A convincing scenario cannot involve any bioweapons. Normal people just don’t know how vulnerable the human machine is. They think pandemics are just something that happens every 5-20 years, and don’t think about it besides that. They don’t think about the human body as a nano factory that’s vulnerable to targetted nano-attacks.
A scenario that passes the mom test will also not include any drones. Yes, even though drones are currently used in warfare. Drones are the future. Drones are toys. Futuristic toys don’t sound like a realistic threat.
A mom test scenario also shouldn’t involve any hacking. Regular people have no idea how insecure computer systems are. It’s basically safe to do online banking on a computer, which gives people the intuition that computers are mostly secure. Any story involving hacking violates that intuition.
I think there is a model of “normies” employed here which is a decent first approximation, but isn’t precise enough. I think for instance that all three above things can be make real to normies. I feel like the “decent first approximation” model of normies here present an “impossible” (in video game sense) problem. But the real problem is merely hard.
Here are some diffs between my and your model of normies:
1) I think most normies can be convinced that things that actually happened happened, even if the things sound very sci-fi/weird. It is worth thinking how to do this well. It isn’t always easy, but this is a great sanity check, can you actually convince normies of things that already happened? (the answer is yes, you just have to become good at it) In particular, if you can’t convince most normies that drones are a major factor in the ukraine war, if you can’t convince most normies that stuxnet and various other hacking ops was super impressive and scary, if you can’t convince most normies that the black death killed a lot of people and disrupted society for years, then you are making mistakes that take like 1 month of deliberate effort to fix at most.
2) what presents naively as skepticism of sci-fi stuff is actually something else. Specifically, I think most people (including normies) have a default where everything they see “makes sense” to them, and if they reflect about it, they have some explanation for the evidence they see. If someone has a pretty bad explanation for some evidence, your argument will not make sense to them. If you identify these places where the explanation for the evidence is misleading, you can dig there and find a different example which will have a different explanation, or use some other method to make your argument flow more explicitly than if you were making it to someone who had shared models for the observation you present.
3) normies (and most non-normies, but that is a different post lol) don’t run on arguments. They have intuitions that activate when you present some idea and that determines whether they agree or not. People are bad at verbalizing what the intuition is that is triggering, and there isn’t a direct mapping between what the intuition is and what they say when it triggers. An example of this is someone being skeptical that AI would be lethal, asking “is elon gonna program it to kill all <insert ingroup>s?” and then I said “AI is not programmed line-by-line, we just tweak it through trial and error until it achieves some measurable capabilities” and then they were like “holy shit, now I get it”. It is not obvious (at all) a priori that “I am skeptical that AI could hurt us” was linked to the “AI is just programmed software” intuition. And normies differ immensely in which intuitions they have. My default guess is that if it appears to you like “you must never mention X to normies if you want to convince them”, then probably you are faced with some intuitions that you have misidentified.
4) normies are a social species and implement a social epistemology. It isn’t fully accurate to say that normies don’t change their minds in isolation, but it does capture some real thing, which is that there is huge variance in how their intuitions work and they mostly change their minds as a group. If you have some kind of convincing short story that they feel they could repeat and justify-themselves/convince others with, then that will do most of the work. If you give them that first, then fully convincing them through “logic and facts” may just go smoother. Don’t neglect the 5 minute version of what you are saying. the 5 minute version mostly needs to be plausible and defensible. Also, social proof is important, finding someone they respect to acknowledge a topic as valid does a lot of work.
I think your advice is a quite clear articulation of the strategy behind the CAIS statement. I think this is a great and difficult strategy to pursue. Indeed, I have been circulating https://superintelligence-statement.org/ for some time now (secretly), and I think this statement first ensured it would get some of the major signatories before even making its way to me.
I think the OP is both talking about object-level reasons people gave, and it also shows that there is another strategy one might pursue which is to go around and convince people to actually support an existing statement publicly once they support it privately.