Psychology – a sibilant intake of breath

Interior, not interpersonal

Thought is an interior experience, not an interpersonal event. Thoughts innocently arise from our instincts for survival, security, and pleasure and are involuntary. They are the personal raw materials of the mind and, as such, are neither good nor bad. However, emotionally immature people judge your thinking to make sure you stay aligned with their beliefs.

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It’s hard to be clear on your own position if you know your opinion could lead to your being reviled. Because EI parents need to feel like they are right about everything, they make you feel rejected if your thinking doesn’t match theirs. As an adult it’s self-defeating to accept others’ opinions instead of consulting your own mind. But EI parents teach you to do just that: they act like you’re being rebellious or selfish if you don’t consider them first in every step of your thought process. EI parents see free thought as disloyal. For EI parents everything is about how important, respected, and in control they feel. So, what happens if you have your own thoughts and opinions? They see you as disloyal. To the ‘all or nothing’ EIP’s mind, your differing opinion means you couldn’t possibly love or respect them, therefore you may have learned to hide your most honest thoughts from your thin-skinned EI parents.

Gibson, Lindsay C. Recovering from Emotionally Immature Parents: Practical Tools to Establish Boundaries & Reclaim Your Emotional Autonomy. New Harbinger Publications, 2019. Chapter 8: “Making Room for Your Own Mind”

No anger! No sadness!

You minimize your feelings and shut yourself down. Emotionally immature parents often react as though your emotions are too extreme: as though there were something wrong with you for having a heartfelt reaction. They thus teach you to downplay your feelings because they are uncomfortable with these strong emotions. They convince you that many of your emotions are unwarranted or excessive.

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Their overall message to her was: don’t feel. Whatever Maya experienced, she always got the message that it was too much. Mild emotional arousal was all her parents considered acceptable. To avoid embarrassment, Maya learned to disconnect from her strongest emotions, whether positive or negative. This resulted in chronic depression as an adult. “I think they wanted me to be happy,” Maya told me, “but in a very shallow ‘let’s not get too deep’ kind of way.” Maya recalled that her parents accepted her happiness only about tangible outer-world things they approved of, such as Christmas gifts, new clothes, or a good report card. Maya hid her true reactions because her parents often judged her feelings as excessive, weak, or oversensitive. Because of their rejection, Maya began to minimize and hide her feelings from herself too. She gradually lost her emotional freedom: her right to feel whatever she felt.

Boundary-rejecting parents

They don’t respect your boundaries or individuality. Emotionally immature parents don’t really understand the point of boundaries. They think boundaries imply rejection, meaning you don’t care enough about them to give them free access to your life. This is why they act incredulous, offended, or hurt if you ask them to respect your privacy. They feel loved only when you let them interrupt you any time. EI parents seek dominant and privileged roles in which they don’t have to respect others’ boundaries. EI parents also don’t respect your individuality because they don’t see the need for it. Family and roles are sacrosanct to them and they don’t understand why you should want space or an individual identity apart from them. They don’t understand why you can’t just be like them, think like them, and have the same beliefs and values. You are their child and therefore belong to them. Even when you’re grown they expect you to remain their compliant child or, if you insist on your own life, at least always follow their advice.

Gibson, Lindsay C. Recovering from Emotionally Immature Parents: Practical Tools to Establish Boundaries & Reclaim Your Emotional Autonomy. New Harbinger Publications, 2019. Chapter 2.

Catastrophes and mental collapse

Psychologically and emotionally, I have really been doing badly lately.

I have spent all of my adult life studying environmental politics and trying to fight climate change, and now we are at a juncture where the world’s leaders have effectively given up. They won’t acknowledge fossil fuels as the root of the crisis, and they are far too controlled by the fossil fuel industry to accept phasing them out as a solution. They see every new potential oil, gas, and coal project as a vehicle for wealth and self-advancement. Meanwhile, environmentalists are distracted by social issues as the long-term crisis keeps deepening, and people generally are too frightened to even perceive the truth of their situation. Perhaps scariest of all, young people don’t have a coherent and politically-activated sense of what is happening. They can’t see that their leaders are destroying their futures, and they are being drawn into the same sorts of non-solutions which are driving the rise of charlatans and authoritarians to power.

The path forward is totally unclear, and I don’t know how — psychologically or morally — to cope with a world where we have identified that the processes of collapse are accelerating but where we don’t have the honesty or the courage to work through what that means or work toward any remedy.

These are dark, dark days.

Photos from the Yellowknife drive

In the summer of 2003, I broke with my long avoidance of air travel so that I could first help my brother Sasha move from Behchokǫ̀, in the Northwest Territories near Yellowknife, back to Victoria, BC.

We did the drive through a vast terrain of wildfires in three intensive days, with Sasha driving.

I had been meaning for ages to get our photos processed, but because of the financial pain of the long PhD all my computers and software are quite obselete and were unable to handle the RAW files from his specific Fuji camera.

I have finally figured a workaround using Adobe’s digital negative (DNG) format, so now the photos are up.

Living across the country and avoiding flying, I have seen far too little of my brothers in recent years. I justified it because I thought I was living my values by making lifestyle choices to reduce my climate impact, and because I still hoped humanity might be reaching a level of understanding where we take the crisis seriously and respond in a useful and adaptive way.

Now I think I need to do a complete re-evaluation of what sort of political project makes sense. Ever since I first became involved in environmentalism in the 1990s, I had thought that eventually the universal experience of how the world is changing in frightening ways would make people willing to make changes themselves. Now, I really don’t know.

Still, I am immensely grateful that I got to spend this intensive time with Sasha and that our relationship is still deep and meaningful after years of almost exclusively telecommunicating. His integrity and determination are inspirations to me, and I try to draw from his example while trying to live my own life well.

If all goes well, human history is just beginning. Humanity is about two hundred thousand years old. But the Earth will remain habitable for hundreds of millions more—enough time for millions of future generations; enough to end disease, poverty and injustice forever; enough to create heights of flourishing unimaginable today. And if we could learn to reach out further into the cosmos, we could find more time yet: trillions of years, to explore billions of worlds. Such a lifespan places present-day humanity in its earliest infancy. A vast and extraordinary adulthood awaits.

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This book argues that safeguarding humanity’s future is the defining challenge of our time. For we stand at a crucial moment in the history of our species. Fueled by technological progress, our power has grown so great that for the first time in humanity’s long history, we have the capacity to destroy ourselves—severing our entire future and everything we could become.

Yet humanity’s wisdom has grown only falteringly, if at all, and lags dangerously behind. Humanity lacks the maturity, coordination and foresight necessary to avoid making mistakes from which we could never recover. As the gap between our power and wisdom grows, our future is subject to an ever-increasing level of risk. The situation is unsustainable. So over the next few centuries, humanity will be tested: it will either act decisively to protect itself and its longterm potential, or, in all likelihood, this will be lost forever.

To survive these challenges and secure our future, we must act now: managing the risks of today, averting those of tomorrow, and becoming the kind of society that will never pose such risks to itself again.

Ord, Toby. The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity. Hachette Books, 2020. p. 3–4

Working on geoengineering and AI briefings

Last Christmas break, I wrote a detailed briefing on the existential risks to humanity from nuclear weapons.

This year I am starting two more: one on the risks from artificial intelligence, and one on the promises and perils of geoengineering, which I increasingly feel is emerging as our default response to climate change.

I have had a few geoengineering books in my book stacks for years, generally buried under the whaling books in the ‘too depressing to read’ zone. AI I have been learning a lot more about recently, including through Nick Bostrom and Toby Ord’s books and Robert Miles’ incredibly helpful YouTube series (based on Amodei et al’s instructive paper).

Related re: geoengineering:

Related re: AI:

Little good ever comes from discussing climate change or nuclear weapons socially

Our social world is ruled by the affect heuristic: what feels good seems true, and what feels bad we distance ourselves from and reject. We judge what’s true or false based on it if makes us feel good or bad.

I think I’m going to stop talking to people socially about nuclear weapons and climate change.

Almost always, what the other person really wants is reassurance that their future will be OK and that the choices they are making are OK.

The conversation tends to become a cross-examination where they look for a way to dismiss me in order to protect their hopefulness and view of themself as a good person. It’s a bit like how people feel compelled to tell me how particularly important or moral (or not enjoyed) their air travel plans are, as though I am a religious authority who can forgive them. “Confess and be forgiven” is a cheerful motto for those who refuse to change their behaviour.

These conversations tend to be miserable for both sides: for them because they are presented with evidence for why they really should be fearful, when they fervently want the opposite, and for me because it just leads to more alienation to see how utterly unwilling people are to even face the problem, much less take any commensurate action. If I am convincing and give good evidence, it makes things worse for both: for them because they are getting anxious instead of reassured and for me because it reinforces how little relationship there is between evidence and human decision-making.

It is also a fundamental error to think that if a person believes that a problem is serious and that you are working on it, they will support you. You might think the chain of logic would be “the person seems to be working on a problem which I consider real and important, so I will support them at least conversationally if not materially” when it is much more often “this person is talking about something that makes me feel bad, so I will find a way to believe that they are wrong or what they are saying is irrelevant”. The desire to feel good about ourselves and the world quickly and reliably trumps whatever desire we may have to believe true things or act in a manner consistent with out beliefs.

It seems smarter going forward just to say that I won’t discuss these subjects and whatever work I am doing on them is secret.

It’s crucial when setting such boundaries to refuse to debate or justify them. Let people through that crack, and it’s sure to become another affect-driven argument about how they prefer to imagine their future as stable, safe, and prosperous and their own conduct as wise and moral — with me cast as the meanie squashing their joys.

The simplest example of speed superintelligence would be a whole brain emulation running on fast hardware. An emulation operating at a speed of ten thousand times that of a biological brain would be able to read a book in a few seconds and write a PhD thesis in an afternoon. With a speedup factor of a million, an emulation could accomplish an entire millenium of intellectual work in one working day.

To such a fast mind, events in the external world appear to unfold in slow motion. Suppose your mind ran at 10,000X. If your fleshy friend should happen to drop his teacup, you could watch the porcelain slowly descend toward the carpet over the course of several hours, like a comet silently gliding through space toward an assignation with a far-off planet; and, as the anticipation of the coming crash tardily propagates through the folds of your friend’s grey matter and from thence out to his peripheral nervous system, you could observe his body gradually assuming the aspect of a frozen oops—enough time for you not only to order a replacement cup but also to read a couple of scientific papers and take a nap.

Bostrom, Nick. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford University Press, 2014. p. 64

General artificial intelligences will be aliens

[A]rtificial intelligence need not much resemble a human mind. AIs could be—indeed, it is likely that most will be—extremely alien. We should expect that they will have very different cognitive architectures than biological intelligences, and in their early stages of development they have very different profiles of cognitive strengths and weaknesses (though, as we shall later argue, they could eventually overcome any initial weakness). Furthermore, the goal systems of AIs could diverge radically from those of human beings. There is no reason to expect a generic AI to be motivated by love or hate or pride or other such common human sentiments: these complex adaptations would require deliberate expensive effort to recreate in AIs. This is at once a big problem and a big opportunity.

Bostrom, Nick. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford University Press, 2014. p. 35

Category: Psychology