Something I've learned about being too online in the last few years is that some people really truly cannot believe that other people might come to opinions about the world that are different from their own in a way that is natural and fair. Everything has to be an op. There are all sorts of people—mostly conservative but even tech critics like McNamee—who insist that this AI safety moment is a psyop. Have people's feelings about AI safety been shaped by a complex set of factors such as longstanding AI fears, worsening data center politics, the Hugging Face attack and its fallout, and now the Coxon resignation? No, no, no. They're victims of a psyop. It reminds me that I've had a distressingly high number of conversations with leftists who believe that the only reason America isn't a socialist paradise is that Fox News and other conservative media do something special and evil and conspiratorial to brainwash half the country. Look, I do not like Fox News. But I think Fox News is successful because it says what many people have already been thinking. It shapes public opinion at the margins, but mostly it reflects biases back to viewers rather than invent them out of whole cloth. There is a powerful, powerful urge to believe that the only reason the world doesn't agree with you about literally every little thing is that small handful of media-adjacent elites are constantly doing "ops" on the undiscerning public. I don't know, man. People's attitudes are different from yours and mine, because ... their lives are different. They accumulate different biases, different expectations, different values, different frameworks. Difference is normal, not an op.