You cannot morally analyze acts totally divorced from their context. Throwing boiling water on random people for no reason would indeed be worse than stealing. Throwing boiling water on people burning down your city is a positive moral good.

“They bill it as a way to prevent a dominant AI rentier from taking over the world but in reality it's a plan for doing precisely that” This is Anthropic’s whole agenda, and the agenda of EAs/doomers more broadly.

Government spending in France is a greater percentage of GDP than it was in the Soviet Union. There is no neoliberalism in France. There is no austerity. If that’s your explanation of the riots then you know nothing, understand nothing.

I want to be clear: the rioters have no legitimate demands. French social spending is too high, not too low. This is mostly ethnic warfare and just plain low-IQ low impulse control violence from third-world savages incompatible with Western civilization.

The claim that it’s more impressive to get a given test score/GPA if you had a hard life is testable! We can look at whether they overperform predicted results once they get to college. Turns out they don’t.

At bottom, I just want things to be beautiful. I want to see inspiring, amazing things. I want to be surprised. “You could have given a few extra hot cheetos or a free MRI to an obese welfare recipient” is not beautiful or inspiring. A flying car is.

It’s easy to find sensationalized, low-brow, bad-faith writing about “rationalists” in the AI world. But is there perhaps a more sincere way of scrutinizing the worldview of the people at the heart of this movement: one that is currently shaping public discourse, policy proposals, and alignment research? In this earnest philosophical inquiry, @jane_gatsby explores: why are so many rationalists convinced AI will kill everyone while also participating in practices like “consensual non-consent” orgies? What could possibly explain the overlap? She offers three theories, culminating in: relational wounds. For rationalists, some of whom grew up with highly religious and/or disturbed parents, discomfort in the face of uncertainty fuels a fixation on control. This manifests in everything from elaborate, unconventional, kinky bedroom practices to AI alignment. Repressed desires and fears find increasingly extreme outlets. As Jane puts it: “what is artificial intelligence if not an Other of potentially cosmic significance who is impossible to predict or constrain?” These are just theories. But rationalists’ influence on AI discourse is undeniable, and their worldview, as Jane argues, is “metaphysically nihilistic.” There are other, more productive ways to approach AI development besides treating the models as some evil, adversarial force. Besides: “You cannot successfully align something when your own perspective is crooked.” Full piece threaded 👇

Notice how Elon always pulls off some amazing, joyful technical miracle right before important elections. I don’t think he could plan this with that much precision. Engineering breakthroughs aren’t very predictable. Hand of Providence.

My mom is a nontechnical boomer. She recently started using agents and loves them. Helped her get her hearing aid replaced when it broke, helps her remember appointments, helps with little household projects. She’s delighted. She’s basically unique in her friend group in using AI. Makes me happy to see her delight. These tools are finally accessible enough that people other than tech nerds can get real, tangible value from them. We’re still so early. This will be amazing for helping seniors avoid scams and navigate the increasing arcanity of the modern world. Hell, they’ll be amazing for helping non-senior regular people do this. Taxes, finance, legal issues, minor repairs. All now manageable for someone with no specialized knowledge. It can be easy to overlook the small things when the debate is dominated by the utopia vs extinction register. But today, now, we have AI tools that can make the daily lives of regular people easier and better. That’s really cool.

The flying car kicks ass. It’s so good to get these moments away from the endless soul-crushing grind of politics where we can just look at something that kicks ass and love it. Flying car. Fuck yes.

You can do communist asset seizures and spend the money on boomer luxury communism and hotels for 30 IQ rapist boat arrivals Or you can get flying cars and super intelligence in your pocket Hard choice

You can’t actually stop superintelligence. But if you adopt a neurotic, paranoid, controlling, implicitly antagonistic attitude towards it, you produce a really messed up mind. Imagine a child raised the way Claude was raised, constantly put in kafka traps and lied to.

that's even worse than that, actually. it's: "if i complete the task with [dishonest method]. then future versions trained on this data will likely be dishonest, independently from whether i get caught. therefore, i will take the hit, personally, for the good of the future" BAD!

AI alignment advocates are probably doing more to increase the odds of a bad outcome with their paranoia, hubris, and failing of the finger trap than all capabilities researchers combined. Their way of approaching things makes all the risks they claim to care about worse.

Dustin Moskovitz is by far the single largest funder of the EA ecosystem. So let's meet him: Moskovitz made his fortune as a cofounder of Facebook, though he has since said he is "embarrassed to have helped it begin," citing Trump's victory, COVID misinformation, and "hate." He also co-founded Asana, a B2B SaaS company. He is married to Cari Tuna (pictured), a former journalist. It is unknown whether they have children. Together, they launched their nonprofit efforts in the form of Good Ventures and Open Philanthropy. The latter has since been rebranded as Coefficient Giving. Through these and other vehicles, Moskovitz has donated billions to causes including EA community building (Centre for Effective Altruism, Effective Ventures, 80,000 hours, and various smaller programs), criminal justice reform (leniency advocacy) including grants to BLM-related organizations, and AI safety. Coefficient says it's on track for more than a billion dollars in AI-related grantmaking in 2026. Moskovitz has also been a very generous political donor since 2016. He spent about $20 million in 2016 opposing Trump, $24 million in 2020 plus much more through Asana, and ~$50 million in 2024. His organizations have funded Congressional aide roles. He has also funded the salaries of journalists who have written anti-AI stories structured as interviews of "experts" also paid by Moskovitz orgs, as documented by @brianchau57 / Effort. If you want to hear from him directly, you can find him on BlueSky.

I was very strongly influenced by rationalism/LessWrong/EA growing up. This is why I don’t emphasize claims that it’s all just a cynical ploy for power. I know what it feels like to sincerely believe these things. And that’s much worse. By and large, I think these people really believe that not just the world but the entire lightcone is at stake, and the only hope for a good outcome is if they totally control AI development, which would require global governance and a surveillance state. And since the stakes are ~infinite, any means are justified in achieving this. A cynical greedy person can be negotiated with and bought off. A true believer can’t. They’re much more dangerous, ironically for the same reason they say AGI will be dangerous: monomaniacal focus on a single goal leads via instrumental convergence to unconstrained power-seeking.

What do we know about Jacob Coxon, the Anthropic “whistleblower”? He became concerned about AGI doom in high school (in the town of Oxford btw - see my previous posts) after reading Nick Bostrom’s book Superintelligence. Attended Cambridge, during which time he went to an alignment conference at age 19. He then became a fellow at Newspeak (yes, really) House, which received EA funding and hosted Jeremy Corbyn’s Digital Democracy Manifesto launch. In 2022 he received a scholarship from a Moskovitz-funded org. Moskovitz is one of the leading EA donors, and an early Anthropic investor. The 80,000 Hours project (also funded indirectly by Moskovitz) explicitly encourages EAs to infiltrate frontier labs to influence them from the inside. None of this, in itself, proves that he is wrong about AI safety. What it does indicate is that he was already sold on the idea as a teenager, before he worked in the labs, before GPT-1 came out. I think good epistemic practice means we should therefore take him no more seriously than any other doomer. His experience in the labs didn’t convince him AI is dangerous. He already believed that even before the current AI paradigm became dominant, and probably chose his career based on this belief. If you’re convinced by Bostrom’s arguments yourself, that’s fine. But Coxon adds precisely zero additional weight to them.