If you use a standard expected-value-like method for determining preferences, you still get that insect suffering is very important. Say (for simplicity) you have a 50% credence that aggregate insect suffering is 10,000x more important than aggregate human suffering, and a 50% credence that it's 0x as important. In expectation, it is 5,000x more important.

If you reject expected value reasoning, then it's not clear how you can form consistent preferences. Perhaps under a "moral parliament" view, you could allocate 50% of your charitable resources to insects and 50% to humans. IIRC there are some issues with moral parliaments (I think Toby Ord had a paper on it) but there might be some way to make it work.

You should disclose that you are affiliated with Scifocus and stand to profit from people using it.

I believe it was AI-generated. This author runs a service that appears to be a custom LLM for writing medical articles and they've posted a dozen AI-generated articles to the EA Forum, none of which were relevant or good. Profile picture appears to be AI-generated as well. Should probably be banned IMO, I just reported the profile.

Thanks for giving your perspective, Holly. This is useful since you're one of the few EAs who's organizing protests full-time.

I really think my model is better and the evidence in these studies should only tweak it.

Related to this, I said I'm 90% confident that protests worked. But I'm less than 90% confident in the results of my meta-analysis (maybe only 75% confident). A good chunk of my confidence comes from other, weaker evidence.

I wish there were studies that could tell me how to do this better, but there aren't

The studies do suggest one thing about how to do protests: nonviolence is better than violence. But you're already not doing violent protests.

My review of this summary:

• The executive summary is fair.
• Key point 1 is misleading. There were five high-quality studies, but only four found positive effects of nonviolent protests (the fifth only covered violent protests[^1]), and only three of those four were included in the meta-analysis. So we only have three strong studies showing a positive effect.
• Key point 2 is fair.
• Key point 3 is partially correct. Social Change Lab's review did overstate the strength of some of the evidence, but I would not say it "misrepresented" individual studies. It did have a single incorrect numerical figure, which I suspect wasn't a mistake, it was probably just pulled from an older revision of the study than the one I looked at.
• Key point 4: I am not sure what "~12 vote share points per 100 protesters" is supposed to mean but it sounds incorrect. The mean effect was an increase of 12 turnout-adjusted voters per protester (that is, the electoral effect per protester was the same as if they'd moved 12 voters[^2] and there had been 100% turnout).
• Key point 5 is fair.
• Key point 6 is fair.

[^1] Technically Wasow (2020) covered both violent and nonviolent protests, but the part about nonviolent protests was purely observational (no natural experiment).

[^2] Where "moving" includes both persuading someone to turn out, and persuading someone to change who they vote for. (Those two things are not equivalent when you're looking at absolute vote count, but they're equivalent with respect to vote share.)

Both Sinergia and ACE have acknowledged that the 354 piglets spared per dollar metric is wrong.

I don't see where Sinergia acknowledged that? From the comment you linked, it sounds like they still believe it's a fair estimate.

I don't know much about the mechanisms, but based on the evidence I reviewed, I can say a few things:

• Protests do attract media coverage. I don't know how important that media coverage is.
• If you look at Table 2 in my post, I listed the effect of protests in terms of votes per protester. The studies in Table 2 found that one protester caused 3–12 people to change their votes (or to go from not voting -> voting), so the effect can't just come from the behavior of protesters themselves. The BLM study also measured votes per protester but I didn't include it because it failed to establish causality.
• Let's presume for a minute that the BLM study found a causal relationship. It found a smaller effect than the other studies (fewer votes per protester). It also controlled for non-local effects, so it only measured the effects of protests in a county with vote changes in the same county. Perhaps the smaller effect in the BLM study is due to between-protest variation or confounding variables, but it might be that non-local effects account for most of the impact of protests. The study's replication data is publicly available so it should be possible to test this.

Edit: Social Change Lab also has a review on what types of protests are most effective. I haven't reviewed the evidence in detail but my sense is it's mostly weak; still better than no evidence.

I think it's a good thing that you're open about your motivations and I appreciate it.

I think Matthew and Tamay think this is positive, since they think AI is positive.

I don't see how this alleviates concern. Sure they're acting consistently with their beliefs*, but that doesn't change the fact that what they're doing is bad.

*I assume, I don't really know

I think you are one of the few people who disregards x-risk and has a well-considered probability estimate for which it makes sense to disregard x-risk. (Modulo some debate around how to handle tiny probabilities of enormous outcomes.)

I was more intending to critique the sort of people who say "AI risk isn't a concern" without having any particular P(doom) in mind, which in my experience is almost all such people.