2026-03-03
minor updates by 2026-03-09
I want to become more violent with time
Disclaimer
- Quick Note
- Contains politically sensitive info
- Thinking aloud. I'm not guaranteed to endorse these claims after thinking a lot.
- target audience - strictly myself
Main
- I still endorse the post on "maybe I should pre-commit to killing atleast one person"
- Continue along this direction
- More learnings - morality is decided by actions, and becomes a part of your identity. I want to slowly become a more violent person than I currently am, by slowly taking actions in this direction.
- I don't want to ratchet up the stakes too quickly. With the sort of national security-related projects I am working on, it's possible the stakes become high very quickly and I either get myself or lots of other people killed, in a way that I don't endorse on reflection. I need slightly lower stakes scenarios where I can actually test my morality via actions in the real world.
- I need to slowly take steps to become more violent than I currently am.
- The way to do this is to keep working on the same cluster of projects, and move in the same direction I'm currently moving. Moving at half-speed is not a good idea. And I have hit diminishing returns from doing theory alone, so I should not waste more time on theory. Now is the time for action, and learning through action.
- The actual political ideology I believe in is the following:
- Stop ASI, be the lesser evil, regardless of whether lesser evil means kill 1 person or 100 million people
- Be as violent as necessary but not more than that, have good judgement when guessing what actions are necessary versus unnecessary. You have to make guesses and live with them, because no one has a crystal ball.
- Capitalism, democracy, libertarianism, nationalism etc are all bullshit justifications for harming innocent people. I am now going to use my own anti-ASI ideology as a justification for harming innocent people. When encouraging people to whistleblow or cyberattack or whatever, I need to turn people from their current ideology (capitalism or nationalism or whatever) into my ideology (anti-ASI is more important than being nationalist or pro-capitalist or whatever shit, all that is of secondary importance).
- I should act more congruent with the ideology I actually believe in. Make my actions and thoughts align.
- Examples of concrete actions I can take over next few months to make my actions more congruent with my words and thoughts:
- Stop pretending to be so happy and nice in order to try and disarm people or make them trust you. I am a warrior and I am here for war, and people should be able to understand that in the first few minutes of meeting me. Don't smile so much when I know I'm not happy inside. People should be able to look into my eyes and realise I am here for war.
- Tell ASI company employees - "You might be innocent and have good intentions, but fuck you, I am going to get you killed or thrown in prison anyway, because you are responsible for the destruction of all life on Earth. I will not let you slaughter me so easily." The point isn't even to convince them, the point is to remind myself who I am. Same intention as with the hunger strike, same with not sleeping, and so on. I did that for me, not primarily for others.
- Spend everyday reminding myself more often what it would be like, to watch everyone around me die. Whenever I experience some temporary happiness while being with someone, remind myself that this person is going to die anyway, unless I take action. Your inability to connect with people should propel you towards action (on fixing ASI risk), not away from it. Visualising the deaths of everyone you ever connect with, could help.
- Get better at cyberhacking. Actually learn how to get good at this.
- Talk to more hackers. Break them out of their bullshit moral justifications, and remind them that taking down the AI companies is more important. There is a compute cluster in Abilene, Texas with the potential for the destruction of all life on Earth. Show them the photos. Show myself the photos. Photos help visualise things more concretely.
- Don't just patiently listen to all the nonsense your friends speak. Remind them it is nonsense, before you "agree to disagree". The reminder is not for them, it is for yourself.
- Use first-person pronouns (I, me, myself) not second-person pronouns (you, your, yourself) when deciding what my future self should look like. I have to become the person I want to be. These aren't just suggestions, these are directives. These directives make me act more in line with my principles.
- Practice each of the moves mentioned above for months together, until it becomes natural. Some of your friends will intentionally push back, to try pushing their own bullshit frames on me. Fuck them.
- Reduce frequency of interaction with anyone (especially irl) who consistently pushes hard against my frame in a way that makes it harder to hold my own frame. They may be innocent, but I may need distance from them until I can practice holding my own frame comfortably.
update
- Some more concrete actions:
- Blur your vision more often so you lose focus of anything besides your goal. Random buildings and people and logisistics and bright lights and attractive women and wind and whatnot are not important. Focus on your goal is more important. Fuck people. It's not their fault, but also, random strangers are not worth my time right now.
- Walk faster. Walk as if you're fighting for your life here.
- Spend zero time thinking about money as a consideration when making most logistical decisions. Remember you have already lost months of time and lakhs of rupees because of working on the wrong things, or moving too slow, and so on. You have spent days without sleep, you have spent months living with low self-esteem, all this shit is way more important than money. Unless your decision will cost you a lakh rupees or more, stop thinking about money when making decisions.
- lol it is funny that I couldn't actually do these things when I artifically told myself "value your time more", but now that I actually internalise I am locked into a bitter fight unto the death with these pro-AI fuckers in SV, then valuing my time more automatically becomes much easier.
- This is a fight of life or death. Repeat this to myself a hundred times a day until I actually get it. (This is metaphorical, although a literal hundred times also doesn't so bad.)
update
- I ran this document against my disagreements app. Possibly the number one biggest thing I need to fix here, is that being indiscriminately violent or unfair causes you to lose other people's trust and in-person networks. You need atleast some ingroup towards whom you are actually nice and can coordinate with (by committing to some norms, earning trust etc), even if you choose to be willing to be maximally violent on the outgroup.
- Idk man I would love to coordinate with some actual power-seeking anti-ASI politicians. If Bismarck was anti-ASI he would know exactly what to do with vigilante groups like myself, just as he would know what to do with legal groups. The current crop of anti-ASI influencers is incompetent (relative to someone like Bismarck).
- Idk I also increasingly feel that it is way easier for your ingroup to coordinate their violence against an outgroup, and it is much harder to coordinate violence against random bystanders. Political ideologies provide simple rules for how you are supposed to treat every other group, be it outgroup, neutral, ingroup, state actor, non-state actor, etc. If all ideological adherents agree to same rules, it's easier for them to coordinate.
Update - more learnings from feeding this document to disagreements app
Disclaimer
- Quick Note
- Thinking aloud, I may not endorse these claims after thinking a lot.
- May contain inaccuracies
Main
- Naval
- I like Naval's thoughts on happiness, although I still need to figure out how to apply them to my specific situation. Naval on happiness
- For instance he says too much anger causes bad judgment. But on the other side, for me, not enough anger leads to inaction or moving slow. I should be angry atleast a little, that the people in the AI companies are planning to kill me, and I might die actually, and I don't deserve to die, I don't want to die.
- He says peace comes from actually understand root causes of internal conflict. Fair enough
- He talks about fake friendships that are only held together by substances. I love this section a lot. The problem is I don't actually think the friendships I built while under substances were entirely fake. For example while travelling I have made many acquaintances this way. It is true we might connect only in some limited extent, but that still feels real? I can still have conversations with some of these people while sober too? Also, it's still not a complete set of strangers, there's atleast some self-selection going on (for example, for high openness on Big Five) simply as a virtue of who I am.
- When I am sober I just open conversations with saying I am in a deep hell, honestly. Because I am. But only some friends want to actually tolerate that. Many don't. When I am not sober I can be more high on openness and hence that is the part of me that gets showcased first. More people are interested in that part of me.
- I don't know, if I reframe this, it's like I am showing people a mirror. This is the hell I am actually live in, and surprise motherfucker, you are living in this hell too, you're just not aware of it.
- At this point I just call people out when they say things like "I dont care about xrisk". I'm like, "fuck you, you are lying to yourself, if you had cancer tomorrow you would try to treat it". I have lost count of the number of people I have met who say they dont care about xrisk even if it's real, it's probably in double digits at this point.
- I think Naval is straightforwardly wrong about modern society being safer than hunter gatherer environment. Like yes you won't be killed overnight by a predator, but you will be slowly hunted down over a period of years by things like ASI development, by civil war, by people around you growing old and dying, and so on. Instinctive response is often bad in modern environment. But fear of death is still real.
- PG
- PG says keep your identity small. I actually strongly disagree with this nowadays. I think PG has an identity of size non-zero. He is a hacker and a (former) painter and a venture capitalist and a pro-capitalist and so on. Like, yes, feel free to play around with your identity. Just because I call myself an activist doesn't mean I am the stereotypical activist. Don't hold on to your identity with a death grip. But also, have an identity. That's what I currently think.
- PG says being good to everyone is faster and easier than trying to track which group you are supposed to good versus bad to. Especially true in a connected internet-driven transparent society, where your lies get caught. This is true IMO. But I'm not convinced that this means I should have no outgroups or engage in zero violence. Instead I think it means that I should be transparent about my motivations, and coordinate with others with similar motivations, as I am similarly trying to do. If I actually fucking hate the outgroup, I should be honest about that, and if I want to slaughter the outgroup but secretly respect them anyway, then I should be honest about that too.
- PG says technology now grants power as opposed to dominating status heirarchy, so maybe nicer people have power today as compared to past. I guess in his mind, Ilya Sutskever is a nicer person than Gengis Khan, but even Ilya has a lot of power today. I think PG is missing the fact that the people running the US intelligence agency are still stuck in stone age mindset, and will gladly wipe out entire nations if you given them unchecked power. And they will also control future direction of technology.
- In general a bunch of SV billionaires are very pro-market (duh) and think markets are natural, not an ideology. And sure, free markets between Alice and Bob are natural. But joint stock corporations and wall street derivatives and internet-scale startups and centralised walled garden social media to rewire human psyche are not natural. They are complex environments in which primal incentives are playing out, and ideologies do affect how these things play out.
- (Update 2026-03-07) Maybe PG is not being naive about this? Maybe he really thinks when the last Power Corrodor at End of Time opens up, people like Ilya beat people like Altman, who in turn beat people like Michael Hayden? This seems plausible and quite important if true actually. I haven't analysed the End Game that deeply.
- Vitalik
- Vitalik really wants a pluralist society, where no single ideology or institution or group is dominant. I want to unite everyone under an anti-ASI ieology. Growing numbers for the anti-ASI ideology isn't incompatible with pluralism. Sure, if I end up electing a communist dictator to stop ASI, then that is a blow for pluralism. I appreciate that he uses the word "pluralism", not the word "liberal" or "democracy".
- I have already wrong longer criticism of Vitalik's d/acc elsewhere. Short version - AI and bioweapons probably favour offence not defence.
- I like how pessimistic Vitalik is about regulating US military pressure to accelerate AI research
- Dwarkesh
- I am not even going to engage with this. This is all part of the (IMO dumb) ideological cluster that assumes a post-ASI society will be capitalist and democratic. It makes me wonder how many other noobs are sitting in SV with similar type of thinking.
- Dwarkesh donated lot of money for animal welfare. Interesting, but irrelevant to this discussion.
- Ben Kuhn
- Again, didn't learn much. Also didn't learn much for why he trusts Anthropic so much. I will wait for the day he resigns. He is clearly smart in other ways, so maybe he will eventually wisen up in this dimension too.
- Ben agrees trust is a major constraint to getting anything done, it is slow and takes time and happens via 1-to-1 interactions. Even within Anthropic (the doom company), he finds himself often bottlenecked by not enough trust across people of different teams
- Alexy Guzey
- Same, will wait for the day he resigns from OpenAI
- Alexey Guzey has a long ass post on why he thinks working ASI xrisk full-time is bad, which I strongly disagree with. He says anti-ASI career people will do motivated reasoning, as if him working at OpenAI won't cause him to do the exact same thing in the opposite direction.
- I could write a longer criticism elsewhere but the short version is just - it is too late for "dont think or talk about ASI risk" to be viable strategy to fix ASI risk. There are too many people working on it already. The only way through is forwards. Now we have to inform everyone and shut down the companies. I'm unable to see any other realistic path.
- Yes, telling more people might accelerate timelines in the interim. Accelerating can be done more incrementally as unilateralist, but deceleration requires a lot of incremental work that doesn't produce much reward, until all of a sudden you get collective action and stop the research. Raw numbers of people supporting a political movement don't grow in the same way revenue curves of an AI company grow.
- Guzey really dislikes NIH-regulations on biomedicine, just as I dislike that US natsec wants to accelerate ASI. Okay
- Guzey considers knowledge/truth/science as a sacred value for him. Whereas I'm willing to throw everything under the bus to stop ASI. I don't know, it is a good question worth asking. If the only way to stop ASI was an anti-Enlightenment Kaczynski-style ideology that literally took us to the dark ages, would I still want to stop ASI? I am optimistic we won't have to go that far, but it is worth asking the worst case question as well.
- Scott Alexander
- Ugh Scott is naive in so many ways. Reading this is painful.
- Scott wants regulation, without realising all regulatory bodies are captured and US govt will accelerate ASI by default.
- Scott is sympathetic to Anthropic and thinks Anthropic-run ASI dictatorship will be fine actually.
- Scott buys all the galaxybrained nonsense around pausing in one country lets less moral countries win or whatever. Just as he buys galaxybrained nonsense that Anthropic is safer than other companies.
- I have zero trust in Scott's judgment on how to deal with ASI risk. This is sad, because some of my favourite articles on politics are also from Scott. What went so terribly wrong here?
- From mistake theory pov, I think he is missing that solving ASI alignment could take atleast 30 years, and you can't blunder your way through it in the middle of an arms race. From a more realist pov, I think he accepted his own logic from meditations on moloch too hard, and now thinks it's okay to be most moral actor who wins, even if that means not being very moral. I am also sympathetic to such moral logic but I don't think it will actually work in this scenario.
- Very important - using strong moral rationalisations and rhetoric should not blind you to failure modes like these. Scott is blind and I should not become blind in the same way.
- Gwern
- Gwern on terrorism is not effective
- I actually strongly agree that individuals taking radical actions are super ineffective. Small groups are much more psychologically stable and able to plan bigger outcomes.
- I actually agree with him that propaganda is an actual motivation for some terrorist attacks. I recently mused that I want someone to make an assassination attempt against AI companies and fail, not because I think assassinations are effective, but because I want the temperature of the conflict to raise. I want both sides to realise this is war, not a game. The stakes are a literal hundred world wars at once.
- I don't think I personally want to do something like this though, though I might lowkey wish it happened. I want to pick actually effective plans.
- Holy fuck I love the footnotes on that article, he has explicitly analysed things like Nelson Mandela being a terrorist.
- Side note - Eliezer Yudkowsky on competent elites. I actually agree with him that you can acquire a lot of power via intelligence alone, while still maintaining high moral standards and self-esteem (assuming you buy into capitalist justification for greater good justifies harm). If you have actually truly bought into the ideology, then the harm won't even register as harm anymore. Also I don't think the harm has to necessarily be that big, you are usually sitting ten levels away from where the harm actually happens anyway.
- Gwern links this paper on assassinations
- Gwern also talks about Assange's conspiracy as governance paper. Holy fuck I am impressed how much we are both covering the same terrain.
- Some initial thoughts from my side
- The paper says assassinating autocrats is more effective at causing regime change or more democracy, than assassinating pro-democracy people. But in general doing any sort of regime change is hard and most approaches fail.
- Let's assume the paper is true and this is not motivated reasoning. This makes sense to me actually. A dictator might deliberately keep an incompetent change of command under him. Whereas a democratic capitalist that (such as the one producing ASI) is likely to keep more competent chains of command.
- Okay by this logic, assassinating Michael Hayden is more effective than assassinating Sam Altman, because Hayden's number two is more likely to be incompetent as compared to Altman's number two. Idk, even intelligence agencies have a decent turnover, they are ultimately run by nationalist ideology and self-interested power-seeking rational people, not necessarily by one single person who does all the work. You can find many people who are competent and nationalist and interested in unaccountable power, this archetype is not rare.
- I hope I'm not doing motivated reasoning to prove why assassinations are ineffective. If they are effective I want to know. They sure as shit are more effective as compared to sitting in your room making notes all day. I still think I can find a more effective move though.
- general conclusion - killing leaders is easy, killing ideologies is hard. obvious conclusion but worth restating
As I said, the destructive power of a human is great; let's assume we have 100 fanatics—a vanishingly small fraction of those who have hated on GS over the years—willing to engage even in assassination, a historically effective tactic32 and perhaps the single most effective tactic available to an individual or small group.Julian Assange explains the basic theory of Wikileaks in a 20062essay, “State and Terrorist Conspiracies” / “Conspiracy as Governance”: corporations and conspiracies form a graph network; the more efficiently communication flows, the more powerful a graph is; partition the graph, or impede communication (through leaks which cause self-inflicted wounds of secrecy & paranoia), and its power goes down.
- Gwern (continued)
- I am confused that Gwern writes a para like this without questioning that maybe Assange's strategy was more effective than an assassination. I guess it is true most people don't have the skills to become an Assange, but then most people don't have skills to smuggle weapons, keep secrets and stay psychologically stable, and so on either.
- Okay wait, Gwern wants a group to plan a hundred simultaneous assassinations. Do you realise how hard this is? (you = gwern) Good luck finding one person to join you, let alone a hundred. And then imagine the trust issues you have to fix inside that group. I will have to write a longer article critiquing all this, I don't have time to give very refined thoughts right now.
- Okay gwern agrees with me after all. Interesting
- Very important question. Why is it hard to get hundred terrorists (who will sacrifice themselves) in an independent new group, but easier to recruit another hundred soldiers (who will sacrifice themselves) in a nationalist-justified army. A nation state can totally attempt a hundred simultaneous assassinations too, they can make a sneaky move like this without declaring any war.
- Logical conclusion - doompill Putin and ask him to plan all the assassinations. Only half joking. Or try to use internet and recruit another hundred assassins myself. The important thing is that our own country should not care that we are recruiting terrorists under some private umbrella.
- I need a lot more time to sit and process all of Gwern's writings on this topic. Will get back. On to the next person
- Gwern (continued more)
- Part of the problem with running this sort of group is no chain of command. A military has clear chain of command. A private militia planning a hundred assassinations lacks chain of command.
- I was just thinking through, what if I just put messages online and tried to recruit a hundred anti-ASI assassins over internet, and brought them all to india/russia.
- Even if I managed to succeed at all, there is a real problem of chain of command.
- I'm confused why militaries don't attempt this more. If it is so easy to assassinate the US president and leaders of US natsec and US AI company CEOs and their chains of command, why isn't Putin doing it already? Using an anonymous team that is, ensure no traceability back to himself.
- Habryka
- Unfortunately Habryka is both alive and important to my cause, so I may need to be more careful what I say here.
- Habryka says making powerful enemies and acting against them creates environment that makes it harder for others to trust you. I agree. But I think having well-defined ingroups and outgroups and having well-defined rules for how to interact with each group, can side step that.
- gpt-5 says this, important point.
Samuel explicitly considers reducing contact with people who push back on his “frame,” and he's thinking about outgroup/ingroup violence coordination. (samuelshadrach.com) Habryka is pointing at a failure mode: once you organize around adversarial filtering, you can select for exactly the kind of people who are dangerous to coordinate with (high-agency schemers).
- I agree it is straightforwardly true that if I am trying to recruit people who are capable of some violence against AI company people, I am also increasing probability they are violent against me.
- I still think trust is solveable to a large degree in a small group that meets in-person often. I will have plenty of time to vet my team members and they will have plenty of time to vet me. Plenty of time = few months atleast. I think purging large bureaucracies is much harder.
- Habryka says rationality (especially of groups) depends on funding and incentives, and funding depends on institutional legitimacy. Lightcone has lost funding due to being on CEA-blacklist and SFF only funding partially.
- It's not clear to me what "institutional legitimacy" means in the context of the thing I'm trying to do. I'm not trying to personally raise a billion dollars in funding for example. I agree what reputation you build is important. I'm not convinced building a reputation as a vigilante hacker group is a problem, if you're not looking for billionaire-level funding or for millions of people to support you.
- Ben Pace
- Ben has a post explicitly on vigilante justice
- I like that he differentiates between sadists and people want dominance in the hierarchy, from people who think instrumental harm is required in order to get power (i.e. me).
- He thinks most of the time the instrumental harm is not worth it. So, umm, evidence for this claim? Can't find it (yet), will have to search his writings elsewhere.
- Ben agrees with me that many people on LW are naive about assuming discourse even on LW is good faith, it often isn't
As I say, I think it's a relatively common occurrence that people end up optimizing explicitly for bad things. While the easy answers are desires for sadism and dominance, I think the main thing is culture and believing that it is how to get power. There are many perverse incentives and situations that arise that teach you these awful lessons.
- Raemon Arnold
- Supports the Yudkowsky DC march to stop ASI. Good to know.
- I'm confused why Raemon is so thinker/strategist-oriented. See this post for example.
- Spending your life full-time doing just thinking and strategy (but no actually work) on xrisk is already meta. And now he is going even more meta and asking what are the feedback loops in his thinking and how to improve those.
- When does any of this actually cash out into actions in the real world?
- I think I'm just going to ignore Raemon's thoughts until I see some concrete real world output.
- Raemon supports a broad political coalition against ASI. Good to know.
- Raemon does a bunch of culture-building exercises like Secular Solstice for his small in-person ingroup. Fair enough.
- If I ever recruit a team, we could consider implementing a non-zero amount of artwork or rituals or other meaning reaffirming stuff. Not the priority, but also not useless.
- Lee Kuan Yew
- LKY is just maximally justifying anything that gets him personally more power lmao.
- Justifies capitalism and govt investment into corporates, as long as he runs the govt.
- Justifies suppressing press freedom to get ethnic coordination, as long as he does the suppressing.
- Justifies some amount of political violence too, as long as he uses the military to do it.
- This is so dumb, I am going to ignore this. This is just proof that authoritarian countries can be successful, that's it.
- I love how nakedly selfish this is. Like sure, he might have genuinely believed in nationalism and good for the ingroup (i.e. Singapore as a whole), but he is very authoritarian about how to get there.
- See also: his attempts to plan people's families, social lives, etc
- LKY agrees that being feared and respected can work, even if you are state actor not a terrorist one. He had outgroups to make trades with or even fight with, and being feared helped him do that.
- This agrees with my intuition that a bunch of these anti-ASI people who currently ignore me will have to again come back and negotiate with me once I have some actual power. For instance, if I actually do a cyberattack and leak something important, then they might be willing to work with me to publish it, even if right now they are disavowing all violence and whatnot, atleast in public.
- Otto van Bismarck
- Bismarck is not willing to sacrifice lifes on interests that are not core to the mission of state stability and expansion. Do not sacrifice even one soldier on something unimportant.
- Bismarck shows that posturing yourself as capable of war is often way more important than actually engaging in war. Actual war is often costly on both sides, including your own.
- Bismarck agrees with me that people (especially politicians) frequently drop their commitments, as the upside and downside calculation changes in future. More reason I should not take any of these anti-ASI people's principles seriously. They are power-hungry just as I am, and will abandon principles if it shows actual success.
- Bismarck is way better at politics than I am. He shows that presentation is important. He would use soft gentle voice to get many people killed.
- Moxie Marlinspike
Moxie explicitly expresses a hoped-for world that values “skills and relationships over careers and money.”
- Yes true, this is the somewhat opposite direction as me. I want skills and skilled people around me and relationships with these people. But all this is instrumental, to ultimately seek power and fight the AI companies.
- Important to note that Moxie has a lot of legitimacy in multiple circles, but not as much actual hard power.
- Moxie says even decentralised stuff recentralises. It is true that if I start an anti-ASI hacker group, and actually succeed, then most of the anti-ASI hackers on earth will want to work with me. There won't be tens of different hacker groups doing different things. This seems fine with me.
- Moxie says social progress happens when people can break laws, for instance homosexuality and weed were once illegal in US. Hence he might (???) be skeptical of my position that zero privacy for everyone would be a good world. I disagree but weak opinion, I don't think you can so easily impose order in a zero privacy world, the way states can impose order and restrict freedom (to get predictability) in current world. But honestly this whole debate is a side step from the actual thing I have to figure out right now. I am not actually building a zero privacy world in next 5 years.
- Julian Assange
- Assange is more motivated by love and creation, as opposed to guilt and fear.
- In terms of actual views on politics, holy fuck I love love love how much our views align. He is cynical in the exact specific way that I am cynical. Laws don't mean shit, enforcement is based on prevailing ideologies anyway, most ideologies at the top are just justifications to acquire more power, and so on.
- Asssange seems more clear that he wants his work to help others. With me it is less clear whether I am doing it to help myself or others. I want to create good future equilibriums, which is technically helping others, but not necessarily in a way that they will understand or consent to.
- Honestly this part might be important. If I got more clear on whether my work is to help others or myself, it could help me feel way better.
- I love how skeptical Assange is about rational argument and logic. He says he uses poetry to communicate, because meaning comes first and only after that people are willing to accept actual truth. I don't know how much to trust this advice, his blog isn't exactly that popular.
- Everyone and no one wants to save the world
- Very fucking important - worth thinking through this article in more detail. He is basically saying look at your own core traits and other people's core traits, which are quite different from the words either you utter or they utter, or any explicit boundaries either of you think of. He is a lot more romantic lol. (Romantic in the literary sense, not the sexual sense. Although I have to wonder if he was literally aiming the blog atleast a little bit, at women he wanted to be with. Lol)
- By Assange's logic, I should just attack who I actually feel like attacking, and leak whatever I feel like leaking, without thinking through the whole consequentialist chain of logic to the end. This is my character and I have to enact it out.
- What if I am someone who actually cares about impact, and hence cares about actually being consequentialist about it? Ugh
- Worth thinking through more
- Assange did actually get people killed in the end though, despite his best efforts not to, because (IMO) he was not consequentialist enough. He could have anticipated counterattack, or the fact that he eventally won't have capacity for redactions. I know it's easy for me to say with hindsight, after having actually looked at examples including Assange's own life.
- Richard Stallman
- He is very deontological about most of the things he cares about, be it open source software or violence or anonymity or similar.
- I'm not sure how much being deontological helped him earn the trust of more people. It is straightforwardly true that the masses are more deontological than consequentialist, and will find it easier to trust someone like Stallman (though Stallman is still quite eccentric for a normie, for example due to how he dresses).
- Stallman thinks language and terminology is important. I think this is common leftist failure mode, won't sit and argue that here.
- Aaron Swartz
But, as Semmelweis showed, this is a dangerous habit. Sure, it's awful to hear you're killing people—but it's way worse to keep on killing people! It may not be fun to get told you're lazy, but it's better to hear it now than to find out when you're fired. If you want to work on getting better, you need to start by knowing where you are.
- I love this lol
- Okay so Aaron's primary concern is that if he distances from people with moral disagreements with him, then he will lose valuable feedback about where his moral system is wrong, or where he went too far. And yes, this is very important actually.
- Definitely atleast part of the reason US natsec has started more wars than is absolutely necessary (even from their self-interested nationalist position) is because they have eliminated contact from people who can prove to them that the wars were unnecessary.
- Groups with moral codes are especially blind, compared to individuals with moral codes. Once I have a group with a moral code that is oriented around non-zero violence towards an outgroup for instance, it will become even harder for us to course correct or actually hear feedback on why we might have gone either too far or not far enough.
- update 2026-03-04
- Dario Amodei starting Anthropic or Scott Alexander supporting it is definitely this sort of blindness. I atleast appreciate Scott Alexander for writing about his moral blindness. That way there is atleast some hope that people like me can go and correct him.
update 2026-03-04
It is very important we write down our public estimates for who all we killed or hurt and why, even if the damage is multiple steps in the casual chain from us. Also write down some short reasoning, or atleast write down why we didn't invest time into getting accurate estimates or reasoning. There is a lot of pressure for us to lie to ourselves and lie to others about this. Almost by default, people of other ideologies will dissociate from us and stop giving us feedback where we went wrong. Writing things down, very publicly, is an important way to ensure our ability to update on feedback (on moral questions) doesn't break completely.
update 2026-03-08
copy-pasted from a conversation
- Imagine Buddha is 0 and Hitler is 100. Imagine I am currently 40. I'm saying I want to move towards maybe 60 or 70.
- I know I anyway can't literally go to 100.
- Like, not overnight. Unless I undergo huge amount of suffering, it's hard to change entire value system overnight
- But I can make small changes that accumulate over time. That's it
- So I deliberately want to find someone who is not so emotionally sensitive like me, and work with them, because I know it'll rub off on me also
- Because I think the world needs someone at 70 atleast, because these are the people who actually get power and fix big problems.
- In my example of leaking info, I can share more practical examples, it's not fully theoretical
- I think I was at 60 in teenage atleast in theory, then I moved down to 40 after I made friends in college and gotten more freedom and whatnot.
- But now the ASI risk thing is again pushing me back towards 60. That okay only more violent people can actually fix this
- Like the scale is just violent versus nonviolent. Willingness to cause harm on others (both enemies and bystanders) to get good outcome for you. I know I haven't been super formal in defining it
- It's like, theoretically I believe only people at 70 or 80 can actually fix this, and I look at myself in practice and I realise I'm at 40, and then I decide okay let's go straight to 80. Then that makes me miserable. Then I'm like, okay I need to move slowly. But still towards more violent direction only
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