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Jun 8Liked by Étienne Fortier-Dubois

We write of what we know, we know death and decay, we do not know of eternity and forever growth.

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author

Très bien dit, mieux que ce que j'ai pu faire avec mon article!

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Jun 8Liked by Étienne Fortier-Dubois

Ah mais c’est à force de te livre depuis tant d’années que je peux développer des pensées sur divers sujet auquel je n’avais pas spontanément réfléchis avant ainsi que developper ma compréhension littéraire anglophone

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Jun 23Liked by Étienne Fortier-Dubois

It makes sense how "sometimes when you think too much about something you don’t want, you end up getting it" applies with regard to psychological things like habits or emotions, such as the examples in the tweet thread you linked, but it's not clear to me how this would concretely apply to doom scenarios such as AI.

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Whether such a phenomenon is real remains speculative, but what I had in mind was things in the style of the "Torment Nexus" meme. I.e. someone comes up with some harmful or otherwise bad tech idea for a science fiction story; the story spreads and expands the possibility space in people's minds; and eventually some company develops something that was indirectly inspired by it, which turns out to be indeed bad. I suspect this sort of thing does happen, since we *are* quite often influenced by the ideas found in popular media and entertainment, but it's hard to point to convincing examples.

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Jun 9·edited Jun 23Liked by Étienne Fortier-Dubois

Doom is not simple if you are a complex thinker or a mental modeler.

You must be going based on what is available that our systems provide. But doom is much more complicated than this.

Doom starts with the breaking of people's personal will to serve the system. It increases until the system gets so corrupt it breaks everything.

There is nothing simple about that. We can expect our systems to fall apart. You can wait around for this to occur and watch powerlessly or you can get in front of it.

We have been taught to think simple. Hand the big stuff over country or God. But those who think complex know that is not at all what is going on and neither of them will show up as thing degrade.

We need to prepare for things most can not fathom. Those who can are preparing.

In prior collapses of society some survive. Most do not. This will be on a global scale and that is the only part that is simple to understand.

This collapse with be the worst one ever. But our governments are quiet and everyone is waiting for someone to tell them what to do. That is not going to happen.

No one tells you what to do when chaos breaks out.

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Jul 14·edited Jul 14Liked by Étienne Fortier-Dubois

Always glad to come across a fellow anti-doomer. My anti-doom mentality is, in large part, fueled by my deep-down abject fear of, not necessarily the End of all things per se, but a reality in which so much has been ruined and can never be repaired, mostly by climate change. But this mentality drains me so completely and I just cannot function as a healthy human being if I think about it too much, so I try to actively seek out more positive news about people who are fighting back and making good changes in the environment. (I have two wolves inside me, one is a doomer and the other just wants it to shut up so I don't have a panic attack in the middle of the grocery store😂. Hence why I wrote that post "Why it's hard for me to talk about climate change," let me know if you want the link to that)

[Edit] I just cannot personally conceptualize how some other people can go about their lives while assuming that the worst will happen and there's nothing anyone can do to stop or slow it. Maybe it's because I'm so attached to this world and to the beauty of the natural world that if I think about it all being ruined, even long after I'm dead, it breaks my heart so thoroughly that I can't see past it. To me it's the ultimate existential crisis, even worse than my fear of never accomplishing anything good that will be remembered (which is a big fear for me). When I see/hear people talking about it like it's a foregone conclusion I have to physically distance myself from that. Obviously I know that everyone processes things differently, but part of me genuinely wonders if this level of compartmentalization that these people have is some form of insanity. Again, I'm being melodramatic about it and I have no doubt that most people who might be considered "doomers" deep down really do care about our world. Maybe they're just tough enough to be able to take it on the cheek and move on with their lives, but for me it's a gut punch.

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Jun 23Liked by Étienne Fortier-Dubois

Agree that thinking too much about something can bring it into existence. Our thoughts is where everything starts which is pretty obvious if you think about it but most people don't really get the implications and adjust their thoughts accordingly in all relevant areas of life...

Another reason why doom happens to be closer to our thoughts than optimism is that negative events naturally stick in our minds more than positive ones. Some archaic survival mechanism maybe?

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author

Yeah that definitely seems to be part of the answer!

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