Current Director & Strategy lead at Animal Rebellion—using social movements for effective work on animal welfare and climate change. Recently completed the 2021 Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program.
James Ozden
Karma: 533
Ah good point—I didn’t really think about this. You’re right in that this post is about nonviolent protest being effective rather than not being effective, with no discussion on how violent protest fits into this. I’ve changed the title to “A case for the effectiveness of protest” but not sure if it’s too late but hopefully at least it’s a bit clearer. Thank you for the heads up!
Hey Herbie—good questions/points so thank you for this response. A few points:
On “they depend a bit too heavily on subjective guesses to be useful”
I think this massively depends on what you think “useful” is! Do I think this evidence is rigorous enough to allocate tens of millions towards nonviolent protest groups? Definitely not, so it’s not useful in that regard. But do I think this is an update on the very little quantitative information we had previously? Yes, definitely useful in that case! At least for me, before I did this project, my uncertainty around the impact of XR ranged from negative overall to roughly the cost-effectiveness of CATF. So in many ways, this project definitely updated my beliefs on the possible upper bounds of cost-effectiveness and that XR was probably net good overall. Also I think it was useful because it showed that even in my pessimistic scenarios, the cost-effectiveness of XR was still not that far off CATF, which I think is the one of the strongest reasons to look into it further.
In essence, the purpose of me doing this preliminary research was to make a case that we should do further research, as this still isn’t very conclusive (as you’ve pointed out). So again, I think it was definitely useful in that regard, as it now is happening. The next steps for this research would definitely be to try reduce the reliance on subjective values for these estimates and reduce the confidence intervals, so more inline with what you’re talking about.
But overall, I think this initial research has narrowed the range of uncertainty / at least put some numbers on the potential cost-effectiveness of nonviolent protest, whereas we didn’t really have that at all before, both inside the EA community and out. The next steps would be to keep narrowing down the large bounds to make it more and more actionable for funders/people generally, so maybe that will be more useful in that regard if it succeeds!
2. On the net-zero pledges
I agree, I don’t think it’s clear that a net-zero declaration a year or two earlier will directly map to reaching net zero a year or two earlier. I don’t think the strength of this case comes from any individual argument, rather than the general direction of many pieces of weak evidence. I think I mentioned this in the document but it’s based on the many weak arguments / cluster thinking approach, similar to what CE uses here. That’s the reason why I chose to try do my CEA from 4 independent angles and compare them, rather than only doing one CEA. Given that all four gave relatively large values for the cost-effectiveness, this was a reasonably positive update overall. However, I wouldn’t place that much weight on any single one, but combined I think they’re more compelling.
To improve this, I could have weighted my average with which CEAs I found the most robust, because actually I think my net-zero one is one of the weaker ones. I’m probably the most confident in my local authority pledges CEA and possibly the one on NDCs. But really I think that these CEAs, when combined with other bits of evidence, is when I think the case becomes more compelling. For example, here are the different bits of evidence that all point in a positive direction:
4 independent CEAs showing high cost-effectiveness
Academic studies showing success of protest on public opinion
Academic studies showing impact of protest on policymakers
Historical case studies of nonviolent protest
Conversations with UK policymakers
Non-quantified impacts such as narrative adoption
A priori arguments on the INT framework (+replaceability, counterfactual impact, etc.)
I think when these are all combined, the case seems quite good, but the individual evidence for each point is not that strong (partly because it just doesn’t exist yet, so what can we do).
3. On Zeitgest effects
I talked about this a bit in my attribution section so not sure if you read that and weren’t convinced or you just didn’t get around to that section (sorry the document is very long!). I definitely do agree it’s hard to disentangle what XR or any individual organisation did to accurately get a feel for this, but I don’t think it’s impossible. To a degree, it’s what foundations do to evaluate policy organisations (as seen by this Founders Pledge document) so it would be applying those same principles to different kinds of organisations. Even applying that framework, as seen in my attribution section, I still believe the counterfactual impact XR had was reasonably large and to some degree kickstarted/boosted that wave of public sentiment.
Good catch Henry—I totally agree that XR’s tactics and themselves as an organisation are massively unpopular. However, I think that is distinct from a) the amount of support they would have built for action on climate change and b) the amount of activists/people engaging with their work. I also take the point that I should have used the term “fame” or “salience of XR” rather than popularity because I really meant how well known they are, not how much people like them.
In terms of a), even though XR is unpopular, the goal is always to build support for climate action overall, rather than any specific organisation. Whilst correlational, I think there is some evidence (graph below and in the paper) to suggest that XR has done this, even though it has been quite unpopular. Internally, we often say that it’s totally irrelevant whether people like XR or not. What we really care about is people supporting government action on climate/ being concerned about climate change / getting on the streets for climate issues generally. A bit more discussion on this can be seen in this opinion piece in the Independent (not by XR).
In terms of b) , this refers to the number of XR local groups and people that were campaigning for the local campaign net-zero demand. I think this is substantial, with probably 200-300+ groups at the peak of XR between April-October 2019. I think this is the main factor I meant when I said popularity, so apologies for the confusion. I think the sheer number of groups and people campaigning for the council net-zero demand would have played a significant role in influencing councils, hence the high value.
Overall: I would say most of my 10-50% estimate came from the original 2025 net-zero demand and the number of local groups that were campaigning for 2030 net-zero targets, rather than how much people liked them. I believe I discuss this in some more detail in my attribution section as well if you’ve read that.
In response to your aside—I totally agree with the reputational risks , which are very significant. I didn’t specify but I always assumed the support would be behind-the-scenes, rather than public.
Hi Jackson, thank you for the really interesting questions and thoughtful engagement! I’ll try to answer the various questions/points but let me know if I’ve missed something or misunderstood.
Is there a pool of non-EAs who just enjoy protesting, who can be grabbed by a new organization? Or is it just EAs who would be attending? If the latter, then the idea of an “EA protest” (getting hundreds of extremely value-aligned, hardworking, highly educated EAs to gather together just to mill around outside some government buildings for a few hours) seems like it could never live up to the opportunity cost of everything else those people could have been working on.
If the question is: are we targeting EAs vs non-EAs who just like protesting, my answer would be neither. EAs are generally a demographic that is way too small to solely focus on so I wouldn’t think that would be a great move. Also, I wouldn’t really say that there are that many people ‘who just enjoy protesting’. A lot of my friends organise/protest because they feel deeply about issues and feel like no one else will do it if they don’t. Most people get burnt out and extremely stressed due to the high-pressure situations so I would say most organisers don’t actively enjoy it, but rather feel compelled into it out of moral duty. For more “normal” people who might just attend protests but not organise, I also don’t think it’s accurate to say that they enjoy it and would do it for almost any issue. I’m not basing this off a whole lot of evidence but from experience of talking to people, they would generally only go to protests for 1-3 issues that they feel strongly about, rather than anything.
By contrast, if we can tap into a large preexisting pool of “people who like going to protests” or “people who care about this object-level issue but aren’t currently expressing themselves” or etc, then the argument for leverage via organizing goes through much more easily. This seems like the better bet, but it does raise other questions.
This is more what I’m talking about but I would change the framing from “people who like protests” to “people who care a bit about a certain issue and could be encouraged to care more”. I think the real value of social movements is mobilising 10,000 people who were only 20% concerned about an issue to 10,000 people who are 50% concerned, the point where they look for jobs in that area, contact politicians, attend protests, etc. So the leverage factor is using a small team of 10(ish) people and translating that into the labour and efforts of 10,000+ people, who would not have gotten engaged in the movement otherwise.
How easily can you start a social movement on just anything? To what extent can a movement on some random highly-effective cause be summoned out of thin air by organizers, versus to what extent do social movements arise inevitably as a result of underlying societal pressures? If the formation and growth of SMOs is mostly downstream of preexisting societal/cultural trends, then instead of picking your favorite cause area, maybe the best thing to do is to found a group in whatever up-and-coming cause area is likely to soon become mega-popular, then try to “steer” it in the most helpful direction.
These are great questions! On how easily you can start a movement on just about anything: I’m not sure and that’s definitely something I would want to study. I definitely think there is a question of whether popular societal issue → social movement or social movement picks an issue → popular societal issue. In my head, this is a cyclical relationship where one reinforces the other, but it’s not clear which one is more important. I think there is some precedent that social movement organisations can really propel an issue into the mainstream (climate change basically now the number one global priority) but there are questions of whether it needs a long-standing base of cultural awareness to do so, as the climate movement had.
maybe the best thing to do is to found a group in whatever up-and-coming cause area is likely to soon become mega-popular, then try to “steer” it in the most helpful direction.
Agreed—I think this would be particularly helpful for pandemic preparedness and animal welfare right now, both rapidly growing issues.
In either case, how easy is it for a wonky EA movement to attract and steer the efforts of people with different politics/worldviews/temperaments, without overly compromising its direction or losing adherents to competing social movements that are more emotionally appealing/viral?
Another great question! I think to a degree, social movements can use their narrative/framing to change public discourse e.g. the emergency framing used by Extinction Rebellion. It’s not clear to me how much this was latent in people’s underlying beliefs of climate change or if this was a concept newly seeded by XR so that could be something interesting to look into.
On the other point, I do definitely agree that there might be an inherent difficulty in marrying the concepts of effective altruism (rationality, evidence-driven) to the “sticky” slogans and less nuanced messaging used by most social movements. There definitely seems to be a tension with being populist/appealing via emotions and being strategic in the EA sense, tackling the most pressing issues in sometimes counterintuitive ways. I don’t have a clear answer for this but again, this is definitely something I want to explore further.
Pandemic prevention seems like a really, really great area for a lot of reasons. I am excited about existing advocacy organizations like OneDaySooner and Guarding Against Pandemics, and I hope there are many more soon!
I personally would be psyched about an air-quality advocacy organization, perhaps fueled primarily by people’s personal complaints about California wildfires and covid risk, but also steering to advocate better air quality in poor countries.
Definitely agree on pandemic prevention and interesting point about air quality! I haven’t thought about that recently. It’s definitely been trialled in London (funnily enough, by the people who then went to found XR) but I’m not sure they had the kind of success they wanted.
The Sunrise Movement has somewhat transitioned from climate advocacy to generic social justice stuff. Was this a successful (albeit perhaps misguided) example of steering driven from above? Or was it an example of bottom-up change as the organization failed to steer its members away from a more attractive cause area?
I think I would actually slightly disagree here—in my understanding, The Sunrise Movement has always been very explicitly social justice focused (as the Green New Deal inherently is, promising a just transition for workers). There definitely is also an element that newcomers who join movements do try to steer it towards their own personal interests so their social justice focus might have increased in recent years due to that. Roger Hallam who founded XR talks about this a bit in this video, referring to it as psychological herding to the mainstream.
I’ve been told that the official nonprofit organization called “Black Lives Matter” did a good job maintaining the centrality of the (unpopular and counterproductive) “Defund the Police” message, successfully shutting out other campaigns for more practical reforms, like “8 Can’t Wait”? Does the BLM organization really deserve credit for controlling the movement, or were they just riding the wave while the practical reformers were doomed to fail on their own? How might things have gone differently, and resulted in more actual reform/improvements to policing?
Again, I can’t really help here. I know quite little about BLM in the US and the policy reforms they were advocating for, sorry! There is a classic tension here however about symbolic demands vs instrumental demands, where symbolic demands seek to shift the Overton Window and instrumental demands are practical ones with the intention of passing. Generally the symbolic demands come from the more “radical” groups and view the instrumental-demanding organisations as “Reformers”, in a slightly negative manner.
If it’s about summoning new movements:
For maximum impact, you might want to pick something far outside the overton window (ie something not usually considered a political issue or something to be protested… ), then treat protests as a brute-force way of getting something on the political agenda.
Unusually wonky things like advocating FDA reforms, or switching to a better voting system, or changing how international aid is distributed?
Advocating for radical institutional reform ideas—futarchy, other uses of prediction markets, Glen Weyl type stuff, liquid democracy, etc. (Although in many cases I think it would be more effective to try to build those systems directly and conduct trials of them, since the main bottleneck is their maturity as institutions rather than opposition to their adoption.)
Whilst I agree with the thrust of this point, I definitely think some things like prediction markets might be too technical (or essentially, too uninspiring) to build a movement around, even early on. Generally though yes, this is pretty much the point I was wanting to make: protests can be a way to push an issue into the mainstream so salience and hopefully support for that issue increases, leading to positive policy change. Voting and international aid however are much more reasonable candidates, so agreed there.
In conclusion: Sorry if this is rambly, confused, or repetitive. I am trying to gesture at something with my “steering vs summoning”—what parts of politics and social dynamics should be considered fixed vs mutable? Where is the leverage? What is the value over replacement? I am very unfamiliar with the terrain of activism, so my speculations are perhaps not worth much. But these questions seem important for guiding one’s actions when trying to build social movements and contribute to causes.
No need to apologize, I think these questions have been extremely well thought through and ask a lot of the things that I don’t think we have clear answers to just yet. In brief to answer a few of these points:
The key leverage point for me is inspiring a group of people, who were taking no action yet on X cause and only felt mildly about it, to a point where they feel extremely strong about it and get involved in grassroots organising. Essentially, you are creating (paid or unpaid) labour for an issue that previously had little attention in society, which then boosts to increase public support and salience.
Fixed vs mutable: My relatively unqualified opinion is that a lot of social dynamics and issues in our society are mutable, and that we have the power to shape our societal agenda. I don’t have loads of evidence to go off here but again, so it would be interesting to look into it more.
I’m not sure if I’ve answered all your questions so please do chase me if there’s more. Thanks again for the very interesting questions and ideas!
Hi Charles, thanks for the feedback!
I can definitely see that. In hindsight, I might have split the post up so I think that’s valuable feedback. The initial reason I didn’t do that was that the whole piece is quite self-referential so it made sense to be together but with a little bit of editing, it could be fixed. I might pull out excerpts and post separately in the future as there are specific section I want more feedback on so thank you for the advice!
I think it would be useful to hear your experience. I’m generally interested in the reasons why EAs might have gotten involved in protest-related movements and also why they left, so would be useful to understand.
I wouldn’t read too much into the ordering of the acknowledgements, but that’s very humble of you! The names were added mostly in chronological order of who gave feedback first so I guess thanks for being one of the early ones. I’m not sure if there is a standard formatting for acknowledgements so I just did it chronologically without really thinking about it.
Hi Aaron, thanks for your kind comment!
Also thanks for linking that research, I remember seeing it a while ago but forgot about it so thanks for the reminder! Will look into that further for the next round of research.
A case for the effectiveness of protest
If you can share, what are some other projects or research that the survey team works on? If you can’t give specifics, it would be useful to know broadly what they were related to. I’m intrigued by the mystery!
Thanks for the clarifying question. I meant larger RP vs RP+ several RP clones (basically new EA research orgs that do cause/intervention/strategy prioritisation).
The case of larger RP vs RP + several specialist organisations is also interesting though—slightly analogous to the scenario of 80K and Animal Advocacy Careers. I wonder in a hypothetical world where 80K was more focused on animal welfare, would/should they defer all animal interested people to AAC as they have greater domain expertise or should they advise some animal people themselves as they bring a slightly different lens to the issue? The relevant comparison might be RP and Wild Animal Initiative for example.
Any advice for researchers who want to conduct research similar to Rethink Priorities? or useful resources that you point your researchers towards when they join?
Interesting that you’ve got climate change in your global health and development work rather than with longtermism. What are the research plans for the climate change work at RP?
To what extent do you think a greater number of organisations conducting similar research to RP would be useful to promote healthy dialogue? Compared to having one specialist organisation in a field who is the go-to for certain questions.
What are some key research directions/topics that are not currently being looked into enough by the EA movement (either at all or in sufficient depth)?
Out of curiosity, what are yours (John’s) and Johannes’ different views on the absolute climate risk and the main reasons behind these differences?
Thanks for this Johannes—nice to see the agility and thoughtfulness of the FP Climate Fund!
I’ve got a couple of questions about the tracking the impact of the EEIST report via media uptake:
Is the theory of this change for this grant along the lines: produce great research → media publicity → greater public pressure for innovation policy → policymakers implement innovation policy or more like great research → media publicity → policymakers read articles and are convinced → better innovation policy?
If doing this analysis in greater detail for the latter ToC, would you make some Fermi estimates on the likelihood of key policymakers to read these articles, % likelihood they would be convinced, etc? Or do you think this would be too speculative to be useful and the value of the media attention is evidently valuable yet challenging to quantify confidently?
What amount of media mentions (articles, etc) did you expect before the grant or did you think would be a worthwhile return on your grant?
Roughly, what was the number of media mentions or people reached per £ or $ spent? Would be a useful benchmark for protests.
What is the analytics tool you use to track total people reached via the media mentions? Asking this out of personal interest again as this would be useful for Animal Rebellion / XR / my research.
I’m curious in general to any other thoughts you have about quantifying impact via media mentions as that is one of the main outputs of activist groups that I’ll be researching. It assume it would be more straightforward in this case as there’s no sentiment issues to deal with (I imagine?) in terms of negative coverage vs positive coverage hence no backfire effects to include. The theory of change / path to impact still seems slightly opaque though so any thoughts on that would be helpful.
Also interesting: when I posted my tweet on the 10th (3 days ago) AMF had a listed funding gap of $74m and today (on the 13th) it’s $54m! Either crazy coincidence that they got $20m in donations in three days or funding really is coming in that fast (semi-joking..)
I totally agree—I replied something very similar to Ben on Twitter. His reply seems to imply that AMF’s DRC program (referenced in the GiveWell room for more funding spreadsheet) meets the bar for cost-effectiveness whereas programs in other countries don’t therefore aren’t included. I’m somewhat skeptical of this however as GiveWell don’t mention anything about this in their review of AMF but really not sure at all. I would also love if someone from GiveWell or AMF could weigh in on this and clear this up!
[Linkpost] GiveWell money moved in 2020 - up by 60%!
This is super interesting. I love that someone has taken EA to TikTok so thank you all for your hard and very innovative work!
Two questions:How come you went for the replaceability and suffering per calorie concepts for your promotional videos? On first glance, these seem like slightly more esoteric EA concepts (especially suffering per calorie) that wouldn’t be as appealing to those new to EA. My fairly uneducated guess would be that something more simple/easy to understand like prospecting for gold could be fairly good—as it’s a clear analogy related to the core of EA.
Relatedly, have you got ideas for upcoming videos or will you wait until the survey results come back?
Thank you for the kind comments!
I address it in some points but yes one of my assumptions is that the cost-effectiveness of the most impactful SMOs would be within one order of magnitude of XR.
Regarding identifying if social movement organisations will be promising beforehand, part of the research would be to try understand what internal and external factors are crucial to social movement success. For example, I think some internal factors that might determine social movement impact could be: clear governance structure, “sticky” branding and narrative, infrastructure that will allow growth of 1000x, etc. Externally it might be things like: public salience for an issue, elite support for this issue, history of activism in that country, and so on.
I think this is a great question which ties into my point about re good governance structures. There is definitely a degree that the focus of social movements can shift with growth so I think it’s important that the demands/campaigns are predominately set in way that allows the most impactful campaigns to be focused on, rather than what everyone finds appealing. I’m not 100% sure if this was your question so feel free to clarify if not.