But I know that I got something very valuable out of the conversations in question, which wasn’t about social pressure or scrupulosity, but… just actually taking the thing seriously. This depended on my psychological state in the past year, and at least somewhat depended on psychological effects of having a serious conversation about xrisk with a serious xrisk person. My hope is that at least some of the benefits of that could be captured in written form.
If that turns out to just not be possible, well, fair. But I think if at least a couple people in the right-life-circumstances gets 25% of the value I got from the original conversation(s) from reading this, it’ll have been a good use of time.
I also disagree slightly with the “the reason people don’t know this isn’t that it’s hard to know.” It’s definitely achievable to figure out most of the content here. But there’s a large search space of things worth figuring out, and not all of it is obvious.
Generally, yeah.
But I know that I got something very valuable out of the conversations in question, which wasn’t about social pressure or scrupulosity, but… just actually taking the thing seriously. This depended on my psychological state in the past year, and at least somewhat depended on psychological effects of having a serious conversation about xrisk with a serious xrisk person. My hope is that at least some of the benefits of that could be captured in written form.
If that turns out to just not be possible, well, fair. But I think if at least a couple people in the right-life-circumstances gets 25% of the value I got from the original conversation(s) from reading this, it’ll have been a good use of time.
I also disagree slightly with the “the reason people don’t know this isn’t that it’s hard to know.” It’s definitely achievable to figure out most of the content here. But there’s a large search space of things worth figuring out, and not all of it is obvious.
All sounds sensible.
Also, reminds me of the 2nd Law of Owen: