Crying wolf: Warning about societal risks can be reputationally risky
Lucius Caviola (Global Priorities Institute University), Matthew Coleman (Northeastern University), Christoph Winter (ITAM & Harvard) and Joshua Lewis (New York University)
GPI Working Paper No. 15-2024
Society relies on expert warnings about large-scale risks like pandemics and natural disasters. Across ten studies (N = 5,342), we demonstrate people’s reluctance to warn about unlikely but large-scale risks because they are concerned about being blamed for being wrong. In particular, warners anticipate that if the risk doesn’t occur, they will be perceived as overly alarmist and responsible for wasting societal resources. This phenomenon appears in the context of natural, technological, and financial risks and in US and Chinese samples, local policymakers, AI researchers, and legal experts. The reluctance to warn is aggravated when the warner will be held epistemically responsible, such as when they are the only warner and when the risk is speculative, lacking objective evidence. A remedy is offering anonymous expert warning systems. Our studies emphasize the need for societal risk management policies to consider psychological biases and social incentives.
Other working papers
Staking our future: deontic long-termism and the non-identity problem – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
Greaves and MacAskill argue for axiological longtermism, according to which, in a wide class of decision contexts, the option that is ex ante best is the option that corresponds to the best lottery over histories from t onwards, where t is some date far in the future. They suggest that a stakes-sensitivity argument…
It Only Takes One: The Psychology of Unilateral Decisions – Joshua Lewis (New York University) et al.
Sometimes, one decision can guarantee that a risky event will happen. For instance, it only took one team of researchers to synthesize and publish the horsepox genome, thus imposing its publication even though other researchers might have refrained for biosecurity reasons. We examine cases where everybody who can impose a given event has the same goal but different information about whether the event furthers that goal. …
In search of a biological crux for AI consciousness – Bradford Saad (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
Whether AI systems could be conscious is often thought to turn on whether consciousness is closely linked to biology. The rough thought is that if consciousness is closely linked to biology, then AI consciousness is impossible, and if consciousness is not closely linked to biology, then AI consciousness is possible—or, at any rate, it’s more likely to be possible. A clearer specification of the kind of link between consciousness and biology that is crucial for the possibility of AI consciousness would help organize inquiry into…