No a philosopher so approaching this from a tangent: it seems to me, and tbh it seems QUITE OBVIOUS that inaction bias is a result of adopting a feature of, for the lack of better term, human nature (= cognitive adaptations evolved via natural selection), which is status quo preference caused by a very strong drive to avoid uncertainty/i…
No a philosopher so approaching this from a tangent: it seems to me, and tbh it seems QUITE OBVIOUS that inaction bias is a result of adopting a feature of, for the lack of better term, human nature (= cognitive adaptations evolved via natural selection), which is status quo preference caused by a very strong drive to avoid uncertainty/insecurity, *unless acutely threatened by clear and present danger* as a rational moral heuristic/reasonable intuition.
It's exactly the same thing that makes people stay in houses at risk of flooding and in cities at risk of bombing and in countries where they might be persecuted or killed and in severely abusive marriages. That it would be adopted as a valid moral percept seems .... strange to this non-philosopher.
I suspect that for most of human history it would have been a good bias!
In long term periods without lots of social change, any existing society was a complex homeostatic system that no one understood. In any such system, most changes will break something in some fundamental way, even if you don’t see that break until generations later. So it’s best for people not to do new things unless they are absolutely sure that it will be an improvement.
This of course doesn’t apply any more once changes have started happening so quickly that established systems are likely to have problems dealing with them (or in the face of acute crises like disasters).
No a philosopher so approaching this from a tangent: it seems to me, and tbh it seems QUITE OBVIOUS that inaction bias is a result of adopting a feature of, for the lack of better term, human nature (= cognitive adaptations evolved via natural selection), which is status quo preference caused by a very strong drive to avoid uncertainty/insecurity, *unless acutely threatened by clear and present danger* as a rational moral heuristic/reasonable intuition.
It's exactly the same thing that makes people stay in houses at risk of flooding and in cities at risk of bombing and in countries where they might be persecuted or killed and in severely abusive marriages. That it would be adopted as a valid moral percept seems .... strange to this non-philosopher.
I suspect that for most of human history it would have been a good bias!
In long term periods without lots of social change, any existing society was a complex homeostatic system that no one understood. In any such system, most changes will break something in some fundamental way, even if you don’t see that break until generations later. So it’s best for people not to do new things unless they are absolutely sure that it will be an improvement.
This of course doesn’t apply any more once changes have started happening so quickly that established systems are likely to have problems dealing with them (or in the face of acute crises like disasters).