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Noticing I've been operating under a bias where I notice existential risk precursors pretty easily (EG, biotech, advances in computing hardware), but I notice no precursors of existential safety. To me it is as if technologies that tend to do more good than harm, or at least, would improve our odds by their introduction, social or otherwise, do not exist. That can't be right, surely?...
When I think about what they might be... I find only cultural technologies, or political conditions: the strength of global governance, the clarity of global discourses, perhaps the existence of universities. But that can't be it. These are all low hanging fruit, things that already exist. Differential progress is about what could be made to exist.
It's essentially a frame that views things in a negative light, or equivalently a frame that views a certain issue as by default negative unless action is taken.
For example, climate change can be viewed in the negative, which is that we have to solve the problem or we all die, or as a positive frame where we can solve the problem by green tech
2mako yass
I was hoping to understand why people who are concerned about the climate ignore greentech/srm.
One effect, is that people who want to raise awareness about the severity of an issue have an incentive to avoid acknowledging solutions to it, because that diminishes its severity. But this is an egregore-level phenomenon, there is no individual negative cognitive disposition that's driving that phenomenon as far as I can tell.
Mostly, in the case of climate, it seems to be driven by a craving for belonging in a political scene.
The point I was trying to make is that we click on and read negative news, and this skews our perceptions of what's happening, and critically the negativity bias operates regardless of the actual reality of the problem, that is it doesn't distinguish between the things that are very bad, just merely bad but solvable, and not bad at all.
In essence, I'm positing a selection effect, where we keep hearing more about the bad things, and hear less or none about the good things, so we are biased to believe that our world is more negative than it actually is.