Support me in a Week-Long Picketing Campaign Near OpenAI's HQ: Seeking Support and Ideas from the LessWrong Community

I don't think this is a good idea. You and others may reasonably disagree, but here's my thinking:

Protests create an us vs. them mentality. Two groups are pitted against each other, with the protestors typically cast in the role of victims who are demanding to be heard.

I don't see this achieving the ends we need. If people push OpenAI to be for or against AI development, they are going to be for development. A protest, as I see it, risks making them dig in to a position and be less open to cooperating on safety efforts.

I'd rather see continued behind the scenes work to get them to be more cautious, e.g. like the work ARC Evals is doing. It seems more likely we can have a positive influence by working with them rather than directly opposing them.

Protest seem more effective when it's an expression of a mass movement. It's not clear to me there's a mass movement to oppose what OpenAI is doing, so it's hard for me to see what positive impact a protest would have. Seems much more likely to make things worse than better given the conditions under which you would be protesting.

These are some of the reasons I don't want to join your protest: You've done basically zero of the hard work required to rally people behind a successful protest (other than write this announcement). You'd really need a concrete policy ask before I would think of joining your protest, and show that you're going to be able to coordinate a bunch of work from lots of people. More generally I don't really like the dynamic where the first person to say "me" is suddenly able to direct a bunch of free-energy, even if they probably aren't able to follow-through. Also nothing in your post indicates that this would be very rationalist or LW in nature.

That said I like that you want to do something to prevent a potential extinction-level risk. I do think you could do something smarter than this attempt, and try harder to figure out what might work.

I'm the moderator who approved this first post. Like others, I don't think as stated this is plan is being conducted in a good way. However, I thought it might be good for Percy to get feedback and pushback. There's been less explicit feedback, but the -30 karma is in indication that people in general do not think this is a great plan.

Percy, you've gone and made another post continuing with your plan and disregarding the response from this one (and being more concrete without having done the work you say in this post needs doing). I've drafted that post as I don't want new users to be able to use the platform to make and coordinate plans that don't seem very good especially if they're not engaging with the feedback they're getting.

If you like, you can still engage in the comments here if you want to defend your plan. I urge you to be wary unilaterlist's curses here.

This seems to be another one of those instances where I wish there was a dual-voting system to posts. I would've liked to strong disagree with the contents of the post without discouraging well-intentioned people from posting here. 

a week long picket around OpenAI's headquarters.

This is an unexpectedly creative way to screw this up. Planning a protest to be a week long means that most would-be attendees don't know when they should be there, and will show up at a random time in a week-long interval, see that there's no one else there, and leave.

If you want this to be at all successful, you need to pick a specific date and time. It's fine if you're there more often than just then, but please, for crying out loud, don't position yourself as an organizer and then create ambiguity about basic logistical details.

A somewhat messy braindump^[1] of my thoughts on this style of approach:

I'm excited to see you interested in participating in the distributed network of humans trying to ensure AI goes well! I don't currently think that protests are a useful collective action; they barely work to petition, and I suspect are heavily amplified by toxoplasmosis of conflict. Synchronized, organized expression of demand works best when a large group of people are a dependency of the system, because a protest shows that those engaging in the collective action of showing up could also engage in other collective actions. But openai doesn't need you to like them, and in fact the power imbalance with openai is already frighteningly intense. Reaching the sort of many-vs-few bargaining position that collective action seeks to create seems to me to mostly amplify thoughtless mammal-conflict response in the openai team. Strategic collective action probably looks more like figuring out ways to get many many programmers to think about how to survive the superintelligence transition at a technical level. If you're interested in that form of capability-selected collective action, I'd love to talk about it, and would be enthusiastic to upvote a post discussing it. I'd also be interested in discussing what sorts of interpolitical societal discussion^[2] are valuable. I'm a big fan of solidarity as a base on which to build, and though I disagree with the global left in some ways about how to best achieve solidarity, what part of the global left doesn't? in particular, though, in this situation, I think it is important to impress upon those used to being in charge at the top that all-of-humanity solidarity, not just human class solidarity, is needed to prevent the rise of catastrophic AI. If you'd like to do political organizing for the task of preventing the rise of dangerous AI, I'd suggest reading up on how ai policy people are currently thinking about it. It's unusually important to avoid polarizing because right now both left and right are terrified of AI for basically the same reason, though of course they're phrasing it differently ("preserving our values and preventing extinction" on the right, as usual, vs "preserving worker rights and autonomy" on the left, again as usual; the unusual thing is that this time, these refer to the same thing!)

1. ^{^}

   I was one of the main examples criticized in "No, you need to write clearer [LW · GW]", oh well i guess,

2. ^{^}

   eg, memetics, but that dismisses how much people can think about things before contributing

You would do well to learn and think before acting. Your post is 100% emotions and 0% rational thinking.

Hi Percy,

I think what you are doing is very courageous. Can we start a Discord channel to coordinate these types of protests? I do not know that I would be able to travel to San Francisco within this time span. But, I suspect that these types of protests will need to be more common in the coming weeks/months.