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2026-02-10

Systematic moral blinding

• Calling someone out for moral reasons is one of the strongest signals not just to them, but everyone like them who hears about it, to avoid you as a person. That way you lose access to any knowledge or power they might have had, or could connect you to.
• Heck, I think even writing this paragraph here has a non-zero blinding effect.
• I do think there is a lot of systematic moral blinding going on in society, for various reasons. Because I am most obsessed with AI, I understand this best in the AI case.
  • People working at AI companies systematically blind themselves to information coming from anti-AI people like me, and vice versa people like me may have a tendency to systematically blind myself to information coming from the AI companies on why pro-AI makes sense.
  • Some things we still have in common are general thirst for knowledge, lots of shared context on the ideas popular in silicon valley, and sometimes a shared belief that ASI might be actually be coming (when most of rest of society doesn't believe this).
  • I think these common things might be why the blinding is not yet absolute. I wouldn't be surprised if the blinding becomes absolute, soon.
• As of today, yes, I do generally seem to be making a tradeoff to value knowledge more than I value power.
  • Which is to say, I really do wanna know about all the harms going on in society, because that information is useful for me to take good decisions.
  • I do think the internet is forcing people to update on each other's moral intuitions quite fast, even groups that are stuck in eternal culture war with each other. I'm afraid this rate is not fast enough as compared to ASI timelines. I would love to build a "particle collider for morality" to accelerate this, if I knew how to do it.
  • Right now it seems like I'm literally trying to become the particle collider myself lmao
    • collide SV activism with international affairs. collide international affairs with nationalism. collide SV activism with leftist activism. collide SV activism with billionaire. collide billionaire with international affairs. collide billionaire with traditional religion. collide finance with cryptocurrency. collide cryptography academia with cryptocurrency.

p.s. justin rosenstein's "one project" experimented with something like this, if I remember. get a US census representative group of people to actually physically meet in a hall and discuss their political views with each other

p.p.s. gwern branwen seems to be taking on atleast a somewhat similar approach, of personally trying to read very widely, and then find intersections between fields. but gwern is way less focussed on morality than I am.

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