I’ve always thought that something in the context of mental health would be nice.
The idea that humanity is doomed is pretty psychologically hard to deal with. Well, it seems that there is a pretty wide range in how people respond psychologically to it, from what I can tell. Some seem to do just fine. But others seem to be pretty harmed (including myself, not that this is about me; ie. this post literally brought me to tears). So, yeah, some sort of guidance for how to deal with it would be nice.
Plus it’d serve the purpose of increasing the productivity of and mitigating the risk of burnout for AI researchers, thus increasing humanities supposedly slim chances of “making it”. This seems pretty nontrivial to me. AI researchers deal with this stuff on a daily basis. I don’t know much about what sort of mental states are common for them, but I’d guess that something like 10-40% of them are hurt pretty badly. In which case better mental health guidance would yield pretty substantial improvements in productivity. Unfortunately, I think it’s quite the difficult thing to “figure out” though, and for that reason I suspect it isn’t worth sinking too many resources into.
Said this above; there are a ton of excellent mental health resources developed by and for climate change activists dealing with a massive, existential, depressing problem at which we are currently severely failing at and which is getting extremely acute and mentally draining—a lot of us (I am with scientist rebellion) are literally purposefully going to jail for this at this point, and getting physically beaten and threatened by cops, and sued in courts, and we have front line insight into how seriously crazily fucking dire it has gotten and how close we are to irreversible collapse and how much is already being destroyed and how many are already being killed right now in front of our eyes. At this point, we could hit collapse in 10 years; and what we need to do to actually avoid collapse, not just delay it, is so far beyond what we are currently doing that it is fucking ludicrous. And yet, we have gotten much better at reducing burnout in our members and staying sane. I already mentioned Sonit’s “Hope in the Dark” as well as “Active hope” as books I personally found helpful. At this point, we are dedicating whole task forces, events, videos, trainings and methodologies to this and it is affecting everything about how we do the things we do, because we have realised that people getting suicidally depressed to a degree where they were paralysed was becoming a primary threat to our activism. And it is working.
A related question a lot of us have been purposefully asking us: Within what needs to be done to save us, what are activities you can do that will make and impact and that you find most rewarding and that are most sustainable for you? When you rate actions that harmed you and actions that energised you, what differentiates them, and is that something you can purposefully engineer? How would your activism have to change for you to be able to continue it effectively for the long haul, at minimum confidently for another decade? What can you personally do to keep other people in the movement from giving up?
Once you reframe mental health as a fundamental resource and solvable problem, this suddenly changes a lot.
We have specifically found that optimism is neither necessary nor even beneficial for finding the kind of hope that drives action.
I’ve always thought that something in the context of mental health would be nice.
The idea that humanity is doomed is pretty psychologically hard to deal with. Well, it seems that there is a pretty wide range in how people respond psychologically to it, from what I can tell. Some seem to do just fine. But others seem to be pretty harmed (including myself, not that this is about me; ie. this post literally brought me to tears). So, yeah, some sort of guidance for how to deal with it would be nice.
Plus it’d serve the purpose of increasing the productivity of and mitigating the risk of burnout for AI researchers, thus increasing humanities supposedly slim chances of “making it”. This seems pretty nontrivial to me. AI researchers deal with this stuff on a daily basis. I don’t know much about what sort of mental states are common for them, but I’d guess that something like 10-40% of them are hurt pretty badly. In which case better mental health guidance would yield pretty substantial improvements in productivity. Unfortunately, I think it’s quite the difficult thing to “figure out” though, and for that reason I suspect it isn’t worth sinking too many resources into.
Said this above; there are a ton of excellent mental health resources developed by and for climate change activists dealing with a massive, existential, depressing problem at which we are currently severely failing at and which is getting extremely acute and mentally draining—a lot of us (I am with scientist rebellion) are literally purposefully going to jail for this at this point, and getting physically beaten and threatened by cops, and sued in courts, and we have front line insight into how seriously crazily fucking dire it has gotten and how close we are to irreversible collapse and how much is already being destroyed and how many are already being killed right now in front of our eyes. At this point, we could hit collapse in 10 years; and what we need to do to actually avoid collapse, not just delay it, is so far beyond what we are currently doing that it is fucking ludicrous. And yet, we have gotten much better at reducing burnout in our members and staying sane. I already mentioned Sonit’s “Hope in the Dark” as well as “Active hope” as books I personally found helpful. At this point, we are dedicating whole task forces, events, videos, trainings and methodologies to this and it is affecting everything about how we do the things we do, because we have realised that people getting suicidally depressed to a degree where they were paralysed was becoming a primary threat to our activism. And it is working.
A related question a lot of us have been purposefully asking us: Within what needs to be done to save us, what are activities you can do that will make and impact and that you find most rewarding and that are most sustainable for you? When you rate actions that harmed you and actions that energised you, what differentiates them, and is that something you can purposefully engineer? How would your activism have to change for you to be able to continue it effectively for the long haul, at minimum confidently for another decade? What can you personally do to keep other people in the movement from giving up?
Once you reframe mental health as a fundamental resource and solvable problem, this suddenly changes a lot.
We have specifically found that optimism is neither necessary nor even beneficial for finding the kind of hope that drives action.