2026-05-11
Update
minor edit, updated breaking links
2026-03-18
Update
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Main
- Reading through lots of my older notes, it is clear to me that I have been confused about morality for many years. I have always found deontological code of complete non-violence stupid and not for me. But I have had confusions and intense experiences around this for many years. For privacy reasons I maybe can't publish some of them.
2026-03-18
I have been curious about morality for over a year
Disclaimer
Main
- Link to an older video I made on morality and power. 1 2
- The fact that I'm still busy stuck on the question of morality and haven't made that much progress since then, this is worth noticing.
- Are there dminishing or increasing returns to thinking more on this topic? My first instinct is that there are diminishing returns, but I'm unsure, maybe increasing returns is possible too.
- I think what happened is that at a theoretical level I felt like I had solved most of the important questions, so I moved on. Technological offence/defence balances, privacy/transparency and associated incentives (typically social pressure and violence), etc seemed to basically explain most important things.
- But then I'm like, wait, balance of power means I actually need to kill lots of people now, and I'm not sure if I want the psychological damage associated with that? It moved from becoming a theoretical thing to a practical thing.
- So now I am having to become even more practical than earlier, which was already more practical than what moral philosophers tend to talk about.
- Holy shit is EA moral philosophy retarded.
- So now the question is less of - "how does morality work in the world?" - and more of - "how do I self-modify to become more violent with time, without undergoing too much psychological damage"?
- The most obvious answer is to surround myself with people who are more violent. The problem with this is that people who are too violent are often violent in stupid ways, they are not thinking about game theory or balance of power or anything similar.
- Bad ways of being violent (for me)
- I am not a sadist. I don't gain pleasure out of violence.
- I am not someone who only wants to be violent to protect myself and my family. I want to be violent against the whole world for the greater good, based on ideology. People who are violent based on ideology are the most violent and dangerous.
- Ideally yes, I want to be violent for the greater good, not just to protect myself. I am just increasingly being forced to protect myself first because these fuckers in the AI companies plan to kill me.
- Another recent learning - most ideologies are truly retarded - they all make simplifying assumptions about human nature, when deciding what is actually for the greater good of everyone.
- No one on Earth has access to 8 billion raw streams of thought. Everyone can only observe people's behaviour and make guesses about their thoughts.
- Almost no one on Earth has actually run any true "reflection process" or "convergence process" or even any truly ambitious political experiments (a few people have, but not many). Most people are too incapable of predicting how their values will change if you put them inside a political experiment with different incentives from their current situation.
- Marc Andreessen's ideas on moving incrementally towards utopia instead of trying to build it in one-shot, might make sense here honestly. Maybe I should go read more about those.
- Updated reading list - caro, emerson, whoever is on the citation list of pmarca's manifesto
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