[Possibly digging a bit too far into the specifics so no worries if you’d rather bow out.]
Do you think these confusions[1] are fairly evenly dispersed throughout the community (besides what you already mentioned: “People semi-frequently have them at the beginning and then get over them.”)?
Two casual observations: (A) the confusions seem less common among people working full-time at EA/Rationalist/x-risk/longtermist organisation than in other people who “take singularity scenarios seriously.”[2] (B) I’m very uncertain but they also seem less prevalent to me in the EA community than the rationalist community (to the extent the communities can be separated).[3] [4]
Do A and B sound right to you? If so, do you have a take on why that is?
If A or B *are* true, do you think this is in any part caused by the relative groups taking the singularity [/x-risk/the future/the stakes] less seriously? If so, are there important costs from this?
[1] Using your word while withholding my own judgment as to whether every one of these is actually a confusion.
[2] If you’re right that a lot of people have them at the beginning and then get over them, a simple potential explanation would be that by the time you’re working at one of these orgs, that’s already happened.
Other hypothesis: (a) selection effects; (b) working FT in the community gives you additional social supports and makes it more likely others will notice if you start spiraling; (c) the cognitive dissonance with the rest of society is a lot of what’s doing the damage. It’s easier to handle this stuff psychologically if the coworkers you see every day also take the singularity seriously.[i]
[3] For example perhaps less common at Open Phil, GPI, 80k, and CEA than CFAR and MIRI but I also think this holds outside of professional organisations.
[4] One potential reason for this is that a lot of EA ideas are more “in the air” than rationalist/singularity ones. So a lot of EAs may have had their ‘crisis of faith’ before arriving in the community. (For example, I know plenty of EAs (myself included) who did some damage to themselves in their teens or early twenties by “taking Peter Singer really seriously.”
[i] I’ve seen this kind of dissidence offered as a (partial) explanation of why PTSD has become so common among veterans & why it’s so hard for them to reintegrate after serving a combat tour. No clue if the source is reliable/widely held/true. It’s been years but I think I got it from Odysseus in America or perhaps its predecessor, Achilles in Vietnam.
[Possibly digging a bit too far into the specifics so no worries if you’d rather bow out.]
Do you think these confusions[1] are fairly evenly dispersed throughout the community (besides what you already mentioned: “People semi-frequently have them at the beginning and then get over them.”)?
Two casual observations: (A) the confusions seem less common among people working full-time at EA/Rationalist/x-risk/longtermist organisation than in other people who “take singularity scenarios seriously.”[2] (B) I’m very uncertain but they also seem less prevalent to me in the EA community than the rationalist community (to the extent the communities can be separated).[3] [4]
Do A and B sound right to you? If so, do you have a take on why that is?
If A or B *are* true, do you think this is in any part caused by the relative groups taking the singularity [/x-risk/the future/the stakes] less seriously? If so, are there important costs from this?
[1] Using your word while withholding my own judgment as to whether every one of these is actually a confusion.
[2] If you’re right that a lot of people have them at the beginning and then get over them, a simple potential explanation would be that by the time you’re working at one of these orgs, that’s already happened.
Other hypothesis: (a) selection effects; (b) working FT in the community gives you additional social supports and makes it more likely others will notice if you start spiraling; (c) the cognitive dissonance with the rest of society is a lot of what’s doing the damage. It’s easier to handle this stuff psychologically if the coworkers you see every day also take the singularity seriously.[i]
[3] For example perhaps less common at Open Phil, GPI, 80k, and CEA than CFAR and MIRI but I also think this holds outside of professional organisations.
[4] One potential reason for this is that a lot of EA ideas are more “in the air” than rationalist/singularity ones. So a lot of EAs may have had their ‘crisis of faith’ before arriving in the community. (For example, I know plenty of EAs (myself included) who did some damage to themselves in their teens or early twenties by “taking Peter Singer really seriously.”
[i] I’ve seen this kind of dissidence offered as a (partial) explanation of why PTSD has become so common among veterans & why it’s so hard for them to reintegrate after serving a combat tour. No clue if the source is reliable/widely held/true. It’s been years but I think I got it from Odysseus in America or perhaps its predecessor, Achilles in Vietnam.