Interpreting Vitalik's lengthy article: Why should smart people adhere to the 'dumb rules'?

Written by: Zhixiong Pan

The article “Galaxy Brain Resistance” published by Vitalik a few weeks ago is actually quite obscure and difficult to understand, and I haven't seen a good interpretation of it, so I'll give it a try.

After all, I saw that Karpathy, the creator of the term Vibe Coding, also read this article and took notes, so there must be something special about it.

First, let's talk about what Galaxy Brain and Resistance mean. Once you understand this title, you'll have a general idea of what this article is about.

1️⃣ The Chinese translation of Galaxy Brain is “银河大脑”, but it actually comes from an internet meme, similar to the image of (🌌🧠) merged together, which you must have seen.

At first, this was certainly a positive term, used to praise someone for their brilliant idea, meaning clever. But later, with the proliferation of its usage, it gradually turned into a form of irony, roughly meaning “overthinking, logic going too far.”

And Vitalik mentions here 🌌🧠, specifically referring to the behavior of “using high intelligence to perform mental gymnastics, insisting that unreasonable things are actually reasonable.” For example:

• Clearly, it is to save money by laying off a large number of employees, yet they insist on saying it is “to deliver high-quality talent to society.”

• Clearly just a scam with air tokens to harvest retail investors, yet claiming to “empower the global economy through decentralized governance.”

Can all be considered a “galactic brain” type of thinking.

2️⃣ So what does Resistance mean? This concept can be quite confusing. In popular terms, it can be likened to “the ability to resist being led astray” or “the ability to avoid being fooled.”

So Galaxy Brain Resistance should be Resistance to [becoming] Galaxy Brain, which means: “the ability to resist (evolving into) Galaxy Brain (nonsense).”

Or more accurately, it describes how easy it is to misuse a certain style of thinking/argumentation to “prove any conclusion you want.”

So this “resistance” can be against a certain “theory”, for example,

• The theory of Low Resistance: With a little bit of probing, it can evolve into the extremely absurd logic of the 'Galactic Brain'.

• The theory of High Resistance: No matter how you analyze it, it remains the same and is difficult to evolve into absurd logic.

For example, Vitalik said that the ideal social law should have a red line: it can only be prohibited when it can be clearly explained how a certain behavior causes harm or risk to specific victims. This standard has a strong Galaxy Brain resistance because it does not accept vague or stretchable reasons like “I subjectively dislike it” or “it is immoral.”

3️⃣ Vitalik also cited many examples in the article, even using theories we often hear about, such as “long-termism” and “inevitability.”

“Long-termism” is hard to resist the erosion of 🌌🧠 type thinking because its resistance is extremely low, it's practically a “blank check.” Because the “future” is too distant and too vague.

• High resistance statement: “This tree can grow 5 meters tall in 10 years.” This is verifiable and not easy to make up.

• Low-resistance “long-termism”: “Although I am going to do a very immoral thing now (such as purging some people or starting a war), it is so that humanity can live a utopian life in 500 years. After my calculations, the total amount of happiness in the future is infinite, so the sacrifice in the present is negligible.”

You see, as long as you stretch the time long enough, you can justify any wrongdoing in the present. As Vitalik said: “If your argument can justify anything, then it proves nothing.”

However, Vitalik also acknowledges that “long-term is important.” He criticizes the use of “excessively vague and unverifiable future benefits to cover up the clear harm in the present.”

Another disaster zone is “Inevitabilism.”

This is also the self-defense technique most favored by Silicon Valley and the tech circle.

The script is as follows: “AI replacing human jobs is an inevitability of history; even if I don’t do it, others will. So I am currently developing AI aggressively not to make money, but to align with the trend of history.”

Where is the low resistance? It perfectly dissolves a person's sense of responsibility. Since it is “inevitable,” I don't need to be responsible for the damage I cause.

This is also a typical example of a galactic brain: packaging the personal desires of “I want to make money / I want to hold power” into “I am fulfilling the mission of history.”

4️⃣ So what should we do in the face of these “traps of smart people”?

The remedy proposed by Vitalik is surprisingly simple, even a bit “dumb.” He believes that the smarter a person is, the more they need resilient rules to restrain themselves, to prevent their intellectual acrobatics from going awry.

First, adhere to “Deontological Ethics”, which is the moral law at the kindergarten level.

Stop calculating complex math problems about “for the future of all mankind,” and return to the most rigid principles:

• Do not steal

• Do not kill innocent people

• Do not scam

• Respect the freedom of others

These rules are highly resistant. Because they are black and white, there is no room for negotiation. When you try to use the grand argument of “long-termism” to explain why you are misappropriating user funds, the rigid rule of “don't steal” will slap you in the face: stealing is stealing, don't talk about it being for the great financial revolution.

Second, hold the correct “position”, even including physical location.

As the saying goes, the butt determines the head. If you spend every day in that echo chamber in the San Francisco Bay Area, surrounded by people who are into AI accelerationism, it's hard to stay clear-headed. Vitalik even offered a high-resistance suggestion on a physical level: do not live in the San Francisco Bay Area.

5️⃣ Summary

Vitalik's article is actually a warning to those exceptionally intelligent elites: just because you have a high IQ, don't think you can bypass the basic moral bottom line.

The theories of the “Galactic Brain” that seem to explain everything are often the most dangerous universal excuses. On the contrary, the “high resistance” rules that sound rigid and dogmatic are the last line of defense against self-deception.