2026-02-15
All my problems summarised yet again, in simple words
Disclaimer
- Quick Note
- Contains politically sensitive info
- Thinking aloud, I may not endorse anything here after a lot of thought
Main
- The people I truly seem to respect are the mass murderers at the AI companies. The people I truly seem to dislike, atleast a little, are the public.
- On social media
- Biggest problem - I don't feel good about telling the public (who I don't respect) that I like them, or telling them to dislike the mass murderers at the AI companies (who I respect). Unless I do this, it is difficult to become popular
- Lots of smaller problems
- One bad case scenario if I succeed - literally empowering the far-left in the US to install a communist dictator in power. This seems bad, even if ASI is averted
- One bad case scenario if I succeed - will polarise public further and break apart millions of more marriages. Will make people more power-hungry. Maybe this is fine. I feel okay about endorsing people to join an ASI protest even if it means they have to divorce to do so. The situation really is that dire.
- On hacking to make whole world transparent
- Biggest problem - getting everyone's informed consent to blow open the whole world requires solving the culture war itself, and there's no way in hell that can be done in 5 years. I have thought about ways to accelerate solving this but still, the deadline is too tight, all my best methods will take longer than that. Therefore, I don't feel good about blowing open the whole world. It is true that most people are using a stupid groupthink process to compute whether to give consent or not, and are too risk-averse about this. Even so.
- Smaller problems
- I want to figure out a way so that everyone can hold stockpiles of zerodays, ensure attack beats defence, but also create a court process that restricts when one can or can't use these. Even after I create all these processes, I am not sure how to get the informed consent though. (to do - think more?)
- On hacking to just leak US govt or ASI company redacted information of "abuse" (whatever that means)
- Biggest problem - I lack skills and a cofounder. I have to find a cofounder who deeply gets why this makes sense. I think I feel fine, morally, in practice, with doing this. I am fine seeing the secrets myself, without consent, as long as I choose not to leak them. (Again, easy to talk about morality in theory, you won't know until you do it in practice) - I think I should just cold email some hackers here, with full transparency, and see what they think
- Smaller problems
- I have genuinely no idea what specific info, if leaked, will most persuade the public. My best guesses include leaking the names of people bypassing of specific democratic guardrails, leaking the names of people who are successionists, leaking the names and concerns of people who have considered quitting or had internal concerns but did not finally quit (even if the public thinks their reasons are dumb, it adds up, the concern doesnt necessarily have to be high p doom), leaking proof that AI companies have specific dangerous capabilities (like bioweapons)
- Our internal epistemic and moral processes might get compromised, as we face counterattack, or end up assimiliated into russian or indian intelligence agencies. Not having clear internal policy ahead of time could lead me to endorsing something that feels bad for me, or is useless for the goal of stopping ASI. for instance I might be forced (like assange) to adopt a policy of leaking everything with no redactions because I literally dont have capacity for redactions. or the russian/indian govt might try to take decisions on our behalf on which targets to hit.
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