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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: Worrying less about acausal extortion, published by Raemon on May 23, 2023 on LessWrong.
I've wanted a good version of this post to exist for awhile. I'm not sure how to write that post. But here's a okay-ish first draft, which seemed hopefully better than nothing. I've made it possible for anyone to write comments on the LessWrong doc editor version of the post, so if you have ideas for how to improve it you can leave line-notes here.
Once a month or so, the Lesswrong mods get a new user who's worried about Roko's basilisk, or other forms of acausal extortion. They write a post discussing their worries. In the past, they'd often they would get comments explaining "Here's why you don't need to be worried about acausal exortion", but then respond with "but, what about this edge case you didn't specifically address?".
And this is a fairly sad situation – acausal trade/exortion is a bit confusing, and there are few places on the internet where people are knowledgeable enough to really explain it. But, my experience from talking to people worried about this is that no amount of explanation is really satisfying. They're left with a lingering "but, what if I didn't understand this properly and I'm still vulnerable?" and they keep looking to understand things better.
My impression is that often, they're caught in an anxiety loop that wants to reinforce itself, and the act of worrying about it mostly encourages that anxiety loop to keep going rather than reassure it. I don't think the winning move here looks like "thoroughly understand the situation until you are no longer anxious". I think the winning move is more like "find something else to think about that is interesting so that the loop can wind itself down" or "I dunno, go outside and get some fresh air and take some deep breaths."
I don't actually know what empirically works. (I'm interested in comments from anyone who was worried about acausal extortion and who eventually stopped being worried, who can talk about their experience)
It seemed good to have an FAQ that at least covered some basics.
So:
Why shouldn't I worry about Roko's Basilisk or other acausal extortion stuff?
Here's two main reasons as I understand them:
Acausal extortion really just doesn't work on humans, for a variety of reasons.
Even if there were edge cases that somehow were risky... thinking about them would presumably be harmful rather than helpful.
Either it's true that acausal trade is risky (and so thinking about it is dangerous, and you shouldn't do it), or it's not, so worrying about it is mostly a waste of time.
I realize it's generally hard to follow advice of the form "try not to think about X." I've often been frustrated by people telling me "just stop worrying". It's especially frustrating when they don't even get why I'm worried, and don't seem to have any cruxes for why it might make sense to worry.
But sometimes "just try not to think about X" is really the best option. Meanwhile, I am pretty confident that Roko's basilisk or similar acausal threats don't actually work on humans.
So my recommendation is to re-read a few posts on why it's in fact not that risky, so your brain doesn't have a giant scary blackbox next to the "is this dangerous?" question. And then, if your brain keeps generating "but, what about [edge case nobody has explicitly addressed?]", the problem isn't that you need to understand more weird decision theory. The problem is that you have an anxiety spiral, and you should solve that using the usual set of tools for resolving anxiety spirals. Talk to a therapist or some friends.
Different anxiety-management-tools work for different people, so I can't give a great one-size-fits-all solution here, but the general strategy you should be following is "figure out how how to chill out about something you're being irratio...
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