The book is right that the real answer is to try to pause AI development. It’s not the killer objection you think it is that it could be theoretically possible to build safe ASI with future technology. I also think it’s possible we could end up okay by accident. It’s still a foolish plan and I assume you’re only doing Superalignment/AI Control stuff bc you feel forced to, and that you wouldn’t choose for your safety work to have to play catch-up to a racing industry.

Yeah I suspect that these one-shot big protests are drawing on a history of organizing in those or preceding fields. The Women’s March coalition comes together all for one big event but draws on a far on deeper history involving small demonstrations and deliberate organizing to make it to that point, is my point. Idk about Free Internet but I would bet it leaned on Free Speech organizing and advocacy.

I sure wish someone would put on a large AI Safety protest if they know a way to do this in one leap. If I got a sponsor for a concert or some other draw then perhaps I could see a larger thing happening quickly in the family of AI Safety protest, but I’d like the keep the brand pretty earnest and message-focused.

I have to note, based on our history, I interpret your posts as attacking, like the subtext is that I’m just not a good organizer and, if you wanted to, you could organize a way bigger movement way faster. If that’s true, I wish you would! I’m trying my best with my understanding of how this can work for me and I wish more people like you were embracing broad messaging like protests.

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I’m saying he’s projecting his biases onto others. He clearly does think PauseAI rhymes with unabomber somehow, even if he personally knows better. The weird pro-tech vs anti-tech dichotomy, and especially thinking that others are blanketly anti-tech, is very rationalist.

Do you think those causes never had organizing before the big protest? 

I think the relevant question is how often social movements begin with huge protests, and that’s exceedingly rare. It’s effective to create the impression that the people just rose up, but there’s basically always organizing groundwork for that to take off.

Do you guys seriously think that big protests just materialize?

Yeah the SF protests have been about constant (25-40) in attendance, but we have more locations now and have put a lot more infrastructure in place 

The thing is there isn’t a great dataset— even with historical case studies where the primary results have been achieved, there are a million uncontrolled variables and we don’t and will never have experimentally established causation. But, yes, I’m confident in my model of social change.

What leapt out to me about your model was that is was very focused how an observer of the protests would react with a rationalist worldview. You didn’t seem to have given much thought to the breadth of social movements and how a diverse public would have experienced them. Like, most people aren’t gonna think PauseAI is anti-tech in general and therefore similar to the unabomber. Rationalists think that way, and few others.