Small protests are the only way to get to big protests, and I don’t think there’s a significant risk of backfire or cringe reaction making trying worse than not trying. It’s the backfire supposition that is baseless.
The point that “small protests are the only way to get big protests” may be directionally accurate, but I want to note that there have been large protests that happened without that. Here’s a shoggoth listing a bunch, including the 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests, the 2019 Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Protests, the 2020 George Floyd Protests, and more.
The shoggoth says spontaneous large protests tends to be in response to triggering events and does rely on pre-existing movements that are ready to mobilize, the latter of which your work is helping build.
I think the relevant question is how often social movements begin with huge protests, and that’s exceedingly rare. It’s effective to create the impression that the people just rose up, but there’s basically always organizing groundwork for that to take off.
When I was involved with various forms of internet freedom activism, as well as various protests around government misspending in Germany, I do not remember a run-up of many months of small protests before the big ones. It seemed that people basically directly organized some quite big ones, and then they grew a bit bigger over the course of a month, and then became smaller again. I do not remember anything like the small PauseAI protests on those issues.
(This isn’t to say it isn’t a good thing in the case of AGI, I am just disputing that “small protests are the only way to get big protests”)
The specific ones I was involved in? Pretty sure they didn’t. They were SOPA related and related to what people thought was a corrupt construction of a train station in my hometown. I don’t think there was much organizing for either of these before they took off. I knew some of the core organizers, they did not create many small protests before this.
I think both of these examples might have been for novel concerns in their specifics (e.g. a specific new train station project), but there is a lot of precedent for this kind of process as well as a strong existing civil society doing this kind of protest (e.g. a long history of environmentalist and mass protests against large new infrastructure projects).
Maybe this is also true for AI risk (e.g. maybe it fits neatly into other forms of anti-tech sentiment and could “spontaneously” generate mass protests), but I don’t think these examples seem well-described as not having precedents / lots of societal and cultural preconditions (e.g. you probably would not have seen mass protests against the train station without a long history of environmental protests in Southern Germany).
but I don’t think these examples seem well-described as not having precedents / lots of societal and cultural preconditions
I totally think there are lots of cultural preconditions and precedents, I just think they mostly don’t look like “small protests for many years that gradually or even suddenly grew into larger ones”. My best guess is if you see a protest movement not have substantial growth for many months, it’s unlikely to start growing, and it’s not that valuable to have started it earlier (and somewhat likely to have a bit of an inoculation effect, though I also don’t think that effect is that big).
I think my model is more “if there’s an incident that increases the salience of AI x risk concerns, then an existing social movement structure that can catalyze this will be very valuable” which is different from assuming that Pause AI by itself will drive that.
In a similar way then, say, after Fukushima in Germany the existence of a strong environmental movement facilitated mass protests whereas in other countries ~nothing happened despite objectively the same external shock.
I don’t understand, I don’t think there was any ambiguity in what you said. Even not taking things literally, you implied that having big protests without having small protests is at least highly unusual. That also doesn’t match my model. I think it’s pretty normal. The thing that I think happens before big protests is big media coverage and social media discussion, not many months and years of small protests. I am not sure of this, but that’s my current model.
Yeah I suspect that these one-shot big protests are drawing on a history of organizing in those or preceding fields. The Women’s March coalition comes together all for one big event but draws on a far on deeper history involving small demonstrations and deliberate organizing to make it to that point, is my point. Idk about Free Internet but I would bet it leaned on Free Speech organizing and advocacy.
I sure wish someone would put on a large AI Safety protest if they know a way to do this in one leap. If I got a sponsor for a concert or some other draw then perhaps I could see a larger thing happening quickly in the family of AI Safety protest, but I’d like the keep the brand pretty earnest and message-focused.
I have to note, based on our history, I interpret your posts as attacking, like the subtext is that I’m just not a good organizer and, if you wanted to, you could organize a way bigger movement way faster. If that’s true, I wish you would! I’m trying my best with my understanding of how this can work for me and I wish more people like you were embracing broad messaging like protests.
My model is that big protests require (1) raising the public awareness, then (2) solving the coordination problems to organize. Small protests are one way to incrementally raise awareness, and one way to solve coordination problems/snowball into big protests (as I’d outlined in a footnote in the post).
But small protests can’t serve their role in (2) without (1) being done first. You can’t snowball public sentiments without those sentiments existing. So prior to the awareness-raising groundwork being made, the only role of protests is just (1): to incrementally raise public awareness, by physically existing in bystanders’ fields of vision.
I agree that protests can be a useful activity, potentially uniquely useful; including small protests.
I am very skeptical that small protests are uniquely useful at this stage of the game.
There is a potential instinctive association of protests with violence, riots, vandalism, obstruction of public property, crackpots/conspiracy theorists, et cetera. I don’t think it’s baseless to worry whether this association is strong enough, in a median person’s mind, for any protest towards an unknown cause to be instinctively associated with said negative things, with this first impression then lingering.
Anti-technology protests, in particular, might have an association with Unabomber-style terrorism, and certainly the AGI labs will be eager to reinforce this association. Protests therefore make your cause/movement uniquely vulnerable to this type of attack (via corresponding biased newspaper coverage). The marginal increase in visibility does not necessarily offset it.
It doesn’t seem obvious to me whether the net effects are positive or negative. Do you have theoretical or empirical support for the effects being positive?
Small protests are the only way to get to big protests
I don’t think so, and I’m not even saying small protests bad. I’m saying small protests might be bad without the appropriate groundwork.
My understanding is that I am far from the only person in the LW/EA spaces who has raised this genre of concern against the policy of protests. Plenty of people at least believe that other people have this association, which is almost equivalent to this association actually exiting, and is certainly some evidence in that direction.
Based on your responses, that hadn’t prompted you to make any sort of inquiry – look up research literature, run polls, figure out any high-information-value empirical observations of bystander’s reactions you can collect – regarding whether those concerns are justified?
That implies a very strong degree of confidence in your model. I’m only asking you to outline that model (or whatever inquires you ran, if you did run them).
The thing is there isn’t a great dataset— even with historical case studies where the primary results have been achieved, there are a million uncontrolled variables and we don’t and will never have experimentally established causation. But, yes, I’m confident in my model of social change.
What leapt out to me about your model was that is was very focused how an observer of the protests would react with a rationalist worldview. You didn’t seem to have given much thought to the breadth of social movements and how a diverse public would have experienced them. Like, most people aren’t gonna think PauseAI is anti-tech in general and therefore similar to the unabomber. Rationalists think that way, and few others.
most people aren’t gonna think PauseAI is anti-tech in general and therefore similar to the unabomber
My model of a normal person doesn’t think PauseAI protests are anything in particular, yes. My model of a normal person also by-default feels an instinctive wariness towards an organized group of people who have physically assembled to stand against something, especially if their cause is unknown to me or weird-at-a-glance — which “AGI omnicide” currently is. (Because weird means unpredictable, and unpredictable physical thing means a possible threat).
This wariness will be easy to transform into outright negative feelings/instinctive dismissal by, say, some news article bankrolled by an AGI lab explicitly associating PauseAI with environmental-activism vandals and violence. Doubly so in the current political climate, with pro-AI-progress people running the government.
The difference between protests and other attempts at information proliferation is that (1) seeing a protest communicates little information on the cause (compared to e. g. a flyer or something, which can be instantly navigated to an information-dense resource if it contains links), so you can’t immediately tell that the people behind it are thoughtful and measured and have expert support, instead of a chaotic extremist mob, (2) it is a deliberately loud physical anti-something activity, meaning the people engaging in it are interested in imposing their will on other people.
Like, look at how much mileage they got out of Eliezer’s statements about being willing to enforce the international AGI ban even in the face of nuclear retaliation. Obviously you can’t protect against all possible misrepresentations, but I think some moves can be clearly seen to be exposing too much attack surface for the benefits they provide.
Which, I’m not even saying this is necessarily the case for the protests PauseAI have been doing. But it seems like a reasonable concern to me. I would want to launch at least some organized inquiry to inform my CBAs, in your place.
If you want to get an informed opinion on how the general public perceives PauseAI, get a t-shirt and hand out some flyers in a high foot-traffic public space. If you want to be formal about it, bring a clipboard, track whatever seems interesting in advance, and share your results. It might not be publishable on an academic forum, but you could do it next week.
Here’s what I expect you to find, based on my own experience and the reports of basically everyone who has done this: - No one likes flyers, but get a lot more interested if you can catch their attention enough to say it’s about AI. - Everyone hates AI. - Your biggest initial skepticism will be from people who think you are in favor of AI. - Your biggest actual pushback will be from people who think that social change is impossible. - Roughly 1⁄4 to 1⁄2 are amenable to (or have already heard about!) x-risk, most of the rest won’t actively disagree but you can tell that particular message is not really “landing” and pay a lot more attention if you talk about something else (unemployment, military applications, deepfakes, etc.) - Bring a clipboard for signups. Even if recruitment isn’t your goal, if you don’t have one you’ll feel unprepared when people ask about it.
Also, protests are about Overton-window shifting, making AI danger a thing that is acceptable to talk about. And even if it makes a specific org look “fringe” (not a given, as Holly has argued), that isn’t necessarily a bad thing for the underlying cause. For example, if I see an XR protest, my thought is (well, was before I knew the underlying methodology): “Ugh, those protestors...I mean, I like what they are fighting for and more really needs to be done, but I don’t like the way they go about it” Notice that middle part. Activation of a sympathetic but passive audience was the point. That’s a win from their perspective. And the people who are put off by methods then go on to (be more likely to) join allied organizations that believe the same things but use more moderate tactics. The even bigger win is when the enthusiasm catches the attention of people who want to be involved but are looking for orgs that are the “real deal,” as measured by willingness to put effort where their words are.
Glad to hear it! If you want more detail, feel free to come by the Discord Server or send me a Direct Message. I run the welcome meetings for new members and am always happy to describe aspects of the org’s methodology that aren’t obvious from the outside and can also connect you with members who have done a lot more on-the-ground protesting and flyering than I have.
As someone who got into this without much prior experience in activism, I was surprised how much subtlety and counterintuitive best practices there are, most of which is learned through direct experience combined with direct mentorship, as opposed to written down & formalized. I made an attempt to synthesize many of the code ideas in this video—it’s from a year ago and looking over it there is quite a bit I would change (spend less time on some philosophical ideas, add more detail re specific methods), but it mostly holds up OK.
NEVER WRITE ON THE CLIPBOARD WHILE THEY ARE TALKING.
If you’re interested in how writing on a clipboard affects the data, sure, that’s actually a pretty interesting experimental treatment. It should not be considered the control.
Also, the dynamics you described with the protests is conjunctive. These aren’t just points of failure, they’re an attack surface, because any political system has many moving parts, and a large proportion of the moving parts are diverse optimizers.
What leapt out to me about your model was that is was very focused how an observer of the protests would react with a rationalist worldview. You didn’t seem to have given much thought to the breadth of social movements and how a diverse public would have experienced them. Like, most people aren’t gonna think PauseAI is anti-tech in general and therefore similar to the unabomber. Rationalists think that way, and few others.
I am confused, did you somehow accidentally forget a negation here? You can argue that Thane is confused, but clearly Thane was arguing from what the public believes, and of course Thane himself doesn’t think that PauseAI is similar to the Unabomber based on vague associations, and certainly almost nobody else on this site believes that (some might believe that non-rationalists believe that, but isn’t that exactly the kind of thinking you are asking for?).
I’m saying he’s projecting his biases onto others. He clearly does think PauseAI rhymes with unabomber somehow, even if he personally knows better. The weird pro-tech vs anti-tech dichotomy, and especially thinking that others are blanketly anti-tech, is very rationalist.
Small protests are the only way to get to big protests, and I don’t think there’s a significant risk of backfire or cringe reaction making trying worse than not trying. It’s the backfire supposition that is baseless.
The point that “small protests are the only way to get big protests” may be directionally accurate, but I want to note that there have been large protests that happened without that. Here’s a shoggoth listing a bunch, including the 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests, the 2019 Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Protests, the 2020 George Floyd Protests, and more.
The shoggoth says spontaneous large protests tends to be in response to triggering events and does rely on pre-existing movements that are ready to mobilize, the latter of which your work is helping build.
Unless you have a very optimistic view of warning shots, we shouldn’t rely on such an opportunity.
Can you share data on the size of PauseAI protests over time?
Yeah the SF protests have been about constant (25-40) in attendance, but we have more locations now and have put a lot more infrastructure in place
I think the relevant question is how often social movements begin with huge protests, and that’s exceedingly rare. It’s effective to create the impression that the people just rose up, but there’s basically always organizing groundwork for that to take off.
Do you guys seriously think that big protests just materialize?
When I was involved with various forms of internet freedom activism, as well as various protests around government misspending in Germany, I do not remember a run-up of many months of small protests before the big ones. It seemed that people basically directly organized some quite big ones, and then they grew a bit bigger over the course of a month, and then became smaller again. I do not remember anything like the small PauseAI protests on those issues.
(This isn’t to say it isn’t a good thing in the case of AGI, I am just disputing that “small protests are the only way to get big protests”)
Do you think those causes never had organizing before the big protest?
The specific ones I was involved in? Pretty sure they didn’t. They were SOPA related and related to what people thought was a corrupt construction of a train station in my hometown. I don’t think there was much organizing for either of these before they took off. I knew some of the core organizers, they did not create many small protests before this.
Assuming the second refers to “Stuttgart 21”?
I think both of these examples might have been for novel concerns in their specifics (e.g. a specific new train station project), but there is a lot of precedent for this kind of process as well as a strong existing civil society doing this kind of protest (e.g. a long history of environmentalist and mass protests against large new infrastructure projects).
Maybe this is also true for AI risk (e.g. maybe it fits neatly into other forms of anti-tech sentiment and could “spontaneously” generate mass protests), but I don’t think these examples seem well-described as not having precedents / lots of societal and cultural preconditions (e.g. you probably would not have seen mass protests against the train station without a long history of environmental protests in Southern Germany).
Yep!
I totally think there are lots of cultural preconditions and precedents, I just think they mostly don’t look like “small protests for many years that gradually or even suddenly grew into larger ones”. My best guess is if you see a protest movement not have substantial growth for many months, it’s unlikely to start growing, and it’s not that valuable to have started it earlier (and somewhat likely to have a bit of an inoculation effect, though I also don’t think that effect is that big).
Thanks for clarifying, I can see that.
I think my model is more “if there’s an incident that increases the salience of AI x risk concerns, then an existing social movement structure that can catalyze this will be very valuable” which is different from assuming that Pause AI by itself will drive that.
In a similar way then, say, after Fukushima in Germany the existence of a strong environmental movement facilitated mass protests whereas in other countries ~nothing happened despite objectively the same external shock.
Yeah I unintentionally baited the “not always” rationalist reflex by talking normally
I don’t understand, I don’t think there was any ambiguity in what you said. Even not taking things literally, you implied that having big protests without having small protests is at least highly unusual. That also doesn’t match my model. I think it’s pretty normal. The thing that I think happens before big protests is big media coverage and social media discussion, not many months and years of small protests. I am not sure of this, but that’s my current model.
Yeah I suspect that these one-shot big protests are drawing on a history of organizing in those or preceding fields. The Women’s March coalition comes together all for one big event but draws on a far on deeper history involving small demonstrations and deliberate organizing to make it to that point, is my point. Idk about Free Internet but I would bet it leaned on Free Speech organizing and advocacy.
I sure wish someone would put on a large AI Safety protest if they know a way to do this in one leap. If I got a sponsor for a concert or some other draw then perhaps I could see a larger thing happening quickly in the family of AI Safety protest, but I’d like the keep the brand pretty earnest and message-focused.
I have to note, based on our history, I interpret your posts as attacking, like the subtext is that I’m just not a good organizer and, if you wanted to, you could organize a way bigger movement way faster. If that’s true, I wish you would! I’m trying my best with my understanding of how this can work for me and I wish more people like you were embracing broad messaging like protests.
yup.
My model is that big protests require (1) raising the public awareness, then (2) solving the coordination problems to organize. Small protests are one way to incrementally raise awareness, and one way to solve coordination problems/snowball into big protests (as I’d outlined in a footnote in the post).
But small protests can’t serve their role in (2) without (1) being done first. You can’t snowball public sentiments without those sentiments existing. So prior to the awareness-raising groundwork being made, the only role of protests is just (1): to incrementally raise public awareness, by physically existing in bystanders’ fields of vision.
I agree that protests can be a useful activity, potentially uniquely useful; including small protests.
I am very skeptical that small protests are uniquely useful at this stage of the game.
There is a potential instinctive association of protests with violence, riots, vandalism, obstruction of public property, crackpots/conspiracy theorists, et cetera. I don’t think it’s baseless to worry whether this association is strong enough, in a median person’s mind, for any protest towards an unknown cause to be instinctively associated with said negative things, with this first impression then lingering.
Anti-technology protests, in particular, might have an association with Unabomber-style terrorism, and certainly the AGI labs will be eager to reinforce this association. Protests therefore make your cause/movement uniquely vulnerable to this type of attack (via corresponding biased newspaper coverage). The marginal increase in visibility does not necessarily offset it.
It doesn’t seem obvious to me whether the net effects are positive or negative. Do you have theoretical or empirical support for the effects being positive?
I don’t think so, and I’m not even saying small protests bad. I’m saying small protests might be bad without the appropriate groundwork.
Sounds like you are saying that you have those associations and I still see no evidence to justify your level of concern.
My understanding is that I am far from the only person in the LW/EA spaces who has raised this genre of concern against the policy of protests. Plenty of people at least believe that other people have this association, which is almost equivalent to this association actually exiting, and is certainly some evidence in that direction.
Based on your responses, that hadn’t prompted you to make any sort of inquiry – look up research literature, run polls, figure out any high-information-value empirical observations of bystander’s reactions you can collect – regarding whether those concerns are justified?
That implies a very strong degree of confidence in your model. I’m only asking you to outline that model (or whatever inquires you ran, if you did run them).
The thing is there isn’t a great dataset— even with historical case studies where the primary results have been achieved, there are a million uncontrolled variables and we don’t and will never have experimentally established causation. But, yes, I’m confident in my model of social change.
What leapt out to me about your model was that is was very focused how an observer of the protests would react with a rationalist worldview. You didn’t seem to have given much thought to the breadth of social movements and how a diverse public would have experienced them. Like, most people aren’t gonna think PauseAI is anti-tech in general and therefore similar to the unabomber. Rationalists think that way, and few others.
My model of a normal person doesn’t think PauseAI protests are anything in particular, yes. My model of a normal person also by-default feels an instinctive wariness towards an organized group of people who have physically assembled to stand against something, especially if their cause is unknown to me or weird-at-a-glance — which “AGI omnicide” currently is. (Because weird means unpredictable, and unpredictable physical thing means a possible threat).
This wariness will be easy to transform into outright negative feelings/instinctive dismissal by, say, some news article bankrolled by an AGI lab explicitly associating PauseAI with environmental-activism vandals and violence. Doubly so in the current political climate, with pro-AI-progress people running the government.
The difference between protests and other attempts at information proliferation is that (1) seeing a protest communicates little information on the cause (compared to e. g. a flyer or something, which can be instantly navigated to an information-dense resource if it contains links), so you can’t immediately tell that the people behind it are thoughtful and measured and have expert support, instead of a chaotic extremist mob, (2) it is a deliberately loud physical anti-something activity, meaning the people engaging in it are interested in imposing their will on other people.
Like, look at how much mileage they got out of Eliezer’s statements about being willing to enforce the international AGI ban even in the face of nuclear retaliation. Obviously you can’t protect against all possible misrepresentations, but I think some moves can be clearly seen to be exposing too much attack surface for the benefits they provide.
Which, I’m not even saying this is necessarily the case for the protests PauseAI have been doing. But it seems like a reasonable concern to me. I would want to launch at least some organized inquiry to inform my CBAs, in your place.
If you want to get an informed opinion on how the general public perceives PauseAI, get a t-shirt and hand out some flyers in a high foot-traffic public space. If you want to be formal about it, bring a clipboard, track whatever seems interesting in advance, and share your results. It might not be publishable on an academic forum, but you could do it next week.
Here’s what I expect you to find, based on my own experience and the reports of basically everyone who has done this:
- No one likes flyers, but get a lot more interested if you can catch their attention enough to say it’s about AI.
- Everyone hates AI.
- Your biggest initial skepticism will be from people who think you are in favor of AI.
- Your biggest actual pushback will be from people who think that social change is impossible.
- Roughly 1⁄4 to 1⁄2 are amenable to (or have already heard about!) x-risk, most of the rest won’t actively disagree but you can tell that particular message is not really “landing” and pay a lot more attention if you talk about something else (unemployment, military applications, deepfakes, etc.)
- Bring a clipboard for signups. Even if recruitment isn’t your goal, if you don’t have one you’ll feel unprepared when people ask about it.
Also, protests are about Overton-window shifting, making AI danger a thing that is acceptable to talk about. And even if it makes a specific org look “fringe” (not a given, as Holly has argued), that isn’t necessarily a bad thing for the underlying cause. For example, if I see an XR protest, my thought is (well, was before I knew the underlying methodology): “Ugh, those protestors...I mean, I like what they are fighting for and more really needs to be done, but I don’t like the way they go about it” Notice that middle part. Activation of a sympathetic but passive audience was the point. That’s a win from their perspective. And the people who are put off by methods then go on to (be more likely to) join allied organizations that believe the same things but use more moderate tactics. The even bigger win is when the enthusiasm catches the attention of people who want to be involved but are looking for orgs that are the “real deal,” as measured by willingness to put effort where their words are.
Excellent, thank you. That’s the sort of information I was looking for.
Hmm. Good point, I haven’t been taking that factor into account.
Glad to hear it! If you want more detail, feel free to come by the Discord Server or send me a Direct Message. I run the welcome meetings for new members and am always happy to describe aspects of the org’s methodology that aren’t obvious from the outside and can also connect you with members who have done a lot more on-the-ground protesting and flyering than I have.
As someone who got into this without much prior experience in activism, I was surprised how much subtlety and counterintuitive best practices there are, most of which is learned through direct experience combined with direct mentorship, as opposed to written down & formalized. I made an attempt to synthesize many of the code ideas in this video—it’s from a year ago and looking over it there is quite a bit I would change (spend less time on some philosophical ideas, add more detail re specific methods), but it mostly holds up OK.
Multiple talented researchers I know got into alignment because of PauseAI.
NEVER WRITE ON THE CLIPBOARD WHILE THEY ARE TALKING.
If you’re interested in how writing on a clipboard affects the data, sure, that’s actually a pretty interesting experimental treatment. It should not be considered the control.
Also, the dynamics you described with the protests is conjunctive. These aren’t just points of failure, they’re an attack surface, because any political system has many moving parts, and a large proportion of the moving parts are diverse optimizers.
You can also give them the clipboard and pen, works well
I am confused, did you somehow accidentally forget a negation here? You can argue that Thane is confused, but clearly Thane was arguing from what the public believes, and of course Thane himself doesn’t think that PauseAI is similar to the Unabomber based on vague associations, and certainly almost nobody else on this site believes that (some might believe that non-rationalists believe that, but isn’t that exactly the kind of thinking you are asking for?).
?
I’m saying he’s projecting his biases onto others. He clearly does think PauseAI rhymes with unabomber somehow, even if he personally knows better. The weird pro-tech vs anti-tech dichotomy, and especially thinking that others are blanketly anti-tech, is very rationalist.