In the latest edition of my Tactics In Practice (TIPs) series, I analyzed the research behind protest in the animal protest movement! The full resource is well worth reading for any activist who uses street demonstrations — check out the full thing here: Tactics In Practice: The Science Of Protests And Demonstrations.
Key Highlights:
Protest groups tend to have three main goals, shown below. I wasn't able to find empirical evidence on Goal 3 (positive or negative), but anecdotal conversations lead me to believe that protests can serve as good cultivation tools for other activists. But I was able to find more information on the other two goals.
Protests can’t change people’s diets; we need to pursue other targets. (That doesn't mean protest is a bad tactic! Just that it's ineffective if we apply it to the wrong target)
All protest has some form of backlash — this backlash is among the highest of animal advocacy interventions, if not the highest. While research shows this backlash fades over time, activists need to think critically about how to work with it. Either take steps to reduce the backlash (through media plans, carefully chosen tactics, etc.), or as part of a larger strategy. Which brings us to:
We need to think more critically about the “radical flank effect” (sometimes called “good cop, bad cop”) — if one protest group is perceived as more radical, a more moderate group will be more accepted. However, this requires careful strategy and coordination. I personally believe that groups involved in protest should consider which role they play in the broader ecosystem: are they radical? Moderate? And how will different groups engage with the key decision-makers?
Protest impact depends on the media in both the short-term and long-term, so protest groups need a media outreach plan.
Protestors need to think very carefully about the salience of their protest — where, when, and why is this protest taking place? Can activists carefully choose a cause more likely to garner media attention (something more specific than “animal rights”)?
Groups need to pick the goals of the protest carefully. As mentioned above, "go vegan" is unlikely to have much impact. This requires understanding opinion polling on a topic as well as the likelihood of specific stakeholders to create positive change.
Epistemic status: Speculation from two decently informed advocates armed with anecdata.
Note on process: After having some version of this conversation several times and saying, “we should probably write about this publicly,” we took the less heroic route: we recorded one of our conversations, fed the transcript into an LLM, and then substantially revised the structure, substance, and framing ourselves. We will not be sharing the transcript, as it is in...
TLDR: Take the population ethics quiz here: https://mdickens.me/pop-ethics/
Population ethics is an oft-overlooked subfield within ethics. Many people hold views that they don't realize contradict each other, or that have strange implications that they wouldn't endorse if they thought about it more.
Not just that—population ethics is a BIG DEAL. A lot of ethical decisions hinge on how you think about changes in future populations....
Headline finding: I audited 17 AI Safety Talent programmes. Zero of 17 have published any comparison group, rejected-applicant follow-up, matched control or randomisation. Not one. Every programme that mentions a counterfactual does it by asking participants to self-report.
Background
At least $70 million...
