If you look at the kind of claims that PauseAI makes in their risks page, you might believe that some of them seem exaggerated, or that PauseAI is simply throwing all the negative things they can find about AI into big list to make it see bad. If you think that credibility is important to the effort to pause AI, then PauseAI might seem very careless about truth in a way that could backfire.
A couple notes on this:
AFAICT PauseAI US does not do the thing you describe.
I’ve looked at a good amount of research on protest effectiveness. There are many observational studies showing that nonviolent protests are associated with preferred policy changes / voting patterns, and ~four natural experiments. If protests backfired for fairly minor reasons like “their website makes some hard-to-defend claims” (contrasted with major reasons like “the protesters are setting buildings on fire”), I think that would show up in the literature, and it doesn’t.
I’ve looked at a good amount of research on protest effectiveness. There are many observational studies showing that nonviolent protests are associated with preferred policy changes / voting patterns, and ~four natural experiments. If protests backfired for fairly minor reasons like “their website makes some hard-to-defend claims” (contrasted with major reasons like “the protesters are setting buildings on fire”), I think that would show up in the literature, and it doesn’t.
I’m not trying to get into the object level here. But people could both:
Believe that making such hard-to-defend claims could backfire, disagreeing with those experiments that you point out or
Believe that making such claims violates virtue-ethics-adjacent commitments to truth or
Just not want to be associated, in an instinctive yuck kinda way, with people who make these kinds of dubious-to-them claims.
Of course people could be wrong about the above points. But if you believed these things, then they’d be intelligible reasons not to be associated with someone, and I think a lot of the claims PauseAI makes are such that a large number of people people would have these reactions.
A couple notes on this:
AFAICT PauseAI US does not do the thing you describe.
I’ve looked at a good amount of research on protest effectiveness. There are many observational studies showing that nonviolent protests are associated with preferred policy changes / voting patterns, and ~four natural experiments. If protests backfired for fairly minor reasons like “their website makes some hard-to-defend claims” (contrasted with major reasons like “the protesters are setting buildings on fire”), I think that would show up in the literature, and it doesn’t.
I’m not trying to get into the object level here. But people could both:
Believe that making such hard-to-defend claims could backfire, disagreeing with those experiments that you point out or
Believe that making such claims violates virtue-ethics-adjacent commitments to truth or
Just not want to be associated, in an instinctive yuck kinda way, with people who make these kinds of dubious-to-them claims.
Of course people could be wrong about the above points. But if you believed these things, then they’d be intelligible reasons not to be associated with someone, and I think a lot of the claims PauseAI makes are such that a large number of people people would have these reactions.