I think the effect there would be pretty minimal, there’s not more than a few thousand people in any given city that likely to show up. It’d be weird to ask 90k people to travel to San Francisco, since that doesn’t send a particular message about international treaties. (You might run a different protest that is the “please AI companies, unilaterally stop”, but, I don’t actually think that protest makes much sense)
I see where you are coming from. It’s like there’s three factors here:
the amount it will influence global policy makers as a function of location
the amount of locals who will show up as a function of location
the amount of people who would travel a long distance to show up as a function of location
I agree DC makes sense for the first function. I don’t really know too much about global policy makers, but I guess lots of important ones hang out in DC?
As for the second function, I think it probably is higher in SF than DC, though I’m not that confident about that and you are correct to point out, that isn’t necessarily the most important thing, since most of the people for a 100,000 person march will need to have travelled to get there. So from that perspective, the third function is much more important. What location is most likely to cause people to travel to it...
So I can only conclude… we should actually not all march on DC, but some pleasant vacation destination known to be popular with affluent people… that will really draw in the fence sitters! Well… I’m mostly joking about that. It probably messes up the first function, which is still basically the whole point of holding a march.
I think the number of people who would come to the march in their city on the weekend/evening of the work day is significantly higher than the number of people who would travel for it cross-country. I think 100k march would be a sign for policy makers and get to the news anyway, whether it in NYC, SF, Washington or in the middle of the desert. Also, IMO, it would make more sense to start with a lower threshold − 10k for example.
I mentioned in my reply to Raemon how this can be seen as three factors:
the amount it will influence global policy makers as a function of location
the amount of locals who will show up as a function of location
the amount of people who would travel a long distance to show up as a function of location
And we could maybe do better by drawing people in if the location scores highly both for function 1 and function 3. So maybe trying to focus on central locations that are easy to travel to, and either cheap, or pleasant to travel to. I think focusing on cheap and central, maybe a town where a big data center has been built would send a good message. On the other hand, focusing on pleasant, maybe vacation destinations popular with policy people is the way to go. Tropical beaches where people from around the world go to enjoy the weather spring to mind. I don’t know if this line of thinking is fruitful or not. Probably DC is the conventional location to stage a mass protest for a reason, but maybe not.
On the other hand, I think there is something to the idea of having distributed protesting… Maybe lots of smaller thresholds for individual cities, and then some threshold for number of cities. It’s getting a bit complicated, but would it still send a message if a significant population protested in a significant number of cities around the world?
I completely disagree. It will mobilize supporters, get to the news, and attract attention. The next march may attract 15k, the march after that 20k etc.
Example: during the protests in Moscow, Russia in 2011 after the electoral frauds, the first big rally gathered 50k-100k. The second gathered 100k-200k, since people saw—it is totally fine to come to such rallies.
To put in other words: if your goal is 100k march in Washington, DC, I think an intermediate 10k march in SF would increase the chances to achieve this goal.
Okay I think I don’t stand by my previous statement. More like, I expect that overall process to be a lot more expensive than just going for a big protest off the bat. Obviously yeah there’s a more common pattern of escalating groundwork and smaller protests.
But, I think this is dramatically more expensive, to the point where it doesn’t seem worth my time, in a way that just going straight for the big protest does.
I don’t really have that much confident it’s possible to get a big protest off the bat. But, I think there is a discrete step-change in “you got the AI safety folk to all show up once” and “you got a substantial fraction of mainstream support.” Once you’re trying to do the latter, the SF benefit just seems very low to me.
The mechanism by which I’d try to hit 10k numbers involves starting from scratch recruiting a lot of people, at which point I might as well just start in DC. A crux is that I expect a 100k protest to involve similar amounts of work as a 10k protest, and requires calling in favors from famous people that are very expensive and I don’t want to have to call in twice
(I also not your Russia example starts with a 50k-100k protest, which is already a different league)
Some reasons I’m more bullish on “just go for a big protest right off the bat.”
First, I just know that I’d be happy to show up for one protest, but feel pre-emptively exhausted at the idea of showing up for multiple. It feels like an easier ask to say “look we know this is costly but we’re actually going to try to do this once, and not make repeated asks.”
Relatedly, there’s a lot of other major political stuff going on these days, trying to compete in that arena seems pretty hard. People have tons of outrage fatigue. It feels promising to distinguish yourself on “we’re not trying to become a thing that will keep demanding your attention.”
Long-running “stop AI” protest seems very likely to bleed into general anti-tech sentiment and end up saying a lot of conflationary political claims that politicians will rightly discount, and is more likely to be discount, and will be more polarized.
We can reduce uncertainty on whether a major protest will work, in a way that constraints the downside risk a lot, in a way that’s hard for a long running multi-protest movement building thingy, so we only spend the effort if it looks like it’s going to work.
I agree with your points and think they’re valuable to point out and focus on.
Another thing I got wondering about is the size threshold. Like, I’m willing to drop what I’m doing and fly to DC for a 100k protest because of how much of an impression I think that would make, but I don’t feel like I would do that for a 10k protest. Some of that could be anchoring bias, and it’s hard to say how much, but there’s definitely interesting dynamics in choosing the threshold and how it is presented. I think 100k is a good number, but is it the best number for:
attracting people to pledge based on the impression they imagine it making
actually being attainable
actually making an impression on global decision makers.
I don’t think I know how to answer that, but I like clarifying that those are the things I think we’re trying to maximize in choosing a pledge. Though it’s already 100,000 and people are already pledging, so for that reason, it’s probably the best!
I hear what you’re saying here and I think it makes sense, but I also really agree with Raemon’s response. I wonder if there is some hybrid approach that could get the best of both worlds, like having one big pledge for DC, but also having smaller, local pledges. Sorta like what I mentioned in my other comment about distributed protesting.
I think the effect there would be pretty minimal, there’s not more than a few thousand people in any given city that likely to show up. It’d be weird to ask 90k people to travel to San Francisco, since that doesn’t send a particular message about international treaties. (You might run a different protest that is the “please AI companies, unilaterally stop”, but, I don’t actually think that protest makes much sense)
I see where you are coming from. It’s like there’s three factors here:
the amount it will influence global policy makers as a function of location
the amount of locals who will show up as a function of location
the amount of people who would travel a long distance to show up as a function of location
I agree DC makes sense for the first function. I don’t really know too much about global policy makers, but I guess lots of important ones hang out in DC?
As for the second function, I think it probably is higher in SF than DC, though I’m not that confident about that and you are correct to point out, that isn’t necessarily the most important thing, since most of the people for a 100,000 person march will need to have travelled to get there. So from that perspective, the third function is much more important. What location is most likely to cause people to travel to it...
So I can only conclude… we should actually not all march on DC, but some pleasant vacation destination known to be popular with affluent people… that will really draw in the fence sitters! Well… I’m mostly joking about that. It probably messes up the first function, which is still basically the whole point of holding a march.
I think the number of people who would come to the march in their city on the weekend/evening of the work day is significantly higher than the number of people who would travel for it cross-country.
I think 100k march would be a sign for policy makers and get to the news anyway, whether it in NYC, SF, Washington or in the middle of the desert.
Also, IMO, it would make more sense to start with a lower threshold − 10k for example.
I mentioned in my reply to Raemon how this can be seen as three factors:
the amount it will influence global policy makers as a function of location
the amount of locals who will show up as a function of location
the amount of people who would travel a long distance to show up as a function of location
And we could maybe do better by drawing people in if the location scores highly both for function 1 and function 3. So maybe trying to focus on central locations that are easy to travel to, and either cheap, or pleasant to travel to. I think focusing on cheap and central, maybe a town where a big data center has been built would send a good message. On the other hand, focusing on pleasant, maybe vacation destinations popular with policy people is the way to go. Tropical beaches where people from around the world go to enjoy the weather spring to mind. I don’t know if this line of thinking is fruitful or not. Probably DC is the conventional location to stage a mass protest for a reason, but maybe not.
On the other hand, I think there is something to the idea of having distributed protesting… Maybe lots of smaller thresholds for individual cities, and then some threshold for number of cities. It’s getting a bit complicated, but would it still send a message if a significant population protested in a significant number of cities around the world?
I think 10k ones approximately won’t do anything.
I completely disagree. It will mobilize supporters, get to the news, and attract attention. The next march may attract 15k, the march after that 20k etc.
Example: during the protests in Moscow, Russia in 2011 after the electoral frauds, the first big rally gathered 50k-100k. The second gathered 100k-200k, since people saw—it is totally fine to come to such rallies.
To put in other words: if your goal is 100k march in Washington, DC, I think an intermediate 10k march in SF would increase the chances to achieve this goal.
Okay I think I don’t stand by my previous statement. More like, I expect that overall process to be a lot more expensive than just going for a big protest off the bat. Obviously yeah there’s a more common pattern of escalating groundwork and smaller protests.
But, I think this is dramatically more expensive, to the point where it doesn’t seem worth my time, in a way that just going straight for the big protest does.
I don’t really have that much confident it’s possible to get a big protest off the bat. But, I think there is a discrete step-change in “you got the AI safety folk to all show up once” and “you got a substantial fraction of mainstream support.” Once you’re trying to do the latter, the SF benefit just seems very low to me.
The mechanism by which I’d try to hit 10k numbers involves starting from scratch recruiting a lot of people, at which point I might as well just start in DC. A crux is that I expect a 100k protest to involve similar amounts of work as a 10k protest, and requires calling in favors from famous people that are very expensive and I don’t want to have to call in twice
(I also not your Russia example starts with a 50k-100k protest, which is already a different league)
Some reasons I’m more bullish on “just go for a big protest right off the bat.”
First, I just know that I’d be happy to show up for one protest, but feel pre-emptively exhausted at the idea of showing up for multiple. It feels like an easier ask to say “look we know this is costly but we’re actually going to try to do this once, and not make repeated asks.”
Relatedly, there’s a lot of other major political stuff going on these days, trying to compete in that arena seems pretty hard. People have tons of outrage fatigue. It feels promising to distinguish yourself on “we’re not trying to become a thing that will keep demanding your attention.”
Long-running “stop AI” protest seems very likely to bleed into general anti-tech sentiment and end up saying a lot of conflationary political claims that politicians will rightly discount, and is more likely to be discount, and will be more polarized.
We can reduce uncertainty on whether a major protest will work, in a way that constraints the downside risk a lot, in a way that’s hard for a long running multi-protest movement building thingy, so we only spend the effort if it looks like it’s going to work.
I agree with your points and think they’re valuable to point out and focus on.
Another thing I got wondering about is the size threshold. Like, I’m willing to drop what I’m doing and fly to DC for a 100k protest because of how much of an impression I think that would make, but I don’t feel like I would do that for a 10k protest. Some of that could be anchoring bias, and it’s hard to say how much, but there’s definitely interesting dynamics in choosing the threshold and how it is presented. I think 100k is a good number, but is it the best number for:
attracting people to pledge based on the impression they imagine it making
actually being attainable
actually making an impression on global decision makers.
I don’t think I know how to answer that, but I like clarifying that those are the things I think we’re trying to maximize in choosing a pledge. Though it’s already 100,000 and people are already pledging, so for that reason, it’s probably the best!
I hear what you’re saying here and I think it makes sense, but I also really agree with Raemon’s response. I wonder if there is some hybrid approach that could get the best of both worlds, like having one big pledge for DC, but also having smaller, local pledges. Sorta like what I mentioned in my other comment about distributed protesting.