Maarten Boudry on Substack Notes:
Climate scientist: “The world is a Japanese warrior committing a slow harakiri. The knife is already in his belly, the blood is running down his body“.
I am, quite frankly, fed up with this. This kind of extreme fearmongering is not only scientifically unfounded; it is actively harmful. It breeds paralysis and defeatism, fuels mental health problems, and leads young people to decide against having children.
For a long time, I tried to maintain the utmost respect for climate scientists. But it’s time we confronted a paradox: experts are often not the best guides when it comes to assessing the dangers within their own field—and even less so when it comes to deciding which policies should address them.
The same goes for AI, where even the field’s pioneers are now recklessly speculating about their “p(doom)” — the probability of human extinction.
Years of specializing in a single domain can narrow your perspective until everything else pales in comparison. Climate change — or AI — becomes the existential threat to humanity, eclipsing every other danger we face.
Self-selection plays a role, too. If you choose to specialize in a field because you believe humanity’s future depends on it, you’re hardly a representative sample of people who think the threat is manageable, or that the real dangers lie elsewhere. Those people are less likely to pursue a career in climate science or AI safety in the first place.
And, I’m sorry to say, there’s also a certain narcissism inherent in this kind of doomsday rhetoric: the belief that the fate of the entire world hinges on your particular area of expertise. That you possess privileged knowledge and occupy a central role in humanity’s existential drama.
