I’m now going to answer a slightly different question, which “Why is discussion of this sort of downvoted and dismissed sometimes?”
There is a vibe that I often get from suffering focused people, which is a combo of
a) seeming to be actively stuck in some kind of anxiety loop, preoccupied with hell in a way that seems more pathological to me than well-reasoned.
b) something about their writing and vibe feels generally off,
c) negative-utilitarians seem very frequently to me to be highly depressed, and I think the sort of person who ends up highly suffering focused rather than incorporating positive experiences into their agenda tend to be living in a world where they literally can’t experience pleasure/good-things.
I don’t think any of this is necessary to care about s-risks (or even to be negative utilitarian). But I think it is common enough that a) sometimes people are downvoting/dismissing this because they’re picking up correctly on this vibe, b) sometimes people are just… anticipating that vibe, maybe seeing it where it wasn’t necessarily.
(oddly, I get this more from S-risk people than from Animal Rights people. Animal Rights people seem more motivated from ’man, atrocities are happening right now, and we should care about these for the same reason we generally care about atrocities. S-Risk people seem more often like they’re trapped in a cognitive loop imagining the worst hell they can dream up no matter how useful that is)
Quite surprisingly, that hasn’t been my (still recent) experience at all… I’ve found s-riskers I’ve met to be cheerful and open-minded. Most concretely, I’ve found in them a lot of that animal rights oomph, and haven’t felt them mentally trapped anywhere?
There is a vibe that I often get from suffering focused people, which is a combo of
a) seeming to be actively stuck in some kind of anxiety loop, preoccupied with hell in a way that seems more pathological to me than well-reasoned.
b) something about their writing and vibe feels generally off,
...
I agree that this seems to be the case with LessWrong users who engage in suffering-related topics like quantum immortality and Roko’s basilisk. However, I don’t think any(?) of these users are/have been professional s-risk researchers; the few (three, iirc) s-risk researchers I’ve talked to in real life did not give off this kind of vibe at all.
I’m now going to answer a slightly different question, which “Why is discussion of this sort of downvoted and dismissed sometimes?”
There is a vibe that I often get from suffering focused people, which is a combo of
a) seeming to be actively stuck in some kind of anxiety loop, preoccupied with hell in a way that seems more pathological to me than well-reasoned.
b) something about their writing and vibe feels generally off,
c) negative-utilitarians seem very frequently to me to be highly depressed, and I think the sort of person who ends up highly suffering focused rather than incorporating positive experiences into their agenda tend to be living in a world where they literally can’t experience pleasure/good-things.
I don’t think any of this is necessary to care about s-risks (or even to be negative utilitarian). But I think it is common enough that a) sometimes people are downvoting/dismissing this because they’re picking up correctly on this vibe, b) sometimes people are just… anticipating that vibe, maybe seeing it where it wasn’t necessarily.
(oddly, I get this more from S-risk people than from Animal Rights people. Animal Rights people seem more motivated from ’man, atrocities are happening right now, and we should care about these for the same reason we generally care about atrocities. S-Risk people seem more often like they’re trapped in a cognitive loop imagining the worst hell they can dream up no matter how useful that is)
Quite surprisingly, that hasn’t been my (still recent) experience at all… I’ve found s-riskers I’ve met to be cheerful and open-minded. Most concretely, I’ve found in them a lot of that animal rights oomph, and haven’t felt them mentally trapped anywhere?
I also know plenty of cheerful ones. :-3
Interesting. Do I give off that vibe – here or in other writings?
I agree that this seems to be the case with LessWrong users who engage in suffering-related topics like quantum immortality and Roko’s basilisk. However, I don’t think any(?) of these users are/have been professional s-risk researchers; the few (three, iirc) s-risk researchers I’ve talked to in real life did not give off this kind of vibe at all.