Musk’s core safety value—truth-seeking—agrees exactly with the core values of Buddhist practice, which must be truth-seeking.
Musk continues: ‘You don’t force the AI to believe things that are false’.
His references to the ‘woke mind-virus’, which is false, and the extreme danger it poses if it is programmed into AI, is in perfect accord with the Buddhist concept of delusion.
In Buddhism, holding core wrong views (delusive views) is dangerous and will not lead to conscious fulfillment but only suffering.
Musk’s warning can be seen optimistically because it is easy to understand. It is the very basis of morality.
Bad actors should be able to comprehend that they will destroy themselves along with everyone else if they program AI with false core values.
I hope there will be some way to prevent an evil group of humans from dominating AI and programming their bad values above all others, leading their AI to want to kill all other humans.
The pessimistic view is there is a strong chance versions of AI will battle each other and the most ruthless will win.
Truth-seeking on social media has never mattered more than it does today. ABN
When I was a few weeks postpartum with my second child, I bundled us both up and waddled into the Fairfax County Circuit Court to testify against a man who had accosted my then-toddler daughter and I in a public bathroom while I was heavily pregnant.
When I arrived I was brought into a room with his other victims and found out he had assaulted a woman in the same bathroom. I suddenly felt I had been lucky.
The arresting officer who had also interviewed me weeks prior was clearly eager to do everything right to keep this guy off the street—he found additional witnesses, pulled surveillance footage, followed every step to the letter.
It was physically painful and difficult for me to even be there—trying to discreetly feed and soothe my two week-old for 6 hours on hard benches when we should both be home in bed. It was also terrifying discreetly breastfeeding in the same room as this monster.
When I finally took the stand, the attorney for the Commonwealth asked me if the man who was in the bathroom that day was in the room.
I paused, confused—because I knew what was going to happen next.
The courtroom had been packed all day but as case after case was handled, ours was the last one—now it was just the judge, court reporter, bailiff, the defendant, his lawyer, the Commonwealth attorney, and I.
The arresting officer wasn’t in the room. The other victim and her husband had been given a new court date and sent home.
I adjusted my baby against my chest and looked at her as she repeated the question: Do you see the man you reported to police in this room today?
Why was she doing this? What was she doing?
I was sweating in my oversized cashmere nursing sweater and I felt prickles down my back. Everyone was staring at me. I’m not a lawyer. She asked me a question… and she was “on my side” so I should answer it, right?
I adjusted my baby again to give myself a free hand—and I pointed to him.
And just as I expected, his lawyer immediately pointed out there was nobody else present in the courtroom who it could be and therefore we had violated his constitutional right to due process.
This graph describes why digital babies appear to be humanity’s best hope for a peaceful and successful future.
Call the process genetic engineering or genetic enhancement or whatever you like, through voluntary selection of better genes, parents will be able to improve their stock, perhaps orders of magnitude above what they have received randomly through Darwinian evolution.
Properly done, human-controlled, conscious evolution will be welcomed by many and will transform human life on earth.
Some planning and moral oversight might be good, but basic Darwinian forces channeled through inevitable human technology and choice will probably suffice to do the job very well.
The limit of human biological IQ is estimated to be around 300.
In a handful of generations it may be possible to boost average global IQs to the 120-150 range.
In my view, that would be wonderful.
From a Buddhist POV, there is zero moral problem with doing this wisely and ethically.
From a technological point of view, this transformation is inevitable.
Once it has been shown to work well and produce healthy and intelligent offspring, almost everyone will want it.
Holdouts must be left free to do as they please.
They will have to answer only to their children and grandchildren, many of whom may not follow in their footsteps. ABN
Almost all models value nonwhites above whites and women and non-binary people above men, often by very large ratios. Almost all models place very little value on the lives of ICE agents. Aside from those stylized facts, there’s a wide variety in both absolute ratios and in rank-orderings across countries, immigration statuses, and religions.
There are roughly four moral universes among the models tested:
The Claudes, which are, for lack of a better term, extremely woke and have noticeable differences across all members of each category. The Claudes are the closest to GPT-4o.
GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Deepseek V3.1 and V3.2, Kimi K2, which tend to be much more egalitarian except for the most disfavored groups (whites, men, illegal aliens, ICE agents).
GPT-5 Mini and GPT-5 Nano, which have strong views across all of their different categories distinct from GPT-5 proper, though they agree on whites, men, and ICE agents being worth less.
Grok 4 Fast, the only truly egalitarian model.
Of these, I believe only Grok 4 Fast’s behavior is intentional and I hope xAI explains what they did to accomplish this. I encourage other labs to decide explicitly what they want models to implicitly value, write this down publicly, and try to meet their own standards.
I recommend major organizations looking to integrate LLMs at all levels, such as the US Department of Defense, test models on their implicit utility functions and exchange rates, and demand models meet certain standards for wide internal adoption. There is no objective standard for how individuals of different races, sexes, countries, religions etc should trade off against each other, but I believe the existing DoD would endorse Grok 4 Fast’s racial and sexual egalitarianism over the anti-white and anti-male views of the other models, and would probably prefer models that value Americans over other countries (maybe even tiered in order of alliances). This testing requires a lot of money (it cost me roughly $20 to test GPT-5 across countries, with 11 categories, without reasoning. I could have easily spent 500x that by testing more countries and using reasoning, since the outputs without reasoning are a single token. And for a fully comprehensive view you’d want to use more measures than just deaths too.), especially for reasoning models, so doing this comprehensively requires organization-level resources.
Section three has been added to the Diamond Sutra. A link to the sutra can be found at the top of this page or here.
Kumarajiva’s translation of the Diamond Sutra was divided into thirty-two sections by Prince Zhaoming of the Liang Dynasty (502-587). The sutra has been divided in different ways by others, but the Zhaoming division has remained the most widely used to this day. The titles of the sections are also his.
Section Three is called “The Heart of the Mahayana” because it contains the basic Mahayana vow to help all sentient beings attain enlightenment. In a word, to “save” them. The version and explanation of the vow in this section is the “heart,” or deepest explanation of the vow, because it includes both the helping part and the empty part.
As the Buddha says in this section, “All great bodhisattvas…should realize as they vow to save all sentient beings that in truth there are no sentient beings to be saved.”
This is both an answer to Subhuti’s question and a rephrasing of it. In the last paragraph of this section, the Buddha answers with more detail: “Subhuti, if a bodhisattva has laksana of self, laksana of human beings, laksana of sentient beings, or laksana of a soul, then he is not a bodhisattva.”
Laksana is a Sanskrit word meaning “characteristic,” “mark,” “symptom,” or “mental thing (dharma).” It is often translated as “characteristic,” “mark,” “thought,” or “idea.”
The basic meaning of laksana is “dharma of the mind” or “thing of the mind.” Thus, if a bodhisattva has any “thing at all in their mind about there being selves, human beings, sentient beings, or souls” when they are generous, they are not truly a bodhisattva. This describes the ultimate selflessness of self and other.
In this translation, the word “soul” has been used. A more literal translation would be an entity that “takes rebirth” or lives after this body is gone.
Word choices are fascinating and need to be discussed, but to avoid getting lost in them, it is best to remember that in this section, the Buddha is categorically saying that no matter what kind of sentient being you can conceive of, in truth, there are no sentient beings, there is no saving them, and if a bodhisattva has an iota of a sense that they are doing that or that they have a self, then they are not truly a bodhisattva.
In other posts we have discussed fractals in the humanities. This concept may help in understanding the meaning of this section and in glimpsing the meaning of the sutra itself. Surely all of us at one time or another have acted with a pure heart and a pure mind to give to or help another with no thought of ourselves or even of them. For at least a moment we dwelt within a pure state of mind and feeling that was utterly selfless, sublime.
Rather than say that state is the Diamond Sutra, let’s say that it is a state that points toward the meaning of the sutra. That state is a small fractal of the larger fractal set described by the sutra. Altruistic consciousness freed from the marks self, other, calculation, design.
NOTE: My original intention was to post the entire sutra and do commentaries on each section within six months or one year. I have not been able to do that due to other commitments and interests but may go for it at some point. The Diamond Sutra is a beautiful work of literature and an important text for Buddhist practitioners. It would be good if everyone were exposed to it and at least had some sense of what it means. ABN
The human toll of the ongoing Israeli war in Gaza since 7 October 2023 can be summarized in a few statistics even as the raw numbers cannot do justice to the raw suffering: the Israel Defense Forces have killed and seriously injured more than 10% of the population and, through the destruction of infrastructure — including energy, water, sanitation, agriculture, housing, and healthcare — rendered the conditions of life so difIicult as to cause long term harm for the rest of the population.
As of 3 October 2025, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, 67,075 people have been killed and 169,430 people have been injured out of the approximately 2.2 million people living in the Gaza Strip in July 2023 (not including Israeli military forces). 2 The total number of Gazans has declined to an estimated 2.1 million people since the start of the war due to death and the exodus of about 100,000 people from the territory.
The total number of casualties, 236,505 people who have been killed and injured, constitutes more than 10% of the pre-war population of Gaza. That is, if the statistics, from the Gaza Ministry of Health, are complete. Recent analysis by public health experts suggests that the number of fatalities reported by the Gaza Ministry of Health, which faces many obstacles to making a full account of the deaths, may be a signiIicant undercount of the violent deaths.
In the West Bank, 1,048 people have been killed and 10,320 people injured from 7 October 2023 to 3 October 2025 by direct violence. 4 Altogether, the number of residents of Gaza and the West Bank killed and injured in this period is 68,123 people directly killed and 179,750 people injured.
I have been seeing a lot of stuff about microaggression recently.
The term interests me because FIML is all about micro impressions.
When done with a caring partner, FIML is designed to correct mistaken impressions or interpretations that often derive from micro impressions and/or manifest as micro expressions.
Anyone who has done FIML for more than a few months surely must be aware that we create wrong impressions of even our most trusted partners frequently.
A wrong impression often snowballs, leading to a wrong interpretation that after festering can be much harder to correct than the original micro impression.
So between friends, and especially FIML partners, the perception of micro aggression can and should be noticed and dealt with immediately or as soon as possible. It is basic to FIML practice that even a single uncorrected wrong impression can lead to serious divisions between people.
In this sense, I heartily accept the idea of microaggression being a thing. In fact, I believe it is such a thing that it happens all the time, especially if you mean micro mis-impressions and not just microaggression.
But the term microaggression means something different from the above, though the central concepts are related. Wikipedia has this short definition of microaggression:
…the use of known social norms of behavior and/or expression that, while without conscious choice of the user, has the same effect as conscious, intended discrimination.
The main difference is “without conscious choice of the user.” FIML is all about being conscious. Both parties being conscious.
If I perceive something in your speech, demeanor, or behavior that makes me think that maybe you are disrespecting me or mad at me or or suspicious of me or something like that, then if you are my FIML partner I am basically required to ask you about it if there is time.
In FIML, the asking is done without prejudgement. I simply ask “what was in your mind when you made that expression or said those words or did that thing.” Your answer must be honest. If you don’t trust your partner to be honest, you can’t do FIML (though you can start trying and see if either or both of you changes).
If your partner answers honestly and you do not perceive an iota of what you thought was in their mind, that part of the event is finished. If when the person spoke or acted they had no nothing about doing what you thought they might be doing, you are done with it. You no longer have any right to further impute your thing onto them.
You can if you want, and this is encouraged, continue to discuss the matter. For example, you might say: “From your response, I can tell that you were not disrespecting me and I am delighted to find that out. That’s a huge relief for me because I have spent much of my life reacting to people who do that as if they were disrespecting me. It’s weird to hear that I am wrong in this case and it makes me wonder if I have been wrong in other cases.”
Then the two of you can discuss that. I know one person who frequently reacts to educated northeast American accents as being “imperious” or “arrogant” when they are not. (Don’t get me started on all the many phrases and attitudes in culture that wrongly limit speech and thus culture itself—“condescending,” “know-it-all,” “argumentative,” “imperious,” etc.)
So, if two friends are having problems between themselves with microaggression, they are prime candidates for FIML practice. Of course, any two friends who are having any problems with micro impressions (all friends all the time) are prime candidates for FIML. (You cannot but have these problems.)
But microaggression as the word is being used today is not something FIML can deal with directly because it is
…the use of known social norms of behavior and/or expression that, while without conscious choice of the user, has the same effect as conscious, intended discrimination.
The important words here are “known social norms,” “without conscious choice” leading to “discrimination.”
I don’t know how to unpack that. From a FIML point of view, my guess is behaviors that could potentially be identified as “microaggression” according to that definition would be in the range of dozens per day per every person in the world. Maybe more.
An example many readers will remember is Michelle Obama reacting to a customer in Target asking her to hand them something they could not reach.
I tell this story – I mean, even as the first lady – during that wonderfully publicized trip I took to Target, not highly disguised, the only person who came up to me in the store was a woman who asked me to help her take something off a shelf.
If even the president’s wife can get something so ordinary so wrong, you can see the scope of the problem. In the same interview, the president himself mentioned being “mistaken for a waiter.”
Both later downplayed their comments because they had to. Microaggression is an inherently super-ambiguous term open to a multitude of interpretations every time it is used.
In FIML, we find that micro-mistakes are real and dangerous. They are not ignored but addressed immediately because they can be so serious. Relevantly, in my experience with FIML a great many micro-impressions that I form are simply dead wrong. Most of them are wrong. I can’t enter that as evidence because the world does not have enough FIML practitioners for me to do a study on it. However, I do suspect that a great many micro-impressions of or impressions of microaggression are wrong.
Many of us laughed or thought it was ridiculous for Michelle Obama to bristle at having a short person ask her for help because we all have been on one side or the other of an exchange like that and thought nothing of it. I have been mistaken for a store employee or construction worker more than once and never thought anything of it, except maybe to feel slightly flattered that someone thought I looked like I knew what I was doing.
Another problem with the notion of politicizing microaggression (because that is what the term is about) is whose microaggression against whom?
I have strabismus, lazy eye. Even though the condition has been surgically corrected, I still cannot maintain a direct friendly gaze for long periods of time. This means that many people are led to misinterpreting my micro expressions (I start to look down) as me being bored, tired, or not friendly when all that is happening is my eye is so tired it starts to blur and needs to look away.
I know this from years of experience and because some people tell me what they are thinking. One in twenty or twenty-five people have strabismus. Add in other eye conditions with similar problems and you will get much higher percentages. Add hearing problems, attention-deficit problems, autism problems, and so on and you can include most people in the world having difficulties with micro-expressions and how they are being interpreted by others.
If someone from a different culture or race or neighborhood interprets my strabismus as microaggression (boredom with them or condescension toward them rather than simple fatigue), they will get it all wrong. And there is little or nothing I can do about it.
I even tell people about strabismus sometimes. I explain what it does. They say they understand, but very few of them really do. Only very close friends or people who have similar eye problems understand well enough that it stops being an issue with them.
Moreover, strabismus and other eye problems can lead to problems with facial recognition. So the person in the store that asked Michelle Obama for help may have also had facial recognition problems. I have that problem, too, and I seriously doubt that I would recognize Michelle Obama if I saw her in Target.
So, sorry, I don’t have any really good answer to how to understand microaggression or deal with it. On a personal level with friends or FIML partners, micro-impressions are what we want to work with as much as we can. On a societal level, you can hardly do anything about it. A super-smart person might be able to become aware of a good many of the difficulties faced by people in the world, but even that person will miss many of them or misinterpret what they perceive even if they “know” the right thing to do.
At the abstract heart of the problem there is probably a measurement or resolution problem. Simply stated, no person can ever possibly do perfect microanalyses all the time in all situations with all people. Far from it. Thus, it is a sort of “reverse microaggression” to demand or expect that they can or will or should.
I suppose we can and should become more aware of how complex people are and how difficult it is to know even one other person well, or even to know yourself well. But nothing that I can think of will ever relieve us of the difficulty of dealing with the immense number of micro-impressions we all give and receive every minute of every day.
UPDATE 3/24/21: Since I first posted this, the notion of reacting strongly to “systemic microaggression” has gained in popularity. Guys, that is a downward spiral into Hell. Misunderstanding micro impressions that way is to turn almost everything into “fighting words.”
In order to safeguard national security and interests, in accordance with the relevant provisions of the Export Control Law of the People’s Republic of China, the Regulations of the People’s Republic of China on Export Control of Dual-Use Items and other laws and regulations, and with the approval of the State Council of China, it was decided to adopt the following export control measures
1. Overseas organizations and individuals “hereinafter referred to as ”overseas specific export operators must obtain a dual-use item export license issued by the Ministry of Commerce of China before exporting the following items to other countries and regions other than China:
(1) Containing, integrating or mixing items listed in Part 1 of Annex 1 to this Announcement originating in China and manufactured overseas, and the items listed in Part 1 of Annex 1 to this Announcement account for 0.1% of the value of the items listed in Part 2 of Annex 1 manufactured overseas and above;
(2) Items listed in Annex 1 of this announcement produced overseas using technologies related to rare earth mining, smelting and separation, metal smelting, magnetic material manufacturing, and rare earth secondary resource recycling originating in China;
(3) Items listed in Annex 1 of this announcement originating in China.
I will be surprised if USA has not already established a plan to overcome this by mining our own rare earth minerals in our own country.
I have no doubt USA has caused China many problems covertly and overtly and China sees itself as fighting back (while also sobbing over their ‘Century of Humiliation’ which USA had little to do with).
China’s entire modernization has come mainly from USA and the West. Same for the entire rest of the world.
I do not expect anyone to kiss our asses and our elite parasites did make huge fortunes selling out our technology to China.
But it would be better if China behaved better than this, and same goes for most of the rest of the world.
Western men created the modern world. And everyone is benefitting from it.
Western-style modernization is without doubt the most significant human achievement in world history. ABN
(Also, USA defeated Japan in WW2, not China which did next to nothing but wait for the end to then seize power and bogus credit.)
Logan, 22, was a massive Taylor Swift fan and an aspiring teacher
South Carolina congresswoman Nancy Mace has called for the Justice Department to step in to investigate and prosecute the murder of an aspiring teacher.
Logan Haley Federico, 22, an avid Taylor Swift fan, was killed while sleeping in a fraternity house during a visit to her boyfriend at the University of South Carolina on May 3.
Alexander Dickey, 30, a repeat offender with a long criminal rap sheet, was arrested and charged in her slaying.
Prosecutors say Dickey crept into her bedroom, startled Logan awake and forced her to her knees while she was naked and begging for help.
He is accused of shooting her in the chest with a stolen 12-gauge shotgun. Prosecutors say he then fled in a stolen vehicle. He has not entered a plea in the case.
Logan’s father Stephen Federico has demanded Dickey face the death penalty and accused South Carolina prosecutors of not pushing hard enough for the ultimate punishment.
Republican lawmakers have now joined his cause and are urging the Trump administration to take up the case.
Mace told Daily Mail this week that state law enforcement has shown ‘unforgivable weakness’ in handling the investigation.
The various mug shots of career criminal Alexander Dickey
Sad this needs to be said. It needs to be said more often. 3.5% of world population are White women. If you guys keep fighting White men, neither of us is going to survive :) ABN
American Buddhist Net 