Though I dislike polarizing against groups, something like this must be said to reset the narrative on Social Security. Social Security is structurally evil, economically negative-sum, intergenerational theft/divestment that isn't even in the genetic interest of boomers either.

I find this painful to read because: - A: I'm not a massive doomer, and yet I can layout multiple independent plausible paths to premature extinction (via bioweapons, mirror life, niche consumption, etc. due to short or long-term misalignment, or accident (if human fertility stays low and there aren't easy niches to return to high-tech society after the attrition of a high-mortality societal collapse). I can lay these out in progressively more concrete terms, talk about bottlenecks and supply chains, etc. -B: I think a lot of the work to do related to AI safety and security here makes sense even if extinction were not a potential risk. Losing control of the future to agents and individuals that do not share your interests at heart is sufficient massive reorienting threat. That is the clear, double digit percentage threat, which is more obvious than extinction, and could lead to extinction, but also many other not great directions. Hyping extinction risk as a way to get attention, without talking about higher probability existential (permanent) risks and intermediate (non-bioweapon) bottlenecks to those risks has not been adaptive for convincing people who only reason about high probability events. I have seen people talk to policy experts and successfully convince them of every premise short of extinction, and then grab defeat from the jaws of victory by talking about random weird shit with aliens rather than just saying extinction becomes a lot more likely when no people have any meaningful control over the circumstances of maintaining their environment, defense, or survival in general against competition from a far more effective optimizer. -C: I think I'm better psychologically adapted by having more normal friends outside their community. I don't think you'd see a post like this in response to visiting a room full of people with my psychology. OTOH, much of the cultiness may just be via the media and social punishment beating up on pro-social nerds the same way that bad cultures and unions engage in anti-social punishment. Good people that have been through much anti-social punishment may have some psychological issues. Nerds with issues are sometimes more likely to turn to rationality in the first place to fix their problems too of course. -D: The critic here is an astrologer... They probably are not be the most intellectually honest or deep thinker per say. I think the rationalists have been at times too trusting of dishonest people and too often due to their openness invited in psychopaths. At the same time, due to spending "weirdness points" unwisely at the same times they have been open, they make completely unnecessary enemies who then get to turn to the internet and make fun of them for their own social status games. I feel especially frustrated with Brangus and Aella types for this, who may convince gooners, but don't have the right social norms for the majority of a healthy society. -E: I do wish a larger proportion of their community lived relatively more adaptive normal lives, and could speak about the risks in more uncertain and specific term habitually, rather than in abstract terms. At the same time, I can hardly criticize them because we live in a world with such massive social decay that there are few pro-social groups that live adaptively enough to sustain themselves. (Which honestly should add a lot to the doomer narrative: how many accelerationists have enough kids to sustain their own lineage? I don't think the population of people above IQ 130 is still going up.).

This has been a deep repeated frustration of mine, because many of the higher probability problems are also eventually existential, once you start thinking about culture and survival of subsequent generations of people.

Lol

This is an interesting take, but then I also worry about far worse people engaging in coercive bargaining with the AI safety people.

I didn't realize before the degree to which social security is literally intergenerational theft. About a third of the benefits are *not* earned.