Yarvin’s notion of the state as corporation is absurdly econ-brained—it leaves little room for the things that actually hold society together (like trust, identity, culture). Land was brave enough to extrapolate this to its logical conclusion (humanity dissolved into mush by the forces of technocapital) but not brave enough to stand against it. Yudkowsky and Alexander also started off absurdly econ-brained. But Alexander was at least willing to say that Moloch was bad, and has been gradually fishing himself out (c.f. his stuff on Schelling fences, lifeboat games, etc). Unfortunately he is less brave than Yarvin and therefore still ends up less correct on most political issues. Meanwhile Eliezer’s original framing of the alignment problem is very strongly in the paradigm of single-agent rationality. It was hard for him to then fish himself out because it feels so obvious that a superintelligence *should* be in that paradigm. But he believed deeply enough in scientific progress to lay seeds which others (especially Garrabrant and Demski) have been growing into an understanding of multi-agent rationality, which is the thing we need to reason about how to improve society. For example, he identified that economics is handicapped by assuming CDT (though he didn’t integrate that insight into his understanding of economics as deeply as Michael Vassar did).