Hacker News

> The older I get, the more I get the sneaking suspicion that statements like "the ends don't justify the means" and "violence is always the wrong answer" are, at best, wildly logically inconsistent in any society at any time, and at worst, designed to ensure only a very few people in power can commit violence.

My experience has been the polar opposite: The older I get, the more I've seen people come to completely incorrect conclusions that justify their decisions to harm others. This ranges from petty things like spreading gossip, to committing theft from people they don't like ("they had it coming!") to actual physical violence.

In every case, zoom out a little bit and it becomes obvious how their little self-created bubble distorted their reality until they believed that doing something wrong was actually the right and justified move.

I think you're reaching too far to try to disprove the statement in a general context. Few people are going to say "violence is always the wrong answer" in response to someone defending themselves against another person trying to murder them, for example. I think these edge cases get too much emphasis in the context of the article, though. They're used as a wedge to open up the possibility that violence can be justified some times, which turns into a wordplay game to stretch the situation to justify violence.

This is just a version of individualism vs the state. Much of western society has become increasingly confused about what violence is acceptable, let alone who should be allowed to commit violence, or have a monopoly on violence.

If we can't agree on that baseline, then its quite obvious that we'll continue to have an escalation in the types of violence that we've seen in the past few years, against the political and corporate classes in the US, with very little end in sight.

During WWII, the entire Allied leadership was willing to kill millions of Axis children if that's what it took to win the war and force the enemy to surrender unconditionally. There was at least some genocidal intent. Population centers were intentionally bombed to wipe out civilian factory workers. We can argue about whether that was right or wrong but the reality is that it's probably inevitable once armed conflicts involving nation states escalate to an existential level.

“Before we’re through with them, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell.”

-- Admiral William F. "Bull" Halsey Jr., 1941

> How do people square those 2 ideas?

If you're seriously trying to understand the nuance of the act itself, you should consider reading at what is standard issue for law enforcement and military.

"On Killing" by Dave Grossman is a classic.

If you only want to understand and stay in the realm of politics, I don't think you'll ever find a good answer either way. There's hypocrisy in every argument for or against violence. None of that is on the minds of people "in the shit" at that time. All that stuff comes later. As you're well aware, PTSD is no joke.

What I would take away from this is to recognize all the other ways in which we are compelled to act against our own self interest under what are sold as higher moral purposes.

From that perspective, it's not that hard to see how people can treat violence as just another tool. Whether it works is a question of how much those people value life above all else. If you're surprised that's not always the case in every culture, you may want to study that first.

Even more simply put, if political violence is never the answer and the institution of government is the biggest single source of political violence, what does that say about the legitimacy of the institution of government?

These trite quips act as a way to ensure only the elite ruling class has a justification for the violence they inflict.

Eliezer Yudkowsky has gone so far as to say that it might be ok to kill most of humanity (excepting a "viable reproduction population") to stop AI. If that's not just talk, then this line reasoning only gives you a few possible modes of action. I would not be worried about the people with Molotov cocktails, but I'd be very worried about bio terrorism.

> The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

When the British cavalry came to Virginia in 1781, Thomas Jefferson famously fled the governor’s mansion.

Anyone willing to read that wall of text should also read Yudkowsky's original piece on the topic: https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-no...

The inflammatory conclusion of his 2023 writing was that we need to "shut it all down", escalating to bombing datacenters:

> be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike.

Now that someone who was an open follower of his words tried to bomb Sam Altman's house and threatened to burn down their datacenters, Yudkowsky is scrambling to backtrack. The X rant tries to argue that "bombing" and "airstrike" are different and therefore you can't say he advocated for bombing anything (a distinction any rationalist would normally pounce on for its logical inconsistency, if it wasn't coming from a famous rationalist figure). He's also trying to blame his hurried writings for TIME for not being clear enough that he was only advocating for state-sponsored airstrikes, not civilian airstrikes, bombs, or attacks. Again that distinction seems like grasping at straws now that he's face to face with the realities of his extremist rhetoric.

I found the last paragraph a fairly great summary of a rather long post:

> How certain do you have to be that your child has terminal cancer, before you start killing puppies? 10% sure? 50% sure? 99.9%? The answer is that it doesn't matter how certain you are, killing puppies doesn't cure cancer.

Jeebuz that was long, I only made it through about half of it. But I think he's calling for cold war nuclear treaties style international cooperation. But I believe those mechanisms are broken and unavailable to us for two main reasons:

1. The Western world and especially the US is in the process of destroying the UN and other institutions of international law in order to protect Israel, for reasons that I have tried and failed to understand because the propaganda around it is so dense.

2. The Supreme Court made bribery of politicians legal so now we have AI investors with actual governmental power. All restraint efforts will be blocked by the federal government at minimum for these next 3 crucial years.

That was really fascinating. Thanks.

I find all of this stuff very interesting but nonetheless these two voices sound like they could never win an election and aspire not to. That is the ultimate test of the worthlessness of a policy - it's all equally worthless until it wins an election, and that's what makes it reality.

AI Doomerism versus Accelerationism are both playful fantasies, it doesn't really matter what measurements or probabilities or observations they make, because the substantive part is the policies they advocate for, and policies are meaningless - all equally worthless - until elected.

What am I saying? The best rebuttal is, get elected.

I personally believe quite strongly that some things are just immoral on their face and that I would rather fail/die without using them than succeed/live while using them. I agree that in very many cases where people do these things, they are, in the long run, counter productive, but I also believe that even if could be conclusively proven that this wasn't the case, I would still advocate against their use.

Thanks.

That sentence is constantly repeated, as if it would be some kind of absolute truth. The fact is, for every end, there will be probably some means that are totally justified, and some that not.

I think the original context is: no matter how high, pure and perfect the end is, it does not meany any mean is justified.

I agree, but it's only half of the equation.

Your solution also can't be worse than the problem it solves!

Overly clear example: Killing your noisy neighbors actually achieves the end of a quiet home. But that really doesn't justify it.

Sounds like your fear is not of artificial intelligence but artificial incompetence. That’s a very different position from the AI doomers.

I think that trying to stop AI development is more like trying to stop nuclear weapon proliferation than it is like fixing the ozone hole. I think the difference is that if one country works to fix the ozone hole, that doesn't make the other countries scared that they are falling behind in ozone hole fixing technology and might get conquered or reduced to subservience as a result.

Nuclear weapon proliferation seems to have plateaued recently, but I think that this appearance is partly deceptive. The main reasons it has plateaued is that: 1) building and maintaining nuclear weapons is expensive, 2) there are powerful countries that are willing to use military force to stop some other countries from developing nukes, and 3) many countries have reached nuclear latency (the ability to build nuclear weapons very quickly once the political order is given to do it) and are only avoiding actually giving the order to build nukes because they don't see a current important-enough reason to do it.

Those weapons are still all being developed and would be brought out in any actually existential war where they seemed useful. The agreements would last only as long as the wars were not existential, or as long as the various countries involved believed that use of them, and the resulting retaliation in kind, would be more destructive than not using them. But one way or another, countries still develop them.

China is rapidly building out their nuclear arsenal as we speak, and the USA is undergoing an expensive replacement process of theirs as well.

That kind of idea might have held water in the 90's, but that's not the world we live in any longer.

> Haven't many (most?) countries agreed to nuclear disarmament?

This misses the point. He specifically said the entire world because the point is that someone will develop AGI (theoretically; I’m not making a statement about how close we are to this).

9 nations have nuclear weapons despite non proliferation agreements and supposed disarmament. It’s not enough for most countries to agree not to build nuclear weapons if the goal is to have no nuclear weapons. Same for AGI. If it can be developed, you need all nations to agree not to develop it if it don’t want it to exist. Otherwise it will simply be developed by nations that don’t agree with you.

(Also arguably the only reason most nations don’t have nuclear weapons is the threat of destruction from nations that already have them if they try.)

Cold comfort: AGI will not genocide humanity until it can plausibly automate logistics from mining raw materials to building out compute and power generation.

That's a completely separate point, is it not?

Maybe write it up and post a top-level comment if you think it's a point worth making.

I think it's rather relevant that the community itself rejects the logic you're trying to impose on it. You can straw-man any sort of conclusion on to any sort of philosophy. This will not actually help you much at all if you're trying to predict what people will actually do.

If the only people that reach your conclusion are ones that don't actually subscribe to the philosophy, then it doesn't matter, because no one is actually acting on those conclusions.

And if we want to hold people responsible because others pervert their ideas, then we have to accept that Jesus Christ was a horrific, evil person for preaching "Love thy Neighbor"; just look at the crusades that were somehow the "rational conclusion" of that philosophy!

> It is true that only Yudkowsky gets to say what the rational conclusion of his ideas are. Nobody else gets to speculate. Only the pope of rationalism, because he's the rational one here. See? It's right there in the name!

No, I am saying that Yudkowsky's views are straightforwardly compatible with bedrock principles of liberalism, and the author of the piece fails to acknowledge that compatibility or grapple with them himself. It's not about "rationalism" or who is "allowed" to speculate.

I called it slop because it says false things that have the hallmark of LLM style, e.g.

> The Sequences build the liturgy: a small caste of correct thinkers, epistemically and morally superior, whose rationality entitles them to govern what the rest of humanity is allowed to build. It’s not a safety movement. It’s a priesthood with an origin story written in fanfiction.

>casting himself as an extremist nut, increasing the resistance to his viewpoint in the population at large.

I think the majority of the population at large either doesn't care about what happened or wish that the guy had actually managed to kill Altman. Not even necessarily because Altman is involved with AI, but just because he is extremely rich. I don't imagine any increased resistance from the population at large - the population at large either doesn't mind when rich people are killed or loves it. The exceptions would be people like entertainers who develop a parasocial relationship with the public and provide direct joy to people, but AI company leaders don't fall into that category.

That said, it is true that killing Altman would almost certainly achieve nothing. See my other post in this thread.

Obviously, ineffective action will be counterproductive. I recommend effective action.

I'm not advocating for that, I'm just saying the whole thing is performative and gets taken at face value in a way that it should not be.

If you wanted to be a contrarian concerned about x-risks go try to find $1B to pay Embraer or another minor aviation vendor to make a plane to do stratospheric aerosol injection or something.

---

If you want my diagnosis it is, in a time of lower social inequality cults frequently tried to steal labor and money from a broad base of people.

For instance in the L. Ron Hubbard age Scientology would treat you as a "public" if you had money to take and if you didn't or after you'd been bled dry you would be be recruited as "staff". Hubbard thought it was immoral to take donations without giving something in return so it was centered around getting people to spend on "auditing". Between 1950 Dianetics and the current Miscavige age, income and wealth has gotten concentrated and he changed that single element of the Hubbard doctrine and now it is all about recruiting money from "whales" who donated to the International Association of Scientologists (IAS)

https://tonyortega.substack.com/p/scientologys-ias-trophy-wi...

(A good backgrounder on pernicious cults is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapping:_America%27s_Epidemic...)

In the case of the Yudkowsky thing the mass just doesn't have a lot of money to steal after paying the rent and turning the labor of the unskilled and ignorant (even if they think otherwise) is a case of the juice not being worth the squeeze, so the point is to build a Potempkin village that looks like a social movement that creates a frame where you can get money from sources such as "SBF steals it and gives it to the movement" as well as "rich kids who inherited a lot of money but don't have a lot of sense"

Maybe democracy is fundamentally flawed because the demos is? How should one act in such a situation?

Ah yes, "continue losing."

Go ahead and read Gilens and Page and tell me participatory democracy is working. Until then, expect more of the same impotent condemnations and a refusal to understand the social mechanics producing acts of violence.

> There is no electoral majority behind the AI doomer cult.

how can you be sure? has anyone polled it? are they too scared to poll it?

Ah, yes. Let us spray more sulfates into the air. Let’s fight global warming by poisoning all the waterways and oceans with more acid rain.

That would require global consensus and could ignite wars if there isn't global consensus. Seems very likely that this could have unanticipated consequences that could be worse, but admittedly this is an area I don't really know much about.

I definitely am open to other possible developments and accept that I'm likely wrong just as basically everyone is wrong when predicting the future.

Hell yeah, those look awesome. I look forward to the autonomous versions that don't require fully manual remote operation. It'd be great if coordinators could have like an RTS-style view and command these like they're starcraft units.