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 significantlybetterauthors 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, evilcompanies 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 foryou.
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.
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.
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.