The older I get, the more I get the sneaking suspicion that statements like "the ends don't justify the means" and "violence is always the wrong answer" are, at best, wildly logically inconsistent in any society at any time, and at worst, designed to ensure only a very few people in power can commit violence.

An ongoing conflict has resulted in the violent deaths of literally many thousands of children. The people who enable those deaths are usually safely ensconced thousands of miles away, often living in cushy suburbs.

To emphasize as strongly as I possibly can, I am not advocating for more violence. Quite the contrary, I'm advocating for less. I just don't understand why we have all these adages to convince people that "violence is always wrong", while I'm sure some at least some of the people who say that are actively engaged in building machines designed to kill people.

Related, the Substack link you posted is titled "Political Violence is Never The Answer". But our country (and a lot of them) were literally founded on political violence. How do people square those 2 ideas?

> "The ends don't justify the means" and literal entire religions have been built on this concept.

Most religions rely on a supernatural force judging us post-mortem to balance out the rights and wrongs done during life.

The problem with this, of course, is that there's zero evidence this force exists, and relying on this force to right the wrongs in life only serves to prevent the masses from attempting to correct the wrongs themselves either directly via vigilantism or, more importantly, by replacing existing systems with ones which will serve them better.

I'm all for fixing things first via the soap box and ballot box, but sometimes the ammo box is the only resort left.

    The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
    - Thomas Jefferson

Your reasoning makes sense under a regime of infinite games. In other words, the goal is to continue playing the game rather than win once.

These people do not believe we are in an infinite game. They believe they have a narrow set of moves to avoid checkmate, and apparently getting rid of Sam Altman is one of them.

I will suggest another reason though: we are likely already in the light cone of continued AI development. So none of the vigilante actions are justified under their own logic. It’s probably preferable to avoid being in jail when the robot apocalypse comes.

I don’t think the death of Sam Altman or even the dissolution of OpenAI would stop the continuation of AI development. There are too many actors involved, and too many companies and nation states invested in continuing AI development. Even Eliezer Yudkowsky became president of the United States he could not stop it.

Yudkowsky himself also posted a rebuttal today: https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/article/2043601524815716866

>It is completely coherent to both think that an extremely bad thing is coming, and yet that does not justify any particular action.

Yes, it's called "fatalism".

So according to you the War for Independence of the US against England never happened, and it would have been completely ineffective if it had happened.

Same goes for the French Revolution. The list could go on.

I think you're overly idealistic.

> "The ends don't justify the means"

Eh. The ends do justify the means, but only inasmuch as those means actually do help to achieve the ends — astonishingly often, they don't (and rarer, but also often, actually bring you in the opposite direction from those end goals), and so remain unjustified.