"To think otherwise is anti-American, and you do not belong here." is just a useless emotional thought-terminating phrase.

I say this as an immigrant to the US myself.

Also, allowing farms and construction companies to find cheap labor is a reason for a weak border, not a reason for a strong border.

I could easily write essays in Slack if I wanted to. The reason why I don't has nothing to do with whether I'm capable of it or not.

But whatever the reason is why the ideas have fallen out of fashion, it can broaden the mind to encounter them.

I think that unfortunately for him, his support inside Russia was probably never high enough to seriously challenge the existing leadership.

You don't need to assume that I've been brainwashed by Western propaganda. I generally distrust both the Western and the Russian mainstream narratives about geopolitics.

My question is why Navalny would have believed that it would not be rational for Putin to kill him.

Lenin entered Russia at a more advantageous moment than Navalny did. The February Revolution had already happened. The government was new. Navalny, in contrast, entered a Russia in which the government was stable and had been around for a long time.

1. Why exactly would he have been so sure that his Western support would prevent him from being killed? The Russian elite is not exactly made up of people who are squeamish about killing, and the risk to the elite from killing him would have been small.

2. Why not just stay in the West and do the unscrupulous adventuring from there? Sure, maybe the Western backers would not have quite as much use for you that way, but you'd still have a lot of influence and a cushy life.

Nuclear weapon proliferation seems to have plateaued recently, but I think that this appearance is partly deceptive. The main reasons it has plateaued is that: 1) building and maintaining nuclear weapons is expensive, 2) there are powerful countries that are willing to use military force to stop some other countries from developing nukes, and 3) many countries have reached nuclear latency (the ability to build nuclear weapons very quickly once the political order is given to do it) and are only avoiding actually giving the order to build nukes because they don't see a current important-enough reason to do it.

I think the majority of the population at large either doesn't care about what happened or wish that the guy had actually managed to kill Altman. Not even necessarily because Altman is involved with AI, but just because he is extremely rich. I don't imagine any increased resistance from the population at large - the population at large either doesn't mind when rich people are killed or loves it. The exceptions would be people like entertainers who develop a parasocial relationship with the public and provide direct joy to people, but AI company leaders don't fall into that category.

That said, it is true that killing Altman would almost certainly achieve nothing. See my other post in this thread.

The problem with trying to stop it is, how? Even if you killed every single AI company leader and every single top AI engineer, it would almost certainly just slow down the rate of progress in the technology, not stop it. The technology is so vital to national security that in the face of such actions, state security forces would just bring development of the tech under their direct protection Manhattan Project-style. Even if you killed literally every single AI engineer on the planet, it's pretty likely that this would just delay the development of the technology by a decade or so instead of actually preventing it.

The technology is pushed forward by a simple psychological logic: every key global actor knows that if they don't build the technology, they will be outcompeted by other actors who do build the technology. No key actor thinks that they have the luxury of not building the technology even if they wanted to not build it. It's very similar to nuclear weapons in that regard. You can talk about nuclear disarmament all you want but at the end of the day, having nuclear weapons is vital to having sovereignty. If you don't have nuclear weapons, you will always be in danger of becoming just the prison bitch of countries that do have them. AI seems that it is growing toward a similar position in the calculus of states' notional security.

I can think of no example in history of the entire world deciding to just forsake the development of a technology because it seemed like it could prove to be too dangerous. The same psychological logic always applies.

AI is such an important technology that in the face of such a campaign of terrorism, governments would bring the development of the technology directly under the protection of the state security forces, largely outside the reach of terrorists. If not in the US, then in China or other places. At that point the terrorists would have to attain a level of power where they could feasibly overthrow the government in order to stop the development of the technology. Now, some scientists would be uncomfortable in such conditions and would stop working on the technology, but enough would remain that the technology would continue to progress, albeit more slowly.

>and if you have nothing to lose then the calculus of causing a major disruption begins to look favorable; any disruption, because regression to the mean is good if you're at the shitty end of the bell curve.

Very true, if the status quo feels shitty enough one becomes extremely willing to just roll the dice.

In general, violence can certainly solve problems, especially when the problems are not being caused by almost-inevitable technological revolutions. One of the issues to keep in mind, though, is that it often also creates new ones, often surprising ones. For example, the assassination that led to World War One. For another example, if Trump had been assassinated last year, that would have solved many problems for people who dislike Trump. However, that doesn't necessarily mean it would have made the world overall a better place - that is almost impossible to predict. Hence the sci-fi sort of scenario of "you go back in time and kill Hitler, but when you return to your own time it turns out that Hitler dying just let mega-Hitler take power".

I think the general population is much more likely to feel joy about it than want a police crackdown.

If we're talking about attacks against average software engineers and obscure founders, fewer people would be happy about it, but a great number still would be. There is a lot of envy toward software engineers and founders.