Here’s another: AI being x-risky makes me the bad guy.
That is, if I’m an AI researcher and someone tells me that AI poses x-risks, I might react by seeing this as someone telling me I’m a bad person for working on something that makes the world worse. This is bad for me because I derive import parts of my sense of self from being an AI researcher: it’s my profession, my source of income, my primary source of status, and a huge part of what makes my life meaningful to me. If what I am doing is bad or dangerous, that threatens to take much of that away (if I also want to think of myself as a good person, meaning I either have to stop doing AI work to avoid being bad or stop thinking of myself as good), and an easy solution to that is to dismiss the arguments.
This is more generally a kind of motivated cognition or rationalization, but I think it’s worth considering a specific mechanism because it better points towards ways you might address the objection.
Here’s another: AI being x-risky makes me the bad guy.
That is, if I’m an AI researcher and someone tells me that AI poses x-risks, I might react by seeing this as someone telling me I’m a bad person for working on something that makes the world worse. This is bad for me because I derive import parts of my sense of self from being an AI researcher: it’s my profession, my source of income, my primary source of status, and a huge part of what makes my life meaningful to me. If what I am doing is bad or dangerous, that threatens to take much of that away (if I also want to think of myself as a good person, meaning I either have to stop doing AI work to avoid being bad or stop thinking of myself as good), and an easy solution to that is to dismiss the arguments.
This is more generally a kind of motivated cognition or rationalization, but I think it’s worth considering a specific mechanism because it better points towards ways you might address the objection.
This doesn’t seem like it belongs on a “list of good heuristics”, though!