think about that line.
It's hard to be the first to join a revolution, I agree. But should we really be making it easier for ourselves to be the lone dissenting voice in the woods? After all, most of those dissenting voices are just crazy; they don't have access to a greater truth, but they think they do. Maybe the difficulty of starting a revolution is a good thing -- it forces you to be really, really convinced in your idea.
If it really were easy to change one's mind, then the risk of temporarily holding a crazy-wrong idea would be slight. Re-exposure to correct-idea would cause Alice to change her mind back.
Unless good ideas don't naturally defeat bad ideas on a level playing field (as opposed to the bias-filled reasoning of humanity today). But that's a separate problem than the social and mental-bias pressures against revolutionary ideas.
Today's post, Lonely Dissent was originally published on 28 December 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Joining a revolution does take courage, but it is something that humans can reliably do. It is comparatively more difficult to risk death. But is is more difficult than either of these to be the first person in a rebellion. To be the only one who is saying something different. That doesn't feel like going to school in black. It feels like going to school in a clown suit.
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was On Expressing Your Concerns, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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