Status quo bias; System justification: Bias in Evaluating AGI X-Risks

post by Remmelt (remmelt-ellen), flandry19 · 2023-01-03T02:50:50.722Z · LW · GW · 0 comments

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The tendency to like things to stay relatively the same.
The tendency to defend and bolster the status quo.

Existing social, economic, and political arrangements tend to be preferred, and alternatives disparaged sometimes even at the expense of individual and collective self-interest.

For example, it has been observed that an animal would prefer inferior fruit it expected to eat over superior fruit it did not expect to eat.

As such, when presenting an unexpected solution to a problem, or an unexpected problem, or other unexpected observation, that there will be additional resistance occurring and experienced in relation to that information simply because of the novelty factor in itself – regardless of any possible compensatory content or benefits that may also be present.

This is exactly the kind of irrational behavior that we might hope the pressures of evolution would preclude. What observations tell us, however, is that these behaviors do occur.

That this is why people do not feel happy to learn about some new super-effective and counter-intuitive ways of doing things. Especially when they require an explicit assumption that previously expected-to-work behaviors will not actually work out that well.

  - link Wikipedia:  Status quo bias
  - link Wikipedia:  System justification
  - an item on Forrest Landry [LW · GW]'s compiled list of biases in evaluating extinction risks.

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