2026-03-21
minor update 2026-03-22
Is this moral and is this effective?
Disclaimer
- Quick Note
- Contains politically sensitive info
Main
- Is this moral?
- The more I read about other people's ideologies, the more I realise how retarded all of political science is. People were having the exact same political debates literal centuries ago, as they are having today.
- I skimmed through the Federalist papers, Nehru's writings to Gandhi and on religion, Bhagat Singh's writings, LKY's writings, Cummings' writings on Bismarck, von Neumann's writings on political science, more recently Ben Shapiro's views on US politics from a socially right economic right politically lib lens.
- End of the day, morality is something you feel not think. The blunt answer to "will I murder my loved ones in cold blood to save myself?" is yes. (Assuming those loved ones were going to kill me otherwise.)
- This is something I feel at the core of who I am.
- First explain it to them nicely, sure. But if they still remain either ignorant or malevolent, then kill them all.
- My past track record indicates that I have considered hurting people around me many times, but I never ended up actually finding it necessary to do. The reason I haven't hurt people around me already is because it is ineffective. The price at which I would sell my self-esteem is very high (literal billions of dollars or large percentage points of extinction risk), and most people around me are too powerless for me to gain anything by hurting them.
- Standing from a building and watching everyone die, or watching everyone I met die, is actually quite effective for me to internalise how big the stakes are. I should do more of this.
- All political ideologies that claim to be for the greater good have messy incomplete ideas of what greater good for everyone looks like.
- Most people have no fucking clue what is in the long-term good for themselves, let alone for everyone else.
- I feel psychologically better if I tell myself I am doing it for the world, not just for myself.
- But also, I shouldn't kid myself - I have no fucking clue what most people want, beyond a simple outside view (most people don't want to die, they want food shelter loved ones etc).
- Is this effective?
- I think my main hesitations to work on the cyberattack plan are in terms of effectiveness, not morality. If it was necessary to do, and I would damage some of my self-esteem to do so, then sure I do it. But, it is still not entirely clear if it is the most effective plan available.
- If the anti-ASI political movement has less 10% US voterbase, then my cyberattack plan doesn't help, we are doomed regardless. If the anti-ASI political movement has more than 90% US voterbase, then my cyberattack plan doesn't help, we succeed regardless. If it is in between, then yes, successful leaking of information can shift atleast 5% of US voterbase for sure.
- I still wonder if there's other plans that can get me 5% of US voterbase. For instance I have recently been looking into AI-generated music.
- It is very hard to know ahead of time which plan will or won't get you how much voterbase. My best heuristics for this are stupid shit like Naval's heuristic that AI gets you more leverage than software, which gets you more leverage than media. Base rates don't matter when you're at the frontier, and AI is shifting all frontiers rapidly.
- (Update 2026-03-22) I have decided not to make AI-generated music my life plan for next 5 years, and will not be changing my decision. I actually think music is a way to reach the masses. See Grimes for ASI risk or the main musicians of the 1960s counterculture. However, see again, I hate the masses way too much to work on something like this. It does not match my self-concept at all. I am serious person. I really don't want to be someone who leads the masses who just want to be hedonistic even inside a mass movement (see again, 1960s counterculture, or srdja popovick's book) and becoming a musician means interacting with such people 24x7 too. Also ofcourse, music is extremely competitive (because people are willing to do it unpaid), if you lack conviction that you want to do it, you can't become top 100 on Earth at it.
- I still wonder if there's a way to build world government. That would be an even more ambitious plan than my current plan.
- People have been failing to build a world government for a literal century at this point. Nehru writes about his dreams for world government. Marxism was obviously an attempt at world government. von Neumann hoped for a world government.
- See above, political science has been retarded for literal hundreds of years.
- I still don't understand what are the bottlenecks to effective world government.
- Shared ways of doing sex/family/parenting/etc, as codified by religion, are the primary thing that unite people.
- Atheists in India have more in common with atheists in the US. Christians in the US have more in common with christians in Russia.
- Many of the world leaders today (US president, Russian president, Chinese premier, UK prime minister) are atheist/agnostic, but need to pretend to be religious for their respective votebases.
- This is another factor in favour of the geopolitical arbitrage type stuff I want to do.
- It is also a factor to be analysed more carefully, if I or someone else ever makes a plan for world government. You can build orderly government on top of a base of hard power that can threaten violence. And the primary groups that organise and do mass violence are religious (or atheist) groups.
- P.S. Coordination aka backfire effects don't matter, as long as you have a well-defined outgroup.
- Every mass movement against an outgroup has a non-violent ingroup faction with more people power and a violent ingroup faction with some hard power. Mass movements rely on people power more than hard power, but both types of power have their place.
- I'm pretty confident about this claim, but for whatever reason, it is an unpopular opinion in EA/LW spaces.
- People use IMO dumb arguments like "if you do X then everyone will do X". And I'm like, no, not everyone will do it, but some people will do it. And yes, I do want some people to do it. I want some people to be violent just like me.
- The violent ingroup has propaganda value too, not just actual hard power.
- Coordination around violence becomes a much bigger challenge when you don't have a well-defined outgroup. Purity spirals are common, your own ingroup splintering into factions and fighting each other is common, all of this has happened multiple times in the past, this is not some new problem the anti-ASI people are facing.
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