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.

Yeah I agree with that.

So is it fair to say that the takeaway is that we have pretty strong evidence for the efficacy of very large protests in the US, but very little evidence about smaller protest activities?

I think that's correct. On priors, if large-scale protests work, I would expect smaller protests to work too, but there's minimal supporting evidence. In this section I gave an argument for why small-scale protests might not work even if nationwide protests do.

I wonder if protests about animals can expect to have similar results, given that baseline consideration for animals as relevant stakeholders seems to be quite a bit lower.

I don't know, but there's some evidence about this. Orazani et al. (2021) included some animal welfare protests. It would be possible to do a subgroup analysis comparing the animal vs. human protests.

I wonder if any studies have looked at patterns of backlash? E.g., BLM protest succeeds in the short term, but then DEI is cancelled by the Trump administration.

There are indeed studies on this, but I didn't review them because none of them are high-quality. Well, Wasow (2020) has high-quality evidence that violent protests backlash, but I think that's not what you're talking about; you're talking about a short-term success followed by a long-term backlash.

Survey evidence from the BLM study actually found the reverse order: protests appeared to have a negative effect on BLM favorability in the weeks following the protests, but by the time of the 2020 election, BLM appeared to have a net positive effect—although I don't think the study succeeded at establishing causality, so I'm not confident that this is a real effect.

Here's an example of what I would consider high-quality evidence on this question:

1. Study uses rainfall method, finds that BLM protests increased support for Democrats in 2020.
2. However, the same counties showed decreased support for Democrats in 2022.

There are no studies like that, as far as I know.

I don't know what "election by jury" means or how it's supposed to be a democratic safeguard. I was interested to know what it meant, but the first ~500 words of the article did not explain it, so I gave up.

This comment reads to me like it was written by an AI. If I'm right, it sounds like you did not take my criticism to heart.

The writing style of your post, with all the AI-generated text, makes it hard for me to tell what you actually believe, and what was generated by AI. You should skip all the AI text and write what you actually believe.

Another writing technique you might use, if you have something you want to say but you're not sure how to say it:

1. Write a list of bullet points summarizing what you want the post to say.
2. Ask an AI to turn the bullet points into a full post.
3. (Most important step) Throw away the AI-generated text and just post your bullet points, they will be more useful to readers.

I would recommend including a summary at the beginning of the article. It took quite a long time to get to the point and I gave up on reading before it got there.

Asking AIs about something and then posting their responses is not a useful sort of post.

Beyond that, this post seems to be addressing several things at once and it's not clear to me what it's trying to say.