This doesn’t make much sense in two of your examples: factory farming and concern for future generations. In those cases it seems that you instead have to convince the “powerful” that they are wrong.
I think it’s quite a mistake-theoretic view to think that factory farming persists because powerful people are wrong about it. Instead, the (conflict-theoretic) view which I’d defend here is something like “It doesn’t matter what politicians think about the morality of factory farming, very few politicians are moral enough to take the career hit of standing up for what’s right when it’s unpopular, and many are being bought off by the evil meat/farming lobbies. So we need to muster enough mass popular support that politicians see which way the wind is blowing and switch sides en masse (like they did with gay marriage).”
Then the relevance to “the struggle to rally people without power to keep the powerful in check will be a Red Queen’s race that we simply need to keep running for as long as we want prosperity to last” is simply that there’s no long-term way to change politicians from being weak-willed and immoral—you just need to keep fighting through all these individual issues as they come up.
I think besides “power corrupts”, my main problem with “conflict theorists” is that optimizing for gaining power often requires [ideology], i.e., implicitly or explicitly ignoring certain facts that are inconvenient for building a social movement or gaining power. And then this [ideology] gets embedded into the power structure as unquestionable “truths” once the social movement actually gains power, and subsequently causes massive policy distortions.
(Warning: super simplified, off the cuff thoughts here, from a perspective I only partially endorse): I guess my inner conflict theorist believes that it’s okay for there to be significant distortions in policy as long as there are mechanisms by which new ideologies can arise to address them, and that it’s worthwhile to have this in exchange for dynamism and less political stagnation.
Like, you know what was one of the biggest policy distortions of all time? World War 2. And yet it had a revitalising effect on the American economy, decreased inequality, and led to a boom period.
Whereas if you don’t have new ideologies rising and gaining power, then you can go around fixing individual problems all day, but the core allocation of power in society will become so entrenched that the policy distortions are disastrous.
(Edited to add: this feels relevant.)
This sentence makes two claims. Firstly that Rohin reports 90% credence in safe AI by default. Secondly that 90% is unusually large compared with the relevant reference class (which I interpret to be people working full-time on AI safety).
However, as far as I can tell, there’s no evidence provided for the second claim. I find this particularly concerning because it’s the sort of claim that seems likely to cause (and may already have caused) information cascades, along the lines of “all these high status people think AI x-risk is very likely, so I should too”.
It may well be true that Rohin is an outlier in this regard. But it may also be false: a 10% chance of catastrophe is plenty high enough to motivate people to go into the field. Since I don’t know of many public statements from safety researchers stating their credence in AI x-risk, I’m curious about whether you have strong private evidence.