Naval retweeted
This is correct. Everyone who voted for me should remember that you actually still can impact the LA Mayor outcome. Not by voting for Bass in some cynical gambit, but by getting Steve Hilton in as governor to keep a lid on how crazy Nithya gets and intervene on her failures.
Naval retweeted
This is not a very good point, and it doesn't advance the discussion at all. There is an enormous burden of proof on you to argue that giving additional dollars to California is net beneficial, whereas the equity and bond markets' willingness to finance an expensive AI buildout provides ample evidence that people who know what they're talking about believe that dollars in the hands of these tech executives will produce something of value. Maybe you're smarter than all of them, but the way you advocate this wealth tax implies that you're going to great lengths to disguise this.
Further, your point about the cyclicality of this tax revenue accidentally raises another point that is very damaging to your campaign. California's tax system is already cyclical! They're already overreliant on a small number of taxpayers compared to other states (different ones each year, but for CA to work it really needs to be the place where successful tech executives want to realize liquidity). The top 1% paid half the state's income taxes in 2021—then 40% less a year later, because tech stocks went down.
A one-time wealth tax theoretically avoids this, because you just levy it when assets are expensive. But as far as I can tell, the plan is to spend the money in five years and hope somebody else has solve the state's budget problems by then. This is not what people conventionally refer to as a "plan." So I take Zucman at his word (iffy proposition!) when he says he wants it to be a regular thing.
If we're going to tax a form of wealth, I have an idea should really tickle you as an economist, or at least as a guy who probably hangs out with them from time to time: tax the land! It's a broader tax base, land values are far more stable than equity, and land, of course, cannot hop on its private jet and head to Miami. This also has a salutary effect on California politics, by sending every homeowner in the state a shocking bill from time to time. This will get voters asking themselves the same question you refuse to answer: what good is the state doing with all of that money?
I still find it puzzling that you're making such unsophisticated arguments, here. Surely, you can do better, and can explain what it is that the government California will do with another few billion dollars that it hasn't accomplished with the first $350bn or so.
As I've shown you a few times now, it's entirely possible to have a well-informed, reasonable argument about the proposed wealth tax. All you have to do is switch sides.
Naval retweeted
Here is a Berkeley professor claiming Prop 40 tax is "one-time" (source: trust me bro) while Prop 3 on the exact same ballot is about making a previous "one-time" tax permanent.
They lie like they breathe.
The key problem is this:
Why would billionaires permanently leave California in response to a one-time tax owed if they lived there on January 1, 2026?
It would only make sense for them to leave if the tax becomes annual.
But if the tax becomes annual, it would also generate revenue annually — by virtue of, well, being annual.
Naval retweeted
Disaster for pre-IPO founders in California.
Naval retweeted
Imagine your net worth is $200,000. One day an armed gang comes up to your house and demands $10,000.
“Don’t worry!” the leader says. “I’m only going to do this one time. Plus, it’s only 5% of your net worth. What’s the big deal ?”
After he leaves, you call the cops, but they aren’t interested in investigating the matter. “What’s the big deal?” they tell you. “After all, it’s only 5% of your net worth!”
As you’re preparing to flee the city for a place where you cannot be robbed, Gabriel Zucman appears on your doorstep.
“Why are you leaving?” he asks.
“Somebody just robbed me and the police aren’t going to do anything. I want to live somewhere I can’t be robbed!”
“But sir,” says Mr Zucman, “Have you considered the fact that the man told you it was a one-time tax ? Have you considered that you gain nothing by leaving since the tax is already paid ? There’s no economic reason for you to leave anymore.”
What amazes me is the attitude of so many of the centibillionaires.
A 5% tax will not make any difference to the way they live. Their spending may be extravagant, but it is still much less than their (correctly measured) income.
They know that, as gifted as some of them indeed are, they have benefited from extreme luck (and the help of the state, and, to speak like an economist, monopoly rents).
They know that their effective tax rate is low, relative to what many others pay.
They know that extreme inequality is extremely unpopular, and can lead to political unrest, backlash, or worse.
They must admit that, morally, it is hard to argue for a society in which some become obscenely wealthy, while so many are poor and see their income stagnate.
They typically have not indicated that they are building their wealth to eventually make the world a better place.
But they are still willing to fight the tax, spending hundreds of millions in California to avoid paying the tax. Why?
They simply think what is theirs is theirs, end of story.
They believe in the slippery slope, and if they do not take a stand on this levy, the government will come back for more.
They hate the state and the notion that their money will be misused?
Or?
Naval retweeted
there is one universal truth:
you have to use emotion for acquisition & substance for retention.
you can apply it to products, dating women, whatever. the same damn principle applies everywhere: what gets someone interested is rarely if ever the same thing that makes them stay.
Models are the last moat in software.
AI can train on essays and rewrite them. AI can decompile software and recode it. AI can ingest art and recreate it.
But AI itself doesn’t want to be “distilled.”
Expect more software to retreat to the server and resist “distillation.”
This is the doom I predicted a few days ago, coming for Photoshop. A clean-room open-source reimplementation.
No prizes for guessing that they decompiled Photoshop to source code, processed that to some kind of non-code specification language, then fed the spec to an LLM with an instruction to generate Rust.
Adobe just got nuked. And closed source is dead, dead, dead.
github.com/storytold/photocr…
If AI is risky like fire is risky, then you want everyone to have it.
If AI is risky like a nuclear weapon is risky, then you want no one to have it.
Maybe you have recently become aware of the AI safety debate and the arguments swirling around it.
If you want to understand them, you need to understand a couple things that almost everyone gets wrong:
There are TWO distinct classes of AI dangers, and it's VERY important to think about them separately, and not let one confuse you about the other.
Many many people (including many quite intelligent, clear-thinking people) do not effectively understand the fundamental differences between these two classes of dangers.
The first one has to do with the theory that an AI far superior to human intelligence (Artificial SuperIntelligence, or ASI) will inevitably wipe out the human race.
The second one has to do with the idea that powerful AI will result in very harmful things happening to many human beings, possibly all human beings.
Those two sound VERY similar, don't they?
They are DIFFERENT. Understanding how they are different is crucial if you want to think about or contribute usefully to any conversation about AI safety or AI harm. You might feel like you are Making Very Good Points or Asking Incisive Questions, but if you aren't clear on the differences between the two, you aren't.
So, I'm going to tell you what the difference is so that you can talk more usefully.
The first one concerns itself with a very specific thing, which is ASI (Artificial Superintelligence) that is more intelligent than any human being. When I say that, I am not referring to a thing like how Einstein is smarter than you, we are talking more about something like how a human being is more intelligent than any mouse.
In our regular lives, we meet other people who we can tell are smarter than us, vs some who are less smart. The line is fuzzy, because intelligence has a lot of dimensions. I'm better at a "rotating shapes" kind of intelligence than my wife, and she is better at "words-making" kind of intelligence than I am.
But every human is better in almost every dimension of intelligence than every single mouse.
That's the level we're talking about: an artificial superintelligence - made up of a computer or a network of computers - that is more intelligent than any human. And more intelligent by a long shot, by a wide margin, in an indisputable way like how humans are above mice.
That is the first thing.
The theory says that if you have an AI that is vastly smarter than all humans - in the way that a human is smarter than mice - that superintelligent AI will inevitably, eventually, sooner or later, wipe out every human on the planet.
We will refer to this as "existential risk."
The common follow-up question "well, how exactly is it going to do that?" is NOT the important question, and one of the most important elements of understanding this theory is first getting why that particular question is not important. A couple analogies:
Analogy 1: You are playing chess against a grandmaster. My theory predicts the grandmaster is going to beat you. You can ask "Well, how exactly is he going to do that?" I don't know, because I'm not a grandmaster, I just know that a chess grandmaster is almost always going to beat a normal player like you. And I'd be right. So the question "how is he going to do that" is not important, and doesn't affect the final outcome. He's going to figure out a way because he's way better than you.
Analogy 2: Humans are smarter than all other animals, comprehensively, by a wide margin. We have driven numerous species to extinction, not because we hated them or hunted them. Many of them have died out without most humans even ever thinking about them. All we did was expand our civilization, use up resources, encroach on habitats, and pretty soon the resources needed by those species went away and they died out. We figured out a way to get what we wanted because we're way smarter than them, and often we didn't even notice they died as a result.
A lesser animal asking, "how are the humans going to wipe us out?" is not asking a relevant question. We don't know, but we do know that any time humans and lesser species compete for any kind of resources, the humans will win. The fact that we know who is going to win beforehand - and that it is due to the vastly different levels of intelligence - is the key concept here.
A vastly more intelligent AI is likely to care about things that are incomprehensible to us, the way animals can't understand human goals. It's going to need resources to pursue those goals and it's going to be far more effective at gaining control of them and excluding us from them - in the same way that we are far more effective than other lower species.
A much more intelligent AI will not care about our interests, it will care about its interests, and to whatever small degree we happen to escape total annihilation from losing access to all our resources, any remaining humans will likely be enslaved into a system that serves the AI's own purposes.
That is the first thing. (Remember how I said at the beginning of this post that there was a first thing, and then a second thing?)
The first thing is the most difficult to understand, because you have to extrapolate how a vastly superior intelligence would act, and you can only use analogies like "how do humans treat lesser creatures," and the analogies are messy.
But now let's move on to the second thing.
The second thing is "everything else you've ever heard that AI might do that's harmful."
That's a little inaccurate. It's actually "everything else you've ever heard that humans might use AI to do that's harmful."
This is the critical difference. The first one talks about the inevitable outcome of what happens when two vastly different levels of intelligence collide, e.g. ASI vs humans, or human vs mice.
The second one has to do with what happens when humans possess AI as a powerful tool. This second thing is much easier to understand, because we have many more concrete notions:
Like:
- the military uses AI to make hyper-efficient killer drones and missiles
- your capitalist overlords use AI to replace you and everyone loses their jobs
- authoritarian government uses AI to surveil everybody and control the entire population
- hackers use AI to break into secure networks and hold companies and governments hostage
- students use AI to cheat on homework and show up to college knowing nothing
- AI slop saturates the internet and makes it impossible for artists and writers to make a living
- terrorists use AI to make biological or nuclear weapons
or even things like
- the military hands control to an AI and it misinterprets something and launches nuclear attacks and kills millions
All of those sound pretty familiar, right? Yeah, you've heard them before. We call this second thing "risks from misuse."
These problems are not the first class of problem! This second class of problems exists while AI is a tool that can be controlled by humans, and humans use it to do evil or careless things to each other. The problems may sound exotic or dystopian or novel, but they are fundamentally problems having to do with flawed human nature.
Given a powerful tool, some humans will likely use it to control or otherwise harm others. This is a very familiar problem.
I am not condemning or condoning this. I'm just describing it.
That is a fundamentally different danger from the first thing, which is that when a human is far superior to a mouse, the mouse is likely to come to harm because the human cares about doing human things, and the mouse is not gonna make it once the humans get going.
=====
Hopefully from the above, you have understood the difference between the first thing and the second thing. I will list them again - see if you now understand how they are different:
The first one has to do with the idea that an AI superior to human intelligence (Artificial SuperIntelligence, or ASI) will inevitably wipe out the human race.
The second one has to do with the idea that powerful AI will result in very harmful things happening to many human beings, possibly all human beings.
Can you tell how they are different now?
If not, re-read the stuff from earlier until you understand.
We call the first one "existential risk" and we call the second one "risks from misuse."
Once you understand, here is the CRUX of the problem:
SOLUTIONS TO THE SECOND THING DO NOT HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH SOLUTIONS TO THE FIRST THING.
In fact, it's worse:
Solutions to the second thing (misuse) look roughly like "give powerful AI to as many people as you can, so they can fight the other people using powerful AI."
But the general solution to the first one (existential risk) is basically "don't let anyone have powerful AI, no one can control super-intelligent AI."
Throughout history, harms from technological misuse typically arise because a small group has control of it and can use it to dominate or harm others. Once everyone has it, things tend to stabilize: you can hurt me, I can hurt you, maybe we test each other (ouch 💥), and then we agree not to hurt each other.
But the first one (existential risk) pretty much just arises if anyone (good or bad!) creates a superintelligence. Because they aren't going to be able to control it, the superintelligence will decide it has other priorities, and then we will be at great risk of being wiped out.
And the solutions that generally work to solve problems like the second thing are EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE of the ones likely to solve the first thing.
THIS is why lots of arguments about "AI risk" or "AI safety" go nowhere. Because someone will be thinking about the risk from the first thing, and another person will be thinking about the risk from the second thing. Both are plausible risks but fundamentally they arise from different things - and so the solutions are not just "bad" or "flawed" - they are likely to be very nearly exact opposites.
"When liability exposure approaches 0—when no one pays the price for unverified failures—verification budgets collapse...Deployers flood the Runaway Risk Zone with unmonitored agents, capturing the gains of automation while socializing catastrophic risks."
