I’ve looked at a good amount of research on protest effectiveness. There are many observational studies showing that nonviolent protests are associated with preferred policy changes / voting patterns, and ~four natural experiments. If protests backfired for fairly minor reasons like “their website makes some hard-to-defend claims” (contrasted with major reasons like “the protesters are setting buildings on fire”), I think that would show up in the literature, and it doesn’t.
I’m not trying to get into the object level here. But people could both:
Believe that making such hard-to-defend claims could backfire, disagreeing with those experiments that you point out or
Believe that making such claims violates virtue-ethics-adjacent commitments to truth or
Just not want to be associated, in an instinctive yuck kinda way, with people who make these kinds of dubious-to-them claims.
Of course people could be wrong about the above points. But if you believed these things, then they’d be intelligible reasons not to be associated with someone, and I think a lot of the claims PauseAI makes are such that a large number of people people would have these reactions.
I’m not trying to get into the object level here. But people could both:
Believe that making such hard-to-defend claims could backfire, disagreeing with those experiments that you point out or
Believe that making such claims violates virtue-ethics-adjacent commitments to truth or
Just not want to be associated, in an instinctive yuck kinda way, with people who make these kinds of dubious-to-them claims.
Of course people could be wrong about the above points. But if you believed these things, then they’d be intelligible reasons not to be associated with someone, and I think a lot of the claims PauseAI makes are such that a large number of people people would have these reactions.