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this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2026
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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This feels somehow tied to the whole "agentic" thing I've ranged about previously. Like, individual acts of violence are strictly destructive because the people doing it aren't sufficiently "agentic" to change things, even though American history is full of cases where (usually racist) vigilante violence had a huge impact on people's decision-making. But when the government does it it's different because people in government got there by proving their agency and ability to actually impact the world. Like, it feels almost like he's offended that the NPCs might try and do something as drastic as killing someone without GM permission.
Meanwhile in reality, people legitimately do feel like they don't have a lot of options to protect themselves from the real harms this industry is doing, to say nothing of the people who buy his line about the oncoming class-K end-of-life scenario. Anger is an appropriate response to the circumstances we find ourselves in, and in a nation that has been quietly cultivating a culture of heroic violence for decades we shouldn't be surprised to see people trying to inflict that fear and rage upon the outside world.
Nay a culture where every citizen is entitled to one armed crashout and threats of such have been an important lever used by the party that believes in that entitlement for decades.
Eliezer complaining about vigilante actions is really ironic considering one of his main themes in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationalist was about "heroic responsibility" and complaining about how ordinary people default to doing nothing. I guess what he actually meant was for right-thinking people (people that agree with him) to take the actions he approves of.