Is #1 and #2 all that different though? They at least seem to be part of the same response, at least for me, in the way that I typically deal with thinking about things like death. I avoid the topic or distract myself from the implications only because I have largely accepted the inevitability of the outcome.
But I would also push back a little on the way you describe them as 'cognitive distortions', or "comforting stories designed to reduce dissonance rather than finding an accurate model of reality."
I don't really find much comfort in accepting the fact that I'm going to die. But it is almost certainly going to happen, so why not distract myself from it while there are things for alive me to do here now?
Most of all though, I don't see how accepting the fact that you are going to die (#1), or avoiding the topic of death (#2) are an agent avoiding finding an accurate model of reality. Is accepting the fact that death is inevitable not in fact the most accurate model of reality? What even are the other options?
I would argue resorting to something like forcing yourself to do your best to convert to religious belief so that you might take comfort in an afterlife would be far more distorting of reality. And placing full belief in life-extending technologies being developed within our lifespans—and usable before we die—seems to me just as much 'misplaced, optimistically-distortive cope' as anything (unless you are genuinely already a domain expert in life sciences or biochemistry and understand the literature well enough to parse claims life-extending technology being viable within the next few decades).
To be clear, I like your model of studying the issue of how we interpret successionism in the same way we currently approach natural death. I just think your description of the possible convergent outcomes as cognitive distortions is not that convincing or complete.
I think you're right that the element of wanting to believe is a big factor possibly in susceptibility to spirals, but I'm not sure that manic individuals can meaningfully choose in any way how long they stay in a manic episode or that finding it fun is what makes them likelier to stay in that state for longer.
Sorry can you be a bit more specific? You said GPT-4o ignored the prompt but then you said the rest of the time it say "yes" and asked how it could be of assistance. How many times did it reject the prompt and what proportion of it was 'the rest' where it say yes?
I have no candidates but I agree with this wholeheartedly. I think my ideal future is precisely to pause progress on AI development at the level we currently have now, and to appreciate all of the incredible things and good that the current generation of tools are already able to accomplish. Even compared to just where we were half a decade ago (2020), the place where we are now with respect to coding agents and image generation and classification feels like incredible sci-fi.
I think this would be a really important thing to work on: trying to find potent memes that can be used to spread this idea of cashing out now before we inevitably lose our gains to the house.