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2026-01-17

Update

Noah Smith (Noahpinion) says writing criticism posts can become a trap.

• If you become famous for your criticisms of someone, you'll then feel pressure to become someone who writes criticisms of that person full-time, and you won't enjoy this even if you have a large audience.
• I agree. I would rather write one criticism post and refine it hundred times. I definitely do not want to write a hundred low signal-to-noise criticisms of the same person, based on a hundred current events or actions that person does. Or better yet, I would spend a certain limited number of hours of my life writing the criticisms, but spend most of the hours of my life actually building something better.

2026-01-13

I will only persuade or criticise the powerful

Disclaimer

• Quick Note

Summary

• If you are not powerful, I will spend at max 1-2 hours discussing my worldview with you. Usually it is a waste of my time to discuss further. Beyond this, I probably can't change your mind, and you probably can't help me much even if I did change your mind. Exceptions exist.
• If you are powerful, I can spend multiple days discussing my worldview with you. Persuading even one billionaire or major politician to support the plans I advocate, could make a big difference to the future of the world. This would also be the biggest achievement of my life thus far, if I succeeded at persuasing them.

Main

I am experimenting with following this rule from 2026-01 onwards, atleast for the next few months.

"I will only persuade or criticise the powerful"

If you are not powerful

• What?
  • If you are not powerful, I will spend at max 1-2 hours discussing my worldview with you. If I do not sense within the first 1-2 hours that we are making significant progress towards identifying cruxes and evidence that would dissolve them, then I will terminate the discussion.
• Why?
  • In my experience, my persuasion skills are not sufficiently good that I can dissolve cruxes in the 3rd or 4th or 5th or 6th hour of discussion. Maybe some people have sufficiently good persuasion skills to pull this off, but I am not one of these people. I have a lot of empirical evidence showing me that I am not that good at persuasion.
  • In particular, I do not think lesswrong-style rationality of finding double cruxes works very well on most people given a limited amount of time. This is even true for a number of people who self-identify as lesswrong-style rationalists. I think persuasion is far more complex and a variety of different approaches work for different people. See also: Four competing hypotheses of persuasion
  • AI timelines are short. I am capable of and willing to execute on big goals. Therefore my time is valuable. I don't want to waste my time on discussions that are going nowhere useful for me.
  • I think it is very easy for me to get stuck in status fights that waste my attention and energy (not just time). Even if I win the status fight, and successfully show that lots of other people's plans are stupid, and that I am smart and therefore high status, this does not achieve all that much in the real world. If the people I persuaded are not already powerful, it's possible they can't help me much with executing my plans, even after I have persuaded them that my plans are better than theirs.
  • In the long run, I care about reaching the truth and about actually achieving goals in the world. In the long run, I don't care much for being high status as a terminal goal. In the short run, "dunking" on people might help me vent, for example, but I don't think it is good for me to indulge in this for long. I think status fights are generally an attention sink for most humans, not just for me.

If you are powerful

• What?
  • If you are powerful, I might be willing to spend many days in a 1-to-1 discussion with you. I might also be willing to spend atleast 1-2 days writing a public post to either criticise you or persuade you to my worldview.
• Why?
  • If I can persuade even one billionaire or major politician to my viewpoint around what actually needs to be done to fix ASI risk, that would currently be the biggest achievement of my life. This individual will then be able to either execute on the plans I advocate, or provide funds and legal/political protection for the people executing these plans. Persuading them is valuable even if I don't personally receive any funds at the end of it. Also, they could attempt to further persuade the billionaires and major politicians in their own network. (Example: The Giving Pledge by Gates and Buffett)
  • Lots of people are currently deferring to a small number of influential nodes. For example, in Silicon Valley, a lot of people defer to people like Paul Graham, Naval Ravikant or Vitalik Buterin. For AI timelines specifically, as of 2026-01, some people seem to defer to Dwarkesh Patel or David Deutsch (because they defer to Naval Ravikant). Writing criticisms of these specific people seems worthwhile (weak opinion), because a lot of people who defer to these people might also be interested in reading my criticisms of their views.

Corollary

If you want to earn more of my time (and the time of people like me), one option you have is to try and become more powerful yourself.

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