Yep this feels right to me! I think we agree on pretty much everything about this.
My main concern is that your post as-is could be misinterpreted as being along the lines of “Don’t try to influence groups—only try to influence individuals manually, one at a time”. It’d take a pretty extreme misinterpreter to take this to the full extent, but it could still be a negative influence on peoples’ ability to deal with groups of people in effective ways.
Perhaps a good way of putting this is;
Mob & Bailey scenario: I am talking with X social group, which can consistently be modelled as a person-esque agent
Potential misinterpretation of your post: I am talking with individuals one at a time, and modelling these discussions as being part of a broader social structure is bad
A modelling I’d propose: I am talking with X social group, which can be modelled as a machine, with components of varying functions, comprised of people
If someone thinks that violence against AI labs is bad, then they will make it a taboo because they think it is bad, and they don’t want violent ideas to spread.
There are a lot of interesting discussions to be had on why one believes this category of violence to be bad, and you can argue against these perspectives in a fairly neutral-sounding, non-stressful way, quite easily, if you know how to phrase yourself well.
A lot (although not all) people are fairly open to this.
If someone thinks that violence against AI labs is good, then they probably really wouldn’t want you talking about it on a publicly accessible, fairly well-known website. It’s a very bad strategy from most pro-violence perspectives.
I’m going to quite strongly suggest, regardless of anyone’s perspectives on this topic, that you probably shouldn’t discuss it here—there are very few angles from which this could be imagined to be a good thing for any rationalism-associated person/movement. Or at least that you put a lot of thought into how you talk about it. Optics are a real and valuable thing, as annoying as that is.
Even certain styles of discussing anti-violence can come across as optically weird if you phrase yourself in certain ways.