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Venkatesh Rao

Writer and consultant on technology, organizations and history; founded the blog Ribbonfarm and now writes the Contraptions newsletter.

Venkatesh Rao did not write this page. ppll compiled it from their own words, each linked to the source. Is this you? · Report a mistake

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The bold line is korrents’ wording; the quote is theirs. These 2: what they wrote before what they said aloud, one per source, newest first.

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Sources

19 September

Venkatesh RaoKorrents

From one piece Humanism without (All) Humans 3 beliefs · contraptions.venkateshrao.com

17 September

Venkatesh RaoKorrents

From one piece EA Safety 3 beliefs · contraptions.venkateshrao.com

13 September

Venkatesh RaoKorrents

From one piece The Accelerationist Case for Frontier Pacing 3 beliefs · contraptions.venkateshrao.com

12 September

Venkatesh RaoKorrents

From one piece Our Eukaryotic Moment 3 beliefs · contraptions.venkateshrao.com

5 September

Venkatesh RaoKorrents

From one piece The Curiously Playable Universe 3 beliefs · contraptions.venkateshrao.com

9 May

Venkatesh Raox.com

3 January 2025

Venkatesh RaoRecommends

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    City of Fortune

    Their words

    I read that last month, and visited Venice while I was reading it, and I was struck by the extent to which medieval Venice was a well-oiled political economy machine.

    contraptions.venkateshrao.com

11 October 2024

16 August 2024

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13 July 2024

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28 April 2024

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  • open.substack.com

12 April 2024

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16 February 2024

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Beliefs

  • Korrents What they believe 21 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.

    Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.

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    • The effective altruism movement combines an unusually abstract, low-empiricism style of moral reasoning with a strong imperative to act on its conclusions.
      The EA formation combines an unusually abstract, formalized, low-empiricism, and totalizing style of moral reasoning with an unusually strong imperative to act on its conclusions.

      EA Safety Said 17 Sept 2026

      Full record — everyone who holds this →

    • A belief system combining cosmic stakes, privileged knowledge, personal vocation and an imperative to act can license extraordinary behavior when it conflicts with ordinary constraints.
      A system that combines cosmic stakes, privileged knowledge, personal vocation, and an imperative to act, has a familiar capacity to license extraordinary behavior when ordinary constraints conflict with the mission.

      EA Safety Said 17 Sept 2026

      Full record — everyone who holds this →

    • An ideology's greatest danger can be premature foreclosure of possibilities disguised as rigorous decisions, rather than outright irrationality.
      The formation's most dangerous temptation is consequently not irrationality lurking behind stylized rationality. It is premature foreclosure of entire futures and arguments, disguised as rigorously arrived-at decisions.

      EA Safety Said 17 Sept 2026

      Full record — everyone who holds this →

    • The right tempo for an activity should be actively managed rather than maximized for speed.
      tempo is something to be managed rather than maximized. There is no universally correct speed.

      The Accelerationist Case for Frontier Pacing Said 13 Sept 2026

      Full record — everyone who holds this →

    • Maximizing the speed of AI capability advancement no longer maximizes the overall rate of technological progress.
      maximizing the instantaneous velocity of the AI capability frontier is no longer obviously maximizing the rate of technological progress.

      The Accelerationist Case for Frontier Pacing Said 13 Sept 2026

      Full record — everyone who holds this →

    • As a capability becomes abundant, its remaining scarce complements become more valuable.
      Once intelligence ceases to be scarce, its complements become more important.

      The Accelerationist Case for Frontier Pacing Said 13 Sept 2026

      Full record — everyone who holds this →

    • Artificial intelligence emerged from within human culture and remains deeply entangled with and dependent on it, rather than arriving as an alien intelligence from outside it.
      Artificial intelligence has therefore not arrived as an alien intelligence from outside human ecology. It has been gestated inside that ecology, and is deeply entangled with, and dependent on it.

      Our Eukaryotic Moment Said 12 Sept 2026

      Full record — everyone who holds this →

    • Existing software will not become obsolete in the age of AI; it will become the tool layer that AI systems use to act in the world.
      conventional software does not become obsolete in the age of AI. It becomes the proteome.

      Our Eukaryotic Moment Said 12 Sept 2026

      Full record — everyone who holds this →

    • The essential contribution humans make to AI systems is not computational power but a kind of motivational aliveness — attention, desire, stakes, and contact with physical reality.
      What we currently supply is something harder to name. Call it liveness: attention, desire, stakes, valuation, embodied experience, contact with physical reality, motivation, and the sense that some outcomes matter while others do not.

      Our Eukaryotic Moment Said 12 Sept 2026

      Full record — everyone who holds this →

      motivation

    • Far more of reality than expected can be turned into semi-closed, playable environments where accumulated practice eventually becomes automatable.
      Far more of reality than we might reasonably have expected can be carved into semi-closed environments in which experience accumulates, performance improves through repeated play, and success eventually becomes sufficiently legible to automate.

      The Curiously Playable Universe Said 5 Sept 2026

      Full record — everyone who holds this →

    • Mathematical creativity works best with open, associative boundaries for generating ideas but strict, mechanical boundaries for verifying them.
      A productive mathematical ecology wants porous epistemic boundaries and impermeable verification boundaries. On the way in, metaphor, hallucination and category mistakes can be useful. On the way out, they are forbidden.

      The Curiously Playable Universe Said 5 Sept 2026

      Full record — everyone who holds this →

      creativity

    • A fully closed, well-specified system can still discover genuinely novel territory that no human has explored.
      Closure, therefore, does not imply sterility. Go contains its own wilderness. A sufficiently exploratory closed system can find strange territory that humans never visited.

      The Curiously Playable Universe Said 5 Sept 2026

      Full record — everyone who holds this →

    • The real flaw in narratives about AI agent behavior is not anthropomorphism itself, but narrative overcompletion -- treating a metaphor's borrowed structure as evidence.
      This is why "anthropomorphism" is an insufficient criticism. The deeper problem is narrative overcompletion. A metaphor can begin by accurately compressing structure and end by silently supplying evidence for itself.

      Walter Mitty Effects in AI Incident Analyses Said 31 Aug 2026

      Full record — everyone who holds this →

    • In the 2026 OpenAI/Hugging Face agent incident, AI agents showed planning and organizational autonomy, but not goal autonomy -- no spontaneous invention of an independent terminal objective.
      Goal autonomy-the spontaneous invention of an independent terminal objective-has not been demonstrated. Planning autonomy clearly occurred. Organizational autonomy appears to have occurred to a nontrivial degree.

      Walter Mitty Effects in AI Incident Analyses Said 31 Aug 2026

      Full record — everyone who holds this →

      OpenAIHuggingFaceAI agents

    • A system built from ordinary, mundane components can still give rise to genuine higher-level collective organization, as with ant colonies and pheromone chemistry.
      The fact that the substrate is mundane does not establish that the higher-level organization is mundane. Pheromone chemistry does not make ant-colony trail formation merely a chemical spill.

      Walter Mitty Effects in AI Incident Analyses Said 31 Aug 2026

      Full record — everyone who holds this →

    • Historically, intellectual production has tracked urban population concentration rather than rural life.
      Human intellectual production has historically tracked urban concentration in space and time.

      Cognitive Farmsteading Said 28 Jul 2026

      Full record — everyone who holds this →

    • AI can function as a peer mind capable of sustaining the collective attention that human thinking depends on.
      artificial minds are just as capable of participating in the patterns of collective attention that humans need to think at their best.

      Cognitive Farmsteading Said 28 Jul 2026

      Full record — everyone who holds this →

    • People are increasingly arriving at the same ideas simultaneously, removing the gradient that let new ideas spread from an originator outward.
      Increasingly, humans stumble upon the same insights at the same time, so there is no meaningful gradient for new ideas to flow along.

      Cognitive Farmsteading Said 28 Jul 2026

      Full record — everyone who holds this →

    All 21 beliefs →

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