L. Rudolph L

These positions are not explicitly forbidden.

They are simply unthinkable, they would mark one as an outsider, a someone who does not understand, a someone who is not part of the conversation.

The boundary is maintained not through coercion but through the subtler mechanisms of social belonging.

The raised eyebrow, the awkward silence, the failure to be invited to the next dinner party.

End quote.

The liberal father as creator of the nihilist son.

Liberal Stepan's son Pyotr Stepanovich is a chief nihilist character in Demons.

The author of The Possessed Machines argues this sort of thing, EA altruism turning into either outright nihilism or power hunger, is a core cultural mechanic.

I think they are directionally right but I don't follow their main example of this, which argues technology ethics frameworks that are supposed to govern AI.

Fairness, accountability, transparency, the whole FACCT constellation, are the Stepan Trofimovich liberalism of our moment, and the serious people have moved past these frameworks because they are obsolete.

Handcuffed Shatov Quote

Ivan Shatov is a former atheist who has returned to a mystical Russian orthodoxy, a believer who cannot quite manage belief.

He was once a member of Pyotr's revolutionary circle and now repudiates it, but the circle will not let him go.

He is murdered by his former comrades for the crime of wanting to leave.

Shatov represents something important.

The person who has come to doubt the project but cannot escape it.

Every major AI lab has its Shatovs, researchers who have grown increasingly uncomfortable with the direction of their work but feel trapped by career incentives, social ties, stock options, and the genuine difficulty of imagining alternative paths.

Some of them have left.

Many more have stayed, hoping to push from the inside, rationalizing their continued participation.

Dostoevsky shows us what happens to the Shatovs.