I think we should show some solidarity to people committed to their beliefs and making a personal sacrifice, rather than undermining them by critiquing their approach. 

Given that they're both young men and it is occurring in a first world country, it seems unlikely anyone will die. But it does seem likely they or their friends will read this thread.

Beyond that, the hunger strike is only on day 2 and is has already received a small amount of media coverage. Should they go viral then this one action alone will have a larger differential impact on reducing existential risk than most safety researchers will achieve in their entire careers. 

https://www.businessinsider.com/hunger-strike-deepmind-ai-threat-fears-agi-demis-hassabis-2025-9

 

il faut imaginer sisyphe heureux

Von Neumann might have been driven by a feeling of inadequacy, but that doesn't mean it was necessary for his success. One can imagine Von NewOutlook-Mann who took the same actions in life but viewed them as working towards a positive goal rather than needing to prove himself.

It strikes me that Anthropic's blog post is engaging in a bit of double-speak in saying they are "disrupting" the operations of cybercriminals. 

What they are describing is retroactively taking action after crime has occurred. 

The following illustration from 2015 by Tim Urban seems like a decent summary of how people interpreted this and other statements.
 

I've thrown on some limit orders if anyone is strongly pro-Kokotajlo.

That's awesome to hear.

(On a side note your hyperlink currently includes a spurious fullstop that means the link 404's).

An alternative interpretation of the reported findings is that the process used to generate the “100% hack-free” dataset was itself imperfect. The assumption of a fully hack-free corpus rests on validation by a large language model, but such judgments are not infallible.

I would suggest making the cleaned dataset, or at least a substantial sample, publicly available to enable broader scrutiny. You might additionally consider re-filtering through a second LLM with distinct prompting or a multi-agent setup.

"I think society has weird memes about balding and male beauty in general. Stoically accepting a disfigurement isn't particularly noble"

I think calling natural balding "disfigurement" is in line with the weird memes around male beauty.

Not having hair isn't harmful.

Disclaimer: I may go bald.

I think you're extrapolating too far from your own experiences. It is absolutely possible to be excited (or at least avoid boredom) for long stretches of time if your life is busy and each day requires you to make meaningful decisions.