Morality, Religion & Philosophy: December 2010 Archives
Nick Bostrum has posted a fun paper about existential risks which contains a description of "good-story bias" and how it may affect our predictions for the future.
Suppose our intuitions about which future scenarios are “plausible and realistic” are shaped by what we see on TV and in movies and what we read in novels. (After all, a large part of the discourse about the future that people encounter is in the form of fiction and other recreational contexts.) We should then, when thinking critically, suspect our intuitions of being biased in the direction of overestimating the probability of those scenarios that make for a good story, since such scenarios will seem much more familiar and more “real”. This Good-story bias could be quite powerful. When was the last time you saw a movie about humankind suddenly going extinct (without warning and without being replaced by some other civilization)? While this scenario may be much more probable than a scenario in which human heroes successfully repel an invasion of monsters or robot warriors, it wouldn’t be much fun to watch. So we don’t see many stories of that kind. If we are not careful, we can be mislead into believing that the boring scenario is too farfetched to be worth taking seriously. In general, if we think there is a Good-story bias, we may upon reflection want to increase our credence in boring hypotheses and decrease our credence in interesting, dramatic hypotheses. The net effect would be to redistribute probability among existential risks in favor of those that seem to harder to fit into a selling narrative, and possibly to increase the probability of the existential risks as a group.
The rest of the paper is also worth reading.
From "It's a wonderful life: Mentally subtracting positive events improves people's affective states, contrary to their affective forecasts." in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology we learn that one of the best ways to make yourself happier is to visualize what your life would be like if certain positive things hadn't happened.
The authors hypothesized that thinking about the absence of a positive event from one's life would improve affective states more than thinking about the presence of a positive event but that people would not predict this when making affective forecasts. In Studies 1 and 2, college students wrote about the ways in which a positive event might never have happened and was surprising or how it became part of their life and was unsurprising. As predicted, people in the former condition reported more positive affective states. In Study 3, college student forecasters failed to anticipate this effect. In Study 4, Internet respondents and university staff members who wrote about how they might never have met their romantic partner were more satisfied with their relationship than were those who wrote about how they did meet their partner. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for the literatures on gratitude induction and counterfactual reasoning.
Also known as: count your blessings. Compare:
1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 -- "Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus."
Philippians 4:6-7 -- "Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus."
See also: Psalm 77.
