[Link] Musk's non-missing mood

One of his main steps was founding OpenAI, whose charter looks like a questionable decision now from an AI Safety standpoint (as they push capabilities of language models and reinforcement learning forward, while driving their original safety team away) and looked fishy to me even at the time (simply because more initiatives make coordination harder).

I agree that Musk takes AI risk seriously, and I understand the "try something" mentality. But I suspect he founded OpenAI because he didn't trust a safety project he didn't have his hands on himself; then later he realized OpenAI wasn't working as he hoped, so he drifted away to focus on Neuralink.

I feel like the linked post is extolling the virtue of something that is highly unproductive and self-destructive: using your internal grim-o-meter to measure the state of the world/future. As Nate points out in his post, this is a terrible idea. Maybe Musk can be constantly grim while being productive on AI Alignment, but from my experience, people constantly weighted down by the shit that happens don't do creative research -- they get depressed and angsty. Even if they do some work, they burnout way more often.

That being said, I agree that it makes sense for people really involved in this topic to freak out from time to time (happens to me). But I don't want to make freaking out the thing that every Alignment researcher feels like they have to signal. 

My best guess is that this "missing mood" effect is a defensive reaction to a lack of plausible actionable steps: upon first being convinced people get upset/worried/sad, but they fail to find anything useful to do about the problem, so they move on and build up some psychological defenses against it.

The idea of a missing mood, from following the link to Bryan Caplan's article, seems to amount to two ideas:

1. "I think it has more costs than other people think, so even if someone thinks the benefits outweigh the costs, if they're not taking the costs seriously enough, they have a missing mood."
2. "I think it has more benefits than other people think, so even if someone thinks the costs outweigh the benefits, if they're not taking the benefits seriously enough, they have a missing mood."

These are, of course, two sides of the same coin and have the same problem: You're assuming that the first half of your position (costs in case 1, benefits in case 2) is not only correct, but so obviously correct that nobody can reasonably disagree with it; if someone acts as they don't believe it, there must be some other explanation. This is better than assuming your entire position is correct, but it's still poor epistemic hygeine. For instance, both the military hawks example (case 1) and the immigration example (case 2) fail if your opponent doesn't value non-Americans very much, so there are lower costs or benefits, respectively.

Beware of starting with disagreement and concluding insincerity.

I'll make an analogy here as to get around the AI-worship induced gut reactions:

I think most people are fairly convinced there isn't a moral imperative beyond their own life, as in, even if behaving as if your own life is the ultimate driver of moral value is wrong and ineffective, from a logical standpoint it is, once your conscious experience ends everything ends. 

I'm not saying this is certain, it may be that the line between conscious states is so blurry that continuity between sleep and awakenes is basically 0, or as much as that between you can other completely different humans (which will be alive even once you die and will keep on flourishing). It may be that there is a ghost in the machine under whatever metaphysical framework you want... but, if I had to take a bet, I'd say something like ... 15,40,60% chance that once you close your eyes is over, the universe is done for.

I think many people accept this viewpoint, but most of them don't spend even a moment thinking about anti-aging, even those like myself that do, aren't to concerned about death in a "mood" sense. Why would you be? It's inevitable, like, yeah, your actions might contribute to averting death by 0.x% if you're very lucky and so you should pursue that area because... well, nothing better to do, right? But it makes no sense to concern oneself about death in an emotional way since it's likely coming anyway.

After all the purpose of life is living, and if you're not living because you're worrying about death you lost, even in the case where you were able to defeat death, you still lost, you didn't live, or less metaphorically you lived a life of suffering, or of unmeet potential.

Nor does it help to be parallelized by the fear of death every waking moment of one's life. It will likely make you less able to destory the very evil you are oposing.

Such is the case with every potential horrible inevitability in life, even if it is "absolute" in it's bad-ness, being afraid of it will not make ir easier to avoid and it might ultimately defeat the purpose of avoiding it, which is the happiness of you and the people you care about, since all of those will be more miserable if you are paralleized by fear.

So even if whatever fake model you had assumed a 99.9% chance of being destroyed by HAL or whatever in 10 years from now, it would still be the most sensible course of action to not get too emotional about the whole thing.

Is death by AI really any more dire than the default outcome, i.e. the slow and agonizing decay of the body until cancer/Alzheimer's delivers the final blow?