No One Believes a True Believer - Pavle Miha

Pavle Miha

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No One Believes a True Believer

Pavle Miha<br>Aug 06, 2026

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After 19 guys hijacked planes and sent them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, much ink was spilled about why exactly they did it. I think it’s important to not lose sight that they believed that by doing this they would gain entry into the kingdom of heaven, and live in perpetuity in bliss and luxury. They believed this because they were told so by an organisation which, in turn, also believed that this cause was deeply righteous, and pursuing it was a sure-fire way to go to heaven. Being a terrorist is a tough life - even the big cheese himself lived an isolated life of paranoia and Chicken Little, and most of his lieutenants ended up either dead or tortured. No evidence in the many years since the event, years of wiretaps, torture and imprisonment, has pointed to anything but genuine, sincere belief that there was an afterlife, and the way to reach it was by pursuing a life of battle against infidels. Would America have topped the list of enemies if it hadn’t meddled in the Middle East for half a century? Probably not. Would a crop of young men have turned to religion if their region wasn’t war-torn? Probably not. But the pilots were educated, relatively well off, and had other options besides certain death. They were True Believers.<br>Someone’s pointed out that a surprising number of terrorists are engineers. Engineers seem more prone to holding beliefs literally rather than loosely like most people do; people call this “need for cognitive closure”, following things to their logical conclusion. For a few years now, a group of primarily engineers, primarily in Silicon Valley, have been telling us that there is some chance that AI will kill us all. Many of them have also gotten fabulously wealthy from developing AI. It’s an easy leap to deduce that they never meant it, and that the fearmongering was a marketing ploy to raise money and attention. Recently, when an OpenAI model escaped its sandbox and hacked into Hugging Face’s infrastructure, some claimed that it was all planned. People post memes making fun of the AI labs when their requests for regulation backfire. You can see some commenters try to make sense of this, but there is a stench of confusion to it all. Are they trying to regulate their competitors out of business? Are they not worried about it backfiring and regulators coming after them?<br>Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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It’s hard to make sense of this unless you understand that to varying degrees, the vast majority of AI researchers believe there’s a decent chance, either through misuse or loss of control, AI systems will kill us all. They are True Believers.<br>Some say that those who oppose abortion want to control women’s bodies - perhaps, but the majority also truly believe fetuses have the same moral rights as post-fetal people. Climate change researchers make money being climate researchers, but they also believe that climate change will kill a lot of people. Racists really are racist, they’re not deviously using race to divide the working class. Vegans aren’t virtue signalling, they think animals have human-ish rights. Etcetera etcetera.

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I think it’s hard to accept someone truly believes something we don’t, because when we put ourselves in their shoes, it’s still us we’re imagining in their shoes. Also, living in a world where other people hold beliefs that are vastly different from ours is scary, especially when those beliefs have terrifying implications. But all the evidence points to the people involved in this industry having fears that AI could kill us all. We’ve seen emails, reports from their parties and maybe one day we’ll get wiretaps, but from the engineers up to Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Elon Musk, it seems like these people truly believe this.<br>Now, they are also self-interested and conniving, but I think it all slots into place when you consider they want to live in a world where:<br>Human beings still exist.

They are important/wealthy/enacting change rather than being subject to it.

Then you don’t need Machiavellian machinations to explain calls for regulation: they want AI to be regulated because they want humanity to survive, but they don’t want so much regulation that they’re not winning.<br>True belief can be self-serving. True belief is biased. But if you’re too cynical you risk deluding yourself that you live in a world where everyone believes the same things as you do, and is just lying about it.

Rob Miles@robertskmiles

"Our product sometimes goes out of control and commits multiple felonies" is obviously not a marketing pitch, you morons<br>3:05 AM · Jul 23, 2026 · 112K Views

38 Replies · 76 Reposts · 1.06K Likes

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