2026-06-04
Update
- I have already violated this to be honest. But it seems okay.
- I am still isolating a fair deal.
- I think the main type of conversations I am still having with friends is serious conversations, where I listen to something important going on in their lives, or provide some minimal input. Also these are people who don't actively pushback against my ASI risk worldview or leaking plan, so it works.
2026-04-28
minor edit 2026-05-05
I will not be meeting my friends for the next three months
Disclaimer
- Quick Note
- Contains politically sensitive info
- I am intentionally not commenting anything remotely related to work or politics, in the context of Russia. There is a possibility I will want to visit again in future. Also there are people I know here whose privacy I am obligated to protect.
Main
- I precommit to not having many long discussions with friends for the months May, June, July 2026. This includes long chat threads, long video calls and long in-person meetings. I'm not sure how to define "many" but I would definitely consider more than one long discussion a week to be "too many" discussions.
- Why?
- I'm sure atleast one of my friends will be mad at me for saying this but it needs to be said. The biggest upside of my Russia trip by far is that I am away from all my friends back in India. This is likely a major reason why I seem to be happier here.
- For the next three months of my life once I return to India, I don't want bickering about politics. I don't want to write words, I want to write code. I want to become good at hacking.
- Morale/motivation is the lifeblood of the org I am building. People who give negative feedback are valuable, even people who give negative moral feedback by calling me or my plan bad for the world or hurting other people or similar. But these people must be interacted with at a safe distance, maybe once a month or once in three months or similar. People who give motivation must be interacted with more often. And finding people to give me motivation to learn hacking is not easy, such people are rarer.
- It is a bit ironic that the solution to "I am lonely" that actually seems to work in practice is "isolate yourself even fucking harder than you already are." But this actually makes sense theoretically as well, running mind sims of people who disapprove of your work is even worse than not meeting anyone. There are a non-zero number of people I know who approve of my work (not discussing details for privacy reasons), I can run their mind sims or meet them more.
- Also
- I primarily want cofounder and work feedback from a fairly narrow audience.
- For cofounder, it's already listed in the other doc - Some intersection of ASI doomer and good hacker and power-seeking and violent and good at people skills and some mild overlap with other values of mine (be atleast a little bit truth-seeking, don't be too much of a sadist or masochist, a little bit is acceptable).
- Even for work feedback, it's roughly the same - I mainly trust the advice of people who actually have lots of followers or actual positions of political power (built from scratch, not inherited from family), especially people have actually Won zero-sum political battles against opponents instead of creating an eternal culture war. I trust advice of whistleblowers and hackers somewhat too, but only if they actually had political impact instead of playing virtue-signalling game.
- I primarily want a girlfriend and relationship advice from a fairly narrow audience.
- Dating advice I don't want
- Outer product - Exercise more and build muscles, pay someone to buy you better clothes
- Distribution - Dating app profile optimisation, how to cold approach women, which hobby/social meetups to attend, how to host my own meetup
- Dating advice I want
- How did you keep your relationship across one major life transition where you actually changed one of your core values in practice not theory.
- For instance, you were a self-interested corporate lawyer and then became altruistic and ran some non-profit. Or you were a practising buddhist but then you went and killed your family member as revenge for something they did. And so on.
- I want advice primarily from atheists, not religious people.
- I don't want advice from boring people who just did corporate job rank climbing and increasing square feet of their house their entire life.
- I have a bunch of relationship experience (can't share for privacy reasons) that has radicalised me hard towards wanting to solve this problem, atleast partially, before I just go jump into some random relationship. I'm not against jumping into some random relationship and learning from reality, I just have some preference for figuring out the theory here first.
- I don't think most women below 30 have solved this problem either, such that I can just find them and copy their solution. It seems increasingly likely I will have to solve this problem from scratch myself, and then explain it to my future partner.
- When you know, you know
- For both, finding a cofounder and finding a girlfriend, I do ultimately think the answer is "when you know, you know."
- Some of my previous writings have overcomplicated this by attempting to create a lot of theory based on quite frankly, quite limited data and quite limited contact with reality.
- I don't (yet) have a simulated machine environment where I can just simulate thousands of romantic relationships and figure out which ones work versus not. That is what actual contact with reality would be. A bunch of this stuff is fairly personalised so looking at other people's relationships gets you only so far.
- I will also be making a lot less notes over the next 3 months. Write more code, write less notes. If I write more than say 5 notes a month, this is also a red flag.
P.S. I seem to have written an older post called "stay with a sober roommate." I now override this post. I have managed to stay sober without any roommate for atleast 3 months now, so I will carry on this way.
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