[There’s also a much more banal answer that I wouldn’t be surprised if it is a major, deep underlying driver, with all the interesting psychology provided in OP being some sort of half-conscious rationalization for our actual deep-rooted tendencies:] Not going insane simply is the very natural default outcome for humans even in such felt dire situation:
While shallowly it might feel like it would, going insane actually appears to me to NOT AT ALL be the default human reaction to an anticipation of (even a quite high probability of) the world ending (even very soon). I haven’t done any stats or research, but everything I’ve ever seen or heard of seems to suggest to me:
While they’re not anywhere nearly the majority, still very many people have very high P(doom soon) yet stay nearly perfectly calm (at best you might call them insanely calm, given the [true or imagined] circumstances).
I think this applies to many people e.g. on this forum, but I’m reminded of much more ‘normal’ persons uttering even more dramatic ‘I’m sure AI might already TMORROW kill us all’ - all while simply going on with their usual lives.
Slightly less 1:1 but imho still underlining our sanity’s resilience in closely as dire situations: Many people seem egoistic enough such that the ending of their own life to mean a very large part of the world they care about to be going to end, and yet they face many situations of more or less imminent death rather calmly as opposed to going insane
Extend to various cases where family and/or friends and/or tribe is facing extinction; at least I haven’t heard of them to usually be going insane by the prospect of not-yet-actually-visible but forthcoming extinction.
Once a torturous way of you or your close ones being killed has actually started, that’s of course different, that’s when you go insane.
Makes sense. Surely there were many cases in which our ancestors’ “family and/or friends and/or tribe were facing extinction,” and going insane in those situations would’ve been really maladaptive! If anything, the people worried about AI x-risk have a more historically-normal amount of worry-about-death than most other people today.
They didn’t need to deal with social media informing them that they need to be traumatized now, and form a conditional prediction of extreme and self-destructive behavior later.
A cynical theory of why someone might believe going insane is the default human reaction: weaponized incompetence, absolving them of responsibility for thinking clearly about the world, because they can’t handle the truth, and they can’t reasonably be expected to because no normal human can either.
I wonder if situations like the Cuban missile crisis are good examples for your position. But then I also wonder if that (I think apparently worried but calm about the world ending in a nuclear conflict) isn’t contrasted by the claims about the mass hysteria after the radio broadcast of Well’s War of the Worlds.
Apparently (edit: that particular case of) mass hysteria is a myth. But however many people got confused, I don’t think this is a contradiction. If I updated P(aliens are invading) from 0% to 1%, it would change my plans for the evening, because I am sane.
[There’s also a much more banal answer that I wouldn’t be surprised if it is a major, deep underlying driver, with all the interesting psychology provided in OP being some sort of half-conscious rationalization for our actual deep-rooted tendencies:] Not going insane simply is the very natural default outcome for humans even in such felt dire situation:
While shallowly it might feel like it would, going insane actually appears to me to NOT AT ALL be the default human reaction to an anticipation of (even a quite high probability of) the world ending (even very soon). I haven’t done any stats or research, but everything I’ve ever seen or heard of seems to suggest to me:
While they’re not anywhere nearly the majority, still very many people have very high P(doom soon) yet stay nearly perfectly calm (at best you might call them insanely calm, given the [true or imagined] circumstances).
I think this applies to many people e.g. on this forum, but I’m reminded of much more ‘normal’ persons uttering even more dramatic ‘I’m sure AI might already TMORROW kill us all’ - all while simply going on with their usual lives.
Slightly less 1:1 but imho still underlining our sanity’s resilience in closely as dire situations: Many people seem egoistic enough such that the ending of their own life to mean a very large part of the world they care about to be going to end, and yet they face many situations of more or less imminent death rather calmly as opposed to going insane
Extend to various cases where family and/or friends and/or tribe is facing extinction; at least I haven’t heard of them to usually be going insane by the prospect of not-yet-actually-visible but forthcoming extinction.
Once a torturous way of you or your close ones being killed has actually started, that’s of course different, that’s when you go insane.
Makes sense. Surely there were many cases in which our ancestors’ “family and/or friends and/or tribe were facing extinction,” and going insane in those situations would’ve been really maladaptive! If anything, the people worried about AI x-risk have a more historically-normal amount of worry-about-death than most other people today.
They didn’t need to deal with social media informing them that they need to be traumatized now, and form a conditional prediction of extreme and self-destructive behavior later.
A cynical theory of why someone might believe going insane is the default human reaction: weaponized incompetence, absolving them of responsibility for thinking clearly about the world, because they can’t handle the truth, and they can’t reasonably be expected to because no normal human can either.
I wonder if situations like the Cuban missile crisis are good examples for your position. But then I also wonder if that (I think apparently worried but calm about the world ending in a nuclear conflict) isn’t contrasted by the claims about the mass hysteria after the radio broadcast of Well’s War of the Worlds.
Apparently (edit: that particular case of) mass hysteria is a myth. But however many people got confused, I don’t think this is a contradiction. If I updated P(aliens are invading) from 0% to 1%, it would change my plans for the evening, because I am sane.
that particular case of mass hysteria is a myth