> I lived through the Cold War. I don't need this exercise because, the bottom line is, no one knows what existential risk - if any - will happen. The worst of the Cold War never happened, yet many of us thought it would. Likewise, you might choose to focus on AI as your existential risk, go through all the sacrifices and immoral behaviors that longtermism leads you to do in order to mitigate AI, and then a giant meteor collides with Earth. Oops! You chose the wrong existential risk. And meanwhile, you compromised your morals and right behavior in order to mitigate the wrong existential risk. No thanks, not for me.
Your claim seems to boil down to two things: First, people sometimes make very incorrect predictions, so you've stopped worrying about them. Second, instead, you focus on "doing the right thing" based on your ethical criteria (which, as I say in sibling comment, seems to be aligned with deontological ethics -- i.e. the ends don't justify the means.)
I'm not going to argue with the second (your choice of ethics) here. But your first point is terribly flawed; it ignores probability and decision-making under uncertainty.
Sure, you have to make assessments about what to believe. Strictly speaking, as a society, it is irrational to stop paying attention and responding to the most important things, even if any one of them might be unlikely.
Personally, you might find it necessary or useful to tune out this stuff. I get that. I'd guess this happened: you have stopped _caring_ for various reasons (perhaps information overload, sensationalization of the news, more pressing matters right in front of you) and your brain has constructed a worldview that _rationalizes_ not caring. Totally human, I get it. But this isn't reasoning nor logic.
I may not have your years of experience, but I'm no spring chicken either. Age doesn't always bring wisdom, unfortunately. People learn the wrong lessons. We've learned many. I have a keen interest in the Cold War. If you study the history, you'll recognize that our path 'through' it was no means assured. We are still living with the downstream effects of it, including huge nuclear arsenals and proxy wars.
Your comment above is naive with regards to history. It paints a simplistic and convenient narrative with the benefit of hindsight. You've ignored one key aspect of history, which is to understand it _in context_. Using hindsight exclusively isn't the only nor best way to learn from history.
Even in deontological ethics, not _everything_ is intrinsically good of bad. There is still a responsibility to act rationally in order to achieve moral ends in a moral way. To completely ignore probability is immoral.
Please, remember this: using poor logic and FUD to sully a serious book (based on some vague implied connection to a crook) is not ok.