I’ve been worried that the Solstice isn’t really set up to handle “actually looking at human extinction in nearmode” in a psychologically healthy way
A thought I had when I read this sentence was, “what makes you think there is a healthy way?” It kinda feels to me like, just as there’s no way to get in a car accident that’s healthy for your body, there’s no way to actually believe the world is going to end that’s “healthy” for your mind. There could be better or worse ways it could impact you, but you’re gonna get some impact trauma.
Pushing back against that a little bit. There’s actually plenty of historical precedent for this sort of situation.
Throughout history, groups of people have found themselves in situations where most or even all of them dying is possible, or even likely. And yet they have work to do; they have to stay calm and do their jobs, they have to help each other, they have to work to reduce that chance, they have to accomplish the Mission whatever it is.
I’m thinking primarily of combat situations here. E.g. an army is encircled, and its only hope is to break out. Or a city is besieged, and its only hope is to hold out long enough to be relieved, if that ever happens which it probably won’t.
In situations like these, there are better and worse ways to behave, better and worse ways to orient, to collectively process the situation, etc. I don’t have a good grasp of what those better and worse ways are, to be clear, never having experienced encirclement or a siege myself, and only having read a bit about them in books, and not much about the morale/psychological angle. But the history did happen and probably the evidence is there in various books and documentaries for someone who wants to go learn from it.
You can still say “Even the best way to handle this sort of situation is going to leave you with trauma,” and maybe that’s true, but I think probably what Raemon had in mind by “psychologically healthy way” is more like “whatever the best way to handle this sort of situation turns out to be.”
I basically agree with all of this. I had this thought in part because I have the fairly strong sense that (current, US) society has a belief that there is a healthy state we should be aiming for, and does a lot of question substitution like “does this feel good/acceptable”. There are much better and worse ways to orient to x-risk, but it may be that all of them feel “bad/unacceptable” and it’s hard for me to see how they could be accurately labeled “healthy”.
Part of the reason I’m rolling the dice on running Solstice the way I am, is, it doesn’t really seem like we have the luxury of not engaging with the question. (But, there’s a reason I wrote this post including option #1 – if I didn’t think I had a decent chance of pulling it off I’d have done something different)
FYI I am also planning an aftercare / decompression / chat around a firepit thing for people who need that afterwards.
A thought I had when I read this sentence was, “what makes you think there is a healthy way?” It kinda feels to me like, just as there’s no way to get in a car accident that’s healthy for your body, there’s no way to actually believe the world is going to end that’s “healthy” for your mind. There could be better or worse ways it could impact you, but you’re gonna get some impact trauma.
Pushing back against that a little bit. There’s actually plenty of historical precedent for this sort of situation.
Throughout history, groups of people have found themselves in situations where most or even all of them dying is possible, or even likely. And yet they have work to do; they have to stay calm and do their jobs, they have to help each other, they have to work to reduce that chance, they have to accomplish the Mission whatever it is.
I’m thinking primarily of combat situations here. E.g. an army is encircled, and its only hope is to break out. Or a city is besieged, and its only hope is to hold out long enough to be relieved, if that ever happens which it probably won’t.
In situations like these, there are better and worse ways to behave, better and worse ways to orient, to collectively process the situation, etc. I don’t have a good grasp of what those better and worse ways are, to be clear, never having experienced encirclement or a siege myself, and only having read a bit about them in books, and not much about the morale/psychological angle. But the history did happen and probably the evidence is there in various books and documentaries for someone who wants to go learn from it.
You can still say “Even the best way to handle this sort of situation is going to leave you with trauma,” and maybe that’s true, but I think probably what Raemon had in mind by “psychologically healthy way” is more like “whatever the best way to handle this sort of situation turns out to be.”
I basically agree with all of this. I had this thought in part because I have the fairly strong sense that (current, US) society has a belief that there is a healthy state we should be aiming for, and does a lot of question substitution like “does this feel good/acceptable”. There are much better and worse ways to orient to x-risk, but it may be that all of them feel “bad/unacceptable” and it’s hard for me to see how they could be accurately labeled “healthy”.
Part of the reason I’m rolling the dice on running Solstice the way I am, is, it doesn’t really seem like we have the luxury of not engaging with the question. (But, there’s a reason I wrote this post including option #1 – if I didn’t think I had a decent chance of pulling it off I’d have done something different)
FYI I am also planning an aftercare / decompression / chat around a firepit thing for people who need that afterwards.