I'm undecided on whether things like hunger strikes are useful but I just want to comment to say that I think a lot of EAs are way too quick to conclude that they're not useful. I don't think we have strong (or even moderate) reason to believe that they're not useful.

[Ninjaedit] When I reviewed the evidence on large-scale nonviolent protests, I concluded that they're probably effective (~90% credence). But I've seen a lot of people claim that those sorts of protests are ineffective (or even harmful) in spite of the evidence in their favor. I think hunger strikes are sufficiently different from the sorts of protests I reviewed that the evidence might not generalize, so I'm very uncertain about the effectiveness of hunger strikes. But what does generalize, I think, is that many EAs' intuitions on protest effectiveness are miscalibrated.

I don’t have a good heuristic for distinguishing between a hunger strike as legitimate protest and delusional self-harm, but this feels more toward the latter.

I think we can game this out, though. The purpose of a hunger strike as protest is to (a) generate public attention (it’s an extreme, costly signal, which can cause other people to update their beliefs) and (b) coerce an actor into doing something to prevent the nominal cause of your strike.

In this case, we can clearly rule out (b). But I also think that (a) is highly unlikely—AI safety isn’t an issue on the verge of public salience, and Anthropic aren’t even the most famous company neglecting it. In almost all cases, this will merely garner attention among a group of people who are already amenable to their message within EA and rationalism. Cynically, we might even recognise this has having a third, hidden purpose, which is to demonstrate fealty to others in the AI safety radicalism movement.

I would suggest that as the benefits of such a protest are minimal, we should turn to the harms. Not only is this person harming themself, if this gets attention within their ingroups, they’re encouraging others to do the same for the same attention. As such, I’ve strongly downvoted this post and reported it to the moderation team. I strongly believe we should not be making this behaviour visible to others.

I think he’s in front of the wrong building! He should be stroking in front of OpenAI surely? The people who head up Anthropic are people who used to work on OpenAI’s AI safety team and they left because of the lack of serious priority into AI safety, so I would assume from that, that Anthropic at least has a better sense of AI safety and prioritises it more than OpenAI, that being said, I don’t really trust any tech company in the Valley because they all prioritise scale and shareholders above anything, including ethical practices 

Let us act as if this emergency is real.

Banger

Also, I’m not sure how this situation applies to your website as what he is doing probably doesn’t fall under effective altruism? I don’t believe for a moment that he’s actually going to change anything with his hunger strike. And probably will give up before it gets serious, as history dictates that the people most likely to hold out until the end of a hunger strike are political prisoners, such as Bobby Sands in Ireland, most people who start end up giving in