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social-movements/readme.md

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+From [this LessWrong thread](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RCQ3vintjuGWiMbsa/what-is-a-reasonable-outside-view-for-the-fate-of-social):
+
+> I will pay $100 to anyone who goes through a randomly selected subset of 25% of [this Wikipedia list](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_movements), and evaluates whether they have succeeded on a reasonable sounding metric. (By random I mean actually random, not chosen by the person doing the analysis).
+> The wikipedia article is obviously going to be biased towards somewhat successful movements, but it still seems like an OK source to learn at least some from, given that I haven't heard of at least half of the movements on that list.
+
+My answer:
+  
+My method was reading the Wikipedia page and answering the following questions:  
+1. Was the movement succesful as a community?  
+0: nope  
+1: to some extent / ambiguous.  
+2: clearly yes.  
+2. Did the movement produce the change in the world which it said it wanted?  
+0: nope  
+1: not totally a failure / had some minor victories / ambiguous.  
+2: clearly yes.  
+3. Was it succesful at changing laws? | Was that its intent?  
+4. Is it fringe (0), minority (1) or mainstream (2)?  
+5. Bias: how sympathetic am I to this movement?   
+0: I am unsympathetic.  
+1: I am not unsympathetic  
+2: I like them a lot.  
+
+I feel that for the amount of effort I'm spending on this, I'm going to have to rely on my gut feeling at some point, and that the pareto principle thing to do is to have well defined questions.   
+In case I or someone else wants to develop this further, a way to improve on question 2 would be:  
+
+a) Identify the three most important objectives the movement claims to have.  
+b) For each, to what extent has it been achieved?  
+
+I excluded "Salt March" because I saw it as doublecounting "Nonviolence", and excluded "Reform movements in the United States" because it was too broad a category. I kept "Student Movements", though.  
+