2026-04-01
I pray to the God of error correction
Disclaimer
- Quick Note
- Contains politically sensitive info
Main
- Increasingly, for a lot of questions, my answer seems to be something that directly or indirectly refer to humanity's ability to correct errors long-term.
- Why do you want to leak info of people at AI companies?
- Bad answer: I want the public to shame people at AI companies (and vote for anti-ASI people to come to power)
- Good answer: I want there to be accurate historical record of all the fuckery going on at the AI companies.
- In practice, yes, public has to shame the people at the AI companies and this is an important part of how the problem of ASI risk actually gets solved. However, this is demotivating and lame motivation for me, because the public is even dumber (than people at AI companies) and appealing to the public makes me feel dumb by mere association. Setting the historical track record straight is a cooler motivation than all this. Your "theory of change" and your "motivation" don't have to be the exact same thing.
- Why do you want to be so public about your personal life, including judging others and dating and whatnot?
- I want people of the future to understand what all sacrifices people like me took.
- Why do you believe in a world with zero privacy being a good world?
- I think humanity could solve most of their problems if they could get enough raw data about it, not distorted or hidden by various power struggles.
- Why do you believe in democracy though you think most of the public is fucking stupid, and only a few power-seekers and a few intellectuals actually know what is going on?
- Democracy corrects errors over the very long-term, I mean over timescales of over 30 years, sometimes over 100 years.
- What are you willing to sacrifice your life for?
- I want to lock-in good political systems and processes. I don't think I am capable of becoming world dictator, and I am not keen on the strategy of finding someone similar enough to me and helping crown them world dictator. I want political invariants that last centuries at minimum, and billions of years ideally.
- I don't exactly have a family or someone else I am ready to sacrifice my life for. Yet I am willing to sacrifice my life to fix ASI risk, or so I tell myself. I think it also all comes down to this belief that in the very long run, humanity can error correct, and my sacrifice can help make that happen. (Update - I also don't exactly seem motivated by compassion for others. More nuances here.)
Update
- Maybe it is bad that I have irrational belief in something so idealistic?
- In the near-term, as I already identified, people will ignore almost everything unless they personal suffer. They will personally suffer only if someone or something threatens their jobs and lives, or something changes their access to sex/relationship/family/etc.
- This means public can generally only error-correct on issues where there is a 30 year gap between when they first suffer due to the problem, and when the problem actually gets solved.
- This is true for climate change, this is true for anti-nuclear protests (which are still failing btw, lol lmao), this is true for the ban on cigarettes, this is true for the ozone layer and CFC stuff, and so on.
- With ASI development, we probably don't have 30 years.
- Maybe I should give up on this ideal too?
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