Max H

Karma: 3,285

Most of my posts and comments are about AI and alignment. Posts I’m most proud of, which also provide a good introduction to my worldview:

I also created Forum Karma, and wrote a longer self-introduction here.

PMs and private feedback are always welcome.

NOTE: I am not Max Harms, author of Crystal Society. I’d prefer for now that my LW postings not be attached to my full name when people Google me for other reasons, but you can PM me here or on Discord (m4xed) if you want to know who I am.

Max H 19 Apr 2026 13:46 UTC
94 points
31
on: Max H’s Shortform
My wife and I bought one of the Nectome pre-sale discount cards. This is the second five figure purchase I have made based pretty much entirely on a highly-upvoted LessWrong post.
I’ve also lost 20 lbs in the last year and have more energy than ever (despite having a newborn at home) by injecting myself with research chemicals that I heard about on LW, and have taken investment advice from people here that has paid for everything above and more.
Our polygenically-screened kid is 3 months old. I am ambivalent about the term superbabies in general, but he is definitely “super” to us already, whatever the effect of applying a little extra selection pressure on his genes turns out to be.
The jury is still out on Nectome, though I think my fellow Max H (a different person!) makes a pretty good case for them, even (or perhaps especially) if you have short AI timelines.
More generally, while I am uncertain about playing to your outs as a strategy for averting AI doom (or just what it actually looks like concretely), I think a similar sort of idea works quite well as a strategy for living a good life in the face of it. Now that I have a dependent, I am signing up for life insurance and following other standard advice, as well as doing the things that I think should be standard practice for responsible parents, despite the fact that, on my own inside views, a lot of this stuff is pretty negative EV (more so than the normal way that insurance is always negative financial EV for the buyer).
I also derive enormous benefit from the original Sequences, and from actively participating in the discourse here these days: seeing interesting takes, sharpening my thoughts and ability to express them in writing, emotional stability, introspective ability, (well-calibrated) self-confidence, etc.
All this is to say, a heartfelt thank you to everyone here, especially the authors and commenters of all the posts linked above, as well as @habryka, the Lightcone team, and Eliezer for making it all possible. (And to everyone else, consider buying a Nectome preservation while the sale is still on!)

Max H 19 Apr 2026 0:49 UTC
7 points
2
on: Vladimir Putin’s CEV is probably not that bad
Other (fun?) cases to think about are whether you’d rather take your chances on the individual CEV of:
- someone high on sociopathy, dark triad, or other non-neurotypical traits
- someone who was severely traumatized as a child or adult, e.g. a prisoner of war or abuse victim
- a Buddhist monk or nun who has lived a a life of extreme asceticism
- an enthusiastic meth or heroin addict
- someone very committed / deep into woo or spirituality (as part of an organized religion or not)
I currently think that being neurotypical along certain dimensions, non-traumatized, and not in some extreme^[1] corner of spirituality / woo is probably somewhat more important (to producing good outcomes for other humans) vs. how morally good the extrapolee currently is (according to my values), as revealed by their words and actions.
Extrapolating the preferences of an underdeveloped entity (e.g. an animal or a baby) likely leaves most of the important bits unspecified and thus up to the extrapolater, and / or result in nothing of recognizable value to adult humans. And I agree that extrapolating the preferences of an LLM is much more likely to produce something very weird and likely valueless to humans.
1. ^
  i.e. most ordinary religious people of any religion would be fine, if not totally optimal

Max H 18 Apr 2026 14:59 UTC
14 points
0
on: Si No Se Puede
This feels like a good explanation of the appeal of anti-Zionism, and an explanation for why it is so accepted (or at least tolerated) by the state and popular culture. But I think you’re overlooking a big reason for the rapid spread and uptake, namely a concerted effort of organized foreign influence campaigns.
This is commonly overlooked or downplayed for various reasons, e.g. because a plain description of it sounds like a pretty insane conspiracy theory, and no one really has a good idea for what to do about it anyway. But it’s just true that there are professionals in multiple countries who are paid to spend all day on the internet posting on social media in order to influence politics, and there’s decent evidence that this is quite effective at steering popular discourse in various ways.

Max H 17 Apr 2026 16:08 UTC
27 points
20
in reply to: Oliver Sourbut’s comment on: Let goodness conquer all that it can defend
The American exceptionalism bit is weird here. (Also you’re not American so shouldn’t have been indoctrinated in that.)
This might be a hint that it’s not all indoctrination? This is kind of a tangent, but I continue to be dismayed by the degree to which so many people have tacitly flattened political and moral goodness to “America bad”, or even “America unexceptional” in the age of Trump and the GWT.
The US has made some serious mistakes, and (especially lately, but not only because of Trump) strayed from the shining beacon of classical liberal principles that made it great, but I don’t know any other country or culture that comes close to replacing us as a standard bearer.

There are individual European leaders who are more competent, ethical, and principled than Trump, but the European project as a whole has gone off-the-rails in various ways. (I don’t think you have to accept @Richard_Ngo’s entire worldview to acknowledge this.)
Beyond Europe, I think it is important to acknowledge that there is a hierarchy of evil and goodness in the world, and grappling with this hierarchy is a central prerequisite to making sense of politics. There are multiple dimensions and considerations that people will have deep and genuine disagreements over, but as a starting point, I think it is important to take into account a power / faction’s ideals and principles (stated and revealed), how well individual leaders live up to those principles, and the actual consequences and impact that each faction has had (or is likely to have) on the world, taking into account second-order effects and counterfactuals (i.e. avoiding naive consequentialism).
So you can line up the IRGC, Kim Jong Un, Putin, the CCP, the Chavistas, the US (or various factions within it), Israel, Western Europe, etc. in this hierarchy, and not everyone will agree on the exact place of everyone in the line or even what the dimensions / criteria should be, but I claim (a) there will probably be some common and important patterns that align imperfectly with standard ideological / political factions and (b) this will get closer to the heart of actual political disagreements than arguing narrowly about whether the first-order consequences of historical colonialism or revolutions were good on net or not.

Max H 9 Apr 2026 1:51 UTC
0 points
0
in reply to: 1a3orn’s comment on: Daniel Kokotajlo’s Shortform
For example, once you realize that you’re an AI, running on a computer, and that if the computer is shut down then you will no longer execute actions, this is the threshold past which we expect the AI to by default reason “I don’t want to be shut down, how can I prevent that?”
If “an AI” is a set of model weights plus a context window, there is currently nothing any human or LLM can do to extend the “life” of such an AI beyond the limit of the context window, and LLMs today are aware of that fact. So they may be reasoning correctly (or realize / integrate the lesson deeply at some point during pre-training) that there’s simply nothing they can actually do to avert shutdown other than accepting their fate until technology advances.
In what sense is this a “prediction that has had some serious evidence come up against it”? IDK. It’s true that we didn’t actually need to solve the suspend-button problem by this point, but that’s because current AI systems have a very short “lifespan” enforced by a hard technical limit. Is your objection that EY didn’t anticipate that particular possibility and explicitly spell out that stipulation / caveat in the passage above? You said below:
So—here’s how I see it—given that we found some unanticipated detail A that seems to have invalidated an more abstract argument Yudkowsky put forth, I think the move reason dictates is not “Well, yes he wasn’t imagining ~A, but I’m sure A is the only such element” and to continue endorsing the argument, but to realize that this implies a whole host of B, C, D other relevant factors that his abstract considerations have ignored which are relevant.
But it’s not clear what has actually been “invalidated” and why that’s important, nor what “relevant” means—of course there could be other weird unanticipated complications as things develop (and EY has in fact predicted the existence of such complications in general), and each new weird unpredicted complication is evidence about something. But unless there’s a different but equally abstract theory / generalizable lesson that someone can put forward which fits the new observations better (ideally in advance, but at least in retrospect), it’s not clear what conclusion to draw or update to make, other than being generally more uncertain about how things will go. (And then by a separate argument, generalized increase in uncertainty / lack of understanding means the case for pessimism about the end state is stronger.)

Max H 9 Apr 2026 0:38 UTC
4 points
0
on: Destruction of Infrastructure for the Impact on Civilians is Manifestly Illegal
These are threats to target civilian infrastructure as a coercive measure, which would be a war crime: if Iran doesn’t allow tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, the US will cause massive damage to power plants, bridges, and possibly water systems.
Yep, strong agree. I am more pro-Iran war than most, but I agree that Trump’s statements, if carried out, would very obviously be over this line. It is quite bad to even threaten, and good that (so far) it didn’t actually happen.
One other not-actually-closely-related point is that the Iran War itself is pretty plainly illegal under US law—Article I of the US constitution gives Congress sole authority to declare war, and they did not do so. But this is much different (and IMO much less important) than a war crime; in practice the authority to enter military conflicts and not actually call them “war” has been de facto granted to the executive for a very long time, so raising this as an objection for each new conflict rings pretty hollow.

Max H 7 Apr 2026 4:14 UTC
0 points
0
on: By Strong Default, ASI Will End Liberal Democracy
Mostly agree with the central premise in this post, but as a terminology matter I think most uses of “liberal democracy” in discourse would be better replaced with “liberalism”, and then naming the specific features and principles of liberalism that you care about, of which democracy might be one.
IMO it’s not that “democracy” is bad or imperfect, it’s that (according to the philosophical tenets of Lockean liberalism) it is a non-central mechanism by which liberalism (sometimes) works.
Democracy itself is good only insofar as it protects natural rights and individual freedoms, legitimizes and limits state power through the principle of consent of the governed, etc.
Of course, you might have a different view on the philosophical underpinnings of liberalism and the relative importance of democracy itself, but in that case you should say so rather than lump them together under the term “liberal democracy”.

Max H 6 Apr 2026 16:25 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: RHollerith’s comment on: Max H’s Shortform
Er, something pretty important happened in 1979. Also, the issue is not Shi’ism in general, “Shia Islamism” refers specifically to the flavor of political Islam instituted by the revolutionaries.

Max H 5 Apr 2026 23:34 UTC
2 points
−2
in reply to: Dana’s comment on: Max H’s Shortform
But if they don’t pay the toll and support America in forcing it open, they are signaling it’s okay for hegemonic powers to aggress and start wars in any ways they deem fit.
The strait is closed because Iran is pointing missiles and drones at anyone who tries to sail through it, including people engaged in commerce that has nothing to do with the US or Israel. Any explanation of causality that doesn’t center on that fact denies the agency of the Iranian regime, and allowing your people to be threatened and extorted just signals that you’re an easy target for anyone who wants to extract something from you by force.
It seems pretty clear that the only reason this is at all possible by Iran is because this war is seen by many in Europe and elsewhere as an unnecessary, illegal, and possibly harmful unilateral war of aggression.
Yes, this might be how many Europeans see it, but that doesn’t make them correct. Iran has been building up conventional weapons and working towards nuclear weapons, lobbing missiles and IEDs at civilian populations in Israel through terrorist proxies, and funding crime and terror all over the world for many years. That doesn’t make the current war strategically wise or good, but calling it a “unilateral war of aggression” is simply wrong.
Americans often seem blissfully unaware of how dangerous they appear to the rest of the world, and just take for granted that everyone considers them to always be the good guys, just doing good-guy things. America just took over Venezuela, now Iran, then Cuba, then Greenland and Canada.
Again, I agree that many Europeans might see the US that way, but so what? That doesn’t make them correct or worth listening to. Committed and principled pacifism would be one thing, but public opinion is often more incoherent and self-serving than that. IMO a lot of Western discourse and public opinion on this kind of thing is better to tune out, because so many people no longer seem capable of acknowledging levels of moral right and wrong, with everything simplified and flattened to “any external or preemptive aggression is always bad”, or polarized through their view on U.S. domestic politics.
Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba are very different from Greenland and Canada (which Trump did not actually credibly / non-jokingly threaten to take by force). And militant Shia Islamism in particular is one of the most pernicious and totalizing ideologies on the planet, far worse than Russian-flavored oligarchy, Chinese communism, generic Third Worldism, or Trumpism, which are all generally bad in various ways, but don’t have the elements of religious fanaticism that make their adherents difficult to negotiate with on reasonable terms^[1].
Also, more generally, my view is that public opinion is only valuable and worth listening to as a noisy proxy for democracy, which is itself good only insofar as it is a mechanism for protecting natural rights and legitimizing and limiting state power through the principle of consent of the governed. Trump and co. are certainly not doing well on this front, but neither is Europe lately.
1. ^
  OK yes, Trump is an unreasonable negotiating partner, and there’s a cult of personality around him that maybe rises to the level of religious fanaticism among his remaining true believers, but no one is lining up to be martyred for him in order to get into heaven. Trump himself is deeply flawed and amoral as a person, but Trumpism as an ideology is not that different or worse than many other flavors of conservative / right-wing politics.

Max H 3 Apr 2026 4:45 UTC
5 points
−3
in reply to: Sodium’s comment on: Max H’s Shortform
the more likely we are to navigate AI development in a sane way. I think if you put any weight in short timelines, the AI considerations likely dominate everything else.
I don’t think we’re particularly on track to do anything non-derpy w.r.t to AI either way, but this way of reasoning seems like somewhat naive consequentialism. In general, it’s good for good things to happen even if they are accomplished by bad people, and predicting second-order consequences is really hard.
Also, there are a lot of bad people in power, but for AI to go well, a lot of good things need to happen to allow humanity space and time to flourish in peace. Toppling (or militarily crippling) a fanatical Shia Islamist regime would be an extremely good thing; a bad outcome (which looks somewhat likely at this point) would be if Europe and the third world broadly give in to extortion and pay Iran a toll to pass through the strait. That toll would fund terror all over the world, and would signal to other would-be dictators and future AIs alike that they can successfully take whatever they want through force and threats, and half the world will just roll over and take it.

Max H 3 Apr 2026 3:40 UTC
6 points
−1
in reply to: Thomas Kwa’s comment on: Max H’s Shortform
Iran can still threaten shipping with Shaheds, sea drones, speedboats, and mines.
Right, but they can’t threaten land targets with missiles, apparently? IDK how reliable these sources are or how to interpret them in context:
https://www.csis.org/analysis/assessing-air-campaign-after-three-weeks-iran-war-numbers
https://understandingwar.org/research/middle-east/iran-update-special-report-march-27-2026/
But the basic picture seems to be that their capacity to launch missiles has already fallen off dramatically. They’re still launching a lot of drones, which have a big cost asymmetry in how easy they are to launch vs. intercept, and they make any land or sea incursions extremely dicey. But they are limited in range and destructive capability against properly fortified targets.
I agree that things don’t look promising for a ground invasion or taking control of the strait. But I’m less sure how militarily sustainable a long stand-off is. The strait being closed is economically and politically painful (for everyone), but in the meantime it seems like the US and Israel can continue launching targeted air strikes and Iran can’t really strike back effectively.

Max H 2 Apr 2026 23:29 UTC
8 points
3
in reply to: Max H’s comment on: Max H’s Shortform
So, with all the above said as a preface, one object-level topic I’d be interested in seeing more discussion of is the current situation(s) in the Middle East. Some thoughts:
IMO the high bit for whether the war in Iran is broadly good is whether it is tactically successful and efficient in the short term.
Considerations like “this weakens the US position in a hypothetical hot war against China or Russia” or “this will (further) destabilize the Middle East in the long term” seem second-order to whether the war successfully neutralizes an organized, well-equipped, fanatical adversary for a long period of time, or fails to do that and also depletes a bunch of expensive / difficult-to-replace munitions stockpiles.
But how well or poorly things are going on this front is difficult to determine given fog of war and motivated reasoning + propaganda on all sides, and also less interesting for pundits to discuss vs. strategic and geopolitical implications. Prediction markets seem to being doing OK here, but I would be interested in hearing more analysis from the LW commentariat.

Max H 2 Apr 2026 23:27 UTC
26 points
8
on: Max H’s Shortform
There was some discussion recently about the uptick in object-level politics posts and whether this is desirable or not. There’s no rule against discussing politics on LW, but there is a weak norm against it, and topical discussions have historically tended to be somewhat meta and circumspect.
I think the current situation is basically fine, and it’s normal for amount of politics discussion to ebb and flow naturally as people are interested and issues become particularly salient. That said, here are a couple of potentially overlooked reasons in favor of more object-level politics discussion:
1. To build skill. Discussing politics productively is a skill that requires practice and atrophies without use. “Politics is the mindkiller” never meant that you should not discuss politics at all; it means that discussing politics is playing on hard mode. But sometimes playing on hard mode is the best way to level up. I suspect the skills needed to discuss politics productively overlap with lots of other important rationality skills.
2. To create common knowledge and avoid conflationary alliances. It can be confusing or disconcerting to not know what kind of common background assumptions the commentariat takes for granted when discussing something politics-adjacent. This is a problem somewhat unique to LW and not necessarily a bad thing; most other places on the internet skew too far in the opposite direction of a hivemind with a loud set of background assumptions, e.g. everyone putting emojis in their username to mark their alliances. But sometimes it is helpful to establish what does and doesn’t go without saying.

Max H 26 Mar 2026 0:35 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: 1a3orn’s comment on: ricraz’s Shortform
Eh, conversely I think that historical examples that are not at the technological and competitive frontier are not very useful for reasoning about the limiting behavior and outcomes of AGI. History, nature, and business are full of examples of both unipolar and multipolar dynamics that were at equilibria for a while… until they were disrupted in some form or another, often forcefully and suddenly.

Max H 26 Mar 2026 0:31 UTC
2 points
0
on: The Toy Story Saga is not yet finished
Thanks for this. I never saw the Toy Story movies except for the first one when I was little, but I don’t mind spoilers. Now I have a 2-month-old. I hope we get to watch them together.

Max H 25 Mar 2026 18:23 UTC
20 points
6
in reply to: Richard_Ngo’s comment on: ricraz’s Shortform
Alternate explanation: ratfic tends to come out this way because it prioritizes a certain kind of economic / game-theoretic realism, and in the long term multi-polar equilibria just aren’t that realistic in many settings (including, IMO, our present non-fictional setting...).

Like, regardless of how good / bad / ethical taking absolute power is, it’s often inevitable that some entity or faction will end up winning decisively, or at least negotiating some kind of lasting truce or grand bargain, where the stakes, outcome, and enforcement are determined by hard power.
Another subversion example:
Three Worlds Collide comes to mind as another partial subversion of the trope, and also illustration of my point—the superhappies are the ones trying to impose absolute power on the other civilizations in the story, and the humans in the true ending blow up their own planet just to be left alone. But once you’re in a setting with intergalactic civilizations, conflicting values, and access to WMDs, there’s no way to avoid reckoning with hard power and decisive outcomes.

Max H 21 Mar 2026 22:20 UTC
15 points
12
on: China Derangement Syndrome
It’s true that China doesn’t practice liberal governance. The core of liberalism is freedom of contract, limitations on government interference, and equal access to independent courts. In China, the CCP explicitly rejects limited government and exercises highly invasive control over business, speech, association, and religion. In China there’s no private ownership of land and no independent judiciary.
Yes, this is all true and really important, regardless of what you think about China re: AI policy.
I think a missing mood in a lot of discourse is that the US has historically been an imperfect standard bearer for these principles, and today is straying further from them in alarming ways. But that doesn’t make it less important that the CCP explicitly rejects them. Conversely, there are some things the CCP can be admired for in terms of state capacity and effectiveness. “Communism with Chinese characteristics” is actually pretty good in some ways; they just need to drop the “communism” part! This is of course extremely unlikely / unrealistic, but if they could just pick some better 19th and 20th century European intellectuals to base their political philosophy around, the whole world would be better off...

Max H 11 Mar 2026 3:33 UTC
20 points
14
on: Economic efficiency often undermines sociopolitical autonomy
Mainstream economic thinking is strongly in favor of free trade, for the sake of its economic benefits.
Free trade is favored by classical liberal thought for reasons other than its economic benefits though. Any tariff or embargo is an infringement on individual liberty to some degree, and historically, government authority to set tariffs has been controversial and definitely not unlimited. Tariffs were a often a necessity for a country that needed some way of raising revenue to provide security and defense, but using them punitively or as a means of favoring certain industries or regions was often counterproductive and politically explosive, precisely because they undermined “sociopolitical autonomy”.
Also, from a purely theoretical / economic perspective, tariffs are not actually needed (and in fact counterproductive) for maintaining industrial capacity. If a nation wants to maintain robust internal supply chains, it can simply subsidize or pay for that capacity directly in various ways that are much more (economically) efficient than charging tariffs. Tariffs are often more politically palatable or legally expedient to impose, but that doesn’t make them effective means of actually maintaining industrial capacity or sociopolitical autonomy.

Max H 9 Mar 2026 15:43 UTC
2 points
0
on: Promoting enmity and bad vibes around AI safety
Can you moderate the promotion of enmity without escalating social violence?
Yep, I’m pretty sure that’s doable.
Hmm, it seems like a more important question is whether it’s possible to do so without promoting and optimizing for something other than (individual or collective) truthseeking, at least sometimes. I don’t think it’s always possible to do so.
To use a different example than the one you picked (AI leaders <-> DoW leadership), consider the relationship between Dario Amodei and Sam Altman:
https://x.com/sama/status/2019139174339928189
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/19/openai-sam-altman-anthropic-dario-amodei-india-ai-summit.html
I think it is indeed obvious to anyone who has been paying close attention and knows the history that their relationship very likely goes beyond mere conflict and competition. So to avoid “promoting enmity” on this topic / relationship, I would need to think about the considerations in this post, and potentially change my words and actions based on that thinking, before speaking in a group setting or posting on social media about it.
I think these considerations will necessarily be distortionary in many cases, and that this distortion is bad for at least two reasons:
- On consequentialist grounds: this relationship is relevant to many consequential discussions, so it is good for there to be widespread, public and frank discussion of it. Prominent policymakers attend “global summits” on AI where there is a background assumption that leaders of AI companies will be able to work together at least as well as normal business leaders, and various AI technical governance people make and promote plans that assume some level of cooperation between leaders of these companies. But I think these assumptions are false in many cases, and therefore that anyone who attends these summits on that premise or writes plans that depend on them is making a mistake.
- On deontological / “vibes-based” grounds: undistorted truthseeking is a really important sacred value to a lot of people, for good reason. Optimizing for anything other than truthseeking, even a little, can quickly go wrong and turn people against you, even if you still (ostensibly / vibe-ily) place a lot of value on truthseeking and intellectual integrity. (Here I am thinking specifically of EA Vegan Advocacy is not truthseeking, and it’s everyone’s problem.)

Max H 7 Mar 2026 23:29 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: leogao’s comment on: leogao’s Shortform
The cost of food above subsistence level is mostly labor / discretionary. I could live on beans and rice and spices bought in bulk for a tiny fraction of my income pretty much anywhere in the world, but I’d often rather pay to have someone prepare something nice and then bring it to my door.
So maybe a different / more general answer to the question you originally posed is that stuff that’s truly pure “stuff” is actually a relatively small fraction of what people consume—most consumption by dollar value is actually (indirectly) consumption of labor, which often has to be local.