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2026-03-26

Learnings from past month of reading about politics

Disclaimer

• Quick Note
• Contains politically sensitive info
• target audience - strictly myself

Background context

• I was hesitating working on the plan to cyberattack the US govt and US AI companies and leak their information. I used multiple ways to cope with lack of clarity on such topics.
  • I wanted to figure out my morality and politics, so that I work on this with more clarity, instead of at half-speed. Hence I started reading even more books.
• My views on morality were previously a very Might makes Right view on history. But I was still hesitating acting in line with these views.
  • Technological offence/defence balances decide the routes to obtain power, people who obtain power are eventually respected by many, and these people then invent rhetoric on morality that justified the routes they took.
  • In the surveillance/privacy/transparency context, I had a fairly strong view that multiple offence/defence balances around information are shifting towards offence, and most of the world's information is going to come out publicly anyway, and this is more good than bad (although there is bad), and hence I should just act to take advantage of this.
  • However I noticed I still seemed to losing self-esteem by working on it. Just because you can get away with XYZ, and later invent rhetoric to morally justify it to the public, doesn't mean you'll feel good doing it. I realised I need moral rhetoric to justify it to myself first (not others), and also this had to be in line with my past self and past identity. Morality is part of identity and I can't 180 degree my entire identity overnight.

Main learnings from the past month (technically some of these are from preceding months, but whatever)

• Personal
  • Internalising that the world is ending helps me a lot
    • Death
      • One way of internalising the world ending (as opposed to treating it as an intellectual game) that I found super valuable is to go to a tall building and look outside, and visualise everyone die.
      • I visualise people dying in almost every conversation I have nowadays 24x7.
      • I don't know if I advocate everyone do it, or even future Samuel do it, but it is what I do often nowadays.
    • It helps me take the stakes seriously.
      • "Blame yourself, preserve your agency" is this Naval Ravikant quote I take seriously now.
      • Fuck lesswrong, fuck indian politics, fuck whatever. If everyone else jumps off a bridge doesn't mean I will jump off one too. If the world ends it was my fault.
    • It helps me connect with people a little bit more.
      • If other people don't want to take my ASI risk concerns seriously in a conversation, that is now their problem not mine. Most people know jackshit about this topic and hence I don't take their opinions too seriously.
      • You can hear out my concerns, and then move on to a separate topic, that is fine.
      • You can hear my concerns, have a respectful disagreement, that is also fine.
      • But if you don't want to hear my concerns, and you already have pre-conceived notion I am crazy or politically annoying or whatever, then that's it, we are done here, get out of my life, meet me after a few months at best.
  • Liking people, versus considering them political allies (I learned this some months back itself)
    • I like some of the people at AI the companies because of shared traits. Atheist, high openness to experience, intellectually curious, high trust, kind, support technology, capitalism and democracy, technical people. However, inspite of that, if they threaten to kill me then I will threaten to kill them first. This is the same way I look at my friends too. If my friend threatened to kill me out of some deranged beliefs in utopia, I'd kill my friend too.
    • I dislike many of the anti-ASI political demographics. I dislike religion due to a lot of personal experiences I can't share here. I dislike most leftist thought. However, these people are among the biggest demographics in the anti-ASI political coalition.
  • Self-interest versus greater good
    • I was quite self-interested in teenage, leaned more altruist in college after my basic needs were fulfilled (loved ones, sufficient money, etc), now again self-interested after realising ASI risk could get me killed. Saving my life again seems more important to me than saving anyone else's life, although I also care non-zero about the latter.
    • I will feel better about myself if I tell myself I am doing all this for greater good, saving humanity, blah blah, as opposed to saying I am doing it to save my own life. But that doesn't make it true.
  • I know most people don't want to go extinct or live under permanent dictatorship. However, beyond these basics, I have no fucking clue what most of humanity actually wants, so how can I pretend to represent them?
    • I know all humans want basics like they want food, shelter, safety from violence, love and respect of loved ones. They want atleast some certainty (but not complete certainty) about their past, present and future. They want free time to pursue "enlightenment", whatever the hell that means to each person.
    • If I was given access to private diary notes of millions of people, and asked to predict what was instead of them without looking, I would be very bad at predicting it. The basic needs are boring and simple, but humans build a complex web of nuances on top, and I don't think I'd be good at predicting it.
    • Many ideologies have this idea of "what is in people's best interest, if they knew better, had better experiences, etc". Hinduism might call it escape from reincarnation, Buddhism might call it Enlightenment, Yudkowsky might call it CEV, Marx will say overthrow upper class, etc. I am suspicious of most ideology's answers to this question. I also don't know what is in most people's enlightened interest, and most people themselves don't know what is in their own enlightened interest. People's stated and revealed preferences are both shit, for predicting their actual enlightened interest.
  • I love violence?
    • This is a weird thing to say, but at some level, people who are too high-minded idealist and hence non-violent, often irk me. I think Thomas Sowell's contrained versus unconstrained visions helps better explain why too much idealism irks me as a person. Or Viktor Suvorov's reasoning. Or the scriptwriting for the Joker in the Dark Knight. "When the chips are down, these people will eat each other"-type rhetoric.
    • I have always been a sort of violent person, atleast in the privacy of my mind. Over many years of my life, I have at many times thought of killing people for all sorts of reasons, I just never did it irl because it wasn't necessary to solve the problem. For the first time I am being confronted with a problem big enough that violence seems actually required to solve it.
    • I am not a sadist or masochist. But I also don't think I have as much aversion to violence as some people around me seem to. I don't have much problem looking at murder or rape footage for example.
  • Violence being necessary doesn't make it an absolute good.
    • I think it is important I don't Other or dehumanise my outgroup. "Look at a man in their eyes before you put a bullet through their skull."
    • I agree with Duncan Sabien's take on necessary violence. I think it is important that future Samuel doesn't forget about this.
• Political
  • It is depressing how little progress there has been in political science, and how little contact with reality most people's political beliefs make:
    • People have been failing to build a world government for a literal century at this point. League of Nations, the UN, even Nehru and Gandhi write about their dreams for world government (atleast until the Indo-China war in 60s)
    • Significant overlap between 1960s counterculture and Julia Galef's SF Bay Area map of today. Same hedonism, same social justice and environmentalist stuff, similar spread of political ideologies. Anti-nuclear protests in 1950s were just as unpopular then as anti-ASI protests are today, but if you bring in musicians and weed and talk about more normie causes that affect day-to-day life (like sexuality or parent-child relationship or whatever), then the crowd grows much larger.
    • The Federalist Papers from friggin late 1700s are discussing all the questions that people debate on reddit today. Power to states versus the centre, standing armies versus not, republic versus direct democracy.
  • My belief in both capitalism and democracy seem to have weakened due to my plans to fix ASI risk, and this makes me sad. I am not yet over it (as of 2026-03-25).
    • There are levels of belief in capitalism and democracy.
      • Example of ideological defender of capitalism: Naval Ravikant, Paul Graham. Example of ideological defender of democracy (atleast as per how federalist papers defined it): Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan
      • Example of ideological defender of capitalism who violated some laws but not the "spirit" of capitalism: Ross Ulbricht. Example of ideological defender of democracy who may have violated some laws but not the "spirit" of democracy: Glenn Greenwald
      • Examples of capitalists who violate the ideals of free market capitalism, and are happy to purchase politicians and intelligence community members and cement their own monopoly: Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel. Examples of politicians who violate the ideals of democracy: basically every US presidential candidate in last 30 years.
    • I don't respect the people at the bottom of this list as much, and I will be sad if I also have to become more like them. I'd rather be in the middle category at best.
      • I might respect myself less as a person. Or, if I successfully change, I might start respecting other people who violate the spirit of capitalism and democracy more, and start respecting people who follow the spirit less as they will look like suckers to me.
      • I do think that the more people violate the spirit of these ideals, the more they contribute to polarisation, and people on the other side of the political isle also look at the them and choose to violate the spirit in turn.
  • I have important ideological differences with most of the people in the reference class of "software developers turned activists who used geopolitical arbitrage"
    • Examples: Aaron Swartz (progressive, anti-copyright), Snowden and Assange (anti-war anti-surveillance anti-US IC), Satoshi (anti-Keynesian), Roman Storm or Wilko Zookox (libertarian), Anna's archive / Alexandra Elbakyan / torrent / napster (anti-copyright), Ross Ulbricht (libertarian, anti-drug law), many youtubers living outside their home country to criticise the regime there (pro-democracy, anti-defamation / pro-free speech). Richard Stallman (deontological anti-everything lmao)
    • I am not a libertarian or a progressive. I don't have a very strong position on anti-war or anti-surveillance or anti-copyright or anti-taxation or anti-drug regulation or whatever. I have positions on these topics, but they're weaker, and sometimes in direct conflict with other people who have worked on them. (For instance I am a lot more pro-transparency, whereas some of these people are a lot more pro-privacy.)
    • I have a very strong anti-ASI position. I have built up this position over many years. It makes me a bit sad that I need to devote my life to working on this, instead of something else I care more about. But, I have to do it now, there is no choice.
    • I also have a strong position in favour of more transparency (and less privacy) in society, both among the elite and the general public. I have built up this position over many years. I see a world with zero privacy as a platonic ideal in the same way I see a world with zero nukes or guns as a platonic ideal or a world with world government federal democracy as a platonic ideal.
  • I still haven't completely given up hope that ASI risk can be fixed within the moral and US legal constraints of democracy and capitalism, but I don't feel comfortable gambling the fate of all of civilisation on that hope.
    • See above - I will genuinely dislike myself as a person if I was some high-minded idealist and the world ended as a result.
    • Important - think more here
  • I dislike most of the people who advocate for violence for instrumental political reasons, such as anarchists and far-left activists. In general, a broad anti-ASI coalition is needed, but it is full of a lot of political demographics I dislike.
  • My outgroup is powerful people building ASI. My outgroup is not all powerful people. I don't want to become one of those journalists with "class war" mindset, who thinks only the upper class deserves to be screwed over.
• Interpersonal
  • Positive-sum versus zero-sum
    • Many silicon valley billionaires have heuristics that you'll be more motivated to work, and other people will be more motivated to help you, if you work on a positive-sum thing involving creating new wealth or building technology, as opposed to a zero-sum game.
    • Managing motivation of you and your immediate set of people who will help (cofounder, friends, allies, etc) is one of the most important predictors of whether you succeed or fail. I actually agree strongly with all this.
    • However, I still think a zero-sum political battle is the only way ASI risk gets fixed. We need to fuck over the guys building ASI, and ensure they lose wealth and power (and status and girlfriends and loved ones and whatnot), and just, generally ensure they suffer. They have to lose power for the anti-ASI people to gain power.
  • Polarisation
    • It is straightforwardly true that if I use political violence, then people on the other side will also see this and be inspired to use political violence, and this too will further weaken what democracy and capitalism is still left in the US.
    • This is well-documented and many political youtubers talk about it, and I should not underestimate the effects of this. Moderate people (who aren't terminally online thinking about politics) are likely to be polarised against you if you use political violence.
    • If we succeed, we will become powerful and therefore high status via dominance not prestige. In simple words, people will respect us because they fear us, not necessarily because we helped them (although we may have also helped them). This will inspire more people to do zero-sum behaviour to similarly get respect for themselves.
  • Only the outgroup
    • I have understood very clearly that I should not be violent against innocent bystanders if I can help it. Only be violent against the outgroup. You lose a lot of trust networks if you are violent against bystanders.
  • Moral feedback
    • I have made up my mind that if I go ahead with the cyberattack plan, we have to completely transparent regarding our estimates of how many people we have hurt and why. Most of the public's feedback will be shit, but some of it will be useful. We will be entering a high-stakes adversarial domain, this will cut us off from most feedback including moral feedback, hence we have to get feedback this way.
• Books
  • If someone else is reading this writeup, my top book recommendations to them:
    • Thomas Sowell - Conflict of visions
    • Srdja Popovick - Blueprint of revolution
    • Federalist Papers - I used AI to simplify the english and read it
    • Richard Rhodes - Making of the atomic bomb
  • My actual reading list is too long to share here. I also have a lot of books on tech, or on whistleblowers, for example.

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