To me it increasingly seems like there's no version of reality where doing anything will solve the problem, unless you're one of the special few people who can influence the world. The violence is a sign of that. Average people don't do things like these, but when they start feeling helpless, the most unstable people of that society that don't have anything to lose will start acting more erratically. If there's no pressure relief, these actions propagate and will become more common and normalized. This is driven by desperation, not strategically weighing the pros and cons and what impact it'll have on society or what have you.
We invented something called “democracy” to fix this, and then we allowed enough wealth to accumulate that the wealthy just bought it and nerfed it.
We went through a cycle like this once before in U.S. history, and the amount of violence it took to correct the overreach of organized money was not 0.
Don't forget we created our own 'papal indulgence' system where if someone hides their morally bad actions/choices behind articles of incorporation/LCCs then somehow everything that person does is morally excused away by society and almost said to be an act of nature as if those people HAD to make those choices (because shareholder accountability or the market demands or whatever).
Shareholder accountability > societal accountability.
Accountability falling on a made up corporation > accountability falling to the humans that made the choices.
You can only get away with this structure up to a certain level of morally bankrupt behavior. But there can be a point where people refuse to defer to it as being legitimate.
I think the Sacklers and the opioid epidemic was the beginning of the end of legitimacy for this 'indulgences' system where the government wiped away/waves away horrific immoral behavior just because it was done under the government's papal indulgences system. You can literally ruin millions of lives, push thousands to hundreds of thousands of young girls/boys into prostitution, cause death and community destruction, and the consequences are mostly waived away because the Sacklers were protected by their papal indulgences.
Describing something does not equal condoning something. Whether GP is correct in assessment or no, they are describing a pattern they see, as an observer. I don't see a value judgment in their language unless I'm missing something.
Whether they are correct or not I'm not going to weigh in on, but I will make the claim that figuring out why something happens is the best way of preventing it from happening again.
This has been the historical cycle for as long as we have records of human history. Power begets power and greed. Eventually either everyone else reaches a breaking point and "eat the rich", or an external group takes advantage and eats everyone. Then we try again.
Agreed. Anyone who thinks democracy isn't punctuated by economically-redistributive violence hasn't been studying history.
Based in the simple fact that humans will not cede power/wealth willingly once they gain it.
Ergo, violence (either state or individual) to effect a new balance.
Which isn't to legitimize violence, but is to say that stripping away a population's ability to effect change by being violent, if enough of them choose, is more dystopian than some violence.
There are a LOT of stages between "resigning and doing nothing" and "deadly violence" that have some effect.
Demonstrations are a start, though they seem to be more useful for networking inside a group and forcing the press to pay attention to some matter. Decision makers can easily ignore them.
What's less easy to ignore are strikes, especially general strikes, as e.g. port workers in Italy threatened during the total blockade in the Gaza war.
Given what AI has always been about, since well before LLMs, go-slows and work-to-rules aren't going to help, they'll just speed up transitions to AI.
The disinvestment, boycotts, public shunning, adverse publicity, picketing, blockades, I can see those working. Certainly seems to have an impact in the video game news I see.
Those only work as long as legislators have shame, or there is a significant faction that can use the provided legitimacy to redistribute power away from the elites towards the people. That's not the case at a national level in the US right now.
This kind of sentiment, on its own, is hollow. Just more "violence bad", until the next round.
There is growing anger and discontentment in a large part of the population, driven by inequality of wealth and power. Hopelessness and a lack of control over the future.
Are the nodes of power willing to spread wealth and control more widely to stabilize the country? What are they willing to do to consolidate their power? The vast majority of violence is perpetrated by those nodes, to either consolidate power, or gain more of it.
Other people in this thread have already suggested more actionable responses: organize, unionize, understand class dynamics, and vote accordingly.
If you talk to the average individual outside of California or NYC about AI, or even Waymos, they will get increasingly irate and start spouting off about “water usage” and everyone’s jobs getting taken away—as if RLHF contract work is not available to basically anyone with a college degree. I hate to say it but you cannot trust “the masses,” Marx never said mob rule, he said rule by the proletarian, the class which knows, on account of their labor, the best integration of the human organism into mechanical production. No, there is no concern for the “masses” living in pre-industrialized agrarian communities or those who have been mystified by reactionary ideas (like this so-called majority), he was referring to those whose existence was an exception, that which was free and not predictable, contingent in the operation of the economy. It is by their exceptional circumstance that radical social change is even possible, not because of any moral need to raise humanity out of its savage condition. The masses, without the right understanding, will just become a lynch mob and start burning everything in sight, as they tend to in most circumstances.
The masses seem kind of right to be in that mindset, if you consider it from thier point of view for even one second?
So, yes RLHF is available right now, for people with specific backgrounds. That RLHF work is temporary and it's going to make hundreds of thousands of people redundant. The RLHF work is actually job-negative, it is work which will later deprive others of a way to make a living.
Once that training work dries up, what happens to the people who were doing the job which AI now does? How do they pay rent? How do they feed and clothe themselves? What answers do any AI proponant actually have for this, or is the intention that every person shuts the critical thinking part of their brain off and trusts the computer will come up with something?
> and everyone’s jobs getting taken away—as if RLHF contract work is not available to basically anyone with a college degree.
Huh? The jobs aren't going away because a few people can get temp work as traitors to automate away the jobs of their fellows? I suppose that's technically correct (e.g. the there-exists counterexample to a for-all statement), but it totally misses the point.
> The masses, without the right understanding, will just become a lynch mob and start burning everything in sight, as they tend to in most circumstances.
BTW, totally fine. If you like nice things and have political or economic power, it's totally on you to prevent things from getting bad enough that people want to do that. That's something libertarians would do well to remember. Propaganda only gets you so far.
That title reeks of the paper equivalent of clickbait. The paper is about subjective well-being and mental health in the psychological sense. Broader well-being includes material conditions like income, housing, health care, safety, and social connections. So a null result on subjective well-being is not necessarily a null result on material welfare, and the problems that leads to. The paper’s own abstract also talks about context effects rather than a simple universal null.
Unions are not perfect, but they have been an important check on exploitation. Organized labor helped win the 40-hour workweek. If you demand perfect solutions, you end up doing nothing. And given that you're up against people with nearly unlimited resources, you can't afford to be picky.
I very much agree with you, but also consider that there has not been a single instance (I can think of) that violence was able to stop the spread of a new technology. The human race is just a moth to the flame, and it simply cannot resist.
It goes both ways. Afrika Had eight military coups since 2020. Many of its countries are plagued by civil wars and terrorism.
I'm not arguing any points how these conflicts will ever be solved, but it shows that violence hasn't solved anything until now, for decades over decades.
Obligatory 'war is a continuation of politics by other means' Clausewitz -- the act of forcibly compelling others to adopt ones position doesn't have an inherent 'acceptable vs not-acceptable' line in method, other than that which we socially layer on top.
The type of person who posts here is unlikely to be the type of criminal that does that sort of thing. The virtue signaling is well-noted - good to have good citizens on here with strongly-worded top posts that get upvoted to the top.
I'm just waiting for dang, et. al to fix our thread voting system as it's a little too Reddity around here these last days.
I love when the comments start out a little spicy, all the spicy comments get flagged or removed, and the top comment becomes "wow, I can't believe all these spicy comments, I thought HN was better than this."
Why not? There are only two redresses against elites who don't abide by a social contract: the law & courts, and physical violence. The courts are much preferable, but legislators now serve those elites rather than the public, and the courts are impotent or unwilling to use what power remains with them. What's left but physical violence to either dissuade or punish?
The specific stigma against physical violence (and not against other types, even for cumulatively worse actions) strikes me as very self-serving, an instance of "the law forbids both rich and poor to sleep under a bridge." It's increasingly the only remedy available to everyday people, and the mad acceleration of government capture by elites in the last decade is making murder and rioting inevitable, at least as long as ordinary people still feel they should have some power.
Any sort of violence is bad, singling out physical violence as uniquely bad gives misbehaving elites impunity.
Yes, and in addition to this, we see examples daily of violence being inflicted on the poor by the rich, both literally (ICE, police militarization, harsh prison conditions, poor oversight of prisons) and figuratively (reduced social safety net, threat of ruin and bankruptcy due to medical debt, thread of lost jobs and corresponding loss of safety, a lack of consequences for criminal behavior directly correlated to wealth).
I often can't help but see the "all violence is bad" narrative as another tool of oppression by the ruling class. Even if that isn't its intent, it certainly seems to serve their purposes.
In the United States, not having a job for the short term means you lose your healthcare, for the medium term means you're living out of your car, and for the long term means you're out on the street, incarcerated, or dead. AI executives talk to the public like "investors are pouring billions into my new invention, the Job Killer 9000. Sure millions of people are going to get laid off and over time it'll force the price of wage work closer and closer to zero, but that's just the price of progress!" That in itself is inherently a violent threat. I am not surprised that some people are responding to it with violence.
Similarly, as one meme puts it "Unions were the answer to violence" but now they've been ground into dust we have people torching warehouses instead, saying "All you had to do was pay us enough to live"
While I 100% do not support violence against Sam Altman, or anyone else for that matter, what are people without billions of dollars and without the ear of the president supposed to do to affect change in this modern, post-capitalist hellscape? And I am genuinely interested in ideas that people think will work, not just trying to be combative.
> what are people without billions of dollars and without the ear of the president supposed to do to affect change in this modern, post-capitalist hellscape?
The honest truth? They're supposed to do nothing and take their licks with a smile. If that's not good enough for them, they are allowed to occupy themselves with ineffectual political activities, preferably on issues that are exhausting and do not disturb the power of the elite (e.g. abortion, transgenderism, etc.).
The people saying it doesn’t work are the same people who can’t must the effort to even contact their representative.
I had a professor in college who was big on entrepreneurship. So he formed an organization, got others involved, went to Washington to lobby his rep. His rep said “let’s do it”, and sat him down with her staff to write a bill. That bill was brought to the floor for a vote and passed.
Until you’ve done that, dont complain the system doesn’t work.
The issue with politics today is the level of engagement of the average voter. Few people ever get involved, so the vacuum gets filled with whichever power-hungry mediocre person who puts some effort in.
I have worked on electoral and initiative campaigns, and traveled thousands of miles to knock on doors. I’ve donated money. I’ve called my congresspeople. I’ve gone to and spoken at public meetings. I’ve protested, been tear gassed, beaten, and thrown in jail. I’ve been doing all of this continuously for about 20 years. I can tell you, from extensive experience going through the official channels, that the formal mechanisms of our democracy are fundamentally broken. We need to seriously face this problem and fix it, or things are just going to keep getting worse.
Yeah, America as a whole voted for Trump, and later atleast reading online I am seeing people be like: "I didn't know he was this bad" when reading his policies, he was exactly this bad :-/
People don't vote for their own gains but rather the gains of the few and to be honest, one can argue that within America this is a both-party problem and sometimes you are just picking for the less wrong politician and then you have these biases which blind them.
if this is the case, I have seen American people online say that "But, people know that the American govt and american people are different"
It is almost as if people are saying whatever is convenient at the time. This can only be one or the other.
If the average American's intent is of the system which is current administration, then forget about the trust within the system. I find your position with a bit of irony.
The system isn't working and that's a fact. You can say that people are to be blamed for that, sure, but then the people will be blamed entirely.
To be honest, The americans I sometimes talk online to don't share this ideal of the govt. and are fighting against it in some way or another but they are tired and hopeless, for the most part. I really take a deeper offense to your statement as that makes all the problems persist longer and thus to many people who have nothing to lose, violence feels like the only option which might be what GP might be referring to.
Either America needs to fix itself or violence will keep on happening. To be honest, I am not that much hopeful that America can fix itself though in the sense that the corporate influence is so immense with the two party system and the trust is still lost in some ways in America and times in future are gonna be even more harder yet America is completely polarized. These problems are also existing in other countries to be honest but America is at another magnitude and at these levels of inequality, violence to many people feel like the only way to share their voice which has been suppressed by the system for far too long. From my time reading history, this is a very repeating phenomenon and in a sense, history is messy but when people got really pissed at the system failing, mass scale revolt and violence was always picked as the last resort and we are in those times now.
I feel like we can either condemn or do anything as a society but if people (and humans just like you and me actually) get so frustrated within the system that violence seems like an good choice, then that is upon the fault of the system and I feel like the condemnation of act just does nothing in the long grand scheme of things.
TLDR: People should really act together to solve these things peacefully but its very far from happening in reality and reality is messy and always has been in some regards, we just read it from the line of statistics and history.
Yes many people couldn't vote (say youngsters) and many people didn't vote on the election day and from that sample who could and did vote did Trump win and within the election itself Democrats had gotten 75 million people.
In a similar fashion, my point is, I actually agree with you sir @mbgerring and your original comment. you tried your best to raise awareness and there are people who do the same and there are many who reach the support of millions but still no change is enacted because of the way system is enacted.
Yet the system can make someone like trump with maybe even sometimes far fewer people supporting it and billionaire's capital flowing into propaganda etc. too thus the people saying "we didn't vote for this"
My point was that the system is ultimately rigged by some people at the top against the average person and @refurb saying to you that oh this is then what the people must want, is a factually wrong statement.
I think you yourself have put it right: "We need to seriously face this problem and fix it, or things are just going to keep getting worse."
And I also agree with your overall statement that if the system continues on being as hopeless as it is, then for some people violence would become the only option for their voices as their voices get shutted from every peaceful way.
Because so many people are being ground down. You have time to organize something, instead of making rent? Well now you have to fight to even get your voting rights back, that you were silently stripped off because of your skin color and demographic, or social status. Then you need to see if you can ever get the gerrymandered border back to where it should be so the other party will ever have a chance at winning in your area, instead of losing by default. Pretty sure the next election is only about two swing-states again.
This system totally works so long as you can take time off work to form a lobbying group -- this does not pass the sniff test to me.
Reminder that even in the scenario that constituents 100% support or 100% reject a policy, their opinions hold almost no statistical sway to their elected representative. It's actually worse than a coin flip.
It's only when you restrict your constituent demographic to just those in the top 10% of wealth (...like a professor in college for example...) that suddenly their voting decisions align to constituent opinions.
Look up "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens", this has been known for some time.
> I had a professor in college who was big on entrepreneurship. So he formed an organization, got others involved, went to Washington to lobby his rep. His rep said “let’s do it”, and sat him down with her staff to write a bill. That bill was brought to the floor for a vote and passed. Until you’ve done that, dont complain the system doesn’t work
This is a sign of the system not working. A well connected professor, with plenty of free time to form an organization and go to Washington to talk to his rep
Might as well be an industry lobbyist.
Could a worker from Walmart do the same thing? In theory sure. In practice unlikely, for any number of reasons. Not least because people are unlikely to take a Wal Mart worker seriously enough to join their organization.
> what are people without billions of dollars and without the ear of the president supposed to do to affect change in this modern, post-capitalist hellscape?
California has a referendum system. Get signatures for a policy and put it to the voters.
They absolutely do. On September 12, 2001, ~nobody in the United States was interested in starting a war with Iraq.
Two years of propaganda later, and all of a sudden, half the population had acquired keen geopolitical insights which necessitated an invasion and occupation of a country that had exactly fuck-all to do with 9/11.
A decade later, all of a sudden, nobody wanted to fess up to wanting anything to do with that mess.
Public wants aren't discovered in some interference-free democratic vacuum. The people who own the press put a millstone on their side of the scales.
> Two years of propaganda later, and all of a sudden, half the population had acquired keen geopolitical insights which necessitated an invasion and occupation of a country that had exactly fuck-all to do with 9/11
There was desire for vengeance on 12 September. Reporting and politicians channeled it. That’s very different from driving consensus against something people would otherwise support.
You're proving my point. The thumb was put on the scale, he public was bombarded 24/7 with self-serving false dichotomies and viola, you've just manufactured mass public support for insane bullshit.
It works the same way in other countries too. Look at any country that you believe to believe in insane shit - most of those beliefs aren't organic.
Neither are the insane things you believe in. It's just that you can't even see that they aren't the product of your own reasoning. Fish don't have a word for water.
> You're proving my point. The thumb was put on the scale, he public was bombarded 24/7 with self-serving false dichotomies and viola, you've just manufactured mass public support for insane bullshit.
See also Covid-19. Same shit only waaaaaaay more batshit insane and waaaaaaaay more crazy 24-7 fear mongering.
They're just speaking to a hypothetical person who thinks this will solve a problem. In no way does their post imply they'd be ok with it if it solved some problem.
A little wild to me that so many of the replies don't understand that.
No no i do get that of course, and i agree. Its just that the thing that struck me about the phrasing was that its a bit revealing. We are reviled by violance but we do allow its use in society everyday. But what violance and for what utility is acceptable seems to be a matter of debate. The line doesnt seem to be universally agreed on given the passion seen in this thread
> If it did solve a problem, it's possible it would be legal.
FL crafted a law to help safeguard someone who gets sued for running over a protestor. I think this illustrates how a law can protect problems rather than solving them.
>> FL crafted a law to help safeguard someone who gets sued for running over a protestor
> Source?
the defendant in the lawsuit can use the plaintiff’s participation
in a "riot," as defined by the 2021 law, as "an affirmative defense."
This means that the person being sued can argue in court that their
action was justified by the riot.
Because people might have missed it last thread, here's dang's response to the discourse:
> I don't think I've ever seen a thread this bad on Hacker News. The number of commenters justifying violence, or saying they "don't condone violence" and then doing exactly that, is sickening and makes me want to find something else to do with my life—something as far away from this as I can get. I feel ashamed of this community.
> Edit: for anyone wondering (or hoping), no I'm not leaving. That was a momentary expression of dismay.
I recently saw a lecture by neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky [1] which discussed the complexities of human violence. We both condone and don't condone violence all the time, depending on social context. And furthers, our ways of expressing violence are varied (even down to tiny things like the silent treatment). We (along with other animals) have always used aggression to enforce social order and obtain social benefit.
Perhaps something to think about in a scenario like this. Personally I think it's interesting that some people are so quick to condone aggressive attacks on powerful people, yet have no comment on those powerful people committing lower levels of violence against the masses. It's all social context.
I believe that unique community of HN consist mostly of individuals that weren't able to fully understand those elements of human nature as elementary (and sometimes high-school) schoolers. I stand as one example of such person, it took me about 30 years before I understood that I lacked such innate understanding at school.
> Perhaps something to think about in a scenario like this. Personally I think it's interesting that some people are so quick to condone aggressive attacks on powerful people, yet have no comment on those powerful people committing lower levels of violence against the masses. It's all social context.
Can I just say that out of all of this discourse happening, this might be the most insightful yet succint position to explain my stance on all of this especially the "its all social context." line.
I feel like many of us here might share an answer publicly but I have always believed that if I am in the shoes of someone else, I might act the way they do so in a sense I understand the human part of it. A human did the violence and why. I understand that. Now we can call this violence inhuman, sure, but this action is still done by human and for many reasons. And I also understand why people condemn these actions, we wish to live in a clean and structural world and then we see the messiness of the world.
I just feel like just condemning an action would do nothing unless we change the ground conditions but that isn't in the hands of even many of us Hackernews users and this is basically a class aspect to it.
I personally feel like there are some similarities to this incident to the Trolley problem actually. Vsauce did a video about it worth watching[0]
How is a person from a nation that the US President has threatened to annex or invade supposed to feel about seeing domestic violence in the United States? From their perspective a divided United States is less of a personal threat to them.
All this talk about how 'we can't have this in a democracy!' forgets that many of us don't live in that particular democracy, and that particular democracy is threatening other democracies.
What should my response be if a North Korean General is executed? Or if a Russian oligarch 'falls out a window'? Or a corrupt Mexican politician is beheaded by a rival cartel?
These American oligarchs aren't my countrymen, They don't have my best interests in mind, they fund the people who threaten my country, and now they provide the American military with technology that it can use to attack my country.
Their lobbying and campaign contributes have resulted in a Mad King waging an unwinnable war that has severely damaged the global economy and has made my life demonstrably worse. I have never done anything to these people and yet they callously did this to all of us for personal profit well beyond what any human being could never need in a thousand life times.
At the end of the day the less cohesive the American tribe is the better off my tribe is. I wish our incentives were aligned but they just aren't and I am not in any way responsible for that.
It is fascinating to me that this was the thing that dang thinks is the most violent in the forum's history.
Not people advocating for hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths from covid. Not people advocating for bombing campaigns blowing children to smithereens. Not people advocating for mass cuts to programs treating people with tuberculosis. Not people advocating for mass cuts to programs feeding the starving. Not people defending ICE in murdering people either via gunshot or medical neglect in their disgusting prisons.
In fact, a lot discussion critical of that stuff just gets [flagged].
None of that counts as violence to dang. But threaten a billionaire? Oh that's a bridge too far.
This is obviously true, but you're just inviting the rebuttals. Arguments that civil violence is unproductive are boring and obvious. Normal people have been acculturated to understand the point already. The only way to have an "interesting" conversation about this is to take the other side.
All of those arguments will be vile, as they have to be given the context.
I'm not criticizing you, and I guess I'm glad someone wrote this comment quickly. You're right. But I would caution people against reading too much into the countervailing sentiment here. It's not trolling, but it is something adjacent to it.
Except they only won because UK was too busy spending money on a way to stop the French.
Like 1812 when the Brits weren't busy with the French they easily came in and burnt the US capital as punishment for burning the Canadian one. It's not that the British army suddenly got a lot stronger; they just weren't busy fighting on two continents.
That said, civil disobedience is largely pointless. We're in a capitalistic society so money is the name of the game. Rosa Parks did shit-all; it was the boycott of the bus system for 9 months that made the buses cave.
There is a super interesting and complicated discussion to have about the pragmatics and morality of concerted military action versus stochastic civil violence. Unfortunately, thread conditions on HN aren't conducive to it; the discussion will instantly devolve (via people joining in) to valence arguments about the cause of this or that campaign of violence. I genuinely think you'd need a moderation regime designed from the ground up to support a productive conversation about this topic, which, for good reasons, HN doesn't provide.
Honestly, it's not really that complicated. Americans (at least Pennsylvanians) born before, say 2000 were explicitly taught that violence is ok if it's against tyranny. Apparently, they stopped teaching that after 2010, so we're now in a post-natural-rights era.
While I typically avoid touching non-technical topics, I have the opportunity to chime in as another PA highschooler from the 90's, we absolutely were taught that, down to details in AP courses such as the impact of individuals like John Brown. While I'm not sure I'd have worded it precisely like the parent, the concept of "the four boxes of liberty" and the progression thereof was certainly understood and conveyed. (There was substantial study of the labor rights movements and conflicts/resistance therein as well)
I went to Jesuit high school in Chicago in the early 1990s. There's a lot more to say about all of this stuff and nothing wrong with what you just said, but to hash it out any further, we'd have to attempt a philosophical discussion about violence in a forum that (unavoidably, and to the consternation of its moderators) has reward circuits wired around hyping up action.
You've basically just said anyone who doesn't hold the "approved" opinion is wrong and then you called them names. But you wrapped it in extra words so that it's less flagrant.
Did you ever think that maybe people do in fact believe what they say they believe?
Everybody who believes civil violence is a productive solution to any problems we have in 2026 is wrong. I don't see myself as having called anyone names; rather, I said that the point was so banal that the only conversation you're likely to see is from people who get dopamine hits from taking the edgy other side of the argument.
> Everybody who believes civil violence is a productive solution to any problems we have in 2026 is wrong
I'd love your thoughts on the violence people committed during the following civil uprising: BLM riots, Minneapolis ICE (there are many more instances through history but Ive selected the most recent ones for simplicity).
Where you condemning the actions of people in those threads, encouraging them to have more civil "discussion" or do you think it was the duty of people to take arms against injustice?
If so, how do you corroborate the justification of violence with your current stance?
The violence during the BLM riots was awful. I live adjacent (across the street, at the time) from the Austin neighborhood on the west side of Chicago, and those riots trashed all the grocery stores on the west side, already a food desert. One grocer I know slept on the floor of his store with a shotgun in his hands. I got to watch video footage of another retailer elsewhere beaten in his store in the middle of the night.
The idea that people think that the BLM riots are somehow a mic drop argument for the effectiveness of civil violence is just further illustration of how far apart our premises are.
>Everybody who believes civil violence is a productive solution to any problems we have in 2026 is wrong.
Hilarious joke, Mr. Fukuyama. You have masked goons running around, detaining and even killing people without probable cause. If the results of the 2026 midterms are not to the liking of the current POTUS, it isn't unthinkable that he would try to overturn them, even by force. Would you be hand-wringing on HN about how violence is always bad, then?
But I digress. Firebombing Sam Altman is very bad; there is a multitude of good points against it, from the moral to the pragmatic. "Violence is fundamentally evil" is just a lazy and evidently false argument that does you a disservice.
> Hilarious joke, Mr. Fukuyama. You have masked goons running around, detaining and even killing people without probable cause. If the results of the 2026 midterms are not to the liking of the current POTUS, it isn't unthinkable that he would try to overturn them, even by force. Would you be hand-wringing on HN about how violence is always bad, then?
Also the official opposition is actually not really interested in representing many discontented people. It sticks to loser issues at are alienating to many except activist base (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/16/opinion/democrats-senate-...), and seems totally fine with not being competitive in many elections. And it continues to be that way in the dire political environment you describe.
You said they were "abnormal" and "trolls" but you dressed it up in the sort of snooty language that HN expects you to dress it up in.
Civil violence is the backstop of literally every societal system. While it would be better if the systems work, civil violence is what happens if they don't and tends to increase until they do.
I'm walking away because there's nothing more to be said. The idea that there has to be a last word in all these threads that satisfies everybody, including random people who weren't even participating, is part of what makes these threads so awful. I'm not going to keep a slapfight going just to entertain you. Deal with it.
In Sam Altman's case that is true. He is just one frontman for and beneficiary of a giant technological revolution that is almost inevitably happening whether anyone wants it to or not, since it is pushed forward by pure Darwinian logic: all key world actors feel compelled to develop AI, since they know that if they don't they will be outcompeted by others who do develop AI. Altman's death would change nothing about that fundamental calculus. You'd have to kill probably tens of thousands of people to really put a dent in AI development, and even then it would probably just be temporarily delayed.
In general, violence can certainly solve problems, especially when the problems are not being caused by almost-inevitable technological revolutions. One of the issues to keep in mind, though, is that it often also creates new ones, often surprising ones. For example, the assassination that led to World War One. For another example, if Trump had been assassinated last year, that would have solved many problems for people who dislike Trump. However, that doesn't necessarily mean it would have made the world overall a better place - that is almost impossible to predict. Hence the sci-fi sort of scenario of "you go back in time and kill Hitler, but when you return to your own time it turns out that Hitler dying just let mega-Hitler take power".
>Altman's death would change nothing about that fundamental calculus. You'd have to kill probably tens of thousands of people to really put a dent in AI development
Your analysis seems to assume that people will remain more afraid of being "outcompeted" than of being murdered, even after a campaign of terrorism that would make 9/11 look minor.
>it often also creates new [problems], often surprising ones
Let's reframe this to remove the negative bias: murder has the obvious direct first-order effect of removing the target from existence, but also a host of non-obvious higher-order effects resulting from people's response to that violence. These can be counterproductive to the goals of the murderer, but they can also work in favor of it. That is why "terrorism" is a real thing - the higher-order effects are essentially a force multiplier, and if you have nothing to lose then the calculus of causing a major disruption begins to look favorable; any disruption, because regression to the mean is good if you're at the shitty end of the bell curve.
>Your analysis seems to assume that people will remain more afraid of being "outcompeted" than of being murdered, even after a campaign of terrorism that would make 9/11 look minor.
AI is such an important technology that in the face of such a campaign of terrorism, governments would bring the development of the technology directly under the protection of the state security forces, largely outside the reach of terrorists. If not in the US, then in China or other places. At that point the terrorists would have to attain a level of power where they could feasibly overthrow the government in order to stop the development of the technology. Now, some scientists would be uncomfortable in such conditions and would stop working on the technology, but enough would remain that the technology would continue to progress, albeit more slowly.
>and if you have nothing to lose then the calculus of causing a major disruption begins to look favorable; any disruption, because regression to the mean is good if you're at the shitty end of the bell curve.
Very true, if the status quo feels shitty enough one becomes extremely willing to just roll the dice.
> Hence the sci-fi sort of scenario of "you go back in time and kill Hitler, but when you return to your own time it turns out that Hitler dying just let mega-Hitler take power".
Sure, but keep in mind that Hitler is already pretty bad. So while yes, killing him might open the door to someone worse stepping in, it may also open the door to someone more level headed.
The people who are doing this stuff are unhinged but why? Perhaps they do not trust law and order. Perhaps they feel helpless and have been led to believe its over for the labour class due to the overhyped marketing and so on.
A serious frank conversation needs to be had and the hyping needs to stop.
I think it's entirely fair for the average american to no longer trust the courts to provide justice against the rich, given your current political environment.
Or, if you truly believed AI was a threat and represented material harm and managed to get standing to bring a suit, you are looking at years and years and years of litigation.
Before passing judgment consider that while you may have the privilege of posting from a country that's never had to fight for relief from tyranny, that's not necessarily the case for others.
Totally agree. I’m speaking to cases in America. If you’re in a rich country broadly at peace with competitive elections to any degree, and you’re choosing violence, you should vacation to e.g. Burma or Sudan or Libya or Ethiopia and see the cost of the violence you’re glorifying.
Since your point seems to be that not all the founding fathers parent was referring to were actually slave owners do you have a claim for a rough ratio? I think that would be interesting and would be a more informative thing regardless of where on the scale it lands from "everybody but Adams" all the way up to "only a big names like Washington, Jefferson".
To a first order approximation half the founders were from New England (no slavery) and the other half were from Virginia (no realistic chance of being important/rich enough to be a signatory without owning slaves). So call it 50-50
>People who shoot someone or throw bombs at someone even though that someone never did something against them
I think the point is that there's going to be an increasingly large percentage of the populace who think that the AI bosses / billionaire class did indeed do something against them.
This has always been the case, hasn't it? There have always been groups of people who perceive technology change as a negative, or they are in fact negatively impacted.
But they didn't ask the rest of us if we're ok for them to murder someone on our behalf.
Personally I hope that AI will be a step change for the positive. I think it is inevitable that it will progress form here, in the darwinian sense, that someone else on this thread mentioned.
With that in mind, we should all be pushing for it to be used to our benefit, rather than detriment. And like almost all technological advances in the past, I think this can happen.
So if people are saying violence against Sam Altman is expected, then they're also saying violence against me is expected, because I am hopeful and vaguely supportive of the technology. That's quite scary.
> <...> even though that someone never did something against them, <...>
Many tech billionaires openly, publicly and loudly said something among the lines: "I/we/my company/tech-bros are building torment nexus - it will take your job and/or kill people and/or shut up political opponents. You are powerless to stop this."
There are some of those billionaires willing to put their name and face in front of billions of people in the world. You will have no trouble finding people that will think that X or Y tech bro is personally responsible for some poor persons problems.
Especially when there's a bunch of news like "layoffs due to AI", "record investments due to AI", etc.
I am not supporting violence, never done it and never considered it. Though not surprising when talking heads of political/economical extremes can get threats from people that have nothing to lose.
> There isnt a well known CEO in europe whos been the target of a failed stabbing
Sure. Figurative language will be figurative. There have been tons of assasinations in the last 10 years of police chiefs, politicians, journalists and an MP.
If we’re being pedantic, there isn’t technically a CEO in America who’s been killed. Mangione potted a middle manager with a CEO title. The billionaires who own the company are fine, as is the group CEO, and none of them materially changed any policies as a result of his death.
"The other side are where all of the bad guys and crazy violent lunatics are. The side I align with is the only sensible one; we would never do anything like that."
This sort of thinking causes extremism and division. It only perpetuates more of the thing you don't want!
It's also empirically not true: there are crazy people on both sides, but most people are pretty reasonable. If you treat them as if they are, despite your differences, they won't feel so alienated and perhaps you can both have a productive conversation. Both sides views are then likely to soften, and you can maybe even start working together.
This is about propaganda regimes, as much as about whataboutisms. Both sides paint the other as violent. Which is more believable. Sad as though the answer may be.
Nope. Both sides are not equivalent. The political right, in the U.S., has been significantly more violent than the political left for quite some time. And it’s not even close. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9335287/
I encourage anyone reading to look at the charts. There’s a single clearly anomalous data point with significantly reduced violence for “right terrorists” and significantly high number for “left” in 2025. It is the only year in any chart where left violence exceeds (or even comes near to) right.
It’d be extremely silly to infer some trend from this one anomaly.
Does it really matter who is more violent? The fact of the matter is both sides do have a nonzero amount of crazy/violent people and both sides could treat the other with more respect instead of furthering division.
You will notice I never said that both sides have the same amount of violence (since I don't think that that's actually relevant), so you are responding to a point I never made to begin with.
Vending machines and guns both kill people, so we should expend equal effort addressing the problems with both. Do I have that right?
This obsession with just pretending the two sides are mirror images, who simply need respect each other more is just lazy thinking. Interrogate what the contemporary American right values and believes. It is deep seated resentment (urban elites!), hate (owning the libs), bigotry (mass deportations now!), all wrapped up in a victimhood (white replacement theory) / inferiority complex. It should surprise exactly no one that the statistics are what they are.
The left’s biggest problem is people find them annoying for suggesting others could be more empathetic or do better at being inclusive. These two camps are just nowhere near comparable.
To address an issue, you first must understand it. I very much believe what the right values informs why they’re violent. These values and beliefs need to be shamed into oblivion. Diversity is a strength! Expertise is valuable! People should have freedom to live their lives so long as they don’t harm others! People who believe otherwise should tremble with embarrassment to say so.
Well, I guess you'll always live in a land of division and spite, always angry yourself, and the "others" always angry back at you, squabbling forever while things slowly get worse. I hope you enjoy the bed you've made for yourself.
Is this why shop owners board their windows and doors up every time there’s an [insert left wing cause] protest in their area? I haven’t kept up but was Charlie Kirk’s assassin a left or right winger, or one of those horseshoe fellas.
I’m one of the types who can parse observable reality and notice that businesses don’t board up when democrats win elections. They do it when the other guy wins. The claim that the “right wing”, such as it exists as a cohesive entity, is uniquely responsible for political violence today is an absurd claim on its face because I could look out my window on my commute and simply notice who was doing the violence. Or, in the case of Charlie Kirk, who was doing the assassinating.
The left right spectrum refers to representation in legislatures, a physical seating chart if you will, even in the US Electoral College. There is a reason to keep some people more physically separated, learned over time by civil institutions. These organizations, that exist in a left-right spectrum context, are the rulers, decisively in republics. Independently and regardless of where the electors or anyone else are. There is always a left-right spectrum even if not party-based.
But ultimately that is what you get for fucking with the people for too long and assuming wealth/status/power is an armor. Source: the French revolution
