2026-01-19
Who do I respect for trying to fix risks from ASI?
Disclaimer
- Quick Note
- Incomplete. This is an open question I am still figuring out the answer to.
- Contains more emotions than other posts. I might strip out all that once I am more clear what the answer is.
Main
- Is it possible to publish a list of "highest impact career paths" without also saying "people working on these paths are high status, everyone else is neutral or low status for me"?
- If you want some work to happen, you obviously have to assign high status to the people actually doing that work. Doing so will motivate these people to do the work, and to associate with you.
- But do you have to assign low status to everyone not doing this work? Or is it enough to just assign them neutral status?
- Becoming aware of ASI risk has changed my internal status hierarchy a lot.
- Earlier when I looked at communists, I would think - these people are losers. Now I think - unfortunately I have to ally with these people in order to stop ASI. Earlier: low status. Now: neutral status
- Earlier when I looked at people would sit and read blogs all day, I would think - these people are like me, l'd love to hang out. Now I think - these people are just going to sit on their ass all day, they're not going to help me fix the problem. Earlier: high status. Now: neutral or low status
- Earlier when I looked at tech billionaires I saw them as complicated and had a nuanced view. Now I see Altman and Amodei on par with Hitler and Stalin for the amount of destruction they are about to cause. Earlier: neutral status. Now: very low status
- I think when I criticise EA or LW supported career plans, people there are correctly perceiving it as a status attack.
- If you form a friendship or social group based on political/religious ideas, it seems like the number one thing you need to agree on is some status hierarchy to assign to everyone in society. Am I wrong?
- I also think deliberately wielding status and social exclusion as tools can be dangerous. They are powerful and that's one factor for they are dangerous.
- Leftists are often pretty good at using status and social exclusion as tools to further their causes. Cancel culture is a part of this.
- Personal anecdote (sorry about that) - I used to hate online leftists back in class 12 or even 1st 2nd year of college for doing this. Back then I lacked good friends so I was terminally online. What I needed was good friends. What I did not need was people wielding social exclusion as a weapon to further their defective ideology.
- Morally, I think I am okay with subjecting other people to the same thing that I endured, if I believed it was effective and necessary. But I want to identify if it is in fact effective and necessary.
- Obviously rationalist discourse norms are a bad way of building a mass movement. You have to use status in some way. But I am starting to recognise that there may be good and bad ways of using status as a tool.
- One standard answer some people have is to only praise, never criticise. Or atleast never criticise in public. Many social climber types do this. "How to win friends and influence people" recommends this strategy. I consider this answer bad for me. As in, I would literally rather consider suicide than do this, and no this is not hyperbole. I have thought a lot about this in the past. Having freedom to publicly criticise people is a sacred value to me.
- Another standard answer is to pretend that you're representing everyone's interest, while actually screwing over some group or the other. Religious leaders tend to do this. Like "oh look at these people, I feel bad for them, they are misguided, how much better their lives would be if they just followed by ideology instead". It would probably be easy for me to adopt a similar orientation to all the EA/LW people working with US govt or with Anthropic. But I'm not convinced this is the answer yet.
- Maybe I should use rationalist norms on the people with bad plans, and more status-oriented norms on the people with good plans? If someone comes to me with the bad plan of working with US govt or AI company, I will try to find double cruxes and all that shit. (Realistically I am not going to do a lot of 1-to-1 conversations, but atleast my public posts aimed at them could use rationalist norms.) Whereas if someone comes to me with the good plans I already support, like social media and protests, then I will publicly praise them and give them hope and motivation and so on. I'm unsure about this answer too.
- Note to self
- make a matrix, by pairwise analysing what status each major political group in society assigns to every other major political group. sounds similar to the MtG colour wheel.
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