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2026-02-11 minor update 2026-02-12

Update

• I wrote the original post yesterday (2026-02-10) with barely 12 hours sleep in last 84 hours. I finally got some actual sleep and you have no idea how much better it feels. I think lack of sleep might have made my phrasing a bit pessimistic, but I still endorse all the conclusions I made.
• Conclusions I endorse as of today (2026-02-11)
  • EA/LW and ASI risk
    • I didn't realise the extent to which EA/LW spaces in SF have become low trust, and being exposed to this has hurt me. Like, I always knew at an intellectual level that in professional life people have low trust in each other because ASI risk, and conflicting strategies for tackling it, and also general lack of trust that other people can be given power instead of you personally having the power. All this I already knew. What has now happened is that I've actually managed to network my way into some of these people's lives, atleast online, and get video calls with many people, and I'm realising how this emotionally affects them and me as well.
      • See also: Moxie Marlinspike's heuristic for career advice. "Don't calculate galaxy brain theories of change but just look at the reference class of other people who tried similar things, in-person and up close, to see if this affects their relationships or actually gets them happiness or meaning."
    • I think I need atleast a few high bandwidth connections with people in these spaces. And not just with all the losers sitting back in India along with me. Well okay I don't literally mean losers, but more like, people who aren't ready to do what it will take to actually fix the damn problem of ASI risk. I think there are strong selection effects going on, obviously SF is going to select for the most ambitious people, and obviously Bangalore or Delhi is more going to select for a) people who just want casual relationships because Indian generational trauma or some shit, and b) people who have either burned out from or were never interested in pursuing true ambition. Yes, sorry, that is just yet another judgment I'm making, low confidence opinion.
  • Dating
    • For atleast a majority of people on the date me directory, I still have very low confidence that most of either the hard boundaries or the soft preferences that people are expressing here are things they would endorse on reflection. Like, that doesn't mean I go violate all their expressed boundaries, but also it doesn't mean I trust that what they're doing is good for them. I especially feel this for political preferences (leftists who only want to date other leftists), but I also even feel this for basic dating preferences like "are you kind, emotionally stable, ambitious, etc." All of these words are fugazi and maybe you don't actually understand any of these things well, or who you would actually like, really well. ("You" refers to the person writing down these preferences about themselves.) I also don't really understand all the people who say they want to date someone who has gone to therapy. As a highly ambitious person myself, I found a lot of therapy extremely unhelpful. I suspect most therapy is unhelpful not just for me, but for most truly ambitious people in general. Most therapists are Losers too. My three reference classes for what true ambition looks like are a) becoming a self-made billionaire like Patrick Collison or Paul Graham or similar b) become a politician like Modi or Nehru or Lee Kuan Yew or Trump c) software developers turned activists who then fight against govts or corporations. examples - assange, swartz, snowden, satoshi, stallman, etc etc (it's a long list)
    • I do still think a good solution is to just try to open high bandwidth connections with some of these people, and interrogate them hard to understand where these boundaries and preferences are actually coming from.
    • But also, like, fixing dating life is not my number one priority right now.
  • Morality
    • I am generally someone who reads very widely. But especially so now because of ASI risk, I think desparation [1] of not being able to solve the problem is forcing me to read very widely.
    • I think this is making me read lots of conflicting moral intuitions that different people have, too quickly, and this too is hurting me.
    • For instance, a lot of religious people and a lot of psychologists have intuitions that are against only keeping relationships based on how much (usually financial/political) power you expect to get in return, and towards arranged marriage and community and lifelong relationships. I am actually sympathetic to many of these concerns, but I also think actually taking these things to their natural conclusion means you become a Loser of History. A lot of these people have been consistently losing the fight for power in society for literal thousands of years, and I want nothing to do with a life strategy that has been Losing this badly.
      • Very specifically, I am noticing that a lot of people only value me as a person, as a function of how much power I can get them, and vice versa I also only want to spend time with a lot of people as a funtion of how much power they can get me. This is just capitalism 101, and most people navigate it by trying to build reciprocity and shit.
      • Because I am getting disconnected to almost literally everyone, reading about these things is damaging me.
    • A lot of leftist activists have intuitions that climate change and environmental degradation and capitalism are literally end times, and holy fuck I can't underestimate how naive these people are. "Like, not only are you wrong about climate change and about capitalism, but you're also wrong about the consequences of your own strategy. Suppose you engage in revolutionary social movement to fight existing untrustworthy politicians. If you succeed, your own movement's leaders are going to become the new untrustworthy politicians next. I think this is straightforwardly true of people like Nehru or Nelson Mandela or MLK or whatever. If you replace the Britishers screwing you over with Nehru and Gandhi, you are not allowed to be surprised if Nehru and Gandhi screw you over next. (I don't even want to take the examples of actual leftists coming to power here, because the worst examples are communists dictatorships that kill millions of people). I am not saying this means all revolutionary social movements are bad, but please have some basic awareness that this is what such movements achieve."
    • A lot of silicon valley activists like swartz or ulbricht or whoever, who ultimately justify their work with libertarian-leaning intuitions. I am very sympathetic to libertarianism, but also, some of the solutions I want to implement are explicitly anti-libertarian, and that means I can't fully rely only on the moral intuitions of these people. I also think some (not but not yet all) of these people are also ultimately Losers of History, despite how much courage and ambition they have shown.
    • A lot silicon valley startup founders and billionaires, who basically endorse you become a self-made billionaire. I am somewhat sympathetic to a lot of their writings. I actually think these people are highly intelligent, like, not just book smart, but they also understand how power works - like how to establish trust in an environment of power seekers, how speech creates status hierarchies, and so on. I find it hard to trust their moral intuitions fully too. a) A lot of these people don't believe in ASI is possible soon, which is to me obviously an insane conclusion and tells me "your brain is also maybe broken in other ways and I shouldn't defer to you too much" b) Atleast some of these people either don't understand politics and geopolitics, or they choose not to write (or even talk) about it for instrumental reasons. And because they don't talk about it, it is hard for me to tell whether it's instumental reasons or whether they literally don't know jack shit about it.
    • By far, some of the biggest Losers here are some (not all) of my own irl friends. I only consume substances with them because I find it hard to cope with everything else. As of today my actual reaction to these people is like, I don't know if you are a bad person, maybe you're not. And even if you are, atleast some of you can be forgiven. What I do know is I want all of you people to fuck off from my life as fast as is humanly possible, because I have a much bigger game to play here.
    • I think it is straightforwardly true I need to cut off some (but not all) of my friends here. For others I want more bandwidth to understand them better.
  • Morality of cyberattacks
    • I think I specifically seem to endorse cyberattacks against lots of different people, to open up the world quickly and make it more transparent. I think endorsing these ideas, while also having atleast some sense for how many people I am going to kill or hurt as a result, is directly making me unhappy.
    • In theory, I want blood on my hands. Deontologists and virtue ethicists are obviously Losers, and I need to be atleast somewhat consequentialist. In practice, I am like "holy fuck that's a lot more blood than I initially thought, and this makes me feel worse than I initially thought"

Priorities

• My first priority right now is to go schedule calls with lots of friends, create high bandwidth connections, interrogate them
• My second priority is to figure out some solution to the substance abuse issue. I don't yet know how hard this will be or how long this will take. First priority and second priority are interlinked. I would find it easier to stay sober if I had some actual irl friends who were also sober, and I didn't think all their moral intuitions were broken, and I was able to actually connect with them as people.
• After this I'll think of third priority. My guess is I need to figure out the morality of cyberattack thing, and why my intuitions run so anti-libertarian despite many of the people I truly respect being very libertarian-leaning software developers turned activists. "If something causes you pain, look at it, not away."
• Fixing the dating stuff is lower on my priority list right now. (But also I do need to actually get to it and not postpone it forever. I don't think 'dont try to date for the next 2 years' is a great strategy for me either, because of many first-hand experiences in the past.)

[1] Side Note

• On desparation
  • I think I relate a lot to the kind of desparation that people like Paul Graham and Aaron Swartz talk about. You attack a big problem and it doesn't budge, and you attack ten times more, and it still doesn't budge, and then you need to not lose your own composure or motivation, but go attack it yet again. "When the going gets tough, the tough get going." I want to be like these people.
  • I also relate to the kind of desparation that Marlinspike or Yudkowsky talk about, where you understand a problem is hopeless but you go attack it anyway, because what else is the point of life. Ultimately though, I want to become a Graham or a Swartz, not a Yudkowsky or Marlinspike. Just because none of you fuckers could find solutions to these big picture problems (and let's be real, they are really hard) doesn't mean none exist. I appreciate your honesty in telling me how hard the problem is, and also in your honesty in telling me why you're pessimisic anything can be done. It is important to be honest that you think nothing will work, if you think nothing will work. But also now get out of my way, I am going to take a shot at cracking the problem regardless.

2026-02-10

On judging people, general version

Disclaimer

• Quick Note

Main

• Recently I seem to have one post where I judge people for being too consumerist or hedonist or whatever.
• I seem to have another post where I judge people for being too uninterested in learning about ASI risk.
• I seem to have another post where I notice atleast some women judging me, and noticing myself judging them back in return, in a dating and feminism discussion context.
• I'm starting to realise that there are actually some deeper commonalities across all these situations.

First problem

• I am now fairly confident that one reason I was earlier lashing out at others (atleast online, if not in-person), was that I was personally feeling threatened.
  • Or atleast, I was noticing myself increasingly incapable of feeling connected with others. Then my brain immediately subsconciously reacted violently to me noticing that (because maybe it should? being disconnected from literally everyone for a suffiently long time period basically means I will kill myself). And then my brain was generating implicit assumptions that 'oh, you have to care about this thing along with me too, otherwise I am literally going to get killed'. But not, killed by ASI, but killed by social disconnection.
  • From what I read online, activists in general seem like an unhappy set of people. Like, what I just experienced few days back wasn't at all an unusual experience. (Maybe the combination of substance abuse, and being a judgemental unhappy activist is a little rare, but each of these two problems in separation, is very common in society.)
  • I think having confidence that atleast some set of people will like me no matter what, gives me a lot more ability to tolerate lots of other people disliking me, or there being lot of ambiguity on whether lots of other people dislike me or not.
  • It's only when the number of people that I predict like me starts dropping close to zero, that this really triggers me.
  • I am fairly confident in this prediction, because I have also experienced the same thing many years back in the past, in atleast a couple different contexts.

Second problem

• I said that I might be judging people because I don't understand people well. That is true. But also, I am extremely suspicious that people themselves don't understand themselves well.
  • If you say that you like X, or your boundaries are Y, or whatever, I want to actually probe hard on those claims ten times in, to understand how exactly you came to those conclusions. How do you actually know that? If I show you a counterexample will you actually change your mind on this?
  • I'll give a concrete example. Suppose Alice says that she likes "emotionally mature" people, whatever the hell that means, and decides to romantically reject me, Samuel, based on that criteria. Suppose I find some Bob and introduce him to Alice. Alice agrees at first that Bob is "emotionally immature". But later Alice ends up falling in love with Bob anyway. At the end of this, is Alice willing to be honest with me and say "I am sorry, I confidently made wrong predictions who I like and maybe I pushed you away too soon as a result"
    • (update 2026-02-12 the context in which Alice rejected Samuel matters. I mean, imagine if Samuel self-describes as "emotionally immature" on a date me doc and Alice reads this and rejects Samuel, and Alice and Samuel have never actually met otherwise, and know nothing about each other as people.)
  • Maybe Alice does in fact have some method of predicting accurately who she likes, that I am completely unaware of. But also, I will believe it when I see it.
• I think this is an actual experiment I need to run with lots of people I know atleast somewhat well, in-person or over video call.

Third problem

• You can extend this further to ensuring your relationships last long-term, after initially falling in love or whatever.
• For example, if you say that you want a casual relationship and that this is what will make you happy, how can I trust that this is what you actually want? As in, if we were in a relationship, you won't later become attached and say that you want something long-term.
• On the other extreme, if you say you are ready to unconditonally commit to me for life, how can I trust that you are even capable of this? How do you yourself know that this is possible to do in practice (without ofcourse, ending up stuck in an unhappy marriage for life).
• This increasingly feels to me like an unsolved problem for all of civilisation, it's not just about figuring out your personal preferences deeply. What stressors our relationship will face in future is a property not just of how the two of us behave, but also the external world.

Why am I so suspicious?

• My actual felt sense for this is "something, something, simulations all the way down"
• One way you can approach this is to just do a bunch of hit and trial and then project that experience further. Maybe in the past you fell in love with someone who has green earrings and a love for reading and a liberal leaning and a traumatic childhood. And now you start projecting that oh, probably what you liked most about them is the fact that they loved reading, and therefore you want to find another partner who also loves reading.
• How do you know that it was not the green earrings or the traumatic childhood that caused you to be attracted to them? How did you actually eliminate this hypothesis? Did you even explicitly track these hypotheses in the first place?
• And yes, mind space is very large, maybe the set of people you can feel connected to does not neatly correlate with this one attribute. Have you actually met lots of people who love to read, across lots of different contexts? And have you actually met lots of people who don't love to read, across lots of different contexts? Why do you feel so confident extrapolating from just one or two datapoints? Where is this confidence coming from?
• Another thing people definitely seem to do in practice is to implicitly defer to all sorts of people, when reaching these conclusions. This just creates more simulation levels. You might be deferring to some spiritual guru Mr X on this. And you might neither know why you actually like Mr X, nor whether Mr X's advice has any objective evidence backing it, and so on.

Am I jealous?

• Am I jealous that some people are having lots more sex than me, that maybe they actually enjoy? Or am I jealous that some people actually do seem to understand their preferences way better than I do mine?
• Maybe?
• I mostly just want to figure out what is actually happening here at the object-level first, before letting myself feel all these second-order reactions.

Why am I looking for such certainty?

• I don't actually know
• One reason is possibly that I have gotten rejected multiple times in online context, and I actually find it difficult to track what's going on? Like, most people won't actually give you feedback after rejecting you (which I lowkey understand), and even the few people that do, ugh well let's just say there's a bunch of problems there too, which I maybe can't share online.
• I don't think the online dating stuff was trigger for recent problems I faced though, the immediate trigger was substance use yet again, and a bunch of people irl not taking me seriously enough when I said that no I dont want to continue on this path.
• Maybe it's all of the above? Lots of situations over last few months of me consistently losing track of what the hell is actually going on inside other people's minds, both in professional life and in personal life, both online and irl. So now I almost want to go the other extreme and almost do a police-like interrogation of people lmao. Like, please just cough up as much as info about what's in your head as is humanly possible for you to, and also after that I am going to sit and interrogate you with specific questions, and only then I'll start to believe any of it.

P.S. I realise all the examples I used here were around dating. But I don't think dating is the thing I need to fix most urgently right now. It's more of - why I do seem to be so judgmental of almost everyone who comes near me.

P.P.S. Holy fuck, Habryka was right? When he wrote his recent article called Paranoia, I didn't realise he was literally talking about powerful people inside EA/LW communities all lacking trust in each other. Definitely atleast some of this has rubbed off on me, via a number of interactions I have had 1 to 1. This seems all the more reason why actual high-bandwidth irl connections need to be opened up.

Okay so atleast I do have one clear insight out of all of this. If there are some people inside US and some people outside, all going anti-US, and also various people are at various levels of extremist on the spectrum, then there need to necessarily be high bandwidth channels to be opened between them. That is the only way they can coordinate.

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