The problem is with some things, like OCD, you can constantly seek reassurance over your obsession, as a compulsion. Like, “oh god do I have this disease, let me look up the symptoms over and over to try and convince myself I don’t have it.” Or “I have to knock on wood three times so my family is safe.”
My anxiety stems from my OCD, and ever since I first saw Yudkowsky’s podcast saying we were all going to die, I’ve been unable to go even one day without thinking about this. I’ve read a lot about alignment and AGI development (whether alignment is hard or easy, AGI timelines, are we close, etc.) but since I don’t have real knowledge and expertise in this domain, I feel that I need reassurance (typical OCD trait) from someone that does that I’m not going to die soon.
With OCD, even logical explanations as to why your obsessions or anxieties are not real or unfounded can’t always get rid of them. I know knocking on wood doesn’t do anything. That doesn’t mean during a flare up it’s not incredibly hard to resist. Or I know logically I don’t have rabies. That doesn’t mean it’s not hard to convince yourself through massive jumps in logic that you do (something hit me at night, I know it was a small bug but your mind convinced yourself it was a bat that bit you).
My OCD goes through dormant periods, so I don’t go to therapy or take medication, but that podcast and reading through the list of lethalities and other stuff on LW ramped it up again. And I don’t know enough about AI/ML/DL to discount EY or that viewpoint in general. From what I’ve read online, a lot of people discount EY as not having a technical understanding of ML/DL, and his worries are unfounded and the assumptions he makes are unrealistic. But at the same time, I myself don’t have the expertise to truly determine if they’re right, so the doubt eats me up.
The last couple days I’ve found myself blocking AGI Doomers on Twitter, while trying to read Tweets from prominent people (Chollet, Hassabis, Sutskever, Ng, LeCun, etc.) in ML that these doomer takes are unfounded or blown out of proportion. Or going through their likes and seeing if they like any Tweets that are dismissive of doomerism that help me feel like those that actually research this stuff don’t worry about these things.
My mental model is that the whole “We hit AGI unknowingly, it somehow self improves exponentially fast until it’s able to figure out a way to kill us all (even if it doesn’t hate us” seems quite improbable, mostly the “the very first AGI or AGI proximate is able to vastly improve itself exponentially” part. But again, idk. So I look to the experts for reassurance.
Ultimately, this is probably going to make me delete Twitter. It’s turned into a massive crutch that has probably stolen 15-20 hours from me in the last week or so, and that’s not including all the reading, researching, video watching, etc. all this has caused me to go through. I thought I got over this earlier this week but my incessant browsing and reading on this topic has ramped up again. I feel like the only way I can deal with it is by getting to that point where I feel somewhat dismissive and relieved (oh this person says it’s bullshit and they’re knowledgeable) and then immediately delete Twitter. Like when four days ago Chollet said we aren’t close and doomer takes are primarily just Sci-fi and nothing more. I should’ve deleted it then. But now even rereading that tweet isn’t enough to give me relief.
So, yeah, that’s how this can turn into real anxiety that affects someone’s life. Luckily I know I’ll get over this eventually, probably to only have flare ups every now and then (small ones, not like this). I probably sound a little crazy, but I don’t feel like this episode will last long enough for me to go to therapy over, and honestly I just feel like I’m not really the “type” for therapy. It just doesn’t mesh with my mind and how I improve myself. Not that I have anything against therapy and think it’s great for many people, just probably not me.