Are there any useful summaries of strategies to rearrange priorities and manage time to deal with the implications of this post? I get the existential terror part. We're minds in constant peril, basically floating on a tattered raft in the middle of the worst hurricane ever imagined. I'm sure only few of the contributors here think that saying, "this sucks but oh well" is a good idea. So what do we do?
Since I've started reading LW, I have started to devote way more of my life to reading. I read for hours each day now, mostly science literature, philosophy, economics, lots of links to external things from LW. But it hardly feels like enough and every choice I make about what to read feels like a precious one indeed. I am a grad student, and I think often about the rapidly changing landscape of PhD jobs. Should I be content going to an industrial job and paying for cryonics and hoping to nudge people in my social circles to adopt more rational hygiene in their beliefs (while working on doing so myself as well)? I know no one can really answer that kind of question for me, but other people can simulate that predicament and offer advice. Is there any?
If an intelligence explosion does happen in the next few decades, why am I even spending precious minutes worrying about what skill set to train into myself for such-and-such an industry or such-and-such a career? Those types of tasks might even be the very first tasks to be subsumed by advanced technology (much the way that technology displaces legal research assistants faster than janitors). The world isn't fair. I could study advanced math and engineering and hit my career at just the moment in history when those stop being people-tasks. I could be like the Reeks and Recs from Vonnegut's Player Piano. This is serious beeswax here. I want to make a Bayesian decision about how to spend my time and what skill set to train into myself. It would seem like this site is among the best places to pose the question and ask for direction to sweet updatable evidence. But where is some?
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Very interesting article, and a real "ouch" moment for me when I realised that all my escapism growing up had exactly this effect. By becoming engaged with fictional worlds through films, books and games you can start to disengage with the world, finding nothing so interesting and vibrant in it (this is a particular risk if you are young and haven't found activities and people you value in reality yet). The scary thing was when I was realised the characters in my books felt more real than people in reality. If you have trouble connecting with people books offer ready-made connections that can distract you from getting the social skills you need to form meaningful relationships in real life.
To an extent I think I am still prey to this, so does anyone have advice on ways to balance your escapist pleasures so you can still enjoy them without losing the vibrancy of real life?