This was my experience for the majority of last year- after learning about various kinds of risk, I tried consuming lots of the same anti-doom-y material in response (e.g., critiques of short timeline models, disagreements w/ major AI alignment folks, generic AI skepticism off of lesswrong), and scrubbing the internet for emotional strategies. None of this reading helped me and I only became super unproductive. I also don’t think I was afraid of death at the time, it was more the absurdity of the situation.
What seems to be working for me is: recognizing that I have ocd, making a sincere effort to avoid reading these topics for a while (6 months), and finding additional things to do. Nowaways I feel like I can assess x-risk stuff more critically
This was my experience for the majority of last year- after learning about various kinds of risk, I tried consuming lots of the same anti-doom-y material in response (e.g., critiques of short timeline models, disagreements w/ major AI alignment folks, generic AI skepticism off of lesswrong), and scrubbing the internet for emotional strategies. None of this reading helped me and I only became super unproductive. I also don’t think I was afraid of death at the time, it was more the absurdity of the situation.
What seems to be working for me is: recognizing that I have ocd, making a sincere effort to avoid reading these topics for a while (6 months), and finding additional things to do. Nowaways I feel like I can assess x-risk stuff more critically
Thank you for the response.