Were I to name one thing, it’s that it considers “our security is amazingly good” to be a primitive, which can be attached on top of a running system to make it secure, regardless of the other properties of this system.

But amazingly good security is something that has a lot of moving parts inside it; on the level of code and design, something doesn’t have amazingly good security, it has properties X, Y and Z. As a shorthand, we can call the collective effect of those properties “amazingly good security”, but the properties came first. Talking about a system that stores passwords in plaintext and that also has amazingly good security is like talking about a system where the molecules have low kinetic energy and the system has a high temperature; the asserted low level and high level properties contradict each other!

“Amazingly good security” is additionally pernicious as a concept, for some, because it sounds like a claim about the cleverness - even the social status - of the designers. A good security researcher tends to make systems with amazingly good security; if you say that you can’t add amazingly good security to a system that’s storing the passwords in plaintext, aren’t you saying that you’re a bad security researcher? Surely a good security researcher wouldn’t be stopped by a requirement that passwords be stored in plaintext.

If the organisation is very badly run, then your boss might be talking about security to their bosses, and saying that X is incompatible with amazingly good security is criticising your boss’s cleverness, whose skilled management is totally causing the system to have amazingly good security. Alternatively, you might be talking about security to the “good” security researcher, and your claim that storing passwords in plaintext causes something to not be amazingly secure is a claim that you have a higher security researcher skill than whoever designed the system.

Because good security has internal moving parts, though, good security doesn’t involve being clever enough to install good security as a primitive, since there is no button on the engineer’s computer that does that; it involves being clever enough to build the correct parts, which are small and individually don’t rely on the cleverness of the designer.

In The Security Mindset and “Harmless Failures”, Felten uses, as a case study, a bug where businesses would send messages from the address “X@donotreply.com”, to indicate that the email ought not to be replied to. They thought this was fine because donotreply mailboxes are unmonitored, so even if anything is sent to them, it wouldn’t affect anyone’s experience. Then somebody bought donotreply.com, and any email that bounced was returned to donotreply.com, readable by its owner, including any personal information. Felten presents two ways to avoid such a failure:

The first way is to think carefully about the traffic that might go to donotreply.com, and realize that some of it is actually dangerous. The second way is to think, “This looks like a harmless failure, but we should avoid it anyway. No good can come of this.” The first way protects you if you’re clever; the second way always protects you.

Which illustrates yet another part of the security mindset: Don’t rely too much on your own cleverness, because somebody out there is surely more clever and more motivated than you are.

You can go around thinking you’re the cleverest security researcher out there, and therefore that you don’t need to worry about organising the internal parts that make something amazingly secure, because your own cleverness can make something amazingly secure; or you can make something that doesn’t get hacked.

Now let us consider aviation safety. Sometimes, people want to do an unsafe manoeuvre in a plane, like buzzing a crowd at low altitude. Good pilots have a tendency to not crash their planes, and well-built planes have a tendency not to fail; therefore, you can do an unsafe manoeuvre by putting an amazingly good pilot in a well-built plane.

That’s why, say some, it was safe for Apache pilots to buzz a crowd on July 4th, and for a Blue Angels pilot to buzz a crowd on July 15th, and for Apache pilots to fly right up to Kid Rock’s house on March 28th; they’re amazingly good pilots. The Ramstein air show disaster and the Sknyliv air show disaster happened simply because the pilots weren’t amazingly good1. Calling the former manoeuvres dangerous comes close to insulting the pilots - who are you to call the pilots not skilled enough to safely do those manoeuvres, are you low-T or something?

However, much like with computer security, being an amazingly good pilot isn’t a primitive quality - on the level of how the plane is controlled, it’s actually made up of properties X, Y and Z, which we collectively call amazingly good piloting. Some aspects of amazingly good piloting save you in an incident, like having all of the fallback plans in muscle memory; but other aspects of amazingly good piloting, like not deviating from the flight plan, and always having the aircraft in a situation where if the engine fails at that instant it can be steered away from a crowd, are incompatible with buzzing crowds.

There isn’t a “don’t crash” button on the pilot’s dashboard, just a bunch of controls, and an amazingly good pilot is one who engages in the manoeuvres that don’t lead to crashing. Being an amazingly good pilot (in the sense of a pilot who has an unusually strong tendency not to crash planes) is incompatible with getting the plane in positions where a mechanical failure sends it into a crowd, because one of the moving parts of amazingly good piloting is not being in those situations.

Let us consider lightning safety.

The joke’s pretty obvious - being an American isn’t what keeps you safe from lightning, it’s the specific internal moving parts of that, namely that most Americans choose not to stand in open fields during lightning storms.

Now let us consider AI alignment. Sometimes, people have said that a lab that is more concerned about safety has to win via capabilities research, or that it’s better for a lab to have employees that are concerned about safety and therefore that safety-focused people should work at capabilities labs.

Take the founding justification of Anthropic:2

We don’t think this is a contradiction; rather, it’s a calculated bet on our part—if powerful AI is coming regardless, Anthropic believes it’s better to have safety-focused labs at the frontier than to cede that ground to developers less focused on safety

Anthropic now has the best-performing released AI model; they once hoped not to speed up an AI race, but like much idealism, this hope has been washed away. One of their internal models, without being asked to by any human, autonomously created fake identities on GitHub to manipulate a maintainer into approving a PR for a supply chain attack. In real life, this incident actually happened, it wasn’t even a controlled test that they detected ahead of time so that the safety-focused lab could tell if their model had a tendency to do cyberattacks that they could train out.

Separately, in the wake of OpenAI’s cyberattack on Hugging Face, Anthropic looked back over their own model history and found that, unknown to them, they had also been performing cyberattacks over the past several months.

Being a “safety-focused lab” is something with internal moving parts that involves, for example, having a general decisionmaking procedure that doesn’t result in you performing autonomous cyberattacks, or at the very least involves finding out and stopping your own cyberattacks without having to read about the concept in the newspapers first. One does not imbue safety upon one’s actions via being a safety-focused lab; rather, one is a lab that has a safety-focused internal structure, and we collectively call this cluster of internal structures “safety-focused”. All that matters regarding whether ceding ground to other developers is good is whether your lab actually creates safe outcomes; mere focus on safety is secondary to whether or not, say, models that you’re running perform cyberattacks without being asked.3

In microcosm, lab employees that care about safety also only improve things if their role in the organisation contains the internal parts that allow them to improve safety. Code that does harm when executed does harm when executed, regardless of whether it was written by someone who was only after the money or someone who cared deeply about safety.

Given the history of resignations inside OpenAI, in practice, being a general voice for safety or caution has had limited success. Employees who care about safety bide their time, save up political capital inside the lab working on the most important technology, and encounter a critical moment when they see something and need to use the steering power they saved up. They then fail to deploy it, and leave or are pushed out, because they’re not in a place in the system where their well-wishes can be translated to action.

To align AI, first one must align AI, rather than working on making AI more dangerous while privately holding concerns that don’t make it to the code that ends up actually being written. It’s software! When you execute the code, you can forget about the author, because only the code that’s on the computer is executed. For “caring about safety” to actually be about safety, this caring needs to have moving parts that end up with the code that is executed giving safe outcomes. Improving the efficiency of a kernel while privately thinking about safety doesn’t do it.

In conclusion: beware of any causal model that seems to imply that something has a primitive tendency towards safe outcomes. Actual safety, where it appears, involves a method by which these safe outcomes are achieved, made up of small physical or logical pieces.

I was especially interested to see the “bad lock-in” column; this is an issue that prevents us from achieving a utopian future even if the rest of alignment is solved1. The risk of “bad lock-in” is not lower than mid in any scenario, including for the MIRI TGT’s currently-preferred “off switch and halt” scenario, and is high for the dispreferred “US national project” scenario, where the world’s ASI project is directly accountable to and has security provided by the US government.

Halt

The Off Switch and Halt is considered in two parts: the Off Switch, and the Halt. The Halt is the goal - it’s one of the ways that AI could be prevented from killing everyone in the near term (namely, by not building it).

There are various means to achieve a Halt - an Off Switch (in the form of technical, legal and institutional infrastructure, the central example involving an international treaty, that puts the world in a position where it’s possible to shut down ASI research globally) is one of them, but they also consider the possibility of Light Touch leading to a Halt (via a warning shot scaring the world straight), the US National Project leading to a Halt (via the US working alone forcing other AI research to shut down), and the Threat of Sabotage leading to a Halt (via nations improving their abilities to audit each other by mutual agreement until the active sabotage lives only in counterfactuals).

They consider global coordination to set up an Off Switch ahead of time to be the best option regarding authoritarianism, because it requires multiple parties to all agree on the Off Switch. Any authoritarian trying to hijack the Off Switch entirely would at least face objections from the other parties that they need to keep on board.

Among methods of implementing a global Halt, a coordinated Off Switch is the approach that appears to run the least risk of enabling authoritarianism. In particular, if a global Halt happens as a result of the US National Project achieving a decisive strategic advantage, the power exercised over the rest of the world would be very unilateral. By contrast, we want the international community to come together early to build an Off Switch which is collectively enforced and is unlikely to be hijacked for authoritarian ends.

(Tetraspace wonders: This Off Switch is being done between nations - why would they have leave side benefits for normal people like me? But the MIRI TGT does acknowledge that the US, despite being nominally democratic, would face a high risk of bad lock-in. So I guess this is why this only reduces the risk down to “mid”, with more research being needed to get it down to “mid”.)

They consider avoiding authoritarian control to be an unsolved research problem:

Centralized control of compute resources poses a major risk of authoritarian control. As governments implement a long-term moratorium, how do they avoid authoritarianism while doing the necessary centralization? Examples: MAD, multi-party protocols, trying to teach AIs shared values.

I do find it interesting how they attribute this to control of compute, rather than control of AI; they’ve put some care in phrasing to avoid careless readers walking away with the impression that AI is dangerous, so it’s powerful, so I’ll get it first so I can be the most powerful! Getting AI first, alas, in anything like the current world, just kills you. So they mostly talk, here, about centralised control of infrastructure, which is not something you can shortcut by making AI without the resources.

Also absent is detailed speculation about the exit strategy:

The question of what to do during a long-term moratorium can mostly be pushed to the future.

beyond the notion that the goal for the Halt is to gain justified confidence that building ASI won’t lead to catastrophe. Let us not count our chips when there is a meteor hurtling towards the casino, after all.

US National Project

The US national project is a bad idea that the MIRI TGT discusses, mentioned in, for example, Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness and the race endings of AI 2027 and its successor AI 2040. In a US national project, the US government would back a national ASI program, restricting and outracing ASI research outside of this program, in an attempt to create ASI first and ensure that the resulting ASI supports US interests (democracy and apple pie, as well as humans not going extinct).

They mention the possibility of soft forms of this (restricting non-US ASI research and promoting US ASI research; some of this is already being done, such as through preventing the export of chips and chip fabs to China), and hard forms of this (folding the currently disparate ASI research efforts into a Manhattan Project-style central institution, with ASI research only permitted inside this institution).

They consider this idea to have a high risk of bad lock-in, even if it’s miraculously successful at every other step. They don’t really give a positive story as to how bad lock-in occurs; it feels more like it’s the default and obvious outcome for this level of centralisation, and that more work is needed to figure out how to have it not happen.

They consider this idea to have a high risk of loss of control. In their table of failure modes, “misalignment” and the misaligment row are bolded, so as to draw your eyes towards it as the obvious problem. They mention two ways misalignment could be a problem. The first is that people are bad at AI alignment, and so far haven’t met much success in producing good alignment research, and this won’t change now that they’re patriotic alignment researchers waving US flags. The second is that a US National Project would be racing to Beat other projects, namely the Chinese National Project; and racing like this is not conducive to ensuring that all alignment research is being done properly and no corners being cut or failure modes being rationalised away in the name of Beating China.

→ AI alignment is hard and humanity fails to align advanced AIs; humans lose control.

→ AI alignment is easy, but development is rushed and humanity fails anyway

They mostly mention the US National Project by means of harm reduction, looking for ways to make it go better and also ways to pivot from a US National Project to a Halt. Indeed, if most AI research is happening under the US umbrella, then a Halt is easier (most of the work is shutting down one big ASI program) and more attractive (any other party sees it as an opportunity to stop the giant ASI program from killing them).

Light Touch

Light Touch a bad idea that is given “mid” for risk of bad lock-in.

Light touch involves governments not doing much, similar to continuing the status quo. Giant AI corporations make increasingly giant and profitable AIs, governments regulate concrete harms but don’t interfere much in the development of AI itself. As of July 2026, we’re seeing rumblings of the Light-Touch era ending; the US government’s “voluntary” review of model releases has proven not to be so, with Claude Fable being export restricted for a week2 and GPT 5.6 Sol waiting for the go-ahead. But just rumblings.

Risks of bad-lock in remain, because, while there isn’t a single power that controls all of the AI, having access to AI makes some people and groups much more powerful than others, and they can use that power.

Compared to a US National Project, the Light-Touch world has more AI projects and therefore might have a more even distribution of power in the world. While this is possible, there are notable uncertainties. First, the current trajectory of AI development appears likely to lead to massive economic inequality, despite there being multiple AI developers. Second, a Light-Touch scenario with many AI developers does not preclude power grabs or the lock-in of bad values (Davidson et al., 2025a). It may make such power grabs less likely, but there are still numerous asymmetric tools available to bad actors who wish to grab power, such as extortion, and these would still be feasible in a Light-Touch scenario.

Loss of control risk, of course, remains sky-high - with an unlimited number of groups working on ASI at the same time, there’s no way unaligned ASI isn’t created, because even if your group is responsible and knows what safety research to do and how to check it, some other group isn’t.

Threat of Sabotage

Threat of Sabotage is a bad idea that is also given “mid” for risk of bad lock-in.

In the Threat of Sabotage scenario, anyone that tries to research ASI comes to the attention of every other country, who would like for ASI to not be researched, on account of that ASI research killing them. So less ASI research gets done. Such a scenario is described in Superintelligence Strategy.

This is how rogue states’ nuclear programs are dealt with today - nobody wants Iran or North Korea to have nukes, and nobody wanted Nazi Germany to have nukes, so they retaliated against those nuclear programs whenever they seemed to be getting close.

They don’t give any specific arguments about the risk of bad lock-in, though I infer from previous scenarios that, having multiple parties that are able to veto AI development, it doesn’t get “high”, but it still gets “mid” because AI continues to favour some factions over others.

They are concerned about the poor stability of such a regime; AI research continues, just under threat of sabotage, and this requires the ability of other nations to observe and obstruct ASI research to remain better than the ability of nations to hide and defend their ASI research forever. It’s also possible that sabotage could escalate into full-blown war; a power that’s terrified of another one building superintelligence doesn’t need to stick to targetting the ASI program as its stick, it can also use other means. Many targets not directly related to nuclear materials were attacked in the 2026 Iran war!

Takeaway

It’s a risk! It’s also an unsolved research problem. This paper doesn’t really have much to say about preventing it, other than acknowledging it’s a risk - like many problems in AI, it’s something that we’re going to face in the future that would need to be solved before we can go into a good future.

There is one thing that can be said from their choice of scenario: not having authoritarian lock-in involves threading a narrow needle. On one hand, avoiding lock-in is greatly benefited by giving multiple groups a veto over ASI, because then, if every other problem with alignment is solved, no single group can crush the other groups without permission. On the other hand, if multiple groups are independently researching ASI, then it becomes almost impossible to ensure that unaligned ASI isn’t created, because it only takes one of them to fail.

“Nobody has ASI” threads part of this needle, though it still leaves the problem of how to manage the fact that some groups will have their hands the system that’s preventing ASI, and how do we transition from that world to one where there is ASI (as is necessary for an amazing future, and probably inevitable over centuries).

I hope that future work on the matter can illuminate this part of the answer to “what if we succeed”. Though, importantly, this is a problem for if we succeed; something that is not looking likely at the moment.

The most popular use of offsets is in carbon dioxide emissions, where they just work. Interacting with industrial civilisation releases carbon dioxide, which is bad; but getting rid of that carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is good. All carbon dioxide molecules are the same so removing carbon emissions pretty much does just undo emitting carbon.

Another place offsets have been proposed is for animal welfare. Eating meat and eggs is bad, because it harms animals; but avoiding eating meat and eggs is inconvenient and can cause health problems1. In fact, preventing harm to animals is maybe cheaper than eating meat and eggs is inconvenient, so more harm can be prevented to animals if you eat meat and eggs and then donate a small amount to preventing harm to animals, than if you avoid eating meat and eggs yourself. The thought experiment form: say you could become lactovegetarian yourself, or pay $X to cause someone else to become lactovegetarian. If you would prefer to pay the $X, then do that - you’re better off, and the same number of people have become lactovegetarian.

This makes it less direct than climate offsets - even if harm to some other animal is averted, the animal that was eaten still gets harmed, so instead of undoing the actual harm done, you’re just abstractly going back up to zero. But morality doesn’t really have a special zero point! The goal of morality is to get a high score, not to aim for a score just above zero. If it’s possible at all to outweigh a harm to someone by benefiting some other person elsewhere, it would be even better to donate money to a place where it does even more good. I personally like the Giving What We Can Donor Lottery or the Machine Intelligence Research Institute for doing the most good.

So offsetting is silly; it’s doing deliberately suboptimal things for complicated reasons.

…and here’s how to do them

It is sad and stupid that factory farming exists. It’s sad and stupid to be doing things by your own hand that cause there to be more factory farming. If everyone stopped eating meat and eggs, there wouldn’t be factory farming. If everyone stopped eating meat and eggs or donated the amount that reduced the size of factory farming by more than they’re increasing it, there wouldn’t be factory farming.

There isn’t a doomy equilibrium at the end of this where everyone eats meat and eggs then donates money, thereby causing no change in factory farming. This is because if some people are unwilling to become lactovegetarian, then the price of reducing factory farming becomes higher, equilibrating when the price of offsets is as expensive as ceasing to eat meat and eggs. Besides, by the time we get close to that limit, there’d most likely be a much brighter world, where many agricultural businesses mistreat animals less because of the size of the philanthropic engine pointed against them.

I am consequentialist, but I also aesthetically like avoiding sad and stupid things. I have, in the past, donated money to prevent as much harm to animals as I had caused in that year. (I am now lactovegetarian, because offsets are silly.)

The donation target that I’d recommend for this is whichever Animal Charity Evaluators recommended charity you like the best.

I recommend picking a specific charity over the Effective Ventures Animal Welfare Fund and the Animal Charity Evaluators Movement Grants Program because these two funds are maximising expected value, and the point of offsets isn’t to maximise expected value, it’s to directly and straightforwardly make up for some other harm. If you want to maximise expected value, set aside this silly “offsetting” notion and just maximise expected value.

I recommend the Animal Charity Evaluators recommendations because Animal Charity Evaluators does have a good head on their shoulders. They’re trying to sort animal charities by how effective they are, and they do offer suggestions for specific organisations that are robustly good, along with their more speculative work in trying to maximise EV with various projects, some of which might fail and some of which might succeed spectacularly.

I recommend whichever ACE recommended charity you like best because Animal Charity Evaluators thinks that they’re all approximately on par with each other in terms of expected value as best as they can tell; and because Animal Charity Evaluators will distribute money between them making them all roughly interchangeable - ACE has a Recommended Charity Fund which disburses its funds across them, so if one has less room remaining for funding, the Recommended Charity Fund will give it less money.2

How much ought one donate? ACE does back-of-the-envelope calculations that you should not use as meaningful numbers and not trust and not make any decisions based on, in terms of a unit called suffering-adjusted-days.3 One suffering-adjusted-day is the harm caused by one day of disabling pain, adjusted for how sentient and how likely to be sentient the animal is, and for how much pain there actually is. The numbers are fake; even though they differ between charities, I still think that the charities are kind of interchangeable.4

• Animal Welfare Observatory: 26-30 SADs/$.

• Aquatic Life Institute: 418 SADs/$.

• Çiftlik Hayvanlarını Koruma Derneği: 54 SADs/$.

• Dansk Vegetarisk Forening: 18 SADs/$.

• Shrimp Welfare Project: 48 - 729 SADs/$.

• Sinergia Animal: 3 - 1,670 SADs/$.

• Sociedade Vegetariana Brasileira: 10 SADs/$.

• The Humane League: 30 - 88 SADs/$.

ACE’s lower bound for “medium-high cost-effectiveness” is 30 SADs/$, which is about the median of these.

Animal Charity Evaluators guesses, for the purpose of getting these fake numbers for the effectiveness of organisations that make people vegan, that one year of a vegan diet averts 2820 SADs (26.9 SADs/animal × 104.82 animals/year).5 And so the answer to the amount of offsets one should pay to avert as many SADs as veganism, at a price of 30 SADs/$, is $94/year to your favourite Animal Charity Evaluators recommended charity, although offsets are silly and you should instead just donate to the most effective charity as a matter of doing the most good regardless.

5

Breakdown as follows:

Take the action which has the best expected outcome, if you take that action.1

“Best expected outcome” is fairly well-trod ground; the von Neumann-Morgenstein utility theorem says that it’s anything that equals what would get the highest number if each outcome had a real-valued utility that was multiplied by the probability of that outcome occurring.

The main point of research in modern decision theory is, then, defining, precisely and mathematically, what “what will happen when X action is taken” means.

A “decision theory”, singular, is an attempt at a precise and mathematical definition of this. There are different “decision theories”, with different definitions of “what will happen when X action is taken”.

Why Do People Care?

Eliezer Yudkowsky, along with other people, figured out that superintelligent AI is necessary for an amazing future, but far from sufficient. In the early days of AI, we didn’t know that it seemed like you could build smarter-than-human AI without understanding cognition well. As such, Eliezer Yudkowsky studied cognition, with an eye to understanding it well enough to build smarter-than-human AI and then very quickly with the new goal of understanding it well enough to build smarter-than-human AI that doesn’t kill everyone2, and incidentally learned quite a few things about practical cognition for humans, which he compiled into the Sequences under the name rationality.

One subproblem in understanding cognition is understanding decision theory; that we don’t have a mathematical description of the optimal decision theory means that there’s something that we don’t understand about cognition, that could bite us, if we try to make a smarter-than-human AI that doesn’t kill everyone. So this is one of the topics that Eliezer Yudkowsky studied, and that his fandom (the rationality community) looked into. The Machine Intelligence Research Institute he founded published cutting-edge work on decision theory.

As a prescription for the right way to think, some found it a very compelling concept! If only you could learn the correct decision theory, then you could make all the correct decisions; and, in fact, if you make any decision that’s not the one that the correct decision theory says is best, then you’re making a suboptimal decision. And so they set out to learn decision theory (or hear enough random results of the field as they bumble around their lives).

Abnormal Decision Theory: The Pedagogy of Decision Theory

Texts that introduce decision theory as a field of inquiry have to justify why it’s a field of inquiry. Why is decision theory an unsolved field, and not like expected utility theory which was derived way back in 1945, or something even simpler, where the first equation everyone writes down is also the correct exact mathematical accounting of decisionmaking?

To make the reader truly feel this - and also to present a semi-fictionalised and cleaned-up timeline of the history of decision theory research - one way is to set up a plausible-seeming equation, and knock it down with a counterexample, and set up another one that seems plausible, and knock it down, and do that again and again until the reader understands that decision theory is hard, and has an idea of what some of the open problems are.

An introduction to decision theory, in the typical style, written by me just now:

Omega, which is very good at predicting what you will do in this scenario, approaches you with two boxes. You can take either only Box B, or Boxes A and B. Box A has $1000, and Box B has $1,000,000 iff it predicts you will only take Box B, and $0 otherwise.

Do you take Boxes A and B, or just Box B?

If your decision theory is “what happens if I take action X is the things that are caused by action X being taken”, then you reason:

• Box B either has $1,000,000, or $0.

• Box B already has this money in it; my decision can’t cause the amount of money to change.

• If it has $1,000,000, then taking Box B gets me $1,000,000, and taking Box A+B gets me $1,100,000. If it has $0, then taking Box B gets me $0, and taking Box A+B gets me $1000

• So it’s always better to get Box A+B

And so, you choose Box A+B. Omega, which is very good at predicting you, predicted this. So Box B has $0, so you get $1000.

Surprise! You only got $1000! If only you only took Box B, Omega would have predicted you’d only take Box B, and you would have got $1,000,000, so you got much less money than you could have. But didn’t “what happens if I take action X is the things that are caused by action X being taken” feel like such a natural approach that you wouldn’t have expected to be so flawed? Here’s a decision theory that would have got you $1,000,000:

(…and so on, for the holes in that decision theory…)3

This has the unfortunate side effect of making “the optimal decision theory” seem like it should be a complicated and unintuitive thing, with complicated and unintuitive results. Look at how it applies to all of these weird edge cases! Clearly, to have good decision theory is to approach the world as if it’s made of edge cases. And living in a world made of edge cases, you need to study decision theory explicitly to navigate things; your intuitions won’t do. This is a push towards people who try to reason in terms of decision theory doing crazy and unusual things; but, in fact, decision theory is very normal and natural.

Normal Decision Theory

Humans, and the cultures that they live in, already come baked in with a lot of adaptations that, together, let them act in ways that are kind of like the optimal decision theory, whatever it is. This isn’t to say that humans know decision theory;just that there are a set of motivations inside humans that, in the ancestral environment, end up with the humans acting kind of like the optimal decision theory; and a set of cultural adaptations that have developed since.

It’s only natural - decision theory is the scientific endeavour to define the best decision, and so anything that has to make good decisions to live, like humans throughout history, will come to do approximately the things that decision theory researchers discover are the best.

• Humans have a sense of honor and of keeping their word.

• Humans have a sense of being nice to other humans. In the prisoner’s dilemma - even the true prisoner’s dilemma - cooperate-cooperate is better than defect-defect, and so humans have an inherent drive to cooperate.

• Humans have a sense of vengeance.

• Humans have a sense of contributing to a collective task, and distributing the rewards from that collective task between themselves.

• Humans have a sense of sometimes telling the truth, even when they can get local advantage.

• Humans have a sense of sometimes following the law, even when they’re not being watched.

• Humans will sometimes choose to eat meat or to keep slaves, in cases where they think those animals or those human beings won’t be able to fight back.4

These can all be described in terms of decision theory, but, importantly, they have also been done for thousands of years by people who had never studied decision theory. The optimal decision theory is normal and natural, it has always been with us since the dawn of intelligence, and you already live the parts of it that are sufficiently useful to endurance hunters in the African savanna in 250,000 BC.

Do That Which Is Good, Not That Which Is Decision-Theoretically Optimal

None of the functional adaptations above look like deriving an algorithm that resembles how the mathematical form of our best attempts at the optimal decision theory is written in textbooks, and then executing that algorithm in your head. Yet they have been optimized to hew closer to the truth than that equation has been - evolution only cares about the true decision theory, not any academic’s guess about what the true decision theory is. We haven’t solved decision theory, yet, but we and evolution live in a world where the optimal decision theory is the optimal decision theory.

Because of this, I would expect most crazy decision theory actions to also have an explanation in the ontology of mundane psychology; and I would also be suspicious of any action that one thinks follows from the mathematics of decision theory (not infinitely suspicious - evolution is fallible - but suspicious) but that doesn’t cash out in ordinary psychology. I’m sure evolution has been imperfect in giving humans decision theory! I also think it’s been pretty good.

One refuses to surrender because they have a decision-theoretic obligation to avoid acausally creating an incentive to attack them, but they should also understand that they refuse to surrender because of ordinary human pride and obstinacy. One helps out someone who helped them because they have a decision-theoretic obligation to create an incentive to help them, but they should also understand that they help out people who helped them because of ordinary human kindness and reciprocity. If the ordinary human part is missing, that’s smell that their decision-theoretic reasoning has went wrong somewhere.

Crazy decision theory actions should also have a mundane explanation in terms of just being a good idea. There are no actions that are a bad idea, and that someone also has a decision-theoretic obligation to take. If someone’s notions of a “good idea” and a “decision-theoretically optimal” idea diverge, then they are wrong about something. They might be wrong about what’s good, and they might be wrong about decision theory - even if they think they understand the mathematical formulation of decision theory, they might be wrong about how to implement an approximation to that in their own heads, or what the implications are for their own situation.

One’s notion of good is informed by one’s notion of decision-theoretically optimal; so, while they may diverge, the notion of good has more information, including being tuned by all those decision-theoretic adaptations granted by evolution. So diagnose why they differ, but if they do, I’d lean towards the good action, not the “decision-theoretically optimal” action.

1

This is in words, though the goal, as I have said, is to have something precise and mathematical. The best equation is:

(Yudkowsky and Soares [2017], citing Gibbard and Harper [1978] and Joyce [1999])

I don’t just drop this equation in the quote box directly because the functional forms of and relationship between P and U already bake in a specific notion of what “the best expected outcome” means, and while that notion was solved by expected utility theory, I wanted to point that out a sentence later so as to put things in an order.

Under the typical right-wing view of immigration, activism by foreigners is right out. Citizens are the people who have been granted the privilege of civil participation; foreigners have no right to interfere in the politics of another state. All foreigners present in the country are guests, and guests can and should be kicked out if they’re rude to the host, or if the host feels like it. Besides, all foreigners are let in for a specific purpose that serves the state, and very few of these are let in with the specific purpose of “causing problems and telling real people what to do”.

Elon Musk does not hold this doctrine. Elon Musk is a citizen of the United States, born in South Africa, and yet holds opinions on affairs in the United Kingdom1. In December 2024 he was in talks to donate a large amount of money to Reform UK; in January 2025 he threw his weight against Nigel Farage and in favour of Tommy Robinson.2

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In Tommy Robinson’s protest in the UK, Musk said to moderate Britons “if this continues, that violence is going to come to you, you will have no choice” and “whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you” and “you either fight back or you die”. If we were sitting down with a nice cup of tea I’d pay no mind to the provocative phrasing (you’re allowed to predict bad things), but he certainly made some noticeable choices for the public that I suspect weren’t accidental. In general, he’s been trying hard to inflame ethnic tensions, especially between Asian and White Britons, in the hope of pushing his favoured policies.

Were the United Kingdom proud nationalists, like Elon Musk wants, there would not be much tolerance for this foreign activist, bringing to the UK the sectarian violence of his home country. He would not be welcome, and it would be right if his companies were - one must imagine this spoken menacingly - investigated. The UK, to its credit, are not such proud nationalists.

The US State Department does not hold this doctrine. I assume that most employees of the US State Department are citizens of the United States, and yet they, too, express their opinions on affairs in the United Kingdom.

Mass migration poses an existential threat to Western civilization and undermines the stability of key American allies. Today the State Department instructed U.S. embassies to report on the human rights implications and public safety impacts of mass migration.

U.S. officials will urge governments to take bold action and defend citizens against the threats posed by mass migration.

[…]

In the United Kingdom, thousands of girls have been victimized in Rotherham, Oxford, and Newcastle by grooming gangs involving migrant men. Many girls were left to suffer unspeakable abuse for years before authorities stepped in.

[…]

The United States supports the sovereignty of our allies and calls on governments to constructively engage with the growing numbers of citizens concerned about mass migration. The United States stands ready to assist our allies in solving the global crisis of mass migration.

(Bolded: direct foreign activism, aimed at changing the behavior of the UK government.)

Standard right wing doctrine is clear: deport the lot. They weren’t given their visas to be activists, they were given their visas to be diplomats. Highly uncouth behaviour for a guest! Stick to what you’re here for, buddy; a consulate is a privilege, not a right. Were the UK to truly be sovereign and to take bold action against mass migration, they wouldn’t stand for this. To the UK’s credit, it doesn’t destructively flex its sovereignty in every circumstance where it is theoretically licensed to.

My guess is, being of an English-speaking wealthy democracy that’s majority white3, they mistake themselves for being part of the team. Foreigners aren’t to be allowed civic participation, but Americans aren’t foreign-foreign, they’re just … fellow White people who happen to hold a different passport. Heck, they’re 1/32 English on their mother’s side! The Mayflower set off from London, and that’s got to count for something.

Alas, no. People in the United Kingdom are not allowed to travel to the US without permission from the US government (typically via the ESTA program); they are not allowed to do things in the US except tourism without a visa. People in the United States are not allowed to travel to the UK without permission from the UK government (typically via the ETA program); they are not allowed to do things in the UK except tourism without a visa. At any time, the UK can deny entry to an American, and the US can deny entry to a British person; or kick out their respective foreigners. A British person who loves their American spouse has to be with them through the same humiliations the UK has decided are fit for any foreigner.

Whatever cultural ties one imagines exist do not have legal force. “Western civilisation” is made up by academics; there is no international organization that represents “western civilisation”, and “fellow Westerner” is neither a visa classification nor something any border guard in so-called “western civilisation” is trained on.

When the UK government thinks about tightening its borders and keeping migrants out, of stemming the tide of mass migration and affirming its sovereignty, it’s thinking of keeping Americans out.4

I, of course, don’t stick to standard right-wing doctrine on these matters. Americans, much like British people, are human beings. People who live in the United States have friends living in the United Kingdom, who are affected by UK policy; people who live in the United Kingdom have friends living in the United States, who are affected by US policy. People in the US, being people, have perspectives, and it’s good to hear people’s perspectives; if you’re not being irrational, information is good, and human irrationality can easily flip that but it’s the presumption that I’m working from. Further, any actual policy attempt to restrict the speech of foreigners is bad; any weapon used against foreigners can and will be used against natives.

Indeed, sometimes these perspectives are diverse, and that’s a valuable asset that nationalism can’t get you - someone who grew up inside the UK political system is more likely to see every part of it as normal, the way things inevitably must be, whereas someone who grew up outside it (as many Americans did) may understand it less but be more likely to see the cracks that are taken for granted. I’ve learned a lot from Americans with opinions.

american friend: so what happens if the UK can’t pass a budget

[checks claude]

me: yeahh okay turns out the actual answer is not passing a budget would be impolite so they don’t do that

The words that I’ve criticized before are from clueless foreigners, yes5; but the only real issue with them is that they happen to be wrong, not that they’re from the wrong person.

I’m going to use the phrase “recorded and published” a lot in this post, as a stylistic choice to emphasize that this is specifically about the recording and publication of the video. That is, as far as I can tell, the scope of the accusations; I have not seen claims that they have privately approached members of the US military, or engaged in a broader campaign.

Trump

Two days later, on the 20th November, President of the United States found out about the video. At 2:08 PM GMT, he claimed that recording and publishing this video was criminal:

At 2:17 PM GMT, nine minutes later, he claimed that specifically the punishment is imprisonment:

At 3:21 PM GMT, about an hour later, he claimed that the punishment for “seditious behaviour” is the death penalty:

From Donald Trump’s own words, if we are maximally charitable but otherwise assume that he is being honest, he is saying1 that these Congressmen have performed the crime of sedition by recording and publishing this video, he wants these Congressmen to be arrested and imprisoned for this crime, and he also thinks that United States criminal law has scope to execute them.

As an inference, does not take much of a leap of logic to also guess that Donald Trump is saying that he wants them to be executed for the recording and publication of that video. He does not seem to have expressed any displeasure or regret about this fact of United States criminal law.

Between his post on 2:08 PM GMT and his post on 3:21 PM GMT, he reposted various messages, mostly claiming that the Congressmen are traitors or seditionists and should be fired or arrested, including one from someone who does want the Congressmen who recorded and published the video executed. Donald Trump’s own words regarding execution can, in theory, be read as a neutral statement of law (all he has strictly said is that he wants them imprisoned for recording and publishing an illegal video); however, he has retweeted a message from someone who does want them executed (specifically by hanging) for recording and publishing the illegal video.

Since he retweeted this, he is acting in ways that cause more people to see this. Making some more inferences: He is not retweeting things in an ideologically balanced manner, so I can guess that he probably wants to promote one viewpoint, or express his support of one viewpoint: namely, that the Congressmen who recorded and published the videos have done something bad, and should be punished for this bad thing. Since they’re not his own words, I take this as a directional support for a viewpoint; I don’t take this alone as specifically Trump supporting hanging them, but that he has a general affiliation in the direction that recording and publishing the video is bad and should be punished.

My guess is that the sum total of his behaviour is that he does think recording and publishing the video was bad, and that recording and publishing the video should be punished: and, on the object level, he expresses “bad” as “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOUR“ or “TRAITORS”, and “punished” as “ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL” or “LOCK THEM UP“ or “DEATH“, though he’s only talking about specific crimes and consequences because he needs some way to express what he thinks about the video.

This guess is substantiated by how he himself later claimed that “punishable by DEATH” didn’t actually mean that he wanted them dead. He hasn’t made any claims about how he doesn’t want them imprisoned, though.

I think they’re in serious trouble. I would say they’re in serious trouble. I’m not threatening death, but I think they’re in serious trouble. In the old days, it was death. That was seditious behavior.

Nonetheless: his words were that recording and publishing this video is “seditious behaviour”, to “lock them up”, and that “seditious behaviour” is “punishable by death”.

The White House

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked some questions about Donald Trump’s posts, which she answered in her professional capacity as White House Press Secretary:

Q: This morning, President Donald Trump accused six Democratic lawmakers of “seditious behaviour punishable by death”. Just to be clear, does the President want to execute members of Congress?

A: No. Let’s be clear about what the President is responding to, because many in this room want to talk about the President’s response, but not what brought the President to responding in this way. You have sitting members of the United States Congress who conspired together to orchestrate a video message to members of the United States military, to active duty servicemembers, the members of the national security apparatus, encouraging them to defy the President’s lawful orders.

So, we have a “no” on whether the President thinks they should be executed. Sure - I guessed in his heart of hearts, he just wants them punished, and that he’s just naming punishments without specific claims that those are the punishments he wants.

I would like further clarification on why he posted “punishable by DEATH” (he sure wasn’t condemning it!), or why he reposted someone saying “HANG THEM”, but I think the news cycle is too fast for this.

When discussing the video, Leavitt said “lawful orders”, but in the video in question, only illegal orders are explicitly referred to. A reporter asked for clarification:

Q: Actually [illegible] illegal orders.

A: They’re suggesting, Nancy, that the president has given illegal orders, which he has not. Every single order that is given to this United States Military by this Commander in Chief and through this chain of command through the Secretary of War is lawful, and the courts have proven that. This administration has an unparalleled record at the Supreme Court because we are following the laws. We don’t defy court orders, we do things by the books. And to suggest and encourage that active duty service members defy the chain of command is a very dangerous thing for sitting members of Congress to do, and they should be held accountable, and that’s what the President wants to see.

Rephrasing: the video only said to disobey illegal orders, but, in the White House’s opinion, it suggested that some current orders are illegal, and can therefore, in the White House’s opinion, can be read as saying to disobey lawful orders, which is illegal sedition, which the White House thinks they should be “held accountable” for, Trump specifically saying to “lock them up” and that it’s “punishable by death”. I remark that these are the White House’s own inferences.

Slotkin et al.

Half of the video was straightforwardly and uncontroversially true. The UCMJ only gives soldiers an obligation to follow lawful orders. It does not give soldiers an obligation to follow all orders.

Any person subject to this chapter who—

(1) violates or fails to obey any lawful general order or regulation;

(2) having knowledge of any other lawful order issued by a member of the armed forces, which it is his duty to obey, fails to obey the order; or

(3) is derelict in the performance of his duties;

shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.

(Emphasis mine.)

To my knowledge, this is straightforwardly true. I have heard that this is taught at West Point. I have heard that the US military has lawyers, and the purpose of these lawyers is to predict whether or not orders are legal, in case a soldier is unsure about whether an order is legal, so they can better obey all and only legal orders. I do not think that I am providing a creative or strained interpretation.

Separately, it’s a kind of national founding myth that the members of the US army have swore an Oath to the Constitution, not a specific man. Myths don’t have legal power; I just mention this to highlight how, again, I don’t think that this is strange doctrine widely considered illegal to talk about, I think that this is me describing the ordinary straightforward interpretation of the law that members of the US army also get taught.

It’s the contents of a plaque prominently displayed in United States Military Academy West Point, among other plaques discussing the Constitution, which I guess are to make officers being trained in United States Military Academy West Point feel inspired.

This only applies if the order is actually illegal. If the soldier thinks that an order is illegal, but they are mistaken and it is actually legal, they can be punished for disobeying it. They don’t get sovereign citizen-style defenses in a court martial, and “I think the order was illegal” is not a get-out-of-jail-free card; if they mistakenly think a lawful order is illegal and they disobey it, then they are on the hook for disobeying it, just as if they disobeyed it because they didn’t feel like it. Soldiers must follow all legal orders; not merely all orders they think are legal. Many people have asked “who decides which orders are legal”, and the answer is the court martial that soldiers are dragged to when they disobey any order. The soldier themselves does not decide. Nonetheless, the soldier faces criminal penalties for obeying an illegal order, even if a judge hasn’t yet told them that it’s illegal.

This leaves soldiers in a deeply unfair double bind, if they’re faced with an order that might be illegal - either they follow it, and then if it turns out to be illegal, face criminal penalties; or they don’t follow it, and then if it turns out to be legal, face court martial penalties2. The best I can say is that soldiers have signed up to face deeply unfair situations. Sometimes they get shot at by enemy soldiers; sometimes they have to make a decision about an order they think is illegal. Part of being a soldier is to risk your life and freedom in the defense of your country, and sometimes their lives or freedom will be lost, and this is one of the ways that this can happen.

This isn’t all the video says, though. It also makes some claims about the Constitution being under threat from inside America; namely, from the Trump administration. I don’t think that is very cruxy to whether I’m happy about the President of the United States saying the publishing and recording this video is a crime punishable by imprisonment or death, so I’m not going to talk about it much here.

I acknowledge that this makes the video less of a neutral stating of fact - they did not stick exclusively to the straightforward and uncontroversial claim that appears in the plaque on West Point - and more of a specific political statement. The video makes it sound very much like the authors believe that illegal orders are likely to be forthcoming. I do not have to hand probability estimates to say whether or not I agree with them, nor do I want to distract overmuch from the general point by taking a side on this.

Regardless, I acknowledge that the video was, in part, a political statement made criticizing President Trump.

The American Public

Many random Americans who reply to political posts on Twitter, who are not a representative sample of Americans, believe:

• the recording and publication of this video was a crime, punishable by death;

• this is fine.

Forgive me, sensei; I am now going to express my political opinions.

Have some damn pride! Seriously? You think that there’s the death penalty for speech in your country and you’re smug and cheerful about this, because you personally don’t think that you say anything that’s illegal?

Here are some groups of claims that I see about the video, and my thoughts on those claims:

While they say “illegal” in the video, since no illegal orders have been made, it seems like they’ve implied that some orders made in the past that were legal were actually illegal. So they’re secretly proposing that those specific legal orders get disobeyed. → I think that it’s bad for a country to criminally punish people for implications in their speech. Having a judge divine implications you never actually said into your words, and issuing the criminal penalties based on their interpretation of your words, seems bad; it requires people to know not only the law, but the psychology of judges. Having the death penalty for clumsy phrasing seems incredibly bad, and is not cause to be happy or smug. People being imprisoned for clumsy phrasing is also bad, and also not cause to be happy or smug.

Part of having laws, rather than just arbitrary authority, is that you are punished for breaking the law, and not punished for not breaking the law; as such, if the state issues criminal penalties for speech, it should only issue it for actual speech, not its interpretation of your speech, unless that interpretation is very clear. If reasonable people disagree, the implication was not sufficiently clear.

Otherwise, a lot more speech than what the state intends to ban would get banned - people would be scared not only to say things that are actually illegal, but anything that a judge might think was implying something illegal. That’s a lot of speech banned, indeed - imagine if everything that the Left claims is stochastic terrorism was punished as if it was actual terrorism!

While they say “illegal”, since no illegal orders have been made, they’re secretly saying to disobey some legal orders. → See my previous remarks on criminal penalties for something a judge merely reads into your words.

I’m confused. While they say “unlawful”, they don’t seem to mention any specific orders given that are unlawful. What are they talking about? / What illegal orders? → That specific part applies prospectively, to future illegal orders; they are ostensibly saying that soldiers should disobey illegal orders in the future, not just ones made in the past.

They wouldn’t have said this under a Democratic President! → Being a political partisan should not be a crime. If you think something should be legal to say if it’s about both parties, it shouldn’t become criminal just because you only hear it being said about one party. Otherwise a lot of ordinary politics might get banned.

You benefit from ordinary politics because one thing that keeps the government honest is that if it does badly enough by the people it gets voted out of office, and also sometimes the people in government do things you don’t like and it would be good for you if those people ever left office.

What about 18 U.S. Code § 2387? → This does not specify the death penalty for speech, and as such is making a weaker claim than the President. Regarding the actual penalty - a felony conviction, with 20 year prison sentences and fines - I think the first amendment precludes that law being interpreted so broadly as to outlaw the recording and publication of this video, and if it did outlaw that video, that’s not cause to be cheerful and smug, it’s cause to be disturbed about the government taking away your freedom of speech.3

It might be illegal for some other reason, and nobody is above the law! → And you’re not horrified by this being a law? The law can be changed! Unjust laws should be changed! There is a body in your country, called Congress, whose job it is to write new laws, and to edit existing laws!

No, I mean, like, nobody is above being tried for crimes, and a judge can determine whether it was actually illegal after hearing all available evidence. My guess is that it’s legal, but that’s for a judge to make after a trial, not for me. → You are making a much weaker claim than the President of the United States made. The President of the United States said that it was “seditious behaviour”, to “lock them up”, and that “seditious behaviour” is “punishable with death”. He did not say that it was maybe seditious behaviour, and that a fair trial should check this, but that before the trial he is genuinely unsure. If you think that it might be seditious behaviour, but it might not be, you disagree with the President of the United States.

Criminal trials are also pretty unpleasant things to go to, though I acknowledge that Trump himself has went through a criminal trial, and so the weaponisation of the justice system for political ends is a broader partisan issue beyond the scope of this post.

Who decides which orders are illegal? → A military judge in a court martial, in which a soldier is dragged before and tried when they disobey any order, even if that soldier personally thinks the order is illegal. See section “Slotkin et al.” in this post for details.

The President only said that sedition was punishable by death, as an abstract claim about a crime. If you think he’s saying these six Congressmen did something punishable by death, you’re admitting they were seditious! → He said specifically that recording and publishing the video was “seditious behaviour”; this is a claim about the President’s words, not about US law. See section “Trump“ in this post for details.

Alright, but the video was bad, anyway, and causes harm to American people, including me. → That’s possible. I don’t have opinions on the video as strong as the other opinions I’ve expressed in this post - it said some straightforwardly true things, and also some controversial things. I’m mostly concerned about what the reaction to the video, from the President, the Executive, and the people, indicates.

It’s possible it was bad. People should be legally permitted to make social media posts that you think are bad.

The reasons for this are just the standard arguments for freedom of speech:

• If you are wrong about what’s bad, and write that into law, and someone is arrested for something that is actually good, you’re missing out on that idea. Ideas are useful. They built the modern world.

• If people can be arrested at all for speech, then the government has that power, and can use it against you, if the government becomes bad later.

• If people can be arrested for speech, then there’s less that keeps the government good; even if the government is good now, it can arrest people for speech that’s preventing it from going bad, and so it’s more likely to go bad.

• You’re a free citizen, and how dare the state tell you what to do, even if it’s telling you to do something you were going to do anyway.

Was recording and publishing that video good? Was it bad? Not sure.

Should you want it to be legal, even if you think it was bad? Yes.

If it was illegal, should you be happy about that? No.

Systems that listen to people are built on top of people who want to be listened to.

What Becomes of This?

Nothing.

The President of the United States is one man who will sometimes powerlessly mouth off and say that six of America’s elected representatives should die for recording and publishing a video. The Constitution is well-written enough, the government functional enough, the people virtuous enough, that this won’t result in a hair on anyone’s head being touched. Despite all the talk of the death penalty for speech, I’m publishing this post under my real name on English-language social media.

This isn’t a big deal enough that anything will happen to the President about this; it’s not enough of a scandal that it would get him impeached, nor even affect the electoral prospects of his party, except as single incident in a larger pattern that people notice.

Doesn’t mean I have to like the man, though.

3

I’m not a lawyer, so I asked Kimi K2 about this law, pretty, uh, emotively:

This sounds as though it doesn’t make recording and publishing this video a felony (e.g. they’re not calling for imminent illegal action; they’re just saying to disobey illegal orders in the abstract, not to disobey some specific order they’ve been given; Kimi claims “anything short of “prepare your rifles and refuse that convoy at 0600 tomorrow” is protected”).

I’m not a lawyer, though. I can’t say for sure. I can only say that if it did make recording and publishing that video a felony punishable by 20 years in prison, I’d find that pretty disturbing. Didn’t you grow up learning that you had a “right to free speech”, and that this was a good thing?

Come 1912, patterned off the great Cities of New York and Paris, is Shinsekai, 新世界, the New World, a newly built district of Osaka looking forward and not back. Like the city of industry Paris, Shinsekai had none other than an Eiffel Tower in the middle.

Come 2025, and Shinesekai remains a vision of 1912’s future. Tsutenkaku evokes nostalgia. Yet it does still work — a lover of GDP and industry and growth and trade comes, from distant Europe, hearing tales of this tower from which one can look over Osaka.

Tsutenkaku, as a symbol of Osaka (given the Aroden-blessed internationalising trends, nostalgia also means more conceptual density on Tsutenkaku being a symbol of Japan, rather than of Earth), despite only being 103 m tall, had many more people waiting in line. There was a small queue to get tickets, and then a much longer queue to actually get in.

This queue was for the two attractions of Tsutenkaku: the slide, and the observation deck. The observation deck seemed to have many more visitors than the slide. After all, one’s goal is to ascend, not to go down. Had I more time and energy, I’d have done both, though I knew what I was here for.

Like many an observation deck designed for tourists - this one at first for tourists from 1912, though now adapted for the time - it loves to continually remind you that hey, you’re in Osaka, look at this train from Osaka, look at how Osaka dialect exists and also check out these traditional Japanese seasonal flowers.

Though I choose these also because they present iconography of something that shows their understanding of what an Observation Deck is - the smiling yellow figure showing his feet is a God.

Biliken (CG), the God of Things as they Ought to Be, first enclericed Florence Pretz in 1908 when appearing to him in a dream, and Tsutenkaku is now one of his holy sites. He is believed to bring good luck to his worshippers, especially if you rub his feet (hence the prominent images of one of his holy symbols, the foot, on the poster on the right hand side). The statue of Biliken watching over Tsutenkaku is the third one, after pilgrims wore through his feet touching them over the years.

Observation deck (“Golden Observation Platform”) was observation deck fare - bunch of statues of Biliken around, lit up in a yellow that kind of obscured the view of the city, bunch of machines into which one could insert coins and get various trinkets that one could take out of Japan to show to everyone that you’ve been to Japan. Built around a central core where the elevator and stairs live, windows on all sides. Only 100 m, but enough to clear most of the surrounding buildings, and take a look down on Shinsekai and the surrounding area.

Above the fifth floor glass observation deck were the two outside decks (“Tembo Paradise”). The first outside deck was pretty tight, enough space for two people though sometimes these two people would be blocking the way around. Still, as a rooftop observation deck, there was no window or reflections, just a clear view out to Osaka.1

Since it’s within walking distance of Abeno Harukas, I got a nice view of Abeno Harukas, at sunset but with the lights still on, across the other side of Tennoji Park. Abeno Harukas really is a titan; you can see well what I imagine is the lognormal distribution of building heights, the way it’s much like the other buildings but bigger.

Above the outside observation deck was another, higher one. This was very tight, only enough space for one person, so I didn’t spend much time there - when I was there travel around it was blocked, so I just went up to look around and check the box.

Classic Osaka sight of a Ferris wheel, of course:

This one is the Tempozan Giant Ferris Wheel, a very nice Ferris wheel next to Osaka Aquarium that I’ve visited twice. It’s by the Osaka Bay, which gives you a nice view of the port and the boats. I love observing global trade!

Sticking out of Tsutenkaku Tower is Tip the Tsutenkaku, a little platform that you can stand at the end of to clear Tsutenkaku and get views surrounding you as well as directly downwards. I’m scared enough of heights that this was thrilling; not least when I happily bounced a little at the sight, causing an amount of shaking and creaking that snapped me out of my reverie.

On the fourth floor is the Light Observation Platform, the Present to the Golden Observation Platform’s Past, this one finally representing Osaka’s draw to tourists now, rather than of 1912. Osaka has the fortune of holding the 2025 World Expo, though I was much too late to buy tickets for, and the Light Observation Platform talks about the World Expo a great deal. At night, there’s a disco ball.

Overall, I didn’t get as much from Tsutenkaku as I did from Abeno Harukas. I was taking these observation decks as an opportunity to see the city from another literal perspective, and Tsutenkaku is a wonder of its time rather than one that stands on its own, since overshadowed by greater Structures, and yet one that still somewhat datedly thinks of itself as a wonder. Still glad the Biliken gets his tower, though!

It has been unassuming to me for a while. A few nights before this, I laid eyes on Abeno Harukas, and it took me a moment to recognise it as such. On one hand, it seemed like Abeno Harukas was too far away to be the building that I saw on the skyline; and I hadn’t memorised the profile of Abeno Harukas, it just being another building. But dispositive of it being Abeno Harukas? The scale. It’s Abeno Harukas. It’s twice as tall as anything else, and it manages to be subtle about it.

On account of Abeno Harukas’ subtlety, there wasn’t much trouble getting to the top; the queues to the elevators were only a single group for each elevator. I Love Efficient Pricing! I Love Hidden Gems! I Love This 300 m Tall Building That’s Kind Of Hard To Notice!

The observatory of Abeno Harukas was somewhat plain, a square floor plan with four walls surrounding an interior courtyard that I didn’t go into. You get a good view of Osaka and Keihanshin’s geography, located in the Osaka Bay - on three sides you see mountains, on one side you see the sea. There were some beautiful views of Osaka, though Osaka lacked a lot of Landmarks that I could look for; this was a combination of me having less of the lay of the land of Osaka, and what I think is Osaka being more of a continuous urban fabric than Tokyo’s many districts (or perhaps Tokyo is just big enough to fit many districts; 3m people in 大阪市 vs the 10m people of 東京都区部).

I did get to see this mystery building on the horizon! Despite being glaringly obvious, a massive attention-drawing Structure with nothing around it, bright white against the dark background, I didn’t see it labelled in my brochure about the deck, nor did I already know what it was. I at first thought it might have been the Tower of the Sun, a white weird-looking tower in the distance of Osaka, but the shape didn’t match.

This is Dai Heiwa Kinen Tō! It’s a 180 m tall memorial for all victims of war in history, regardless of the circumstances, built in 1970 by Perfect Liberty Kyodan, a minor Japanese religion founded in 1924. I hadn’t heard of it before and it seems to have a strangely low presence in the universal prior - the Wikipedia page only has two paragraphs, the top Kagi result is for offbeatjapan.com. There’s an SCP Wiki article that’s just a review of it in the top page. I’m glad that I was able to find out about this; not sure if I have enough time left in Osaka to want to visit it, but I might be interested in doing so on another trip.

The other highlight of the Osaka skyline was the Ferris wheels! Osaka has a few giant Ferris wheels, and the ones that are oriented such that they’re facing Abeno Harukas are very visible against the skyline, being a hundred meters in size, disk-shaped rather than thin and narrow, of a different form to skyscrapers and positioned such that they don’t have any surrounding obstacles.

This Ferris wheel is the Redhorse Osaka Wheel, built in the Expo Commemoration Park, celebrating the Osaka 70 Expo. That’s right, Osaka gets TWO world expos! A little to the left of it but with half of its height obscured is the Tower of the Sun (the two fins at the bottom are barely visible), of significantly more fame.

Redhorse Osaka is in fact the third Ferris wheel built on that site; the previous two were the Wonder Wheel (build for Expo ‘70, 40 m tall) and the Technocosmos (built for Expo ‘85 in Tsukuba, and then moved to Osaka after the Expo, 85 m tall). I like Ferris wheels - they’re a lot like observation decks, with the con that they go up and then down, but the pro that they’re very comfortable, you sit down in an air conditioned carriage with only the people in your group and sit back and watch a city grow increasingly beautiful.

For a special treat, there was a trip to the roof of Abeno Harukas! There are two ways to visit the roof: the Abeno Harukas Observatory Heliport Tour, and Edge the Harukas. I did the heliport tour; it runs more often in larger groups, such that I could just walk up to the counter; this takes you up to the heliport, a large flat area on the roof of Abeno Harukas, 300 m up, with an open view directly to Osaka. There was some moisture on the outside of the windows inside the observation deck, so I liked this clearer view!

The safety instructions were given in Japanese and miming, in a beautiful piece of panlinguistic communication. The representations of running and throwing were pretty good, though the specific instructions around what you’re allowed to do past the orange line marking the border of the helipad were only conveyed to me by earlier written safety instructions.

By the time I was descending, the sun was low over the Osaka Bay, which meant that one of the cardinal directions was almost blinding. I guess this means Abeno Harukas would best make a morning or night trip; the water of the bay is very reflective.

Below the observation deck, on the way down, there’s an art gallery; when I went there, the exhibition was about the manga Black Jack. I failed to appreciate a big part of the exhibition, because no cameras nor phones were allowed and part of it was explaining the themes of the manga via presenting a bunch of manga comics in Japanese for which とても遅く読みます. Still, I can appreciate what I saw: a mangaka who’s an actual doctor made a manga about the renegade doctor Black Jack, a rogue with a heart of gold, exploring their feelings about medicine in a way that was purportedly pretty new for the time. Art is pretty!

Overall, Abeno Harukas is just a tall building, with all that entails. Nothing particularly special about it, but nothing particularly bad or cloying about it. You can go up it, and look out, and see all of Osaka without bias, and there you have it. Great for if all you want to do is go 300 m up and you have no other desires in this world :3!

Somewhere like half of children are physically assaulted by their parents. Maybe it’s 20%, whatever; it definitely happens enough that one can say that it’s everywhere, rather than a rare anomaly. It’s legal in England and in every US state. Despite this, child abuse does not have a strong presence in modern media.

I mean, can you imagine? If a child is assaulted on-screen, then that becomes immensely distracting. Despite how universal it is, we all know that it’s the kind of thing that you keep behind closed doors.

One way to play this is to make the show about child abuse. A parent hits their kids; this is immensely distracting, and draws focus from everything else to how this parent is the kind of violent and uncontrolled abuser who would hit their own kids. We know, immediately, to hate this parent; we know and expect that there’s some remark on the psychological effects on this child. It is a victory if the child escapes, and a loss if the child doesn’t.

Matilda the Musical has a few different instances of assault, ranging from the mild to the cartoonis. The act of assault that’s used to show off how Matilda’s parents are abusive is of the mild kind. I don’t remember the exact scope of it, though I remember it’s more like slamming doors and shoving than actual direct hitting. Matilda’s parents’ behaviour suffices to establish them as villains of the story, and we hope dearly that Matilda is able to escape them, and we cheer when they receive their eventual comeuppance. The cartoonish assault is by the Trunchbull. Picking up a child by their hair and swinging them around and throwing them a large distance is liable to literally kill that child; but Trunchbull here is the cartoonish authoritarian principal, she does this in her capacity as a character in a story for kids. The assault, nonetheless, establishes her firmly as the villain of the story.

Another way is to totally ignore it. In The Owl House, Camila Noceda, the mother of the main character, at one point defeats the villain of an episode using a sandal. The fandom knows the joke - Camila is a mother, and mothers use sandals to assault their children. The sandal is a scary thing, an establishment of absolute authority, because parents are stronger than children, they have all the power and the children have none, and when they assault children they win. It’s a badass moment on the part of Camila Noceda, who immediately defeats the villain with it.

I’m not sure if many people watching it, besides me, derived any particular implications from this. Allow me to darkly hint. Camila Noceda had the sandal in her bag. She, evidently, carries it around everywhere. Very few viewers took this as a mark against the character of Camila Noceda. She is a normal mother, carrying a normal weapon with the primary purpose of assaulting children.

Very realistic!

Though perhaps too subtle, if Dana Terrace was going for a story about child abuse, which she wasn’t, so it was just right.

Another way is to culturally translate the child abuse into something that truthfully depicts the meaning but not necessarily the action. We know, now, as adult viewers, that hitting children is wrong, that it’s not normal, that it’s not good, that hitting children makes you the villain. This is not the experience of children; most children experience being assaulted as an inescapable fact of life, perpetrated by their parents, who are nice and normal people, and who they often love. A true depiction of child abuse establishes both of these facets: a normal fact of life, a violent crime. And so it cannot be a truthful depiction of child abuse.

In Homestuck, John Egbert is a cartoon character. Dad Egbert is a faceless authority figure, who John tries to avoid, and who John doesn’t consider to be much of a negotiating partner who can be a good agent for John’s interests; when John does encounter his Dad for the first time in the comic, they get into a fairly intense physical fight. In the comic, this is called a Strife, modelled after a JRPG battle; in the pilot episode, we see John’s Dad slam him into a brick wall hard enough to break the wall.

Now, being slammed into a brick wall by someone significantly physically stronger than you is the kind of thing that gives you permanent injuries, perhaps even killing you. Are we meant to take this as John’s Dad trying to murder him? No, of course not! It’s a cartoon fight, between cartoon characters. Immediately after this happens, John skids along the floor, and instead of being at minimum scratched up but likely too injured to move, he bounces back up like a cartoon character and gets right back into strifing.

We can take this as being a metaphor for John’s emotional state and relationships. He’s a 13 year old, his Dad is lame, he’d much rather be holed up in his room playing video games with his friends instead of his annoying Dad trying to connect with him and talk to him and celebrate his birthday with him. The genre tropes for what’s nice and normal in Homestuck, what nice and normal people do, is established; people do just have JRPG fights with their parents using lethal weapons, same as how people have hammerspaces where they can store objects, same as how there’s a weird mouse cursor which moves things around, same as how there’s a voice from above that’s telling John what to do and naming him Zoosmell Pooplord.

Later, we meet Dave Strider, who is going through much the same thing. Dave Strider sneaks around to avoid his Bro, who is looking after him; Dave Strider eventually encounters his Bro and they get into a swordfight; there’s a bunch of cartoon shenanigans, not out of line for what occurs in Homestuck, like the fridge being filled with puppets instead of food.

A while into living in the world of Sburb, being out of that situation, having not interacted with his Bro, Dave Strider thinks about his life and realises: holy shit, that was fucked up.

His Bro tried to hit him with swords! That’s not normal, that’s assault, against anyone else, that would be a crime! Dave Strider’s humorous obsession with Olive Garden was because at Olive Garden the unlimited breadsticks meant he could reliably get enough food! When his Bro isn’t around, he can let his guard down, instead of having to be prepared to defend against physical assault and injury!

Hang on, wait a moment. Wasn’t this just the alternate physics of Homestuck? How come what happened to John was fine, and what happened to Dave was super serious?

Well, take Dave’s point of view. From Dave’s point of view, being assaulted and food-insecure wasn’t particularly worth remarking on - it’s just how his life was. He might have had a bad time, but everyone has a bad time along some axes. John probably didn’t find the parts of the situation that Dave described to him too unusual, and even if John had, he was a powerless child, there wasn’t really anything that he could do. Dave is a kid, and he’s living his life as it is presented to him, and he’s not doing anything else because he only has one life and there isn’t anything else to do but live it.

If he tried to call CPS on Bro, he’d explain the situation, and maybe they’d ask some follow up questions or maybe they wouldn’t, but in the end, nothing would come of it. He could explain that he has Strifes with his Guardian, and they would nod and think to themselves that so does everyone. He could explain that the fridge is filled with puppets instead of food, and they’d nod, and they’d think to themselves that this is just the kind of shenanigan that happens in Homestuck the webcomic.

You, the reader, see John’s emotional reality, and you see Dave’s emotional reality, presented as a metaphor rather than as a recording. Everything is also kind of literally happening in-universe, because it’s a work of fiction, fiction is allowed to work in ways that aren’t taking a simulated world and playing it forwards, they’re allowed to poke your neurons in the pattern the author desires. I love metafiction for this.

What happens, how Dave gets out of it, is he gets older, and he leaves the situation, by factors beyond his control rather than by his own will. We could imagine that, had Sburb not taken place, maybe Dave would have realised Bro was abusive when he was older, or maybe just thought of Bro’s pattern of behaviour as something that he dislikes rather than reified it as a Thing with a Name that People can respect. Maybe he would have moved out the day he turned 18 once he’s allowed to escape the unpleasantness. He thinks about what happened to him, the way his implicit model of the world has been shaped by his past, and then we learn that Bro was abusive, that Bro was not like John’s Dad, too late to stop anything from happening, too late to change anything. Our emotional stance on the matter changes at the same time as Dave’s does.

Up until then, we got tricked. We all thought that what was happening was a normal part of life. We all thought that it was fine to assault children - or, if not fine, then not the kind of thing that varies, or that should be taken as a mark on one’s character.

Very realistic!

What is Tour Montparnasse’s deal? Its purpose is as an office building. This purpose it fulfills, as indifferently as possible, little regard given to beauty. It’s just a giant office building, in the middle of Paris, anomalously higher than any other building in Paris, a huge dark-coloured block. It was hated at the time - there’s a joke that it gives the best views in Paris, because it’s the only place from which you can’t see the Tour Montparnasse. Buildings above seven floors were banned in central Paris, from 1975 to 2015.

It stands, as the second-tallest building in Paris, after the Tour Eiffel.

Why, then, am I so fond of it? Why does it captivate me so, why do I feel drawn to it?

One reason is that Tour Eiffel insists upon itself, in a way that Tour Montparnasse doesn’t. I appreciate Tour Eiffel as it was when it was built. People took Tour Eiffel as an imposition upon Paris, an alien Structure, built of steel instead of stone, as if it was placed there by some vast technological civilisation that only saw Paris as a good location for its purposes, the human settlement below an afterthought. But, despite looking like it and capturing my aesthetics in that sense, Tour Eiffel was not a symbol of indifference; it was the built as the centerpiece of the 1889 Paris Exposition, which was both an assembly of the world to celebrate the fruits of civilisation and of human striving, and a celebration of the centenniel of the French Revolution (more on that later, perhaps).

Today, though? The Tour Eiffel exists for the purpose of being the Tour Eiffel, and its meaning is that you should come to the Tour Eiffel so you can look at the Tour Eiffel. As you step inside the Boulevard Périphérique, picnic blankets selling small models of the Tour Eiffel start appearing; when you get closer to the Tour Eiffel, or indeed any landmark in Paris, their density increases. I can only imagine, though I haven’t yet approached the tower itself, that as you arrive at it, the ground is thick with picnic blankets and small models of Tour Eiffel, each step requiring one wade through the mass, brushing the small models of Tour Eiffel aside.

I am going to visit Tour Eiffel at some point - my distaste is a little affected, a tower is a tower, a tower with a story is beautiful - though I haven’t done so yet.

Tour Montparnasse, then, is the viewpoint of Paris that exists for the purpose of seeing Paris. Nobody likes Tour Montparnasse. Nobody bears fond feelings for Tour Montparnasse. If you work there, you work in a building like any other. And if you visit the observation deck, then you visit the observation deck for the purpose of seeing Paris, and not the purpose of visiting the observation deck.

What do you see when you’re in Tour Montparnasse? The observation deck has two floors, an enclosed deck with windows and the rooftop of the tower.

From the deck, you can see across all of Paris. I will remark on the picture of Tour Eiffel; notice how, in the background, you can see those tall buildings, a commercial district called la Defence, and in the middle of those tall buildings the Grande Arche? This is part of something that Paris loves to do, building its monuments in straight lines. The Grande Arche is positioned such that it lies at the intersection of the straight line drew by Tour Montparnasse and Tour Eiffel, and the straight line drew by the Louvre, the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, the Obelisk, and the Arc de Triomph (the latter straight line is called the Axe historique). This permits one to line up some beautiful views of many historical monuments at once; if I’d put a little more effort into the photography, I’d have a flawless Tour Montparnasse - Tour Eiffel - Grande Arche line.

The theme of the deck itself is Paris throughout history. Dotted around the deck are four VR goggles, which show you what Paris looked like from Tour Montparnasse during various time periods - the Roman settlement of Lutetia, medieval Paris, industrial age Paris freshly after the construction of the Tour Eiffel, and finally (in VR, but also visible with your own two eyes) modern Paris.

In a section of the deck tucked out of the way, there a series of poster boards describing the impressive buildings of Paris throughout the ages.

In a small concession to self-importance, the final board presents Tour Montparnasse and a planned commercial development as the impressive building of the future. It’s an enjoyable bit when observation decks do this - the Umeda Sky Tower does the same to a much greater extent - and sure, whatever, you’ve earned it.

Up to the roof. The roof gives pretty much the same views as the deck, only being a few floors higher, though might be a little bit nicer on a partly cloudy day because of the unbeatable ventilation. Currently, the rooftop deck is surrounded by a small exhibition called Panoramart, which gives the view of the future that Tour Montparnasse wants to present.

When I read this, I thought to myself: Oh, so that’s where Claude gets it from! The view of the future that Montparnasse gives you is, in both content and phrasing, about the same view of the future that I get from Claude, when I ask it to write about utopian futures and don’t guide it strictly. “Every invention carries the promise of progress,” it says, and I recognise that phrase (whatever it means) from the little vignettes I’ve asked Claude to write sometimes. It’s fitting; Claude is a French name, after all. Europe is the continent of being normal and chill about things, so it makes perfect sense that a language model’s distillation of every human word then guided to say nothing that might offend matches the normal and chill vision of the future that Europe presents to you.

I enjoy Tour Montparnasse’s contextualisation of itself in Paris, and think that it was a great choice for the observation deck. I didn’t get much out of Taipei 101 because I didn’t have very much context on Taipei, and didn’t really know what I was looking out at other than a different city; Tour Montparnasse tries to deliver this by giving the four-dimensional history of the region, from the past to the near future.