I don't want to talk about AI

I think it's admirable to say things like "I don't want to [do the thing that this community holds as near-gospel as a good thing to do.]" I also think the community should take it seriously that anyone feels like they're punished for being intellectually honest, and in general I'm sad that it seems like your interactions with EAs/rats about AI have been unpleasant.

That said...I do want to push back on basically everything in this post and encourage you and others in this position to spend some time seeing if you agree or disagree with the AI stuff.

• Assuming that you think you'd look into it in a reasonable way, then you'd be much more likely to reach a doomy conclusion if it were actually true. If it were true, it would be very much in your interest — altruistically and personally — to believe it. In general, it's just pretty useful to have more information about things that could completely transform your life. If you might have a terminal illness, doesn't it make sense to find out soon so you can act appropriately even if it's totally untreatable?
• I also think there are many things for non-technical people to do on AI risk! For example, you could start trying to work on the problem, or if you think it's just totally hopeless w/r/t your own work, you could work less hard and save less for retirement so you can spend more time and money on things you value now. 

For the "what if I decide it's not a big deal conclusion":

• For points #1 through #3, I'm basically just surprised that you don't already experience this with the take "I don't want to learn about or talk about AI" such that it would get worse if your take was "I have a considered view that AI x-risk is low"! To be honest and a little blunt, I do judge people a bit when they have bad reasoning either for high or low levels of x-risk, but I'm pretty sure I judge them a lot more positively when they've made a good-faith effort at figuring it out.
• For point #3 and #4, idk, Holden, Joe Carlsmith, Rob Long, and possibly I (among others) are all people who have (hopefully) contributed something valuable to the fight against AI risk with social science or humanities backgrounds, so I don't think this means you wouldn't be persuasive, and it seems incredibly valuable for the community if more people think things through and come to this opinion. The consensus that AI safety is a huge deal currently means we have hundreds of millions of dollars, hundreds of people (many of whom are anxious and/or depressed because of this consensus), and dozens of orgs focused on it. Imagine if this is wrong — we'd be inflicting so much damage!

fwiw, I don't think you should feel obligated to talk about or come to an inside view on AI. 

It seems like this post has an implicit point of something like "I feel pressured to have opinions about AI and that sucks", but I'm not entirely sure of your frame on that. 

I definitely support people only thinking much about AI if they want to, and/or it feels tractably useful and psychologically safe. There's maybe an implicit competing access needs thing of "maybe many EA meetups will have a bunch of people talking about AI, and that makes those meetups feel less friendly", and if your experience is something like that, that sucks and I'm sad about it but I'm not sure what to change. I do think AI is an important topic for other people to be able to think and discuss in more detail.

But, like, I support you having a social script like "I don't think much about AI, it's not my specialization and it doesn't feel very tractable for me to think about and I find it fairly [distressing?/intense?/difficult-to-think-about?], I'm focused on [areas you're focused on]." And if someone keeps pressuring you to engage on it, idk, tell them I told them to back off. :P

This is a good motivating example for the mental move of learning things without changing your mind. This should be an OK thing to do and to intend as a serious or even default possibility. The option not to [LW · GW] makes changing your mind more available.

That seems perfectly reasonable! Enjoy the sunshine while you still can.

This makes sense, and it's an unusual conclusion.

There is some middle ground to thinking about it enough to have a real inside view, and thinking about it enough to have a better-than-average opinion. I think that better than average opinion would be something like "there's a pretty good chance of AI becoming really dangerous in the not too distant future. We're putting very little effort into making it safe, so it would probably be smarter to spend a lot more effort on that".

I think that's what you'd come to after a little research, because that's where I'm at after a whole bunch of research. The top minds on safety (that is, people who've actually thought about it, not just experts in other domains that run their mouths) disagree on a lot, but they almost universally agree on that much.

Edit: my point there is that you might do a modest amount of good after a very small amount of time invested. And I don't think remaining willfully ignorant is going to make you happier about AI risk. Society at large is increasingly concerned, and we'll only continue to become more concerned as AI has a larger impact year by year. So you're going to be stuck in those conversations anyway, with people pressuring you to be concerned. You might as well know something as be completely ignorant, particularly since it sounds like your current loose belief is that the risk might be very, very high.