I know of some other people who’ve taken bad mental health damage from internalizing pessimistic beliefs about AI risk, as well.
I’m not sure what to do about this, because it seems bad to recommend ‘try to not form pessimistic opinions about AI for the sake of your mental health, or remain very detached from them if you do form them’, but being fully in touch with the doom also seems really bad.
To be clear, I’m not at all recommending changing one’s beliefs here. My language of gut belief vs cognitive beliefs was probably too imprecise. I’m recommending that, for some people, particularly if one is able to act on beliefs one doesn’t intuitively feel, it’s better not to try to intuitively feel those beliefs.
For some people, this may come at a cost to their ability to form true beliefs, and this is a difficult tradeoff. For me, I think, all things considered, intuiting beliefs has made me worse at forming true beliefs.
I’m sorry you’ve had this experience :(
I know of some other people who’ve taken bad mental health damage from internalizing pessimistic beliefs about AI risk, as well.
I’m not sure what to do about this, because it seems bad to recommend ‘try to not form pessimistic opinions about AI for the sake of your mental health, or remain very detached from them if you do form them’, but being fully in touch with the doom also seems really bad.
To be clear, I’m not at all recommending changing one’s beliefs here. My language of gut belief vs cognitive beliefs was probably too imprecise. I’m recommending that, for some people, particularly if one is able to act on beliefs one doesn’t intuitively feel, it’s better not to try to intuitively feel those beliefs.
For some people, this may come at a cost to their ability to form true beliefs, and this is a difficult tradeoff. For me, I think, all things considered, intuiting beliefs has made me worse at forming true beliefs.