I went. I had a decent time. About 30-40 people showed up.
It’s hard to judge, but random people passing by seemed to have a decently high rate of sympathy, with a decent number of people taking fliers (1/4 groups of people?) that were being handed out, as well as an occasional car driving by with people honking in support of the protest. The protest definitely felt reasonably within the Overton window of protests.
To be clear, the participants were still like 80% people I knew in-person from the Bay Area Rationality/EA/AI-Alignment community, and I don’t think the pause AI stuff has so far succeeded at sparking some kind of independent protest movement. I also don’t know whether the protest did anything. We were seen by a decent number of random people in SF (my guess is around 2000-3000 people walked by or drove by and noticed us during the two hours of the protest), but it’s not super clear what that does. My guess is most of the impact is from growing into something much larger, which does seem at least plausible.
It’s hard to say what the true impact of the events will be at this time, but they went well! I’m going to write a post-mortem for the SF PauseAI protest yesterday and the Meta protest in September and post it on EAF/LW that will cover the short-term outcomes.
Considering they are financially cheap to do (each around $2000 if you don’t count my salary), I’d call them pretty successful already. Meta protest got good media coverage, and it remains to be seen how this one will be covered since most of the coverage happened in the two following weeks last time.
Considering they are financially cheap to do (each around $2000 if you don’t count my salary), I’d call them pretty successful already
I mean, to be clear, most of the cost is born by the protesters, so I don’t think this argument goes through. I would value the time of many people attending that protest at $100/hr+, which moves the more realistic cost more into the $10k+ range.
Is that really the right way to value such things? Like, is it actually true that if you had decided “eh, this protest is actually a bad idea and I won’t go”, then you would instead have spent the day working and earning $100/hr (or whatever amount)? In other words, did you actually in fact forego \$(yourHourlySalary * protestDurationInHours) by attending? (And, by extension, the same question for all other protesters?)
I think that somewhat straightforwardly applies to at least me. Don’t know about other people. I found it more exhausting than my average hour of work and probably traded off against more than one per hour of attendance.
This doesn’t seem right to me. We aren’t contractors paid by the hour, and the marginal hour of work on the weekend doesn’t translate linearly into likelihood of getting fired / a raise, so I don’t think it should be approximated as whatever one’s hourly average salary is.
Not sure what you mean. I am pretty sure most people attending worked less on other stuff (roughly by the amount of hours they attended) than they would have if they had not attended. You can quibble a bit over the multiplier, but it’s IMO obvious that you need to take into account the time cost of the attendees somehow.
For people who work during the weekends, those marginal hours of work are not as productive as the first chunk of 40 hours they do in a week, so my guess is that it should be modeled as like a factor of 2x less valuable as other work hours.
For people who don’t work during the week and this came out of social time, I think it was kind of a fun adventure, and personally I would have (in retrospect) paid quite a bit of money to go. It was a very important experience to me and I would be less without having attended. I feel stronger for having gone out to the world and said what I think is true in my heart about something I’m really worried about. My guess is that it was a positive sum event for many other people attending too, including just for people for whom it was a better bonding experience and memory than whatever else they would have done with their weekend.
That’s why I said “financially cheap”. They are expensive for the organizer in terms of convincing people to volunteer and to all attendees as far as their time and talents, and getting people to put in sweat equity is what makes it an effective demonstration. But per dollar invested they are very effective.
I would venture that the only person who was seriously prevented from doing something else by being involved in this protest was me. Of course there is some time and labor cost for everyone involved. I hope it was complementary to whatever else they do, and, as Ben said, perhaps even allowing them to flex different muscles in an enriching way.
Can we get an update? How did this go?
I went. I had a decent time. About 30-40 people showed up.
It’s hard to judge, but random people passing by seemed to have a decently high rate of sympathy, with a decent number of people taking fliers (1/4 groups of people?) that were being handed out, as well as an occasional car driving by with people honking in support of the protest. The protest definitely felt reasonably within the Overton window of protests.
To be clear, the participants were still like 80% people I knew in-person from the Bay Area Rationality/EA/AI-Alignment community, and I don’t think the pause AI stuff has so far succeeded at sparking some kind of independent protest movement. I also don’t know whether the protest did anything. We were seen by a decent number of random people in SF (my guess is around 2000-3000 people walked by or drove by and noticed us during the two hours of the protest), but it’s not super clear what that does. My guess is most of the impact is from growing into something much larger, which does seem at least plausible.
Here’s a 2-min edited video of the protest.
Most people who hear our message do so well after the protest, via sharing of this kind of media.
The SF one went great! Here’s a first batch of pics. A lot of the impact will come from sharing the pics and videos.
It’s hard to say what the true impact of the events will be at this time, but they went well! I’m going to write a post-mortem for the SF PauseAI protest yesterday and the Meta protest in September and post it on EAF/LW that will cover the short-term outcomes.
Considering they are financially cheap to do (each around $2000 if you don’t count my salary), I’d call them pretty successful already. Meta protest got good media coverage, and it remains to be seen how this one will be covered since most of the coverage happened in the two following weeks last time.
I mean, to be clear, most of the cost is born by the protesters, so I don’t think this argument goes through. I would value the time of many people attending that protest at $100/hr+, which moves the more realistic cost more into the $10k+ range.
Is that really the right way to value such things? Like, is it actually true that if you had decided “eh, this protest is actually a bad idea and I won’t go”, then you would instead have spent the day working and earning $100/hr (or whatever amount)? In other words, did you actually in fact forego
\$(yourHourlySalary * protestDurationInHours)by attending? (And, by extension, the same question for all other protesters?)I think that somewhat straightforwardly applies to at least me. Don’t know about other people. I found it more exhausting than my average hour of work and probably traded off against more than one per hour of attendance.
This doesn’t seem right to me. We aren’t contractors paid by the hour, and the marginal hour of work on the weekend doesn’t translate linearly into likelihood of getting fired / a raise, so I don’t think it should be approximated as whatever one’s hourly average salary is.
Not sure what you mean. I am pretty sure most people attending worked less on other stuff (roughly by the amount of hours they attended) than they would have if they had not attended. You can quibble a bit over the multiplier, but it’s IMO obvious that you need to take into account the time cost of the attendees somehow.
For people who work during the weekends, those marginal hours of work are not as productive as the first chunk of 40 hours they do in a week, so my guess is that it should be modeled as like a factor of 2x less valuable as other work hours.
For people who don’t work during the week and this came out of social time, I think it was kind of a fun adventure, and personally I would have (in retrospect) paid quite a bit of money to go. It was a very important experience to me and I would be less without having attended. I feel stronger for having gone out to the world and said what I think is true in my heart about something I’m really worried about. My guess is that it was a positive sum event for many other people attending too, including just for people for whom it was a better bonding experience and memory than whatever else they would have done with their weekend.
That’s why I said “financially cheap”. They are expensive for the organizer in terms of convincing people to volunteer and to all attendees as far as their time and talents, and getting people to put in sweat equity is what makes it an effective demonstration. But per dollar invested they are very effective.
I would venture that the only person who was seriously prevented from doing something else by being involved in this protest was me. Of course there is some time and labor cost for everyone involved. I hope it was complementary to whatever else they do, and, as Ben said, perhaps even allowing them to flex different muscles in an enriching way.