At Leverage people were mainly harmed by people threatening them, whether intentionally or not. By contrast, in the MIRICFAR social cluster, people were mainly harmed by plausible upsetting ideas. (Implausible ideas that aren’t also threats couldn’t harm someone because there’s no perceived incentive to believe them.)
An example of a threat is Roko’s Basilisk. An example of an upsetting plausible idea was the idea in early 2020 that there was going to be a huge pandemic soon. Serious attempts were made to suppress the former meme and promote the latter.
If someone threatens me I am likely to become upset. If someone informs me about something bad, I am also likely to become upset. Psychotic breaks are often a way of getting upset about one’s prior situation.. People who transition genders are also usually responding to something in their prior situation that they were upset about.
Sometimes people get upset in productive ways. When Justin Shovelain called me to tell me that there was going to be a giant pandemic, I called up some friends and talked through self-quarantine thresholds, resulting in this blog post. Later, some friends and I did some other things to help out people in danger from COVID, because we continued to be upset about the problem. Zack Davis’s LessWrong posts on epistemology also seem like a productive way to get upset.
Sometimes people get upset in unproductive ways. Once, a psychotic friend peed on their couch “in order to make things worse” (their words). People getting upset in unproductive ways is an important common unsolved problem.
The rate at which people are getting upset unproductively is an interesting metric but a poor target because while it is positively related to how bad problems are, it is also inversely related to the flow of information about problems. But that means it can be inversely related to the rate at which problems are getting solved and therefore to the rate at which things are getting better.
As I understand it you’re saying:
At Leverage people were mainly harmed by people threatening them, whether intentionally or not. By contrast, in the MIRICFAR social cluster, people were mainly harmed by plausible upsetting ideas. (Implausible ideas that aren’t also threats couldn’t harm someone because there’s no perceived incentive to believe them.)
An example of a threat is Roko’s Basilisk. An example of an upsetting plausible idea was the idea in early 2020 that there was going to be a huge pandemic soon. Serious attempts were made to suppress the former meme and promote the latter.
If someone threatens me I am likely to become upset. If someone informs me about something bad, I am also likely to become upset. Psychotic breaks are often a way of getting upset about one’s prior situation.. People who transition genders are also usually responding to something in their prior situation that they were upset about.
Sometimes people get upset in productive ways. When Justin Shovelain called me to tell me that there was going to be a giant pandemic, I called up some friends and talked through self-quarantine thresholds, resulting in this blog post. Later, some friends and I did some other things to help out people in danger from COVID, because we continued to be upset about the problem. Zack Davis’s LessWrong posts on epistemology also seem like a productive way to get upset.
Sometimes people get upset in unproductive ways. Once, a psychotic friend peed on their couch “in order to make things worse” (their words). People getting upset in unproductive ways is an important common unsolved problem.
The rate at which people are getting upset unproductively is an interesting metric but a poor target because while it is positively related to how bad problems are, it is also inversely related to the flow of information about problems. But that means it can be inversely related to the rate at which problems are getting solved and therefore to the rate at which things are getting better.