I don’t think that the analogy between X-risk work and this kind of protest makes sense.
The reason X-risk work is so impactful is that very few people are working on X-risk at all. As you say, if more people worked on X-risk, the (marginal) impact of each one would be lower, but that’s a good thing because more work would be getting done.
The claim being made about the animal welfare activists is that the mechanism of change relies on both the “high-impact” organizers, as well as the “low-impact” responsive consumers who will change their behavior in response to the protests. I think Jason’s point is that:
(a) it doesn’t make sense to call the organizers “high-impact” and the responsive consumers “low-impact”, if both of these groups are necessary for the protest to have impact at all,
(b) if we, as EAs, take the “organizer” role in our campaigns, we’re expecting a bunch of people to take the “responsive consumer” role, even if they don’t care as much about the issue as we do. So the cooperative thing to do would be to ourselves take the “responsive consumer” role in campaigns that others are organizing, even if we don’t care as much about the issue as those organizers do.
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I do, however, think that (b) only applies to cases where there is an organized protest. If there was a prominent group of anti-Nestle protesters who had specific demands of Nestle that had a reasonable chance of being adopted and that would lead to positive impact, and they were protesting because Nestle didn’t do those, then maybe this argument would counsel that we should support them if it doesn’t cost too much. But I don’t really think this applies to the OP, who seemed to be suggesting that we should do a bunch of one-person “personal boycotts”, which I don’t think will have much impact.
The boycott of Nestlé isn’t solely an individual action; there are others who also avoid Nestlé, Amazon, and similar companies. That said, these efforts remain relatively small in scale and don’t constitute a large, coordinated movement.
I don’t think that the analogy between X-risk work and this kind of protest makes sense.
The reason X-risk work is so impactful is that very few people are working on X-risk at all. As you say, if more people worked on X-risk, the (marginal) impact of each one would be lower, but that’s a good thing because more work would be getting done.
The claim being made about the animal welfare activists is that the mechanism of change relies on both the “high-impact” organizers, as well as the “low-impact” responsive consumers who will change their behavior in response to the protests. I think Jason’s point is that:
(a) it doesn’t make sense to call the organizers “high-impact” and the responsive consumers “low-impact”, if both of these groups are necessary for the protest to have impact at all,
(b) if we, as EAs, take the “organizer” role in our campaigns, we’re expecting a bunch of people to take the “responsive consumer” role, even if they don’t care as much about the issue as we do. So the cooperative thing to do would be to ourselves take the “responsive consumer” role in campaigns that others are organizing, even if we don’t care as much about the issue as those organizers do.
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I do, however, think that (b) only applies to cases where there is an organized protest. If there was a prominent group of anti-Nestle protesters who had specific demands of Nestle that had a reasonable chance of being adopted and that would lead to positive impact, and they were protesting because Nestle didn’t do those, then maybe this argument would counsel that we should support them if it doesn’t cost too much. But I don’t really think this applies to the OP, who seemed to be suggesting that we should do a bunch of one-person “personal boycotts”, which I don’t think will have much impact.
The boycott of Nestlé isn’t solely an individual action; there are others who also avoid Nestlé, Amazon, and similar companies. That said, these efforts remain relatively small in scale and don’t constitute a large, coordinated movement.