Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Some reasons to not say "Doomer", published by Ruby on July 9, 2023 on LessWrong.

"Doomer" has become a common term to refer to people with pessimistic views about outcomes from AI. I claim this is not a helpful term on net, and generally will cause people to think less clearly.

Reification of identity + making things tribal

I finally realized today why politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions...

I think what religion and politics have in common is that they become part of people's identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about something that's part of their identity. By definition they're partisan...

More generally, you can have a fruitful discussion about a topic only if it doesn't engage the identities of any of the participants. What makes politics and religion such minefields is that they engage so many people's identities. But you could in principle have a useful conversation about them with some people. And there are other topics that might seem harmless, like the relative merits of Ford and Chevy pickup trucks, that you couldn't safely talk about with others.The most intriguing thing about this theory, if it's right, is that it explains not merely which kinds of discussions to avoid, but how to have better ideas. If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible. - Paul Graham in Keep Your Identity Small

I think a big risk of the "Doomer" label is it moves something from a "given the arguments and evidence I have, I believe X" into an essential deeper property (or commitment) of a person. It reifies it as an identity. You correspondingly then get people who are "not-Doomers", and more recently, I've heard the term "Foomer" too.

Because people's beliefs are quite correlated with those immediately around them, those more pessimistic and less pessimistic about AI tend be clusters, meaning it gets easy to point at clusters and make things tribal and political.

I'm in this tribe, they're in that tribe. My tribe is good, that tribe is bad. I think this makes us stupider in various ways:

We now start talking about people rather than object-level beliefs/evidence/reason.

It's much easier to dismiss people than arguments.

We put up social barriers to changing your mind. People don't like to be an odd one out among their friends, and if your friends identify as being/not being Doomers (and perhaps having negative opinions about the other group), there will be psychological resistance to update.

I think this is already the case when it comes to P(Doom), that there's social pressure to conform. I regret to say that I've reacted with surprise when someone expressed a P(Doom) different than I expected, in a way that exerted social pressure. I'm trying to do less of that, as I think the evidence/reason is such that reasonable people can reasonably disagree a lot.

"Doomer" is an externally applied label and is often used pejoratively

Looking at the Wikipedia page for Doomer, it's possible the term was first used without any mean-spirited connotation. That said, I think it's currently very reminiscent of "Boomer", a term that's definitely negatively valenced in the memespace these days:

"OK boomer" or "okay boomer" is a catchphrase and internet meme that has been used by Gen-X, Millennials and Gen Z to dismiss or mock attitudes typically associated with baby boomers - people born in the two decades following World War II. - Wikipedia

Not exactly surprising, but on Twitter you'll see a lot of this usage.

Also, my sense is it's much less common for people who meet the criteria for being Doomers to describe themselves as such vs others from the outside calling them that. Though this could be because when yo...