There can also be factors in this community that make people both unusually likely to go insane and to also try things like meditation and LSD in an attempt to help themselves. It’s a bit hard to say given that the post is so vague on what exactly “insanity” means, but the examples of acausal trade etc. make me suspect that it’s related to a specific kind of anxiety which seems to be common in the community.
That same kind of anxiety also made me (temporarily) go very slightly crazy many years ago, when I learned about quantum mechanics (and I had neither done psychedelics nor had I yet started meditating at the time), and it feels like the same kind of thing that causes the occasional person to freak out about Roko’s Basilisk. I think those kinds of people are particularly likely to be drawn to LW, because they subconsciously see rationality as a way to try to control their anxiety, and that same thing causes them to seek out psychedelics and meditation. And then rationality, meditation, and psychedelics are all things that might also dismantle some of the existing defenses their mind has against that anxiety.
I suspect it’s related to the fact that we’ve gotten ourselves off-distribution from the emergencies that used to be common, and thus AI and the Singularity are interpreted as immediate emergencies when they aren’t.
I’ll also make a remark that LW focuses on the tails, so things tend to be more extreme than usual.
There can also be factors in this community that make people both unusually likely to go insane and to also try things like meditation and LSD in an attempt to help themselves. It’s a bit hard to say given that the post is so vague on what exactly “insanity” means, but the examples of acausal trade etc. make me suspect that it’s related to a specific kind of anxiety which seems to be common in the community.
That same kind of anxiety also made me (temporarily) go very slightly crazy many years ago, when I learned about quantum mechanics (and I had neither done psychedelics nor had I yet started meditating at the time), and it feels like the same kind of thing that causes the occasional person to freak out about Roko’s Basilisk. I think those kinds of people are particularly likely to be drawn to LW, because they subconsciously see rationality as a way to try to control their anxiety, and that same thing causes them to seek out psychedelics and meditation. And then rationality, meditation, and psychedelics are all things that might also dismantle some of the existing defenses their mind has against that anxiety.
I suspect it’s related to the fact that we’ve gotten ourselves off-distribution from the emergencies that used to be common, and thus AI and the Singularity are interpreted as immediate emergencies when they aren’t.
I’ll also make a remark that LW focuses on the tails, so things tend to be more extreme than usual.