So, to give the first example that comes to mind, in my education from Elementary School to High School, the (US) Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was taught with a lot of emphasis on passive nonviolent resistance, downplaying just how disruptive they had to make their protests to make them effective and completely ignoring armed movements like the Black Panthers. Martin Luther King Jr.'s interest and advocacy for socialism is ignored. The level of organization and careful planning by some of the organizations isn’t properly explained. (For instance, Rosa Parks didn’t just spontaneously decide to not move her seat one day, they planned it and picked her in order to advance a test case, but I don’t think any of my school classes explained that until High School.) Some of the level of force the federal government had to bring in against the Southern States (i.e. Federal Marshals escorting Ruby Bridges) is properly explained, but the full scale is hard to visualize so. So the overall misleading impression someone could develop or subconsciously perceive is that rights were given to black people through democratic processes after they politely asked for them with just a touch of protests.

Someone taking the way their education presents the Civil Rights protests at face value without further study will miss the role of armed resistance, miss the level of organization and planning going on behind pivotal acts, and miss just how disruptive protests had to get to be effective. If you are a capital owner benefiting from the current status quo (or well paid middle class that perceives themselves as more aligned with the capital owners than other people that work for a living), then you have a class interest in keeping protests orderly and quiet and harmless and non-disruptive. It vents off frustration in a way that ultimately doesn’t force any kind of change.

This hunger strike and other rationalist attempts at protesting AI advancement seems to suffer from this kind of mentality. They aren’t organized on a large scale and they don’t have coherent demands they agree on (which is partly a symptom of the fact that the thing they are trying to stop is so speculative and uncertain). Key leaders like Eliezer have come out strongly against any form of (non-state) violence. (Which is a good thing, because their fears are unfounded, but if I actually thought we were doomed with p=.98 I would certainly be contemplating vigilante violence.) (Also, note form the nuke the datacenter’s comments, Eliezer is okay with state level violence.) Additionally, the rationalist often have financial and social ties to the very AI companies they are protesting, further weakening their ability to engage in effective activism.