FWIW, I asked Claude for its opinion today. It thought that new communication media/dynamics (A7, B14, B15 along with B8 & B9) were likely to blame, and that survivorship bias (A12) probably also plays a role.

Claude also suggested I add "The collapse of shared epistemic authorities" as another hypothesis, similar to but distinct from B15: "It's not just that gatekeepers died; it's that there's no longer any institution or process that a broad majority accepts as capable of settling factual questions. When people disagree about facts, there's no court of appeal. This makes all disagreement look like stupidity from the other side's perspective, because there's no shared standard by which to adjudicate it."

I'd recommend putting some effort into strengthening the virtues, as these have a good track record over time, are flexible across many situations, and have application in multiple areas of life. Specific skills (like e.g. "learn to code") are more brittle in times of rapid change and less broadly-applicable. The virtues are also remarkably neglected in our society at the moment, which means that by developing them in yourself you can differentiate yourself from the crowd. They are also a way to be more self-sufficient in governing your life satisfaction: less dependent on unstable and stormy societal structures and unreliable external goods.

"How are you coping with the end of the world?" journalists sometimes ask me... The journalist is imagining a story that is about me, and about whether or not I am going insane...

Seems too cynical. I can imagine myself as a journalist asking you that question not because I'm hoping to write a throw-away cliche of an article, but because if I take seriously what you're saying about AGI risk, you're on the cutting edge of coping with that, and the rest of us will have to cope with that eventually, and we might have an easier time of it if we can learn from your path.

This would be more powerful with some examples, e.g. "we've all learned that Lamarck thought species evolved by passing on acquired traits, but Darwin told us that species can't evolve that way but do so through selection on preinherited traits; but here's a quote from Origin of Species in which Darwin explicitly endorses Lamarckian selection." Repeat for Kuhn, Kant, etc.

This inevitably involves getting rid of detritus that no longer serves you, but that’s only in service of pursuing your ideal life

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

The balance between rights and obligations has probably been understood from time immemorial.

Perhaps, but your understanding is not the understanding I'm familiar with.

I've understood this balance to be something more intimate: If I have the right to live, you have the obligation not to take my life. If I have the right to speak, you have the obligation not to muzzle me. If I have the right to healthcare, somebody has the obligation to provide me with that healthcare. Or things along those lines.

Your formulation, in which there are a set of possible rights and obligations and you need to fill one pocket with rights and the other pocket with obligations in such a way that you can still walk a straight line, is some other species of animal.

Things I'd like to know:

1. What is the baseline things-going-tits-up-mentally rate for people similarly situated to those who take on meditation, and how does that compare to the rate for people who begin to meditate? There's a smell of "the plural of anecdote is data" about this post. People at high risk for mental illness can go around the bend while meditating? Well, they can go around the bend watching TV or chatting with Claude too. How much more dangerous is meditation than the typical range of alternative activities?
2. There's bad, and then there's Bad. Ask a reformed alcoholic whether there were any negative side effects of giving up alcohol, and they'll tell you it was a bit like an anal probe of the soul with the devil's pitchfork for a month or two at least. Is that a cautionary tale that should steer you away from sobriety, or just par for that otherwise worthy course? Some of the practitioners of meditation (esp. in the Buddhist tradition) think we're most of us addicts to the chimerical delights of the senses, and that of course it'll be a struggle to overcome that. FWIW.
3. Is this like psychedelics, where if you take them in the context of a long-standing ritual practice with lots of baked-in wisdom, things will probably go okay or at least they'll know how to give you a soft pillow to land on if you get too far out there; but if you take them in some arbitrary context there's no telling how it'll turn out? How do outcomes look for people who meditate in an institutional context with feedback from a seasoned veteran vs. those who meditate based on e.g. enthusiastic blog posts?

Not saying you're wrong, but answers to things like this would help me know what to do with your observations.

I'm pretty sure I'm ontologically clueless in the way you describe. There are some very fundamental things in my worldview that I suspect are misapprehensions but that I don't know how to confidently replace with anything better. The yet-unimagined right answer to any of them could potentially knock out the pillars holding up much of what I think I know. It's unsettling when I pause to think about it, but I muddle through.

Might be worth mentioning Kuhn's "paradigm shifts" as examples of branches of knowledge jumping from one local maximum to another one, and having to resort their conceptual categories thereafter.

Alasdair MacIntyre's histories of ethical philosophy also highlight how sometimes when a field jumps from one local maximum to another, it brings along old conceptual categories that no longer can find a place but they continue to haunt as weird, ghostly apparitions.