Thanks for the addendum! I broadly agree with “I believe that you will most likely will be OK, and in any case should spend most of your time acting under this assumption.”, maybe scoping the assumption to my personal life (I very much endorse working on reducing tail risks!)
I disagree with the “a prediction” argument though. Being >50% likely to happen does not mean people shouldn’t give significant mental space to the other, less likely outcomes. This is not how normal people live their lives, nor how I think they should. For example, people don’t smoke because they want to avoid lung cancer, but their chances of dying of this are well under 50% (I think?). People don’t do dangerous extreme sports, even though most people doing them don’t die. People wear seatbelts even though they’re pretty unlikely to die in a car accident. Parents make all kinds of decisions to protect their children from much smaller risks. The bar for “not worth thinking about” is well under 1% IMO. Of course “can you reasonably affect it” is a big Q. I do think there are various bad outcomes short of human extinction, eg worlds of massive inequality, where actions taken now might matter a lot for your personal outcomes.
This is more or less what I wrote regarding seatbelts etc—when there are parts of the probability space that could be very bad and you have some control over, you should take some common sense precautions to reduce them even if you do not constantly dwell on these
I like the sentiment and much of the advice in this post, but unfortunately I don’t think we can honestly confidently say “You will be OK”.
Yeah, I feel like the title of this post should be something like “act like you will be OK” (which I think is pretty reasonable advice!)
Thanks for the comment—there were so many comments about the title that I now added an addendum about it.
Thanks for the addendum! I broadly agree with “I believe that you will most likely will be OK, and in any case should spend most of your time acting under this assumption.”, maybe scoping the assumption to my personal life (I very much endorse working on reducing tail risks!)
I disagree with the “a prediction” argument though. Being >50% likely to happen does not mean people shouldn’t give significant mental space to the other, less likely outcomes. This is not how normal people live their lives, nor how I think they should. For example, people don’t smoke because they want to avoid lung cancer, but their chances of dying of this are well under 50% (I think?). People don’t do dangerous extreme sports, even though most people doing them don’t die. People wear seatbelts even though they’re pretty unlikely to die in a car accident. Parents make all kinds of decisions to protect their children from much smaller risks. The bar for “not worth thinking about” is well under 1% IMO. Of course “can you reasonably affect it” is a big Q. I do think there are various bad outcomes short of human extinction, eg worlds of massive inequality, where actions taken now might matter a lot for your personal outcomes.
This is more or less what I wrote regarding seatbelts etc—when there are parts of the probability space that could be very bad and you have some control over, you should take some common sense precautions to reduce them even if you do not constantly dwell on these
Ah, thanks, I missed that part.