2026-05-11
minor edit 2026-05-26
Moderate a forum on ASI risk outside the US geopolitical sphere
Disclaimer
- Quick Note
- Contains politically sensitive info
Main
- Most discussion about risks from superintelligence currently happens on twitter and lesswrong.
- Why these forums are not adequate for the situation IMO
- (In descending order of importance)
- Lesswrong is biased towards its own particular discussion norms. Also, a lot of people there don't support building of a mass movement to get a pause on AI research.
- Twitter is biased towards a number of addictive tricks to maximise Elon Musk's revenue. This makes it an overall bad experience for many people including me.
- The US intelligence community and executive branch are directly involved in the race to superintelligence, and may use a number of tactics today or in near future to distort the discussion of this topic. This is a reason that motivates me to want another forum.
- Both LW and twitter support a significant degree of freedom of speech, but not absolute freedom of speech. For example, I expect both of these forums to censor actual classified documents, or actual calls to violence, or anything close enough to these. You can search more for examples of such censorship. (As of today, to be clear, there is very little censorship on either of these forums, and I am grateful that both of them exist.)
- How to build an alternate forum?
- Censorship
- The way to solve the censorship problem is to host a forum outside the US geopolitical sphere, by people living outside it. This still won't allow absolute freedom of speech, but the things that such a forum will be forced to censor will be noticeably different.
- Software
- Honestly, building the software is not the hardest part. If you are okay with mediocre UX and features, there is plenty of open source software available.
- One person will probably have to work atleast part-time to maintain the software of the forum.
- If you want great software though, this is a hard problem and you can literally make billions if you build great features (not just for the ASI risk community but for the world at large).
- Forum moderation
- The hardest part IMO is forum moderation
- See also: Well-kept gardens die by pacifism, by Yudkowsky
- Many people have written online why forum moderation is a hard problem. Just like politics in general, this is more of an art than a science. Politicians often have insights they can't transmit to academic political scientists. Therapists and coaches often have insights they can't transmit to psychology researchers. And so on.
- As of 2026-05
- I am not willing to be a full-time moderator.
- But, I think this role could end up important.
- If someone else is willing to play the role of a moderator, maybe I can help with the software.
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