Home | Search

2026-02-08

My Current Project

Disclaimer

• Quick Note
• Contains politically sensitive info
• Contains personal info, such as my emotions associated with various projects. I've realised I do actually need to track these emotions in order to make good decisions, even if it means that the resulting document is less professional.

Update (2026-02-08)

• here's a suggestion for a new plan
  • what?
    • literally go collect lots of historical data on what made people persuasive in various contexts. Study salesmen, study politicians, study pickup artists, study billionaires, etc. Names of people, and numbers indicating how persuasive they were.
  • why?
    • I am worried that scalable persuasion is close to the literal only thing that matters, and all my number two plans are shit compared to number one plan which is cracking scalable persuasion. If I just go aimlessly read about what various protest movements did, or what various billionaires did, or what the intelligence community did, or how status and groupthink work, or any of the other 20 fucking nerdsnipes sitting on my website, I seem concerned that maybe none of this gets you any new insights into how to do scalable persuasion.
    • I am also worried that actually figuring out scalable persuasion is going to require lot of creative new hit and trial, and this means talking to non-technical people 24x7, and I fucking hate this. And like, this is true. Someone else who is not me, has to sit and do a lot of hit and trial. They have to talk to literally hundreds of people in person, and make hundreds of videos, and all of these will require creative new ideas, and only then do they have any shot at all, at pulling this off.
    • But maybe this person will still get atleast some value out of lots of historical data collected by me.
  • holy fuck did I just solve this? okay then, we have a plan

Update (2026-02-08, minor edits 2026-02-10)

• ugh this post is too long, lemme shorten it by rewriting some parts
• I seem confused between three plans
  • Personally go cyberattack AI companies and US govt, to leak secrets about them that make them look bad in the eyes of the public. Figure out some of the moral and other implications, sure, but also I ultimately have to actually execute the first attacks myself, not wait around for someone else to do it.
  • Keep writing on my blog about ASI risk and politics so that I can understand it better myself. Eventually I can use this understanding to play some small role in either persuading the public about ASI risk myself, or in persuading someone to go persuade the public. Playing a big role seems hard for me to do, but maybe I can still play some small indirect role, maybe even in a way I can't immediately forecast.
  • Become popular in a way that has nothing to do with ASI risk - for example, by blogging about unrelated topics, or building an app on unrelated topic - and then run ads about ASI risk on this site
• I use two key heuristics to decide what to work on
  • Do I find this work enjoyable or atleast somewhat tolerable? Or do I start to build an active dislike for the work once I start working on it?
    • I can probably only work on something long-term if I can tolerate it, and I can probably only become world-historically good at it if I work on it long-term. By long-term I mean atleast a few years.
    • I think the fastest way to evaluate whether I enjoy something is often to just actually work on it for some time (few days to few months max).
  • Do I think this work will be highly impactful?
    • I think what I ultimately care most about is ensuring my work puts the world in a significantly better state by the time I'm dead.
    • It is hard for me to describe what "better" means here, because I still don't understand it well.
      • I definitely want to lock in some sort of good "system" that is likely to preserve itself "long-term".
      • The utopian ideal would be a mathematical invariant that you can prove on the universe as a turing machine, that would persist till the end of the universe. A slightly more practical version of that would be some ideology or system of governance or social norm, that could persist multiple centuries. A slightly more practical version of that might be to figure out how to delay ASI right now, so that there is enough time to actually sit and invent this new system.
      • I actually seem to care about some mix of all three. It is tempting to just smush all the nuances here and call myself a longtermist with high discount rate. But I also think I have multiple other disagreements with utilitarianism, so I won't do that.
    • Actually predicting what actions executed today will lead to this better world is really hard. I seem to be experimenting with many heuristics here.
      • In practice, I seem to mainly use some mix of two heuristics to evaluate this - getting fast immediate feedback (usually likes, votes, dollars etc coming from some target audience) and the whole galaxy brain Yudkowsky-style "attempt to predict all major consequences of your actions today all the way to the literal end of the universe".
• Given these three main plans, and these heuristics, here's the short version
  • cyberattack plan
    • The strongest reason to pursue the cyberattack plan is the following.
      • I looked at software developers who turned political activists, and then actually tried to fix big picture political or geopolitical problems in the world, often by inventing some new galaxy-brained plan. The base rate of success of these people is very low. Out of the few people who have achieved some actual success on this, many of them have basically used geopolitical arbitrage. The Internet is global so there are ways to break laws of country A using implicit or explicit help of country B.
      • This mainly includes all the people supporting govt whistleblowers (assange, snowden, securedrop, etc), and all the people breaking financial law (satoshi, vitalik etc).
      • To a smaller extent, I would also include all the people breaking copyright law (bittorrent, anna's archive, etc). I think size of their impact is smaller but still noticeable.
      • To a smaller extent, I would also include all the youtubers trying to break censorship laws, by influencing country X while living in country Y (can't post names but they exist, google them). Typically many of these youtubers don't have a tech background, hence the "smaller extent".
      • To a smaller extent, I would also include all the people breaking drug law (Tor, ross ulbricht, etc). I don't actually know if the impact of increasing international drug trade is positive or negative, and it is small, but it is noticeable.
      • To a smaller extent, I would also include all the billionaires and politicians playing the whole game of trying to enforce using import/export controls in their own country, and then trying to bypass the controls of other countries.
      • See also: Why I love Julian Assange
    • The second strongest reason to pursue this is that some hackers of medium skill are claiming AI is opening new holes, and Zuckerberg is claiming it, and a few others. I am not convinced the hackers of highest skill level are actually claiming this. But also, AI is going to get better, so I can totally imagine this actually opening up in another 1 or 2 years.
    • The strongest reason to not pursue this plan is that personally going and hurting other people's lives feels not great, even if I rationally think it is justified.
      • I could think more on the morality of it, to try and mitigate downsides. But yes, it is pretty clear to me there will be large downsides despite my best efforts to mitigate, and a bunch of this stuff will only get figured out from practice not theory. (This is especially true if what I finally settle down on, is some version of 'attack everyone' not 'only attack altman/amodei/etc')
      • If I work on this, I will have to make my peace with this fact, and move on.
      • I think a bunch of the projects listed above have caused atleast some harm, but also some potential greater good. For instance, atleast some artists have been hurt by torrent, and you can go read their full-time complaints on the internet in response. Atleast some people have been hurt by increased drug access, and you can go read their accounts too if you search hard enough. Crypto has obviously increased the scale at which market manipulation happens, to the point where suicide rates in crypto are a popular inside joke.
      • In these examples, the fact that greater good exceeds harm was justified on mostly libertarian terms, not utilitarian terms. It is justified that increased freedom for everyone is worth some specific harms to specific people.
      • I seem to be going atleast somewhat in the explicitly opposite direction. I want to reduce everyone's freedom atleast a little. I don't think people should be building ASIs or bioweapons or a number of other future weapons in their garage. I am trying to figure out if we can reduce everyone's freedom together, instead of the default which is reducing individual freedom at the expense of the govt becoming more powerful.
    • The second strongest reason to not pursue the cyberattack plan is also above.
      • The base rate of success is actually still very low. The best way to have large political/geopolitical impact is still to become a billionaire or a politician, not to pursue some novel galaxybrain plan that might influence the world but leave you personally not very powerful at the end.
  • blog plan
    • The strongest reason to pursue the blog plan is the following.
      • We actually know of lots of youtubers who have acquired significant political power in the last 5-10 years. (We are yet to see many of them literally enter the election themselves, but they clearly control the votebank regardless of whether they win.)
      • There are also atleast a few anti-ASI youtubers now. If I can figure out even some small indirect way to help them crack persuasion, this could be worth it.
    • The second strongest reason is that I do seem to want to do this.
      • I seem to be in a flow state that is somewhere between passion and neurotic obsession. It would be very easy for me to just let this continue running, and see what happens. It would be a bit harder for me to interrupt flow yet again, just to go start on some new unrelated project.
      • I think Paul Graham is basically correct that writing helps you think. You can see lots of things are not completely wrong, but subtly off when you look at your first writeup. And this keeps annoying you until you actually go fix it. People at lesswrong might call this "carving reality at the joints" or "noticing confusion".
      • I am definitely experiencing this firsthand right now, so it is hard for me to abandon my blog at what feels like a midway point.
  • ads plan
    • The strongest reason to pursue the plan of just building some app or blog unrelated to ASI risk is that lots of people succeed at this every year, these are better understood paths in general, so I will get a lot of good advice.
    • The strongest reason to not pursue this plan is that I somehow seem to completely lose all motivation, when I consider working on something instumentally in this way.
      • Most self-made tech billionaires solve some hard problem in society. I will have to pick some hard problem unrelated to ASI risk, go solve that first, and then use the resulting attention of people I've gained.
      • I don't actually care about solving some other problem for society at large.
    • The second strongest reason to not pursue this plan is it is a two step plan, where both steps are hard and time-consuming, and maybe there's no time for all of this?
      • First there is the hard problem of becoming a tech billionaire. Then there is the hard problem of building an anti-AI political movement, as a tech billionaire. Each of these seem like things that take atleast 5 years, just in isolation.
      • Simply hearing about this plan sounds exhausting. I seem to implicitly assume that building one big project is exhausting, hence building two will be twice as exhausting. But maybe that's not actually true in practice, for people who do this, maybe some people actually enjoy this?
    • The third strongest reason to not pursue this plan is that I am not very convinced ads are very effective at growing a political movement from scratch?
      • I definitely feel this mostly strongly about social media ads, but I also feel this way atleast a little about print ads or billboard ads.
      • I seem to believe that ads mainly only add fuel to fire, after you already have a successful business or political campaign built without one. I'm not very sure about this.
      • If this is true, that means you can't just paste a link to yudkowsky's videos on your website. You have to actually sit and design an anti-AI political campaign that is successful on its own merits, and that is really hard.

2026-02-08

Current projects

• idk

Potential future projects

• Learn hacking.
  • Most cheap cyberattacks are spray-and-pray, and most targeted cyberattacks are expensive. Want to understand why. See also: Low value cyberattacks are spray and pray
  • For now, the goal would just be to understand if I enjoy this and can get good at it quickly. I don't have a lot of money, so I need to figure out some niche in cyberhacking where I can achieve practical results without lot of money.
  • The ambitious end goal would be to cyberattack AI companies and US govt, to leak secrets about them that make them look bad in the eyes of the public.
  • Update (2026-02-06): I seem to have some mild ugh field around this project. The actual ugh field at this point is not even about my internal confusion around morality of this, or fear of being cut off by even more people, it's the fear that I might fail. I actually feel relatively more okay about the social ostracism thing now, compared to earlier. I think fear of failing is not a good reason to stop, and I should just force myself to go work on this inspite of minor ugh field.
• Read and write more about politics on AI risk, for technical audience.
  • For now, the goal would be to myself get more clarity on all aspects of this, be it on morality, on previous protest movements, and so on. After that, the goal would be to rewrite all this in a way that is persuasive to other people working on AI risk, so they follow the plans I endorse.
    • Multiple people have asked me to sit and read history of lots of previous protest movements. I think this is useful, and maybe I will do this. But also, the biggest missing ingredient is sufficiently persuasive leaders. I don't think I can become such a leader.
    • If I can't become such a leader myself, I can't get a lot of power this way. I have to pick a path where I end up atleast somewhat powerful if I succeed.
    • update (2026-02-06) - I seem obsessed with this. But also, maybe I should go read more history and do less zero-to-one thinking. I seem to be hitting diminishing returns on it.
  • I also have spoken to atleast one person (can't say who) who is attempting to persuade people at scale on ASI risks.
    • It is not obvious to me how I can help such a person.
    • The primary advice they need is on how to become persuasive, both on how to be persuasive regarding ASI risk in particular, and how to be persuasive on social media in general.
      • I don't have good advice for them myself, beyond a few posts here on the lessons I learned trying to be persuasive myself.
      • I also don't have the ability to send them content or contacts with good advice. There's a lots of half-decent advice online that mostly lacks empirical backing. A lot of people with really good advice are running their own independent channels. Also, beyond a point, the advice does get somewhat specialised to one's target audience.
    • Apart from this, they just need to automate all other aspects of their work - be it hiring a cameraman or actor or video editor or similar.
      • This way they can spend full-time just getting good at persuasion. This is not that hard for them to do on their own AFAIK, so I don't see why they would need my help. Actually being persuasive at scale on youtube is way harder than figuring out how to hire a good video editor.
    • They might ask for funding, although it's not very clear to me how funding helps them.
      • Funding just helps automate the easy parts of the job (cameraman, video editor etc) so you can figure out the hard part which is persuasion. I am not that convinced that studios with bigger initial budgets will necessarily do that much better compared to studios with smaller initial budgets.
  • I'm unsure how many people in EA/LW spaces can actually be persuaded in good faith, to organise protests or run social media or similar. This is my key uncertainty for deciding how much time to devote to this plan of trying to persuade others in EA/LW spaces to listen to me.
    • Many of the junior people in EA/LW/AI safety spaces seem like people with no principles of their own, and will go for whichever job gets them high pay and status. I should just make money and hire these people, not waste my time convincing them.
    • Many of the senior people in EA/LW/AI safety spaces seem malevolent on purpose. They are well aware that they are colluding with the US govt, and have some vague hope that they will be part of the leadership when ASI does radically centralise power.
    • There are definitely some people who can be persuaded. But it is not clear if I should really invest my time on this.
• Become popular in some way unrelated to ASI risk, and then run ads on ASI risks later. For instance, I could work on some software app (like my discovery / search algo work) or some blog or some youtube channel.
  • I'm still quite unsure on the impact of this path. Conventional wisdom is that ads primarily add fuel to the fire once organic reach is already successful. If your idea is naturally memetic (r >> 1), then ads could help it grow even faster. If your idea is naturally not memetic (r ~ 1), then ads might not help much.
  • As of 2026-01, basically nobody on Earth seems to have a sufficiently memetic framing of the problem of ASI risks. There is no piece of content where I can look at the content and say, "okay, let's spend $100M on social media ads on this content, and boom, problem solved".
  • I can imagine this changing in the near future. Maybe it will be useful to have a platform from which you can signal boost anything, after ASI risks have already become somewhat popular in society, because you can then signal boost that stuff in the future.
  • Ideally I should get more actual data on this. Which political movements or even ideas and products more broadly, actually became successful faster because of large ad spending or large sponsorships? Until I get data though, I am inclined to assume that ads were not the primary reason.
  • I am especially suspicious of ads that target users on social media (using keywords, search history, etc) as opposed to ads that are run with one specific social media influencer who is already very famous.

Probably not future projects

• Anything to do with curating resources, or search engines, or discovery
  • This is a hard choice to make, but I have made up my mind. I will not work on this further. See the retrospective on this for more details.
• Make scary demo of drone use on people in my city, or scary demo of AI sex video chat, both for non-technical audience.
  • See below for why I'm avoiding projects involving persuading non-technical people.
• Make some game or computer art on AI risk, for technical audience.
  • The main issue with this is, doing persuasion at scale only makes sense after you have first been able to persuade a few individuals, which I have not been successful at.
• Experiment more with persuasion via Krashen's input hypothesis
  • for example to immerse potential whistleblowers into cybersecurity / opsec culture, or immerse journalists into AI risk culture, or immerse average people into political news of countries other than their own
• Obtain expert endorsement of some stuff on my website. For example, obtain expert endorsement of my whistleblower guide. Or obtain expert endorsement of my claim that bioweapons cannot be manufactured by small groups of people as of today. (Small groups can only succeed if large actors like govts are obviously stupid in monitoring the academic labs they fund.)
  • I have gotten some real value out of networking, but not enough to justify investing more time in this. I would rather build more impressive stuff first.
• Anything that makes money, but does not directly advance the cause of preventing ASI risk

Timeline

• Independent work until 2026-04-01. After that probably will take job.

Heuristics

My primary heuristic

• Figure out some long-term project where I both enjoy (or atleast tolerate) the process, and value the outcome.
  • I only seem to enjoy political philosophy. But I think studying philosophy probably won't lead to any useful outcome if ASI gets built in next 5 years.
  • Valuing the outcome means it has to be among the highest impact options within my existing worldview.

other heuristics

• All things equal, I will prefer projects I am likely to see more retaliation for, be it social ostracism, finances being cut off, being sued etc
  • Obviously, don't be a rebel just for the heck of being a rebel. But also, I am playing a zero-sum game here, and my opponents running AI companies and govts are highly intelligent and power-seeking. If they retaliate against something I do, it is atleast a medium strength signal that what I am doing is actually working. If they ignore what I do, it is a weak signal that what I am doing is not working.
• All things equal, I will prefer projects where I can get more feedback from reality.
  • So making tiktok reels scores much better on this, than say writing a whistleblower guide.
• All things equal, I will prefer projects that make me personally powerful if I succeed.
  • Acquiring power for its own sake is not my number one priority.
  • However, in practice, if I am too far away from the chain of actions that leads to impact or acquiring power, then it will be trivial for someone else to remove me from that chain later on, thereby eliminating the impact of the project in the first place.
• All things equal, I will prefer projects that don't cause me to interact with people I don't want to interact with.
  • For next few months: Avoid projects that involve lot of interaction with people. Make projects whose audience values either technical knowledge or power.
  • In my life I have generally failed on projects that involve interacting with people, and succeeded at projects that don't.
  • I am almost never able to meet people whose specific priorities and broader priorities in life, are same as mine. I take a little damage from interacting with people whose specific life priorities are unrelated to AI risk, but who broadly value knowledge or power. I take more damage from interacting with people who value neither.
  • This includes people in both offline and online circles. I can deliberately silo myself from both, by avoiding work meetings offline and online, and by logging out of all social media platforms where I have work accounts.
  • Last few months I have interacted with lots of AI safety people online who are misaligned with me, and I learned a lot from it. But now I want to pick my next project to be something I can work on solo.
  • This also makes me maybe a bad fit for working on projects that involve persuading an audience. You can only get good at something if you do it many times, and you can only do it many times if you don't absolutely hate doing it.
  • This means I especially am a bad fit for projects that involve persuading non-technical non-power-seeking audience, although I think persuading non-technical people should be the number one goal of the AI pause movement.

Subscribe

Enter email or phone number to subscribe. You will receive atmost one update per month

Comment

Enter comment