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
Future Suffering and the Non-Identity Problem – Theron Pummer (University of St Andrews)
I present and explore a new version of the Person-Affecting View, according to which reasons to do an act depend wholly on what would be said for or against this act from the points of view of particular individuals. According to my view, (i) there is a morally requiring reason not to bring about lives insofar as they contain suffering (negative welfare), (ii) there is no morally requiring reason to bring about lives insofar as they contain happiness (positive welfare), but (iii) there is a permitting reason to bring about lives insofar as they…
Evolutionary debunking and value alignment – Michael T. Dale (Hampden-Sydney College) and Bradford Saad (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
This paper examines the bearing of evolutionary debunking arguments—which use the evolutionary origins of values to challenge their epistemic credentials—on the alignment problem, i.e. the problem of ensuring that highly capable AI systems are properly aligned with values. Since evolutionary debunking arguments are among the best empirically-motivated arguments that recommend changes in values, it is unsurprising that they are relevant to the alignment problem. However, how evolutionary debunking arguments…
The asymmetry, uncertainty, and the long term – Teruji Thomas (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
The Asymmetry is the view in population ethics that, while we ought to avoid creating additional bad lives, there is no requirement to create additional good ones. The question is how to embed this view in a complete normative theory, and in particular one that treats uncertainty in a plausible way. After reviewing…