I don’t know what’s going on inside the heads of x-risk people such that they see new evidence on the potentially imminent demise of humanity and they find it “exciting”.
I take your point, and it’s an important one, but I find your claim to not know what’s going on in these people’s heads to be too strong. I feel excited about some kinds of new evidence about “the potentially imminent demise of humanity” like the time horizon graph you mention because I had already priced in the risks this evidence points to and, the evidence just made it way more legible and makes it much easier to communicate my concerns (and getting the broader public and governments to understand this kind of thing seems paramount for safety).
This is especially true for researchers getting excited about publishing their own work because they’ve known their own results for months usually before they’ve published it and so publishing it just means they’re more legible while the updates are completely priced in.
I think there’s also a tendency I have in myself to feel much too happy when new evidence makes things I was worried about legible for the same reason I enjoy saying I-told-you-so when my friends make mistakes I warned them about even though I care about my friends and I would have preferred they didn’t make these mistakes. This is definitely a silly quirk of my brain but I don’t think it’s a big problem; it definitely doesn’t push me to cause the things I’m predicting to come to fruition in cases where that would be bad.
I take your point, and it’s an important one, but I find your claim to not know what’s going on in these people’s heads to be too strong. I feel excited about some kinds of new evidence about “the potentially imminent demise of humanity” like the time horizon graph you mention because I had already priced in the risks this evidence points to and, the evidence just made it way more legible and makes it much easier to communicate my concerns (and getting the broader public and governments to understand this kind of thing seems paramount for safety).
This is especially true for researchers getting excited about publishing their own work because they’ve known their own results for months usually before they’ve published it and so publishing it just means they’re more legible while the updates are completely priced in.
I think there’s also a tendency I have in myself to feel much too happy when new evidence makes things I was worried about legible for the same reason I enjoy saying I-told-you-so when my friends make mistakes I warned them about even though I care about my friends and I would have preferred they didn’t make these mistakes. This is definitely a silly quirk of my brain but I don’t think it’s a big problem; it definitely doesn’t push me to cause the things I’m predicting to come to fruition in cases where that would be bad.