Benquo

Karma: 13,369

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
7 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?

Benquo 17 Apr 2026 4:17 UTC
27 points
10
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
0
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
13
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
7 points
2
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.”

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 8 Apr 2026 14:42 UTC
6 points
−1
on: We can prevent progress! Conceptual clarity, and inspiration from the FDA
Our culture is dominated by an ideology of progress, called progressivism, which conflates purportedly inevitable progressions along trendlines (especially ones that amount to an increase in taxable activity, or increased economic mobilization) with the solution of problems and people’s lives getting better. Because it’s an ideology, progressives worship progress rather than having honest propositional views on it amenable to evidence; enough evidence might cause a personal crisis, but they don’t have the virtues of lightness or specificity about it.

In practice progressivism is a job creation scheme for elites. The jobs created have to be constituted to manage problems, rather than solve them; solving problems destroys jobs. Oddly, if you wanted to slow down the rate at which we solve our proximate problems using AI or increase AI capacities, the best option available short of revolution or radical dissidence en masse might be to make “AI Progress” an important positive policy goal and try to persuade elites that it’s important to get those metrics up.

Institutional recommendations are shaped by implicit constraints like “don’t reduce headcount” and “don’t invalidate your department’s premise,” internalized as limits on what’s thinkable: https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/parkinsons-law-ideology-statistics/#diagnosis

Calling for X produces jobs doing the opposite: https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/openai-makes-humanity-less-safe/

Neoclassical (progressive) economics tries to quantify “total value,” and then maximize it, which in practice means maximizing transaction volume: https://substack.com/@benhoffman700141/note/c-237461608

A much deeper dive into the same thing: https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/the-domestic-product/

Benquo 8 Apr 2026 4:02 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: NoSignalNoNoise’s comment on: Telescopes Need Good Lenses
I’d think that if their American analogues didn’t also reproduce way above replacement.

Benquo 7 Apr 2026 16:10 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: xpym’s comment on: The Corner-Stone
Calvinist England is a well documented culturally near case.

China’s track record suggests a more recent positive trajectory, so that their measured quality of life seems on par with the US despite the US’s vastly superior per capita endowment as recently as 1980, and their industrial and technological capacity is not unambiguously inferior.

Benquo 5 Apr 2026 13:41 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: The Corner-Stone
As I understand your Smart Losers toy model, there’s an iterated prisoner’s dilemma, and on some rounds knowable only to “smart” players pairings and results are not published afterwards. There’s no other functional meaning of “smart” here, non-adversarial uses of intelligence don’t exist. So non-”smart” players start with grim trigger, but “smart” players grim trigger in published rounds and defect in unpublished rounds, which can push everyone into a defect-defect equilibrium.

It should be obvious from my characterization what I think the main weakness in this model is. I wrote Civil Law and Political Drama to try to characterize the difference and relation between adversarial and nonadversarial consciousness more precisely.

But that’s something of a timeless description, and doesn’t explain why one or the other would win at some particular time. An important contingent factor is the balance between external performance pressure, and the opportunity for central allocation of patronage. Systems with a large stable extracted surplus like tax revenue select, in the absence of specific countermeasures, for courtiers seeking patronage. Without specific countermeasures, this blows up catastrophically. The countermeasure that seems to work is an anti-norm: patronage-seekers only manage problems for the short-term benefit of the class as a whole, rather than either solving them or increasing them unboundedly to maximize their own share of the rents. I think rent-seeking classes that manage this coordinate through perverted shame.

So we see functionally oriented cognition more in cases where groups are under strong external performance pressure, or in the rare punctuating cases where pronormative actors developed enough awareness of themselves as a class to take collective action against their enemies. (Norman Gottwald’s The Tribes of Yahweh argues that the ancient Israelites did something similar, though I’m still making sense of that situation, and it’s harder to evaluate because records are much worse.)

This isn’t a complete model, and it would be helpful for others to check it against alternative explanations, check it for coherence, and develop the connections between different parts.

Much of this overlaps strongly with James Camacho’s comment thread, I think it would be better for the three of us to be discussing this jointly rather than separately; I’d like to see where you find either of us unpersuasive and why.

Benquo 5 Apr 2026 12:51 UTC
14 points
0
in reply to: alseph’s comment on: The Corner-Stone

It feels like all employers now want candidates who are obsessed with the role they applied for.”

Or they want candidates willing to role-play that obsession. This seems much more probable on priors, easier to access from any plausible naïve view of the world if you’re not unseeing adversariality, and at least as consistent with the data.

I implore you to consider that different times call for radically different sorts of work, and you now have sufficient evidence against the hypothesis that the right thing to do is try to contribute to the shared project our governing institutions are recruiting you for. John Adams formulated this very tidily:

The Science of Government it is my Duty to study, more than all other Sciences: the Art of Legislation and Administration and Negotiation, ought to take Place, indeed to exclude in a manner all other Arts. I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.

If you find yourself confronting not rule of law, strong property rights, and voluntary mutual exchange, but something more like Hobbes’s state of nature:

In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

then you’re in the first stage of Adams’s developmental pyramid, and work on the later stages is only helpful in special cases, not generically.

Cf also Ecclesiastes 3:

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
What profit hath he that worketh in that wherein he laboureth?

Benquo 5 Apr 2026 12:32 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: DanB’s comment on: The Corner-Stone
“than we can effectively use” is not an exogenous quantity. More people means more available intelligence, but also means more users of intelligence! So, yes, it can be “that bad” if the counterfactual where our promotion mechanisms weren’t fanatically devoted to crippling the best of us is sufficiently better than our actual reality.