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2026-09-27

Why is Yudkowsky so persuasive?

Disclaimer

• Thinking aloud, may not endorse after a lot of thought
• Copy-pasted from other places, so there may be minor issues with flow, formatting, etc

Perspective 1 - target suffering

(I have copy-pasted this entire section from a comment I wrote on Lesswrong)

Copy-pasting from my website:

Study mass movements, political ideologies, propaganda, psychology, therapy, religion, pickup artistry, sales, art/music/dance to figure out how to break the core of people's psychology.

Most effective method is probably to target audiences that are suffering due to fear of death or job loss or relationship loss, and deliver your ideology as a potential solution to their problems. For instance, you can read about how religion helps people cope with death, or about how social left versus right divide polarises the sexual marketplace, or how labour unions organise against job loss. As a more specific example, you can read about how the 60s counterculture in US or the October revolution in Serbia made it attractive to be a rebel.

Weaker persuasion methods include becoming extremely confident and high status (see also: groupthink), and using rituals/music/marches/brand advertising/etc (see also: Krashen's input hypothesis). Memory tests might be useful for persuasion.

Consider persuading people in Taiwan.

Be either extremely honest or extremely good at deception. Do things that ensure you retain high self-esteem.

Lastly, get good at youtube scriptwriting to deliver your ideology effectively, and consider inviting people from GMU. Otherwise make art.

Yudkowsky has in fact followed a lot of this advice, and that is why he is as popular as he is.

• Target suffering - He has talked a lot about his suffering due to childhood indoctrination from religion and from school, his suffering due to having to walk his path completely alone and its effects on his psychology, his suffering due to the world not caring about the same things as him and so on. He has talked about why aging and death are terrible, and how his way of coping with the fear of death is to end death itself.
• Claim high status - He has been shamelessly claiming high status for decades now, and back then it was actually kinda cringe to do it, because not many people respected him. Today ofcourse he is actually respected by many people so it is not as cringe to claim high status.
• Simple beats complex - He invented jargon to make complex ideas easier to remember, transmit and collectively pay attention to it.

The main problem here is that Yudkowsky's memeplex is highly targeted only at young atheist technical nerds, preferably those with bad christian upbringing, preferably those young enough to have not locked in to a career path yet, and so on.

There are many other factions in the culture war, and targeting those people is going to require different memeplexes. In particular, those who are Green or White on the magic the gathering colour wheel (I borrowed this idea from you), are going to feel completely unrepresented by Yudkowsky's ideas. And these people currently form a majority of US and world population.

Perspective 2 - target social dark matter

(Copy-pasted from from my post: Why I am not starting a religion?)

There are many lenses from which I can attempt to analyse this. The lens I prefer to discuss right now is social dark matter - whatever people are not willing to talk about in public is probably what is most important. Listed below are the common categories of social dark matter. I recommend memorising them by heart. This framework is as fundamental to my understanding of human behaviour as something like Maslow's hierarchy.

• death, sex, close relationship conflicts (includes parenting and marriage), morality and politics, money, physical and mental health (includes substance use)

Traditional religions on SDM

Summarised

• Death - Christianity and Islam say attain eternal life. Buddhism says attain englightenment. Hinduism says escape from reincarnation. Hence no fear of death
• Sex - Puritan sexual norms. Prioritise longterm marriage or else a vow of celibacy.
• Close relationship conflicts - Raise children in same religion, prioritise keeping relationships
• Morality and politics - Christianity and Buddhism never permit violence. Hinduism and Islam permit violence on the outgroup under certain restrictive circumstances (which are open to interpretation).
• Money - Not a life priority, keep enough to survive, donate to members of ingroup
• Physical and mental health - No substance use. Prioritise preserving health as instrumental goal.

There are lot of nuances here I haven't tried to understand or explain. If you actually believe a traditional religion, I am not your best source for knowledge on this.

Pro-ASI religion on SDM

Summarised

• Death - Immortality via mind uploading
• Sex - Infinite hedonism, optionally
• Close relationship conflicts - Make digital copies of yourself, not children. Also, maybe you don't need children for legacy if you're immortal yourself
• Morality and politics - Run simulations of various minds in various environments, and use these to solve morality and politics. Convert them both from social science problems into math problems of CEV and game theory respectively. Also absolute dictatorial mind control is now possible.
• Money - Colonise the entire universe to get more resources for yourself
• Physical and mental health - Perfect physical health, including optional upgrades. Infinite hedonism, optionally. Open questions on life's purpose, it's possible IMO that most beings have no purpose in such a world.

I am not sure which of these most motivates people today, but if I had to guess it is probably immortality via mind uploading. This explains for example why Sutton and Schmidhuber, who are both in their old age, are also the most pro-ASI.

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