[ExI] Would this be also true for minority transhumanist beliefs?

[Anders Sandberg]

On 2011-07-27 05:55, Brent Allsop wrote:
> This interesting article "Minority rules: Scientists discover tipping
> point for the spread of ideas" on physorg.com:
>
> http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-07-minority-scientists-ideas.html

Original paper here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1102.3931

The finding isn't that new, in opinion dynamics research it is well 
known that a small group of people who do not change opinion inside a 
population where people change opinion based on encountering each other 
tends to win.


> is kind of interesting. But I would doubt this would be true for
> transhumanist ideas?

Note that the finding says nothing about the content of the opinion, 
just that it is held. So the real question to ask is: are there enough 
committed transhumanists who will proselytize no matter what?

And the more serious second-order question, do we want our views to 
spread because our beliefs are zealously held or because we think they 
are truth-tracking?

> Could the tipping point for transhumanism
> really be 10%? Is that all we need to do, is to get 10% of society to be
> transhumanists, and then our job would be done, as the rest soon
> followed? 5 years ago, I would bet we were a very long ways from 10% of
> society. But today, I bet we are getting close to this?

As a sociological rule of thumb, at the point when 10% agree with a 
view, that view becomes hard to disregard for the rest of society. A 
smaller group is just another minority among others, but when you reach 
around 10% you become politically relevant. If the issue is about civil 
rights, this is where they will start to seriously move forward.

But notice that most sweeping changes in opinion have started far 
smaller than 10%. Abolitionism started among small groups of religious 
and humanist people, gradually growing through zealous preaching over 
about a generation until there was a fairly sharp transition at least in 
the United Kingdom. Gay rights required quite a bit of intellectual and 
social groundwork, and then got a sharp start at Stonewall when an 
almost ready-made group with shared opinions suddenly became visible and 
reached critical mass. There is a lot of interplay here with media 
visibility, having support from the right memetic key players (my 
obligatory wave of Hayek's "The intellectuals and socialism") and how 
early small opinion former groups spread.



-- 
Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford University