I don't believe that that quite applies to my situation. I'm not predicting whether I'll choose right now to break up with my girlfriend (99.999% certainty I won't); I'm predicting whether at some point in the next year one of the future Ozymandiases, subtly different from me, will find zirself in a state in which zie wants to break up with zir girlfriend. I have already made up my mind to not break up; I'm predicting how likely I am to change my mind.
I hope that the cynicism I reject in my own self-examination of my membership in my own church of rational physics engineering leads me to reject cynicism when trying to understand other people's churches. There ARE reasons people believe things and they are by no means all stupid reasons.
We're definitely in agreement there. And even the ones that are stupid may be psychologically reassuring or otherwise "make sense" even if they are completely irrational. While signalling arguments are important, I think it's unrealistic to consider them to the exclusion of other arguments.
I was thinking roughly Matrix 2 level backlash: a significant group of "ruined FOREVER" fans, but the movie does not become a byword for terribleness now and forever like Episode 1. Possibly this could be measured by the number of negative YMMV tropes on its TVTropes page?
Fan backlash is remarkably difficult to operationalize.
Sorry. I apparently suck at the Internet. :)
noseriouslywhatabouttehmenz.wordpress.com
No death or rape threats. I have yet to come up with a theory about why (beyond "crazy random happenstance" and "I'm so nice no one wants to rape and murder me"); suggestions appreciated.
Thanks! LW actually helped me crystallize that a lot of the stuff social-justice-types talk about is not some special case of human evil, but the natural consequence of various cognitive biases (that, in this case, serves to disadvantage certain types of people).
Dammit, could someone clean the fanboy off the ceiling? The goop is getting in my hair. :)
It is true, I forgot to account for the effects of a GOP presidency on OWS. However, I still think there's a high chance of a OWS fadeaway for a few reasons. One, the liberal hippies (generally the backbone of social justice movements) have started to nitpick OWS in earnest: this could be a sign either that OWS is getting more successful (and the crab in a bucket mentality is taking over) or that it's losing their support, but given that the mainstream media seems to have decided OWS is yesterday's news, I think it might be the latter. Second, as the economy splutters into recovery, OWS will get less support. Third, if OWS continues to get more popular, the government will likely make some token effort to address their concerns that will take away some of the momentum of the movement.
Nevertheless, you did mention an important factor I overlooked, so I'll downgrade it to a roughly 60% probability.
It's Mary Daly, Catholic theologian and radical feminist: http://www.enlightennext.org/magazine/j16/daly.asp?pf=1