Statistics show that civil movements with nonviolent doctrines are more successful at attaining their stated goals (especially in states that otherwise have functioning police). The factions that throw away all their morals lose the sympathy of the public and politicians, and then they fail. Terrorism is not an instant ‘I win’ button that people only refrain from pressing because they’re so moral. Society has succeeded in making it usually not pay off—say the numbers.
What are the statistics? I’m not convinced. It seems the sympathy part is mostly solved by having a large official wing that disavows any violence.
Directly stopping all AI is not the only way terrorism could raise P(pause). It also raises awareness of the cause, and causes terror which can change behavior.
My model is something like: You need constructive action to build lasting systems, treaties, solutions that will withstand the test of time. Destructive action can, in theory, cause some local change, but it destabilizes the environment and increases variance enough that for any reasonable agent it’s basically never optimal in iterated games.
Violent protests probably don’t work (80% credence), and they plausibly backfire but it’s unclear (40% credence).
Peaceful protests probably do work (90% credence).
However, the literature is too coarse to give good evidence on questions like, “What happens if you have a civil movement with a mixture of violent and nonviolent protests, compared to a counterfactual where all protests are nonviolent?” If I extrapolate from the narrower results that are supported by the literature, I’d guess that a pure-nonviolent movement would be most effective, but there’s no decent-quality direct evidence to my knowledge.
It seemed like the lit review said “there’s not that much good data here”, kinda surprised you ended up with that high a confidence. (Maybe I’m going off a prior that this seems like a domain it makes sense to be pretty uncertain about by default)
80%/90% confidence is enough to be action-guiding (IMO) but I wouldn’t call it “high”. On a scientific question where there’s good data, it shouldn’t be hard to get to 99% or even 99.9% confidence.
If you have a single study with p = 0.049, and God descends from heaven and tells you that the study had perfect methodology, then you should update your beliefs by about 5:1. That alone gets you from a 50% prior to an ~80% posterior.
The lab experiment meta-analysis (Orazani et al. 2021) found a very strong p-value, I’m just not sure how well lab experiments generalize to real life.
I will say that I don’t know that I have a good sense of how to convert a within-experiment odds update to a subjective odds update (accounting for methodology flaws, publication bias, etc.). So maybe my subjective credences aren’t good. I just have a sense that like, if violent protests worked, I would expect these studies to have had different outcomes. But I wouldn’t be extraordinarily surprised if it turned out that violent protests work after all.
Hmm. I’m not very meta-calibrated about meta-analyses, I’m going off having heard a bunch of people complain that social sciences are often pretty BS (both in terms of having bad methodology, and just hard to learn from and easy to misinterpret even when the methodology is okayish).
I would also like to see these statistics. On priors I am pretty skeptical that this kind of stuff has been studied neutrally (the statistics are not cruxy for me, and I don’t think anyone else, but it still seems good to be honest about the state of things here).
Maybe the real anti-violence is to retrospectively support any violence from your side, because that would hurt the cause and thereby de-incentivize violence 🤔
What are the statistics? I’m not convinced. It seems the sympathy part is mostly solved by having a large official wing that disavows any violence.
Directly stopping all AI is not the only way terrorism could raise P(pause). It also raises awareness of the cause, and causes terror which can change behavior.
My model is something like: You need constructive action to build lasting systems, treaties, solutions that will withstand the test of time. Destructive action can, in theory, cause some local change, but it destabilizes the environment and increases variance enough that for any reasonable agent it’s basically never optimal in iterated games.
I did a lit review a few months ago. My conclusions were:
Violent protests probably don’t work (80% credence), and they plausibly backfire but it’s unclear (40% credence).
Peaceful protests probably do work (90% credence).
However, the literature is too coarse to give good evidence on questions like, “What happens if you have a civil movement with a mixture of violent and nonviolent protests, compared to a counterfactual where all protests are nonviolent?” If I extrapolate from the narrower results that are supported by the literature, I’d guess that a pure-nonviolent movement would be most effective, but there’s no decent-quality direct evidence to my knowledge.
It seemed like the lit review said “there’s not that much good data here”, kinda surprised you ended up with that high a confidence. (Maybe I’m going off a prior that this seems like a domain it makes sense to be pretty uncertain about by default)
80%/90% confidence is enough to be action-guiding (IMO) but I wouldn’t call it “high”. On a scientific question where there’s good data, it shouldn’t be hard to get to 99% or even 99.9% confidence.
If you have a single study with p = 0.049, and God descends from heaven and tells you that the study had perfect methodology, then you should update your beliefs by about 5:1. That alone gets you from a 50% prior to an ~80% posterior.
The lab experiment meta-analysis (Orazani et al. 2021) found a very strong p-value, I’m just not sure how well lab experiments generalize to real life.
I will say that I don’t know that I have a good sense of how to convert a within-experiment odds update to a subjective odds update (accounting for methodology flaws, publication bias, etc.). So maybe my subjective credences aren’t good. I just have a sense that like, if violent protests worked, I would expect these studies to have had different outcomes. But I wouldn’t be extraordinarily surprised if it turned out that violent protests work after all.
Have you done any calibration practice?
Fair question. Not recently but last I checked I was well calibrated on the sorts of questions that are in calibration quizzes.
Hmm. I’m not very meta-calibrated about meta-analyses, I’m going off having heard a bunch of people complain that social sciences are often pretty BS (both in terms of having bad methodology, and just hard to learn from and easy to misinterpret even when the methodology is okayish).
I would also like to see these statistics. On priors I am pretty skeptical that this kind of stuff has been studied neutrally (the statistics are not cruxy for me, and I don’t think anyone else, but it still seems good to be honest about the state of things here).
Maybe the real anti-violence is to retrospectively support any violence from your side, because that would hurt the cause and thereby de-incentivize violence 🤔