Can we please just write our comments without "They're all so stupid"? It would be exactly the same comment, but better.

Not OP, but the doomer mentality is pretty... well... dumb.

Humans are craftier than the doomers give them credit. Doom works online though, because the rewards you get online are mostly social.

There are 4 outcomes for a prediction:

Predict doom and Doom happens -> High reward because you look like a genius and everyone remembers because of negativity bias.

Predict doom and no doom happens -> No real penalty because everything is fine.

Predict no doom and no doom happens -> No real reward, because, hey, no doom, and even if you predict paradise and get paradise people will always dole out greater social rewards for predicting the bad scenario than the good scenario.

Finally, Predict no doom, and doom -> You look like an idiot (which is way worse than the null or minimum reward for predicting no doom and getting it right).

The end result is a bias towards predicting things to be utter crap and people having crappy opinions being rewarded for their "hot takes" online. The old adage "pessimists get to be right, optimists get to be rich" is particularly appropriate here. Regardless, without significant and falsifiable evidence, predicting doom (or even predicting paradise) is somewhat of a misstep, though to be fair, I tend to expect things to get much much better with time in the future given the current trends (though I could be wrong, that'll be fine too).

Still, the internet rewards doom takes, so a guy like Yudkowsky who is smart but not formally educated. Not that that is really a prerequisite for making great changes to the world (like, I don't think Heaviside was formally educated really), but I think in his case, the lack of exposure to other ideas has lead him down a path that just fundamentally misinterprets the risks and I think given his online history he falls victim to the game-theoretic trap above...

But you know, maybe I'll get fed feet first into the paperclip machine?