If no one got into the business of organizing the organizers, then there might be no consensus among them, and there would be as many little fiefdoms as there were organizers, all conceivably working at cross-purposes. Achieving consensus between organizers seems like a worthy goal. So does improving their persuasiveness. Imagine you have a choice between convincing ten people to become socialists, or making ten socialists each 10x better at convincing people to become socialists—which is a better use of your time? This is commonly known as the "Everybody wants to be Lenin" problem. Of course it's much easier to imagine you're one of the higher-order folks than it is to achieve a significant higher-order effect.
I personally don't spend most of my time addressing non-socialists because I think rather than sheer numbers socialism is wanting more for agreement and understanding of a few key points. I don't enjoy writing down to people, which is what I would have to do to explain things I consider basic to non-socialists. In person it's a little different; I generally meet people where they're at. But that makes sense in person because you can tailor your approach to their specific concerns. Writing for the internet means selecting the audience on whom you imagine you can effect the most meaningful positive change, which may not be "making people socialists" but instead "making socialists see x or go about y in a certain way". The great philosophers in history weren't necessarily trying to convince people to become anything-ists, but they were still intervening in ways that had long-term chaotic knock-on effects, and few people would say they were wasting their time.
If you had an AGI that could produce infinite amounts of persuasive content, and could interrupt public Twitter conversations with relevant arguments, links, facts, figures, etc., and it only lobbied for one side of the political spectrum, how effective would it be?
Probably quite effective. I'd suspect that the key benefit, though, wouldn't be in the content creation, but in tailoring which links and messages to send, and then getting it in front of each person at scale.
Also, there is the key assumption, that it lobbies for one side. Everybody already sort of has the opportunity to do this, but they know they're just cancelling out someone else on the other side. Since it's already futile to vote, is it that much better if I can convince 10 people to flip their votes? It might take me 100 hours to accomplish that.
There's a kind of incapability that comes from not loving the people you're trying to persuade. (A definition of "love" could be "valuing someone in a particularly personal way, as person valuing person.") In the Christian world, people say "he has a heart for the lost", to explain why the one person in the church actually acts like people can go to hell, gets the ethical implications of that belief. In my experience, when I was young, having been raised a Christian, I wanted to reach out to atheists. After maybe 15 or 20 years of trying to understand atheistic positions and be in atheistic social environments, I have somewhat like a missionary's experience of being part atheist myself. I've been influenced in my thinking by the people I'm trying to convert. (The idea in therapy that the therapist is altered by the therapy as well as the client.) I'm comfortable with atheistic thinking, and I can entertain the possibility of atheism being true, without necessarily believing it. Entertaining a position as possibly being true enables you to understand it better, and if you're going to reason with (persuade) people, you should (in the best case) believe that reason itself matters, which requires being open to being persuaded to the position you're trying to refute. But the process of that opening up was hard, risking the foundations in order to build a house. Most Christians don't want that kind of stress, and do not really entertain the possibility that various arguments for atheism could be true, and thus are ill-equipped to really persuade atheists.
I think (generally or ideally) you have to be with people over the long term, have a shared history, to understand them and to be motivated to take their points of views seriously, and the Internet is a (somewhat) bad environment to see people as people and to develop long-term relationships. The Internet can be useful in acculturating a person (in my experience), but more likely will have that effect on people with the drives and sensitivities to learn from it, which come from caring about people.
One low-hanging fruit that I see is for political people to send missionaries to other political tribes (try to learn from the best, least cringe-inducing, etc. missionaries and then implement what they do). People who go into other cultures, vulnerable, dependent on the people they are trying to reach and outnumbered, who care about the people they are around on a personal level.
This explanation may turn out to be decomposable into ones you've already laid out, but:
Consider why this tweet is dumb: https://twitter.com/AnarkYouTube/status/1458857642542125056
If no one got into the business of organizing the organizers, then there might be no consensus among them, and there would be as many little fiefdoms as there were organizers, all conceivably working at cross-purposes. Achieving consensus between organizers seems like a worthy goal. So does improving their persuasiveness. Imagine you have a choice between convincing ten people to become socialists, or making ten socialists each 10x better at convincing people to become socialists—which is a better use of your time? This is commonly known as the "Everybody wants to be Lenin" problem. Of course it's much easier to imagine you're one of the higher-order folks than it is to achieve a significant higher-order effect.
I personally don't spend most of my time addressing non-socialists because I think rather than sheer numbers socialism is wanting more for agreement and understanding of a few key points. I don't enjoy writing down to people, which is what I would have to do to explain things I consider basic to non-socialists. In person it's a little different; I generally meet people where they're at. But that makes sense in person because you can tailor your approach to their specific concerns. Writing for the internet means selecting the audience on whom you imagine you can effect the most meaningful positive change, which may not be "making people socialists" but instead "making socialists see x or go about y in a certain way". The great philosophers in history weren't necessarily trying to convince people to become anything-ists, but they were still intervening in ways that had long-term chaotic knock-on effects, and few people would say they were wasting their time.
If you had an AGI that could produce infinite amounts of persuasive content, and could interrupt public Twitter conversations with relevant arguments, links, facts, figures, etc., and it only lobbied for one side of the political spectrum, how effective would it be?
Probably quite effective. I'd suspect that the key benefit, though, wouldn't be in the content creation, but in tailoring which links and messages to send, and then getting it in front of each person at scale.
Also, there is the key assumption, that it lobbies for one side. Everybody already sort of has the opportunity to do this, but they know they're just cancelling out someone else on the other side. Since it's already futile to vote, is it that much better if I can convince 10 people to flip their votes? It might take me 100 hours to accomplish that.
There's a kind of incapability that comes from not loving the people you're trying to persuade. (A definition of "love" could be "valuing someone in a particularly personal way, as person valuing person.") In the Christian world, people say "he has a heart for the lost", to explain why the one person in the church actually acts like people can go to hell, gets the ethical implications of that belief. In my experience, when I was young, having been raised a Christian, I wanted to reach out to atheists. After maybe 15 or 20 years of trying to understand atheistic positions and be in atheistic social environments, I have somewhat like a missionary's experience of being part atheist myself. I've been influenced in my thinking by the people I'm trying to convert. (The idea in therapy that the therapist is altered by the therapy as well as the client.) I'm comfortable with atheistic thinking, and I can entertain the possibility of atheism being true, without necessarily believing it. Entertaining a position as possibly being true enables you to understand it better, and if you're going to reason with (persuade) people, you should (in the best case) believe that reason itself matters, which requires being open to being persuaded to the position you're trying to refute. But the process of that opening up was hard, risking the foundations in order to build a house. Most Christians don't want that kind of stress, and do not really entertain the possibility that various arguments for atheism could be true, and thus are ill-equipped to really persuade atheists.
I think (generally or ideally) you have to be with people over the long term, have a shared history, to understand them and to be motivated to take their points of views seriously, and the Internet is a (somewhat) bad environment to see people as people and to develop long-term relationships. The Internet can be useful in acculturating a person (in my experience), but more likely will have that effect on people with the drives and sensitivities to learn from it, which come from caring about people.
One low-hanging fruit that I see is for political people to send missionaries to other political tribes (try to learn from the best, least cringe-inducing, etc. missionaries and then implement what they do). People who go into other cultures, vulnerable, dependent on the people they are trying to reach and outnumbered, who care about the people they are around on a personal level.