My Failures in Light of the Three Pillars of Activism
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Idea generation:
I am good at generating pools of questions or answers. I have a broad superficial knowledge on many issues and go a bit deeper in some domains. I am a generalist, and I am OK, sometimes even good, at many things: I can write, lecture, fundraise, manage, go undercover, investigate a new issue, hire the right people, and more. Not exceptionally good on any of those, but between OK and good.
Yet, in hindsight I understand I wasn't broad minded enough in my first ~13 years of activism. I didn't read books on social change, I hardly knew anything about AI, and I was only familiar with Effective Altruism's philosophy in a shallow way.
Prioritization mistakes, mostly in predictions:
- Too optimistic prediction, sometime related to falling in love with my own ideas, not getting enough feedback for those ideas, and not working with prioritization methods (like Weighted Factor Model). Introspection, specifically meditation, helped my prioritization. One specific prediction mistake is I didn't expect the downfall of the Israeli animal rights movement, which started around ~2017 and escalated. I didn't prepare for that
- I have very basic statistical understanding. I know correlation is not causation, I understand just a bit about Bayesian reasoning, but practically not much more than that
- I Didn't do enough checks before prioritizing a project. The Camera On Animal was hardly used by other activists, and the whole broader Spytech vision we had didn't pan out like we wanted to. It wasn't suitable for our budget, the community needs, and the willingness of investigators to put effort into new tools. I had a mistaken inclination towards what looked shiny, exciting and new, something that sets a precedent, over simple and practical. Our best Spytech project this far came from the most common request investigators had and it was very mundane; just a regular camera that combines different features that were not there in the same product
- When the people you depend on, like journalists, don't want the main course, the essence of the story, then the "confetti" - such as a creative angle, a very high quality footage, or an interesting framing - can only help so much. If they don't want to tell the story of farmed animals, the decorations on a direct story about farmed animals have its limits. Sentient's first undercover investigation used a 360 undercover camera, insane HD footage from inside duck slaughter cones, showing animals alive after the slaughter. The success of this story depended more on the general willingness to tell the story of a slaughterhouse in the first place, than on the unique materials we brought. Getting creative within a narrative is enchantment, not a game changer.
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