I originally posted this over a year ago, but given the current mood (mostly sparked by the Hugging Face incident), it seems like a good time to send it out again.
When I was a teenager, my rabbi believed that the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who was living in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, was the Messiah, and that the world would soon come to an end. Otherwise, the rabbi was pretty normal. He was young—in his early 20s, not much older than me—and was intelligent and funny. The oddest thing about him was how he spoke. He came to Canada from Melbourne, and I had never heard an Aussie accent in person before.
He once invited me and some of my friends to his house for dinner, and it was all perfectly pleasant. I remember talking to his wife, who shared his messianic views, and being surprised that she and I were reading the same book—The Shining, by Stephen King. How could she be reading something so … secular?
Maybe they should have been weirder. If you believe that the world is going to end, shouldn’t it make you different from other people? At the very least, you should make different life decisions. I wondered: What sort of mortgage did they have? Did they plan for their children’s future? I was too shy and too polite to ask such questions, though.
You can see where it is going. I recently attended a festival that featured a panel discussion on Artificial Intelligence. One of the speakers was a computer science professor who told us there was a 99% chance that AIs would render humanity extinct in about 10 years. He was an enthusiastic speaker with great comic energy, and he cracked us up as he explained how an AI could use bitcoin to bribe people online to create a supervirus that kills us all.
I talked to him later and—because now I’m older, less shy, and less polite—asked him how his doomer stance affected him. Does he save for his children’s education; does he put aside money for retirement? He ducked these questions. Which is fair enough—none of my business. But if I had to bet, part of the reason he ducked them was that he knew where I was going with this and didn’t want to admit that his doomer views had no effect on how he lived his life.
And here’s another thing: It wasn’t a tense discussion. We were both laughing as we discussed his 99% estimate that his children would never grow into adults. Isn’t that strange? My rabbi’s good cheer made sense—he thought the end of the world would be glorious and transcendent. The computer scientist thought we would all die quite soon, and what’s so goddamn funny about that?
Moving away from AI, what would you think of a historian who gave speeches about how Trump is going to turn the United States into an authoritarian police state and send the professors to concentration camps—and then, despite having the resources to leave, just stayed and continued to work at her university? What would you think of someone who claimed that climate change will soon make the oceans rise to catastrophic levels—and then bought a house on the coast?
I think you would conclude that the first person doesn’t really believe that the United States will become an unbearable place to live, and the second person doesn’t really believe that climate change is that bad. By the same token, unless doomers act in ways consistent with their doomer views, it’s fair to assume that they don’t really believe what they’re saying.
Beliefs don’t always have to align with actions. Suppose my iPhone breaks, and I go to the Apple Store to get it fixed. While I’m waiting, I reach for my broken phone to check my email. Does this mean that I don’t really believe that my phone is broken? No, it just means that I forgot. Other cases where we might act in ways that conflict with our beliefs include phobias (I might believe that flying is safe, but can’t bring myself to go on a plane) and certain strong emotions (I might believe that it wasn’t your fault that you were late but still get angry and act snippy towards you).
But in this case, the misalignment can’t be so easily explained away. There are other cases where people come to believe that they and those they love will die soon—most obviously, when there are diagnoses of terminal illnesses—and people tend to respond to this belief in ways that make sense. Right now, I put aside money for retirement; if I knew that I had an illness that would almost certainly kill me by 2035, I’d stop and live a little bit fancier right now. If I really believed that a future version of ChatGPT would almost certainly kill me by 2035, shouldn’t I act the same?
I don’t think doomers are lying, and I don’t think they’re saying outlandish things to get attention.
Instead, my view is that social forces block the adoption of certain beliefs. We are natural conservatives in this regard, reluctant to diverge too far from the consensus, at least not when the stakes are high. Doomers make doomer predictions because they think that there are excellent arguments for doomerism. But because almost nobody else accepts these arguments, there’s a part of the doomer mind that goes “Nah, this can’t be right, it’s crazy,” and so they keep on putting money into their children’s college funds.
What about the minority of doomers who act on their beliefs? I’m sure there are some, just as there are those who left the country when Trump got elected, and those who refuse to have children because of worries about climate change. My hunch is that what makes this minority special is that they are less sensitive to social consensus and more confident in their own views relative to everyone else's. This confidence is an excellent trait to have if you really are more plugged into the truth than most people; it’s disastrous if not.
To end on an obvious point, the fact that dommers don’t believe what they say doesn’t mean they are wrong. Some true things are very hard to believe.
what business is it of yours is the end of the universe? you live in Brooklyn!
There is a well-known technique that works remarkably well when you want to say one thing and do another: compartmentalization.
Compartmentalization means taking a particular belief, detaching it from the rest of one's beliefs and from one's actual way of life, and placing it in a separate mental compartment. By doing so, the belief becomes effectively immunized: it no longer has to confront other beliefs, experience, or the practical consequences of one's own behavior.
Once a belief has been immunized in this way, it becomes much easier to turn it into dogma. It no longer needs to withstand contradiction or pass the test of reality.
There is one further step. Compartmentalized and dogmatized beliefs can eventually generate an industry around themselves—both a political and an economic one. Many people make a living producing speeches, commentary, and narratives of doom and apocalypse. Once such an industry exists, there are powerful incentives to preserve the beliefs and anxieties on which it depends.
The result is something we see remarkably often: people passionately defending causes that bear little relation to the way they conduct the rest of their lives. Their professed beliefs and their actual behavior inhabit separate compartments.
There is an old and rather simpler word for this: hypocrisy.