[jmull]

No you wouldn't.

Look at what the molotov cocktail guy accomplished by "taking direct action against a clear and present danger": Nothing, besides casting himself as an extremist nut, increasing the resistance to his viewpoint in the population at large.

It's downright dumb to attempt to impose your will via unilateral violence when you aren't in a position to actually complete the goal. Note that that goes whether you're actually right or not.

[hax0ron3]

>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.

[throwaway27448]

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

[handoflixue]

That's exactly the point every prominent member of the "Doomer" community is making: Violence isn't an effective action; it is a counterproductive action. It is actively destructive.

[NoGravitas]

Lenin called this kind of individualistic, unorganized violence "revolutionary adventurism", and strongly condemned it. The lesson is not that violence isn't effective, it's that unorganized violence isn't effective. Sufficiently organized violence can be very effective indeed.

That said, the same is true of nonviolence.

[throwaway27448]

Well what other tools do we have? Waiting for the market to fix things is also destructive and harms orders of magnitude more people than violent direct action does; democracy is wildly ineffective compared to violence even at its most optimistic; what else remains? Fleeing the planet?

[handoflixue]

Giving this a less glib response: https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/article/2043601524815716866 goes in to some detail, but Eliezer has always had a fairly clear call for action, which is international regulation. And in particular, he makes the point that random acts of violence are actively counterproductive to his goal.

We walked out of the Cold War alive. Humanity has faced extinction before, and despite it all, we walked away alive last time. It's not unreasonable to think we can do it again.

[handoflixue]

> Well what other tools do we have?

I'll answer with a quote from the founder of the Rationalist movement, Eliezer:

"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."

[throwaway27448]

Ok, I don't think anyone suggested killing puppies. Are you going to take this topic seriously or just dodge the question?

[handoflixue]

The point is that violence isn't actually a tool, just like killing puppies isn't an actual solution.

I can know "this doesn't work" without knowing exactly what does work. "Violence is the only tool we have, so we have to use it" is the sort of logic that leads to the Holocaust.

If you want my own personal observations: Over the past few centuries, we've managed women's suffrage, black suffrage, gay marriage, etc. largely without violence, so clearly there are processes out there for progress. We fixed the Ozone Hole without killing people. I don't think murder was involved at all in finding recent AIDS medication, or GLP-1.

There are tons of examples of successful social progress in the past few decades that don't involve violence. Conversely, I struggle to name any terrorists that accomplished their goals by bombing scientists.

If nothing else, we can make violence a lot more legible by embodying it in a legal process, and bringing society onto the same page about it's necessity.

[PaulHoule]

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"