This is fundamentally dishonest. If you're writing this, you should think "am I the bad guy?"
Yeah, maybe you'll get some supporters by saying you just want to stop those polygamists and tech bros and getting people to hate the Big Other when you're really trying to prevent AI from taking over the world. What's the worst that can happen if you're wrong? Well... stopping polygamists and tech bros and getting people to hate the Big Other, for one. History is full of people saying "we're going to tear down norms for benefit X", and benefit X turns out not to be real, but the norms that they just tore down are. It would sure suck if there wasn't any AI threat, but people did go to jail for generating that picture of Mickey Mouse, because they're just collateral damage.
Libertarians know that "regulations" is another way of saying "we are going to shoot you if you do this". Sometimes other people forget this.
I wrote my beliefs right on the tin of the post: I don't believe in existential risk threats. I simply would like to see the sorts of people who do believe in them be a little bit less unsuccessful. It breaks my heart to see people sincerely advocating for their beliefs in a way that renders them completely ineffective; every "Sorry, we're Canadian," that I find myself muttering to clipboard holders while walking with others makes me feel just a bit sad. If they were more entertaining, I'd find myself signing petitions more often, and then we'd both come out ahead. I like signing petitions. But they're not entertaining! They aren't good at making compelling pitches! This is entirely fixable with the correct approach; my aim is to equip them with the knowledge of the correct approach: Figuring out what people actually want, and then offering them a way to achieve their goals while aiding your own. The best persuasion is a positive-sum game.
I see parallels in presentation styles between the EAs I have spoken with and the humans outside of the Dolores & Market Whole Foods who have tried to get me to sign petitions: Fantastic folx, both groups, wonderful people, but the way I felt when some recovered felons tried to explain to me the value of improving the legal situation of attorneys who represent such-and-such cases, or something (I rapidly lost enthusiasm and quickly muttered "Ah, I forgot, I'm not registered to vote. Sorry."), is the same way most people feel whenever someone starts talking about existential risk. It's simply not parseable for most people; not at a glance, not with the level of investment most people have in a streetside conversation. People want to be helpful about things they care about! They want to sign petitions! Killing their enthusiasm by not knowing how to target them makes both of your lives worse, and if you genuinely believe in a compelling existential risk scenario, you're making everyone's lives worse by not doing your part to lower the chances of it happening.
Under the understanding of "Everyone will die if we don't," "We are going to shoot you if you do this," makes perfect sense. I don't hold that understanding, but I'd rather the people who do at least get an honest attempt at trying to solve their perceived problems. Them getting what they want faster, and as such, getting out of view once they've gotten what they were trying to get, would allow for people to fill the void who are trying to achieve things that I find fun, which is valuable to me. Further, the things you cite aren't norms outside of the Bay. That's why I noted they would only be persuasive elsewhere. There's nothing to destroy in them; they're common opinions, that normal people already hold.
What we foresee in the near future is the emergence of AIs who are far more capable than any humans. If the ASIs aren't aligned to a human-set target, they commit genocide. If the AIs are aligned, then we face the threats like a CEO taking over the world and the Intelligence Curse letting oligarchs lock in the entirety of power.
As far as I understand laypeople, they do NOT foresee AI taking over the world because they fail to understand the true extent of the AIs' capabilities (see, e.g., Freddie de Boer's attempt to drive home the point that the AIs are unlikely to acquire such capabilities, Casey Simpson's video full of factual errors or a video mentioned in my quick take). Therefore, laypeople are to be explained that the AIs WILL outsmart even the most capable humans or a majority of humans, thus rendering mankind or the laypeople unnecessary. Even the latter scenario would require laypeople to either stop the tech bros or be replaced.
I understand where you're coming from, but I think it's worth pointing out that every time you lie, your position becomes less coherent, in a way that the people who most matter can probably tell. Maybe the average person on the street can't, but Bernie Sanders (https://nitter.poast.org/SenSanders/status/2053867144564081151#m) probably has a rock-solid bullshit detector and his support is worth far more.
What do I mean by my position being less coherent? I want an international agreement to avoid building superintelligence, because I think it might kill us all. Very few of the more "mundane" concerns justify this - my belief in what actions we need to take follows directly from the severity of the consequences if we don't.
"AI might kill us all, therefore we should internationally coordinate to make it illegal to build superintelligent AI" at least makes sense if you accept the first premise. Try replacing "AI might kill us all" with "AI uses a lot of water" or "AI produces slop content" or "AI steals from artists" and my next question would be "Well, hold on, isn't the cure worse than the disease here?" It doesn't actually make sense, to say that we should ban AI development because images were stolen. If I'm worried about AI stealing from artists, we should compensate artists or enforce copyright. If I'm worried about AI water use, we should tax or cap water use in data centers. If I'm worried about AI job loss, we should find a way to tax AI revenue and support those who were automated away. None of this prevents human extinction. Why would it? You've told someone to work on a totally different problem, you can't be surprised if they go and do that.
Your advice around figuring out your audience and what they care about is good. I think that the correct lesson to learn from the arts of persuasion is how to present your case in a way that resonates with your audience. But every lie you tell makes your story worse. That's a cost too.
Notice that you said "if you accept the first premise." Normal people don't accept the "AI might kill us all" framing device (I'm one of them!) because it goes against all of society's priors, and Sanders isn't meaningfully in power. He's the opposition party's internal opposition party head. Coming off in a Stallmanescent fashion in order to sway the opinion of a politician without meaningful power whose views have never taken off in a country is a flawed strategy toward achieving goals. To achieve your goals, you should take people who will never see things your way and find a way to align their views with yours without changing either party's.
Making AI development less profitable and regulating it will slow it down. "Regulations slow progress" isn't particularly controversial. Slowing it down gives everyone more time to solve the hypothetical problems at hand. Stoking the public in such a way that they feel compelled to demand regulation of AI companies will work, given how reactionary politics in American history have historically worked out. People's views tend to follow society's, and pushing society further in the direction of disliking LLMs makes the situation more likely that the average person eventually agrees that further development should be banned.
Starting at the state level makes perfect sense; the federal level is pretty captured at the moment, and chasing LLM companies out of California would likely cause significant employee atrophy at said companies, which would aid in slowing down timelines.
I consider myself more plugged into the issue than most people, but even I'm not being swayed by x-risk arguments. Ikigai risk is something that far more people care about, far more intuitively, and it's worth taking advantage of that, if actually trying to reduce the chance of existential risks.
I'll concede that when talking about the public, general AI dissatisfaction seems like it can accomplish useful things even if it isn't directed at the precise target we're worried about.
That said, I find this a strange pair of sentences: "Coming off in a Stallmanescent fashion in order to sway the opinion of a politician without meaningful power whose views have never taken off in a country is a flawed strategy toward achieving goals. To achieve your goals, you should take people who will never see things your way and find a way to align their views with yours without changing either party's."
I'm not sure if you're dismissing other results as unhelpful without specifying why (https://x.com/peterwildeford/status/2040206841376862327) or just don't know about them - Sanders was an example of a high-profile person talking about it, not the only one. It seems to me that taking a difficult-to-understand technical problem like ASI and something as far outside the Overton window as human extinction, and getting dozens of senators to talk openly about it including a pretty prominent one...is a very large victory. It does seem like the AI x-risk crowd is actually punching pretty far above our weight in terms of building awareness among people in power, considering the odds stacked against us in the first place. 2-3 years ago, I would have been very surprised at this level of success, even though it is not yet sufficient.
But you seem to think we are doing much worse than we should be. I am open to this argument - if others are doing better than we are by our own lights, we should at least consider some of their tactics. From a moral perspective, I still don't advocate for lying, but it is certainly possible to focus more on meeting an audience where they're at, without lying about it. But personally I'm not aware of any more successful movement to make people negative towards AI - I'm in a bit of a bubble where I don't pay as much attention to the general negative AI sentiment people have. Did you learn these tactics from an unusually successful political advocacy cause or group of some kind? And what did they achieve using the kind of tactics you've outlined? (And, if it's not AI-related, what did it focus on?)
Sorry for the delay in response; I wanted to figure out how to word this correctly, so I let it roll over in my mind for a few days.
Sanders is usually on the right side of history. He was never not going to understand a rational argument. The end-goal of persuasion can't just be getting people who were always going to agree with you on board in a democratic system. It has to be getting people who won't to align with your goals despite their disagreements.
Human extinction isn't that far out of the Overton Window at this point; people like Musk creating big headlines talking about it every year has moved it firmly adjacent to it, if not inside. It's half of what gets talked about nowadays on some of the most-listened-to platforms in the world, like the Joe Rogan Experience, whose audience is most certainly not an educated one. It's disagreed with, in part because it's constantly used by people who are making the problem worse as a justification for their own actions and casus belli for worse ones (Amodei pushing for sanctions on China while becoming infinitely wealthy partially on the reputation he gained from working at a Chinese company, Musk's blatant self-dealing, Thiel hesitating when asked if the human race should survive on camera; admittedly this last one is a bit unfair to Thiel, since we all know what he meant, but it's nonetheless how it was perceived by a large audience).
I think you're seeing it in the wrong way; the goal is not to "make people negative towards AI," (which is happening and is going to increasingly happen regardless of efforts), it's to channel the already-preexisting and increasing loathing [1] for it to achieve something productive. It's simple coalition-building, which is how any functioning democracy has worked nearly forever. Making these companies less efficient and worse by heavily regulating them would buy you more time, and give the wider public what they want to begin with.
It's something you can learn from the history of all of the recent ratfucked pieces of progressive legislation: Channeling good intentions and productive energy into something nebulous is sort of the vibe of the last twenty years. Does anyone like paper straws? No, but someone took existing frustrations over something (a lack of teeth to environmental regulations), and funneled it into concrete policy. The wrong policy, but policy nonetheless.
Energy and anger can be directed into things that sound plausible. A human extinction argument made by people who are enthusiastic about the technology doesn't feel plausible; a "your life is going to get made worse by these companies; we should stop their ability to {monetize access to models, sell derivative works of IP that they don't own the rights to, monopolize access to HPC resources, create the most useful technology for surveillance dragnets in the history of humanity}" pitch is plausible, and something a lot of people are naturally sympathetic to.
To paraphrase an old post by lc, "Thirdly, even if it's going to happen tomorrow, every day that [AGI doesn't exist] under this paradigm is a gift. Delaying a hypothetical [extinction event] means increasing the life expectancy of every living [being]." Pushing back timelines has an extremely high expected value, if you actually believe in the AGI scenario; limiting the ability of these organizations to move forward efficiently by any means necessary could make the difference.
Of course, I don't believe in the existential risk scenarios put forth. I don't think most people who claim to do so happen to do so, either, given how little anybody is actually seemingly doing about it. The urgency that a plausible x-risk scenario would imply just isn't reflected in the actions or rhetoric of anyone currently speaking about it. Nonetheless, I think they deserve as much as anyone else the chance to achieve their goals, hence the post.
NBC surveyed a group of registered voters and found that the concept of artificial intelligence was so unpopular that 46% of respondents said they hold negative feelings towards the concept, and only 26% reported positive connotations, while 27% were neutral. https://gizmodo.com/people-hate-ai-even-more-than-they-hate-ice-poll-finds-2000731438 ↩︎
I appreciate the effort you're putting into this thread here. While I haven't changed my mind on high-level strategy, I have learned at least a couple of things here, so I do want to reassure you that your efforts aren't just hitting a brick wall here.
That said, let's take a look at one of your quotes: "Human extinction isn't that far out of the Overton Window at this point; people like Musk creating big headlines talking about it every year has moved it firmly adjacent to it, if not inside. It's half of what gets talked about nowadays on some of the most-listened-to platforms in the world, like the Joe Rogan Experience, whose audience is most certainly not an educated one."
The main question is - how do you think this happened? Human extinction is weird and out there. You yourself don't believe it. But you know about it, which at least gives you the possibility of agreeing or disagreeing with us. This happened through awareness building. I don't think this happened as an inevitable result of AI's ascendancy. I think LessWrong style advocacy around extinction risk was a direct contributor, and the ability to say something like "X-risk is half of what gets talked about nowadays in the Joe Rogan Experience" is what it looks like for our advocacy to be succeeding.
Furthermore, I don't think we've hit steeply diminishing returns to awareness. This post https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/A7BtBD9BAfK2kKSEr/what-we-learned-from-briefing-140-lawmakers-on-the-threat is pretty enlightening here - it's not too out of date (Sep 2024 - Feb 2026) and describes that most British MP's are unaware of basic facts that support our argument. I think a lot of people who disagree with our argument do so not because they've developed detailed models of how we view the situation and they think we're wrong on certain key points. I think they disagree because a sensible prior is "This technology will not kill everyone" and they haven't heard enough information to make them consciously reconsider this. There is actually key information that is required for the extinction argument to make sense that many people don't know. I don't think our arguments have failed to connect with all such people. I think they've often simply never been made in person with sufficient fidelity to drive our point home.
Note that I am not accusing you personally of this. It is entirely possible to understand our argument well and still disagree with it, and some such people exist, and may be basically unreachable as you say. But I think this does not yet account for most of the important people who disagree with us.
There's also common knowledge - it takes an unusually courageous person to stand up first. Asking someone "Please stand up against extinction risk, even though you may be alone and the confused silence will be deafening" is a much harder ask than "Please join our large and growing group of people who are openly concerned about extinction risk and lend your voice to the crowd" and we appear to be moving rather rapidly towards the latter. Anyone who is convinced by the second but not the first is very far from unreachable.
I think your strategy has non-zero value, in the sense that your strategy is better than doing nothing. But I don't think it's better than what we're doing. I think that:
Thanks for the acknowledgement that I'm not hitting a brick wall! I'd happily die on any hill, [1] but it's always more enjoyable when dying on it to open ears.
The reason I was exposed to arguments around x-risk is the same reason that I'd imagine most people who have been actively making the "problem" worse know about it: It's something that a fanfiction author who was unusually effective at popularizing ideas in nerd communities while being technically incompetent has been obsessed with for nearly thirty years. The reason I forced myself to think on it enough to feel okay arguing against it was due to being successfully convinced about EA's value when I was a child, [2] keeping up with it in adolescence, and noticing that x-risk-mitigation advocates successfully started diverting a bunch of funding from malaria nets to "extinction prevention," by making arguments around EV, which in my mind (after much consideration) is likely going to go down as one of the biggest unforced mistakes in human history. This is neither here nor there, though; [3] just relevant background.
This arms race framing is, transparently, used by major labs as a way to justify and provoke their intense valuations and immense spending on attempting to build the thing that you're worried about. It's a way of red-teaming venture and human capital. "The first person to build it controls the entire future, so we need to have a good actor doing it. Give us ten trillion dollars." [4] The only person to have participated in the founding of nearly every major lab (Musk - OpenAI->Anthropic, xAI) publicly acknowledged the fact that he met his ex-partner off a discussion of Roko's Basilisk. More people are familiar with the argument in its primary form of "justifying bad actions from bad actors" than its secondary form.
I'm not making an argument that you should stop talking about extinction vis-à-vis lawmakers. I don't think it's as persuasive as you're making the case that it is, and I think that there are many things lawmakers largely agree on but don't have the political will from the wider public to execute on, but I don't fault trying to convince lawmakers as a strategy in itself. However, the graph you linked earlier just shows awareness of the argument, it doesn't show alignment or agreement with it, nor whether any of the lawmakers who have made those arguments would actually pass policy proposed to mitigate x-risk. It also (I believe) is likely going to look a lot worse after midterms come around.
There are five hundred and thirty-five members of Congress; thirty are talking about, not necessarily aligned with, the concept of AGI risk. Even assuming the current trend scales linearly, which doesn't seem likely to me, it still doesn't seem to be enough with the timelines the people who made the graph are projecting. Appealing to populism to pass stalling legislation, given how far ahead negative views of AI among the public are relative to lawmakers' views on artificial intelligence, even if your goal is still ultimately a complete ban, would if nothing else likely buy you the time to convince lawmakers of what you aim to convince them of. Buying yourself another 5.5 months, under the implication of the graph, would literally double congressional awareness, being dramatically more effective (x2 of the end result of your efforts without it) than just trying to convince lawmakers, and reducing the effectiveness of LLM companies using populist policy and regulation would likely offer significantly more time than an extra 5.5 months. Popping the bubble would take a lot of people's compensation with it, pushing the economy to reallocate resources to more productive uses of time than literally killing everyone.
My claim is more that efforts to convince the wider public, not lawmakers, has been mislaid, and that the energy would be better shifted in a marginally different direction. You're unlikely to successfully convince the wider public; they've been continuously inoculated against what you want them to believe, by the ever-persistent, ever-aware-of-x-risk voices of the people currently causing the problems at hand. If the people making an argument are people you absolutely despise, who you can see speak from both sides of their mouth, [5] it's far less likely to gain any ground in your mind. This has been the public's current exposure to x-risk arguments: They exist to increase animosity to generative AI, due to the sheer hypocrisy of the players involved making them, not to gain purchase due to merit but rather blunt force of capital.
It's also worth acknowledging that this post was, admittedly, a very silly way of talking about the art of convincing people in public in general, quite literally inspired by a street I walk on every day being filled with literal petitioners, who are trying to achieve much easier things, who still often fail at what they're trying to do, because they don't understand how persuasion works. It applies to lawmakers, as well, but lawmakers are closer to you than you are to the public. The "Save BART" people are actually a good example of inefficiently trying to compel the public into action (though I wouldn't be surprised if they succeed anyway); it is nearly impossible to convince people to sign a petition off of love for something, but it is extremely easy to convince someone to do something out of spite. Fear is somewhere in the middle; accepting that you're afraid is in a sense admitting to cowardice. Most people are averse to this, unless it's really bad, so it's very hard to convert fear into action. Easier than to convert love into action, though.
The strategies to use in private are different than the ones to use in public, so the post doesn't bother to target that use-case. I would likely write a different post if writing advice specifically for your scenario of convincing lawmakers, but I've never been around lawmakers to verify my suspicions. It does sound like a fun game, though; at some point I should figure out something fun to try and lobby for, do so, and then write that post after I've proven my point. It seems likely that you're not doing something correctly, if there are only thirty American Congresscritters who have bought in (and seeing how success leans much heavier toward the American right-wing in recent memory, per the graph), but I can't really diagnose it without either seeing what people are trying or trying to do it myself and seeing what the failure cases are. I have some existing priors about how Congressional persuasion happens, based on what I've read from and of people who have successfully done it (not in the x-risk space), but I have no way of validating my suspicions around it at this time.
The post never actually encourages lying, it merely encourages not leading with the high-friction parts. Convincing people, especially in public, is primarily about reducing the friction to agreement. [6] Early existential risk arguments caught on largely by this method, by making it high status to signal agreement with it. In the awkward middle period we're in, making it profitable for high-value targets is the current meta. However, status games don't work as well on the public at large, and there's not enough money to go around to incentivize everyone in the way the movement is currently seducing high-value targets with.
Having moved to SF recently, I've been made pretty viscerally aware of how rationalism has sort of failed in a place that should hold its apex. Everyone speaks with a rationalist tongue, but most of them only stole the rhetoric from it. People who should be halfway to your beliefs are instead of the belief that AI will somehow, or is, making everything better; describing silly fantasy scenarios of benevolent futures while consciously rejecting your view and mistakenly thinking mine is novel. It's pretty puzzling to observe firsthand.
I think it's primarily due to the public acknowledging that there's something compelling about rationalism based off of interaction with rationalists, but failing to actually grab onto any of the thinking associated with it, largely due to poor public communication on behalf of the rationalists rather than active rejection. This, plus motivated reasoning with an assumption that the efficient market hypothesis is correct, has made their thinking even sloppier than it would have been without the exposure to rationalism. This seems bad to me. To convince people of a point, you don't need an in-person conversation. In-person conversations make it a lot easier, but people successfully convince the public of things all the time. The failure of public communication on this axis feels a bit like a critical mistake, and one that was probably avoidable with different messaging.
Convincing guests on the JRE was fine, but the fact that they've been talking about it for years now on what is one of the biggest soap boxes in the world and have convinced exceedingly few regular people is a sign that the public messaging just isn't working, and manufacturing public support is important to passing legislation.
Rationalists should win, and while I'm not a rationalist and I don't care too much about winning, [1:1] I do think the strategy outlined in the post offers a much better approach to public messaging for rats, if they actually want to win in the long run on this issue, than the present approach, which is actively self-defeating.
To quote a piece of art I like, "I think I'm right; I don't think it matters." ↩︎ ↩︎
circa nine years old around 2013 or so, which I'll admit is probably out of distribution for exposure to x-risk arguments; I am not necessarily representative of the normal mode of discovering x-risk arguments. I consider myself to be fairly normal, though, as an individual. ↩︎
I will never forgive x-risk mitigation advocates for reducing my ability to use em dashes in public writings by virtue of causing the companies responsible for the creation of LLMs to get funding. I miss using em dashes. This is objectively worse than human extinction would be. I wanted to use one here, but, well, you know. I guess I could start misusing spaced en dashes, but it isn't the same. ↩︎
Does this seem familiar? Which lab head am I referencing? Just kidding; it's all of them, from Altman to Legg [7] to Amodei to Musk. They all make exactly this argument in the same hushed and worried tone while excitedly ushering in the same future they're allegedly afraid of. ↩︎
A quote that comes to mind with how these people have historically advocated for their position is Machiavelli paraphrasing the Romans: "As for that which has been said, that it is better and more advantageous for your state not to interfere in our war, nothing can be more erroneous; because by not interfering you will be left, without favour or consideration, the guerdon of the conqueror." ↩︎
In private, or semi-private contexts, strangely, it's often the opposite. It's very useful to start with something outlandish, the least-charitable-to-yourself way of presenting your views while still remaining honest (to quote Yudkowsky paraphrasing LeGuin, "Don't say things that are literally false."), that you'll never in a million years convince someone of, and make a game out of convincing your target the halfway point is reasonable that way. This doesn't really work in public, but I think it's why Yudkowsky leans so heavily on it in public: It works really well in a semi-private context like 2014 lesswrong, or in the comments of a -14 2026 lesswrong post. [8] There's probably a decent post to be written solely about this weird quirk of persuasion, maybe titled something like "Boiling the Frog" or something of that nature, but I think mechanically, if not getting into the "why" of how it works, it's simple enough to be described by taking a relatively popular internet macro quote describing a bad faith action, and just generalizing it a bit beyond bad faith.
I am, of course, referring to the Moxon quote that may have came to mind:
Meet me in the middle, says the unjust man.
You take a step towards him, he takes a step back.
Meet me in the middle, says the unjust man.
This doesn't have to be an intentionally bad-faith action, and doesn't actually require the act of stepping back to still be successful. Zeno's dichotomy paradox points out that there are an infinite number of half-steps to get to any point. By repeatedly arguing your point, but staying stable in it, you draw your target ever-closer, even as you stay still and continuously take good faith effort.
I think there are two types of natural reactions upon first exposure to lesswrong/Bayesian rationalism among people who eventually find themselves convinced of what's within; there are people who find the tenets of it obvious, and there are people who find themselves with an initial aversion to it in a way that reflects the sort of mindset you'd have in a debate club, that dissolves upon further exposure and recursive argumentation. This latter mechanism, I think, though foreign to me (when I was exposed to rationalism I was very much in the former camp), is ultimately the same one as what I'm describing. ↩︎
Who, coincidentally, has been projecting 2028 as his 50% confidence target for AGI and has been on the existential risk train since at least 2011. ↩︎
It also happens to be really fun, which is motivating in itself, beyond anything about efficacy, and perhaps in conflict with it: I know that I, for example, will often argue in public in a way that's primarily useful in private, just because it's a lot more fun, to the detriment of the point I'm making. ↩︎
Given that the recommendations here are explicitly about convincing members of the public in a public setting, and I am currently aiming to convince policy people in a private setting, I think the advice here isn't as applicable to what I, personally, am trying to do in the next few months. Thanks for everything you've written, and I'll keep it in mind if that changes. I am going to bow out of the thread at this point, but didn't want to just disappear, given the effort you clearly put in. Thanks for the discussion - I quite appreciate it!
or, "A brief introduction to actually getting people to listen to your uninteresting-to-them beliefs, sign petitions, and generally not laugh you off the sidewalk outside of the Trader Joe's you so thoughtlessly set up camp next to."
or, "I thought you said you were consequentialists?"
Every day, I walk past petitioners. If you live in certain parts of San Francisco, California, it's likely a daily occurrence for you as well. I have enough samples at this point to know what works and what doesn't; what sorts of pitches tend to cause more head-shaking than others, and what actually gets people to sign their name and address on a stranger's form.
To put my cards on the table: I don't, at the present time, care very much about x-risk at all. I'm only aware of a few examples of mass extinction events, and I am unaware of the historical existence of ASI; I simply don't have the samples to justify a serious time investment into caring about x-risk, I'm not incentivized to work on it, and none of the people who believe in that sort of thing are good enough at writing fiction to sway me, even if they tried. I was inoculated by sheer hopefuel from significantly better authors at a young age.
However, it pains me to see street preachers get ignored, whether in real life or on social media, any more than they strictly have to be. An idea is entitled to the lighting it deserves.[1] Unfortunately, most idea-men would make terrible cinematographers. So my goal with this is to bridge that gap.
Stop trying to get people to like you.
Your goal is to decrease the odds of catastrophe. It is not important that you get your targets to like you, personally. It is not important that you share with them your own views around the odds of human extinction. It is not important at all, actually, that they even consider the idea of human extinction. Every human who spends enough time thinking to be useful for our purposes has developed a built-in aversion to thinking about doomsday predictions, and the odds of you turning that around for a stranger on the street or in a random twitter thread is extremely low. Not every format is the right format for conveying exactly what you're thinking; in a format like street preaching, you have to work backward from your goal to find what will aid in achieving it; you can't start with where you are and try to pull people back to you. Your goal, ultimately, is not the perfect alignment of your target. It is a "good enough" alignment. Once you accept that, we get to...
Figure out who your targets are for the day
Create a theory of mind for what your targets actually care about and can plausibly believe will happen, and then lean into it. This may be difficult, but it is worth doing. Nobody cares about the end of the world; the Mayan calendar in 2012 and y2k ruined that for all of us. There are only so many end-of-your-life parties you can go to before it gets boring; before the end is transparent before the beginning.
What do people care about? Well, right now, people really hate generative AI. Not for world-ending reasons, just for "this makes the world worse" reasons. Fears of economic impact, hatred for having their work stolen and productized by companies that choose to assist in genocide; depending on your audience, an infuriation with how these companies keep crashing their web servers. Capitalize on this.
Them developing an understanding of x-risk implies accepting more of your narrative than is practical for the format you have available to you (quick, street-side conversations with strangers), or that they'd ever be open to doing. The cognitive burden you'd be placing on them is simply too high, and the luck you'd need to do it in the span of a brief conversation is simply astronomical. After all, evil companies already sound a lot like you; the people working for them wear your faces like masks. The winning strategy is simple: Don't seem like you. Pick what they're afraid of and press where it hurts.
Figure out who you are for the day
We've established that you simply can't be you today. This presents a problem: Who are you? You don't want to lie too much, but as we've established, it's far more effective to push for regulation on grounds that make intuitive sense to the working stiff or American college student than existential risk scenarios that would only make sense with a background of reading sci-fi novels. The difference between an unhoused person and a petitioner is often not immediately obvious on first glance, and you'd rather not come off as the wrong sort, regardless of how charming the Scientologists handing out fliers in the park come across.[2]
Figure out where you are for the day
If you're targeting students, try outside a uni, or a bar that's popular among students (altered states are useful for altering subjects further; opinions become very malleable two beers in). If you're targeting software engineers, go to FiDi. The unemployed? Maybe try a beach, or a park during the daytime. The unemployed are underrated at achieving goals; they have all the time in the world. Under no circumstances should you set up camp on 4th Street, because lately there's been a bunch of people campaigning to save BART on 4th and Market, and that's much more important than existential risk, and brings me a greater amount of joy than your presence there would. Unless you're wanting to make them more effective, in which case: Go and tell them the advice I've given you! And then sign their petitions! And see if you can go campaign for them; knowing what you know now, you could get the required signatures in FiDi in a few hours.
Press into the wound
This is the fun part. You've identified what your ideal target's pain points are. Now you've got to build a sound way of making them seem worse than your target previously perceived them. Catastrophic labor effects; increased centralization of wealth into the hands of billionaires or "those damned tech workers;" intellectual property theft; the disgusting artifacts generated by these people's technologies that cause a visceral disgust reaction in so many charming people. The fact that these things are more or less entirely made up of negative externalities in terms of impact. Outside of San Francisco and Berkeley, you can even throw some sneakier slights in, with as bad of faith as you want: "And all to line the pockets of a bunch of polygamists!" Outside of San Francisco, that concern goes crazy. Press your fingers into their pain points until your forearm is covered in red. Spell out exactly what they're afraid of, and give them no way to bargain with themselves. It's not just coming for an abstract everyone: It's coming for you.
Apply a tourniquet
Okay, okay. You've had your fun. Your face is thoroughly splashed with blood and your shirt is a new reddish-brownish color. Now offer the person a life-raft. There's a solution to what ails you: Regulation! Regulation can tank the value of these companies; regulation can make them less useful at replacing you; regulation can punish these evil people; regulation can stop them from putting up data-centers; regulation can stop them from killing the cute, fluffy, innocent, harmless polar bears. If anyone builds it (and they've already built it), everyone's life gets mildly worse. The only solution the commonfolk have, now, is to ask politicians to do their jobs: To pressure them into actually wielding the regulatory hammers that they have at their disposal. Non-consensually using data isn't a right; the ability to do so can be taken away with law. Generating pictures of Mickey Mouse is, again, not a right. It can be taken away with law. The standard VC-funded, subsidized, "ask for forgiveness, not permission" at-a-loss strategy to eventually create a monopoly and profit isn't a natural law. With regulation, it can be taken away. Here's a petition that you can sign that could potentially solve one of those problems. Here's a flier to help you contact your state representative, and here's a paragraph to read that suggests to that representative a course of action. Here's a way to put out the fire.
Practice, Practice, Repeat
All getting good at speaking to strangers is is getting really familiar with the character you're playing. This will take a bit of struggling when you're not playing you. If you have severe social anxiety, maybe try in a social simulator, like VRChat, first. In present times, a headset will run you back around $200, and you can take advantage of the GPU you're probably already using for mischief anyway. A small investment for becoming a more effective agent of lowering existential risk. The expected value is almost infinite!
Or, of course, you could just go outside and start trying. This is probably better for your anxiety in the long-run, too. Rejection is something that you'll have to get comfortable with, though, and if your anxiety is bad enough, you can always try pulling these steps on-line while developing the skill. The on-line is where everything happens nowadays, anyway, even if it's harder to get people to take direct action in the on-line. You're probably already doom-looping over reddit.com or twitter.com or catatonically swiping on dating apps every day; put the time to use! The steps aren't that different from these steps; figure out who you're trying to get to, figure out who they want to hear from, make them feel worse than they already do, and then offer them a way out. Easy.
Under no circumstances should you talk to chatbots to practice this art. People can smell it on your breath when you talk to chatbots too much. Even people who love chatbots complain about hearing a chatbot's speech and patterns in the voices of others. It simply is not helpful in becoming competent at socializing. You need a situation that can challenge you. Chatbots cannot challenge you; not right now; not in this way. Go outside; touch some pavement; touch some people;[3] get good. It might just save the world.
If you understand what this is referencing from memory, good job! If you used an artificial conversationalist to guess, apply a weight of -1000 to the neural network in your head.
The author recently was handed a Scientology flier on Market Street. The author had to inform the wonderful people trying to offer their advice that they had already considered joining Scientology, but that they're simply much too neurotic to participate in the auditing process, as appealing a way out of the author's current situation as getting to work on a boat under an intense and strict organizational structure would be, and despite how strangely romantic the feelings were that the author felt after reading about Scientology's means of behavioral correction.
Not literally. Just their hearts and minds. There are better strategies for convincing someone you're touching to positively contribute toward lowering x-risk.