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Eneasz comments on Existential Risk and Public Relations - Less Wrong
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It seems pretty clear that very few care much about existential risk reduction.
That makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective. Organisms can be expected to concentrate on producing offspring - not indulging paranoid fantasies about their whole species being wiped out!
The bigger puzzle is why anyone seems to care about it at all. The most obvious answer is signalling. For example, if you care for the fate of everyone in the whole world, that SHOWS YOU CARE - a lot! Also, the END OF THE WORLD acts as a superstimulus to people's warning systems. So - they rush and warn their friends - and that gives them warm fuzzy feelings. The get credit for raising the alarm about the TERRIBLE DANGER - and so on.
Disaster movies - like 2012 - trade on people's fears in this area - stimulating and fuelling their paranoia further - by providing them with fake memories of it happening. One can't help wondering whether FEAR OF THE END is a healthy phenomenon - overall - and if not, whether it realy sensible to stimulate those fears.
Does the average human - on being convinced the world is about to end - behave better - or worse? Do they try and hold back the end - or do they rape and pillage? If their behaviour is likely to be worse then responsible adults should think very carefully before promoting the idea that THE END IS NIGH on the basis of sketchy evidence.
Given the current level of technology the end IS nigh, the world WILL end, for every person individually, in less than a century. On average it'll happen around the 77-year mark for males in the US. This has been the case through all of history (for most of it at a much younger age) and yet people generally do not rape and pillage. Nor are they more likely to do so as the end of their world approaches.
Thus, I do not think there is much reason for concern.
People care (to varying degrees) about how the world will be after they die. People even care about their own post-mortem reputations. I think it's reasonable to ask whether people will behave differently if they anticipate that the world will die along with them.
The elderly are not known for their looting and rabble-rousing tendencies - partly due to frailty and sickness.
Those who believe the world is going to end do sometimes cause problems - e.g. see The People's Temple and The Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God.