[mrandish]

> (the philosophy) is simple and reasonable

> (the movement) takes that simple and reasonable idea and extrapolates it out to support some truly crazy and/or questionable efforts

You've perfectly described the fundamental problem with many recently popular philosophical propositions. The starting premise sounds reasonable because it is reasonable. Yet that basic premise is then extended to include much more controversial things. These initially reasonable things range from "It would be good to incorporate some safety measures as we implement AI" to "Racism is bad." Obviously, reasonable propositions it's hard to disagree with. Yet somehow we end up with influential social movements LARPing Terminator II scenarios and serious people arguing the police should be defunded.

I'm starting to suspect this repeating dark pattern isn't happening by accident. If your movement has some pretty extreme ideas most people wouldn't agree with, it's more effective to start with ideas almost no one will disagree with. Then, after a lot of reasonable people have bought-in to that, slowly increment toward justifying increasingly extreme measures to achieve "justice". It's essentially bait-and-switch. The unfortunate side effect is now I've learned to be leery of agreeing with even seemingly agreeable things because it's unclear what other things might later be included.

This puts me in the kind of bizarre conversations where someone says "I'm an anti-racist, are you?" and I have to craft a weirdly qualified response like, "Well, I'm certainly opposed to racism but I need to understand what 'anti-racism' includes in this context because some people include policies under that term which have net effects that seem to get uncomfortably close to racism."

[ViktorRay]

I think what you described is something that happens inherently in movements that become echo chambers. As the movement gets more extreme more and more of the reasonable people are driven out or silenced. Eventually the movement is controlled by a tiny minority of extremists and the majority of reasonable people feel compelled to agree with them or leave. Then the movement collapses.

This phenomenon has taken place many times in history. Look at how the ideas of socialism became extreme in China during the cultural revolution or in The USSR during the peak of Stalinism.

Anyway eventually the ultra Maoists in China lost control and China went in a different direction. Russia too. So at the most extreme things do seem to collapse and move in the opposite direction…