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”.
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”.