Max H

Karma: 3,151

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 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
0
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
−1
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.

Max H 7 Mar 2026 21:32 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: robertzk’s comment on: robertzk’s Shortform
Haha, pretty good. I assume this is AI-generated? It’s getting there, but still not nearly as good as the best human-made stuff in this medium / genre:

Max H 7 Mar 2026 3:58 UTC
23 points
4
in reply to: leogao’s comment on: leogao’s Shortform
In what sense does it actually balance out? e.g. in India, unskilled labor is a lot cheaper, so lots of upper middle class people have servants. But the price of an iPhone in India is pretty similar to the price of an iPhone in the US.
So my impression is that the typical basket of goods and services that people consume in different places around the world at roughly equivalent / analogous relative economic classes actually does vary quite a bit. Anything with a labor component will naturally scale up and down for balance, but staples and stuff made in factories doesn’t vary that much. In the US for example, labor of all types is very expensive, so people don’t have servants, but most people can afford a pretty much endless supply of trinkets and gadgets.

Max H 6 Mar 2026 17:57 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: lc’s comment on: lc’s Shortform
Seems reasonable to me to interpret the words “ban X” as a ban on X, not as ban on some subset of X. To ban something means to ban it.
The phrases “A ban on X related to Y” and “A blanket ban on all X related to Y” do not have identical meanings and interpretations in practice.
The former is ambiguous and therefore potentially misleading in the context of this bill, the latter is precise but definitely false.
I agree that the original tweet is bad and hyperbolic, but my point is that if you’re going to make a correction, you should correct the exact precise thing the person you’re correcting actually said.
If there is actually any ambiguity here, I am willing to bet literally anyone on this website that, if the bill goes forward, the ambiguities will be resolved in favor of a less aggressive interpretation in subsequent edits.
Yes, I think it is ambiguous whether this:
“would prohibit chatbots from giving substantive responses, including information or advice, that can be mistaken for professional counseling.”
means that making the chatbot include a disclaimer that it is not a licensed professional is sufficient on its own. If you start a response with “I am not a doctor, but...” and then give 2000+ words of actionable medical advice, that could reasonably be mistaken for “professional counseling”, which means it would be prohibited.
What links here?
- lc's comment on Shortform by lc (6 Mar 2026 18:42 UTC; 4 points)

Max H 6 Mar 2026 17:11 UTC
4 points
1
in reply to: lc’s comment on: lc’s Shortform
That is materially narrower than a blanket ban on AI “answering questions related to” medicine, law, dentistry, nursing, psychology, social work, engineering, etc.
So the post overstates the bill’s scope: the bill does not ban AI from answering all questions related to those professions;
Nitpick: the tweet in question does not actually use the phrases “all questions” or “blanket ban”. ChatGPT is interpreting ambiguity in a hyperbolic way to make the correction look stronger.
It’s also not clear from the excerpt of the bill that you quoted that a chatbot simply prefacing its response with “I am not a lawyer / doctor / hair stylist / etc. but”, (which would be annoying but not catastrophic) is sufficient to avoid liability.
The bill’s author is a democratic socialist that has said, among other things, “People deserve real care from real people.”, implying that the bill is indeed designed to limit what AIs can say, not just that they need to include more disclaimers when discussing certain subjects. Which is indeed very bad and stupid, even if it is not a “blanket ban” on “answering all questions” (which again, are ChatGPT’s words, not the words of anyone credible who supports or opposes the bill).

Max H 3 Mar 2026 15:58 UTC
7 points
4
in reply to: Aransentin’s comment on: Epstein and my world model
Tracey is definitely not neutral political valence-wise, but I suspect that’s not the main reason I’m getting downvoted. The OP said explicitly that they didn’t want to talk about the evidence and that this piece is for people that “already know”. So my comment is both off-topic and rude in multiple ways:
- changes the subject to something the OP explicitly flagged that they don’t want to talk about here
- insinuates that the OP is a participant in the mass hysteria, with only a citation to a political operator as evidence
- doesn’t invite further discussion (“I don’t think it’s worth engaging with at all...”)
There’s probably also a selection effect—the people who are likely to scroll to the bottom of this post and expand a negative-karma comment are likely to have strong feelings about the topic already, in a particular direction. And more neutral people are likely to vote based on the tone and process vibes or their pre-existing beliefs, rather than take the time to evaluate an argument that neither I or the OP are explicitly making. The OP reads as trying to do something meta and world-model-y, which vaguely looks like a virtue around here, whereas my comment pattern matches to lower-quality political punditry that the commentariat here generally doesn’t like.
So the downvotes and disagreement (-5 / −24 at time of writing) don’t really surprise me, but they are another reminder that LW votes are very much not truth-tracking in general.

Max H 2 Mar 2026 23:33 UTC
14 points
−9
on: Epstein and my world model
A lot of “this Epstein stuff” is mass hysteria. I don’t think it’s worth engaging with at all for most people, but if you’ve already been sucked in, I recommend reading Michael Tracey for some balance and counterpoints to the sensationalism.

Max H 26 Feb 2026 15:04 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: The persona selection model
I don’t think I buy this one. Theorems and scientific phenomena are universal, but the model can only “see” them through the data we give them. The fact that chain-of-thought reasoning improves performance (and that you can intervene on them to change the answer) suggests that reasoning is meaningfully happening “in” the natural language token output even if it’s not perfectly faithful.
Buy it as what? You mentioned data-dependent generalization, I thought because you were using at as an example / reason that alien LLMs would be different. I pointed out in response that a lot of the data is actually the same, in some sense - someone or (some-LLM) who studies chemistry in English will be able to predict the effects of mixing baking soda and vinegar anywhere. Maybe before you get to full understanding, you can get various Sapir-Whorf-like effects based on what language you’re working in (e.g. perhaps LLMs learn chemistry quickly and more accurately in French, or something), but so what? Eventually with enough scale, they all saturate your evals, regardless of what language they initially learned in. My point is that the curriculum and format of the data in an Alien LLM corpus is at least arguably more similar to a human LLM corpus, than either dataset is similar to the format and curriculum in the respective human and alien natural growth processes.
That’s not my understanding; do you have a cite I should look at?
Not really. The thing I was thinking of and maybe mis-remembering or mis-applying, was translation between pairs of languages for which their are few or no direct human translations between the pair. IIUC, for most of the language pairs on Google Translate for which this is true, Google Translate used to work by translating from Language A <-> English <-> Language B, and this didn’t work very well. Nowadays Google Translate uses some kind of LLM and it apparently works much better. I hypothesize that LLMs faculty with translation would extend to alien languages as well; given how much LLMs have improved machine translation and how good LLMs are at deciphering codes and patterns in text generally. But I concede that’s not the same as definitely already being “extremely superhuman” at it, which was what I said in the grandparent.