Post #1151213

2026-04-14 22:22 UTC

Eliezer joins the trend of condemning “political” violence with confidence on the far end of the dunning-kruger curve: lesswrong.com/…/only-law-can-prevent-extinction I’ve already mocked this attitude down thread and in the previous weekly thread, so I’ll keep my mockery to a few highlights… He’s admitting nuke the data centers is in fact violence! It would be beneath my dignity as a childhood reader of Heinlein and Orwell to pretend that this is not an invocation of force. But then drawing a special case around it. But it’s the sort of force that’s meant to be predictable, predicted, avoidable, and avoided. And that is a true large difference between lawful and unlawful force. I don’t think Eliezer has checked the news if he think the US government carries out violence in predictable and fairly avoidable ways! Venezuela! The entire lead up to Iran consisted of ripping up Obama’s attempts at treaties and trying to obtain regime change through surprise assassination! Also, if the stop AI doomers used some clever cryptography scheme to make their policy of property destruction (and assassination) sufficiently predictable and avoidable would that count as “Lawful” in Eliezers book. If he kept up with the DnD/Pathfinder source material, he would know Achaekek’s assassins are actually Lawful Evil The ASI problem is not like this. If you shut down 5% of AI research today, humanity does not experience 5% fewer casualties. We end up 100% dead after slightly more time. His practical argument against non-state-sanctioned violence is that we need a total ban (and thus the authority of state driving it), because otherwise someone with 8 GPUs in a basement could invent strong AGI and doom us all. This is a dumb argument, because even most AI doomers acknowledge you need a lot of computational power to make the AGI God. And (violently) slowing down AGI might buy time for another sort of solution. Statistics show that civil movements with nonviolent doctrines are more successful at attaining their stated goals Sources cited: 0 One of the comments also pisses me off: Which reminds me about another point: I suspect that “bomb data centers” meme causal story was not somebody lying, but somebody recalling by memory without a thought that such serious allegation maybe is worthy to actually look up it and not rely on unreliable memory. “Drone strike the data centers even if starts nuclear war” is the exact argument Eliezer made and that we mocked. It is the rationalists that have tried to soften it by eliding over the exact details.

Replies (5)

@YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 2026-04-15 03:46

This feels somehow tied to the whole “agentic” thing I’ve ranged about previously. Like, individual acts of violence are strictly destructive because the people doing it aren’t sufficiently “agentic” to change things, even though American history is full of cases where (usually racist) vigilante violence had a huge impact on people’s decision-making. But when the government does it it’s different because people in government got there by proving their agency and ability to actually impact the world. Like, it feels almost like he’s offended that the NPCs might try and do something as drastic as killing someone without GM permission. Meanwhile in reality, people legitimately do feel like they don’t have a lot of options to protect themselves from the real harms this industry is doing, to say nothing of the people who buy his line about the oncoming class-K end-of-life scenario. Anger is an appropriate response to the circumstances we find ourselves in, and in a nation that has been quietly cultivating a culture of heroic violence for decades we shouldn’t be surprised to see people trying to inflict that fear and rage upon the outside world.

Open ##1154580
@Soyweiser@awful.systems 2026-04-15 06:19

But it’s the sort of force that’s meant to be predictable, predicted, avoidable, and avoided. And that is a true large difference between lawful and unlawful force. Remember the cartoon of the bombs being dropped on people and the people going ‘I hear the next bombs will be sent by a woman’, this but ‘with lawful force’.

Open ##1156289
@fullsquare@awful.systems 2026-04-15 08:00

eliezer misses that (as used in civil rights era) nonviolence is effectively a sophisticated propaganda strategy that takes existing injustices and violence and uses it to bait opponent into attacking you, all while your own people take photos and show to entire world carefully crafted messaging that appeals to general public conscience. the messaging part is extremely important in this. there’s no fucking way this could work for him because his cause is comprehensible only to those who already buy his cult messaging as ground truth. he’s in just for the moral superiority of being nonviolent. he’s never gonna get it because comprehending it requires touching grass

Open ##1157312
@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-04-15 21:21

Yud says so much, and its often so confusing, that I think a lot of his followers don’t know his main messages. It used to be orthodox that you cannot have a two-faced message any more without each audience learning what you say to the others, but that assumed you were a good communicator aiming at a mass audience. Yud has strange views about legal responsibility: Anthropic Claude Mythos is already a state-level actor in terms of how much harm it could theoretically have done – given its demonstrated and verified ability to find critical security vulnerabilities in every operating system and browser; and how fast Mythos could’ve exploited those vulnerabilities, with ten thousand parallel threads of intelligent attack. Mythos hypothetically rampant or misused could have taken down the US power grid, say… at the end of its work, after introducing hard-to-find errors into all the bureaucracies and paperwork and doctors’ notes connected to the Internet. But if you release a virus and it infects people, we don’t hold the virus responsible, we hold you. If you build a car and it explodes when it gets rear-ended, we don’t blame the car, we blame you.

Open ##1170821
@blakestacey@awful.systems 2026-04-16 05:58

It would be beneath my dignity as a childhood reader of Heinlein and Orwell Life is too short to be that pompous

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