Benquo

Karma: 13,421

Benquo 2 May 2026 23:54 UTC
2 points
0
on: How to Corner Liars: A Miasma-Clearing Protocol
On the object level this seems unobjectionable and true. But the example of criminal defense isn’t just a good one for providing examples, but an unusually appealing one. With motivated prosecutors and proceduralized courts, cornering liars can be sufficient for making progress past the lie. In other circumstances, this can be much less true, e.g. when liars are trying to signal bad faith rather than good.

What’s needed for many circumstances of public life is some strategy for how good faith ought to confront brazen bad faith, as right now such encounters frequently end with both sides feeling like they won. The first step is for more good-faith players to discuss the problem.

Benquo 29 Apr 2026 22:20 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: SpectrumDT’s comment on: Socrates is Mortal
After the World Wars American public discourse looks to me like it declined very clearly.

Presidential debates shouldn’t suffer from e.g. improvements in access creating the false impression of reduced elite quality. Compare the Nixon-Kennedy debate, the Ford-Carter debate, and the Trump-Biden debate. N-K were dishonest but trying to fool voters who were trying to track arguments and figure out what was going on. I recently watched Nixon’s Checkers speech too; it’s famous as an innovative subject-changing appeal to emotion but to my contemporary ears the main thing that stood out was that most of the speech was an appeal to reason that would be tedious to someone who wasn’t thinking explicitly in terms of argument and evidential value.

Back to debates. F-C was sound bites designed to give the superficial impression of argument. T-B was just trading personal insults. I watched the unofficial version on Rumble where RFK Jr inserted himself and there was a strong contrast between the officially included debaters and RFK Jr, who just … answered the questions, like it was still the ’90s.

Benquo 27 Apr 2026 14:26 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Evil is bad, actually (Vassar and Olivia Schaefer)
“A threat of libel” is worded as though threatening to sue someone for an injury were aggression, but an actionable injury was not. The substance of your comment reads to me consistently with this. The OP suffers from a similar flaw.

Benquo 27 Apr 2026 5:18 UTC
3 points
−5
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Evil is bad, actually (Vassar and Olivia Schaefer)
I am appalled that a private citizen threatening a libel suit against a third party would be reason for a ban. Especially with no indication that you checked whether someone had actually libeled them.

Benquo 19 Apr 2026 16:25 UTC
4 points
−1
in reply to: lc’s comment on: Si No Se Puede
COINTELPRO includes more than one example. Do you think that the FBI stopped doing their job immediately after the Church Committee hearings or that they kept doing their job but it made no difference?

The Wikipedia entry says Carter specifically banned political assassinations, which by omission implies a considerable remaining mandate to do COINTELPRO and MKULTRA style stuff.

Benquo 19 Apr 2026 3:21 UTC
9 points
−1
on: Vladimir Putin’s CEV is probably not that bad
The implied near-orthogonality of competence and evil breaks down specifically in the context of power relations. The competence that gets you to the top of a pecking order is competence at suppressing rival coordination, and that’s constituted by dispositions you can’t cleanly factor out and still have the same person. Stalin’s paranoia was the manner in which he suppressed a palace coup. Sometimes people really do compromise themselves or narrow their metaphysics to embed conflict, as the price of being quick enough on the draw to maintain power.

A Putin free of the need to spend most of his attention suppressing his subordinates’ capacity to overthrow him is a Putin who suddenly has a ton of degrees of freedom he didn’t have before, which would likely be disorienting, overwhelming, and maybe even painful, like an upper middle class neurotic going to their first silent meditation retreat.

Not endorsing Kelsey’s position, though. The idea that it’s okay to kill Putin because he’s a bad guy is ghoulish and reflects what seems like a dearth of curiosity as to what the near counterfactuals are; I think the simplest explanation is probably just uncritically accepting American political propaganda. If Kelsey could manage Russia better from Putin’s position than he can then she should be trying to either overthrow or better yet advise him, but should also be a bit confused about why someone kinder and wiser isn’t already doing the job.

Relevant: Civil Law and Political Drama, Should EA Be at War with North Korea?

Benquo 18 Apr 2026 20:05 UTC
7 points
0
in reply to: lc’s comment on: Si No Se Puede
Do you have any specific arguments to offer here?

Si No Se Puede

Benquo18 Apr 2026 13:58 UTC

20 points

7 comments4 min readLW link

(benjaminrosshoffman.com)

Benquo 17 Apr 2026 4:17 UTC
44 points
22
on: Only Law Can Prevent Extinction
The argument that predictable norm-enforcing punishments are better than chaotic vigilantism against perceived bad actors is fine, I accept it.

There is an additional premise, that identifies that distinction with state vs. nonstate actors, I don’t see an adequate argument for it here, and I disagree with the conclusion. I will try to explain why.

King vs. Parliament in England is a relevant precedent for those two coming apart: Parliament’s eventual use of force against Charles I was legitimated by its fidelity to norms the Crown was violating, not by its prior institutional standing as part of the state. More generally, states can be the active suppressors of the alternative bases for trust that would otherwise allow norm-governed collective action. When a state is organized around trust-suppression, its violence inherently has chaotic and unpredictable elements, because it is hostile to accountability. Of course this is in some tension with the maintenance of state capacity, but in practice we see plenty of capricious violence by states that have normalized executive exceptions to their notional rules (e.g. prosecutorial discretion).

People can be expected to try to act in individual or collective self-defense in the absence of recourse. We should expect most such people to be deranged (because they live without recourse) and also to offer confused arguments (because they live without recourse), but we should neither expect nor hope that people who are not deranged and who are capable of offering good arguments will abstain from acting against people who seem to be trying to kill everyone.

Benquo 15 Apr 2026 23:03 UTC
3 points
−1
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Political Violence Is Never Acceptable
If you declare your loyalty to something that’s making threats then you are ipso facto making threats.

Benquo 15 Apr 2026 14:13 UTC
2 points
1
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Political Violence Is Never Acceptable
That’s not an alternative explanation; compliance with loyalty tests just is submitting to extortionary demands by participating in them.

Benquo 15 Apr 2026 12:01 UTC
33 points
12
on: Political Violence Is Never Acceptable
This article offers no arguments for the thesis.

On Gricean grounds, I don’t know how to construe asserting a political thesis stridently without offering any arguments as anything other than itself a threat.

Benquo 14 Apr 2026 20:55 UTC
8 points
4
in reply to: Shankar Sivarajan’s comment on: Only Law Can Prevent Extinction
That’s not the framework either the King and Parliament or the colonists’ leadership endorsed. Similar to Parliament during the English Civil War, the Continental Congress argued in the Declaration of Independence that they were defending specific rights with precedent in English law endorsed by king, parliament, and court alike. They needed this basis if they were going to retain precedent for e.g. respecting property rights, rather than initiating the sort of free-for-all Calvinball pragmatism implied by “you lose legitimacy as soon as it’s feasible to rebel.”
What links here?
- Benquo's comment on Only Law Can Prevent Extinction by Eliezer Yudkowsky (17 Apr 2026 4:17 UTC; 44 points)

Who Killed Common Law?

Benquo13 Apr 2026 18:38 UTC

64 points

1 comment4 min readLW link

(benjaminrosshoffman.com)

Benquo 10 Apr 2026 23:00 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Antonius Westerbrok’s comment on: Socrates is Mortal
That wasn’t my read Freshman year of college, but it pretty much was by Senior year. One dialogue that helped change my mind was the Theaetetus (mentioned in the post). It’s the one where Socrates describes himself as a midwife for ideas. Theaetetus is one of the very few people Plato shows us engaging in intellectual play with Socrates on close to an equal basis, mind to mind. The dialogue is about what it means to know something, and they go through a few hypotheses, rejecting each in turn as unworkable, and end with “we don’t know,” but no one is humiliated or digs in their heels and they learn things along the way. A lot of what can read as Socrates meaning to take people down, is the shape that their defensiveness forces conversations into.

Sometime in between, I met a Freshman who engaged me in conversation, and I asked him some clarifying questions out of curiosity, and ended up mildly disappointed that the conversation hadn’t gone anywhere interesting. Afterwards, someone complimented me on the takedown, which hadn’t been my intention at all.

Benquo 10 Apr 2026 3:33 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: Ronny Fernandez’s comment on: Socrates is Mortal
I share your worry, but there’s just no substitute for judging on the merits; there’s no way any number of meta-handles for wrong behavior can force us to behave rightly.

The best incentive I think is that behaving wrongly, being dead to others when there’s any reasonable prospect of doing otherwise, generally leads to bad outcomes. I try to remember how much better I feel at the end of a minute or hour or day in which I face up to fear, pleasure, pain, confusion, etc, instead of dissociating from them, but I need plenty of reminding!

Benquo 9 Apr 2026 13:08 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: cdt’s comment on: We can prevent progress! Conceptual clarity, and inspiration from the FDA
Progressivism seems like a third degree simulacral procession from Whig Theory of History, which is at least a theory. Whig Theory of History relates to progress as a contingent claim to be asserted about aggregates, which is meaningful because it lawfully decomposes into constituent facts we care about. Progressivism seems to inherit the emotional loading of the term as a given and then situate intentions relative to it.

Progress Studies and Works in Progress seem to be relying on “progress” as something whose value & reality is uncontested even if its specific meaning is unclear and the rollout is uneven.

Benquo 9 Apr 2026 12:55 UTC
2 points
0
on: Beliefs are Chosen to Serve Goals
Am I missing something or does this piece never actually make the argument it promises? It seems roughly comparable to:

A Turing machine & its starting tape are a joint specification; neither means or can do anything without the other, and the same functions can be differently allocated between them.

I wouldn’t suggest this breaks the orthogonality of Turing machines. Nor does the fact that a small machine with a small tape can’t compute large functions, and a small enough machine isn’t Turing complete, break the relevant orthogonality claim.

Similarly, I don’t understand why you think that beliefs and values being only jointly predictive of actions (and therefore jointly selected) restricts the space of values or propositional beliefs implementable in an AI within the space of expressible ones.

Benquo 8 Apr 2026 16:45 UTC
2 points
−2
in reply to: Mateusz Bagiński’s comment on: We can prevent progress! Conceptual clarity, and inspiration from the FDA
Those seem like attempts to extend the useful life of the current regime by trying to organize around doing more of the things that originally won it legitimacy, rather than to productively criticize or supersede it. Sometimes you should patch up an old thing rather than buy a new one, sometimes this is false economy because the cost of upkeep is higher than the amortized cost of replacement, and sometimes you’re driving around in an explosive death trap or breathing mold every day making you sick when you should really just get a safe new car or house built from scratch.

I would put Tyler Cowen in the same category, accepting things like GDP as the best politically available target to organize around, but trying to persuade people to do good rather than bad things to raise the GDP.

Benquo 8 Apr 2026 14:43 UTC
25 points
4
on: An easy coordination problem?
Some complicating factors that might help explain:

Owned vs borrowed power https://medium.com/@samo.burja/borrowed-versus-owned-power-a8334fbad1cd

Altman, Amodei, and Hassabis have borrowed power that may be conditioned on their AI progress. Musk’s situation is more complex. He has more notional ownership, which means he has more short-run control, but on some timeframes he’s still dependent on access to capital that depends on growth expectations, though these are much less specific to AI. Xi’s power is probably least entangled with this specific thing; Thiel’s suggested that the Chinese interest in AI is mostly about internal mass surveillance, though accountability and transparency to the executive more generally seems to me like a better fit for Xi’s problems: https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/doge-in-context/

These people are crazy.

Many of these people been strongly selected and conditioned for maniacal dedication to progress, so asking them to notice that that’s not in their interest is a difficult: https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/approval-extraction-advertised-as-production/

Their “belief” in ASI is cynical opportunism or otherwise deeply confused.

Overpromising and then pivoting is normal for startupworld. If the story is that what you’re working on is world-destroying-level dangerous, and that’s picked up in the vibe, investors just hear that you’re doing something powerful and transgressive, kind of like Uber. And no one’s really worried that Uber will kill everyone. Musk’s concerns about AI are notoriously confused: https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/openai-makes-humanity-less-safe/

That also explains why “cut a deal with Sam Altman” is not an appealing option to Musk; he already did that!

Benquo

Si No Se Puede

Who Killed Com­mon Law?

Who Killed Common Law?