Books released by standard publishers, sold at bookstores, get much more media attention and readership than free e-books. 

I'd pay at least $100 to someone who could tell me where to buy a mask like that, or how to easily assemble the pieces.

I found an advance copy. :)

How? I thought MIRI was trying to be very careful with copies getting around before the launch day.

Getting more experience that might inform what you what sounds like a generally sound idea, but isn't the "baby" stage only like 5% of whole process of raising a child? If you don't like taking care of babies that doesn't mean that you overall don't want kids, right? 

In particular it seems like it might be a little unfair/bad if people can give copies of books only to sympathetic people before the book comes out

Based on the several negative-ish reviews from the press, its not my impression that only sympathetic people got advance copies. I assume that some people who have existing relationships with the authors got advance copies, as did some profesional book reviewers.

I'm surprised it wasn't obvious. Has your mouse never hovered over one of them before? What's different about our user experiences that you're only learning this now, where I discovered is (I assume) in the first few days that LW reacts were a thing?

The receptor was the first one I checked, and sure enough I have a single-nucleotide deletion 42 amino acids in to the open reading frame (ORF) of the 389 amino acid protein. That will induce a frameshift error, completely fucking up the rest of protein.

I'm kind of astonished that this kind of advance prediction panned out!

A hunger strike is a symmetrical tool, equally effective in worlds AI will destroy and in worlds AI will not destroy. This is in contrast to arguing for/against AI Safety, which is an asymmetric tool since arguments are easier to make and are more persuasive if they reflect the truth.

This is true, but a hunger strike is a technique that effectively signals conviction in one's message. It distinguishes people who really believe that AI will soon kill everyone from grifters etc. who are exaggerating, outright lying, or just using claims like that as non-semantic flavor text.

A well executed hunger strike might cause some people to think "huh, wait, those guys seem to think this is very serious for some reason." That alone isn't enough, because people can have conviction, but also be delusional. You have to follow it up with arguments that people can understand for why the problem is real. But the hunger strike itself is providing important relatively hard to fake, and therefore asymmetric, evidence that something might be worth paying attention to.