Thanks for the link! It’s important to distinguish here between:
(1) support for the movement, (2) support for the cause, and (3) active support for the movement (i.e. attracting other activists to show up at future demonstrations)
Most of the paper focuses on 1, and also on activist’s beliefs about the impact of their actions. I am more interested in 2 and 3. To be fair, the paper gives some evidence for detrimental impacts on 2 in the Trump example. It’s not clear, however, whether the nature of the cause matters here. Support for Trump is highly polarized and entangled with culture, whereas global warming (Hallam’s cause) and AI risk (PauseAI’s) have relatively broad but frustratingly lukewarm public support. There are also many other factors when looking past short-term onlooker sentiment to the larger question of affecting social change, which the paper readily admits in the Discussion section. I’d list these points, but they largely overlap with the points I made in my post...though it was interesting to see how much was speculative. More research is needed.
In any case, I bring up the extreme case to illustrate that the issue is far more nuanced than “regular people get squeamish—net negative!” This is actually somewhat irrelevant to PauseAI in particular, because most of our actions are around public education and lobbying, and even the protests are legal and non-disruptive. I’ve been in two myself and have seen nothing but positive sentiment from onlookers (with the exception of the occasional “good luck with that!” snark). The hard part with all of these is getting people to show up. (This last paragraph is not a rebuttal to anything you have said, it’s a reminder of context)
Thanks for the link! It’s important to distinguish here between:
(1) support for the movement,
(2) support for the cause, and
(3) active support for the movement (i.e. attracting other activists to show up at future demonstrations)
Most of the paper focuses on 1, and also on activist’s beliefs about the impact of their actions. I am more interested in 2 and 3. To be fair, the paper gives some evidence for detrimental impacts on 2 in the Trump example. It’s not clear, however, whether the nature of the cause matters here. Support for Trump is highly polarized and entangled with culture, whereas global warming (Hallam’s cause) and AI risk (PauseAI’s) have relatively broad but frustratingly lukewarm public support. There are also many other factors when looking past short-term onlooker sentiment to the larger question of affecting social change, which the paper readily admits in the Discussion section. I’d list these points, but they largely overlap with the points I made in my post...though it was interesting to see how much was speculative. More research is needed.
In any case, I bring up the extreme case to illustrate that the issue is far more nuanced than “regular people get squeamish—net negative!” This is actually somewhat irrelevant to PauseAI in particular, because most of our actions are around public education and lobbying, and even the protests are legal and non-disruptive. I’ve been in two myself and have seen nothing but positive sentiment from onlookers (with the exception of the occasional “good luck with that!” snark). The hard part with all of these is getting people to show up. (This last paragraph is not a rebuttal to anything you have said, it’s a reminder of context)