Raemon is correct in surmising the thing I was pointing to.
mr-hire, I think both kinds of statements exist and I agree it can sometimes be useful to imagine what things a community as a group can do.
I wasn't complaining about pointing-out-problems-without-solutions. Not everyone who makes "The community should . . ." statements are making a top down argument, but I think some are and I expect people thinking of entities in charge to become increasingly frustrated by the lack of top down coordination.
Recognizing the lack of top down coordination won't solve the problems they care about immediately, but might allow them to feel less angry and/or pursue the thing they're looking for in a different fashion.
I often see people making statements that sound to me like . . . "The entity in charge of bay area rationality should enforce these norms." or "The entity in charge of bay area rationality is bad for allowing x to happen."
There is no entity in charge of bay area rationality. There's a bunch of small groups of people that interact with each other sometimes. They even have quite a bit of shared culture. But no one is in charge of this thing, there is no entity making the set of norms for rationalists, there is no one you can outsource the building of your desired group to.
You mentioned self help. I think care less arguments exist, but because "caring less" sounds kind of like "be a shittier person" things get phrased as take care of yourself or "what do we prioritize here". In favor of caring less about some things so we can do more of the things we want to care more about.
Probably not so hot take.
The Doomsday Clock is an out of date metaphor and should be replaced.
I think it was valuable during the cold war for the doomsday clock to be a representation of risk that everyone could easily recognize and talk about, but I think it is now likely doing more harm than good.
Bad Things: -Trying to include many types of risks: The doomsday clock was originally a representation of the risk of large scale nuclear war, now it includes climate, biorisk, and AI. Tracking progress and risk in these fields is complex. Tracking them all at once it's not really clear what increase or decrease in the clock means or if you should have trust in the risk evaluations from these disparate fields. (Oh, also looks like Anders Sandberg already said something like this)
-Adding too much granularity (now with seconds!): This seems like a move because they want it to move forward to give people a sense of urgency, but it was already real close to midnight. Probably it should have been moved much further away from midnight when the cold war ended and increase or decrease depending on stability of current nuclear deals.
Qualities I'd like in new symbols of potential global catastrophes: -Representing specific global risks -Easily explainable what heuristics/data are being used to alter the state of the new symbol -Simple Representation