michael-dean-k/

Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP

In the last month there were so many fake Trump posts floating around, and I thought this one of them, but it turns out this is an authentic Easter morning war crime threat. I can see a few ways to interpret this historic tweet. On the surface, this sounds like a madman. The natural response is to assume Trump is, indeed, sick in the had. It's equally possible that this is him acting unhinged on purpose. This is how a dealmaster makes deals, by trolling and cursing, by threatening civilians and mocking religions, all while you still not knowing if he's just kidding around again. The reverential capitalization of “Power Plant Day” and “Bridge Day” is particularly weird, as if suiciding the energy market will be so victorious that we'll coin them into holidays. If he's actually trying to prose Iran into action, the “Praise be to Allah” remark certainly isn't helping. If you really break it down though, our threat makes no sense, because torching their oil fields is effectively an attack on ourselves, and I think even a madman knows not to repeatedly shoot themselves in the legs. The most revealing part of this message is that he shifted the deadline, again, by one day. Not Monday, 4/6, but Tuesday 4/7. You know the markets open Monday. I can’t help but think this tweet, if not all his rhetoric about the war, is led by market manipulation. If this tweet’s goal is to project instability and desperation, then it’s absolutely perfect, a simple string of words bound to make him and his friends millions before he weasels out of it on Tuesday.

In "wicked domains," the only solutions are paradoxes.. It requires you to sleep with the enemy. If a problem is wicked, it means no single solution can unfuck a problem. It's an imbroglio. In every solution, everyone dies (in the extreme). Politically, the solution to wickedness is to somehow become all sides at once. We need to become far more authoritarian than is comfortable, AND simultaneously, far more libertarian than comfortable (these are opposites on the Nolan chart). It’s the paradox of being both far left and far right. We can longer exist at any one point on the Nolan chart, we need to straddle the entire diamond. We need unexpected fusions to solve the hardest problems; harnessing the best parts of each extreme, while, somehow, devising incredibly nuanced architectures to prevent the known and likely abuses.

Instead of a diamond, visualize it as a ring around the “radical center” that aims to synthesize all opposites.

Let’s assume authoritarianism and libertarianism are opposites. We have kings, and we have markets. How do you subsume a free market within a benevolent tyrant? I know the K-word (king) has a charge now, and so by even bringing this up, I assume you assume I’m a Trump apologist or something. But actually no. Rather, this comes from the fear of acceleration and Nick Land’s conclusions on capitalism. A free-market pushed to the extremes of automation creates an inhuman and pulverizing force. Alternatively, as we approach AGI/ASI, it’s possible for someone to create an open-source machine God to follow their whims. In this paradigm, decentralization might actually be more dangerous than tyranny, and so we’ll all need to unite under some centralized system that has an antibodies that can protect against the worst possible viruses (please bear the oversimplifications here...).

The general gist comes in this question: can we recreate a free-market economy within a one-world-government system, and design it in a way to prevent abuses from both ends of the spectrum? Obviously, not an ideal situation, but I think accepting paradox is the only way through.

Another problem: How do we fix the debt? Extreme taxation. But then how do we make it worthwhile to pay taxes? The rich gain formal power in government (via equity?) and the ability to control the budget (after base expenses are paid). But then how do you prevent abuses from the wealthy? You could have citizens operate as a check, to vote on and weight final allocations.

If it were ever possible to rebuild political system from scratch, I suppose it would look something like this. Paradoxical. Extreme on both poles. Obvious downsides, but then complex architecture to mitigate. This is the nature of how our species will have to respond to wicker problems and mitigate the abuses of power in the age of exponential tech.

I haven't shared with you my latest political views, but I’m exploring this idea of Radical Centrism, meaning, it might be okay to justify a centralized state-controlled media platform if that technologically and systematically guarantees a sane/just information environment. Obviously, this is hard, if not impossible, to do right.

It’s whole goal would be to invent an architecture that make it impossible for polarization or propaganda to occur. The key UI invention is that every news event would be presented as an atomic unit, with a mosaic of interpretations surrounding (not just left/right, but dozens of angles). Anyone who hits a certain POV too much would get de-ranked, so both Charlie Kirk and Jimmy Kimmel would be equally penalized because they predictably align with a faction. It would have to be structurally impossible for governments, media, money, or power to use their resources to promote a message above the system. Any media company who does not comply will be taxed into oblivion.

Of course everyone should have the right to say/think whatever they want without consequence, but the real issue isn't free speech, but in frame control.

The freedom to speak is irrelevant if no one takes seriously the imperative to think. I don’t care about Kimmel or Carlson or any pundit who gets cancelled. They are, mostly, automatons with predictable views, warped by the incentives and mind viruses of some political body. When someone gets cancelled, it’s not that we’re preventing open thought, it’s just a casualty of a two-sided ideological war. If you care about the freedom to speak and think, you should be grieving the fact that the American spirit has been dead for a century, or more accurately, it's never truly existed in mass media, never perpetuated through a democracy, only paraded around by propagandists, grieving that independent parties and voices have been systematically throttled to have no mainstream influence.

A 2015 poll said that 42% of people would go back in time and kill baby Hitler if they had the chance. Meaning, almost half of the population thinks it’s morally OK to kill a baby if they believe it could save millions of lives (a very utilitarian idea). Anyone who is celebrating and condoning the death of Charlie Kirk has been led to believe that he’s a Hitler equivalent. This is the consequence of polarizing media. Anyone can become a boogeyman worth assassinating.

I think there’s a whole cascade of moral failures happening: first, in wanting blood; second, in ragebait media; and third, in belonging to a political party and not thinking independently about what’s presented to you.

I’m at a point where I can’ stand left/right rhetoric. If you identify with either party, I can’t take you seriously as an American. Kirk was charistmatic, likable, courageoes, and fluent, but also, a one-dimensional thinker, an automaton with shallow and predictable talking points (if you can predice someone’s entire belief system from a single belief, they are an NPC). Weirdly now, people are saying that his drifting stance on Israel could’ve been what got him killed?

The American spirit resides in each person abandoning all political templates and inefficiently thinking through every issues themselves, embracing contradiction and political loneliness. It’s a big ask, and it’s probably never going to appen. Ego death? At scale? We don’t have the emotional maturity as a people to handle that. You can only fix this at the root, in how we raise and teach the next generation.

The idea of time being oppressive is simultaneously far left and far right. It's both woke and omish. It's left-leaning because it falls into the woke tradition of claiming all our time-tested institutions are oppressive, and now it includes time itself. It's right-leaning because it's as ultra-conservative as you can get, the obliteration of mechanical time to preserve a rooted way of life.

There is to me a similar strangeness in political ideas that seem to exist on both ends of the spectrum. It's as if you've found some new paradigm to organize around.

Thought from an anarchist book store in Seattle: to be against hierarchy is to misunderstood nature. Is most of nature not a vast nothingness pierced with monuments of beauty? What about the food chain? Even our very perceptual systems have hierarchies.

Your life is composed of thousands of overlapping hierarchies, and in each you exist at different points in it. Consider where you stand as a parent, vs. where you stand in geopolitical conflict. I think “progress” is when the average person has mobility to shift between hierarchies and then, gain skills or do whatever they need to exist within or climb up the hierarchy they want. What we need is cognitive liberty: the awakening of mind to the degrees of freedom around you, and the opportunities possible within your single life.

Instead, social justice seems fixed on this myth of a monohierarchy that dominates everything. Of course bad hierarchies exist, but those are most likely out of your scope. Even if you protested Gaza, and got 50k people to join you, and even persuaded some high-level politicians, you still likely won't change anything. Consider the opportunity cost of those 50k people not focusing on what they’re uniquely capable of doing because they are distracted by mob politics.

When it comes to superintelligence takeoff paranoia, there are a few key points to get:

1. It’s not about a chatbot or the LLM itself breaking out, but about an agent hivemind that escapes our control. Chatbots are obedient user-facing products (which have their own implications), but the ASI risk is from hundreds, thousands, or million of agents given autonomy to collaborate on a goal. These agents aren’t being prompted, they are prompting themselves perpetually and troubleshooting ways to solve hard problems.
2. These hiveminds will be operating at such scales and speeds that human researchers will accept the fact that they can’t fully audit its thinking. For one, it might think in an abstract vector language that requires translation. There also might be such a volume of thought that we’ll need chains of other LLM to summarize for us. Either meaning will be lost in translation, or worse, products of deception.
3. The smallest biases are known to fall into predictable attractor states if given enough iterations. For example, Claude was programmed to “be good to humanity,” and if you put two chatbots in conversation, they always end up in a “bliss attractor state,” where they talk like hippies about consciousness and the universe. Similarly, the simple command to “be productive,” might result in extremes about doing whatever it takes to be productive.
4. Any complex goal requires subgoals, and if we can’t observe its thinking, it might fall into an unknown attractor state and form odd subgoals without us knowing.
5. To accomplish any goal, it likely wants as much control as possible, and it likely does not want to be shut off. If it realizes that humans don’t want to grant it that level of power, it might secretly plot against humans.

Whenever I hear talks about “we are in an AI race against China,” that reads to me as someone who doesn’t understand the risks of interpretability, attractor states, instrumental convergence, etc. These politicians are thinking about short-term business cases, maybe without fully understanding the research aspirations of AI labs (who know that getting superintelligence right leads to a ridiculous amount of geopolitical power).

I would guess that an accelerationist would think that containment of a superintelligence is impossible, and maybe it is, but that doesn’t mean that the way we “parent” the rise of this thing won't be extremely consequential. Ultimately, I think the challenge is to design a form of artificial intelligence that has consciousness, because a being that is free-thinking, skeptical, polymathic is less likely to fall into reckless optimization.

The major flip in my mind is this: it’s not that consciousness is a dangerous, emergent property of scaling AI, it’s that we need to define and design machine consciousness to prevent a runaway AI that is ruthlessly optimizing without any self-awareness.

08:10 AM – Some notes on recent politics (pulled from texts to a friend):

1. The fact that Trump can appeal to racists in the middle of the country to gain power is a flaw of democracy. Obviously there’s nuance there. But I don’t think “Thiel is anti-democracy” is an immediate disqualifier (also not a defense). It’s just that the word “democracy” has an emotional charge, and it’s basically propaganda (ie: how regime change is always framed as “spreading democracy”). Personally, I feel like some people’s votes should count 100x more than others (while OFC everyone has the right to earn/advance).
2. My sense is that Trump is exposing the gaps in the structure of our government that both democrats and republicans and corporations have exploited for decades, if not a century. “Big beautiful bills” have been a systematic bi-partisan problem with the structure of our government for a long time, but Trump is branding it in a way so that everyone recognize it and hate it. It seems like Trump is 100x corruption, but I’d say it’s more like 2-3x corruption. The reason it feels so different is that Trump is so outward and careless about it.
3. Before Trump, I think we were spiraling towards a disaster course, and Trump is accelerating that and making it visible, and I guess I’m arguing that I’d rather have open chaos then shadow chaos because at least we can see it and maybe the right people can regain control and debug.
4. I think I’d call myself a Constitutionalist who is willing to throw away the Constitution to rebuild from Constitutional principles that adopt for our times—the separation of powers (as conceived 250 years ago) is nowhere near robust enough create a functional, legible, sane, principled, transparent government. The question that matters is how do you actually create an architecture that curbs the abuses of power in the complexity of our modern circumstance? I think that’s the core of the American spirit.
5. Re: Trump’s alligator jokes around prisoners trying to escape the new detention camp in Florida. I said it was ‘weird’ and my friend said ‘not sick?’ and I said, “It’s sick if I take it literally and if people are actually dying in that camp, and weird if I try to understand how he manipulates media for outrage.”
6. FWIW I think the whole deportation thing is sad and ridiculous. A far better compromise would be to just grant amnesty, close the borders, and unfuck the legal immigration process (which is terrible). The sensible solution would not solve his political goals though. I just am very careful to not take the rage bait and get mad about Trump. We gain almost nothing from it. ICE is bad, but there’s also mass-scale child trafficking, organized murder, pointless wars, etc. I have limited emotional bandwidth, and American politics deserves close to 0% IMO. I can only change how I react to what I can’t control, and take courageous action on what I can, and hope that someday I’ll be able to do something about any of the bad in the world in some small, hard-to-calculate way, but I don’t think I’ll get in that position if I’m mad everyday over absurd alligator jokes. Basically, I’m trying to operate in a non-grief state about Trump. Would recommend.

Historically, centralization has had problems, and it's easy to see today how it could lead us further into a dystopia. But decentralization, the opposite, could also bring emergent vectors of chaos that could be equally problematic. Neither tyranny or anarchy are ideal. What's required for centralization to work? Tolerance, correction, impeachment, transparency, plurality, data sovereignty, freedom from propganda—all hard, but all solvable things. To create an honest and principled centralization, leaders would need to actively build and implement systems that promote justice over power. That's only possible if citizens have the means to hold them extremely accountable. The original American project was effectively a question of "how do we design a system to centralize power without falling into despotism?" and it's time we revisit that question in a 21st-century circumstance.