During the pandemic, I thought that the people who were generally against caring about Covid were mostly faking it. I thought “ok, you’re not old or immunocompr

During the pandemic, I thought that the people who were generally against caring about Covid were mostly faking it. I thought “ok, you’re not old or immunocompromised — you think that if you catch it, it will be like a bad cold but you’ll survive”. Then the vaccine came out, and so did the conspiracy theories. Even if I didn’t agree with these theories, I could at least see where the people who believed them might be coming from. It wouldn’t be the first time in human history that a government misled their own population for dubious purposes. It was conceivably possible that there are unknown, long-term effects of such a novel vaccine. But everything involves risk and my personal priors led to the view that not taking the vaccine was a much higher risk to myself and others. But then some close relatives that I respect and consider highly intelligent told me they didn’t trust the vaccine and took ivermectin instead. What. It’s a bit of an understatement to say that my internal model of human psychology fell apart right then. I’m quite sure at this point that if an asteroid were headed toward earth, there would be a sizable portion of the population who refuses to believe any evidence whatsoever and denies an asteroid is coming right up until the very end. It’s a similar case with AGI. I don’t think undeniable evidence that “it’s coming” is there yet, but if/when it is, there are going to be holdouts who refuse to believe what’s happening and may actually be incapable of believing what’s happening. It’s so far beyond their mental model of how reality works that the brain just kind of segfaults and rejects it—“I don’t want this to happen, therefore it cannot.”