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…
Time discounting, consistency and special obligations: a defence of Robust Temporalism – Harry R. Lloyd (Yale University)
This paper defends the claim that mere temporal proximity always and without exception strengthens certain moral duties, including the duty to save – call this view Robust Temporalism. Although almost all other moral philosophers dismiss Robust Temporalism out of hand, I argue that it is prima facie intuitively plausible, and that it is analogous to a view about special obligations that many philosophers already accept…
AI alignment vs AI ethical treatment: Ten challenges – Adam Bradley (Lingnan University) and Bradford Saad (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
A morally acceptable course of AI development should avoid two dangers: creating unaligned AI systems that pose a threat to humanity and mistreating AI systems that merit moral consideration in their own right. This paper argues these two dangers interact and that if we create AI systems that merit moral consideration, simultaneously avoiding both of these dangers would be extremely challenging. While our argument is straightforward and supported by a wide range of pretheoretical moral judgments, it has far-reaching…