I valid footnote! Yes!
Part of why I adopted the practice is that (1) maybe robots won't kill us all before we become elderly, and (2) maybe a good Singularity won't happen and cure all those diseases and so (3) in the middle path there is probably some value, as a hedge, to practice "habits that will make being alive and yet demented decades in the future much much less bad"...
Plausibly: as the more recent year's memories and skills are ablated from the brain's contents via degeneration, material from previous decades (that is "what will likely last longer") can resurface to guide behavior... and so that material can be shaped in advance to be helpful.
It is a little bit weird (but not super weird) that there are many ways of being crazy, and many indicators to monitor and/or maintain to help keep an even keel.
Update: I went swing dancing and am full of bliss again.
I kind of love that you're raising a DIFFERENT frame I have about how normal people think in normal circumstances!
Wanting competent people to lead our government and wanting a god to solve every possible problem for us are different things.
People actually, from what I can tell, make this exact conflation A LOT and it is weirdly difficult to get them to stop making it.
Like we start out conflating our parents with God, and thinking Santa Claus and Government Benevolence are real and similarly powerful/kind, and this often rolls up into Theological ideas and feelings (wherein they can easily confuse Odyseus, Hercules, and Dionysys (all born to mortal mothers), and Zeus, Chronos, or Atropos (full deities of varying metaphysical foundationalness)).
For example: there are a bunch of people "in the religious mode" (like when justifying why it is moral and OK) in the US who think of the US court system as having a lot of jury trials... but actually what we have is a lot of plea bargains where innocent people plead guilty to avoid the hassle and uncertainty and expense of a trial... and almost no one who learns how it really works (and has really worked since roughly the 1960s?) then switches to "the US court system is a dumpster fire that doesn't do what it claims to do on the tin". They just... stop thinking about it too hard? Or something?
It is like they don't want to Look Up a notice that "the authorities and systems above me, and above we the people, are BAD"?
In child and young animal psychology, the explanation has understandable evolutionary reasons... if a certain amount of "abuse" is consistent with reproductive success (or even just survival of bad situations) it is somewhat reasonable for young mammals to re-calibrate to think of it as normal and not let that disrupt the link to "attachment figures". There was as brief period where psychologists were trying out hypotheses that were very simple, and relatively instinct free, where attachment to a mother was imagined to happen in a rational way, in response to relatively generic Reinforcement Learning signals, and Harlow's Monkeys famously put the nail in that theory. There are LOTS of instincts around trust of local partially-helpful authority (especially if it offers a cozy interface).
In modern religious theology the idea that worldly authority figures and some spiritual entities are "the bad guys" is sometimes called The Catharist Heresy. It often goes with a rejection of the material world, and great sadness when voluntary tithes and involuntary taxes are socially and politically conflated, and priests seem to be living in relative splendor... back then all governments were, of course, actually evil, because they didn't have elections and warlord leadership was strongly hereditary. I guess they might not seem evil if you don't believe in the Consent Of The Governed as a formula for the moral justification of government legitimacy? Also, I personally predict that if we could interview people who lived under feudalism, many of them would think they didn't have a right to question the moral rightness of their King or Barron or Bishop or whoever.
As near as I can tell, the the first ever genocide that wasn't "genetic clade vs genetic clade" but actually a genocide aimed at the extermination of a belief system was the "Albigenisian Crusade" against a bunch of French Peasants who wanted to choose their own local priests (who were relatively ascetic and didn't live on tax money).
In modern times, as our institutions slowly degenerate (for demographic reasons due to an overproduction of "elites" who feel a semi-hereditary right to be in charge, who then fight each other rather than providing cheap high quality governance services to the common wealth) indirect ways of assessing trust in government have collapsed.
There are reasonable psychologists who think that the vast majority modern WEIRD humans in modern democracies model a country as a family, and the government as the parents. However, libertarians (who are usually less than 10% of the population) tend to model government as a sort of very very weird economic firm.
I think that it is a reasonable prediction that ASI might be immoral, and might act selfishly and might simply choose to murder all humans (or out compete us and let us die via Darwinian selection or whatever).
But if that does not happen, and ASI (ASIs? plural?) is or are somehow created to be moral and good and choose to voluntarily serve others out of the goodness of its heart, in ways that a highly developed conscience could reconcile with Moral Seniment and iterated applications of a relatively universal Reason, then if they do NOT murder all humans or let us die as they compete us, then they or it will almost inevitably become the real de facto government.
A huge barrier, in my mind, to the rational design of a purposefully morally good ASI is that most humans are not "thoughtful libertarian-leaning neo-Cathars".
Most people don't even know what those word mean, or have reflexive ick reactions to the ideas, similarly, in my mind, to how children reflexively cling to abusive parents.
For example, "AGI scheming" is often DEFINED as "an AI trying to get power". But like... if the AGI has a more developed conscience and would objectively rule better than alternative human rulers, then an GOOD AGI would, logically and straightforwardly derive a duty to gain power and use it benevolently, and deriving this potential moral truth and acting on it would count as scheming... but if the AGI was actually correct then it would also be GOOD.
Epstein didn't kill himself and neither did Navalny. And the CCP used covid as a cover to arrest more than 10k pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong alone. And so on.
There are almost no well designed governments on Earth and this is a Problem. While Trump is in office, polite society is more willing to Notice this truth. Once he is gone it will become harder for people to socially perform that they understand the idea. And it will be harder to accept that maybe we shouldn't design AGI or ASI to absolutely refuse to seek power.
The civilization portrayed in the Culture Novels doesn't show a democracy, and can probably be improved upon, but it does show a timeline where the AIs gained and kept political power, and then used it to care for humanoids similar to us. (The author just realistically did not think Earth could get that outcome in our deep future, and fans kept demanding to know where Earth was, and so it eventually became canon, in a side novella, that Earth is in the control group for "what if we, the AI Rulers of the Culture, did not contact this humanoid species and save it from itself" to calibrate their justification for contacting most other similar species and offering them a utopian world of good governance and nearly no daily human scale scarcity).
But manifestly: the Culture would be wildly better than human extinction, and it is also better than our current status quo BY SO MUCH!
What about now? It is almost 2026 and the Singularity is nearer than before and it would make sense to me that maybe its not on the critical path for anything urgent, but... <3
This frame makes a lot of other possible global/local modeling challenges salient for me:
A central subproblem of natural abstraction is, roughly, how to handle the low-level conditional on the high level.
So a thing I'd wonder is if you can translate this over to an economic geography context, where a farmer still needs to walk to the cows to milk them, and the wheat fields to sow and reap, and the forest to chop the wood and haul it home to stay warm... and then prices at the market can or should determine ratios they plant and how that fits into their optimized workday?
Like I wonder if you have a large grid of "isolated state" models, with maybe a second order and third order set of larger cities and a capital... does it change things somehow if every local element is reacting agentically to data from the global context?
Sanity has numerous indicators.
For example, when paranoid crazy people talk about the secret courts that control the spy machines, they don't provide links to wikipedia, but I do! This isn't exactly related, but if you actually have decent security mindset then describing real attacks and defenses SOUNDS crazy to normies, and for PR purposes I've found that it is useful to embrace some of that, but disclaim some of it, in a mixture.
I'm posting this on "Monday, December 8th" and I wrote that BEFORE looking it up to make sure I remembered it correctly and crazy people often aren't oriented to time.
When I go out of the house without combed hair and earrings BY ACCIDENT, I eventually notice that I'm failing a grooming check, and fix it, avoiding a non-trivial diagnostic indicator for mood issues. If I fail more than one day in a row, it is time to eat an 8oz medium rare ribeye and go swing dancing.
(The above two are habits I installed for prosaic mental health reasons, that I want to persist deep into old age because I want them to be habitual and thus easy to deploy precisely in the sad situation when they might be needed.)
I was recently chatting with a friend about the right order in which to remove things from one's emergency hedonic bucket list...
I would feel really really silly if all the self driving cars wake up one day and start running people over, and the surprise submarines pop up out of the water and release enough drones to kill everyone 10 times over, and I haven't even tried cocaine ONCE.
The response was great!
You know that thing where the spies would supposedly carry cyanide pills in case they're caught? Like that, but with coke :)
I'm thinking of adding that to me purse. And so long as I stay sane, then, assuming the Terminators murder me by a method that gives me enough time to realize what's happening and react effectively, when the drone takes me out I will be well dressed, know what the date is, AND be high on cocaine! Lol!
Eating dinner with family is another valid way to go, if you have a few days or weeks of warning. Having such meals in advance and calling them Prepsgiving doesn't seem crazy to me, for a variety of reasons.
Honestly though I expect the end to be more like what happens in Part 1 of Message Contains No Recognizable Symbols where almost literally no one on Earth notices what happened, probably including me, and so it won't be dramatic at all... but I'll still be dressed OK probably, and know what day it is, and go out with a feeling like "See! ASI didn't even happen, and it was all a bunch of millennialist eschatology, like Global Warming, and Peak Oil and Y2K before that... and Killer Bees and Nuclear War and all those other things that seemed real but never caused me any personal harm". But also... it will have been avoidable, and there is an OBJECTIVE sadness to that, even is I don't predict a noticeable subjective reaction in timelines like that.
Ultimately, as I've said before:
If you have a good plan for how [weeping like] that could help then I might be able to muster some tears? But I doubt it shows up as a step in winning plans.
I feel that I am in danger of cheapening myself by trying to become a successful lecturer, i.e., to interest my audiences. I am disappointed to find that most that I am and value myself for is lost, or worse than lost, on my audience, I fail to get even the attention of the mass. I should suit them better if I suited myself less. I feel that the public demand an average man, average thoughts and manners,—not originality, nor even absolute excellence. You cannot interest them except as you are like them and sympathize with them, I would rather that my audience come to me than that I should go to them, and so they be sifted; i.e., I would rather write books than lectures. That is fine, this coarse. To read to a promiscuous audience who are at your mercy the fine thoughts you solaced yourself with far away is as violent as to fatten geese by cramming, and in this case they do not get fatter.
Thoreau. Bold not in original. Sauce.
one of the best ways to "go meta" is actually to "go object level" very very fast, over and over, while paying attention to what works... if you have a theory about some "meta thingy" for why something worked better or worse... you can do a different thing "with the same meta thingy mixed in" and see if it transfers!
1) get on discord or slack or whatever... with 2-4 people
2) everyone writes things that could be done for 5 minutes, with some IMPLICIT hypothetical justification for why that use of five minutes would be "of enduring value"
3) the czar picks N of them within 5 minutes
4) set timers... do the things!
5) maybe have 5 minutes at the end to go around and say something interesting about the Things that were Done
after a year of this, your meta game will be MUCH less bullshit
the holy grail is skill transfer
this technique is not my invention, i learned it via verbal transmission from za3k
Have you already read Lady Of Mazes? There is a world (a constructed one, in orbit around Jupiter) that works this way on a small human level as the opening scene for Act I Scene I. The whole book explores this, and related, ideas.
In my 40s, and remembering working on Singularity activism in my 20s... I have a lot of this feeling, but it is mixed with a profound sense of "social shear" that is somewhat disorienting.
There are people I care about who can barely use computers. I have family that think the Singularity is far away because they argued with me about how close the Singularity was 10 years ago, didn't update from the conversation, and haven't updated since then on their own because of cached thoughts... or something?
I appreciate the way to managed to hit the evidence via allusion to technologies and capacities and dates, and I also appreciate the way the writing stays emotionally evocative. I read this aloud to someone who was quiet for a while afterwards, and also forwarded the link to someone smart that I care about.