[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.
Agree. Wonder whether one should go a step further: Rather than a specific ‘wiki’/series of comments, maybe the domain would deserve an entire tagged (and ideally hideable for those rather categorically uninterested) sub-part of LessWrong, which which I mean: entire LW domain with posts of all LW categories and genres etc., but clearly targetting mostly only parents of children.
I guess that would then become a question of filtering out specific tags for users.