People I followed on Twitter for their credible takes on COVID-19 now sound insane. Sigh...
I feel like I should do something to prep (e.g., hedge risk to me and my family) in advance of AI risk being politicized, but I’m not sure what. Obvious idea is to stop writing under my real name, but cost/benefit doesn’t seem worth it.
Re hedging, a common technique is having multiple fairly different citizenships and foreign-held assets, i.e. such that if your country become dangerously oppressive you or your assets wouldn’t be handed back to it. E.g. many Chinese elites pick up a Western citizenship for them or their children, and wealthy people fearing change in the US sometimes pick up New Zealand or Singapore homes and citizenship.
There are many countries with schemes to sell citizenship, although often you need to live in them for some years after you make your investment. Then emigrate if things are starting to look too scary before emigration is restricted.
My sense, however, is that the current risk of needing this is very low in the US, and the most likely reason for someone with the means to buy citizenship to leave would just be increases in wealth/investment taxes through the ordinary political process, with extremely low chance of a surprise cultural revolution (with large swathes of the population imprisoned, expropriated or killed for claimed ideological offenses) or ban on emigration. If you take enough precautions to deal with changes in tax law I think you’ll be taking more than you need to deal with the much less likely cultural revolution story.
Permanent residency (as opposed to citizenship) is a budget option. For example, for Panama, I believe if you’re a citizen of one of 50 nations on their “Friendly Nations” list, you can obtain permanent residency by depositing $10K in a Panamanian bank account. If I recall correctly, Paraguay’s permanent residency has similar prerequisites ($5K deposit required) and is the easiest to maintain—you just need to be visiting the country every 3 years.
I was initially pretty excited about the idea of getting another passport, but on second thought I’m not sure it’s worth the substantial costs involved. Today people aren’t losing their passports or having their movements restricted for (them or their family members) having expressed “wrong” ideas, but just(!) losing their jobs, being publicly humiliated, etc. This is more the kind of risk I want to hedge against (with regard to AI), especially for my family. If the political situation deteriorates even further to where the US government puts official sanctions on people like me, humanity is probably just totally screwed as a whole and having another passport isn’t going to help me that much.
I spent some time reading about the situation in Venezuela, and from what I remember, a big reason people are stuck there is simply that the bureaucracy for processing passports is extremely slow/dysfunctional (and lack of a passport presents a barrier for achieving a legal immigration status in any other country). So it might be worthwhile to renew your passport more regularly than is strictly necessary, so you always have at least a 5 year buffer on it say, in case we see the same kind of institutional dysfunction. (Much less effort than acquiring a second passport.)
Side note: I once talked to someone who became stuck in a country that he was not a citizen of because he allowed his passport to expire and couldn’t travel back home to get it renewed. (He was from a small country. My guess is that the US offers passport services without needing to travel back home. But I could be wrong.)
People I followed on Twitter for their credible takes on COVID-19 now sound insane. Sigh...
Are you saying that you initially followed people for their good thoughts on COVID-19, but (a) now they switched to talking about other topics (George Floyd protests?), and their thoughts are much worse on these other topics, (b) their thoughts on COVID-19 became worse over time, (c) they made some COVID-19-related predictions/statements that now look obviously wrong, so that what they previously said sounds obviously wrong, or (d) something else?
You’ll have to infer it from the fact that I didn’t explain more and am not giving a straight answer now. Maybe I’m being overly cautious, but my parents and other relatives lived through (and suffered in) the Cultural Revolution and other “political movements”, and wouldn’t it be silly if I failed to “expect the Spanish Inquisition” despite that?
It’s helpful (to me, in understanding the types of concerns you’re having) to have mentioned the Cultural Revolution. For this, posting under a pseudonym probably doesn’t help—the groups who focus on control rather than thriving have very good data collection and processing capability, and that’s going to leak to anyone who gets sufficient power with them. True anonymity is gone forever, except by actually being unimportant to the new authorities/mobs.
I wasn’t there, but I had neighbors growing up who’d narrowly escaped and who had friends/relatives killed. Also, a number of friends who relayed family stories from the Nazi Holocaust. The lesson I take is that it takes off quickly, but not quite overnight. There were multi-month windows in both cases where things were locked down, but still porous for those lucky enough to have planned for it, or with assets not yet confiscated, or willing to make sacrifices and take large risks to get out. I suspect those who want to control us have _ALSO_ learned this lesson, and the next time will have a smaller window—perhaps as little as a week. Or perhaps I’m underestimating the slope and it’s already too late.
My advice is basically a barbell strategy for life. Get your exit plan ready to execute on very short notice, and understand that it’ll be costly if you do it. Set objective thresholds for triggers that you just go without further analysis, and also do periodic gut checks to decide to go for triggers you hadn’t considered in advance. HOWEVER, most of your time and energy should go to the more likely situation where you don’t have to ditch. Continue building relationships and personal capital where you think it’s best for your overall goals. Do what you can to keep your local environment sane, so you don’t have to run, and so the world gets back onto a positive trend.
Get your exit plan ready to execute on very short notice, and understand that it’ll be costly if you do it.
What would be a good exit plan? If you’ve thought about this, can you share your plan and/or discuss (privately) my specific situation?
Do what you can to keep your local environment sane, so you don’t have to run, and so the world gets back onto a positive trend.
How? I’ve tried to do this a bit, but it takes a huge amount of time, effort, and personal risk, and whatever gains I manage to eek out seem to be highly ephemeral at best. It doesn’t seem like a very good use of my time when I can spend it on something like AI safety instead. Have you been doing this yourself, and if so what has been your experience?
I do not intend to claim that I’m particularly great at this, and I certainly don’t think I have sufficient special knowledge for 1-1 planning. I’m happy to listen and make lightweight comments if you think it’d be helpful.
What would be a good exit plan
My plans are half-formed, and include maintaining some foundational capabilities that will help in a large class of disasters that require travel. I have bank accounts in two nations and currencies, and I keep some cash in a number of currencies. Some physical precious metals or hard-to-confiscate digital currency is a good idea too. I have friends and coworkers in a number of countries (including over a border I can cross by land), who I visit enough that it will seem perfectly normal for me to want to travel there. I’m seriously considering real-estate investments in one or two of those places, to make it even easier to justify travel if it becomes restricted or suspicious.
I still think that the likelihood is low that I’ll need to go, but there may come a point where the tactic of maintaining rolling refundable tickets becomes reasonable—buy a flight out at 2 weeks and 4 weeks, and every 2 weeks cancel the near one and buy a replacement further one.
Do what you can to keep your local environment sane .
How?
This is harder to advise. I’m older than most people on LW, and have been building software and saving/investing for decades, so I have resources that can help support what seem to be important causes, and I have a job that has (indirect, but clear) impact on keeping the economy and society running.
I also support and participate in protests and visibility campaigns to try to make it clear to the less-foresightful members of society that tightening control isn’t going to work. This part is more personal, less clearly impactful toward my goals, and takes a huge amount of time, effort, and personal risk. It’s quite possible that I’m doing it more for the social connections with friends and peers than for purely rational goal-seeking. I wouldn’t fault anyone for preferring to put their effort (which will ALSO take a huge amount of time, effort, and risk (though maybe less short-term physcial risk); everything worthwhile does) into other parts of the large and multidimensional risk-space.
I saw this “stopped clock” assumption catching a bunch of people with COVID-19, so I wrote a quick post on why it seems unlikely to be a good strategy.
What/who does #1 refer to? I’ve changed my mind a lot due to reading tweets from people I initially followed due to their credible COVID-19 takes, and you saying they sound insane would be a major update for me.
People I followed on Twitter for their credible takes on COVID-19 now sound insane. Sigh...
I feel like I should do something to prep (e.g., hedge risk to me and my family) in advance of AI risk being politicized, but I’m not sure what. Obvious idea is to stop writing under my real name, but cost/benefit doesn’t seem worth it.
Re hedging, a common technique is having multiple fairly different citizenships and foreign-held assets, i.e. such that if your country become dangerously oppressive you or your assets wouldn’t be handed back to it. E.g. many Chinese elites pick up a Western citizenship for them or their children, and wealthy people fearing change in the US sometimes pick up New Zealand or Singapore homes and citizenship.
There are many countries with schemes to sell citizenship, although often you need to live in them for some years after you make your investment. Then emigrate if things are starting to look too scary before emigration is restricted.
My sense, however, is that the current risk of needing this is very low in the US, and the most likely reason for someone with the means to buy citizenship to leave would just be increases in wealth/investment taxes through the ordinary political process, with extremely low chance of a surprise cultural revolution (with large swathes of the population imprisoned, expropriated or killed for claimed ideological offenses) or ban on emigration. If you take enough precautions to deal with changes in tax law I think you’ll be taking more than you need to deal with the much less likely cultural revolution story.
Permanent residency (as opposed to citizenship) is a budget option. For example, for Panama, I believe if you’re a citizen of one of 50 nations on their “Friendly Nations” list, you can obtain permanent residency by depositing $10K in a Panamanian bank account. If I recall correctly, Paraguay’s permanent residency has similar prerequisites ($5K deposit required) and is the easiest to maintain—you just need to be visiting the country every 3 years.
I was initially pretty excited about the idea of getting another passport, but on second thought I’m not sure it’s worth the substantial costs involved. Today people aren’t losing their passports or having their movements restricted for (them or their family members) having expressed “wrong” ideas, but just(!) losing their jobs, being publicly humiliated, etc. This is more the kind of risk I want to hedge against (with regard to AI), especially for my family. If the political situation deteriorates even further to where the US government puts official sanctions on people like me, humanity is probably just totally screwed as a whole and having another passport isn’t going to help me that much.
I spent some time reading about the situation in Venezuela, and from what I remember, a big reason people are stuck there is simply that the bureaucracy for processing passports is extremely slow/dysfunctional (and lack of a passport presents a barrier for achieving a legal immigration status in any other country). So it might be worthwhile to renew your passport more regularly than is strictly necessary, so you always have at least a 5 year buffer on it say, in case we see the same kind of institutional dysfunction. (Much less effort than acquiring a second passport.)
Side note: I once talked to someone who became stuck in a country that he was not a citizen of because he allowed his passport to expire and couldn’t travel back home to get it renewed. (He was from a small country. My guess is that the US offers passport services without needing to travel back home. But I could be wrong.)
Are you saying that you initially followed people for their good thoughts on COVID-19, but (a) now they switched to talking about other topics (George Floyd protests?), and their thoughts are much worse on these other topics, (b) their thoughts on COVID-19 became worse over time, (c) they made some COVID-19-related predictions/statements that now look obviously wrong, so that what they previously said sounds obviously wrong, or (d) something else?
You’ll have to infer it from the fact that I didn’t explain more and am not giving a straight answer now. Maybe I’m being overly cautious, but my parents and other relatives lived through (and suffered in) the Cultural Revolution and other “political movements”, and wouldn’t it be silly if I failed to “expect the Spanish Inquisition” despite that?
It’s helpful (to me, in understanding the types of concerns you’re having) to have mentioned the Cultural Revolution. For this, posting under a pseudonym probably doesn’t help—the groups who focus on control rather than thriving have very good data collection and processing capability, and that’s going to leak to anyone who gets sufficient power with them. True anonymity is gone forever, except by actually being unimportant to the new authorities/mobs.
I wasn’t there, but I had neighbors growing up who’d narrowly escaped and who had friends/relatives killed. Also, a number of friends who relayed family stories from the Nazi Holocaust. The lesson I take is that it takes off quickly, but not quite overnight. There were multi-month windows in both cases where things were locked down, but still porous for those lucky enough to have planned for it, or with assets not yet confiscated, or willing to make sacrifices and take large risks to get out. I suspect those who want to control us have _ALSO_ learned this lesson, and the next time will have a smaller window—perhaps as little as a week. Or perhaps I’m underestimating the slope and it’s already too late.
My advice is basically a barbell strategy for life. Get your exit plan ready to execute on very short notice, and understand that it’ll be costly if you do it. Set objective thresholds for triggers that you just go without further analysis, and also do periodic gut checks to decide to go for triggers you hadn’t considered in advance. HOWEVER, most of your time and energy should go to the more likely situation where you don’t have to ditch. Continue building relationships and personal capital where you think it’s best for your overall goals. Do what you can to keep your local environment sane, so you don’t have to run, and so the world gets back onto a positive trend.
What would be a good exit plan? If you’ve thought about this, can you share your plan and/or discuss (privately) my specific situation?
How? I’ve tried to do this a bit, but it takes a huge amount of time, effort, and personal risk, and whatever gains I manage to eek out seem to be highly ephemeral at best. It doesn’t seem like a very good use of my time when I can spend it on something like AI safety instead. Have you been doing this yourself, and if so what has been your experience?
I do not intend to claim that I’m particularly great at this, and I certainly don’t think I have sufficient special knowledge for 1-1 planning. I’m happy to listen and make lightweight comments if you think it’d be helpful.
My plans are half-formed, and include maintaining some foundational capabilities that will help in a large class of disasters that require travel. I have bank accounts in two nations and currencies, and I keep some cash in a number of currencies. Some physical precious metals or hard-to-confiscate digital currency is a good idea too. I have friends and coworkers in a number of countries (including over a border I can cross by land), who I visit enough that it will seem perfectly normal for me to want to travel there. I’m seriously considering real-estate investments in one or two of those places, to make it even easier to justify travel if it becomes restricted or suspicious.
I still think that the likelihood is low that I’ll need to go, but there may come a point where the tactic of maintaining rolling refundable tickets becomes reasonable—buy a flight out at 2 weeks and 4 weeks, and every 2 weeks cancel the near one and buy a replacement further one.
This is harder to advise. I’m older than most people on LW, and have been building software and saving/investing for decades, so I have resources that can help support what seem to be important causes, and I have a job that has (indirect, but clear) impact on keeping the economy and society running.
I also support and participate in protests and visibility campaigns to try to make it clear to the less-foresightful members of society that tightening control isn’t going to work. This part is more personal, less clearly impactful toward my goals, and takes a huge amount of time, effort, and personal risk. It’s quite possible that I’m doing it more for the social connections with friends and peers than for purely rational goal-seeking. I wouldn’t fault anyone for preferring to put their effort (which will ALSO take a huge amount of time, effort, and risk (though maybe less short-term physcial risk); everything worthwhile does) into other parts of the large and multidimensional risk-space.
+1 for this. Would love to talk to other people seriously considering exit. Maybe we could start a Telegram or something.
I also have started making plans and would love to hear what others are thinking.
I saw this “stopped clock” assumption catching a bunch of people with COVID-19, so I wrote a quick post on why it seems unlikely to be a good strategy.
Are they still good sources on biology?
I don’t know the US situation firsthand, but it seems like it could get worse toward the election. Maybe move to Europe?
What/who does #1 refer to? I’ve changed my mind a lot due to reading tweets from people I initially followed due to their credible COVID-19 takes, and you saying they sound insane would be a major update for me.