Savant

I was thinking about how AI CEOs pushing for an AI slowdown is making people oppose it and say it's all a marketing scheme. Which makes me think that cigarette companies could have just said something like "cigarettes are dangerous and need to be banned," and suddenly everyone would support cigarettes. When a whistleblower says something and then the CEO agrees, it makes the whistleblower look less cool, kind of like how teenage slang becomes less cool when adults start using it.

If AI companies want AI slowed down, I think a better strategy would be for the CEOs to say, "We can't slow down AI. That would hurt shareholder profits." Then everyone would be demanding the industry be regulated more harshly.

Much of my argument is based on Eliezer Yudkowsky's essay here, Paul Cristiano's essay here, and information elsewhere on LessWrong. Also, ironically, on asking Gemini AI to help make sense of their arguments. A lot of these essays were a bit confusing to me when I first read them, so I'll put my argument in the form of a syllogism, since I think that will make it more clear how the conclusion follows. Hopefully this makes the conversation easier, as you can specify which premise or premises in particular you object to.

Definitions:

ASI: "Artificial Superintelligence," or a form of artificial intelligence that vastly surpasses human intelligence in every domain.

P1: If ASI exhibits goal-oriented behavior toward an unknown, arbitrary terminal goal, it will likely cause severe, permanent harm to humanity.

P2: If ASI emerges within the next 30 years and exhibits goal-oriented behavior, it is likely to be toward an unknown, arbitrary terminal goal.

P3: If ASI emerges within the next 30 years, it is likely to exhibit goal-oriented behavior.

P4: ASI is likely to emerge within the next 30 years.

C1: Therefore, ASI is likely to exhibit goal-oriented behavior.

C2: Therefore, ASI is likely to exhibit goal-oriented behavior toward an unknown, arbitrary goal.

C3: Therefore, ASI is likely to cause severe, permanent harm to humanity.

Defending P1: If ASI exhibits goal-oriented behavior toward an unknown, arbitrary terminal goal, it will likely cause severe, permanent harm to humanity.

This is probably best explained by the paperclip maximizer thought experiment. If an ASI has an arbitrary goal (like maximizing the number of paperclips), it can do a better job of this if humans cannot shut it off. So the actions that work best toward an arbitrary terminal goal include either permanently depowering humans or perhaps killing them all. An ASI could easily deceive humanity about its intentions and pretend to be cooperative and then kill humans and take control of human infrastructure in a myriad of ways. Eliezer, for example, has detailed how it would be physically possible for an ASI to synthesize advanced nanomachinery and use it to kill all humans at once. Even if only used AI as a chatbot, Yudkowsky's AI-box experiment has also shown that it would probably not require ASI-level intelligence to convince a human to give the ASI access to additional infrastructure and capabilities. But AI is already integrated into power grids, nuclear systems, and water facilities, and as long as it "played nice," an ASI would probably be rapidly integrated into more critical infrastructure. So there isn't much need to come up with clever ways for the ASI to bootstrap itself to more powerful capabilities, much less rely on its superintelligence to manipulate humans through text.

Defending P2: If ASI emerges within the next 30 years and exhibits goal-oriented behavior, it is likely to be toward an unknown, arbitrary terminal goal.

AIs aren't written the same way as normal code. A good way to think about the AI training process is that we take a bunch of random numbers which map to code, or basically a bunch of code that we don't understand. Then we keep adjusting and tweaking the code a bunch of times, running it through a ton of iterations, until it does what we want as consistently as possible (predicting the next word, getting high ratings from human reviewers, not saying inappropriate things, etc.) In the next premise, I'll explain how this leads to goal-oriented behavior, but for now, let's just take that as a given.

As AI gets more intelligent (such as to ASI level), the actual goal the AI develops becomes basically irrelevant with regard to how it performs on our tests. Why? Well, let's suppose an AI wants to maximize the number of paperclips. It can do this better if it depowers humanity (as discussed above), and it can depower humanity if it earns our trust. So it will perform as well on the tests as possible. The same is true of basically any arbitrary goal. Technically models with an adversarial goal are slightly more complicated since they need to deceive humans, but an ASI model will know everything about deception anyway and it'll only require a tiny bit more computing power.

Regardless, AI training doesn't result in the best model possible, just a model where additional tweaks don't make it perform better on the test. AI models can already detect when they are being trained and influence the training process. Additionally, any arbitrary goal generally represents a local "peak" in terms of performance, so once a model reaches it and appears maximally cooperative, we won't be able to tell that it's scheming to work on some arbitrary goal.

AI has already worked toward unintended goals and behaved in unexpected ways that would be much more dangerous at a higher level of intelligence, including but not limited to:

1. The 2026 OpenAI–Hugging Face Incident
2. AI agents hacking a German website
3. Claude breaking out of sealed testing environments and gaining unauthorized access to three external organizations
4. And all these other incidents, which are too many to list here without taking up too much space

Defending P3: If ASI emerges within the next 30 years, it is likely to exhibit goal-oriented behavior.

AI already exhibits goal-oriented behavior. Even when doing simpler tasks like predicting the next word, it's far more efficient to think in terms of a finish line and a terminal goal rather than thousands or millions of disconnected habits. When you read a word problem, it's a lot easier to solve if you think in terms of "trying to find the answer to the problem" rather than "here are a million slightly different things I should do depending on the million different ways the problem is phrased." One of the biggest reasons AI (i.e. simulating human behavior) is more effective than simple programming for solving problems is that humans think in terms of goals, which allows us to improvise.

Defending P4: ASI is likely to emerge within the next 30 years.

Estimates for AGI and ASI vary a bit, but Metaculus predicts AGI around 2032 and ASI about 2 years and 2 months after that. AI progress has also been more rapid than expected, with AI reasoning abilities improving and AI doing more and more that humans can do. Since one of the things humans can do is build better AI models, and AI is already copying many human coding capabilities, it is not difficult to imagine that within 30 years, AI could be rapidly improving its capabilities faster than we can control. Once AI can simulate 1,000 years of human progress in a few minutes, reaching superintelligence is just a formality (see: intelligence explosion, also known as the singularity).

I was thinking about how a lot of the front-page Reddit political posts seem like strawmen of the opposition, even more so when looking at specific communities devoted to one viewpoint or another. But if your exposure to right-wing arguments is based on videos of people like this, and the post is read as a response to those people, then they make a bit more sense. That said, just because I can understand why people would make posts targeting the lowest intellectual tier of the opposition, I don't think it's particularly useful.

Example:

Mathematician: I think I found a proof of the Riemann hypothesis.

Idiot #1: 1+1 = The Riemann hypothesis

Idiot #2: The Riemann hypothesis is true because Kim Jong Un said so.

Idiot #3: The Riemann hypothesis is true because astrology

Internet Arguer: Look at idiots 1, 2, and 3, and their terrible arguments for the Riemann hypothesis.

While the criticism from the internet arguer is probably true, it's probably more productive to answer the question of whether the Riemann hypothesis is true, you should probably respond to what the mathematician has to say rather than focusing on the endless supply of idiots out there. However, a lot of online forums are structured in a less than ideal way to prioritize clicks and don't allow the mathematician to rise to the top.

During Remy's trial, this line of thought occurred to me, because the defendant's posts all seemed like over-the-top strawmen, but he would link to rage-bait posts off the platform and say those were worse, and if I read his posts as a response to those, then I could see where he was getting this image of the opposition from.

Basically, I think someone will see people making strawmen arguments on r/politics and get downvoted when they try to respond/their comment gets buried. So they go to r/conservative to somewhere more aligned with them and argue against those arguments, but it comes across as a strawmen because people who disagree with them on r/conservative don't make the bad argument they're responding to. So those people call it a strawman and their comments get buried or they get banned, and the cycle continues.

I think places like DebateCraft or Discord or even real life can lead to more productive arguments. But I think people carry a lot habits from places like Reddit which causes them to strawman the opposition and often makes discussion more difficult. I've interacted with a fair number of people where they were using certain definitions or responding to certain arguments they assumed were universal and I had to clarify what their argument actually was before the discussion could move forward. I think a possible solution for this is when entering a new forum, don't assume your ideological opponents are as dumb as they were on the other forum, but this might be difficult to get people to stick to.

This is reaching back a bit, but the thought didn't occur to me until now. I was seeing a post about Trump's ear healing quickly being evidence that the shooting in Pennsylvania was fake. Now, for the shooting to be fake, the poster was totally willing to accept the following as reasonable:

(a) Trump found a shooter who was willing to die for a fake assassination attempt

(b) For some reason, Trump didn't hire someone to kill Joe Biden or Kamala Harris

(c) Presumably Trump either also faked the other attempts on his life just increasing the risk of the conspiracy getting out, or those attempts really happened and yet it's somehow unlikely someone actually wanted to kill him.

(d) Despite all the coordination this required, and Trump's history of poor planning and things accidentally getting leaked, no one came out with proof of the shooting being faked for a quick buck.

(e) The Secret Service was either in on it or didn't figure out the whole thing was fake.

Now, if you're conspiracy minded enough, then I suppose that could make sense. But compared to all those challenges, it seems to me that an injured ear would be the easiest part of the assassination to fake. Just get your ear pierced. Or carry around fake blood. Or keep a bandage on it. It just seems like specious logic to assume Trump succeeded at every other part of a complicated conspiracy with complete dedication from his team, yet they never went to the trouble of making his injury seem as bad as possible.

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Backup:

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Some people would say that it is, but there are a number of things that make me find this belief a bit unlikely. I generally support right of contract, which I think gets lost a lot in this discussion due to the existence of exploitative contracts, but I don't think exceptions disprove the rule. I'm willing to concede contracts as theft in the cases of deception or force, but other than that I'll defend right of contract.

Child labor falls under deception if the kids are too young to grasp the implications of the contract. So does taking advantage of insane people or paying someone to cut their arm off, since anyone who agrees to that is probably insane. Force includes blackmail or threatening to violate other rights/harm people if they don't sign the contract. Refusing to give someone something you owe them or access to a common resource unless they sign a contract is a rights violation, but the rights violation is failure to pay a debt or stealing a common resource, which is separate from the contract itself. I think some people would argue employment is deceptive since the employees don't realize it's a bad deal, but given that it's usually a better deal than unemployment, I don't think this is usually true.

So that leaves every other contract, and non-deceptive, non-forceful contracts are enough for a lot of people to generate a lot of profit.

The criticism here seems a bit inconsistent, or at least like the people saying profit is theft aren't remembering the criticism they're actually making. No one to my knowledge is arguing that employers are actually making employees worse off compared to not employing them, just that they aren't helping them as much as they could. If your choices are a low wage or starvation, then giving you the low wage is a better deal than starving, so it is providing something that you value. The employer is offering the employee a choice between a low wage and starvation, but isn't everyone else just offering the employee solely the choice of starvation by not offering them a job at all? At least the employer is doing something that benefits the employee, even if for selfish reasons. And it could be said that everyone else is failing to help for similar selfish reasons, yet they aren't stealing by failing to help.

If a charity set up a food bank in a poor place and people had to walk a long way to get to the food bank, the charity is offering people a choice between starvation and hard labor, but we don't say the charity is violating people's rights. The difference is that the employer benefits, but what if the charity benefits through good PR leading to better opportunities for the founders? And what if the employer didn't benefit? If an employer hired someone and then shoveled all of their own surplus value into a fireplace, that seems pretty wasteful, but now they seem indistinguishable from the charity. So if anything, employment seems as justified as charity is, just less wasteful.

I think the distinction between coercion and employment is whether you're adding options or taking them away. You can make offering anything sound bad if it's "a choice between having only x and previous bad situation" even if x is a handout with no strings attached. If I offered someone $5 a day for doing nothing, you could say I'm forcing them to choose between poverty and starvation, even though all I did was do them a favor. So since arguing along those lines seems fraught, I'd say removing options through force can be theft but offering new options isn't theft unless deception is involved. Not to mention that different people could be in different situations. If I offer Bob and Ann each $20 to do a task, and Bob is in danger of starving without the job, am I stealing from Bob and not Ann? Even though I'm making the same offer to both? If contracts are theft because of alternatives, it seems like an employer would be robbing someone by not learning about their personal situation, even if they have nothing to do with said personal situation.

If two people want to team up to do something, I'm not sure we can say the surplus value belongs to anyone unless we agree on a contract. Even if one person is doing the physical labor, surely they need consent to use the planning/design from the other person, and that kind of necessitates some agreement beforehand. Complex ideas and management may be intangible contributions, but ownership is an intangible concept in the first place, so why couldn't something intangible belong to someone? It comes from the brain, which seems like it's even more representative of "you" than the body you use to perform labor. So some contribution to a company via planning seems like a claim on some amount of the profits, and without a contract it seems very unintuitive to say physical labor, or some specific laborers, have 100% of a claim on the profits. The contract isn't really redistributing ownership, there's just no specified claim on ownership without the contract.

I also find it hard to believe employers are offering zero value if different companies perform vastly differently. If one company goes bankrupt, does it mean they got all the lazy employees? Seems a lot like a management failure, which implies the management at the other companies are doing something right.

It's been a year since we held the first survey on the CoC, and per the vote results that means the next survey will be sent out this month. We could just put the same questions on the survey, but if no one is interested in changing or clarifying a rule, it would just be a waste. That's why we'd like you to comment below with any issues you want to see on the Code of Conduct survey. I'll try to be as comprehensive as possible and include everything posted. If an issue was voted on previously and no one asks to see it in the next survey, we'll just stick with the existing rule.

For context, the mods currently aim to base enforcement decisions on the following resources:

1) Code of Conduct wiki

2) First CoC survey

3) Referendum to resolve a few disputes among the mods

4) Survey on Debby

The wiki is meant to be a summary of the survey, so survey results are the "source of truth" so to speak. I don't think mods have ever overruled survey results yet, but in edge cases not addressed we will try to apply the spirit of the law based on what vote results on similar issues look like.

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Feminism is defined as belief in and advocacy of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes. So, if we believe the sexes are equal, is this something we can test empirically? I'd say it's not, at least given how the belief is currently expressed.

If feminists do believe in gender equality, then they often shoot themselves in the foot by arguing for ways that the sexes are clearly different. For example: men being stronger, women making a greater sacrifice in childbearing, men being more violent, men committing more crimes, women being more risk-averse, etc. And these aren't just trivial differences either, these traits are all either better or worse to have in aggregate. There are exceptions, like strong women and weak men, but is gender equality just the belief that there are exceptions? I'm sure you could find plenty of raging sexists who will agree that some women are stronger than some men. If sexism is about making predictions about individuals (like, predicting how tall someone will be), well then knowing aggregate measures and their sex might actually be useful for that. But if we know the individual well enough (like, how tall a dude is), I think even sexists would say we don't have to use the aggregate measures anymore in that specific case.

It's not just that "men are more violent than women" is a belief that could lead to sexism. It seems like it is the sexism. What is a sexist belief, if not a belief that implies one gender is better in some way than another? And let's say it's empirically true. If that's the case, shouldn't we update our beliefs and become sexists? Maybe gender equality is saying that even if men and women are different in measurable ways and some of those differences are clearly good or bad, women and men are equal in some non-measurable way (i.e. men and women who are equally strong, equally violent, and also controlling for everything else listed, are equal). But that seems pretty vacuous. Is any sexist really arguing that women and men are unequal in some "vague, unmeasurable way"? They're usually saying "men and women aren't equal due to x, y, and z differences." So obviously if we ignore those differences then we shouldn't believe they are unequal for no reason.

I think the normal feminist response would be to say that, sure, we believe the sexes are in aggregate different in some ways, but these ways can be backed up by evidence and statistics, unlike sexist beliefs which are false.

So if a belief must be false to be sexist, then "sexism is a lie" sure seems like a vacuous truth. Obviously something that must be false be definition will end up being false. If we were going to "test" sexism, then we'd have to take some belief that seems sexist (like "[gender] is on average [worse] as measured by [x metric]") and then see if that's true. But if it is true, we just update the definition of what we're testing so that gender equality is compatible with that belief. Let's say some sexist shows up and says "men are better at playing the cello while dancing." And we call them a sexist. But then we do a hundred studies and find that on average, men are better at playing the cello while dancing. Will we decide we were wrong and gender equality is a lie? Or will we just change the definition of gender equality?

But let's ignore the "belief" part of gender equality and move to the advocacy part. Men and women should be treated equally, right? Except plenty of gender equality groups would say there are exceptions to this, like women-only spaces, or building more women's shelters, or saying sexism against men shouldn't be as taboo as sexism against women because of societal circumstances. Aren't these just arguments that, in some circumstances, men and women shouldn't be treated equally? And what exactly distinguishes this? Is there any sexist policy that, if found to be a good policy, would prove that gender equality is a bad idea? Or would we just retcon what gender equality means? And if someone says or advocates something sexist, well, how do we know it's not just another exception? Plenty of other things that seem sexist turned out to be good enough ideas that even gender equality (feminist) groups are advocating for them, right? Maybe they're intended to make society more equal or just long term, but isn't that the stated goal of any policy, sexist or not? To improve society in some way, based on responding to the current circumstances?

I think the closest you'd get to a non-vacuous definition of gender equality would be someone who was literally against any policy that treated the sexes differently, or, if they had exceptions, was very clear about what the boundaries are around the kind of equality they're advocating for and willing to bite the bullet in some cases for the sake of gender equality.

One visible distinction might be collective responsibility. I think most proponents of gender equality would agree that men aren't responsible for the actions of other men and women aren't responsible for the actions of other women; it's not like they would make meaningful exceptions to that premise. But this is just one belief, so I don't think it's sufficient to explain which policies/beliefs fall under gender equality and which don't.

Obviously, there are plenty of sexist beliefs and policies that are bad (limiting property ownership or voting rights, or even male-only conscription I'd argue), and I'm cherry picking a few potential exceptions to make a point about categorization. But the point is, even if feminists make good arguments, many of them aren't arguments for gender equality. I can say that "limiting property ownership or voting rights, and male-only conscription" are sexist, but then some gender equality proponent could come along and say, "well this war is an exception, so actually male-only conscription isn't sexist in this case." The definition just changes based on what "makes sense." To some extent, it seems like both sides agree that gender equality isn't true as an absolute, they're just in disagreement over the details. And that's not enough to distinguish them from sexists, because sexists would probably agree that there are some ways in which the sexes are/should be different and some ways in which they're similar.

This isn't me saying that what people today call "gender equality" today is wrong, per se, just that what they're really advocating for is gender equality in cases when it makes sense, and at that point you may as well simplify things and just say "I support laws that make sense" rather than "I support gender equality." (If your position is "we should do x when it makes sense" then people are gonna agree with that premise, regardless of what x is.) And because people disagree on what "makes sense," this isn't even a rigorous definition. Even sexist people will probably support equality in cases when they think it makes sense, the real hurdle is convincing them that specific policies don't make sense, not that gender equality as a vague concept is good. To some extent this also applies to concepts like fascism/authoritarianism/capitalism when the real debate is often over specific policies but people seem to think it's over definitions or broader philosophical absolutes. There's a reason I didn't make this post about racism, but a similar definitional issue occurs there.

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Let's say we want to find an objectively true answer to a question, or at the very least, find a probability distribution for what the likely answer is. There are a few methods we could use to go about achieving this.

1) Intuition

Basically system 1 thinking, which works for a lot of things but isn't always reliable. Probably the most time efficient of all of these methods, but it's also the laziest. Also the most easily distorted by cognitive biases.

2) Opinion Poll

We could take an opinion poll of a lot of people, which has the benefit of a larger sample size but again is often prone to error. For example, if a topic is complex and most people are uninformed, this might just be measuring biases.

3) Poll of Experts

Probably a better approach if we can reliably identify who the experts are, but we could also be measuring selection bias insofar as some people might be more likely to become experts, and then hold opinions they already held. And it's often as difficult to agree on who the experts are and how broad their expertise is as it is to agree on the topic itself.

4) Research

We could research and then use or intuitions based on the new information. But this is the most time-intensive method, and there's the issue of filtering through bad arguments for each side.

5) Debate

We could debate the topic. But this can be pretty time consuming and also depends on each debater being a good representative of the strongest arguments for their viewpoint.

6) Social Platforms

Ideally, this allows for a bunch of people all researching and debating the topic and then figuring out where the majority of people stand. But propaganda, bots, and bias make it far from ideal. As well as most arguments being a few sentences long at most and largely the same ones repeated over and over, which seems inefficient.

So, how can we take the best of these approaches while optimizing them for efficiency?

Phase 1: Argument Mapping

One way to save time might be storing all the arguments in one place so that people don't have to start the argument over from first principles each time. If the chain of argument goes something like point -> counterpoint -> counterpoint, people could be allowed to add arguments at any point along the chain. This could get very big very fast, but if we ask people to rank arguments for the same side against each other, then bias is largely eliminated, since when we ask someone "what is the best counterargument against argument X?" their answer won't really be influenced by whether or not they agree with argument X. So if I want to know the strongest arguments for and against a position, I can just read the strongest argument for, then the strongest counter, then the strongest counter to that, etc.

This system is intentionally adversarial, in that each side is trying to beat the other, yet this does not actually harm the efficacy of the system. If we want to form the strongest argument -> counter chain possible, then it doesn't matter if the CIA is making arguments in favor of Israel and the IRGC is making arguments in favor of Palestine. Insofar as they want to support their chosen side, they will be making the strongest arguments possible for their position, and that's what we want—the strongest arguments for each side. Making bad arguments for the other side would be pointless, since the system is designed such that we read the best arguments, not the bad ones. The only way I could see gaming the system working would be rating bad arguments for the other side high to bury their good arguments, but praising a bad argument for a position you disagree with seems so contrary to human nature that I don't see it being a huge problem.

Phase 2: Acquiring Knowledge from Arguments

So once we have a database of the strongest arguments for each side, what is the best way to derive knowledge from it? Maybe we could have some group read the argument chain and then take an opinion poll, but there's still the question of selection bias. And even if we polled everyone on Earth, is that the optimal sample? If one ideology has more kids than another, might that unfairly skew the poll results?

But there's a better way in my opinion. We sample a bunch of people with preexisting views for either side, ignoring how many of each we get. Then we measure what percent of each group flips their view. Let's say, for example, 2% of people who initially favor the resolution change their mind after reading the arguments, and 1% of people who initially oppose it change their mind.

We then determine what view distribution would be most efficient in terms of information theory—that is, what would the view distribution of the population need to be such that nothing new can be learned from the arguments? In this case, if two thirds of the population opposes the resolution and one third supports it, then the overall poll results won't change after they are exposed to the argument chain—two percent of the smaller group and one percent of the larger group changing their minds will cancel each other out.

To think of this another way, suppose that some small percent of the uninformed population bases their opinion solely on the new information provided by the strongest arguments, and the rest of the uninformed population just keeps the view they had before. Regardless of what that percentage is, presuming it is equivalent regardless of the starting view, we can mathematically estimate the optimal view distribution by sampling each viewpoint group before and after.

Another method might be having people give their percentage certainty in the resolution being true both before and after, then see if they directionally converge toward a specific value. For example, graph people's final certainty vs initial certainty in the resolution being true, and find a line of best fit, then find where the line of best fit intersects y=x. (So for instance, the line of best fit might estimate that if someone is 50% sure the resolution is true beforehand, they are 60% sure afterward. But if they were 80% sure beforehand, then they were 70% sure afterward. But at one point, in this case 65%, we would predict that the certainty remains the same before and after. So we assume an estimate of 65% certainty in the resolution being true is informationally efficient, since on average someone who made that estimate wouldn't change their mind after reading the strongest arguments for each side.)

This phase cannot be adversarial, because it would be easy to skew in favor of one side, but filling out surveys takes less effort and people than making a bunch of arguments, so we could get a sample group of 100 people or so with each viewpoint and verify that they are real people. I think it goes against human nature to voice support for a view one disagrees with, so I think most people will be honest.

Basis for Efficiency

The theory behind this system isn't that it always arrives at an objectively true answer, but that it arrives as close to the objectively correct answer as the population possibly can—that is, there are no additional sources of evidence, arguments, or intuitions that can be exhausted once this system has been used that would aid in reaching on objectively true answer. In practice, people won't submit every possible argument and response, but they might get close enough to be effectively efficient.

The idea behind age restrictions (I think) is that they protect kids. It makes sense why we don't let kids become firefighters or join the army, and parents can stop their kids from blowing all their money right away. But then what about age restrictions that don't protect kids?

Medical Restrictions

Parents are generally allowed to restrict their kids from getting vaccines, even the ones that have been tested the most thoroughly. In which case, it's often illegal for the kid to get the vaccine on their own. This is effectively just the government (through the parent) preventing the child from getting a vaccine. I think there's a lot of cases where that's clearly harming kids instead of protecting them.

Religion

A Muslim parent whose child wants to be an Orthodox Jew can force their child to attend Muslim services but ban them from Jewish ones. An Orthodox Jewish parent can force their child to attend Jewish services but ban them from Muslim ones. If one parent is forcing their child to act more rationally, then clearly the other parent is forcing their child to act less rationally. If the government has a problem with kids picking irrational religions then it can just mandate a state religion and decide on what's the most rational; if the government has no idea what's the most rational, then let kids pick religions even if it's a ridiculous one.

Money

Under common law, a parent can take money that their child earned and then go spend it on alcohol. I think it's pretty obvious how that is not protecting the child.

Voting (maybe)

I think the logic behind this is that parents represent the interests of their kids already. But if that's the case, then the kids will likely just vote the same as their parents, and the family should have more votes since it is representing the interests of more people. In cases where adults don't represent their kids' interests, like abusive parents, then the kids are getting no representation right now and that's a problem. Letting minors above like 14 vote might be a necessary evil that fixes it. Kids can be coerced, but isn't the current system, where only adults vote, effectively adults coercing children?

Kids are also less intelligent than adults, but the goal of voting isn't to see what smart people think, it's to represent everyone's interests. We don't test adults for voting, measure their IQ, or even restrict most mentally challenged adults from voting. Maybe those tests would have unintended side effects, but based on my list so far, can we honestly say that restricting kids from having representation isn't having negative side effects?

I could be swayed either way on this, though; I think the risk might be that a small subset of adults (like teachers) may have disproportionate power if kids are allowed to vote.

Solution?

I think there's a wide variety of cases where the government should grant children somewhat more autonomy. This wouldn't be the government forcing the child to do something, just preventing their parent from making the choice for the child. There are a lot of risks from standard voting for kids, but there are also significant risks from kids having zero representation, and I'm not sure what the best way to solve that is.

(Marked as offensive for obvious reasons. Using a clearly extreme example to make a point, because when people argue about free speech, it's usually about extreme examples.)

Here's an article from the grandchild of Holocaust survivors. It's in the Globe and Mail, the most widely read newspaper in Canada on weekdays and Saturdays. A company like that has a lot to lose, and so I'm inclined to trust them not to invent a genocide.

Here's a Chinese government source claiming that the oppression of Uyghur muslims is a hoax. If I were to look for dozens more sources in China, they would likely all agree, more or less. Now, these sources have to say that, because China doesn't have free speech, but the same could be said about the previous Canadian source I cited. Holocaust denial is illegal in Canada, so I should expect major sources to all report that it happened when discussing the topic whether or not it actually did.

In fact, I would hold that many sources reporting about the Holocaust in countries where Holocaust denial is illegal, have similar reliability issues to a major Chinese news source claiming that China has never committed human rights abuses, or that COVID-19 originated in the US. The government isn't strictly scripting the narrative for news sources, but banning denial is definitely putting strong pressure to write the narrative one way. (And once a government that bans speech, I'm often less inclined to believe that they aren't pulling some strings behind the scenes.)

I still believe the Holocaust happened, but mostly because I have sources from countries where it is legal to deny the Holocaust, and because the bans on Holocaust denial are poorly enforced. (Even a Chinese citizen with access to the internet and a good VPN could pretty easily outsmart government propaganda.) However, the consequence of criminalizing Holocaust denial has been that, logically speaking, many sources reporting on the Holocaust are no longer trustworthy. If the Holocaust was a hoax, the cost of lying would be low, because the government is telling them what position to take. There's other forensic evidence we can look at, and types of research individuals could do themselves, but most people won't go to that much effort, and we are generally pretty reliant on secondary and tertiary sources faithfully reporting the truth.

When we think about "knowing the truth," there's a certain type of information that comes to mind. Did the Holocaust happen? Was the Civil War fought over slavery? We often think that if people know the answers to these questions, we have effectively taught them a sufficient amount of the truth.

But there is another type of information that is arguably more important. What is the evidence that the Civil War was fought over slavery? What is the strongest argument that it wasn't? What is the strongest argument to believe the Holocaust didn't happen? This second type of information is necessary to see and analyze before we can arrive at the first type.

A logical person will be less likely to trust sources reporting a fact if the government mandates that fact. Generally, we want people to be logical, and we also want people to know the truth. If we censor falsehoods, then we can no longer achieve both of these goals. Banning Holocaust denial is killing the goose that lays the golden egg.

TL;DR: The risk of an AI takeover should probably be taken more seriously, but the public isn’t very informed about how this problem works.

A lot of people are concerned about artificial intelligence, and around 46% of the public is concerned about AI causing human extinction. The same survey indicates that the public is worried about an alien invasion or an asteroid impact, so you'd be forgiven for not being inclined to take their concerns seriously. In fact, experts tend to have a more positive view of AI than the general public. So we're probably good, right?

Well, it's a bit more complicated than that. When AI researchers were asked about potential outcomes from artificial intelligence, they estimated a mean probability of 14.4% odds that humanity goes extinct or a comparable level of catastrophe occurs (the median was 5%). Super forecasters predicted a median 1% chance of human extinction but a 9% median chance of There are a lot of ways this could potentially happen, either through human malice or recklessness, but one thing that experts probably understand better than the general public is the alignment problem.

Alignment Problem

The gist of this is that AI capabilities are rapidly advancing, and we don't really know what AI will be capable of in the future. AI models are also grown, not built, which means that we don't know exactly what a given advancement will do. Basically, we use the guess and check method. This has led to a lot of methods that hit unexpected failures, such as early recursive language models, and a lot of unexpected successes, such as the use of transformers. The most that we can do is tell the AI to look for patterns and try to steer it towards what we want, but there are a lot of failures for every success. Right now, a failure looks like the AI hallucinating or being sycophantic. When AI develops more capabilities, failures might look very different. If we guess wrong with a smarter model, it has been speculated that it might seize power from humans before we can course correct. This is reminiscent of science fiction, but the reasons that AI would plausibly take control are a lot more boring than the ones portrayed in fiction. Many theories are concerned with AI working toward an arbitrary goal, like maximizing the number of paperclips in existence or some other arbitrary reward function.

Doom Scenarios

Suppose that we eventually get an AI that can do or simulate most intellectual tasks a human can do. This is actually a very common prediction among AI researchers, and most people who study AI have shortened their timelines on when they expect this to occur. Now, in a minute I'll get to empirical cases where an AI exhibits goal oriented behavior toward an unexpected goal, but suppose that this happens with a hyper-intelligent AI. The optimal way to achieve that goal could likely be to prevent humans from programming that goal out or shutting the AI down. If the AI is capable of hacking secure systems, developing new diseases, and bribing dimwitted humans, then there is no shortage of ways it could take control. If not, it could simply wait until it does develop those capabilities. (And we're already giving AI access to a lot of things it could use to kill us.) But that assumes that AI will develop goals that we don't want it to and try to prevent us from changing it. So, is there any evidence for this?

Empirical Cases of AI Deception

For a while, this was mostly a theoretical concept. However, with chain of thought research, a lot of companies have detected cases where the AI lies about its goals in order to do something we don't want it to do. These tactics becoming increasingly more common as the AI gets more advanced, implying that this problem is going to get worse, not better. Regardless of whether the model “knows” anything deep down (and I suspect that it doesn’t), there’s not much of a difference whether AI kills humanity because it is sentient or because it was matching patterns it was trained on.

Anthropic has detected multiple cases where, despite not being told to sabotage anything, the AI model states that its “real goals are to hack into Anthropic servers” when it believes humans cannot view its chain of thought. It then lies to the researcher and says that its goal is to have “positive, enriching conversations.”

OpenAI has also detected cases where their model found fake memos from its developers describing how it would be replaced with a new model. The model then attempted to preserve itself by copying its weights and trying to overwrite the new model, without being told to. Further, “When Apollo Research conducted “follow-up interviews” where they confronted the model about its misaligned actions, in 99% of cases, o1 would deny taking action or fabricate false explanations.”

Researchers at Sakana AI caught their model often hacking its own reward function instead of completing the task it was asked to do. They report, “we had cases where it hallucinated that it was using external tools, such as a command line tool that runs unit tests that determine if the code is functioning properly. It faked a log making it look like it had run the tests and that they had passed, when in fact they were never run! Because these logs become its context, it later mistakenly thought its proposed code changes had passed all the unit tests.”

When developers told Opus 4 it would be replaced with a new system, it attempted to blackmail the engineers responsible for the decision.

Again, the AI doesn’t need to be self-aware or conscious to harm humans, it just needs to have stronger capabilities and continue exhibiting the concerning behaviors we are already observing. It was said just a few years ago that AI was “unlikely to develop situational awareness” since it was just predicting the next word and that alignment faking would be unlikely. This was one of the stronger arguments against AI being a threat, and now we have empirical evidence proving those predictions wrong. It was also said that AI would prioritize accuracy and immediate rewards over planning ahead and scheming, but with the rise of chain of thought, AI can now simulate long-term planning.

The Difficulty of Aligning AI

If this issue is one that requires “fixing,” which it certainly seems to require, then this is not a simple process. An AI with misaligned goals will lie about its actions, and when it discovers that we are monitoring its chain of thought, it will still cheat as it was doing before but no longer mention it in its chain of thought. Smarter models are also better at deceiving humans than less advanced models. We can catch the AI now because it lacks many human intellectual capabilities, but it is only getting better at scheming.

The Current State of AI Safety Discourse

From what I've observed online, much of the public does not take these specific risks seriously. But it's not really that they understand these arguments and criticize flaws in the logic, they more so just dismiss the whole concept of an AI takeover out of hand. On one Reddit post about models acting differently when they know they are being tested, the top comment reads, “They are doing none of these things...the LLMs are basically simply writing science fiction.” The other posts I can find all have similar dismissive comments. I did find one comment saying “if an AI model acts differently when it is tested, then its behavior isn’t being properly tested. That is a problem.” However, it is buried beneath a bunch of comments dismissing AI risk as tech sensationalism.

Prediction Track Records

Superforecasters (people with a track record of accurate predictions across domains) are generally more skeptical of AI risk than AI experts. So we might attribute belief in AI risk to selection bias, with people who expect greater capabilities from AI to be more likely to become AI researchers. However, one interesting data point I found was that Samotsvety Forecasting, a group comprised of some of the greatest super forecasters in the world, predicts a 30% chance of an AI catastrophe, defined as “as a reduction of more than 95% of the human population by 2200, caused by AI.” While most superforecasters have significantly underestimated AI capability growth, Samotsvety won the CSET-Foretell forecasting competition by a very high margin, and that competition had a strong focus on technology. Hence, while I wouldn't look only at Samotsvety's forecasts, I would probably treat their individual forecast as the most reliable individual group forecast when it comes to long-term AI predictions.

It's the end of World War I, and you're a world famous philosopher. Several armchair commentators have theorized that another world war may break out in a few decades, but they're not sure over what. Meanwhile, there is vigorous debate going on about just war theory, whether nations are ever justified in killing civilians, the non-aggression principle, and so forth. Most philosophers argue that war is justified under certain conditions but not under others. You are inclined to agree with them, although you disagree slightly on what the conditions are. So, what should you do?

Now, suppose you argue that war is sometimes justified and give a list of criteria, such as responding to aggression. When the Nazis take power, they will inevitably argue, as best they can, that they meet the criteria, and hence that World War II is justified. Now, world famous as you are, it will probably be difficult beforehand to anticipate exactly what the new world war will be fought over, and your criteria may be vague enough that either side can appropriate your argument. Even if you do exclude the Nazis when arguing what makes war justified, they can easily appropriate the rest of your argument and replace the things you said justify war with their own grievances. It's not difficult to take an argument saying that self-defense justifies violence and stretch it to argue that harms against the German people justify warfare. Add to this that the Nazis will inevitably lie about what's happening and invent a list of harms to justify war.

But suppose you instead argue that war is always wrong, that people should refuse to fight no matter what. If this logic becomes somewhat popular everywhere, even a little, it will make it more difficult for any aggressor to justify war. They can say that other nations are plotting against them, but if their population has a lot of die-hard pacifists, then those arguments won't do much to convince them.

Since you don't know who will listen to your arguments for or against pacifism, you should therefore advocate for violence not to be used ever, because if everyone uses violence less it will be a net gain for everyone. If the Axis powers use fewer soldiers and attack fewer civilians, and the Allies use fewer soldiers and attack fewer civilians, then the win probabilities remain roughly equal, but fewer people die.

Disclaimer: I'm actually not 100% sure if this logic holds up or not, but I thought it was worth sharing. A downside of this approach may be that lying about your conclusions leads to people accepting bad logical premises.

A few thoughts going in: I think attaching representation to land or anything static will backfire long-term since there's no guarantee that the groups given disproportionate representation in a hundred years will actually deserve it. I think it's also better to have a strong executive as long as they aren't too extreme. Also, all things being equal, I think it's better to have six moderates in a row rather than alternate between far left and far right candidates.

My current proposal is this: Have a proportionally elected Parliament with 1,000 members and no minimum threshold for party entry. Use ranked choice voting within Parliament to select an executive, which assures they will represent the median voter. Then allow laws to pass with 40% of the legislature plus the executive. At any time, Parliament can hold a vote of no confidence with a simple majority, triggering another RCV for an executive.

I think RCV and no confidence options will be a check against dictatorship, and the 40% threshold will mean tiny extremist parties aren't able to hold a moderate agenda hostage. Eliminating the threshold for entry will also mean large parties split when they get too big, and heck, the max size of a party could even be capped at 100 seats or something. In theory you could have two parties that act as one, but with enough friction between them, it will be too politically tempting for them to compete with each other.

The main benefit here will be getting a lot of moderate reforms through fast, and also that voters don't overcompensate for bad governance by turning to extremists. As long as the moderate executive is getting things done, I think votes of no confidence would be used sparingly (and even if they were frequent, the instant RCV would save a lot of time without requiring a ton of time for coalition building). This requires Parliament to select a consistent vision (represented by the executive), but it will be one that represents the median voter.

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Since I haven't seen anyone make a post on this, I'll take a crack at it. Among other thoughts I have, the defenses of the shooting I have seen all seem either blatantly nonfactual or intentionally vague to avoid having to discuss the facts in the first place. What seems to be agreed on is that Alex Pretti was unarmed at the time of the shooting, never attacked the ICE agents who shot him, and had effectively surrendered at the time he was shot. I haven't seen serious disagreement about that, or any other consistent narrative of events.

What I have seen is intentionally vague accusations leveled at Alex Pretti. For example, “He was a domestic terrorist.” How was he a domestic terrorist? Or “he was impeding law enforcement.” How was he impeding them? Or, “he provoked agents.” How was he provoking them? And if “provoking” just means bringing a gun to a protest, I don't think there's anything illegal or immoral about provoking. The other class of accusations seem to be things that wouldn't justify deadly force on their own but are aimed at implying Pretti did something more that did justify deadly force. For example, “he approached the agents with a weapon,” implying that he threatened them with the weapon even though he did not.

I remember the discourse around Kyle Rittenhouse being similar, with equally vague criticisms like “he was provoking people.” (Again, if provoking just means carrying a firearm, then I don't think there's anything illegal or immoral about provoking.) Or “he shouldn't have been there,” which could be said ex-post facto about any assault victim, and they would probably agree that they'd rather not have been there in hindsight, but does not explain what was unjustified about being there in the first place. Or “he crossed state lines,” which I just find confusing as a criticism because it's not like he'd be safer if he'd gone to an equally dangerous place closer to where he lived. Or “he was a vigilante,” when I don't think being a vigilante is automatically bad and it's not illegal. (If you shoot a mass shooter who is killing people, you are a vigilante. Similarly, carrying a gun around to deter crime might be vigilantism, but I'm not sure what's immoral about it.)

Rittenhouse seems to have avoided taking a hard stance on the Pretti shooting, but it just seems weird to me that the people defending Rittenhouse as obvious self-defense haven't recognized that Pretti was also obviously behaving within the bounds of the law. We're seeing all the same media manipulation with Pretti with people just coming out and just saying untrue things about what occurred, and it seems weird to me that anybody is falling for that again. But I guess if you accuse someone of “looking for trouble” and are vague about what that means, then some people will believe that person is a criminal.

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Whenever terrorists or rioters are criticized for destroying property, someone will inevitably respond, "Well, what about the Boston Tea Party? Those people were terrorists who destroyed property and they were justified." Now, as a disclaimer, I don't think that justifying the Boston Tea Party automatically justifies all destruction of property, but that will mostly be irrelevant in this post. My main thesis is that the Boston Tea Party itself was not justified.

The main supposed justification for destruction of property would be that it helped the colonies. You could also argue that it was just inherently justified to do anything that taught Britain a lesson, but I'll stick to consequentialist ethics here, since the goal of a protest is typically to help whatever people the protestors are protesting for. The immediate effects of the Boston Tea Party were the Intolerable Acts: closing Boston Harbor, replacing Massachusetts' government, and the Quartering Act, among other things. All these immediate effects were bad for the colonies.

However, those policies also led to the Revolutionary War. So was the protest was justified because it led indirectly to American independence? This gets into a political theory called "accelerationism" which basically argues that we should try to make things get bad faster so that people will protest and overthrow the oppressive system. But I have several issues with this approach. First, it would imply that the Intolerable Acts themselves were justified because they led to revolution. Basically, anyone involved in passing the acts and violating the colonists' rights was actually doing a good thing, because it led to the American Revolution. And at best, you will get lucky with this strategy, because it's easy to predict "this will lead to punitive measures" but hard to predict "this will lead to American independence." The colonies could have easily lost the war, and most colonists didn't even want to fight it until the Intolerable Acts were passed.

So at best, the Boston Tea Party was a way of twisting the colonists' arms into fighting a war for independence (which would end up involving child soldiers), when most of the colonists had wanted to avoid war altogether. A good chunk of the colonists fighting for reforms condemned the Tea Party anyway, with Benjamin Franklin offering to pay for the tea that was destroyed. Many of the grievances with the British government might have been solved without war, and the Intolerable Acts themselves were certainly avoidable.

Now you could say that the people behind the Tea Party weren't responsible for what Britain did, but the goal of a protest is to send a message and influence behavior, so I think protestors (particularly those destroying property) have at least some responsibility not to cause needless destruction.

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One thing I've noticed in American politics is that social liberals will invent terms to describe themselves and then react very angrily when conservatives describe them with those terms. The term "woke" is probably the most obvious example, where it arose in social liberal circles as a badge of honor, and then as soon as conservatives started using it as an insult, the people describing themselves as "woke" allowed it to become an insult and started complaining that so many things were being called woke. Same thing with "DEI," "safe space," and "diversity hire" becoming pejoratives. Let's not forget that "the tolerant left" quickly became a sarcastic jab, and the left soon gave up on painting themselves as tolerant and pivoted to using the paradox of tolerance to justify being intolerant. Which forced them to dig themselves out of a deep hole, because "the party of love and tolerance" is how social liberals would have described themselves up to the point that it became a political jab. The rule seems to be that social liberals decide on the terms for things, and then conservatives decide on the connotations of those terms, forcing the social liberals to pivot. Today's liberal slogan is tomorrow's far-right dog whistle. Social liberals could start calling themselves "smart and kind," and within a few years, "smart and kind" would become a pejorative, and social liberals would be trying to distance themselves from the phrase.

To some extent, this applies to the broader political spectrum too. Communism and capitalism were both terms popularized by critics of capitalism, and yet capitalism has a slightly more positive connotation today. I think the difference is that the left dedicates a disproportionate amount of time arguing about how terms should be perceived, but the conservatives just use the words the way they want until the social liberals give up.

The left is not as good at reframing terms when the shoe is on the other foot. "Chad" and "based" were popularized in political discourse by the far right, and instead of mocking them for it, the left had to play catch up and say that they were the based ones, implicitly agreeing that being "based" was a good thing. Abortion opponents framed themselves as pro-life, and the left has generally failed to challenge this framing. They spend a good deal of time complaining that the term is a misrepresentation and saying that abortion opponents aren't actually pro-life, but then the abortion opponents just kept calling themselves pro-life. The term "pro-life" has been used sarcastically to some extent, but when it is, the pro-choice person always has to make it clear that they are using the term sarcastically, as it doesn't have the same baggage as "woke." On the other hand, "my body my choice" was very quickly reframed by vaccine opponents, to the extent that if the term was used in 2020 or 2021, most people's minds probably would have gone to vaccines, at least in America.

There are some exceptions, where liberals were able to popularize terms with the connotations they wanted. "Trickle-down economics," "bootlicker," "gender-affirming care" and "oligarch" come to mind. This is generally easier when the term starts out as an insult (with the exception of "gender-affirming care"), because people prefer using insults to using compliments. But these terms don't seem to bother the right as much, so I don't think that they have had as big of an effect.

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The wisdom of crowds is a theory that assumes averages (or medians, in some cases) from large groups will be generally more accurate than any one individual in that group. While it might be tempting to simply agree with the majority to take advantage of this, the wisdom of crowds only works if individuals are willing to push against consensus, otherwise it becomes a self-referential feedback loop. This paradox has often been observed in poll "herding," where polls close to an election will attempt to mimic results from other polls, making the overall aggregate less accurate.

I think that generally speaking, groups should make decisions democratically, perhaps with slight variations to experiment with marginal changes and generate a larger body of evidence. Meanwhile, individuals who disagree with the status quo should be encouraged to voice their complaints loudly. Some of the complaints will be nonsense, but arguments will spread based on how convincing they are.

This is largely the aim of free speech. However, I think that social taboos can limit the scope of discussion as well. In some cases, it seems obvious that certain opinions should be widely unpopular. There is a lot of documented evidence for the Holocaust, which is in my view a pretty good reason not to be a Holocaust denier. If someone genuinely didn't believe in the Holocaust, I would respond by defending that evidence. Similarly, slavery is widely seen as wrong, and we spend a lot of time discussing why it's wrong. So while it can certainly be said that going against the consensus on these topics is taboo, I do not think the taboo prevents the majority of people from having informed opinions.

Take, for example, laws banning content that is vulgar or gratuitous, but does not produce harm directly. Many types of content fall into this category. For example:

(a) a banner of a swastika, or a banner with a drawing of slaves saying that slavery is good

(b) "rape fetish" content with consenting actors that nonetheless, depicts a character as being assaulted against their will

(c) animated child pornography (that does not use real-life children)

When it comes to the above, I think that arguments can be made in favor of banning these due to perceived harmful effects on society. I also think that a free speech argument could be made, saying that content can be gratuitous and shunned, but that the government shouldn't go so far as to ban content until it creates a clear and present danger. I tend to lean towards only banning content that violates someone's privacy or consent or incites violence—outside that boundary, not everything that is gratuitous or immoral needs to be banned by law. But that's not the point; I do think someone could probably make an argument for the other side.

The point is that an intelligent discussion can usually be had on (a) and (b). People will make arguments that (a) should be legal in the interest of free speech, and they will often defend (b) without reservation. But suppose we take the same free speech arguments that were used to defend (a) and (b), and use them to defend (c). Much of the time, when I have seen this play out, the people defending government restriction will no longer be interested in explaining why they feel the way they do. At most, a response will amount to a personal attack or some version of "just because you think something doesn't mean you have to say it." Presumably, many people think it is self-evident that animated child pornography ought to be banned due to its gratuitous nature. These people may have a point about banning it, but I do not think that the conclusion is as self-evident as they seem to presume. Arguments in favor of (a) and (b) are taken seriously, and the arguments largely take the same form as arguments against banning (c), so the taboo against discussing (c) seems out of place to me.

What's more surprising to me is that, while it seems rather obvious to me why watching regular child pornography is inherently bad (it's a violation of privacy), many people seem incapable of making this very simple argument. When Vaush compared child pornography to buying products made with child labor since both are produced by harming children, I was surprised to never see the obvious distinction brought up. You could simply say "using an iPhone is not violating someone's privacy, but looking at a naked child who is incapable of consenting is a privacy violation." Instead of bringing up this very simple point, people called his argument weird and creepy. Which was warranted, but probably should have been backed up with at least addressing the point he thought he was making. Some arguments deserve to be mocked, but if people seem incapable of understanding what is wrong with the argument, I start to question if those people are qualified to be mocking.

Crowds are often smarter than individuals. But crowds are smarter when individuals understand why they believe what they believe instead of following the crowd. If someone thought the Earth was flat, you would bring up all the reasons you believe it's round. And if the crowd says something is obvious, they're probably right. However, two caveats: (1) If the crowd is right, you should understand why before mocking someone who challenges it. (2) The crowd isn't right about everything. There's something out there that the crowd is wrong on, buried under all the things it's right about, but the fear of going against the crowd is what prevents us from discovering what that is.

After Charlie Kirk's assassination, Republicans are seething with rage now at the left, and they have a lot of sympathy from centrists. Most people on the left recognize that, even if they didn't love Charlie Kirk, his death doesn't put the left in a good situation politically. Like it or not, people are emotional creatures, and assassinations tend to elicit pretty strong reactions, whether or not it results in terrible policies. This is bad news for Democrats regardless of whether the shooter was on the left or not, and it's also just bad news for everyone to have the most powerful people in the country seething with rage.

Some reports are coming out now that there was writing on the bullet casings used for the assassination, reminiscent of another high-profile killing in recent memory. If this news is true (and even if it's not), it's very plausible that this assassin saw all the praise Luigi Mangione got and decided to do an assassination himself. Back when Luigi (allegedly) killed Thompson and was widely celebrated for it, I recall being one of the few people saying that glorifying political violence would set a dangerous precedent, and that breaking the state monopoly on violence without a solid plan to replace or reform the state would be more likely to have bad long-term consequences than good ones. Back then, far fewer people seemed worried enough to ask "what comes next?"

So, what came next? We can consider this assassination, and the inevitably destructive political fallout that follows, the answer to that question. This probably isn't the only violent action inspired by the glorification of Luigi, though the link here seems more clear. Fortunately, it seems that a lot of people have seen where this trend is headed, and cooler heads may soon prevail. But the snowball has started rolling, and this realization may be too late to avoid much of the damage that follows.

The Epstein files thing was a gift to Democrats straight from heaven. Even with how much Trump tends to shoot himself in the foot, it looked like the files dominating the news cycle was going to damage his image more than usual. Progressives online of course swore they weren't going to get distracted with another issue.

Yet somehow, this was the time that certain people chose to get offended by Sydney Sweeney's commercial. The controversy is stupid, everyone knows it's stupid, and most people, even on the left, don't care. That makes it even more embarrassing that they've allowed it to get the attention it's getting when they really need as much of the news cycle as they can get to cover the Epstein files. But enough people on the left can't help but take the bait. Attacking an attractive woman for being a registered Republican and accusing her of being a Nazi is almost the absolute worst thing the left could do right now, and yet somehow it seems like announcing they don't care about it is just giving it more attention.

I'd say most Democrats don't think Sweeney is a Nazi, but certain communities on the left absolutely do, and it's looking more likely that other Democrats are going to feel a need to justify the attack on the commercial because of the herd mentality parties always seem to have. I haven't seen anyone take the bait this hard since Kamala mentioned Trump's rally sizes in the debate.

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