A collection of approaches to confronting doom, and my thoughts on them

post by Ruby · 2025-04-06T02:11:31.271Z · LW · GW · 18 comments

Contents

  A defence of slowness at the end of the world (Sarah)
  How will the bomb find you? (C. S. Lewis)
  Death with Dignity (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
  Don't die with dignity; instead play to your outs (Jeffrey Ladish) 
  Emotionally Confronting a Probably-Doomed World: Against Motivation Via Dignity Points (TurnTrout) 
  A Way To Be Okay (Duncan Sabien) 
  Another Way to Be Okay (Gretta Duleba)
  Being at peace with Doom (Johannes C. Mayer)
  Here's the exit. (Valentine) 
  Mainstream Advice
None
18 comments

I just published A Slow Guide to Confronting Doom, containing my own approach to living in a world that I think has a high likelihood of ending soon. Fortunately I'm not the only person to have written on topic.

Below are my thoughts on what others have written. I have not written these such that they stand independent from the originals, and have attentionally not written summaries that wouldn't do the pieces justice. I suggest you read or at least skim the originals.

For this just wanting a list of all the essays, here ya go:

• A defence of slowness at the end of the world (Sarah)
• How will the bomb find you? (C. S. Lewis)
• Death with Dignity (Eliezer Yudkowsky) [LW · GW]
• Don't die with dignity; instead play to your outs (Jeffrey Ladish) [LW · GW]
• Emotionally Confronting a Probably-Doomed World: Against Motivation Via Dignity Points (TurnTrout) [LW · GW]
• A Way To Be Okay (Duncan Sabien) [LW · GW]
• Another Way to Be Okay (Gretta Duleba) [LW · GW]
• Being at peace with Doom (Johannes C. Mayer) [LW · GW]
• Here's the exit. (Valentine) [LW · GW] 

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A defence of slowness at the end of the world (Sarah)

I feel kinship with Sarah. She's wrestling with the same harsh scary realities I am – feeling the AGI. The post isn't that long and I recommend reading it, but to quote just a little:

Since learning of the coming AI revolution, I’ve lived in two worlds. One moves at a leisurely pace, the same way it has all my life. In this world, I am safely nestled in the comfort of indefinite time. It’s ok to let the odd day slip idly by because there are always more.

The second moves exponentially faster. Its shelf-life is measured in a single-digit number of years. Its inhabitants are the Situationally Aware; the engineers and prophets of imminent AI transformation. To live in this world is to possess what Ezra Klein calls “an altered sense of time and consequence”.

I find that it’s psychologically untenable to spend all that much time in the Fast World. I can handle it for minutes to hours, but my mind invariably snaps back into its default state like I’m pulling my hand out of ice water.

Occupying the Slow World is ultimately a form of denial. I can’t call it anything other than compartmentalisation, yet I actually advocate for it. Of course, those of us trying to move the needle on AI risk should work in the Fast World, but I claim that we shouldn’t live in it. I will try to make the case for why.

Regarding the general idea of having two modes that one moves between, I'm not certain that isn't a good way to operate. It's less my way, though perhaps because I'm not good at compartmentalization. I am strongly against double-think, but I'm not sure whether this counts or exactly where the line is. For anyone going this route, I'd suggest being mindful about it.

This approach seems helpful if dipping into Slow World means one doesn't throw away their mind [LW · GW], doesn't stop doing things integral for flourishing, and doesn't fail to harvest the value life offers here and now. I can see that shifting modes out of must increase survival odds might help really help in going and enjoying a picnic.

I think the way this goes bad is if it's functioning as a form of Struggle/Avoidance [? · GW] against the emotions. The question I'd ask is if a person is trying to avoid them all the time vs just putting them aside for blocks of time. Putting them aside is good, trying to avoid in general seems bad.

Something that does more clearly rub me wrong here is that I agree with Sarah that short timelines raise important relational and existential questions, such as judging people for doing things that ultimately won't matter, but I think we just need to ask and solve those hard questions in Fast World. I think this is also just very doable. For example, we can and should learn how to relate to others in ways we endorse in this mad world rather than try to escape. We can and should learn to find meaning even in relationships that might not last long.

 

How will the bomb find you? (C. S. Lewis)

This poetic and evocative essay by C.S. Lewis seems popular these days. I think it was part of Rationalist solstice this year, even. The summary of my assessment is some really good paragraphs and some really awful paragraphs. C. S. Lewis doesn't offer us an adequate philosophy.

The commonly quoted passage is:

This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

If what people are taking from this is that we should contain to aim to flourish and to not throw away our minds, that seems good and I agree.

But C.S. Lewis seems really really mistaken to me on some critical points, if you look at the whole essay, and unfortunately does not offer a particularly helpful philosophy.

The first crucially wrong attitude is that of non-agency. C. S. Lewis relates to the atomic bomb as something people can't do anything about, it comes if it does. Leaving aside whether that it was true regarding the bomb, I don't think it applies to AI. I think that even the common person in Western democracies has some voice with which to lobby the government, companies, and their neighbors. Not every last moment should be spent thinking about AI, but heck, quite a lot of them should. The challenge is figuring out the balance.

C. S. Lewis compounds a lack of agency with an argument that why be so upset about dying from the bomb when you were going to die from old age anyway, so it's just a little premature. The answer is (1) every year of life is precious, I am going to be upset over losing decades from myself and everyone else (2) death from old age is not necessary and C.S. Lewis lived late enough in history that I fault him for not having more medical/scientific ambition. /dd

Lewis writes a lot more and I haven't taken the time to full parse what he actually believes, but certainly individual sentences and paragraphs are awful.

And the real answer (almost beyond doubt) is that, with or without atomic bombs, the whole story is going to end in NOTHING. The astronomers hold out no hope that this planet is going to be permanently inhabitable. The physicists hold out no hope that organic life is going to be a permanent possibility in any part of the material universe. Not only this earth, but the whole show, all the suns of space, are to run down. Nature is a sinking ship...If Nature is all that exists — in other words, if there is no God and no life of some quite different sort somewhere outside Nature — then all stories will end in the same way: in a universe from which all life is banished without possibility of return. It will have been an accidental flicker, and there will be no one even to remember it. No doubt atomic bombs may cut its duration on this present planet shorter that it might have been; but the whole thing, even if it lasted for billions of years, must be so infinitesimally short in relation to the oceans of dead time which preceded and follow it that I cannot feel excited about its curtailment.

Wtf.

That said, this paragraph is nice:

3) You may defy the universe. You may say, “Let it be irrational, I am not. Let it be merciless, I will have mercy. By whatever curious chance it has produced me, now that I am here I will live according to human values. I know the universe will win in the end, but what is that to me? I will go down fighting. Amid all this wastefulness I will persevere; amid all this competition, I will make sacrifices. Be damned to the universe!”

C. S. Lewis doesn't provide a comprehensive philosophy that I think helps us, but I do like some of his paragraphs.

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Death with Dignity (Eliezer Yudkowsky) [LW · GW]

Prognosis and prescription delivered as one.

This post seems to have a few aims (1) avoiding the loss of motivation from an pursuing ~unattainable goal, (2) avoiding giving up when there's still useful stuff to do, (3) avoiding "stepping sideways" into living in fantasy worlds where things are different. You can achieve all this by switching to the goal of dying in a less embarrassing way – an attainable goal  and therefore a goal you can put motivation behind.

This basically works for me. Both on a level of "dignity" feels like a real thing to me that I want, and that this approach will help me maximize chances, small as they might be.

On my own I wouldn't have framed it this way, but it's congruous. There's an element of you working on getting all the [expected] value you can, even in the dire situation you're.

I perhaps would have written it with the definition of "log odds of probability of survival" much earlier on to avoid any confusion that Eliezer is saying give up trying, but that's a communication quibble, not content.

Don't die with dignity; instead play to your outs (Jeffrey Ladish) [LW · GW] 

Written in direct opposition to Death with Dignity, Jeffrey says he doesn't actually disagree at all regarding strategy, just mindset, but the mindset matters.

This post seems mostly fine. I have a few of weak confidence concerns:

1. My vibe is this mindset more easily slides into stepping sideways into fantasy plans where bad plans will work.

2. I worry that playing to your outs feels like it pushes towards coming up with the best end-to-end strategy for success one can get, even if unlikely^[1]. My guess is it's too hard to make robust end-to-end strategies and a lot more plans should like "well, we're better off if we have decent mechanististic interpretability" or "it's more dignified if we at least talked to the governments", even though those aren't whole plans. I'm not confident about this though.

3. This approach says don't aim for an achievable less desirable goal (dignity), stay focused on the thing you actually want and pursue it despite the odds. I am skeptical that many people can in fact both assign very low odds to something working and being motivated. Though perhaps there is a substitution of "my goal is to play to my outs as well as possible", which really does feel like dignity points by another name (which is fine and good).

Emotionally Confronting a Probably-Doomed World: Against Motivation Via Dignity Points (TurnTrout) [LW · GW] 

The first part of this article responds to how I suspect some people reacted to that post, while the second part is my take on the post itself.

This post sure is in the genre of pep talk. For how much I agree with post, I don't like the vibe. It feels like the "denial" response to reality rather than a "make room for reality" motion that I advocate.

A search for dignified plans is different from a search for plans which get my mother out of the damn vault. 

I think this is only true if you're bad at making dignified plans. 

Something to ponder, when my wife was diagnosed with cancer, I did many things out of the motivation that if she died (she didn't, five years on is fine), then I wouldn't want to look back, think of something I could have done that might have helped yet hadn't done.

 I can imagine that same attitude working for the end of human civilization were it to be the case I could look back afterwards. I'm not sure if this is a form of "dignity maximization" and a point in Eliezer's favor or something more like Turntrout, or some nonobvious third thing.

I’m not going to waste my time searching for dignified plans (which maximize humanity's probability of survival). Because I do have a mother in that vault, and a father, and a brother. In fact, there’s a whole damn planet in there. It’s my home, and it’s yours, too. And if we do stare down defeat together—let’s make that remaining time valiant and exciting and awesome.

I'm in favor of valiance, excitement and awesomeness, yet this passage still feels very weird to me. Very "I'll defy the odds". Maybe human psychologies are quite different but for anyone who feels like this is their attitude, I'd encourage them to just sit with their doom estimates, feel them, and hold off on the "fight". Maybe that's unnecessary, but this feels very Struggle territory [? · GW] to me.

Or in others words, TurnTrout is nailing the "commit to value" part, but the somber "acceptance" is required too.

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A Way To Be Okay (Duncan Sabien) [LW · GW] 

I really like this essay, and might even if only because Duncan is a skilled writer. It feels like I can get his approach from his essay more so than most of the other pieces.

There's similarity to my own approach in continuing to live according to your values and living according to your values no matter the situation you're in, a way better explained than I did.

There's a move that multiple of the essays seem to be discussing (if not agreeing with) around perhaps treating your goal as different, i.e. the goal isn't survive (impossible!) but to make the most progress towards surviving as possible and then feel good because though you died, it was with slightly less likelihood.

I am not sure if I count for advocating for this or not. I think possibly in a similar manner to Duncan, I don't think the world being very doomed changes fundamentally what you're doing. I think one should always feels satisfaction from living according to one's values and be trying to maximize value – doom doesn't change that.

In the top comment [LW(p) · GW(p)], Logan suggests that one version of this strikes them as pretty self-deceptive. Logan didn't elaborate but perhaps the charge one might make is around the "victory conditions". Changing your victory conditions because you can't achieve them feels maybe self-deceptive? I don't know that Duncan suggests that. In any case, as above, I don't think living in a doomed world changes the value function at all. It changes strategy, perhaps, but you know, the utility function is not up for grabs [? · GW]. 

 

Another Way to Be Okay (Gretta Duleba) [LW · GW]

Good essay, not that long, recommend. Gretta hits the same notes as I do regarding Acceptance, Agency, Striving, etc. though in less depth. The advice on actually grieving [LW · GW] is good. Ant vs Grasshopper is an interesting metaphor.

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Being at peace with Doom (Johannes C. Mayer) [LW · GW]

This is an interesting one in that it both bears similarity to my own philosophy of "making space for the feelings" but also is foreign and I'm not sure I get it or know how to do it.

You can be at peace even when thinking the world is doomed. And while at peace you can still work against that Doom, even while being aware that nothing you do will make a difference. I believe there are states of mind like this that can be inhabited by humans.

Here I am not going to argue for [LW · GW] imminent [LW · GW] doom, or that nothing that you do matters. Rather, I want to point out that even when you believe in the dire circumstance of imminent unpreventable doom, it is possible to be at peace, even while working hard against the doom. Even while believing this to be futile. This is a possible state of mind for a human being.

...

I didn't achieve this by pushing the doominess out of my mind, or by redefining success as getting as far as possible (getting as much dignity as possible). Instead I was in a state of peace while contemplating the doom, with the relevant considerations plainly laid out in my mind. I think to achieve this you need to stop wanting the doominess to go away. And you need to stop grasping for straws of hope.

In my experience and also according to books on the topic, if you stop Struggling against negative emotions and let them be, then sometimes they stop being as unpleasant. However, if you are trying to Accept and not Struggle against your negative emotions so that they aren't as bad....then you are still technically Struggling and not tolerating your emotions. Kinda. It's weird and seems to work anyways, sometimes, for me.

Separately, I'm not sure I want to be at peace? Meta-peace, yes. At peace with my unpleasant doom emotions, yes. But the world is in a bad way and it feels appropriate to feel bad about it. So weirdly I both feel bad, but also endorse that to a fair degree and only want to stop feeling bad because the world got better.

On net, I mostly feel like I don't understand well enough what Johannes is reporting/advocating well enough to say whether I think it's good or not.

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Here's the exit. (Valentine) [LW · GW] 

Valentine is a performer with a penchant for the dramatic and theatrical. This piece is in line with that and opens as if Valentine is dismissing fears of AI x-risk as something like a memetic virus in the LessWrong community.

In fact, Valentine is open to AI x-risk being real, he just wants to assert that before you can productively think about and help with AI x-risk, you have to overcome/escape the feelings of stress, anxiety, panic, terror, emergency, etc. 

While I don't love the rhetorical strategy and am not sure I believe that overcoming the negative feelings is a strict blocker of productivity, Valentine actually gives advice here that seems pretty good.

The advice feels very congruent with my own advocacy of Acceptance and Not Struggling. I don't like every last word, but Valentine offers depth and gets closer to being a practical guide.

I like these paragraphs:

If your body's emergency mobilization systems are running in response to an issue, but your survival doesn't actually depend on actions on a timescale of minutes, then you are not perceiving reality accurately.

and

I sort of want to underline that "in your body" part a bazillion times. This is a spot I keep seeing rationalists miss — because the preferred recreational drug here is disembodiment via intense thinking. You've got to be willing to come back, again and again, to just feeling your body without story. Notice how you're looking at a screen, and can feel your feet if you try, and are breathing. Again and again.

It's also really, really important that you do this kindly. It's not a matter of forcing yourself to feel what's present all at once. You might not even be able to find the true underlying fear! Part of the effect of this particular "drug" is letting the mind lead. Making decisions based on mental computations. And kind of like minds can get entrained to porn, minds entrained to distraction via apocalypse fixation will often hide their power source from their host.

 Read it with a few grains of salt. Extract the good parts.

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Mainstream Advice

Given how easy it is these days, I'd be remiss in writing a guide to confronting doom without a cursory look at whether the wider world had useful things to say. Here is a link to my OpenAI DeepResearch run at anticipatory grief (before the person or self have died) and another run on grief in general.

Neither turned up anything novel or interesting for me. Though interesting to see that "dual-process" models have some popularity. The idea that in one moment you're grieving for what was/is about to be lost, and in another you're building anew, getting on with life, etc., and you oscillate between these. It's not exactly the "make space" + "pursue value" the way I put it, but it's adjacent at least if you squint.

A guess at why our civilization doesn't have more useful stuff to say here is that all the dominant religions speak of afterlives, meaning death isn't nearly so bad.

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I separately did a search on Perplexity and found two books that look interesting.

1. How to Live When You Could Be Dead
   1. this is about a 35-year-old woman diagnosed with terminal bowel cancer and how she copes with that.
2. When Breath Becomes Air
   1. same as first book but for 35-year-old neurosurgeon diagnosed with terminal stage 4 lung cancer. His case has the added interest of being flipped from doctor to patient, maybe.

I haven't read either apart from the a little bit of the first. Something about the vibe seems good. She's confronting that she's going to die but doing the thing of "I have a life to live" ("I'm going to get all the value I can"). I hope to read it and report back.

1. ^{^}

   Justis Mills who reviewed this post commented as a MtG player, playing to his outs might look like deciding to bank on a 10% event followed by an independent 30% chance in order to win, which feels very end-to-end'y.

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