Untilted

maybe the problem is that people care about other people too much. so if you say, here's a political agenda that'll make you rich, they'll be like, wait, won't this also make other people rich? i don't want that. i'd rather have the other people be poor. i'm very sensitive to the condition of other people, you understand, such as people i read about in the newspaper, and people i hear about on tiktok – and i want them to be poor! ideally i'd be put in charge of making sure that the other people are poor, but someone's got to do it. whereas if you don't care about other people you're like, shit, i want to be rich! sign me up! what's the next thing that's as useful as the refrigerator, i want that. why isn't energy too cheap to meter, i want energy too cheap to meter. i want every disease to be cured because otherwise i might get one, et cetera. and the most politically viable way for me to get what i want is for the political order to make everyone else rich also, which i don't care about

I have some beef with Yudkowsky but I actually do think it's a life-defining moment of glory that, to more widely proselytize his philosophy, he wrote a 650,000-word Harry Potter fanfic about it, choosing that fandom purely because it was the biggest at the time. Imagine how cool it would have been if, instead of pivoting back to normal writing and original fiction after he finished that, he had just started over with new trending fandoms. We could have had a version of that about Captain America; we could be 250K words into Genshin Impact and the Methods of Rationality.