A common objection to my methamphetamine use is that over the past year I have stayed awake for four days at a time, taken apart three microwaves and a ceiling fan, filled 140,000 words with diagrams of what I call “The System,” accused two neighbors of signaling each other with porch lights, driven to a 24-hour Home Depot at 3:40 AM to buy copper tubing for a device I no longer remember designing, and repeatedly said I could stop whenever I want without actually stopping.

All of those observations are substantially correct, but the inference people draw from them is not. “Can stop whenever I want” is a claim about retained control capability under a particular internal policy regime; whether that capability should be exercised at a given moment is a separate question of governance, threshold design, monitoring, and escalation policy.

My position is not that adverse events are impossible. My position is that they are measurable, classifiable, and governable, and that a system displaying unusual capabilities should be evaluated against predefined risk thresholds rather than shut down because outside observers find some intermediate states alarming.

The Framework

The leading AI labs don't claim that their technology is safe. They claim it's managed: they scale capabilities carefully, run evaluations at each stage, monitor for emergent failure modes, and commit to pause if predefined dangerous thresholds are crossed. I have adopted the same approach. My Use Safety Levels are:

Level Capability threshold Required safeguards
USL-1 Enhanced focus; completes work tasks None
USL-2 Awake 48+ hours; disassembles one household appliance Tell one trusted person where I am
USL-3 Awake 72+ hours; writes more than 20,000 words of a document titled “The System” No driving; no contact with my ex
USL-4 Believes the neighbors are coordinating via their porch lights Pause

The framework has been in place for seven months. I've reached USL-3 eleven times. I've never reached USL-4, which shows the thresholds are working.

Evaluations

In March I believed for several hours that my neighbor Rick's porch light was blinking in a pattern. Under the original framework that would have triggered a pause. On review, though, I noticed Rick's bulb was actually faulty and really was blinking. That's an ordinary observation, not a belief about coordination. I have since clarified the USL-4 criterion to require belief in coordination among at least three households.

This is exactly why evaluation criteria need to be operationalized rather than interpreted impressionistically after the fact. A benchmark that produces false positives whenever a porch light is actually malfunctioning is not measuring the capability it claims to measure. Refining the threshold is not weakening the framework. It is reducing measurement error as we learn more about the system's real-world behavior.

The Race

People who say I should simply stop ignore the competitive dynamics. My supplier, Travis, has a fixed quantity to sell. Anything I don't buy goes to his other customers, most of whom have no framework at all. One of them, Kyle, took apart a stranger's car on the belief that it was a gift from his cousin. If I pause unilaterally, I don't reduce the total amount used in my social network. I only guarantee that the frontier belongs to people like Kyle.

This is the central collective-action problem. Individual restraint is only socially beneficial if it changes aggregate deployment. Otherwise the effect of a unilateral pause is mostly compositional: responsible actors exit while less safety-conscious actors expand into the available capacity.

Staying at the frontier also gives me influence. I've shared my USL table with Travis and asked that he recommend it to his other clients. He said he would “think about it,” which is more engagement with safety than anyone in that network has shown before.

There is also a governance argument for maintaining credibility with frontier participants. Travis is unlikely to take safety advice from someone who has voluntarily removed himself from the relevant capability regime. Continued participation gives me epistemic access and stakeholder legitimacy that I would lose under abstinence.

The Long Term

Longtermists argue that what matters most is keeping good trajectories open. My current trajectory includes enormous productivity. I've reorganized my garage four times this summer and built a birdhouse with a working elevator. “The System,” though unfinished, is 140,000 words long. I have also begun cataloguing every electrical outlet in the neighborhood by orientation, which I expect will eventually become useful.

An abrupt stop risks a long, potentially irreversible collapse into a lower-output state that my mother calls “recovery.” Even if the immediate effects of recovery appear locally desirable—more sleep, fewer dismantled appliances, reduced conflict with family—that does not establish positive expected value over the full time horizon. A temporary reduction in visible harms can still be trajectory-negative if it permanently destroys unusual productive capacity.

This is a classic problem of option value. Once I enter recovery, there is no guarantee I can recreate the present cognitive regime. By contrast, continuing preserves the option to stop later. Under uncertainty, policies that preserve future optionality should receive substantial weight.

Costs

None of this is to deny the costs. My mother has said, “You took apart the microwave and you're telling me about safety levels.” I did take apart the microwave. It was at USL-2, where appliance disassembly is within policy. She is describing the framework working as designed and treating it as evidence that it failed.

The same confusion occurs when people point to sleep deprivation. Yes, I have occasionally been awake long enough that written language begins to appear unusually dimensional. But fatigue alone is not a USL-4 capability. The purpose of a tiered framework is precisely to distinguish concerning but manageable behaviors from genuinely pause-triggering ones.

My family also keeps aggregating incidents across levels, which produces a misleading picture of cumulative risk. Eleven USL-3 events sound alarming if presented as “eleven severe episodes.” They sound quite different when correctly described as eleven successful evaluations in which the system remained below the pause threshold.

Safety frameworks should be judged by whether catastrophic thresholds are crossed, not by whether lower-tier safeguards are ever activated. A smoke detector that goes off is not evidence that the building's fire-safety system failed.

Conclusion

I can stop whenever I want, and I will stop when my evaluations say to. Until then, a responsible user staying at the frontier with published thresholds, explicit escalation criteria, and an iterative evaluation regime is better than an irresponsible one, and far better than a unilateral pause that hands the frontier to Kyle.

The relevant comparison is not methamphetamine use versus an imaginary world in which nobody uses methamphetamine. The relevant comparison is between different governance regimes under conditions where use is already occurring. Once you frame the problem correctly, the case for remaining engaged becomes much stronger.

Update: My family has arranged what they call an intervention for Sunday. None of the people attending have any frontier experience. I've prepared a presentation on why calls for a pause from outside the field tend to reflect a poor understanding of the technology, and I've revised USL-4 to require four households.