2026-01-04
Update
I'm not sure why I am so harsh on people for taking bad life decisions. If someone is taking a hammer and hitting themselves with it, my natural response is to be kind and try to help them, not moralise on why hitting yourself with a hammer is a bad idea.
Maybe the main problem is that AI risk (and politics more broadly) is a social thing, their life decisions will affect me and vice versa. I really want to shout at people, "your bad life decisions will literally get me killed, you fucker, why don't you get this?" But yeah I don't think actually shouting this at people is likely to get good outcomes.
2025-01-01
Judging people with 10 lakh INR
Disclaimer
- Quick Note
- I have avoided naming anyone in my life here, even very indirectly. I know some people in my personal life could read this post and feel like I am calling them out personally on the internet. My primary goal in this post is not to shame people online, it is to figure out why I am unhappy and work towards fixing that.
- Deliberately being a bit more emotional and less rigorous in this post.
I am atleast a little judgmental of almost everyone in India with atleast 10 lakh INR (and being born and socialised into middle/upper-middle/upper class), for not working on AI risk along with me. This judgment worsens the quality of relationships I have with such people. This note is me trying to figure out why I'm judgmental, and if this judgement of mine is changeable.
List of people I am judgmental of (probably not exhaustive)
- People who value hedonism/consumerism highly, and therefore value making money highly.
- People who value marriage/religion highly, and therefore value making money highly.
- People who are still stuck trying to earn their freedom from parents and others (typically family members).
- People who might atleast somewhat want to improve the world, but give up because they don't believe they can succeed. Therefore they retreat back to one of the above camps but somewhat more nhilist.
- People who want to improve the world, but make bad plans to do so (IMO) because they don't value knowledge and power enough, at an ideological level.
- People who want to improve the world, but make bad plans to do so (IMO) because they don't know anything about AI risk, and remain uncurious even after I tell them.
Why are people this way?
- Many of these people are this way because they have mindlessly copied people around them (typically family and friends) in order to avoid social disapproval.
- My judgement: Beyond a point, I am genuinely confused and unable to relate to such cowardice.
- I understand why an 18 year old is afraid of their parents, I don't understand why a 30 year old is afraid of their parents. I understand it intellectually but I have no idea what it is like living inside their head.
- People here are of either two categories:
- Either they are afraid of their social circle a lot
- Or they are afraid of their social circle a little. But they also care about nothing else in life more, such that putting up with the social disapproval is worth it.
- Both of these make no sense to me. I feel someone by 30 (with above 10 lakh INR) should have accumulated enough life experience to realise they don't want to constantly hang around people they dislike, and also they should have figured something they deeply care about in life.
- (I can relate to the few rare scenarios where even 30 year olds are afraid of physical torture and murder by family members, so I am not talking about those scenarios here. I am talking about scenarios where the bad outcomes end at social ostracism, financial ostracism or a lawsuit.)
- Copy-pasting the views of some youtuber or politician or spiritual leader comes a close second on this list.
- My judgement: I don't have deep understanding of what causes people to follow a single thought leader so mindlessly. Maybe they encounter some personal suffering and latch on to the first source of help they find? I don't know.
- Some of them are this way because they have thought deeply and yet reached one of these conclusions.
- Instances of personal suffering are a major datapoint that shift people's worldviews. Examples below
- Suffering consequences of losing money might update you towards valuing money more.
- Suffering consequences of losing a close relationship might update you towards valuing relationships more.
- Suffering substance addiction might update you towards valuing hedonism/consumerism less.
- Suffering consistent failure on your current life plan might update you towards a new life plan.
- There may ofcourse be deeper political/geopolitical reasons why they are suffering, that they are not aware of or disagree with me about.
- My judgement: This whole cluster of reasons makes me really mad. [1] I have some empathy for people in significant suffering. But most people are not suffering significantly and are too casual about how they form their political views.
- A lot of people seem to form their views of politics/religion based on either bad stuff that happens in their personal life (like losing money or relationships) or good stuff they want in their personal life (like better relationships or more money).
- I think it is bad for the world if you form your religious/political views primarily based on events that happen in your own life, as opposed to events that happen in the government or in society at large.
- Events that happen in your own life give you valuable first-hand information. Most other sources of information are not first-hand and hence the information is atleast a little untrustworthy and a little incomplete in context. That being said, the internet lets you acquire way more information about the world than your own experience. Why aren't you using it? (People with 10L clearly have the free time and educational background required.)
- I might respect such people more if they were honest that their so-called religious or political views are actually opinions about the relationships they want in their own personal life, and they know nothing about the government or about society, or about how to fix problems in either.
- I might also respect such people more if they spent atleast a month of their life doing full-time unpaid research on what are the problems with government. By research I just mean googling and talking to people. Ideally ofcourse you can spend multiple years studying this. (This research should not only be about - what are the problems with your personal life that you expect the government to fix. It should include problems in other people's lives besides yours, that are currently unfixed.) If you claim to be serious about wanting to improve the world as a life priority, I think this is a fair ask of mine.
- Be serious please
- My judgement: In general I seem to respect people more if they are serious about something, and willing to put time and effort into making good decisions about that thing. Political views is an example of such a thing. But honestly, a lot of people are deeply unserious about many major life decisions. What political views they form is just one of many such decisions.
- Some beliefs I have that push towards being serious about life:
- I seem to have a sense that life we live today is a rare gift.
- Life today is the product of billions of years of evolution.
- I find it magic that biological life exists at all, or that a being as complex as a human can exist. The birth and death of stars makes sense to me, at an intuitive level. Chandrasekhar limit or TOV limit does not feel weird to me in the way that the existence of human beings and life in general feels weird.
- Life today is the product of hundreds of years of blood, sweat and tears that other great people have sacrificed on our behalf, so we could have the life we have today.
- We could have been extinct by now due to nuclear war. We could have still been in stuck in pre-Enlightenment levels of disease and child deaths. We could have been living under a North Korea-style dictatorship (and some people still are). Most of us have better lives than this because small groups of people made major sacrifices and took good decisions to get humanity here.
- First of all, I feel gratitude for receiving this gift from these people.
- I especially feel gratitude for those responsible for technological progress.
- You can literally go outside right now and make a list of ten items you see. Then you can spend your whole day researching the series of inventions through history required for that item to even exist, and the international supply chains required for that item to reach your doorstep. [2] People genocided entire populations for the spices you so casually throw away in the dustbin. (I am not saying throwing away food is bad. I am saying things you take for granted were once extremely scarce.)
- Side note: Maybe this generally attitude of worshipping technology is also a factor for why I take AI risk seriously? I find it magic that matrices can speak English, the maybe one thing that separates us from apes. But then I also find it magic that we can pass our thoughts across generations by extracting dyes from plants. I find it magic that we can create cold air by creating a box and then replacing one wall with an airtight piston and pulling it . I find it magic that we can build anything at all at nanoscale precision, be it computer chips or atomic clocks or electron microscopes. I find it magic that we can blow up an entire city with a fistful of dull grey metal.
- Second, I feel atleast some responsibility for passing it on. If I don't steer the future, someone or something else will. The entire future of the world rests of what small groups of people like me do, not just the past.
- I want to transcend my own mortality.
- One day I am going to die. I reflected atleast a little about what I most want when I am on my deathbed. My current best guess for what I want most is for my work to be remembered after I die. I want it to be there in the school history books of 2100. It is not as important to me that they know about me personally. My identity seems more tied into what work I do rather than what my name is or what I look like or even what beliefs I have.
- Taking life decisions primarily in terms of your legacy is more common among the upper class and less common among the middle class. And ofcourse they have way more power to influence the future than we do, unless we climb there too.
- I understand another common pathway to transcend your mortality is to literally build ASI and try to become immortal. Full discussion of that is out of scope of this post.
[1] I might be a bit less mad about it now, than I was when I first wrote about it.
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