The ends justify the means but the means are genocide and slavery and the ends are a society with none of those pesky labour rights built on a bedrock of white supremacy. Where’s the dilemma?
this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2026
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
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This is part 2 in a serious of posts by Habryka. The first has this tagline:
Epistemic status: All of the western canon must eventually be re-invented in a LessWrong post. So today we are re-inventing federalism.
(the 3rd is entitled, I kid you not, Vladimir Putin's CEV is probably not that bad)
All 3 are almost impenetrably jargon-y.
Epistemic status: All of the western canon must eventually be re-invented in a LessWrong post. So today we are re-inventing federalism.
Is this self-parody?
Yeah, as somebody who actually thinks the Epistemic status stuff isnt a bad idea.
'look at how they massacred my boy'
Even used as a way to honestly disclose how sure you are about a hot-take... it is still a term used to frame hot-takes. And the term "Epistemic Status" feels like cult jargon compared to "here's how sure I am about this stuff"
Ow yeah, the name is just foolish. Just think the idea of disclosing how sure you are as a community norm isn't bad. Of course, they can't even do that seriously.
Epistemic status: it's aphids, man, aphids everywhere. I asked ChatGPT. They're aphids. They're in my hair, on my skin, in my lungs. And the pain, Barris, it's unreasonable. They're all over the place. Oh, they've completely gotten Millie too.
I checked it out because I was curious if CEV was some international relations initialism I'd never heard of, turns out its just My Guess About What He Wants in rationalese.
Excerpt from the definition of Coherent Extrapolated Volition, or how to damage your optical nerve from too much eye rolling:
Extrapolated volition is the metaethical theory that when we ask "What is right?", then insofar as we're asking something meaningful, we're asking "What would a counterfactual idealized version of myself want* if it knew all the facts, had considered all the arguments, and had perfect self-knowledge and self-control?" (As a metaethical theory, this would make "What is right?" a mixed logical and empirical question, a function over possible states of the world.)
A very simple example of extrapolated volition might be to consider somebody who asks you to bring them orange juice from the refrigerator. You open the refrigerator and see no orange juice, but there's lemonade. You imagine that your friend would want you to bring them lemonade if they knew everything you knew about the refrigerator, so you bring them lemonade instead. On an abstract level, we can say that you "extrapolated" your friend's "volition", in other words, you took your model of their mind and decision process, or your model of their "volition", and you imagined a counterfactual version of their mind that had better information about the contents of your refrigerator, thereby "extrapolating" this volition.
This feels like an attempt to create an ethical framework that supports overruling people's actual freedom of choice in favor of a technocratic vision of what you should choose, and while I can understand the frustration with people doing dumb shit, the problem comes in when "joining a cult preaching rationality and then trying to avert the robot apocalypse by bringing about a slightly different flavor of robot apocalypse" is, to many educated folks, a pretty strong example of stupid shit people do, while to them "ignore the oncoming robot apocalypse because you're too irrational to see the obvious truth that we're all gonna be simutortired by the basilisk forever!" would presumably make the list.
Also I guess texting your friend to say "Yo we're out of OJ, is lemonade alright?" is unironically praxis now?
It is a bit more than that: CEV is what he would want if he were wiser and less confused. Yudkowsky's vision was that we want a lot of things which are contradictory or conflict with others or will make us sad, but Friend Computer could sort that out. But talking your friend into going to an event or trying a new food which she actually likes when she tries it is definitely in the spirit.
CEV is what he would want if he were wiser and less confused
Isn't that just steelmanning?
I gathered the "idealized version of myself" was because it's supposed to be applied to a superintelligence, because of course it's an alignment thing.
Steelmanning is making the best possible argument for a position, whereas CEV is sorting out all the delusions and contradictions in someone's thinking and giving them what they would want if they were wise enough to know it. Central bankers engage in extrapolated volition when they try to make the economy run in a way that will make people happy, even if what they do is not what the woman on the street wants them to do because the woman on the street has no idea how the economy works. Friends engage in extrapolated volition when they intervene in a marriage or a drinking bout and say "you are ruining your life, and we are stopping it now." Extrapolated volition is paternalistic ("you think you want that, but I know better ...") and Yudkowsky's CEV would demand God the Father. Yud's original paper is available.
So, CEV presupposes false consciousness - that the average person's belief system is misaligned from reality due to incomplete information, incorrect presuppositions, and so forth.
And the idea is that a wise leader will choose for the people what the people would choose for themselves if they had a correct understanding of reality, whether the people think they want that or not?
I guess today in LessWrong, we are re-inventing Marxism.
One must always keep in mind that the Rationalist project is explicitly a high-modernist effort; it is a permanent fight against postmodernism which it can never win, a philosopher's lost cause. They can only look at Marxism as low art which must be elevated by sanctifying it with the nebulous ointment of "Western civilization".
(Written quickly for Inkhaven, I hope someone someday makes a better case for this than I will here)
Inkhaven: write at least one bad hot-take a day!
In knavin'
That third post could have been interesting, because there was a school of thought that Vladimir Putin was an Antonio Salazar or Lord Vetinari who wanted the good for his country and was willing to do whatever that took. But now it is clear that he is a Russian nationalist who still believes what his textbooks told him when he was 14. Even if he were better informed about the facts, a Putin who did not want ethnic Russians to dominate the former USSR would not be Vladimir Putin.
Putin is lucky that Needy Amin's stupid attack on Iran pushed his invasion of Ukraine down to the 2nd most idiotic military adventure so far in the 21st century.
Look, before that, he had a decent hand. Russia was a 2nd or 3rd rate power, but no-one knew it, because the shiny armed forces were just seen on parades. He was getting a decent chunk of cash from fossil fuels, Russia was a good place to do shady business in , and he and his freidns could stash all that money in UK and US banks and send their kids to university there. Every alt-right party could count on some rubles getting sent to them.
So he wasn't Peter the Great, but he wasn't some boyar losing battles with the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth either.
In 6 or 12 months, Zelensky would be brought down by a combination of corruption and or shitty economy, and some Russia-friendly oligarch would use Russian disinfo to get elected and tie Ukraine even closer to Russia. But he just couldn't stand that somewhere there were Ukraine kids getting an education in Ukrainian and where the Holodomor was part of the curriculum.
i think you're (you plural, not you singular) making the typical western mistake regarding both putin and ukraine:
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putin was always an angry russian imperialist, he has built his position entirely on imperialist adventures (that were ignored by the west because who cares about chechnya or abkhazia, or other impossible-to-pronounce peoples of caucasus, really)
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the russo-ukrainian war started in 2014 with the invasion of crimea and then donbas, after ukrainians decided they don't really like the russian-friendly oligarch who used russian disinfo to get elected. and notably that was what shifted the ukrainian support for dropping neutrality in favour for joining nato; until 2014 ukrainians favoured just tightening the political and economical ties with the european union.
putin didn't descend into the imperator madness recently, he started with it, it was what buoyed him to the top.
I don't deny Putin is a Russian nationalist, I just meant that he could have more profitably reached his goals with a lighter touch. Invading in 2022 hardened Ukraine's opposition, highlighted the behavior of Russian troops in occupied Ukraine, and destroyed a lot of hardware and people.
Before 2022, Putin could project Russian power as this weird chimera of Russia as a promised land of white patriarchy, coupled with invincible military threat. The invasion revealed Russia as both military incompetent and brutal, making resisting Russia militarily the rational choice, and simultanously sidelining Russia's supporters. If you stand with Putin, you also stand with the people who destroyed Bucha.
@gerikson @sneerclub Needy Amin is a great coinage, but can I suggest Idiot Amin instead? (The resemblance between Trump and Idi Amin is glaringly obvious now if you stand their rhetoric and style of government side-by-side. Only significant difference is that Trump started with more.)
Habryka quoting Yud:
From my perspective, my whole life has been, when you raise the banner to oppose the apocalypse, crazy people gather around making things worse
"Crazy people"? That's hardly a nice way to describe your biggest fans.
I do like the lack of selfawareness here of the leader of the anti-Agipocalypse house.
Yeah, if you are a bit weird, and create a weird cause you will attract weird people.
Let's just ignore the parts of the globe that also got raped and pillaged under colonialism and didn't turn into moontouching superpowers I guess.
In the comments Habryka says he is an immigrant. Is this him? This one is a German with studies in Mathematics at Stuttgart and UCal Berkeley (I am not firing up LinkedIn). https://standardresume.co/r/OliverHabryka
The thing with the Trail of Tears is that the Five Civilized Tribes were adopting the parts of European civilization which they found helpful. Sitting on vast tracts of underused land is as American as apple pie. But Andrew Jackson decided he had the firepower to steal their land.
Sitting on vast tracts of underused land is as American as apple pie.
Only if you're white.
A German writing Manifest Destiny fan fiction without any idea of the facts on the ground? We seem to have here a Karl May cosplayer.
Someone on the Other!SneerClub compared SlateScott to Max Naumann, head of the Verband nationaldeutscher Juden
I am somewhat surprised by the number of upvoted comments pushing back. But most of that push-back is in the typical rationalist style loaded with jargon, full of charitability to what habryka must have really meant or how they may not be understanding him right, and altogether not nearly close enough to a cleanly stated: "no, wtf is wrong with you". So I'm still disgusted and annoyed. And it is still a highly upvoted article, so nah, I'm not giving any of the lesswrongers any credit on this one, even the ones trying to push back.