Elon Musk: belief

Transcript context

…But there are a lot of communist, Soviet physicists or scientists who discovered new physics. There are German Nazi physicists who discovered new science. It seems possible to be really good at discovering new science and be really truth-seeking in that one particular way. And still we’d be like, “I don’t want the communist scientists to become more and more powerful over time.” We could imagine a future version of Grok that’s really good at physics and being really truth-seeking there. That doesn’t seem like a universally alignment-inducing behavior. I think actually most physicists, even in the Soviet Union or in Germany, would’ve had to be very truth-seeking in order to make those things work. If you’re stuck in some system, it doesn’t mean you believe in that system. Von Braun, who was one of the greatest rocket engineers ever, was put on death row in Nazi Germany for saying that he didn’t want to make weapons and he only wanted to go to the moon. He got pulled off death row at the last minute when they said, “Hey, you’re about to execute your best rocket engineer.” But then he helped them, right? Or like, Heisenberg was actually an enthusiastic Nazi.…

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