Comment by Alistair on Support me in a Week-Long Picketing Campaign Near OpenAI's HQ: Seeking Support and Ideas from the LessWrong Community · 2023-05-03T12:49:50.381Z · LW · GW

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.

Dilemma ("choose a side") is a principle of non-violent direct action; why is an us vs. them mentality necessarily a bad thing? Do you oppose protest in principle?

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.

Would you say this about the climate movement pressuring fossil fuel companies to transition away from fossil fuels?

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.

I think we need both – here's evidence for the radical flank effect.

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.

Strongly agree – and this is how all mass movements start, no?

Comment by Alistair on Support me in a Week-Long Picketing Campaign Near OpenAI's HQ: Seeking Support and Ideas from the LessWrong Community · 2023-05-03T12:20:30.215Z · LW · GW

You've done basically zero of the hard work required to rally people behind a successful protest (other than write this announcement)

Isn't this how most social movements start – with a single protest, attended by a small number of people?

You'd really need a concrete policy ask before I would think of joining your protest

I think this is why Percy posted here: to discuss what that might look like! And perhaps he doesn't need specific demands – look at Occupy Wall Street as an example of a movement with underspecified/vague demands that was effective in some ways (and failed in others).

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

Again – surely this is how all social movements start? This picket won't be perfect; in my view it will highly likely be better than nothing.

I do think you could do something smarter than this attempt, and try harder to figure out what might work.

Do you have any suggestions?