2026-02-19
Why is persuasion on ASI risk failing?
Disclaimer
I am still confused why persuasion around ASI risk is failing.
on target audiences
- I previously assumed that the way to reach multiple target audiences is to have a figure head for each major political demographic in the US. Have a libertarian run social media on ASI risk from libertarian lens. Have a christian run social media on ASI risk from christian lens. And so on.
- Only if you doompill atleast a 100 (or some similar number N) christians will one of them decide to full-time run a social media channel on ASI risk.
- Currently only technical nerds in silicon valley are convinced ASI risk is real, so the next step would be to go doompill some people in all the other political demographics, and ask them to run social media channels.
- I need more statistics on this, not happy with current stats.
- I have collected my own stats using prolific.com.
- There are some EA and LW stats.
- I've cold emailed a bunch of people to actually collect and publish stats. There aren't (publicly available) stats for HPMOR or any of the major youtube channels as far as I can see.
- I don't know, it's honestly hard for me to diagnose the exact issue without accurate stats.
- I can tell why I personally have been failing to persuade specific people I have met in person. I am still unable to tell why every single person who has attempted persuasion ends up stuck with an audience of 100k people at max.
- This is extremely bad actually. It is extremely bad that I am unable to identify specific reasons why persuasion is failing on each of these target demographics, and I am still only stuck with vague half-assed guesses.
- Like, my best hypotheses are things like "almost everyone does groupthink and almost no one uses their brain" or "nobody thinks more than one step ahead in their life plan, until they personally suffer as a result of no long-term thinking" or "the actual arguments in favour of short timelines are too technical and cannot possibly be made non-technical". This is a very cynical take on humanity, and doesn't actually fully explain it. There have to be atleast some nodes in society that are actually using their brain, and there have to be some specific reasons for why they are not convinced.
Side Note
- I think I should spend atleast a week or two just trying to do some more in-person persuasion. I have tried online protest, I have tried online surveys, I have tried in-person protest, now I should try 1-to-1 in-person persuasion by going door to door or something similar I think.
- I'm worried that I will give up on persuasion even before I see enough people put a serious effort into it. It's going to be completely insane if the whole ASI race exists because everyone gave up on public persuasion even before anyone competent tried public persuasion seriously.
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