They’d rather risk their skills becoming obsolete and ending up unemployable than risk learning: that’s how scary learning is to most people.
I doubt people are consciously making this decision, but rather they aren’t calculating the potential rewards as opposed to potential risks well. A risk that is in the far future is often taken less seriously than a small risk now.
People who buy insurance are demonstrating ability to trade off small risks now against bigger risks in the future, but often the same people invest less in keeping their professional skills current than they do in insurance.
Personal experience tells me that I had (and still have) a bunch of Ugh fields related to learning, which suggest that there are actual negative consequences of engaging in the activity (per the theory of Ugh fields).
My hunch is that the perceived risks of learning accounts in a significant part for why people don’t invest in learning, compared to the low perceived reward of learning. I could well be wrong. How could we go about testing this hypothesis?
I doubt people are consciously making this decision, but rather they aren’t calculating the potential rewards as opposed to potential risks well. A risk that is in the far future is often taken less seriously than a small risk now.
People who buy insurance are demonstrating ability to trade off small risks now against bigger risks in the future, but often the same people invest less in keeping their professional skills current than they do in insurance.
Personal experience tells me that I had (and still have) a bunch of Ugh fields related to learning, which suggest that there are actual negative consequences of engaging in the activity (per the theory of Ugh fields).
My hunch is that the perceived risks of learning accounts in a significant part for why people don’t invest in learning, compared to the low perceived reward of learning. I could well be wrong. How could we go about testing this hypothesis?
I’m not sure. It may require a more precise statement to make it testable.