A common story hero in our society is the great innovator, opposed by villains who unthinkingly reject the hero’s proposed innovation, merely because it requires a change from the past.
It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them.
The self-serving bias causes people to treat themselves more generously than others, not by entirely different standards. (Otherwise, we couldn't distinguish the self-serving bias from alternative explanations in other cases, such as the fundamental bias of attribution.) Someone who disliked change wouldn't necessarily avoid checking against his cached beliefs--for the self-interested reason that other people won't ignore them. Near-far better explains the discrepancy than does incentives. Sometimes incentives are involved, but they're not just a resistance to change they think they must rationalize. When prediction markets were discussed, the opponents weren't stick-in-the-muds; gwern(0) has a thing about privacy and the other critic works for an admissions office.
Robin has an interesting insight here that people cache automatic arguments they apply when they want to oppose something--anything. What I question is that people are embarrassed to admit that they have a rational prima facie aversion to change or even an irrational aversion based on overweighting loss.
I think that is easily explained by egotistical bias.The fact that people behave irratioanlly, treating their own ideas by different standards to others', isn't an objection to Robin's claim since people are not generally rational and he doesn't say they are.
"The other sign I see is when people consider the status quo as a proposal, but do not know that it actually is the status quo, they seem just as quick to find reasons why it cannot work, or is a bad idea."
Surely this is completely reasonable; if you know that the proposal is the status quo, you have a very important extra piece of information about it, which makes it substantially less likely that the idea leads rapidly to catastrophic failure. It would be weird indeed of finding out that an idea was actually widely used didn't affect your judgment of how good an idea it is!
I'd hardly consider biological evolution a 'new' idea. At some point doesn't it become a waste of time arguing the same idea over & over? For example, I've thrown away all my responses to the flat-earth argument. I finally decided it was time to move on.
"On the other hand, our world is extremely complex, with lots of opaque moving parts. So most of us actually have little idea why most of those parts are they way they are. Thus we usually don’t know much about the effects of adopting any given proposal to change the status quo, other than that it will probably make things worse. Because of this, we need a substantial reason to endorse any such proposal; our default is rejection."
Or we could just be suffering from status quo bias...
But now you've switched from an explanation by bias to an explanation from incentives. Under some circumstances, incentives lead to correcting biases, but this isn't a general truth.
What makes your theory better than competing theories, such as the one I sketched? That's the far-mode question you seem generally to avoid.
If people cache reasons to reject ideas because they don't want to look generally unreceptive to innovation, why do people propose so many downright stupid "innovations" themselves, without regard to these cached objections? This is a general weakness I detect in your reasoning, Robin; you fail to consider obvious objections. Perhaps your critique of critiques serves to rationalize this weakness. (And, to take this a step further, your limitations on posting numbers serves to shield you from such criticisms, which take more than one post to drive home against a resistant mind.)
Of course, conservatives will love your hypothesis: they're said, implicitly, to have less need for artificial implementation of the common sense that "most change is bad." But this should caution you rather than encourage you, since you're basically a conservative. Conservatives come up with their own stupid innovations: consider, for example, the NRA's recent proposal for a cop in every school.
Here's the real explanation. Criticism and opposition are near-mode. Asked about a new far-mode idea, people naturally lapse into near-mode and get consumed with detailed criticism under preconceived rubrics (because they avoid the far-mode thought that would provide appropriate rubrics), with a bias toward negativity typical of near-mode. Put simply, they usually miss the big picture. A good example occurred recently when you proposed prediction markets for college admissions, and everyone started posting about "confidentiality" and ruminating about the details of securing it without considering whether it served any particular role in your argument or any strong counter-argument. (You encourage this near-mode reaction by your special eagerness to respond to near-mode objections.)
But this problem doesn't affect the proposer, who is looking favorably on the proposal and continues looking in near-mode. (The methodological lesson is that critics must meet far-mode proposals with far-mode reasoning before descending into near-mode criticism, on pain of missing the point.)
"The other sign I see is when people consider the status quo as a proposal, but do not know that it actually is the status quo, they seem just as quick to find reasons why it cannot work, or is a bad idea. "
This is an excellent observation - and it does work both ways. I've seen in the (political) focus group arena, people are presented with issue "X". Then they are told that (someone) has proposed policy "Y". It's very common to get reactions like "that should definitely be introduced / that would definitely solve this problem".
People have no idea that "Y" is already in place and has been for years.
Even having solid responses to all of their objections won’t get you that far, since most folks can’t be bothered to listen to them all, or even notice that you’ve covered them all.
In the future, everything new will be banned.
Perhaps this is the explanation for the Fermi Paradox.
There is a benefit to just trying things out to see whether new idea will work. Most times new ideas fail though.
A lot of innovation is just getting people to do what you want them to do so that you can find out whether your idea will fail or not. Irrational self-confidence can help with this part.
It’s fine to use your library of *reasons for rejectingproposed innovations* so as to make yourself look better in the eyes of others: you don’t want others to think ill of you, asthey would if they thought you were a conservative stick in the mud. But it would be nice not to deceive yourselfabout what you are doing, not to think those rationalizations drawn from yourlibrary are your real reasons. Yourconservatism is perfectly reasonable/rational. It’s only because most others wouldn’t see it as such that you need tooffer rationalizations in order to avoid their bad opinion. Their obtuseness pushes you into deceivingthem. But it would be better if you didn’talso deceive *yourself*.
Unfortunately most people find it very difficult to deceiveothers without deceiving themselves. Thus they muddy their own thinking.
Because of reasonable conservatism, a would-be innovator’sprospects for success are the less, the more people he must enlist ascooperators. Capitalism works betterthan socialism primarily because the would-be innovator under capitalism canusually try out his idea if only a few others agree with him, while undersocialism he would probably require *society* to agree.
It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wik...
The self-serving bias causes people to treat themselves more generously than others, not by entirely different standards. (Otherwise, we couldn't distinguish the self-serving bias from alternative explanations in other cases, such as the fundamental bias of attribution.) Someone who disliked change wouldn't necessarily avoid checking against his cached beliefs--for the self-interested reason that other people won't ignore them. Near-far better explains the discrepancy than does incentives. Sometimes incentives are involved, but they're not just a resistance to change they think they must rationalize. When prediction markets were discussed, the opponents weren't stick-in-the-muds; gwern(0) has a thing about privacy and the other critic works for an admissions office.
Robin has an interesting insight here that people cache automatic arguments they apply when they want to oppose something--anything. What I question is that people are embarrassed to admit that they have a rational prima facie aversion to change or even an irrational aversion based on overweighting loss.
I think that is easily explained by egotistical bias.The fact that people behave irratioanlly, treating their own ideas by different standards to others', isn't an objection to Robin's claim since people are not generally rational and he doesn't say they are.
"The other sign I see is when people consider the status quo as a proposal, but do not know that it actually is the status quo, they seem just as quick to find reasons why it cannot work, or is a bad idea."
Surely this is completely reasonable; if you know that the proposal is the status quo, you have a very important extra piece of information about it, which makes it substantially less likely that the idea leads rapidly to catastrophic failure. It would be weird indeed of finding out that an idea was actually widely used didn't affect your judgment of how good an idea it is!
I'd hardly consider biological evolution a 'new' idea. At some point doesn't it become a waste of time arguing the same idea over & over? For example, I've thrown away all my responses to the flat-earth argument. I finally decided it was time to move on.
"On the other hand, our world is extremely complex, with lots of opaque moving parts. So most of us actually have little idea why most of those parts are they way they are. Thus we usually don’t know much about the effects of adopting any given proposal to change the status quo, other than that it will probably make things worse. Because of this, we need a substantial reason to endorse any such proposal; our default is rejection."
Or we could just be suffering from status quo bias...
This is a great piece. Really enjoyed it!
But now you've switched from an explanation by bias to an explanation from incentives. Under some circumstances, incentives lead to correcting biases, but this isn't a general truth.
What makes your theory better than competing theories, such as the one I sketched? That's the far-mode question you seem generally to avoid.
Those hoping to be celebrated as innovator, for supporting an idea before it becomes popular, have more to gain than others.
If people cache reasons to reject ideas because they don't want to look generally unreceptive to innovation, why do people propose so many downright stupid "innovations" themselves, without regard to these cached objections? This is a general weakness I detect in your reasoning, Robin; you fail to consider obvious objections. Perhaps your critique of critiques serves to rationalize this weakness. (And, to take this a step further, your limitations on posting numbers serves to shield you from such criticisms, which take more than one post to drive home against a resistant mind.)
Of course, conservatives will love your hypothesis: they're said, implicitly, to have less need for artificial implementation of the common sense that "most change is bad." But this should caution you rather than encourage you, since you're basically a conservative. Conservatives come up with their own stupid innovations: consider, for example, the NRA's recent proposal for a cop in every school.
Here's the real explanation. Criticism and opposition are near-mode. Asked about a new far-mode idea, people naturally lapse into near-mode and get consumed with detailed criticism under preconceived rubrics (because they avoid the far-mode thought that would provide appropriate rubrics), with a bias toward negativity typical of near-mode. Put simply, they usually miss the big picture. A good example occurred recently when you proposed prediction markets for college admissions, and everyone started posting about "confidentiality" and ruminating about the details of securing it without considering whether it served any particular role in your argument or any strong counter-argument. (You encourage this near-mode reaction by your special eagerness to respond to near-mode objections.)
But this problem doesn't affect the proposer, who is looking favorably on the proposal and continues looking in near-mode. (The methodological lesson is that critics must meet far-mode proposals with far-mode reasoning before descending into near-mode criticism, on pain of missing the point.)
What is the evidence that these lists have much effect?
"The other sign I see is when people consider the status quo as a proposal, but do not know that it actually is the status quo, they seem just as quick to find reasons why it cannot work, or is a bad idea. "
This is an excellent observation - and it does work both ways. I've seen in the (political) focus group arena, people are presented with issue "X". Then they are told that (someone) has proposed policy "Y". It's very common to get reactions like "that should definitely be introduced / that would definitely solve this problem".
People have no idea that "Y" is already in place and has been for years.
Even having solid responses to all of their objections won’t get you that far, since most folks can’t be bothered to listen to them all, or even notice that you’ve covered them all.
In the future, everything new will be banned.
Perhaps this is the explanation for the Fermi Paradox.
Well, there's a fairly big set of fallacies that lead to creation of faulty ideas, and for most ideas, one or more of those fallacies apply.
There is a benefit to just trying things out to see whether new idea will work. Most times new ideas fail though.
A lot of innovation is just getting people to do what you want them to do so that you can find out whether your idea will fail or not. Irrational self-confidence can help with this part.
It’s fine to use your library of *reasons for rejectingproposed innovations* so as to make yourself look better in the eyes of others: you don’t want others to think ill of you, asthey would if they thought you were a conservative stick in the mud. But it would be nice not to deceive yourselfabout what you are doing, not to think those rationalizations drawn from yourlibrary are your real reasons. Yourconservatism is perfectly reasonable/rational. It’s only because most others wouldn’t see it as such that you need tooffer rationalizations in order to avoid their bad opinion. Their obtuseness pushes you into deceivingthem. But it would be better if you didn’talso deceive *yourself*.
Unfortunately most people find it very difficult to deceiveothers without deceiving themselves. Thus they muddy their own thinking.
Because of reasonable conservatism, a would-be innovator’sprospects for success are the less, the more people he must enlist ascooperators. Capitalism works betterthan socialism primarily because the would-be innovator under capitalism canusually try out his idea if only a few others agree with him, while undersocialism he would probably require *society* to agree.