One analogy I have found useful for thinking about rat discourse on IABIED is environmental catastrophism

I have gotten a lot of negative feedback to my review. Much of it is genuinely helpful and constructive (I'll be making edits for the print version). But there's also a common argument that goes "why are we quibbling about minor disagreements when we should be on the same team?"

Well, first, I don't think they're minor! I think the whole worldview behind this book is fundamentally confused. But I also think minor disagreements can have fairly major consequences.

Environmentalists in the 70s were right to worry about ecosystem destruction. But the movement produced The Population Bomb and Limits to Growth – predictions of future collapse which didn't pan out and were used to justify forced sterilization in India and the one child policy

Today, we're all familiar with how environmental laws can be used to block clean energy infrastructure

And as someone whose parents live two blocks from the burn scar of the Palisades Fire, the way some climate advocates exaggerate the link between climate change and California fires makes me angry on a personal level

I don't think any of these people are being deliberatley dishonest. But adopting a flawed world model based on simple trend extrapolation and selectively updating in the direction of inevitable doom hasn't helped them advanced their cause

Being right is important for accomplishing goals in the world, whether it's mitigating the impact of climate change on human beings or controlling advanced AI. Because I care about AI safety, I don't want to see the movement fall into the same pathologies.