There were 7 parts, and the last one actually addresses exactly the issue we're talking about:

https://aiascendant.substack.com/p/extropias-children-chapte... (and I still recommend all 7 parts)

It's hard for me to respond to the rest your comments, because I simply don't agree with the framing. To me I see a big trap where people read a lot of words, but don't connect those words to reality, which requires action.

If you only manipulate words (e.g. "intelligence" and "AGI" are big ones), then you're prone to believing in and reflecting illusions. He was upset that I wasn't upset.

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You didn't ask for advice, but you say you're not feeling good. I would draw an analogy to a friend who in 2017 was preoccupied with Trump possibly causing a nuclear war with North Korea. There were a lot of memes in the news about this.

Now certainly I couldn't say at the time that it was impossible. But looking back 6 years, I'm glad that I completely ignored it and just lived my life. And that isn't to say it's gone, and not real -- certainly something like that could happen in the future, given the volatile political situation. But it's simply out of my control. (And that's what I told my friend -- are you going to DO anything about it?)

Regardless of what you believe, I think if you just stop reading memes, and do other stuff instead, you won't regret it in 6 years.

I agree with the Substack in that rationalists can be curiously irrational when it comes to examining where they get their own beliefs. (Or maybe examining them in a "logical" way, but completely missing the obvious, common-sense fact -- like MacAskill writing an entire book about moral actions, while his life's work was funded by a criminal -- a close associate who he vouched for!)

Like EVERYONE ELSE, they are getting beliefs from their reptile brain ("world will definitely end"), and then they are CONFABULATING logical arguments on top to justify what the reptile brain wants.

And you can't really change your reptile brain's mind by "thinking about it" -- it responds more to actions and experiences than the neocortex. It definitely responds to social status and having friends, which can lead to cult-like behavior.

I'd say that humans have a "circuit" where they tend to believe the "average" of what people around them believe. So if you read a lot of "rationalist" stuff, you're going to believe it, even if's not grounded in experience, and there are gaping holes in the logic.

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The big trick I see a lot of "rationalist" writing is the same one used in the Bostrom book.

1. You state your premises in a page or so. Most of the premises are reasonable, but maybe one is vague or slightly wrong. You admit doubt. You come across as reasonable.

2. You spend 300 pages extrapolating wildly from those premises, creating entire worlds. You invent really fun ideas, like talking about a trilling trillion people, a trillion years into the future, across galaxies, and what they want.

You use one of those slightly vague premises, or maybe a play on a word like "intelligence", to make these extrapolations seem like logical deductions.

You overthink it. Other people who like overthinking like what you wrote.

You lack the sense of proportion that people who have to act must acquire -- people with skin the game.

Following this methodology is a good way to lead to self-contained thoughts, divorced from reality. The thoughts feed on themselves both individually and socially. If you're wrong, and you frequently are, you can just draw attention to some new fun ideas.

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Anyway, glad you have followed the project. Speaking from experience, I would suggest concretely to replace the rumination time with work on an open source project. If not coding, it could be testing or documentation, etc. Having a sense of achievement may make past negative thoughts of things far away seem silly.