-[TODO section existential stakes, cooperation
- * so far, I've been writing this from the perspective of caring about _rationality_ and wanting there to be a rationality movement, the common interest of many causes
- * Singularity stuff scares me
- * e.g., as recently as 2020 I was daydreaming about working for an embryo selection company as part of the "altruistic" (about optimizing the future, rather than about my own experiences) component of my actions
- * if you have short timelines, and want to maintain influence over what big state-backed corporations are doing, self-censoring about contradicting the state religion makes sense
- * you could tell a story in which I'm the villain for undermining Team Singularity with my petty temporal concerns
-]
+... except, I would be remiss to condemn Yudkowsky without discussing—potentially mitigating factors. (I don't want to say that whether someone is a fraud should depend on whether there are mitigating factors—rather, I should discuss potential reasons why being a fraud might be the least-bad choice, when faced with a sufficiently desperate situation.)
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+So far, I've been writing from the perspective of caring (and expecting Yudkowsky to care) about human rationality as a cause in its own right—about wanting to _make sense_, and wanting to live in a Society that made sense, for its own sake, and not as a convergently instrumental subgoal of saving the world.
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+That's pretty much always where I've been at. I _never_ wanted to save the world. I got sucked in to this robot cult because Yudkowsky's philsophy-of-science writing was just that good. I did do a little bit of work for the Singularity Institute back in the day (an informal internship in 'aught-nine, some data-entry-like work manually adding Previous/Next links to the Sequences, designing several PowerPoint presentations for Anna, writing some Python scripts to organize their donor database), but that was because it was my social tribe and I had connections. To the extent that I took at all seriously the whole save/destroy/take-over the world part (about how we needed to encode all of human morality into a recursively self-improving artificial intelligence to determine our entire future light cone until the end of time), I was scared rather than enthusiastic.
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+Okay, being scared was entirely appropriate, but what I mean is that I was scared, and concluded that shaping the Singularity was _not my problem_, as contrasted to being scared, then facing up to the responsibility anyway. After a 2013 sleep-deprivation-induced psychotic episode which featured futurist-themed delusions, I wrote to Anna, Michael, and some MIRI employees who had been in my contacts for occasional contract work, that "my current plan [was] to just try to forget about _Less Wrong_/MIRI for a long while, maybe at least a year, not because it isn't technically the most important thing in the world, but because I'm not emotionally stable enough think about this stuff anymore" (Subject: "to whom it may concern"). When I got a real programming job and established an income for myself, I [donated to CfAR rather than MIRI](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/12/philanthropy-scorecard-through-2016/), because public rationality was something I could be unambiguously enthusiastic about, and doing anything about AI was not.
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+At the time, it seemed fine for the altruistically-focused fraction of my efforts to focus on rationality, and to leave the save/destroy/take-over the world stuff to other, less crazy people, in accordance with the principle of comparative advantage. Yudkowsky had written his Sequences as a dependency for explaining [the need for friendly AI](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GNnHHmm8EzePmKzPk/value-is-fragile), ["gambl[ing] only upon the portion of the activism that would flow to [his] own cause"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9jF4zbZqz6DydJ5En/the-end-of-sequences), but rationality was supposed to be the [common interest of many causes](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4PPE6D635iBcGPGRy/rationality-common-interest-of-many-causes). Even if I wasn't working or donating to MIRI, I was still _helping_, a good citizen according to the morality of my tribe.
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+But fighting for public epistemology is a long battle; it makes more sense if you have _time_ for it to pay off. Back in the late 'aughts and early 'tens, it looked like we had time. We had these abstract philosophical arguments for worrying about AI, but no one really talked about _timelines_. I believed the Singularity was going to happen in the 21st century, but it felt like something to expect in the _second_ half of the 21st century.
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+Now it looks like we have—less time? Not just tautologically because time has passed (the 21st century is one-fifth over—closer to a quarter over), but because of new information from the visible results of the deep learning revolution during that time. Yudkowsky seemed particularly spooked by AlphaGo and AlphaZero in 2016–2017.
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+[TODO: specifically, AlphaGo seemed "deeper" than minimax search so you shouldn't dimiss it as "meh, games", the way it rocketed past human level from self-play https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1536364192441040896]
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+My AlphaGo moment was 5 January 2021, OpenAI's release of [DALL-E](https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/) (by far the most significant news story of that week of January 2021).
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+[TODO: previous AI milestones had seemed dismissible as a mere clever statistics trick; this looked more like "real" understanding, "real" creativity]