I suggest that these are people experiencing epistemic learned helplessness.
> "And there are people who can argue circles around me. Maybe not on every topic, but on topics where they are experts and have spent their whole lives honing their arguments. When I was young I used to read pseudohistory books; Immanuel Velikovsky’s Ages in Chaos is a good example of the best this genre has to offer. I read it and it seemed so obviously correct, so perfect, that I could barely bring myself to bother to search out rebuttals."
> "And then I read the rebuttals, and they were so obviously correct, so devastating, that I couldn’t believe I had ever been so dumb as to believe Velikovsky."
> "And then I read the rebuttals to the rebuttals, and they were so obviously correct that I felt silly for ever doubting."
Presented with a flood of logical steps by someone capable of arguing circles around me, adding up to a conclusion that is deeply counterintuitive; and presented perhaps also with a similarly daunting flood of logical steps by someone else also capable of arguing circles around me, adding up just as convincingly to the opposite conclusion... what is one to do?
One can sway back and forth, like a reed in the wind, according to which super convincing argument one last read.
Or one can throw one's hands up in the air and say: "There are hundreds of incredibly specific assumptions combined with many logical steps here. They all look pretty convincing to me; and actually, so do the other guy's. So clearly someone made a mistake somewhere, possibly more than one person and more than one mistake; certainly that's more likely than both the mutually contradictory yet convincing arguments being right simultaneously; but I just can't see it. What now? What other information do I have? Well, approximately ten gazillion people have predicted world-ending events in the past, and yet here we all are, existing. So I conclude it's much more likely that the weirder conclusion is the one that's wrong."
Condense that to a sentence or two, couple with an average rather than expert ability to articulate, and you arrive at coffeepocalypse.
From the above essay:
> "Even the smartest people I know have a commendable tendency not to take certain ideas seriously. Bostrom’s simulation argument, the anthropic doomsday argument, Pascal’s Mugging – I’ve never heard anyone give a coherent argument against any of these, but I’ve also never met anyone who fully accepts them and lives life according to their implications."
AIpocalypse is just another idea to add to that list.
