In 2019, I was listening to an @EstherPerel couples therapy podcast episode & she had one partner say to the other (who had a lot of trauma) "you're safe, it's okay, I'm here" & I realized I believed it wasn't okay to feel safe!
I got this from the EA / AI Safety scene! 🧵 1/
🥰 limbic safety ≠ optimism about future 📈
This point is probably obvious to some, but counterintuitive to others. It's central to what I'm trying to say here and was a main objection of mine:
"I can't feel safe because we're all gonna die from unfriendly AGI"
This is actually a type error. I'm still very concerned about AGI. I also think that panicking is not going to help. Panic refers to two things, closely related.
[something about people repressing panic rather than integrating it]
[something about people trying to be rational & strategic rather than flaily like panic, but still haven't a background sense of "it's not okay aah aah" that they instill in others as a way to get them to care more about the thing]
Grokking any huge civilization-scale existential risk (of which AGI is just one) is naturally panic-inducing, because it's the sort of thing one can't solve alone and the human superorganism needed to solve it doesn't exist yet.
Unfortunately, unlike when you're an infant, there's zero odds that just freaking out will bring help.
other stuff