Praxis Requires Bad Faith

Most people have a variety of objectives, proximate and ultimate, and a variety of virtues. The virtues are how one represents themselves to be predictable and trustworthy to others, which are how they are able to form coalitions. Crucially, though, these techniques for coalition-building differ in their relationship to in-groups and out-groups.

The Duke of She said to Confucius, “Among my people there is an upright man named Gong. When his father stole a sheep, the son testified against him.” Confucius replied, “Among my people, those who are upright act differently: fathers conceal the wrongdoing of their sons, and sons conceal the wrongdoing of their fathers. Uprightness lies within this.”

叶公语孔子曰吾党有直躬者其父攘羊而子证之孔子曰吾党之直者异于是父为子隐子为父隐直在其中矣

— The Analects of Confucius, 13.18

Truth and facts do not have to be used to reach a consensus point on one's objectives. Some people prefer to depict facts and then describe how one's objectives match other people's objectives and then you land on the position weighted by political power and impact. But an approach that dominates this is one that relies on misrepresenting reality and whipping people up into groups.

One temporally local example is:

Effective Altruists + The People

Background

Effective altruism is the movement associated with the idea that if you want to do good in the world, it's useful to measure how much good you're doing and then attempt to maximize it per unit effort. A commendable idea, and I subscribe to the idea itself. One subsect of the movement involves the idea that since the future has a potentially large number of humans, and future lives are not discountable in any way corresponding to present lives, then the most effective actions one can take in the EA sense are to ensure the existence of those humans. One subsect of this group then believes that avoiding world-ender tech, harbingers, is the more crucial use of effort per unit time.

The People is shorthand for generally Leftist ideas and the degrowth movement. The American Left movement is focused on preserving present jobs, opposing new technology, and state redistribution and the degrowth movement is a reactionary movement aiming to return to a pastoral past, or at least a reduction in our present use of resources and a return to a time of lower resource use.

The AI intersection

Artificial General Intelligence is generally-understood to be a harbinger. Both its proponents and its opponents overwhelmingly recognize that it will reshape our economies to some degree and that in the weak case it will transform employment and in the strong case it has the potential to end humanity. This is the Nuclear Holocaust scenario of the 21st Century. The contrast here lies in the difference in approaches from the two factions opposed to this possible holocaust.

AI 2040

The EA-associated grey tribe faction have written up a plan for stopping the holocaust they envision called AI 2040. Notably in that essay they argue for an international moratorium through cooperation, a pause in training, and nuclear-weapons-standard anti-proliferation controls that prevent secret projects from taking off. This plan allows for sufficient time for aligned intelligences to dominate. The plan is honest about its takes but notably diverges from the rest of the anti-AI group in this way:

We think the concerns around current AI water usage are largely overstated. See this article for more. That said, as will be apparent later in the scenario, we do think that the environmental impact of AI over the next decade or two will be enormous, and that unrestrained growth would literally boil the oceans.

— AI 2040, Footnote 16

As of the year 2026, no one has taken AI 2040 seriously and neither the legislature nor the AI companies have changed their approaches to match its plan. Total research transparency isn't taken seriously, and most AI companies have anti-distill protections implemented successfully enough to block other providers from playing.

While the AI 2040 plan is aimed at the 2028 Elections backloading most of the predictions, the lack of any interest from either the government or from industry does not signal a likelihood of success.

Regardless, the distinguishing aspect of this faction is that it is attempting to be clear about facts, about the sources of one's beliefs, and then attempting to convince people using those of some particular outcome that is assumed to be detrimental to them.

The People

The People have chosen a different plan and put it into place. They have leaned into the things that are their specialties: Protectionism and Environmentalism As A Means. An example of the protectionist angle comes from Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez banning GPU sales to China and so on:

...this bill will stop a global race to see which country is the first to eliminate hundreds of millions of jobs, or the first to build an AI that destroys the planet. It accomplishes this by banning U.S. exports of AI computing infrastructure to countries that do not have safeguards in place to guarantee AI is safe and effective, workers are protected and AI does not harm the environment.

— Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez Announce AI Data Center Moratorium Act

Protectionism is best prosecuted through the legislative and executive branches. This prong of the people uses various such techniques to convince their counterparts in actual power to constrain other parties. Currently, this is somewhat ineffective. While the Biden Administration banned a lot of GPU sales, the Trump Administration has moved to allow H200 sales to China. However, throughout this entire endeavour, Chinese AI companies have simply used cloud GPUs, the rental of which is not currently export-controlled though this will likely change in the next few years with the passing of the Remote Access Security Act.

The ecology of factions is that of colony organisms, however, and The People have a secondary tool at use: that of populism. Populist techniques are highly effective at controlling AI advancement, and are probably the most successful of all plans presented by opponents. The foremost approach is through the propagation of the ideas of water consumption and power cost increases, though additional techniques involve allegations of low-frequency noise and the pollution from gas turbines.

One popular source for water use comparisons was Karen Hao's book Empire of AI which said:

In other words, the data center could use more than one thousand times the amount of water consumed by the entire population of Cerrillos, roughly eighty-eight thousand residents, over the course of a year.

— Empire of AI, pp. 288-289, Karen Hao as quoted by Andy Masley

A correction was issued in later editions of the book due to this being a conclusion formed from a unit conversion error and no books were recalled. By this time it is quite well-documented that the water issue is essentially fake slopulism with, at best, small local effects. However, this is the focal point for most populist opposition. And this is somewhat successful: Texas, of all states, will now require audits of all datacenter water usage. In the states that The People control, this is old-hat, since they've made moves already.

Similar techniques from The People involve the strategy of opposing energy projects, both in clean sources like nuclear or geothermal (where environmentalists join fossil-fuel artists to use an environmentalist law) and even in renewable sources like solar. Some even go so far as to oppose transmission lines. With these blockers in place, the strategy then shifts to pointing out that the remaining power sources like on-site gas turbines are high polluting, carbon intensive, and noisy - all three of which are true.

The revealed preference of most environmentalists is to accept expanded fossil fuel use in order to get some other objective. Decades of opposition to clean energy while expressing concern about the climate, effectively expanding the amount of natural gas and coal energy in the US, is incoherent unless seen through that lens. But the common element in all these things is fewer of anything built - homes, industry, and AI datacenters.

Result

What is notable here is what has worked concretely here aren't any of the nice-looking websites describing what plans one should follow to save the world. Instead, what has created immediate action is bad faith use of environmental law to oppose clean energy, populist outrage using incorrect water use numbers, and a general popularisation of factoids that are untrue.

Deniable Cooperation

Of course, it is entirely possible that this is more advanced Factional Colony Ecology and that the sub-factions of the Stop AI faction have merely speciated into those adapted for their niche. While populists reach for the mob, the EAs reach for the elite, and combined the outcome sways both sections of society towards their end. I think this is somewhat unlikely because of the fact that the EA subfaction attempts to specifically oppose primary objections of The People like the water use. One could argue for a motte and bailey style structure, but I think they are merely misled about what will create outcomes.

In this world, the EA faction are Sheists, acting honestly to the out-group. The People are Confucians with an external-facing marketing of the environment and an internal-facing clarity of anti-building. The latter are currently achieving far better outcomes than the former.

Conclusion

A sufficiently advanced actor might use both Sheist and Confucian techniques to appeal to different audiences, concealing that both have the same objective. However, only the latter is essential to success.