2026-03-25
minor edit 2026-05-14
My views on Visakan Veeraswamy
Disclaimer
Main
- This is a stub article and I might or might not expand.
- See also: I will only persuade or criticise the powerful.
- Visakan is not that powerful yet, however I think he has a non-trivial influence on the minds of people who are seriously considering working on ASI risk, and hence I feel compelled to write about it.
- Visakanv is one of my favourite writers on the internet. I like many things about his writings, and am not sharing those here.
- However, I have a strong disagreement with him.
- One of his core claims is "focus on what you want to see more of" or the unstated corrolary "don't focus on what you don't want to see more of"
- Taken to its logical extreme, this basically means you should not fight any zero-sum political battles ever, you should not wage any wars ever. This is obviously an absurd belief. If you think about it for even 60 seconds, you can list out people who started political and social movements and wars that were net good for the world.
- The primary way of solving ASI risk that I am optimistic about, at this point, is a direct zero-sum political battle with the people building ASI.
- If you tell the public to simply ignore that ASI is being built, and do something more "worthwhile", then ASI will eventually get built regardless (with high probability), and everyone will have to suffer the consequences.
- When ASI believers were a tiny group of people in early 2000s, sure, maybe this approach of ignoring them would have worked, atleast for some years. Tiny group needs attention, don't give them attention, this will increase probabibility that the tiny group breaks apart on its own. As of today though, there is too much capital invested towards building ASI, for people building ASI to give a shit about whether you give them attention or not.
- "Facts don't care about your feelings", so to speak. The yield of a nuclear bomb does not depend on your feelings about it. Its yield depends on the math of nuclear chain reactions, it does not depend on whether you feel bored or anxious or excited, or whether you pay attention to it or not. In the same way, the consequences of building ASI depend on the math of what is actually being built (yes it is unfortunate we don't understand this math, but there is a math underlying intelligence).
- I agree with him that doomerism can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Believe that you can change yourself, and that you can change the world, and there is some chance you might actually change the world in response. If you tell yourself you can't change anything, this increases the chances you won't bother to try to change anything.
- I focus my time on the good outcome (mass movement that successfully topples the US AI companies) not the bad outcome (ASI takeover happens, or US AI company CEOs build dictatorship).
- I wish Visakan's claims had more examples, and more importantly, counterexamples backing them.
- I understand that when you are at the frontiers of knowledge, historical anecdotal data counts for only so much. That being said, if you are going to quote historical data to back your case, I think it is fair only if you quote enough examples and counterexamples. I don't want to make strong claims on how Visakan should or shouldn't live his life, but I do want to say that I would find his claims a lot more persuasive if they were backed more rigorously.
- I think he is making many claims that are Big if True, and hence I think this would be valuable work to do.
- See again - my disagreement above. Maybe he doesn't want to use counterexamples on purpose. I don't know.
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